EY’s Future Friendly wins esteemed team design award

A month on from its purchase by EY, product and design consultancy Future Friendly has picked up a Good Design Award.

At the 2023 Good Design Awards, Sydney and Canberra-based product and design consultancy Future Friendly was named ‘Team of the Year’. Certainly not its first, the award category recognises companies which have consistently performed at the highest level and “established a tangible design-led culture within their organisation”, this being the firm’s remarkable 27th accolade.

“This is an award we are so excited to win,” stated Future Friendly co-founder Nick Gower, now a partner at EY.

“For nineteen years, the underlying theme of Future Friendly has been that happy teams create change. The moniker has turned out to be 100 percent true. The more time we have put into building a safe, supportive, and purpose-driven place for design, the bigger the outcomes that we have been able to achieve for our communities.”

EY Future Friendly sits alongside management consultancy Nous Group as a multiple Good Design Award winner, with Deloitte having also picked up a major gong last year for its work in the space sector. The awards are considered the highest of their class in Australia, having emerged from The Australian Design Council which was established in 1958. This year, under the overarching theme of ‘Design for a brighter future’, the organisation received a record number of submissions, the quality of which was described as “truly outstanding.”

Future Friendly’s ethos centres around the notion that the public’s well-being and our environment are directly affected by the things we regularly engage with, such that, through conscious design and the hands-on development of everyday products and services, the firm can make a positive impact at scale. This approach has led to more than two dozen Good Design Awards, via collaborations with the Commonwealth Bank, ABC, and Service NSW among others.

Speaking with the Good Design Australia team, Gower cited bank accounts, passports, and doctor’s appointments as among those day-to-day things that people don’t necessarily think of as being exciting, but shape the world around us, stating; “They affect how our communities can access everything from leisure to medical services, how they connect as people, and just have such an enormous effect even though they’re sort of in the background.”

To achieve its ambition then, Future Friendly needed to regularly work with the companies, organisations and governments that could deliver the biggest impact, and this, the firm says, led to its hook-up with EY, which could aid in the delivery of large, meaningful projects from both a technology perspective and a compliance and regulatory one. The company says that EY is equally excited to support large transformations with humans at the centre.

Human-centred design might seem like a buzz-phrase, but for a crop of fresh, innovative Australian consultancies it’s the most important element to their approach. Gower concludes; “The communities that use these services are the ones that should be leading the creation of those services, and their needs and voices should be brought into that process. It means doing more than just talking and listening, (but) allowing them to participate throughout the creation process.”