Evidence of Impact
Development and Innovation in Action
#1 Case Study
The Teach IR website supports international relations teaching but faced significant challenges.
#2 Case Study
The IR thinker Podcast: enhancing simplicity and accessibility through a unified design across over 100 episodes.
The hardest work often looks effortless.
#1 Case Study - Teach IR
The Challenge
When designing this website for the global academic community of scholars and professors, we confronted multiple critical challenges. How could we ensure global reach through multilingual accessibility? How might we achieve absolute clarity whilst eliminating visual clutter?
The platform needed intuitive navigation, flawless readability across all devices, strong search visibility, and full accessibility for visually impaired users. Each challenge demanded careful consideration, as compromise on any element would undermine the project’s mission.
Our Solution
We embraced simplicity as our guiding principle. The website features minimal design and streamlined navigation, making it virtually impossible to click incorrectly. Visual noise disappeared through super-simple graphics that never compete with content.
Behind the scenes, smart technology enables seamless multilingual reading experiences whilst ensuring all content remains freely accessible.
The Impact
Scholars now engage with inspiring, guidance-rich stories grounded in authentic narratives, free from distractions. The focus remains precisely where it belongs: on the text and its reception by the audience.
Information flows clearly, accessibility barriers have been removed, and content sharing happens effortlessly. The platform has become what academic communities need most: a space where ideas take centre stage, unobstructed and universally accessible.
What if the solution was simpler than we thought?
#2 Case Study - The IR thinker
The Challenge
The IR Thinker is an international podcast serving the academic community as a pro bono initiative. With over 100 episodes accumulated, the project faced mounting difficulties that threatened its sustainability. Maintaining the website had become increasingly demanding, with inconsistent text formatting across episodes creating a fragmented user experience.
Beyond content issues, the platform struggled to connect effectively with social media channels and streaming services including YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Amazon Music. At the same time, website maintenance consumed valuable volunteer hours whilst security vulnerabilities demanded constant attention.
The question became unavoidable: how could a volunteer initiative sustain this level of technical overhead whilst continuing to serve its audience effectively?
Our Solution
Sometimes the most elegant solutions are simpler than we imagine, and this proved to be exactly such a case. Our approach, however, was unconventional: we deleted the entire website. Shocking? For many, absolutely. Yet our Studio saw an opportunity others might have missed.
We migrated the complete project to Substack, driven by one clever insight: Substack allows scheduling individual posts with specific dates, which meant we could recreate the entire archive with proper chronology intact. We completely rewrote all episode descriptions and designed a universal structure that prioritised accessibility above all else.
Instead of struggling with WordPress tags, users can now search through all episodes using simple, intuitive full-text search. Better still, the platform handles all technical infrastructure, from hosting to security updates to performance optimisation.
This shift eliminated roughly 80% of the maintenance workload simply because most processes became automatic. We did sacrifice complete design control in the process, but the benefits far outweighed this compromise.
The Impact
The IR thinker now thrives on Substack with remarkable consistency across every touchpoint. Following the initial consolidation period, the next evolution may involve connecting a custom domain to remove the subdomain format, though this will depend largely on how the audience continues to respond. So far, the academic community has welcomed the transformation enthusiastically, and for good reason.
The project finally achieved true standardisation, ensuring that identical episode information appears on Substack, YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Amazon Music simultaneously. This harmonisation revealed an important principle that extends beyond this single project: strategic sacrifice of certain elements can yield superior outcomes elsewhere.
By focusing on shareability and searchability rather than technical customisation, The IR thinker now serves its audience more effectively whilst demanding far less maintenance from its volunteer team. Sometimes, it turns out, less truly is more.
What These Case Studies Revealed
1. Simplicity Serves Better Than Complexity
Both projects demonstrated that radical simplification often delivers superior results. Whether through minimal design that eliminates visual clutter or deleting an entire website in favour of a streamlined platform, less can genuinely be more.
2. Strategic Sacrifice Unlocks Greater Value
Success sometimes requires letting go of what seems important. Teach IR sacrificed decorative elements for accessibility. The IR thinker surrendered complete design control for sustainability. In both cases, giving up certain features created space for more meaningful benefits to emerge.
3. Technology Should Serve People, Not the Other Way Round
The right technological choices reduce friction rather than create it. Whether through multilingual accessibility, automated maintenance, or unified searchability, technology proved most effective when it became invisible.