on wednesday we led a creative session with staff and trustees at domestic abuse services. they offer a service within the north yorkshire coast and ryedale to women and men who are victims of domestic abuse - helping them get out of often very damaging situations and start a new life.

creative sessions like this are how we prefer to start many design projects - we learn so much more from being able to spend an hour or so with the people who are involved in the organisation than from any written brief.

we began by playing with random images, choosing those that represented the situations that cause someone to pick up the phone and contact DAS and those that continued the story after the victims had been given help. by no means is it a straightforward happy ending story - leaving your comfortable home and taking your children to live in temporary accommodation is a brave move, but several times the process was described as being a rebirth. any birth is a painful process.

taking hemingway as inspiration - who once said the best story he’d ever written used just six words - we wrote typical stories from the experiences of working with victims of domestic abuse. the photomontages became the binding for these stories forming a book (pictured above). the next stage is for us to take these as the starting point for ideas on how to communicate DAS’s message to both the people they can help, and the people who can help DAS to continue to provide the service it does.