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.