On the 22nd of June my very welcoming internship in why not associates began. So far I’ve been here about 2 months and its always difficult to properly assess just how much I’ve learnt. When you think about how fast you assimilate into a working environment, the underlying learning amounts to infinity. Even while working on something and passively listening to a phone call or aware of a meeting your forming a collective of just how a company organises itself, the manners in which people communicate ideas and the freedom that each designer has to question a project decision or make a quick phone call to clients. Tea is offered intravenously and a game of fouzball never goes a miss. A particularly colourful yet nostalgic collection of soap boxes exists in one corner of the room, a reminder of just how far back this company goes.
From my experiences and conversations here I soon came to the realisation that the studio dynamic in why not is a huge rarity. Due to their reputation and long standing success the designers have quite a lot of freedom. Surprisingly enough, the freedom to be able to deal first hand with the client at all times, something that I assumed was always a given. Amongst other things, they’ve never had to promote themselves for work. So how did this come to be?