Post #1246

Officially we’re closed this week. But on Monday we packed up the old studio, and yesterday Tom, Matt B, Tom Taylor (from RIG) and I moved all our collective stuff 100 yards down the road and piled it up in the new place.

I ache!

But it feels great. Imagine that in a Tony the Tiger voice. Grrreat!

I’m popping down there later so the locksmith can do the windows. And once all the odds and ends are finished between Christmas and New Year, I’ll pop down again and straighten out some desks so we have a running start on the 4th.

So yes, we’re closed next week too. I won’t write anything for week 238.

I just had a look back at our work from 2009. Chronologically:

• Shownar, a telly and radio guide based on data-mining the social Web for buzz (BBC). Shownar was a successful prototype, and its technology and ideas will be integrated into bbc.co.uk in 2010.
• The Incidental, a map and guide to the Milan furniture fair, printed nightly and updated from the social Web (with Fromnowon, the British Council, and Åbäke). The Incidental was also published at the London Design Festival and I’m sure it’ll be back.
• Here & There, maps of Manhattan projected in plan and from street level simultaneously, our first product and sold online. It was a great success for us.
• Nearness and Immaterials, short film explorations of RFID and connection without touching (Touch project). These films have each had over 100,000 views.
• Mag+ interaction design and video on the future of digital magazines. The video established the reading experience as central, has had 200,000 views in just under a week, and received fantastic write-ups from the NY Times, Guardian, Engadget, Gizmodo, All Things Digitial, Wired, Core77, Creative Review and many more.

Ashdown and Kendrick, both projects on this scale, are well underway, and there are three workshop/invention gigs over 2009 I haven’t mentioned, with another two just starting up. There are two or three self-initiated projects which haven’t yet seen the light of day.

Then there’s the rebrand from Schulze & Webb, two studio moves including this one, and general growth and everything that comes with it — the Dayeujin and the Escalante.

Also we’re having fun.

This is going to sound weird: it feels like we’d done more.

Growing takes a ton of energy. If you grow and want people to be as happy as when you were smaller, able to focus on the work yet have that work continuously improve, and have the studio benefit from that growth too… well, developing everything from cultural values to patterns for workshop proposals to financial projections takes effort to get going. Scaling is hard.

There’s a little more growth I want to do in the early part of the year, and one more ingredient to throw into the mix, then I want to turn some of that growth energy into basic work and studio energy.

But enough about that.

On the whole, a good 2009.

That feels like an awesome thing to be able to say. A good 2009!

Grrreat!

A short advertisement: if you’re looking for a New Year resolution, and you have a small company or work freelance, consider keeping weeknotes! Bryan Boyer aggregates several at weeknotes.com and it’s an awesome learning experience reading how other people work. Personally I find reflecting each week helps me and helps the studio, and clients and friends seem to like them. There’s something about the regularity that surfaces things that otherwise wouldn’t come up. The form is like a click track. Anyway. You should do it, and let me know if you do.

Advert over.

See you on the other side!