Our ThinkingBreaking silos: how an interdisciplinary design blend transforms complex projects
We are a design consultancy built on a foundation of different disciplines, originating in human factors and control room design, with expertise in accessibility and inclusive design, design research, wayfinding and graphic design and service design.
Having multiple disciplines is not unique - however, the blend of these specific skills and the mix of people we have in our team - we’re prepared to bet there isn’t a comparable consultancy on the planet. We often think about how we have evolved to have this set of disciplines together under one roof - it is where we can offer true value and solve problems from multiple lenses at once. This blend allows us to address challenges holistically. The unifying, common element is human centered design - all of our disciplines start with understanding and designing for people.
In this article, we reflect on how this specific blend of disciplines has not only strengthened our projects and outcomes for clients and tackled complex problems, but created richer, more connected experiences for the people who use the spaces and services we design. Drawing on real examples, we share insights into how cross-functional collaboration across this blend has driven innovation, value, efficiency, impact, and learnings along the way.
Our clients come to us with a wide range of challenges - changing passenger behaviours, improving accessibility, workforce pressures, understanding future experiences to human and technology integration. These problems are often layered with diverse user needs and operational constraints, making them complex and multi-faceted.
From airports to museums, these projects span diverse sectors and environments, but one goal remains consistent: creating the best, most inclusive experience for the people visiting, using, and working there - whether that is transport, or destinations - the places people go, and how they get there. Much can be learned across these different sectors. Aviation trends are increasingly shaped by changes in passenger behaviour, with travellers placing more value on the experience - embracing digital solutions to make journeys seamless from check-in to boarding. At the same time, culture and heritage sectors are embracing the experience economy, with museums evolving into active spaces of engagement, authenticity and digital integration. These insights and practices are mutually beneficial, helping us shape richer, more meaningful experiences across all the sectors as we work in parallel.
Collaboration in action
Bristol Temple Meads Interchange, Connected Places Catapult
Connected Places Catapult commissioned Mima's experience design team for a multi-faceted research project to study the passenger interchange experience at Bristol Temple Meads train station. The purpose of the research was to understand pain points during the act of interchanging at transport hubs (from train to train, as well as train to bus and train to ferry) to deliver insights to drive innovation to improve and enhance the passenger experience.
The challenge required a comprehensive approach, which is why we selected our project team to include a blend of experience design and behavioural change expertise, to capture detailed journey mapping and uncover underlying motivations and interactions, with expertise from our accessibility and inclusive design team, to ensure our research and engagement was representative of all passenger needs, especially those facing the greatest barriers to travel.
We directly engaged with passengers (from daily commuters, to families on day trips, to elderly couples on their way to the airport) as they went about their journeys using ethnographic research methods of observation, intercept interviews and journey shadowing, bringing real-world barriers and individual challenges to the forefront of the project. Alongside this we consulted with a range of stakeholders and local accessibility user groups. By taking a holistic approach, we were able to look through multiple lenses simultaneously, ensuring the research provided the widest and most diverse range of passenger experiences across the transport networks. If we had looked at this challenge without an accessibility and inclusive design angle, we may have missed significant systemic barriers, resulting in design interventions that only served a portion of passengers. Our blended team ensured the insights Connected Places Catapult received were rich, inclusive, and actionable for SMEs and future innovators in Bristol Innovation Zone looking to build a deeper, more equitable understanding of the passenger journey.
Network Rail and Gatwick Airport Station
Moving from the challenges of multi-modal passenger interchange in Bristol, to a major international gateway to the airport, Gatwick Airport train station had historically grappled with capacity and congestion issues. To remedy this, an ambitious redevelopment project was undertaken, which aimed to revolutionise the passenger experience, creating seamless transitions from train to plane. Mima were brought in from a user-centred design perspective to address how the station space operated, and to design a wayfinding system that would inform and drive the new passenger flows.
Part of the challenge was in creating an inclusive and accessible wayfinding system that could fundamentally manage passenger flow. Rather than work to purely comply with standards or meet good practice, our wayfinding team collaborated directly with our accessibility team and human factors design researchers. This meant that they were able to bring accessibility insights and passenger behaviour directly into design discussions and see them influence the emerging wayfinding solutions in real time. Our blend of human factors and customer experience meant they were able to bring together the functionality of the space - stress, crowds, confusion etc with the experiential and emotional side of a passenger’s journey.
The Mima team worked collaboratively with our architecture partners and the station stakeholders to model the station operation, map passenger behaviours and plan step free routes. These insights informed the design development of the customer-facing touchpoints, including ticketing and the assisted travel. This deeper level of knowledge was integrated into the wayfinding strategy and design to optimise passenger movements. It enabled the team to make decisions from a wider, holistic perspective of the operation and how it serves different requirements, ultimately creating a space that feels intuitive, inclusive, and genuinely designed for the people using it.
Royal Botanical Garden Edinburgh
Similar to the challenge of passenger experience in a transport system, our work on the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RGBE) focused around how to create a more human-centred approach to visitor flow within a cultural setting. The challenge was that the building created a complicated circulation and orientation was confusing for visitors. RGBE sought to understand how, and why visitors moved through the primary entrance in order to look at the wider visitor experience.
Our experience design team used their journey mapping expertise to understand the customer journey and identify the pain points. To then explore, in more detail, how improving the wayfinding and accessibility could drive a better experience, we were able to draw on our in-house team's experience to offer a different lens. A signage and accessibility audit revealed why wayfinding was part of the problem with the visitor journey. As a result of this blend we were able to provide a solution that catered to different visitor needs and interests and improve accessibility, with wayfinding and accessibility being a key part of the customer experience.
COP28 UAE
Expanding visitor experience challenges site-wide, COP28 set an ambition to be the most accessible climate conference ever, aligning accessibility across physical, digital and social environments. To tackle this, our work would be led by our inclusive design experts. But to ensure they were able to explore this in the context of the end-to-end experience, we brought our service designers into the team to use their skills in mapping those user journeys and exploring the operational delivery.
To help understand the COP28 guest journey, we engaged with people who had lived experience of disability, including local and international disabled people's organisations to understand their experiences at similar global events such as Expo 2020 and previous COP events. Our service designers used these insights to create a set of personas and user journeys - blending our accessibility and inclusive design expertise with experience design approaches. By combining these skill sets - incorporating journey mapping with the technical knowledge of accessibility requirements and inclusive design - the process went beyond documenting touchpoints and became an active space to test and validate whether design ideas truly addressed identified needs across digital and physical touchpoints. Throughout, the accessibility and inclusive design team ensured that lived experience voices were central, demonstrating how equity can be championed in practice and challenging what accessible spaces look like.
Aeroporto di Bologna (Adb)
So, how does our work in control rooms fit in with all of this? A great example of the marriage of customer experience design and control room design was highlighted in our work on Aeroporto di Bologna (Adb). AdB wanted to improve their operational efficiency, creating a new Airport Operations Centre (APOC). But they also wanted to explore how these changes could also help to improve the passenger experience. The great thing about using service design methods is that it helps to connect mapping the passenger experience with the operational organisation required to deliver it.
In the first stage, our team developed a high-level passenger experience vision with the senior project stakeholders. Aligned to this, we also developed four operational principles that were essential to deliver the experience - ‘one mind’, ‘one team’, ‘voice of the passenger’, and ‘proactive and predictive’. We used service blueprinting to model the current and future passenger experience and how the organisational design could be reshaped to improve operations and deliver the new experience.
At the core of this new operations design was the APOC that would act as a focus, bringing together different operational teams in a co-located function. We brought our human factors and control room design experts into the project team to help AdB identify the best locations for the APOC on the airport campus and develop a concept design. We identified new roles, new ways of working and technology innovations that would be needed in the APOC. Bringing together service design and control room design has given AdB a foundation on which to develop both their passenger experience and their operation. From this basis, AdB are now progressing with the construction of an interim APOC, useful to prototype some of the new ways of working, before creating their permanent, full APOC in the coming years.
At Mima we have brought together a team with a diverse range of disciplines, not usually found together. Each of those is connected to a foundation in human-centered design - we all start with understanding the people, their needs, their goals and use that to solve problems and create solutions that improve experience.
This allows us to bring different perspectives, skill sets and methods together to address the problems our clients are setting us.
It’s not the specific services we focus on, it is how we combine the disciplines across our team, and why we have built up a team of people with the individual skillsets they have. By blending research, design, insight, strategy into one integrated approach, delivers solutions that work in reality. As challenges become more complex, what makes Mima different is not what disciplines we have, but how they work dynamically together, and how we rethink the way teams collaborate to meet these challenges.
Written by:
Rachel Berner
Marketing Manager
Rachel brings a decade of marketing and branding expertise, with experience spanning diverse sectors, including architectural lighting design and live events and exhibitions.
