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This Wednesday I was very honoured to be the keynote speaker at the opening of the annual Cumulus event at the O2 here in London. Cumulus is an international association of universities and colleges of art, design and media. It is a forum for partnership and the transfer of knowledge and best practice. The association of more than 140 colleges and universities meet throughout the year at its international conferences and events.

I was invited to kick start a debate that would continue over three days – what is the potential future of different enterprise models, what does this mean to employment and therefore, what does this mean for the role of education?

In an hour, this was surely an ambitious ask and frankly, its inherently difficult or risky to predict the future. Five years ago Facebook was founded and the new kid on the social media block, twitter, was just mere sparkle in its eye.

I started by proposing that we needed to reconsider the relationship of education to student, between Master and Padawan (the Jedi novice). And of course, that change was a constant. Children undertake ‘inline’ play with no question – moving seamlessly in their imaginations from offline to online experiences and many of us draw entertainment from prancing around our living rooms, as family units, reunited to play Wii.

I talked about the huge impact that a digital strategy had on the 2008 US elections, the opportunity it represents in fast emerging markets such as India, how acknowledging that to be connected is the be attractive (in the case of Saudi Arabia) and that obviously, marketing and other commercial paradigms are being rewritten.

More specifically, the roles that people participate in today (as part of a studio or inside enterprises) are evolving – because of a change in technology and human behaviours – especially around interaction – with each other, with the wider community and with brands as a part of that.

A great example of this is the role of the Dev-igner, as much a hybrid activity as a person. You can read more about that principle specifically on these blogs – Felix Corke and Richard Griffin.

The heart of the presentation was what’s next and what does education teach?

More chance.

For the enterprise, I honestly believe everything is up for debate. The way that it produces operates and markets itself. We are seeing innovation in digitally enabled promotion, sells distribution and service, internal communications and workflows and staff attraction and retention strategies. EMC Conchango has consulted across all of these enterprise activities. For example, my team and I spent a period of time with a world-leading brand recently talking about the nature of work in their organisation and how some of the corporate mentality – about how people have ideas and develop them in a more ‘open source’ way than them had historically. To be effective as an employer, did this enterprise need to afford great ‘osmotic potential’ – via IM, blogs and other social media networks?  Similarly, enterprise has to come to terms with the desire of its staff to genuinely balance life and work, seek altruism and add value – value that might need to be measured in new ways.

For employees, everything’s set to change. The number of jobs that an individual will have over their career is increasing and indeed, individuals are beginning to behave as personal brands, seconded into enterprises temporarily. And the roles that we will do will change as media, channels, society and behaviour change.

On this point, I asked my team to consider the roles that they or others may do at ‘some point in the future,’ whether within a company or as one (SME). I think that these really excited and entertained the audience – certainly tweets would suggest so.

Consider becoming an Eco-mber – the future equivalent of a rag and bone man, moving people’s cast-a-ways around local networked communities. An Affinity Agent who can build shared values and vision amongst highly diverse collaborators. Or a Neurological Training Officer, employed to improve the cognitive fitness amongst enterprises employees.

And finally, who is going to help us pick-up the pieces when the data from our ‘virtual lives’ and the digitised output from our physical lives is lost or corrupted? How many people do you know who have lost all of the digital photos of there new born/wedding/holiday in the Seychelles? Losing your photos is painful enough but what happens when we reach a situation where loss of personal, digital information could really start to impact our lives in much more fundamental and serious ways. Already it is the case that if you forget your wallet you’ll get by but if you forget your phone you’ll go back home. As our lives become increasingly more digitally dependent, we will need services and/or professionals to help prevent or to pull us back from ‘catastrophic’ loss. Enter the Digital Life Recovery Assistant.

I happen to have dozens more and some of them are quite amazing concepts. Feel free to contact me directly on Twitter @mattbagwell for more.

But behind these roles, what is the underlying point? What traits will the ‘employable’ of tomorrow have to develop, deploy and nurture? And who is responsible for gaining and maintaining those skills.

I propose that we have to be Squidgy. By this I mean that we have to learn how to be highly adaptable, flexible, communicative and collaborative. I am not suggesting that specific skills training isn’t still important, I am simply suggesting that we need to compliment these specialisations with an increasingly agile and dexterous capability. In the presentation I drew on a reference to an old presentation given by the philosopher Alan Watts called “Prickles and Goo”.  In it he proposed that people traditionally were either analytical therefore Prickly, or creative and therefore Gooey. He goes on to suggest that success would actually be predicated by being Prickly Goo or Gooey Prickles. You’ll have to see it to understand.

The young mind can find this adaptability easier than perhaps the developed imaginations can. Why? Because it has not been conditioned by red tape, rules and conditions, rejection and institutionalised thinking. It is praised and rewarded for its creativity, inventiveness and inquisitiveness.

It is the responsibility of a great studio to attempt to create a viable environment to maintain the ‘playground’ of the imagination. And it is the role of the individual to keep himself or herself open to being flexible and adaptable. We need to retain the hunger we had when we were children – to be sponges to experience and eclectic stimulus, try and try again and explore all questions with all possible answers.

And for education? In my opinion it should not be as focused on vocational placement and the pursuit of developing specific software or process skills. It should open up the creative mind and nurture the ambitions or its students. It should also be more accessible – education should be a continuous process of improvement. We’re not finished when we graduate, in fact we are just beginning the most wonderful of journeys and its one education should take with us. Similarly enterprise should continue to educate itself and the educational establishments should become increasing pervious to support this. What I celebrated at Cumulus was numerous good examples of enterprise entering the educational process to enjoy the mutual benefits of learning, experimenting, failing and succeeding with the talent of the future.

Most importantly, we should not be afraid of failure. Within it, with determination, there can be discovery, serendipity and success. Michael Johnson, the basketball legend once said, “I have been thousands of situations where I have the last ball of the game and I have missed. It’s this failure that brings me success.”

Finally, I think that we need to retain mentorship in our professional lives. We can continue to learn and be nurtured, praised and guided by a Master. We can always be students, young-minded Padawan, until we ourselves become masters ourselves.

Return of the Jedi.

I would like to say a thank you at this point to members of my talented design team who helped make this presentation one of the most enjoyable I have delivered. James, Sari, Sheel and Hannah – thank you all.

Tonight, I am hosting the second meeting of The Fantastic Tavern (#TFT).

Cheers to everyone who attended the first event, to DoubleClick for making it a very lubricated evening and for your feedback. That’s all-important. After all, this is your community and we collectively shape it’s agenda.

We want TFT to be true to its origins – a creative meeting of minds who share a discourse about the things that affect our professional life’s; where we develop a point of view and potentially take some affirmative action to improve how we work, how we relate to clients and nurture our skills.

So tonight is experimental. We are going to discuss The Twitter Effect. Not just the medium itself but what it represents and means in a wider context. I want us to be able to create some collective content – thought leadership – about the role of social media in the marketing mix, its importance in brand management and the implication on skills in the creative industry.

We have three panellists who will be asked to state a point of view about some submitted themes and then we’ll throw it out to all of us to discuss. The three panellists are Chris Robson, Richard Sedley and Colm Brophy.

Questions will include: Is Twitter just a fad that isn't worth investing time & money in? How can you use Twitter in a damage limitation campaign? What are the relative merits of personal v. corporate representation for brands? How should enterprises respond to the demand that ‘social networking’ places on their employees time? Should there be more or less freedom?

This will last about an hour and then we’ll eat and drink – at about 8pm. Hopefully the food lasts longer than last time – I cannot promise the drink will!

Thank you to our sponsors this evening, EMC Conchango and Michelle Flynn who works with me to get this all running smoothly.

Why Surface matters

There is plenty of interest in Microsoft’s newly launched Surface device, certainly in EMC Conchango’s studio. While it’s cumbersome in an un-housed state, it does have the wow factor, always evoking latent childhood memories of sensory and multi-touch interfaces, accelerated in modern films including Bond and Minority Report.

The excitement around Surface is palpable and its early application into Retail and Entertainment spaces, most notably hotels and casinos, easy to grasp. However, the opportunity for experiences enabled by this kind of technology in an ‘always on’ web of ‘ubiquitous computing’ has far wider implications and potential opportunities. Imagining these opportunities takes the brightest thinking.

To unleash Surface’s potential we have to accept this truism. It’s not all about a device; four characteristics represented by Surface all signal a real change to computing, potentially as significant as desktop publishing was in the 1980s.

 Surface challenges the way we interact with content

The environment is blatantly rich and immediate. And if applications for Surface are well designed, they should retain the inherently intuitive nature of the platform; you touch and move things. You ‘work’ with the content. Of course, the key term here is ‘if’. You don’t ‘point and click’, you pick things up, place them, flick them, twiddle them. This isn’t the vernacular of the graphical user interface – its something new, much more akin to ‘play’ than work. This will not only affect how we design for the Surface but what we design, challenging the structure of content itself.

Complex concepts can be exploded, explored, directed, illustrated and explained. Something like help can be truly contextualised – where you want it, not ‘pages’ away through hypertext links. Almost paradoxically, some interactions can be more efficient – like configuration and adding to baskets, becoming more literal manifestations of these age-old design problems. Not only could this mean better cognisance of content, but potentially ‘stickier’ brand experiences.

What does this mean for business?

Two things are striking – organisations need to better manage the ‘constituent’ nature and structure of content and understand the importance its metadata as the experience of it changes so dramatically.

Surface inspires greater opportunities for interacting together

Collaboration is one of those phrases that consultants can use and everyone accepts without necessarily really exploring the meaning.  Surface challenges that. Why? Firstly, its genuinely multi-touch and this means that more than one person can use it simultaneously. Moreover, its multi-directional – there’s no ‘top or bottom’ – there’s four sides. Air hockey apart – yes really – this means that people can stand around it and work together, face to face, side by side or in clusters.  

Beyond passing a virtual menu, handing back a food order or folding a bad poker hand – although these simple applications shouldn’t be underestimated – the impact of this ability to work together will be significant.

Imagine a discussion around the selection of a complex product or service, where two or more people use both conversation and expertise as well as content accessible via Surface to make assessments and decisions? Working together to explore and investigate the right outcome. Add to this that all the interactions and content can be tracked in real time for later access on the same device or elsewhere. Side by side comparisons can be truly ‘virtual reality’, with products or metaphorical objects for those products being placed directly on the surface, triggering reactionary surfacing of media.

In practise, the desktop metaphor, first polarised by Apple and much loved, takes another leap forward, converging physical with digital seamlessly around the within touch of users. Sharing, swapping, showing, passing – these interactions are all practical realities.

What does this mean for business?

For me, it means that ‘self-service’ is not the only possible strategy to pursue in the landscape for digital interaction. People count and arguably, in a return to first name terms, familiarity and trust, could be a significant driver for brands in the near future as customers seek reassurance, honesty and transparency.

How Surface is experienced needs to be a design consideration too

Beyond some simple technical issues – around height, lighting and network accessibility for example – the proximity of Surface is all-important to its success and adoption. While attention may currently be on what applications could be developed, thoughts quickly turn to where and how it will be used.

Yes, it’s large. But more importantly, its not just a large computer terminal, it’s a new experience.

This calls for greater collaboration in the design process. Few ‘design shops’ can offer all the skills required to establish successful – purposeful and effective – interfaces of this nature. Without doubt, Surface heralds a resurgence of the role of the ‘interactive designer’ – a hybrid who can conceive ideas and manipulate them, considering input and response. A designer who can emphasize with how things will ‘feel’ or ‘seem’ as much as how they are displayed. However, space, time and participant skill all need to be considered in parallel to the application itself.

The surface device will be a destination point, a focal point perhaps. The intent of the application may require groups to be able to gather around the device. The duration of interaction needs to be considered – will they be casual bystanders or prolonged users – in which case, how will you accommodate them? Is privacy a prerequisite to creating the right environment for interaction, for example, to discuss financial matters?

Spatial designers will need to work hand in hand with interactive designers and the business itself to ensure that all the behavioural, social and physical factors have been well planned and designed for.

What does this mean for business?

You cannot just commission application development for Surface and assume that it will work in reality. You need to design the experience holistically. The application development itself is relatively straightforward, but where and how it will be used needs to be carefully planned or it will fail.

Surface is one point of interaction, but not necessarily the whole story

The wonderful thing about Surface is that it almost commands being part of a bigger picture. Its collaborative nature is near unique and this is its inherent strength.

However, it’s a meaningful touch point on a more convoluted journey. To truly capitalise on its potential, we need to consider how it fits into the ‘flow’ of interaction, over time, location and devices.

People will bring things to the Surface, be it something physical, like an ID tag, or something intangible, like an inquiry. They will leave with something too, be it fresh information, a new insight or even content itself. Their journey may have started elsewhere and could continue.

This means that to design effectively around Surface we must design the flow to and from it. And in this context design means much more than the look and feel of the interface. It’s the structure of content, the business processes, the data, the value and the interface itself.

For me, it is this flow and Surfaces role within it that presents the greatest opportunity. Surface is a key milestone in physical, human interfaces as a critical channel for consideration in total experience design. Now, more than ever, we need to consider the whole story, not just individual, silo’d chapters.

What does this mean for business?

The implication is substantial. Now is not just a good time to take a top down, bottom up look at the experience of your brand, but also the right time. Total experience has to be considered when customers expect and demand more – more transparency, more immediacy and more intimacy. Brand that recognise this and structure ‘flows’ around the user, whatever interactive device they might use, will be the winners in a fast changing world. Your business will have to change, your people, processes, even your product or service.

Surface is a wake up call to business – its time to rethink what you know because the future isn’t around the corner anymore. It’s arrived.

Real world context

Surface undoubtedly intrigues and even inspires those that interact with it but enquiries quickly turn to how the platform can actually be used in the context of the businesses that we consult with.

As I have already said, this isn’t ‘the web on a new box’ or a stand-alone interface. Applications on Surface have to been seen within a multichannel, multi-device experience strategy. Each opportunity and user or customer journey has to be considered on its own merits, some may benefit from a Surface application as a possible touch point, some won’t. But how might it work?

In Retail

Imagine the food tasting stations in your local super market. There’s often little or no real interaction or call to action and the experience can be quickly forgotten. People like something for nothing but it doesn’t necessarily trigger a purchase response or command loyalty. Now introduce food choices with Surface at the heart of the store experience. The content itself could be richer, moving from recipes and menu recommendations, video and tasting notes. The customer could be given a numbered card with a call to action to a website. When they return home, they could access tasting notes, see recipes and click to buy seamlessly.

The reverse might also be true. A customer could come to a wine tasting station and place their tagged loyalty card onto the Surface. This could activate all their tasting notes from an online site and help the demonstrator make more informed recommendations, based on ratings and individual taste.

This isn’t science fiction. Tesco are developing these interfaces with EMC Consulting.

In Financial Services

Imagine going to a discussion with you banking representative or advisor and being able to ‘experience’ the benefit of different products and services by using advanced modelling tools. For example, understanding how a pension works can be complicated for some people and advisors often resort to drawing diagrams. But an interactive description could be so much more comprehensive and memorable.

Of course, not all consultations lead to an immediate sale. People may want a consideration period or discuss what has been suggested with others. Again, as the advisor and customer interact, they can ‘save’ content and access it later through a different channel, for example, online.

The reverse path is also true. An existing customer could access they information on the performance of their existing products and see how they spend diagrammatically before making ‘on Surface’ comparisons and selection of alternative products. 

In this instance the technology is only a small part of the equation to a successful interaction and relationship. The real potential is in the return to a collaborative working towards ‘fit for customer’ solutions, done in real time and over time.

Should banking all be automated and non-human, out-sourced and unfamiliar? EMC Consulting thinks perhaps not and is prototyping these ‘modelling tools’ with banking clients today.

In Energy

Imagine if you need to know where all your resources are at any one moment, real time. What are your yields, production facility outputs, where is transportation? Expensive decisions, potentially taken collaboratively, are often held up as people try to get together and access the right information sources. Neither is simple to overcome, but it could be possible to export lots of data into a more natural, diagrammatic interface that could be simultaneously accessed across boundaries. An interface that allows modelling and cross-referencing, integrating decisions back into back-end resourcing and provisioning technologies seamlessly. Enter Surface.

It might sound a bit Minority Report but data can almost be ‘useless’ unless you can work effectively with it and that’s what Surface could mean in this context.

Every second and every detail counts in the down stream energy market. That’s why EMC Consulting is wasting no time to model the interfaces energy providers will deploy deep within their enterprises in the very near future.

In Telco

Have you bought a phone recently? You might well have been stuck by the array of service options, services and phone features.  Imagine a chat with a sales representative who can place two phones on a surface and show you direct comparisons. Or two different service levels. In simple visual terms. Or I could place my phone on the Surface and look at my usage and discuss recommendations for upgrades or different service packages.

And is it out of the realms of possibility that you will be able to configure ‘blank’ phones with just the services that you really want? Clearly, some networks and phone providers don’t think so. But downloading through an online store might prohibit some users – a face-to-face experience could be what they need to really capitalise on the capability for technology to be customised. Another visit to store, another opportunity to build loyalty with the brand.

None of this sounds impossible. In fact, EMC Consulting is developing these customer experiences now.

Media and entertainment

A group of people sit across a bar table. They place their MP3 devices and phones on the Surface. They start by showing each other photos of their adventures, passing images around of a recent shared holiday. Images are shuffled from one device to another so that each user can share and build their collections.

This is real life ‘side loading’ from one device, through a collaborative experience, to another.

And of course, people won’t simply share images. They’ll want to distribute other forms of content – that new film or latest track. Even contact details – after all, not everything changes. Current Rights issues notwithstanding, people will share and there will be environments utilising the Surface platform to facilitate them. But what is the role of brands in this context – what do they own of this content or the experience itself? How do they generate value from it?

These are the questions EMC Consulting is currently answering with media owners who know that past thinking is a thing of the past.

Key considerations

·         Surface isn’t a table. Its part of an integrated experience and has to be ‘designed in’ as such. This means that you need to think ‘total experience’ - ‘flow’ and ‘touchpoints’

·         Surface is a platform but Surface needs people. Human factors have to be factored in. How will people work with this technology?

·         Content needs to be accessible, portable and structured in ways that afford it being used across devices and channels – this is one of enterprises’ key challenges

·         Traditional metaphors like ‘pages’ and ‘indexes’ are all change on Surface – you won’t be able to ‘throw’ your website on it and it will take a unique set of skills to design for it

·         Surface is a spearhead technology that represents another significant step forward in computing. It’s not a fad and shouldn’t be ignored

·         Get used to trial and error and learning to fail – this is a new frontier and some things will work well, some less well. Take small incremental steps of innovations but take them quickly

·         You’re not alone. Surface needs to work. We often partner with Microsoft to find out how it work can for you

About the author

Matthew Bagwell joined EMC Consulting (formerly Conchango) as its Creative Director three years ago. He leads the Interactive Media division and is responsible for both planning and all aspects of design in the organisation. Matt leads strategic projects, understanding that they are always about managing people as much as defining future systems, interfaces or processes.

Matt’s prolific career that includes a board level role at Syzygy and interactive brand management role at Imagination has seen Matt develop award winning projects for clients as varied as Virgin, Ford Motor Company, Sony Ericsson and most fondly Guinness.

matthew.bagwell@emc.com

Contact: talktoconsultingemea@emc.com

Conchango Creative Director Matthew Bagwell on rethinking workflow and collaboration in the studio

Last week at the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference in LA, Conchango’s Paul Dawson and Tesco’s Nick Lansley presented a touchscreen WPF application prototype we’ve been working on for a little more than a month. It provided a glimpse into how ‘touch’ could revolutionise the way we all think and act about what we eat at home. More, it demonstrated what can be achieved in very short timeframes with new approaches to workflow, enabled by collaborative software like Expression Blend.

We’ve had all kinds of positive feedback about it so far. Comments like:

‘The Tesco demo just blew my Dad away.’
‘I heard gasps from the audience.’
‘Great, thought-leading stuff.’

You can watch the presentation here (it comes on at about the 95:00 mark and runs for 5 minutes): http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/KYN02

As I say, the entire project, from conception to presentation, came together in about 4 weeks. Making it happen required a very nimble approach to collaboration and workflow that would facilitate interaction between team members throughout...

Most importantly, our developers and designers needed to work literally side by side from day one. The traditional ‘hand-off’ simply wouldn’t do.

And that’s increasingly true. Which is why we’ve been honing a new take on integrated workflow – from concept to final delivery – over the past 24 months here at Conchango.

Some of the key questions driving our investigation:

Are traditional ‘studio’ principles and structures still appropriate for the creative development of ‘digital interfaces’? 

Or are the scope of the briefs we’re getting, the potential richness of the interfaces, end user technologies and creative software all combining to force change?

Are we returning to a type of studio environment more akin to film-making, animation and post-production – where creatives work dynamically with producers and often clients; hours spent together, working ‘on the fly’?

I’ve often bemoaned the ‘waterfall’ method of production – where ‘graphic’ designers respond first to briefs, cascading their design solution ‘down’ to developers who have to ‘make it work’. Fortunately, this is happening less than it used to, particularly where integrated business analysts and user experience architects are working in parallel with designers – and when methodologies like Agile are deployed, where creative work is developed in sprints aligned to technical development. But it still happens.  

Ideally, interfaces are created in unison, such that what’s designed can be developed and vice versa. And combined thinking is surely better than over-emphasizing one particular skill. If you have a hammer, you’ll create nail-like problems. Put different tools in the box and you’ll solve problems differently.

Certainly, at Conchango, we’ve realised the benefits of reconsidering the relationship between developer and designer, combining their skills to develop rich interface applications for touch screen kiosks, IPTV players, financial simulators, desktop apps, telemetric data and deep zoom microsites.

Historically, the dev/designer relationship has been ‘authored’ in Abobe Flash. However, latterly we’ve enjoyed the pleasure of working with the Expression suite, and specifically Blend. For me, the obvious clue to the advantages that this software offers is in the name itself. The environment affords us a practical way to develop creative interfaces, almost on the fly, in a way that doesn’t compromise the work of ‘designer’ or the ‘developer’. Work can be produced at speed, in synchronicity – and tailored, tweaked and fiddled with in quick iteration.

Real or perceived divisions are being eroded. Devs and designers are starting to think and create more ‘sympathetically’ together, driven by a common ambition and contributing complementary skills.

Richard Griffin is one of our interactive developers, a self-described ‘code geek’. He’s one of the people here who’s passionately charting this new territory and speaking about it at conferences worldwide, alongside our interactive designer Felix Corke. Rich has this to say:

“Developers have to come to terms with the fact that our world has changed. In this new world you’re part of a duo. Without the designer, you’re not going to be able to create compelling user experiences that take advantage of powerful APIs like WPF. So make friends with a designer and start to understand how they work. This will really help you further down the line.”

Felix adds: “Making it work is rather personal. The most important thing is to build a relationship so that you understand each other’s considerations. Developers are concerned with efficiency and logic, so they may not initially understand why the designer is concerned with perfecting the layout of the control and the type face.”

Any studio beginning to adapt its collaborative workflows in this way needs to ask a few basic questions and then begin to sort out the answers:  How will the art director, experience architect and copywriter combine with the interface designer and developer? Do we need each of these roles to be handled by a separate individual, or might we begin to see the emergence of ‘uber-creatives’ capable of spanning several roles simultaneously? How will these new relationships affect the collateral that clients have come to expect (functional specification documents, wireframes, personas)? Indeed, how do we begin to re-set clients expectations around both process and documentation?

Advances in interface hardware – I’m referring to multi-touch and Surface specifically – mean these changes in studio make-up and dynamics are set to accelerate as the ‘tactility’ of digital experiences becomes increasingly important. Understanding how to engineer these experiences requires us to rethink the creative process. It’s something we’ve been doing at Conchango for some time, and for which we’re now seeing the rewards.

Last week, a creative called Paul Arden lost his battle with a long-term illness.

While you might not realise it, you probably know the man’s work even though you may not recognise the name. Remember the hundreds of people walking from the sea to converge as a big smiling face for British Airways? Or the iconic branding device of a slash in purple silk? These are just two examples of Paul’s great work, created while he was creative director at Saatchi and Saatchi.

In later life, he defied his own words, “I am not a writer. I am afraid of words” and penned two great books, Its not how good you are, its how good you want to be and Whatever you think, think the opposite. I call books like these ‘bathroom books’ – they are easy to read from whichever page you hit first, they can be read cover to cover before the water gets cold and the content is more important than their waterproof qualities. Both are thought provoking, providing any creative with that often-needed burst of optimism and inspiration.

Apparently in life, Paul Arden insulted and inspired in equal measure. Read the books for a taste of the latter.

 
http://www.amazon.com/Its-Not-How-Good-Want/dp/0714843377
http://www.amazon.com/Whatever-You-Think-Opposite/dp/B000JMK8R4/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1208241823&sr=1-2

So here I go. The first blog. I had said that there was no real reason for me to blog in order to achieve what I wanted to in 2008. How wrong that was! Now more than ever, it feels that communicating through this channel about what we are doing is more important than ever! Why? Well, there is a lot of activity going on in Conchango's creative studio and its hard to market it directly - both internally or externally. Some of the work is pretty confidential. However, we can talk about some of the general principles and I can get some valuable feedback from you. So this will be a 'work in progress' kinda blog. I'll ask questions and make the most of the answers I get back.

Right now, I am thinking about what 'brand' means and more forward thinking, what Total Experience Design could mean - both to the team and to our clients who might develop it with us. The reason for this? So that I can be clear about the our goal and the strategies that will help get us there.

I am starting by describing what a brand platform is. You can see a diagram of a brand platform here.

It starts simple but there's another level or two of granularity to go down to when I have time. For example, corporate identity is made up of about a dozen elements and each one needs to be managed.

The next step will be to layer on the services we provide (e.g. Performance Measurement reports) and some aspects of our methodologies (e.g. aspects of User Centered Design - like journeys). This should give us a multi-dimensional view of what brand experience design and management really means. After all, thats what Conchango really does.

So here are two questions. Why is blogging software so counter intuitive and secondly, what do you think might be in each aspect of the personality wheel? And if you're really keen, do it from a Conchango perspective.

You never know. You might be tested on this later!