It’s week something or other, in our weeknote list, and the studios are really busy. I think Wendy has become an expert at putting together Aeron chairs, and I’m told we’re running out of wastepaper bins.
We have a summer intern from Harvard working with us. Emma is working for one of our clients and is spending her time getting immersed in academic research and developing the much needed intellectual grounding for our client’s methodology. As usual, we’re not able to say much about the work with our clients as it happens. It’s part of the deal we make with them unfortunately.
One of the things we are able to talk about and very proud to do so, is our involvement with Ride Alabamboo. They leave tomorrow and the four of them are riding across America on bamboo bikes they made themselves. Yes, across the States. Bamboo. And bikes. We’ll say more about it soon, but for now if you are interested or want support them, drop by their site: http://ridealabamboo.com/ Ride Alabamboo is part of Common Cycles, founded by COMMON.
The photo is of Nicole, one of the team cyclists, holding up her frame she’ll be riding on. She’ll of course put on wheels and things before doing so.
In other news, we’ve teamed up with Weightshift again on an exciting project for ourselves. One that we’ll be very public and transparent about in the short future. Over the last two years of our four year history (though Central was first started about eight years ago) we’ve gone through several stages of change as we’ve evolved from a design studio to being more of a consultancy. We’ve built up some great project experience and knowledge around the impact and value of the design process and are looking forward to sharing where we’re going with all that. And of course, collaborating with Weightshift on our own story is always a pleasure.
Being busy and with this upcoming change, we’re a little more quiet online than we usually are. But here’s a photo of Jonathan inspecting a mock-up of a book we had bound for a project we’re working on.
So in tinkering with things, I think we broke our site. We’ve called in the experts, we’re prototyping fixes. And I’ll eat the banana when we get things worked out and our site no longer repeats everything we post here.
So in tinkering with things, I think we broke our site. We’ve called in the experts, we’re prototyping fixes. And I’ll eat the banana when we get things worked out and our site no longer repeats everything we post here.
Just joking. I did that myself.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
If I stop to think about it, it is amusing to me that I now think it is really quite nice to have so many warm bodies in the studio these days. Keela takes up every available flat surface in the two studios. Which now includes five IKEA dining room tables and her own desk. Jonathan, only a week into joining Central has just one additional dining room table. That leaves only one for me. And Jonathan makes noises. He laughs out loud at things he reads online. He might also drum the beat to the tune that is playing in the studio. Or he’s cutting up paper and making paper mock-ups. He also did something strange but likely useful: he rolled out a huge sheet of craft paper across his desk so that he can draw on his desktop. Which makes me think of the digital desk by Pierre Wellner and William Newman [link to paper]. He also talks about things other than work. Like life. Wendy doesn’t spread out, but arguably touches every single thing in the office. It’s kind of her job to do so. It’s all here, because she made it so. It’s been fun and interesting easing into having this extra daily activity.
This web site is also fairly new. We collaborated with our friends Weightshift for this new presentation of ourselves. Why would we have someone else design our site when we could easily do it ourselves? In a word: collaboration. In most cases, the benefit of collaborating with people you trust, admire and respect can give you collectively a chance to produce something you might not be able to individually. Added to this, it sometimes can be hard to know what you look like to the outside world. You may think you look like one thing, but in this case, in working with Weightshift, they knew who we were from how we behaved, acted and conducted ourselves inside and outside of work.
This time around, we’d been working with Weightshift on a long-term client project and so they had much more experience in how we work and what makes us tick. Naz easily understood that we needed a site that grew with our activity and that a major part of activity is research. And as we’re a little different from traditional design firms or agencies, we’d need a site that allowed us to curate the content we want to share, in different ways. As Naz wrote, we’re part think-tank, part design. We collaborate deeply with our clients, and we work on our own products, projects and ideas. We love research. We love studying and learning. So it made sense that our site began to reflect that.
We’ve decided to share more about what we study and research. In simple ways. Because a project easily lasts one to two years, and in that time we amass an incredible amount of data and research about the subject matter, we want to find ways to collect and store some of it online. So that if you happen to be interested in what kinds of work or areas we work in, when you search, you’ll get an in-depth and probably very interesting response. Where you’ll see all the inspiration, news, articles, papers and people we uncovered on the topic, as well as photos documenting our process on the project along the way. And some longer form pieces (like in this column) publishing thoughts, points of view, or project details.
So in the end, you’ll be able to search for ‘workshop’ and everything we’ve found, photographed, run ourselves, completed or are doing will turn up. Or you can search for Ashoka, and see everything that we’ve done for them, including photos, research and some of the work itself.
It’s hard to tell the story of two years work in a single page, downloadable PDF. In truth, it takes about an hour in front of a screen so you can show movies, photos, and then tour people through the dozens of foam core boards of synthesized research, the sketches and finally some of the outcomes. But to look at the outcome alone, wouldn’t let someone know what they’re in for should they pick Central to collaborate with. So we’re big fans of other firms who share and document how they do what they do. Something we’re going to get a lot better at I’m sure.
In the coming weeks we’ll have about a dozen projects or activities uploaded and documented here on the site. And we’re going to continue to publish all the bits, matter and pieces of interest that surround the projects we do. Both for clients, and ourselves.
Now I have to go write up the shop items so we can get that online today.
I’m new here. New to the office, new to the city and new to the state. When you move somewhere, be it to a new city or a new job, there are many changes, many differences to what you are previously accustomed. Some changes are big, some are small nuances that can really make you smile. For instance, both my previous commute and my current commute are 9 miles. Before it would take me close to 45 minutes on an extremely congested highway to travel 9 miles, now I drive a leisurely 25 minutes across the golden gate bridge to a wonderful place called “Liberty Ship Way.” Kinda makes you want to smile and salute. I never get tired of going over the bridge. Coming around the bend on 101, just past Divisadero it suddenly appears as a giant orange Transformer standing to protect the Bay. And everyday is different, somedays I leave behind an extremely foggy city, travel through the rainbow tunnel to find a magnificent blue sky on the other side. Sometimes, it’s even foggier in the North Bay and I wind down the hill seemingly inside a eucalyptus flavored cloud. Arriving at the bottom of the hill and top of the Liberty Ship.
The way I worked has changed tremendously. Now, I find myself in a veritable playhouse of creativity. I can play music loud, draw on post-its and throw out any crazy idea without the fear the furrowed-brow. Currently, I am doing a lot of research on urban planning and cities in general. Research meaning, I troll the internet for hours, reading article after article in hopes of some amazing, wonderful, incredible story to post on my wall of information. Lots of times, it’s a wild goose chase. One site re-posts an article from another, that was a summary of a talk given by this guy, who wrote this book, and so on. It’s a hunt, and I love it. To make sense of all this information, I have learned to use post-its. There are no shortage here at Central. In my compulsive need for order, I try to color code each post into a category of thought orange=”this is interesting” blue=”fantastic quote” pink=”scary fact about the world ending.” I’m aware that my coding system is just for me and to everyone else it has no rhyme or reason. Here is one recent article by Chuck Wolfe (myurbanist.com) about the urban experience that got the honorable blue post-it ”The urban experience is the best spectator sport we have, free of charge.” I find that quote especially pertinent here in San Francisco.
So I love the change, I love that you can find a farmer’s market any day of the week and purchase nineteen different kinds of tomatoes if you wanted to. Or that you can hear parrots chirp outside your window (the parrots of Telegraph Hill hang out behind my apartment building). But I especially love the change in my work…from the commute to the fact if I suggest that we hire an office chimp for amusement and filing purposes, it’s not met with harsh words and confusing stares, but rather a simple question “Where are we going to keep all the bananas?”
Four espressos into this morning, it’s not possible to shake this dense fog that is both inside and outside. Shame really, yesterday was like summer and there’s a lot going on here in the studio.
Several of last year’s projects carried into this year. And are moving at a tremendous speed. But it seems like everyone is busy, so when we get the chance to look up from our projects, there’s always a lot to catch up with.
Unfortunately we’re still not in a position to share much of the project work in the studio. Until we wrap it up and launch it all that is. We’ve got projects launching at the end of every month for the next three or four months starting in February. For now, here’s whats been going on and what we can share.
Last year we got to chat with BERG a little about a possible future collaboration on one of our projects. We discussed physics, games and a bit of urban design.
Our code-named Brooklyn Project kicked off at the end of last year with a local collaborator. It has an aggressive timeline to it, seeing a final concept prepared by the end of March, when most spend up to a year doing similar projects.
A large ongoing project has us researching everything about creative collaborations, workshops as well as architecture, urban design and cities. You can follow some of the things we find on twitter here: centralstory
Next month we’re looking forward to sharing the outcome of collaborating with Weightshift. Annually, we’re going to get together and build something together. It’s a chance to do something outside of projects brought to us by others, and make our own restrictions and boundaries. It’s always a pleasure to work with the outstanding craftsmen Naz, and Scott.
Of course, a New Year can’t go by without a kind of transformation or reorganization. We’re better suited now to be completely project focused. A second studio space hosts our ongoing projects, which this journal’s image shows some of. It appears we have almost as much table surface space as we have floor space, yet every inch of the tables are covered. A good sign of activity.
If the writing here seems to waning al title, I think its because the last espress o has worn of f.
To wrap up, here are some other very busy people with some great news, announcements or projects at hand.
Gino Zahnd, former colleague, collaborator and good friend launched Seabright Studios with John Bragg. Weightshift relaunched a new delicious version of their site. They have some excellent things in the works right now. Aaron Kenedi (good friend, and collaborator and the content producer on our Future of Fish project) has launched a fresh looking new Print magazine. Project Projects art directed January’s issue. Read about it here. It looks fantastic. I subscribed instantly. I’m looking forward to collecting them. Kwame dropped by the studio last week for coffee. His recommendation was to put the squiggle into a poster. So we’re looking into that- I think we can produce an excellent poster. Thanks Kwame. We don’t know Alex Bogusky, but he introduced a community designed brand that is open sourced and community owned and directed. Take a look at it over here.
And in a final note, we’re on the lookout for outstanding talent to help us with some project work. We need researchers, graphic design help- both production and visual design, specifically in print. This is for in-the-studio help. If you or someone you know are a creative, super-collaborative individual who’s up for working in a small, everyone-mucks-in-here studio, then email us. Send us a note, and some examples of your work to: jobs /at/ centralstory.com
I dipped into Bruce Mau’s Life Style recently. Dipping is really the best way to experience the book if you’ve not got the time to read the six hundred and twenty six pages from beginning to end. I don’t think he wants you to do this anyway.
As I dipped in, kind of looking for inspiration about how to sum up the work we’ve done over the last few years, and within a few pages I arrived at this:
To understand the studio, you must understand the way we have defined collaboration. A collaborator comes to the studio with an undefined relationship to the proposed work. They approach with an understanding that anything is possible. They arrive prepared to ignore the limits, engage content, and develop something new. They may have expectations, even quite specific ones, but within those expectations or desires, there is space for invention. We, on the other hand, enter an open space of learning. It is an enviable position. At the best of times we have been students with the world’s greatest teachers.
And the text goes on to list learning things like architecture with Frank Gehry, urbanism with Rem Koolhaas and so on. Page 223.
I like this passage. It connects with something we try to do here: truly collaborate with the client. In a fashion where we’re not so much leading as we’re facilitating, and learning on the project together. Almost every project we work on tends to spawn news ones, new directions and take different trajectories. And this comes with knowing that we don’t, at the start, know yet what we’re going to find out as we embark on a collaboration together. But we do know we’re going to learn a lot.
I was thinking about our list.
We’ve learnt a tremendous amount both from the people we’ve collaborated with but also in exploring the field with our clients.
So as a first pass, we have studied:
The future with Ashoka Changemakers.
Complex system design with Changemakers’ Discovery group.
The supply chain black hole with the Future of Fish project.
Strategic investment with the Packard Foundation.
Urban redesign with Urban Re:vision
Making it personal, with Proteus Biomedical
States of mind with Silverado winery
Storytelling with Architecture for Humanity, and Kosmix.
In my own words, when I look at the projects like this, I end up being grateful for how much you get to learn with each collaboration. Because it is inevitable that if left open, you’re going to be changed by a real collaboration.
In Bruce Mau’s words: Our collaborators have helped create a situation in which we have more at the end of our work than we had at the beginning.
I think there’s something to this in both how you see what it is you do, but also in how you see the projects and “clients” that come through the door. I know I’ll be writing more about this in the future.
In other news. People came to resurface the parking lots outside our studios. I had to wrestle with the desire to push a bright yellow Post-it note into the black tarmac that had sharpied on it: DO NOT WALK ON THIS. But then I noticed someone had… forever leaving their mark on the ground. And their shoes.
I also have to draw attention to this Kickstarter project: the Glif. Thomas and Dan presented a story of how they’d like to manufacture a mount for the iPhone 4, so it could work as a camera. They created a great short movie, were very likable, and asked for a mere 10,000 dollars from the community at large.
When I found out about it, they had a measly 6,000 dollars pledged, with a lot of time to go before the funding period ran out. Today they closed the funding goal time (they set at the outset and can’t change) with a total of 137,417 dollars pledged.
This isn’t the most extreme case of funding on the Kickstarter Platform, but it is one of the top 100. And it was fun to watch the number climb and have that nice fuzzy feeling of having contributed.
That’s it for now. More to think about on studying with collaborators.
It is busy right now. The nice kind of busy where things are getting done. Things are coming together and ideas are being hatched, shared and augmented into bigger and better ones. I’m driving a lot again. Down to Stanford. Which gives me a great period of time to reflect on the busy state of things and where’s the next place to end up.
I realized that the very nature of the work we do here at Central will largely prohibit us from sharing much of the behind the scenes, and sometimes, even the sharing of the final products we develop for our clients. I found I was becoming frustrated about the lack of detail I could share here, when I stumbled upon the idea that if I couldn’t share the scope of work, the client, or the client details, I could share some of the questions we’re faced with on the various projects. The questions that come out of our working sessions, workshops and problems our clients are facing.
One of the questions we’ve been mulling over is the purpose of a book. And how could a book be part of a story along with other mixed media. IDEO released a timely short on the “Future of the book”, sharing with us three faces of tomorrow book: Nelson, Coupland, and Alice. As beautiful as the concepts were, and so very well narrated, they were kind of beyond the book and not really about a book at all. We found ourselves considering that the concepts either generated more noise, or were not even a book anymore but simply an app. They seem to all be based on a hidden assumption or belief that we’re all wanting short-form narratives instead of being able to engage in a long-form novel or something. I think it might have been better put, “What’s the future of the narrative or story?” and how might we use an iPad to consume this? Now if IDEO and Berg had teamed up, I believe something magic would have come out of this around the future of the book.
We’ve also been looking at possible learning tools for what Naz likes to call “the supernormal”. Sal came up with some great ideas for sentence creation. And now we’re going to have to look at creating the magic engine behind that to really deliver a decent experience. Back to the book question. The next question we’ll have around the purpose of the book, is how do you get a book to be part of a movement and engagement platform. Something that can explain a completely new way of seeing things, and then enable you to engage in change. Without creating a new social network. A new flickr, or twitter.
Also this week we’re sorting out the new space for running workshops. A big part of what we do are workshops. Its all part of the design process. And we’re finding we need the space to spread out, break out, and make a huge mess. And then be able to leave it exactly as it is, as we spend a few weeks afterwards carefully putting everything into something that makes sense. A kind of story. The workshops can vary, ranging from being focused around creating ideas within a particular problem space (like the Future of Fish workshop), or can be very “business therapy” like, in helping an organization realize its purpose, and how to deliver that. Through behavior, design, and experience. So we’re thrilled to now have the space to spread out in.
Shane dropped by a week ago to answer our call for help. He’s returned since to make it a frequent thing. Cathy now legitimately can spend time watching TV and browsing online. All in the name of research.
An old friend dropped by the studio this week. With his business partner, they shared something they’ve been working on for a couple of years. I loved it. It made me think about the way I find authoritative information online and who are the trusted advisors I seek recommendations from. When I thought about it, I think I ask people less in person, “have you listened to anything great lately?” and do my hunting online. I feel lucky that we get to see new concepts and ideas as people come by to share them.
The class at Stanford is going well. I realized that I’ve been teaching for more then fifteen years. Lessons on learning quark or photoshop, and open classes on the internet and web back in the early nineties. This kind of co-teaching is very different, but wonderfully refreshing to be teaching what I do every day. So much so that when I return to my team, back in the office, I find myself having the same kind of expectations of them as I do for the graduate students. “Sketch it out and pin it up…”. I think I might start grading everyone.
We sent the file out for the pads to be printed. Soon we’ll have little children pads to accompany the larger green pads. Can’t wait. And the beta group filled up nicely and promptly. All taken sorry. I’ll send out more information to the group shortly.
Okay- now I have some writing to do for imprint. I should leave soon, it’s all quiet here in the studio late Friday evening.
Have a good weekend. When yours comes.
Yes, I skipped a few weeks from the last ‘weeknote’ entry. The excuse of being busy doesn’t really hold weight as we’re always busy, but in this case we were perhaps a little crazier than usual. On Friday we held the exhibit for Sara’s work. The paper cutting exhibit for what she’d been working on for the last eighty weeks or so. It was a great success, lots of people made the trip over one of the two bridges, and we rounded the evening off with a late and large dinner at Le Garage with the remainder of family and friends.
Sara’s mum flew down, and as the invite promised, after two glasses of wine, they both sang the chipmunks version of Jingle Bells. Naz filmed it. So photos and movie to come. Photos of the night will be posted shortly. You have to see the completed prototype of the Backgammon set – it really is quite stupendous.
The Beta version of our site is live. We’re updating content to it. Making the tweaks and kind of embarrassingly excited to get it live. It’s like a exquisitely tailored suit, and the process of working with the Weightshift team has been equally as inspiring as it has been enjoyable. Working with people who care and love their craft is something we love to do, so the design and development of this site has been a treat for us.
It also looks like Christopher and Barbara Warnock might loan us their Chandler & Craftsman Press. It will require removing the large windows at the front of our space and fork-lifting it into the studio, but it will be worth it to have ready access to it. Cathy is going to flip. But I’ve not told her yet.
In other weekly news. I get to give a talk next week at Stanford for Arna Ionescu’s class on design methods for projects we’ve worked on here at Central as well as out there in the ‘real world’. I’m also thinking of sneaking in some other case studies that I gathered on such things as the insertion point case study for cut-and-paste from XEROX Parc and perhaps one on iteration. Helps to have a teaching father who researches such things.
The Future of Fish project wrapped up somewhat quietly. And a smaller team of us, including the Packard Foundation, Ashoka and two of us from Central are working on the transition of knowledge and research to a new partner. In December we make a final presentation to the Foundation and we hope sometime after that we’re able to create some sort of solution story for the web site without undermining the future potential of what we developed. It is great to see that the state of marine wildlife is a growing topic of interest with the general public, which was very different when we started this project and ‘fish’ wasn’t such a popular concern. Its great to see people like Kristofer Lofgren being recognized for their herculean efforts to create a sustainable and even thriving change in the industry. Not just for themselves, but for the industry.
Projects keep coming along. We’re busy throughout the year and into next. Which is a satisfying feeling. We also decided to close the office for several weeks over the Holidays. Last year I believe we worked right through them. If we don’t start making these decisions in the right way now, we’ll find ourselves ten years down the line, overhearing staff asking us why the company gives so little holiday time. If we don’t remember to take the time to feed ourselves, we’ll have nothing to give to the projects when we work on them. However, if we keep moving the office around like we’ve been doing for the painting and the exhibition, I might actually evolve to being a very streamlined and organized person. Tough way to go through the process though.
Super rationalization is our focus in the last three weeks of the Future of Fish project. The team is focused on pulling together facts, figures and data to support our solution concepts. In which they will tell the story of why these ideas realistically can make the impact we believe they will. Over a year’s work comes down to these last three weeks in how we craft this final storytelling piece. Well, it is more like a package of storytelling pieces. We’re hoping to explain our solutions on the Future of Fish web site in the coming weeks.
Sara’s group is fantastically busy and deep in development of a couple new projects. They received samples back for a Christmas mailer and have sent out a new file to be sampled. The new file was made out of two months of paper cutting work, then six weeks to trace it into Illustrator. The 20 x 20 inch metal sample is going to be for a new limited run product, which is threatening to be quite an amazing thing of beauty.
We’re also exploring the right kind of packaging for the letter-pressed coasters. Seems foolish to drop them into plastic when we’re trying to use less of that where possible. It may end up that we have to design and make the perfect disposable container for them before we can sell them. We’ve not even begun to think about how to package the Central pads yet. Along the lines of new products to sell, we’ve finally agreed on the first three T-shirts to make. The squiggle being one kind and digitized paper-cutting on another.
Weighshift have been patiently working with us over the last few months to design a new web presence for us. We’re really excited about our new identity online and how Naz and his team have helped craft the way we look and feel in a web site. We get to show the Strohls’ new logo for us too.
We’ve got a couple new small projects to keep us busy in the final months of this year, including an exhibition and seeing if we can make the book project happen that we’ve been wanting to do.
So week 89 is from roughly the first time both Sara + I began working together for the Central Office of Design. Though we technically started the practice many years before likely back in 2003/4. The last 89 weeks have gone by in a blink and inspired by BERG’s updates, I thought it would be interesting for us to share what our company is up to.
It has been a while since we’ve had a chance to stop and reflect on all that is going on. Since we started Friday Edition we grew larger than expected, working on many excellent projects with outstanding clients, organizations and people. We’ve got a growing stash of products designed and made by Central, and our Future of Fish project has its own storytelling site. Here on centralstory.com, over the next 12 weeks or so, we’re collaborating with one of the finest design firms to help express and craft our story to replace this site. We’re really proud of the work we’re doing and the people we’re getting to collaborate with, so it is fitting to get a greatly improved way to say so. If you’ve signed up, we’ll let you know of when things evolve here, as well as when we set up the online store.
