Message Stick - Forging the Future of Work
Design Strategist & Project Manager • University of Sydney in partnership with Message Stick · 2024 · ADP GradShow Winner - EY Award
I co-developed an EY Award-winning growth strategy for Message Stick: An Indigenous Australian-owned ICT company, positioning them as a thought leader in the future of hybrid work. The deliverable was a comprehensive four-phase strategic framework, a design language system, and a commercial roadmap spanning 24 months.
Recognition & Impact
EY Award
Best Project — USYD School of Architecture, Design & Planning 2024
Message Stick
Indigenous Australian-owned ICT company partnered with the University of Sydney
Discovery
We began with deep contextual research into Indigenous Australian knowledge systems and intellectual property protocols, while engaging Message Stick's leadership as active partners, not consultees. That cultural grounding shaped how we approached the user research, which ran in parallel:
Affinity diagrams and structured interviews mapped hybrid work pain points across distributed Australian teams.
Journey mapping surfaced three dominant friction points: network congestion, ergonomic inconsistency, and the absence of place-based thinking.
Design Decisions
The conceptual centrepiece was The Living Songline: A key visual drawing on the Indigenous concept of the songline as a navigational system connecting people, places, and knowledge. This became the strategic metaphor that gave the entire framework coherence and gave Message Stick something only they could own. The Realms model reframed hybrid work environments as purpose-built, specialised spaces. The home office, boardroom, and focus room were individually optimised for a specific mode of work and connected through an integrated ICT framework. I personally authored the commercial strategy, marketing roadmap, and partnership development sections of the four-phase deliverable.
The Living Songline gave Message Stick more than a strategy, it gave them a story only they could tell. In a market where ICT firms compete largely on capability, a framework rooted in Indigenous knowledge systems and expressed through a visual language that was theirs by origin created a positioning that no competitor could replicate. The EY Award validated what the work already demonstrated: that the most durable strategic advantage is one built from identity, not imitation.
Featured In
Special thanks to
[Group mates] Lachlan, Thendrl, and Michelle / [Educators] Rohan and Kat