Blog posts tagged as 'weeknotes'

Matt Jones and I have been in San Francisco this week, for meetings and a conference (an event called Foo Camp). We’ve been demoing Ojito, a cheap 3D device for the iPhone we’ve developed. Although it wasn’t the purpose of the trip, we’ve pitched it maybe two dozen times, sometimes in less than a minute in a corridor, and it’s fascinating how that process helps distill a product concept and clarify its route to market.

I met one guy and he was like, “oh, great name, how did you come up with it,” so I told the story: we give all our projects codenames after places on the Colorado Plateau. We need essentially meaningless names for the dark projects, and it’s one of my favourite regions in the world. Ojito is a place there. And he replied, “no, no, you don’t understand. I speak Portuguese. Ojito, it means LITTLE EYE.” Auspicious.

My plan for the remainder of this week is to write Ojito up as a plan and cost it, and catch up on the admin that’s difficult to do away — invoicing, payroll and so on: there’s an approved suppliers list the company needs to get on otherwise we’ll lose our chance at a project, and the other big task is setting up a subsidiary company to run Ashdown so that project can start. The wheels are in motion but I need to speak with the bank.

Jack and Tom are in London, working together on a toy I’m really looking forward to seeing. It needs a codename. I understand there are stickers involved. That’ll continue next week.

Tom has been spit-and-polishing the website. Jack has been finishing the stationery templates for invoices and so on. Next week he’s doing some video work with Timo on our RFID research project.

Energy is important to new product development, and to creating new work, as is perspective. It’s easy to get mired in even the most exhilarating work and lose sight of what’s important in a product, and work is always better – and easier – when it’s approached with bright eyes and an open, confident nature. For projects that last longer out of the public eye, you need willpower too.

Conversations and conferences help (Matt J and Tom are both at dconstruct this Friday). What erodes these feelings is a lack of stability. In that spirit, the big news this week is mundane: we’ve been waiting for invoices to two clients to be paid… and in the last couple days, the money landed in the bank. Frankly it’s a relief. Large company bureaucracy can make the payment process time-consuming to navigate, and now especially – what with expanding and investing in new product ideas – Berg’s two major resource constraints are attention and cash flow. Having these invoices paid makes me realise quite how tense I’ve been about the latter for the last month (I don’t mind saying that most of my waking cycles go to thinking about the company), and it’ll be good to return to the normal situation of just having too many exciting projects to work on. That’s life in the Escalante.

Our first week being BERG, and everything is sweet. Welcome to the new website! I should ask Matt J and Tom to say a few words here about the design ideas behind it, how it was put together, and where it’ll go next.

Tom is migrating the last parts of the old website now, and he and Jack are working together on an internal interaction design project for the rest of the week. That sounds fancy: it’s a toy and it’s funny and clever. I look forward to seeing it.

Matt J and I are both in California for conferences and meetings later this week and most of next. Jack has been making demos for Ojito with Campbell (the 3D designer who worked on the Manhattan maps), so we’ll show that around while we’re out there. It’s a simple toy and tool, and our best guess is that – as a standalone thing – it’s legally unprotectable. That means we need to be able to move fast, fit with other people’s products and context, innovate with the service design, and be flexible with route to market. It might still end up as an experiment but that’s fine. We’ll show it more publicly once it’s gone through another round of refinements.

Matt is also wrapping up final deliverables for the two design strategy projects. At that point both become a kind of gentle chase through the accounts payable sides of the relevant companies, which is simply a part of doing business with organisations of a certain size.

This is a quick note because I’m travelling a day early, today, for client workshops in New York (part of one of the two design strategy projects). On the plane I’m hoping to prep for that, and also collate our comments on the Ashdown contract — our solicitor had some interesting points I need check into.

Disappointingly I’m not going to get to work more on the racing car, which needs about another day’s work. Andy and I spent last Friday on it, and lost a good half an hour chasing it round the studio kitchen and having it respond to different instructions. It’s fun to play with in ways I hadn’t expected: interactively and together. More laughter than I’d thought. A good toy.

It’s the last week of Schulze & Webb because we’re renaming the company on Thursday. S&W no longer says what we are: four permanents and a network of expert practitioners, working in design strategy, invention and new product development for ourselves and others. The new name is good for the next four years… and more on that in a day or two.

Tom’s working on the website. It’s super clean, and the launch scope is good and tight. It’s all built in WordPress so we can add to it continuously — a big problem with the current one is how hard it is to update, given how busy we get. Matt Jones is on that too. He’s designed it as a hypertext, all cross-linked so browsing is a flow of reading. He’s also writing, sketching and designing as the deliverables are created for the two design strategy projects. And he’ll be on business development towards the end of the week.

Jack is working on negotiations for the new studio, developing our new branding, and today is with our model maker on various projects… one is Ojito, prototypes of which Matt J and I are hoping to take to California when we visit next week.

I’m writing, one design strategy doc and a little copy for the website. And I’m still on business. The Ashdown contract needs to be run past our solicitor, which is new for us but it’s more complex than ones we’ve signed before. And I have my fingers crossed that we’ll be able to move the iPhone app job forward towards kick-off later this week too.

See you on the other side of the re-brand!

Matt J’s two design strategy projects of last week continue. One is at illustration and document design stage, and the other is feeding into a bigger process through docs and meetings. Tom A continues work on the new website, and we’ll be having some friends of the company over for drinks on 19 August to help us launch. Jack Schulze is working on our new stationery and typography, and on moving us into a new studio with friends.

Schulze also has a new prototype in hand from the model maker we work with — the feasibility test has come back well. The project is codenamed Ojito. We name a bunch of our projects with place names from the Colorado Plateau. Jack leads new product development and prototyping internally and for clients. His main client project, a toy car for AHO, wasn’t supposed to be a priority last week, but Andy H was able to come in and work on the electrical engineering so there was more progress than we expected. We’re hoping there will be more of that this week.

My week is costings, admin and closing projects. Matt J and Schulze have each put out proposals this week, and I’ve helped with costings for both. I’m working on a financial model and some user scenarios with Jack; a visual/interaction design project in Germany and an education project in London, both at contract stage and requiring a little shepherding towards signing; and an iPhone project we need to get to a letter of intent this week to keep timings sweet. I was hoping to gather material for the preparation of our year end accounts, but it looks like that’ll have to wait until next week… because instead I’ll be putting together a contract:

Tom Armitage has been working with us four days a week for the last six months, primarily on Shownar. This week is his first week full time. He’s been doing ace work as lead developer and a kind of embedded journalist/design researcher, and I’m super pleased to make this permanent.

I thought it’d be interesting to start giving a weekly update here of what we’re up to in the company.

We have weekly design crits inside, on Tuesday mornings, where we all talk about our plans for the week and crit a single project, so in the future look for these updates just after those meetings.

Let’s see… Matt Jones is leading on two big design strategy projects on at the moment, both oriented around workshops. The shorter is more about concepting, and the workshops are complete so it’s about writing up products, the ideas behind them, and illustrating. The longer is just starting and more focused on facilitating and synthesising.

Tom Armitage is leading on building out our new website. The old one hasn’t been updated in, oh, four years or so. Look for that in the next couple weeks.

Otherwise we’re focusing on business development. There are two projects we’re hoping to move to first draft contract this week or early next, and Jack is in Amsterdam for a few days developing a proposal for a third. His travelling means two other projects (ongoing new product development and a prototyping gig) aren’t burning super bright this week. And of course the usual following up leads.

It’s an exciting summer, doubling in size, new studio soon, lots of work and project, lots of stories to tell… but more of that in weeks to come.

Oh, the week 217 thing: Schulze & Webb Ltd isn’t the original name of the company. Jack and I renamed an off-the-shelf company we bought — that’s often the easiest way to start up in the UK. So for a while the company was called Z.V.B. Ltd. “What does that stand for, Zero Version Behaviour?” said Jack’s dad. And that particular company was formed 1 June 2005. I like that it pre-dates us, if only by a few weeks.