This report describes the graduation project in collaboration with Total Design (TD), a creative agency specialised in Branding, Communications and Technology. The primary objective of this thesis is to enhance the internal collaboration between these three domains. To achieve this goal, the study explores the barriers to collaboration, using co-creation sessions with TD employees as a key method to gather insights. The process follows a general approach consisting of four phases, Exploring the Current Context, Reframing the Problem, Creating Opportunities to Improve Collaboration and Catalyse Synergy Creation at TD, each described in its dedicated chapter.

Leveraging co-creation sessions and interviews with employees of TD, the study shows that the internal team’s focus is seen as the main barrier to multidisciplinary collaboration within TD. This focus stems from team-specific targets, that discourage collaborative efforts between teams and cause each team to prioritise their own proposition to clients. As a result, clients are unaware of other services offered by TD and employees under-utilise the expertise of their colleagues. This internal team focus comes from TD’s existing organisational structure. Therefore, a new organisational structure is proposed as the final solution for TD. The proposed organisational structure introduces dynamic, project-based teams that replace traditional, static teams, facilitating fluid cross-domain collaboration and enabling a more agile response to client needs. The expected positive impact of the final design for clients is a broader service offering and improved client satisfaction, and enhanced learning and innovation for employees of TD.

The report concludes with recommendations for the adoption of the new structure and recommendations for future work. The first aim to mitigate the reorganisation’s potential challenges, like coordination & communication and a loss of team identity and include involving employees for successful implementation. The latter suggested areas for further research, including broadening the focus group, incorporating diverse research methodologies and conducting follow-up studies to assess the impact of the changes implemented.

The findings provide valuable insights into employees’ perception of the current situation, the barriers to collaboration and the desire for engaging employees in decision making. To align with employee demands and enhance multidisciplinary collaboration, TD is recommended to transition towards the proposed organisational structure that facilitates dynamic project team configurations.

In this report a collection of experiences at Total Design is presented while looking through a lens of Organizational Designing. The concept of looking through a view-master is used as metaphor for the purpose of this report. To highlight this Organizational Designing, two main questions had to be answered; How can we look at Organizational Designing? Where do we see Organizational Designing at TD and in this project? To recognize Organizational Designing within the ways of working, some existing literature is used to set up its first attributes. By the use of design perspectives like the action-centered perspective (Schön, 1983), a Human Centered Design perspective (Junginger, 2005) and the four orders of design (Buchanan, 2019) we start to make an effort on what Organizational Designing is. Then a view on the complexity of organizations (Norman & Stappers, 2015) and their ‘wicked’ problems (Buchanan, 1992) is given to see on what entity this design process works. This literature overview is closed with some things Organizational Designers encounter and work with, such as the need for ‘satisficing’ (Simon, 1969), the incremental strategy of ‘muddling through’ (Lindblom, 1979), improvisation (Weick, 2017) and designing ‘interventions’ (Stacey et al., 2000). To capture the ways of working at TD various ethnographic methods were used (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007), such as observation, participation and the use of field notes and ‘thick descriptions’ (Geertz, 1973). Throughout the report examples of these thick descriptions are presented to illustrate the point of view of me as a user of the organization TD. Together with these examples, different frames on how TD as an organization can be viewed are showed to emphasize how complex the definition of what an organization is, can be. The captured experiences are categorized into three areas where Organizational Designing can be seen. The first area is at the interface between TD and its clients, where the design inquiry in projects the collaboration with the use of online tools and the integration of different design disciplines led to organizational impact at the clients side. The second area highlights the organizational designing within TD itself, where observations triggered the process of incremental changes in interaction of the standup, and the evolution of the agency call. As well as how the hourly billing creates tension between the freedom of creativity and the need for having a financially healthy agency. The third and last area the design interventions of this project are discussed. Here, methods of reflection and the use of archetypes challenge the way TD could think about themselves. And reflection-in-action lead to shifting the purpose of a given workshop while doing. In the end we conclude with an overview of how organizational designing at TD can be seen. As well as a discussion on the fact that organizational designing can be seen in other design disciplines, since the design of an organization deals with problems that require integration of problems of communication, construction and interaction. This is why we can see organizational designing on different moments at TD, since they integrate various design disciplines to create organizational impact at their clients.