Joyce Brown brings a new twist to interior design. Photos courtesy of Joyce Brown Design Group
DESIGNING SOLUTIONS CREATIVE SERVICE FOR HOMES AND BUSINESS By Wendy King
T here’s one thing you can say for certain about interior design: There is no shortage of choices for your decor. That’s where Joyce Brown Design Group and Design Dilemma?! come in. Owner Joyce Brown knows how difficult it can be for home and business owners to settle on those choices and she has been busy developing a hi-tech solution. "When you are going from one store to the next, sometimes everything becomes all grey," she says. "The object is to help people make better, more educated decisions." Brown, 46, made Winnipeg her home when she graduated from the University of Manitoba with a degree in Interior Design. Twenty years later, it wasn’t much of a leap to form a business and develop her own strategy for building a creative team. "I take a multi-disciplinary approach, working with interior designers, architects, ad agencies, app developers, accountants, whatever a project requires," she says. That strategy has allowed her to be adaptive, and to take on two very innovative projects in addition to traditional interior design work. "I’m working with Dave Wilkie from Fusion Advertising on an app that uses enhanced reality or augmented reality," she says. The object of the app is to provide retailers with the means to assist their customers to create a coordinated look for their homes by tailoring options based on their specific tastes. So, if a customer chooses a red Adirondack chair, the app allows the customer to see the items in their own backyard or in a picture the app will provide.
"It’s about helping each individual customer, as many as I can, on a larger scale," Brown says. Her other big project is focused on a design area that doesn’t get a lot of attention — automobile showrooms.
"I’m helping dealerships to distinguish what the qualities of their specific brand are," she says. "This will help the retailer go beyond the personality of their products to create a distinctive environment that the customer will encounter, rather than going into just another showroom."
Although she is moving with, and even developing, technology in her field, some things will never change. She still takes her clients through the traditional steps of identifying their design challenges, establishing the esthetic ideals they are trying to achieve, setting budgets and timelines, and finally creating a proposal and executing the project. "It’s definitely a two-pronged business: Joyce Brown Design Group encompasses all the different things I’m doing, and Design Dilemma?! more specifically addresses the technology,” she says. "The aim is to remain a small, custom studio offering clients a creative and practical, but ultimately very personal, design service.” Learn more at www. joycebrowndesigngroup.com. ■
18 MBiz | November 2014
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