←
Find the Compass on the website of the New European Bauhaus

NEB Compass

Iteration | Conceptual Thinking | Graphic Design | User Research | Design for Policy | Visual Design | Prototyping

During a traineeship at the Joint Research Center of the European Commission, I joined the New European Bauhaus (NEB) team to develop the NEB Compass.

The purpose of this framework is to help decision makers and project owners to understand the values and principles that NEB proposes. It can be used to evaluate a project's ambition in terms of sustainability, inclusivity and quality of experience.

Because how inclusive is your project? In what way do you engage in a participatory process? And how is what you are doing or creating beautiful?

Creating a visual from the NEB logo

The current logo of the New European Bauhaus (designed by Christine Del'Osso) represents the three values of beautiful, sustainable and together. Since the Compass is supposed to deepen those values, I remixed the logo and created different depths by using surfaces, lines and colours.
‍
NEB logo transformation into NEB Compass Visuals

Making it modular

The different layers can be combined and interchanged, creating unique identifiers. This way, the visual can reveal something about the ambition of a project — see how that's applied in the examples on page 21.

Working iteratively

The NEB Compass came into being through an unusual way of working within the European Commission. Instead of a linear, document driven approach where lay out and visuals are just a final touch up, we chose for a design driven approach, giving equal attention to both form and content from the start.

Working from both ends (letting the content guide the form and the form guide the content) allowed the team to create draft documents that already feel designed. Sending out visual drafts keeps the stakeholders excited and engaged. And stimulates to give feedback.

In an iterative process, the NEB team took input from experts in different domains, from policy analysts, designers, architects, researchers, scientists and project initiators. The NEB Compass went through more than 10 different versions over a time span of several months.
Pages of the NEB Compass. Trying to get a logical visual structure that supports the content.
Time span
March to July 2022

In the context of
a traineeship at the Joint Research Center, European Commission

Together with
Vera Winthagen, Solene Gautron, Lorenzo De Simone, Christine del'Osso, Maria-Elena Camarascu

Activities
Questioning, researching, drawing, visualising, communicating, correcting, editing, lay-outing, user testing, iterating

Resources
The NEB Compass document
ABOUT