It’s Fleet Week. Probably one of my favorite weeks of the year. I am anxiously awaiting the Blue Angels to arrive in the Bay and do their “survey flight” for the weekend show. This marks the 30th anniversary of Fleet Week in San Francisco but my first here, so I am quite excited. I just hope the rain…holds…off.
Here at the studio…
The toolkit is coming along. We’ve started to pin up sections for review. If you turn a 4’ x 8’ foamcore board horizontal, you can fit about 10 11×17 sheets of paper for review. This is great for layout review, except that the benches we were setting the boards on were too low and you had to bend down to review. Not so good for the client. So, we called on our good friends at Tinkering Monkey to build us some wall rails that can hold foam core at eye level. Everything is completely customizable, the kind of wood, how many boards to hold, etc. They’re going to start building and then hopefully coming in a few weeks to install. I’m very excited, once everything is in place, we could essentially have 80 spreads to review at once, which is a lot, but not quite the entire toolkit which is currently at 130 pages (1 spread per).
The toolkit itself, which we are creating with our incubating client, explores a different approach to designing a space that looks at the entire area as a holistic system in order to take into account all the issues, transportation, community, energy, etc. I ran across this project called Making Room which deals with the family and community aspect of housing and space and how the guidelines for development of housing hasn’t really changed since post WWII, when houses were built for the nuclear family. Interestingly: did you know that per New York code, it’s illegal for 3 or more unrelated adults to live together in one place?
Other things…
We’re continuing our work to support the making of a feature film about the life of Alan Turing and his role in modern technology. This project is especially pertinent and topical today considering the news of Steve Jobs. Ben Horowitz said it nicely in an online NYT article: “This is a tragic day for humankind. Like the loss of Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, and Alan Turing, Mr. Jobs will be badly missed but never replaced.” I think it’s only fitting that Steve Jobs is placed among these greats.
That’s it. Now I wait for the sonic booms.
My Autumn decorations are out so where’s my Fall weather?
The last few days included copious amounts of spread sheeting, making sure our contractor doesn’t melt, ordering supplies, errand running, furniture moving, assembly, and repair. The plants that needed it have larger pots and one in particular is much happier now that I know it needs more watering. On Tuesday there was a scheduled fire in the Marin Headlands. We didn’t hear about this so naturally Keela and I went into emergency evacuation mode, we didn’t evacuate far, just to the front door. It brought up the question of whether or not we should have a Central boat. I think we should. It took awhile but the office no longer smells like a campfire.
Everyone is heads down, busy mousing and typing away on projects. At my desk, I am once again diving into the world of twitter. It’s been over 2 years since I’ve logged into my account and apparently I have forgotten how to speak the language. At times it’s exciting but it’s similar to driving a race car one can’t get too comfortable or the car can get away from you, you have stay alert. I’m sure my other half will enjoy me staying plugged in more than normal.
I’m also excited to be ordering more squiggle tees. We’re ordering a limited amount in navy blue with an orange squiggle. Hopefully I can figure out how to add them to the website next week. In the meantime check out the store, we still have a few sizes available.
This weekend is the Hoe’s Down festival in Capay Valley. There will be camping, a farmer’s market, a giant hay maze, farm animals, tours of the farm and much more. I’ll be camping for the weekend in their walnut orchard and sneaking a few giant heirloom tomatoes before I go! If you love local food I highly recommend visiting the farm. Farmers from the Capay Valley will be in attendance not just Full Belly, it’s a great opportunity to see exactly where your food comes from and personally say thank you.
Mid September is my favorite time of year – on both coasts. I grew up in and around the Northeast Corridor, and this time of year is when the intense summer heat subsides and the cool, crisp signs of autumn move in. In the Bay Area, it’s almost the opposite, and I’m currently looking forward to more beach time (I have written about this phenomenon before, the Indian Summer). Both, however, are a welcomed change.
Change is certainly palpable here at Central – in the past few weeks we’ve added a full time teammate, an awesome contractor, and said goodbye to another really excellent intern. Big speaking engagement accomplished? Check. Damien spoke at SoCap, which I hear went really well. Looking at the list of speakers again, I was reminded that there are so many talented people here in the Bay. Damien will be teaching some of those people at Stanford in a few weeks, and I’m definitely sneaking in to audit his class – D, you’ve been warned.
All else is humming along. When I say humming, I mean to evoke consistency, not pace – Keela spoke well to that last week. But yes – things are really moving forward. Website launched? Check. Research synthesized? Check. Progress is good, even in short bursts. Shout out to my awesome team here for being really good at their jobs. Thanks!
Unfortunately, I haven’t made much personal progress in my attempts to reduce my daily caffeine intake. It’s a syndrome caused by that damn good french bistro next door. I stopped by Heath Ceramics about a month ago, which is right down the street, and upgraded to their new expresso cup, which I quite like. The photo depicts it in the usual state – empty – and then I convince myself I need more. But seriously, if you have the chance to go to Heath, you should really do it. Ideally on Fridays at 11:15, when you can take the factory tour during live operation. It’s a great place to remind yourself that people can still make things by hand – and do it really well. I think I’m thinking about clay a lot these days – I’d be a ceramicist as well as a graphic designer if I had the time. I was also fortunate enough to receive a really generous birthday gift from the team this morning – it says on a card that I can go get myself a new tea set from Heath, and I’m really happy about that. I turned 25 today, and it’s nice to think that I’ve changed a lot, but still appreciate some of the things I did twenty years ago.
So for this week, I’ll leave on a different note than you might be used to – a quote from one of my favorite films. Maybe I’m feeling a bit nostalgic, go figure. So enjoy the change of seasons, enjoy a moment to appreciate something well made, and enjoy working well at what you love to do.
“We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering – these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love – these are what we stay alive for.”
–– Robin Williams, the Dead Poets Society
We incubate some of the things that come out of our work with our clients. It’s the perfect way to stay involved in implementing the ideas we developed with them. Right now, we have one non-profit incubating with us that needs an intern. Read on if you’re interested in a pretty fascinating and interesting internship. We’ve already had a couple super-smart summer interns and we hope to find another to join the team.
Fall 2011
We’re looking for a stellar intern to help us with an immense challenge for one of our clients. We are looking for a student (or recent graduate) who could work in our offices in Sausalito, CA, who is interested in both research and using design to change the built environment we live in. We are looking for someone excited about mindboggling amounts of research and who is able to transform that research into meaningful insights and tools for a client of ours.
The non-profit we’re working with seeks to have the greatest impact on design possible, by changing what is considered necessary for a successful urban or community design. The non-profit works with cities and communities to help them build an environment that supports people through their lifecycle and enables both the cities and people to thrive.
This role requires the ability to conduct primary research, interviews, getting “out into the field”, writing and editing skills. As well as being able to prototype ideas and scenarios, and create strategic and practical plans of action for design and implementation. You must have excellent written and verbal communication skills.
Keep reading…
Truly successful design isn’t just done with the user in mind, but instead with the actual users participating in the design itself. You’ll be looking at what is currently out there in terms of tools, principles and possibly develop a new set applicable to the non-profit. As well as take the existing assets and experience the organization has, and repurpose them.
You’ll also be working closely with and applying the intellectual framework developed by the non-profit to show how it can lead to project success, even failure or possible places for intervention
And if there is time you’ll be looking to develop a method or system for measuring the impact of using the framework and the designs that emerge from using it.
Who might you be?
If any of this sounds truly interesting, then please don’t hesitate to get in touch. If you’re the type of person who relishes at the thought of hardcore research, finding every piece of worthy information about a relevant topic and pitching its importance, or someone who is energized by a large and loosely defined scope of direction and can easily turn that into smaller, more manageable and practical tasks, then we should meet. If you’re driven to take on large and immensely important tasks that have a direct impact on making the world a better place to live in, then definitely let us know. If you’re highly collaborative, super-hardworking individual, and enthusiastic about helping a non-profit, with an exceptional cause meet their goal, then what are you waiting for? Write us an incredible cover letter, send some examples of your work and experience, along with your resume. And a reference from someone we might already know.
What you’ll get in return?
While you’ll be working for our client, a non-profit urban design organization who is preparing to take its work out to Haiti, possibly Cambodia and Japan, you’ll also get to work alongside a highly creative and successful transformation company. Central uses the design process to transform organizations to design better futures. For themselves, their stakeholders, customers and the people they’re trying to help.
So you’ll get exposed to the design process, along with a very innovative process for redesigning the built environment we all live in. If you have any interest in architecture, planning, permaculture, community engagement, measuring social impact and biology or neuroscience, then you might find this work very inspiring.
This paid internship is for the fall, it begins when we find the right candidate and run for 8-10 weeks depending on your availability. All candidates must be able to work in our offices in Sausalito.
Please no calls, or drop-ins.
Email your stuff to: iamperfect [ at ] centralstory.com
Look forward to hearing from you.
Usually we end the week with a weeknote. This week, we’ll start with one. Last week was just too busy. We had a lot to do, in a short amount of time. But we had a great team helping and lucky for me they all showed up back to work today.
So, a little about last week.
The office…
There was a definite shift. There were more people, we’ve somehow doubled in size. Linda, our studio manager, has been here for a few weeks now and brings new meaning to the word “organization.” From the moment she walked in the door I swear all our plants are greener, it’s always sunny and the sharpies are always sharp. She’s a monumental help with other work as well. We had to pick and resize 300 photos in like 8 hours, I think she did it in 5, while on the phone with HP to fix our printer and probably baking cupcakes in the back.
More people…
We reached out to two different contractors last week when we realized just how much more help we actually needed. So, Christy kindly accepted our invitation to come help us out with some writing and Tom obliged us by throwing himself in to organize the design and production of the toolkit we’ve been working on. It seemed with the addition of a couple extra people, the studio was humming along at an even higher pace, higher efficiency. Like going from 4th to 5th gear. It’s also more lively, people working things out, eating lunch, solving problems. It was and is quite nice.
Our intern…
Really, Kathleen is our client’s intern, but I like to claim her. It’s her last week of her 7-week internship, although it seems like she has only been here for a couple of weeks. Time flies when you have a good intern. She’s out in the field this week talking to different groups, about how they speak to their community and even who their community is. I can’t wait to see what she comes back with. Some secondary research Kathleen did last week about non-violent communication was interesting…you tend not to think about the seemingly obvious do’s and don’ts, like “don’t cross your arms” “make eye contact but don’t stare.” This reminds me of the Global Do’s and Don’ts in regards to eating. So, maybe not as pertinent but entertaining none the less.
The client…
We’re gearing up to launch our client’s site this week. It’s very exciting for us. We’ve been working with this client for over a year and while we have many deliverables coming, this is the first one to “launch.” We’ll definitely post the link once everything goes live and is working, so for now you’ll just have to be in the dark. Big thanks to the guys at Weightshift for making this week’s launch possible. And a congrats to Scott on his recent nuptials. For those non-profits who don’t have Weightshift to help with their site, they can check out Bellstrike, who look like they are doing a good job helping non-profits get access to online fundraising.
Oh by the way, we are looking for a few more interns. For Central and for our client. We’ll post more information soon. So if you are a stellar intern, could be a stellar intern or know of a stellar intern, get your info ready to send to us!
end.
I love celebrations! Lately I’ve had a lot to celebrate, getting engaged, moving to the North Bay, Kathleen’s birthday today (see above: delicious cookies and a rose from Keela’s garden), and my new role as Central’s Studio Manager. Not quite 3 weeks in and I feel right at home. There’s a lot to do and I’m looking forward to helping Damien and Keela with their to do lists and making things as easy as possible within operations.
It’s my Friday today. I’m off for a three day weekend to do restoration work on my engagement ring, a 1974 Rally Vespa. It’s been in the design community for quite some time, handed down to me by a former IDEO colleague and renamed “Poppy”. The intent was to drive it a year and then restore it but once I took one piece off I couldn’t stop. Now we have 5 boxes of parts and one frame ready for metal work. Another plus to the long weekend is driving my other baby, a ’76 Stingray, for one last road trip before she’s stored for the next year. Side note: I’m working on getting a company field trip to Laguna Seca for a Skip Barber day of racing.
I’m very excited to be here. I look forward to more birthdays, more cookies, more laughs, more debates on whether or not we should remove the espresso machine and many more posts! Now back to the bills!
Yes, its true, Keela and Jonathan are working about a hundred and sixty weeks behind me. Hopefully I can bring them up to speed in time for week 188.
Week 188 is likely to be written by a new member of Central: Linda Hoecker. I’m really pleased to be able to welcome Linda to the team. We were previously colleagues at IDEO, which is where for the first time, as Daniel Kushner recently put it, under Linda’s reign the San Francisco office actually ran smoothly. So now Linda is here. At first, to help sort out our studios, and then help prepare us for growth and see where that takes things. We’re lucky to have her, and even within a couple weeks, things have been running better and overall there’s been a lighter step to how we work.
We’re in one of those unenviable situations where there’s only two weeks left to a several year long project. There’s so much to do. 336 photos have to be selected, uploaded and then written about online. All the text and details have to be written. An entire 350 page (and growing) toolkit is being shaped and drafted as we speak. Plans, strategy, business models and launch projects are being hatched. All for our incubated client. Which, now in a couple of weeks, we get to pull the wrappers off of and start speaking publicly about our work with them.
What is exciting about the work with our client is how it will shift into a new kind of relationship where we’re no longer being hired as consultants to help achieve the goals of the client’s organization, but now we’re helping to define the goals as well as develop the opportunities for the client. For us, we get to build an organization of people, infrastructure and parts in order to creatively tackle their goals. It’s really quite a luxury.
As I write this, the BERG fellas are staring at me. From the cover of the latest ICON magazine. On the cover it says, BERG invents the near future. If you don’t already stalk them online, it’s a great piece on them and the three principals (Matts, and Jack). In the article there’s a line I like:
The trouble with the modern world, the guys agree, is that designers are used by business to achieve the goals of business– not the other way around.
Firms like BERG, of which there are but a few, fall into this category of being incredibly smart not just about the process of design, but also business and the system that built stuff falls into. It’s great to see. Inspiring too.
In the near future, which we’ve not yet invented for ourselves, we’re to be dipping our toes into conservation and the complex systems existing there. In the mean time, I must get back to the moving parts of one machine, and contribute to our own, now smoothly running machine.
I have to agree with what Keela said last week and exclaim “Can anyone believe its already mid august?!” Everyone has been working really hard, and I don’t think we saw summer flash past us.
I returned from Korea last week, which was probably the best trip I’ve ever been on, despite the incessant rain (it’s monsoon season). So I’ll treat the beginning of this post as a sort of show and tell. The design scene in Seoul is one of the best in the world. Literally at every corner is an art bookstore, incredible museum, experimental retail shop, or the best handmade food you’ve ever eaten (this is a traditional soup called dukgook, which includes stock broth, egg, seaweed, fresh sliced vegetables, meat, spice, and of course duk, which is compressed rice cut into slices):
It’s always a good bet that if you think something is cool, there’s something cooler there. What is most fascinating, not only from a design point of view, but also linguistically and historically, is Hangul, the native language. It was invented by King Sejong in 1443. Concerned that his people were unable to express themselves in everyday language with Chinese characters, he enlisted the services of scholars and together with them, devised the writing system that is used today. The amazing part is that all of the characters were designed after speech organs, and the basic vowels were representative of the confucian realms of heaven (ㅇ), earth (ㅡ) and man (ㅣ).
You can see how these symbols represent their inspiration. 대박! So research, synthesis, design. They were using the design process a long time ago. Not only that, Korea invented metal moveable type. Let’s just say for a graphic designer, there’s a lot of inspiration. What I thought was really cool was the typographic logo on this truck (can anyone guess what it means?):
(It’s the Korean word for Milk! Notice the milk droplets.)
Luckily, the Bay Area is famous for its Indian Summer, so we get a summer bonus in the fall. Thinking about it now, that’s really nice. Although the weather might be nice, it does feel a bit like “back to school.” We’ve been preparing all summer for some big things in the fall – some of our Exchange projects will be in their final stages and wrapping up, and new ones will be starting. We’ll be meeting a lot of new people. Damien’s SoCap appearance is just a month away now also. I’ve just recently read his piece in the August edition of PRINT magazine, which summarizes a lot of points that have themed these summer months at Central. Snag a copy if you see it!
We were lucky to have Linda join us full time this week. She has a pretty cool background (she worked at IDEO), which makes her ideal for her new role as Studio Manager. It’s really fantastic to have someone new join our team. We’re already good friends, and I’m a bit envious of her EU passport. We had actually run into each other before, at an IDSA awards event last year. SF is such a small place! I’m hoping next week she can do one of two things: 1) bring it some cool german music, 2) ask Pandora to add new songs to their playlist. We’re happy to have you here, Linda!
Kathleen and Keela have been working super hard this week as well. They’ve been working together on Kathleen’s research, and from what I gather, Kathleen is totally breezing through what would otherwise be a very steep learning curve.
This weekend, the Outside Lands concert is taking over Golden Gate Park in the city, although I waited too long to get tickets. I might have to just experience it vicariously through Keela’s Monday description.
I have no idea how it’s Friday already. I have no idea where the week went or how we are in the month of August. Our new intern, Kathleen, started this week. Well, she’s not really ours, she technically works for our client, but she sits in Suite 6 with the rest of the Central crew. So far she’s doing lots and lots of research, which I hope she likes. She seems too, but she’s also extremely polite so we probably wouldn’t know otherwise.
The Alabamboo team made it cross the finish line this past weekend. So, we helped throw a little party for them at the Bamboo Bike Studio on Post. It was great to hear about their journey and very cool to see all the people they brought together. It was also nice to see our buddies at Weightshift show up. Sometimes, it’s nice to have a face-to-face conversation with people that you talk to via e-mail more than 7 times a day. We had an interesting conversation about when startups aren’t startups any longer and those that truly stay indie vs. those in for the buyout. You can ponder your thoughts on that.
This week has been about juggling. Juggling different projects, different responsibilities and keeping the team moving forward, while still staying smart. It’s easy to push toward a hard and fast deadline, but you’ve got to make sure that you are keeping with the overall vision that you set out, not just trying to make it to the finish line. Sometimes this needs to be repeated aloud.
We’re continuing our collaboration with the teams from SOCAP, Fearless and COMMON this week. We’re hopefully going to pull off something pretty cool at the SOCAP event in September. We’re also learning more about the COMMON pitch…clever people pitching bold ideas to change the world. I love it and can’t wait to hear how it went!
I’ve been getting a lot of e-mails lately from soon-to-be graduates looking for jobs. We don’t really have anything posted out there as far as “help wanted” signs go, but they find us anyway and are all so specific about their interests in working at Central and they all live far away. We usually stick to a strict in-person interview process. The first test is finding the studio. The second is deciphering Damien’s British humour. Both are oftentimes impossible.
That’s it for today. Got to get back to… everything that is…on…my…desk.
