Just a little public note to announce that among the many various little and bigger projects I’m working on, I’m also helping Mozilla as Local Producer for their upcoming London-based Festival on November 4th-6th. It’s gonna be about media & freedom and in light of the recent public debate around the role of media in politics and society, there will be lots of good conversations to have. Ear-mark it people, you should come.
Somehow, I seem to be in the middle of organising 4 different events. Thought I’d share.
1. Lirec Secret Robot House evening which gives me an opportunity to invite my good friend Nicolas Nova (very excited to turn the tables on him for once). I’m not afraid to admit his blog is the reason why I got into Internet of Things in the first place. It’s free, it’s secret and there will be drinks and food and robots.
2. Co-curating the return of This Happened in London. I went to the first one on the evening of the day I moved to London in 2007 and it’s with real pride that I’m co-curating the revival of this unique free event about interaction design, creativity and technology with Russell Davies and Ben Hammersley. It will be fun. We’ll start with a pre-summer event on June 7th and then have a few events in the autumn.
3. A nice future-making afternoon workshop (arduino + product design + presentations) in Berlin in a few weeks. It’s nice to run these as they feel quite comfortable now after so many years and I get to work with friends.
4. Giving a tour of Silicon Roundabout tomorrow to 20 journalists from Denmark. I’ve invited lots of nice people from the surrounding area to come and talk to them about the work they do and share the reasons why they set up shop in East London. It should be totally awesome. I’ll blog about it later. We’ll be having drinks at Strongroom from 6h15pm if you’re around.
Things are good and interesting.
So far:
- The iPad came out
- The President of Poland died in a plane crash on his way to Russia.
- The Liberal Democrats are doing rather better than the leading parties
- A volcano spread its ashes around Europe leading to chaos at airports and the bluest and quietest skies in years.
Clearly there is a glitch in the Matrix.
A bit of an update if you don’t follow my company’s blog. We’ve rebranded our UK studio to Tinker with a new url, new logo, corporate colours and everything ( for official release check out the official blog post) which was the result of more than a year’s worth of work in figuring out exactly how to talk about what we do, how to communicate it, to who and why.
A comment that people have made was “oh I liked the .it” and that’s ok coz it’s not going anywhere. Again read the blog post for that.
But it became very very clear quite early on that the joke was on us as far as our UK presence was concerned. What had started out as a pun (“tinker it”) then became a monster to manage in terms of brand message. With a dot, without, exclamation mark, without? Capital t or no? Corporate companies we deal with had their finance department or admin departments capitalise the IT because they assumed quite naturally that we were an IT firm. You can imagine how happy that made me.
The .it was also misleading in terms of url vs real location. A woman who I met recently who is managing director of a company I would consider in our ecology and are located nearby our office asked me “how often do you come to London then?”. I wanted to crawl under the carpet. “We’re based around the corner from you”. “Oh I thought you were in Italy”. This was a normal thing to assume of course, but one I didn’t think would impact our ability to reach the right people. And of course it did.
When you run a business, I figure 3 years down the line, it’s ok to admit that the logo you designed one sweltering April afternoon in the middle of the furniture fair (this year marks my first break in attending that particular event) and the website that was put together rather rapidly are part of a history but can always be improved on. That message can change, like companies change and adapt. The big difference these days is being able to play the Google analytics/juice game in a smart way, making sure everyone on Twitter gets it and that the people you work with know why you’re doing it. It’s hard work, but the attention span is quite short, so I think you can afford to change more often than what would have been regarded as safe in terms of marketing a decade ago. Work in progress, as usual.
I realised I don’t write very often about my day job here, perhaps because this feels like a different space that I can use to talk about the meta-job of running a company. Last year, I wrote about running a business but I’m very interested in the dynamics of running a design studio at the moment since we’ve just finished moving for the 4th time in our London office and are part of London’s so-called Silicon Roundabout.
Once upon a time in Ivrea, I borrowed a bunch of DVDs on the Eames’ work and was totally fascinated by 901, their studio in Venice California. Through the years that studio and their work in general has actually been more and more of an influence and reference point. The big challenge in the 21st century activity of running a business is deciding what you are defined by. Are you defined by your work? If so, which part of your work will people hang on to as a mental hook? In our case it was Arduino even if we didn’t develop it, and don’t even sell it anymore. Are you defined by the people in the business? If so how do you give them a voice outside of the business? In our case, I push people to speak at conferences so that I’m not the only one people see. Are you defined by your approach? If so, how do you communicate that? Really hard but I suppose we’re slowly getting there.
One thing I’ve been really looking into lately is how to build culture internally and what that culture means. I’ve come to the conclusion that business culture comes from the types of habits that are formed. In our case, that habit is around sweets. Let me explain. Everytime someone goes somewhere for a conference or a holiday, they always come back with sweets from that place. Small thing, but that makes the office feel like a family which is important when some people are full time and others aren’t. Some people have office breakfasts, friday morning meetings, ours has weekly office emails, sweets, Bantam and Google docs.
It’s always scary and entertaining when a concept that comes from programming techniques kindof made me think of the way I run my company.
Instead, most of a program’s overall functionality is coded into a single “all-knowing” object, which maintains most of the information about the entire program and provides most of the methods for manipulating this data. Because this object holds so much data and requires so many methods, its role in the program becomes God-like (all-encompassing). Instead of program objects communicating amongst themselves directly, the other objects within the program rely on the God object for most of their information and interaction. Since the God object is referenced by so much of the other code, maintenance becomes more difficult than it otherwise would in a more evenly divided programming design. [...] While creating a God object is typically considered bad programming practice, this technique is occasionally used for tight programming environments (such as microcontrollers), where the slight performance increase and centralization of control is more important than maintainability and programming elegance.
You are currently browsing the archives for the businessasusual category.
