I recently had the chance to see North Kingdom as part of a D&AD Presidents Lecture in London. Hosted by Sanky from AllofUs, the event allowed two of North Kingdom to spread the word about their creative practice.

Co-founder Robert Lindström and Senior Producer Marcus Ivarsson came down from Skellefteå to show London more about their world and their work.

Skellefteå’s city centre is extremely reminiscent of a standard British town which hasn’t really had much love. An urban oasis in the far north of Sweden, home to about 30,000 people with the odd five story medium-high rise block of offices. It is this unassuming town which is home to the folk at North Kingdom.

Attention to detail

The lasting impression from the two Swedes was that North Kingdom value and maintain high quality, award winning, work. They go the extra mile to achieve a perfect product, even finishing off some of their work after it has been delivered to the client, just to finalise the details and ensure complete satisfaction.

Many of the projects are multi-disciplinary and their belief in cross-competency teams and individuals shows through in their work which encompasses film sets, videos, illustration, 3D modelling and animation, artworking, website design, product concepts and much more.

One particular project which, I think, shows off these skills is the Adidas Team Geist project to support the German football team during the world cup. The aim of the website was to get visitors to help find the German football team’s identity. The core of this was a strategy football game.

The attention to the graphics, game, animation and ensuring that all of these elements tie in together is a wonderful feat, which is admired.

See more at:  http://www.northkingdom.com/case-studies/adidas-teamgeist/

Process – The F.U.C.K. Rule

I’d normally avoid swearing on this blog, but when there is a process which I think makes sense, it’s worth mentioning. North Kingdom’s process is essentially broken down into F.U.C.K. It’s a unique way of remembering the order of things, how the work should be done and what is important.

• Function
• Usability
• Cosmetics
• Kärlek (Love in Swedish)

The fact that such a creative agency puts function and usability at the beginning of their process is actually very admirable. I haven’t quite decided whether they mean this in a creative sense, i.e. the function of the creative is to communicate a message, or the function of the product which could be a game or website. Either way, I like this idea of process where form follows function.

Love

The last item in the process is love, and that is where I get the impression the magic happens, and the final details and creative finesse is put into the work. But it’s not just about the work. The importance of and value placed on Love also shows through throughout everything they do.

Their offices are crafted into a more homely environment to encourage a better working environment. They partake in personal projects as part of what they do, and not just because it makes money – e.g. Woodbot Piliot. Their blog communicates all of this so well.

Overall, the talk was especially insightful into the world of a different agency. How they work, use process and SCRUM, finalise the details, the length of projects and the involvement of their teams. Every insight is valuable and this is a fantastic one!

Image by mediadeo

The redesign I stumbled across when logging onto HSBC internet banking recently got me thinking about how we use the internet. I’ve coined the term Action Prompting Voids (APV’s) to describe what I found!.

In this particular case, HSBC have added to the usual current and savings account details with some additional categories of services and products which I might have with them. Except, I don’t have those services or products. I’ve blanked out the first two rows within the interface, but the bottom three areas are blank.

The first thought which runs through my head is, why are those boxes empty? “Do I need a loan and mortgage, a pension or some insurance?” And then, “wait, didn’t I have some insurance once with HSBC? Do I need it again?” It actually makes me feel like I’m missing out or that I have forgotten something, even though I may or may not have these items with other banks  / building societies or other financial institutions.

This method of displaying a void where possible purchases or investments can be made is actually rather clever. It is a  void, which prompts the action of the end user in which to fill it. On a basic level, the same approach it used with website shopping baskets. “Your basket is empty” is actually saying “Please buy something!” or “put something in here so that it’s not empty.”

I’m sure that this somehow relates to our intrinsic humanistic need to fill, fulfill or complete things. One of the reasons computer games are so addictive, and applications which involve gaming or rewards, such as foursquare, are pretty addictive.

Other simple uses are the watched items notification on eBay, baskets on ecommerce websites and goal / reward medals on foursquare.

So, can we use these blank areas, action prompting voids (APV’s), to encourage people to complete actions with the reward of filling in a bit of web real estate?

This recent video talks about how business people need to become designers. I feel strongly that design is part of my role as a digital project manager, and there are multitudes of opportunities to design within any job role.

Roger Martin, Dean of Rotman School of Management, explains that traditionally business people take an analytical view of the world, and base future planning on past results. That knowledge, together with innovative and design thinking, can be used as an insight into creating new products and services. This thought process shouldn’t be restricted to business people though. I believe that to some degree anyone can be a designer, or use design within their work.

For example, within the digital marketing world where I spend all of my work day:

• Account Directors / Managers / Executives are able to help clients to work out new marketing strategies, react to impartial insights into a campaign or business justification for a project. They work with clients to design outcomes to an idea.
• Project Managers / Producers work hard at the beginning of the project to understand the requirements and put those into a structured format, designing the architecture, functionality and order of production.
• Designers are of course creating the visual appearance of a website or application, but there is more to it than that. They design the navigation, the user experience, the method by which people are expected to find the information they are looking for.
• Developers take their opportunity to design the method of production, the specific methods by which people will input data, manage content and the technical elements of final delivery.
• Search / SEO Specialists design keyword strategies and systems to appropriate meta data into websites. They also design metrics by which those are measured and a tactical plan to achieve those.

Design is used by almost everyone within their work day, whether a little bit or a lot. It’s available to everyone.

More videos from the same video series can be found here: design does matter!

Friday marked the launch of the London Design Festival with the writing of the words “LONDON DESIGN FESTIVAL 2010 IS NOW OPEN” on the set of Audi production line robots which have been placed in Trafalgar Square.

Even though I missed the opening line, there were plenty of messages which came flooding through from their website. You can log on and submit a message of your choosing, with it randomly being selected through a lottery type system. It is then written, recorded and played back both online and also on the LED type display which surrounds the installation. Take a look at the video below and the picture above to understand how it works.

London Design Festival – Outrace – Audi Robots from Richard Stowey on Vimeo.

If you are in London between the 16th and 23rd of September, then go and take a look. Apart from it being crowded with tourists who are probably wondering what on earth it is, it’s a chance to see some production environment machinery in real life. The London Design Festival also has other events on in London this week. A full schedule can be found by going to the London Design Festival website.

It’s also worth checking out some of the designers other collaborative work: Clemens Weisshaar and Reed Kram

Image Outrace – London Design Festival 2010 by Richard Stowey, on Flickr

As is usually the case over the festive holiday period, I had a little more time on my hands than usual. After seeing a number of adverts for the Decode: Digital Design Sensations exhibition at the V&A I decided to go and check it out and see what all the fuss was about…

I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of translating digital ideas into physical reality. The idea of taking a set of data, either made up or recorded from somewhere and representing that in a digital way. The Decode: Digital Design Sensations exhibition at the V&A is a demonstration of just that. Digital ideas represented in an easy to understand way.

The exhibition was split into three distinct parts: Code, Network and Interactivity. Code simply showed what could be done with raw data and the different ways in which it can be represented. I particularly liked the Digital Zoetrope by Troika London in this section which comprised text spinning on the outside of a cylindrical object, and appeared to slow down periodically in order to reveal certain facts.

Network contained exhibitions which displayed information which used a network in order to supply the information. There were a number of different ideas present here which mainly seemed to aggregate data and provide a visual representation of the data. One of the possibly more well known exhibits is the Exquisite Clock, where users who have downloaded the iPhone app can contribute an image to the clock pool. The clock uses these contributed images to display the time.

The interactivity section was by far the largest, in space and numbers. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Make Out display was one of the most intriguing with a six screen display with lots of videos of people kissing, sourced from the internet.

Other installations which I really liked included the Vanetian Mirror by Fabrica, which essentially recorded a long exposure picture but in a digital form. It was displayed on a high definition screen, almost life size. Because of the long exposure, subjects would have to sit or stand still for a few minutes before being completely and clearly shown.

Daniel Rozin’s Weave Mirror was also extrememly clever using motors, electronics and laminated c-shaped prints to display a reflection of whatever was in front of the mirror. The mirror was constantly moving to reflect what it saw using a gradient from light to dark.

Alth0ugh not by any means the last of the exhibition, Body Paint by Mehmet Akten seemed to be one of the most enjoyable interactive exhibitions with people throwing themselves and everything else they had up, down and around in front of the display which altered the paint on the digtial canvas. A very neat idea, and very well made!

Overall, the exhibition really shows off current trends, capabilities and performance by digital designers around us. The multitude of ways data can be represented, used, manipulated and displayed are seemingly unlimited. This, it seems, is the future – digital ideas which transcend the virtual world and real world boundaries, and bring some of the human elements back into computers.

Human input, digital output!