Where has this year gone?! It feels like only a few weeks since 2022 was fresh, new and full of resolutions. But now we’re looking back, and I’m pleased to say that it has been a stellar 12 months for us at Luna 9! We’ve done some insightful and creative work that we’re truly proud of, met some wonderful new clients, and delighted in solving some interesting communication dilemmas.
Many moons ago we used to say that, for us, ‘problems are like rocket fuel’. While our messaging has moved on a little bit, this team mindset hasn’t. We thrive on putting our heads together to address the prickly, foggy and seemingly un-winnable issues that our clients face.
Here are three of our favourites from 2022…
How do you tease out a clear strategy thread from the tangle of a growing company?
The Totem team’s sense of energy and enthusiasm for what they do was the first thing that hit us when we logged on to our first strategy session. Born from a strong history in events, when lockdown caused us all to go digital and seek out remote ways of connecting, Totem revolutionised their tech in record time and developed Reef – their always-on engagement platform.
The problem they brought to us was that this had all happened so fast, they’d not had a chance to stop and understand how this change was being perceived by their customers and the outside world.
By gently pulling on the threads that came out of a series of insightful workshops meetings, we were able to devise a clear structure and hierarchy for the Totem brand and their products. As well as the creation of some stunning visuals (if we say so ourselves!) we were delighted with the collaboration from the team and the grateful for the trust they put in us to define their story. Not to mention the record pace at which we delivered this complex project!
How do you devise a narrative to explain AI drug development?
Passion projects allow us to dig deeper into what we can do and explore more avenues that we can then take to our clients, so when a pocket of time presented itself to let us flex our muscles a bit, we leapt at the chance.
But when the sky is the limit, where do you start? We wanted to immerse ourselves into a topic that we’d never encountered before, and so settled upon ‘in silico’ drug discovery.
This was also the perfect chance to collaborate with agency partners First Create The Media. As a top-notch team of life science communications specialists, they were the very best people to task with creating content for our digital explainer.
From here, it was our turn to tackle the challenge of visualising the abstract – how to guide users through something intangible, using compelling user experience and insightful visual devices. The result is an engaging digital experience to delight and inform about the intricacies of using AI to develop life-saving healthcare solutions.
How do we approach supporting and informing NHS patients with key healthcare decisions?
This was one of the projects that we’re really proud of from the past 12 months. Working with the Winton Centre for Risk & Evidence Communication from the University of Cambridge and with NHS England, our brief was to design a suite of patient decision support tools to help people from all walks of life decide about their treatment options for different topics and situations.
This brief required us to think of the needs of our audiences more than ever before. It required us to pull on all our collective and combined knowledge and experience – not just as designers and artists, but also as patients, scientists, authors and analysts. Each tool had very specific, individual needs that challenged us and pushed our boundaries.
With the help of feedback from patient focus groups and expert guidance managed by the Winton Centre team, we produced a suite of tools ranging from hip replacements to glaucoma.
It’s a real pleasure to know that these are now out in the world, being used by doctors and specialists throughout the NHS to support people making decisions about their heath that can often be scary and hard to navigate. This is the kind of work that we love!
Bring on 2023
We can’t wait to see what kinds of problems that we’ll be tasked with solving in 2023!
If you have something that seems foggy and un-winnable, run it by us – we’d love to hear more and to see if we can find a solution that gets you into next year’s top of the probs!
Get in touch at info@luna9design.com