Giving a global AI community a shared language
A Vision Sprint to help AIxDESIGN articulate who they are, transforming how they see themselves, operate, and communicate.
CLIENT
AIxDESIGN
YEAR
2025
DELIVERABLE
A facilitated 5-day Vision Sprint
A Vision Sprint to help AIxDESIGN articulate who they are, transforming how they see themselves, operate, and communicate.
CLIENT
AIxDESIGN
YEAR
2025
DELIVERABLE
A facilitated 5-day Vision Sprint
Founded in 2019, AIxDESIGN had grown quickly from a Slack group into a global community of 1500 people across 65 countries. As the organisation and its team expanded, people came to talk about it in subtly different ways, with no shared metaphor or language to rally around. There had been many previous iterations of how they framed themselves, but none had stuck as the definitive version.
Without a clear, consistent way to articulate the value of what they did, it was harder to fundraise, and harder to explain themselves to the collaborators and partners they wanted to work with. The raw materials were all there but they hadn’t been pulled together into something cohesive that the whole team could own and repeat.
AIxDESIGN is a non-profit community organisation of practical radicals making AI work for the rest of us.
We ran a structured Vision Sprint: five half-day working sessions, designed to take everything AIxDESIGN already knew and formalise it into a clear and usable vision. The goal was to make sure the vision was practical, embedded, and owned across the team. Members of the AIxDESIGN team played an active, hands on role throughout, pulling together materials, generating directions and insights, and testing outputs.
Pre-sprint: Gather & Audit. As an established organisation with years of work behind them, AIxDESIGN already had a great deal of material. We asked them to gather what existed around their vision, mission, offerings, and culture. They returned with a wealth of documents giving us rich raw material to work from.
Session 1: Frame the Vision. We started by painting a picture of today, then made protest posters together imagining what they didn’t want if the world went wrong for them. From there we painted a picture of tomorrow: what they hoped to achieve and where they fit into that world. We played with metaphors and archetypes for the role they might occupy, from mythical beings to caregivers, digital gardens, playground makers, storytellers, even an “AI coven”. We mapped their key audiences, then distilled it all into a high-level vision and mission statement.
Session 2: Tools to use the Vision. We unpacked what the organisation looked like in this future world, then built a Vision Compass: six pillars they could mark themselves against to see whether they were moving towards their North Star or drifting into murky waters. The Compass was designed to be used in regular check-ins with the team throughout the year.
Session 3: Map the Work. We mapped their current services, offerings, and projects against this new understanding of themselves, coordinating the work into clear buckets of research, education, and making, all held together by the community they nurture.
Session 4: Craft the Narrative. We turned to the website as the primary way to articulate the vision externally. Building on what they already had, we worked on high-level storytelling, structure, and tone then handed it back for AIxDESIGN to develop and refine, which they have since done.
Session 5: Test & Refine. We brought others from the team into the space to share and pressure-test the work. It was also a moment to be reflective and take stock of what the sprint had produced, what the team found most useful, and what they wanted to carry forward versus leave behind.
“I feel like now we’ve updated. It’s like we’ve rebooted and we’ve updated the OS. And now we all know what we’re doing, what we want to do.”
Nadia Piet, Co-founder + Creative Lead, AIxDESIGN
A shared internal language
The sprint gave AIxDESIGN a shared internal language for who they are and what they do. Working from their own metaphors and archetypes, the team landed on a set of clear “buckets” a simple, repeatable way of describing their activities that everyone could rally around. What had felt scattered became something the whole team could say in the same way, rather than a story held slightly differently by each person.
Structure they can operate by
With that language in place, the team could operationalise it giving structure to the work they had already been doing. The buckets made it far easier for the wider, extended team to see how the non-profit organises its activities, and in turn where and how they could plug in and support them. The vision moved from an idea into a framework for how the organisation actually runs.
A clearer story for the outside world
The same vision and language gave AIxDESIGN a story to tell beyond their own walls. They could articulate the value of their work to funders and collaborators with consistency and confidence, and used it as the foundation for a full website refresh built around the new language.
Alongside the core vision work, we co-created a Vision Compass for AIxDESIGN: a simple tool the team can use to check their work against their own metrics and values, and judge whether they’re moving towards the vision they want or away from it.
Built around six pillars, the Compass is designed to be returned to in regular check-ins rather than filed away. It keeps the vision as a living reference point that the organisation can navigate their decisions with.
