Thinking Outside The Box

At Lim, we care about the environment and take sustainability seriously.

As you can imagine, we do a lot of drawing. So instead of going through hundreds of single-use plastic pens, we choose Neuland because they’re refillable and you can replace the nibs, which makes them the most sustainable pens on the market. Ellie has had hers since she started visualising over 10 years ago.

We’ve stopped using foam boards and now only use paper on pinboards or a graphic wall, but we’ve been exploring other options that are even more sustainable.

Our research led us to learn that most cardboard boxes are used once and then recycled, but keeping cardboard in use for longer helps save trees, water, carbon and energy.

We loved the idea of sourcing used boxes and giving them another life, and started brainstorming how we could use them in a creative way. We’re always thinking outside the box (pardon the pun), and we had the brainwave to use these boxes instead of paper when visualising an event.

We had the C&IT Festival of Forums on the horizon. This would be our third project with Haymarket Media Group this year and we had a trusted relationship with the client which allowed us to play with the form of what we were delivering. The upcoming conference had a focus on sustainability, so this would be the perfect opportunity to debut our idea.

We set the boxes up as an installation style piece, with Ellie P speaking to attendees about their learnings and key takeaways, making it an interactive experience for people there as they saw their words being drawn directly onto the boxes.

Unlike when we live scribe conferences using pen and paper, the boxes allowed Ellie more freedom and creativity to create something unique and exciting. The boxes could be arranged and rearranged in endless ways, and the team had the idea to move them outside so people could see them as they were leaving the event.

We had amazing feedback from our client, and people at the event were engaged and curious about what we were creating

After the event finished we put the boxes up for free on Gumtree so they could be used for someone else and continue their life cycle. We love the idea of someone moving house with our drawings all over their boxes.

This is only the start, watch this space.