.oO Tailwind

Have you seen the new AOL homepage? It look svery similar to the Yahoo! one.

One wonders how they can get away with this sort of thing. i mean there are design patterns and there is 100% rip-off. It even looks as if the grids are pixel perfect.

Wow.

Continuing our foray into all things beta, I’ve scored access to Mailplane which is a Mac OSX desktop client for Gmail.

Sure, you can set up Mail to access Gmail, but you lose all the good stuff that Gmail provides such as labels, conversations etc.

Anyway, I’m just starting to play with it, so I’ll let you know what I think later.

Our company is currently going through a bit of a change after some fairly heavyweight mergers. Firstly Oyster with Framfab and then Framfab with LBicon. The group is now an 1800 person, multinational full service design agency. It’s essentially a rollup of Oyster, Framfab, LBicon, Lost Boys, Wheel, MetaDesign, Scient, iXL and some bits of Razorfish.

We now have offices in the UK, US, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Italy and China (!). Pretty huge I’d say.

But with this growth there are the inevitable challenges such as knowledge sharing, creative agility, familiarity and moreover team culture and individual identity. Certainly in the London office where I work.

I wrote about the begining of this challenge, here and here.

The team culture has no doubt been impacted which breeds some questions around personal identity and the sense of place an individual has within the whole. On the whole everything is positive, there are just some interesting challenges afoot. there are also some very interesting opportunities afoot in cross-polinating the disciplines from one country to the next as there is so much to learn.

I’ve already been part of a knowledge exchange with out Dutch counterparts at Lost Boys in Amsterdam. Cool bunch they are too.

Anyway, in order to deal with this the London outfit has arranged into ‘ecosystems’ and these groups seek to deliver small group thinking, sharing and agility within a large, well supported network. The are teams of about 60 people grouped around clients with a natural affinity.

Growth brings process as process is required to control the new chaos. Process can all too often equate to bureaucracy and bureaucracy is an innovation killer in my book. So we’re working on ways to reintroduce chaos (a bit anyway), to reinvigorate a mistake-embracing culture where it’s okay to try new things and get it wrong.

This is design. It’s about invention and experimentation.

All this starts with people and my key observation about agency culture after a few years first hand experience is that very talented people join to work on ‘cool’ brands. Those same talented people are used on projects from week to week, month to month so that all the ‘learning’ takes place on-he-job. Yes there are training course and development packages etc.. but that’s all too often structured around a skill-deficit and is rarely about just trying things out.

I don’t like that and I think that it’s wrong. Who has ever been on a course where they say “Just play. make and break stuff, be curious”?

My colleagues at LBi who lead our ecosystem also agree so we are currently introducing an 80/20 culture to our team.

80% on billed client work. 20% making mistakes working on things that excite them.

It’s not new but the reasons for pursuing it are obvious. It is all about creating an innovation culture where people are challenged and encouraged to work on subjects that intrinsically motivate them. To create a sense of ‘play’ in our workplace.

Any professional service company worth its salt has this approach but I haven’t heard of anything similar in a digital design agency. Yes in product design, but not in digital and certainly at none of our competitors.

I’ve always said that our discipline has a lot to learn from other design disciplines, being the new kid on the block and I stick to that.

So. 80/20. How do we make it happen?

Well there are 2 challenges to deal with from the off:

1. In a culture of 100% billable, creating breathing space for the ‘20′ to happen
2. Finding out what topics individuals should work on and what the prospective projects might be

Firstly we can consider blocking out sometime each week where we switch mode from billed work to private work. I like the idea of this all happening at the same time each week as I think it will create a nice buzz in the team to have everyone on ‘pet projects’ at the same time.

To get started we’re thinking of setting ‘Design Challenges’ to run for a time-boxed period just to introduce the 80/20 way of life. 80% on projects, 20% on other stuff.

We can let this run for a while, enjoy the distraction and nurture our capacity planning to accommodate the new activity.

While we are re-engineering ‘how’ we do things we can be thinking about those ‘pet projects’, what they are, what interests us all as individuals. Some people can team up and start making, trying and developing ’stuff’. The Design Challenges will help us establish the time slot and be a conduit for developing some personal ideas.

I’m always up for feeling our way towards this by trying things out rather than talking talking talking too much.

We’ll let you know how it goes.

We’ve discussed it and it’s all systems go on our new innovative, mistake embracing, creative, fun, developmental culture.

Yay.

Stephen Hellens, a guy in my team at LBi has created a timelapse screensaver of our office. He used a tool called (surprisingly) TimeLapse Screensaver 1.0. It’s free and it’s quite nice.

have a look:

All you need is a webcam, so it’s great if you have a Macbook.

10 things to ring my bell this week.

1. See how much of a cliché you are
2. Cool panoramic of Paris by night.
3. New easy to read wine labels from Wine That Loves…
4. Bruce Mau’s ‘Incomplete Manifesto for Change’ - A list to make you ‘do’ differently not just ‘think’ differently (Via Brand Autopsy)
5. Sing n search, you sing it, it will find it (provided you have a decent mic built in that is)
6. Record last.fm and other stations if you have a PC
7. Gmail keyboard shortcuts Improve productivity with Gmail, some secret delete shortcuts in here.

Twitterlinks:

1. Twitthis Tell people via Twitter about a blog or posting.
2. Twitterbuzz See what ‘Twits’ are linking to.
3. Celebrity Twitter Follow the lives of your fav celbs on Twitter. Yaaaawn.

Continue reading ‘Tailwind Lazy Links 2′

My good friend from university, Fosta is again in Tokyo (he’s a product designer for Sony) and he always makes interesting posts from the weird and wonderful out there.

We were chatting on Skype last night (3 am Tokyo time) and he showed me this stuff which I find all to strange to be honest. The dolls are nearly £200 each and are about 25 cm high.

Oddities.
Continue reading ‘My friend Fosta in Tokyo’

Google have added 10m resolution for Switzerland for Google Earth 4 users and it’s in 3D!!

You have to check out the Matterhorn, it’s pretty decent stuff. BTW Thanks to the Earth Sightseer for the KMZ file, I have a whole host that I want to share, but that’s for later

You have to make sure that the terrain layer is turned on to see it all and there are some great Panaramio shots from the side of the mountain too.

Added to this latest update there are some very interesting NASA environmental overlays that can be checked each day.

I’ll have more to add on the joys of Earth later, but this excited me and I wanted to share it this Sunday morning so you can lose a few hours.

Here is a posting on the Earth Community forum on all image updates.