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I was recently asked to write a small thought piece for the Power House Museums’ D*Hub blog. The question posed was ‘Can Design make a difference’?  This is what i wrote (the clock will make sense dont worry!) …

Design is one of those words, it means many things to many people. It’s been defined, deconstructed, damned and deified. Architect William McDonough famously stated that design is the first signal of human intention but for most people it is decoration, mere window dressing on the engineering below. Ask a random person in the street and they might describe a sign writer or if you’re lucky a graphic designer slaving over a Macintosh in a black skivvy and Jonathon Ivvy buzz cut.

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We have 60 – 80 sq metres of space available alongside us in our beautiful Surry Hills studio and we’re looking for some new friends to join us.

Our studio is filled with natural light and fresh air and welcoming people. We’re located in the middle of Sydney’s design precinct, 5 minutes from Central Station and surrounded by good food and good coffee (though we also have a commercial expresso machine in our kitchen, which saves addicts among us a fortune). We have a parking space for bikes and a shower if you want to run or ride in to work or in your lunch hour. Security is rock solid.

You can read a bit more about the space here.

We’re offering the space for a long term lease at $50 per sq metre per month. We can add other things like access to our meeting rooms if you need it.

If you’re interested, call us on 02 9212 3366 or email Duncan at du at digitaleskimo.net.

We’d love to hear from you.
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Question: how long does it take to produce and publish good-quality, unique content for a single webpage? To research it, write it, source and prep the media for it, review and revise it, upload it, test it? …a few hours? Half a day? A full day? It’s probably best to know before you start.

Well I reckon (based on some painful lessons over the years) that it can easily take up to 10 hours for a page to go through a typical workflow. While some pages obviously take far less time (and the process does get quicker), some are frankly a slog to push over the line.

If we’re being realistic: unfamiliar subjects need research and collation, applying the style guide and voice takes skill and perseverance, sensitive content needs several sign-offs (and several revisions!), CMS uploading introduces errors, and thorough testing is required before publishing… it quickly adds up.

Yet content STILL continues to be a peripheral afterthought for many web projects out there.

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Late last year  we were engaged by startup NGO NewsStand to design an infographic to convey the extreme concentration of print media in Australia. The infographic above shows just how we should all be feeling as we listen to the same voices reverberate through the media driven largely by the morning newspapers – which happen to be mostly owned by that defender of journalistic ethics himself Mr Rupert Murdoch.

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We’re stoked to announce that the online extension of the Compost Revolution is now available to all councils throughout Australia. A collaboration between Digital Eskimo and Randwick, Waverley and Woollahra councils, the project allows residents to learn about composting and worm farming in the comfort of their own home. The online approach means people who wouldn’t normally get to a face to face tutorial can take part, massively mainstreaming the programme.

Already a stack of councils have signed up for the revolution and with over 90% of people who received bins still using them up to 8 months afterwards the impacts are substantial– and growing.

It works like this: Residents take a 15 minute tutorial and then once completed they answer a short quiz to ensure everything’s understood. Successful revolutionaries are then provided with information on how to claim a free bin, vouchers or any incentive their council choses to offer.

It’s a simple, effective and proven way to reduce a household’s personal carbon footprint and a great way for councils to engage the community and reduce CO2 and waste expenses.

Join the revolution and get your free worm farm, compost bin or prize

Work for a Council? Learn more about the benefits and our low cost plans
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A lot of people I’ve spoken with over the break agree 2011 was a tough year.  A year of relative slog and frustratingly slow progress. A year we optimists – just about all designers and entrepreneurs are optimists by definition (im a bit of both so god help me!) – would describe as all about ‘ground work’. A few steps forward and at least one (or even two!) back.  And like every good optimist the world over  i am already seeing the signs that 2012 is the year that we might just start breaking through on the many progressive issues we focus on and really consolidate on the hard work of the past few years.

And you know what, those two steps forward could become four, eight – or even a stampede if more people took up their seat at the optimists’ table – after all it’s the failure of imagination and our lack of belief in our ability to change that is the first, and i’d suggest most formidable, block that prevents us from changing everything. We could then get on to amping it up and seriously leveraging the ground work done to date. Making this the year we gain serious traction on our responses to the climate crisis and chronic (and the inextricably linked) social justice issues and finally begin to transform our personal, political and business systems for the greater good.

I always find i’m extra optimistic after taking stock of what our little company in Surry Hills was able to achieve in just one year. So in the interests of being able to boldly take my seat at the optimists’ table again this year  i’ll ask you to join me in taking a moment to look back on the great work Digital Eskimo, our clients and community of collaborators produced  in 2011.

If you’re a subscriber to our DE updates and invite emails you would have already seen our end of year email (there’s a few additions and link fixes though so might be worth a  second squiz!).  If not here it is and here’s to another year at the table!

View the ‘Annnd its a wrap!’ 2011 end of year email from Digital Eskimo.
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Digital Eskimo and the Australian Human Rights Commission have just launched the Something In Common project. The initiative incorporates an unusual double website approach; the first – Tell Me Something I Don’t Know – is a uber-sharable mouse-stopper of a microsite delivering surprising info bites like “1 in 4 retirees are living in poverty”. People can then dig deeper to learn more about the issues through inspiring videos of real Australians, take action on the issues that they feel most strongly about and tell their own story on the Something In Common website.

“Tell Me Something I Don’t Know” summed up an attitude that prevails in society where people are looking for new ways to creatively engage with human rights outside of traditional media.  It was this and other research-driven insights that led Digital Eskimo to develop the online strategy that underpins an exciting shift in the way the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) is promoting the understanding of human rights issues through social media.

Check out the sites here and spread the word:

Tell Me Something I Don’t Know

Something In Common

Bigups to the team!

Digital Eskimo is proud to have co-designed the online concept, social media strategy, brand and user experience of this ground breaking project with the team at AHRC.  I’d like to especially thank our technical partners on the project  Morgan who went above and beyond the call in building the site on a shoestring budget. Finally my gratitude and respect to the masterful team at DE who put their blood sweat and (just a few!) tears into the project; Ben Crothers, Senior Design Strategist and lead Experience Architect ; Liam King,  Experience Architect, Anika Ebner & Yvonne Lee, Producers;  Ben Hoh, Lead Designer; Mark Elizondo, Designer ; and Chris Oates, Technical Lead (DE).

More info:

Media release (from the Australian Human Rights Commission)

Listen to a podcast with myself talking to Disability Discrimination Commissioner, Graeme Innes about the project
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Our Founder and Creative Director, David Gravina, was today named (for the second time) among Sydney’s top 100 most influential people by the Sydney Morning Herald’s the(sydney)magazine.

The article recognised the work of  David (and the crew here at Digital Eskimo!) on the Your Rights at Work and Raise the Bar campaigns and mentions our awesome online campaign platform, Do Gooder. The awards recognise people across a broad range of disciplines and pursuits and then categorises them accordingly, with Dave garnering a slot in the appropriately named ‘Altruist’ category.

From the article:

David Gravina’s design firm, Digital Eskimo, has driven successful online campaigns like Your Rights at Work and Raise the Bar. Now he’s giving his secrets away. In July, DE launched Do Gooder, a platform that allows other campaigners to build websites using DE’s most effective tools.

It’s already having an impact: the NewsStand campaign used its Do  Gooder site to get 3500 people emailing their MPs about a national media inquiry; just days later, an inquiry was announced. Gravina, 41, tasted his first such win when he was just 10, succesfully lobbying his local council to build a BMX track. “I hope Do Gooder will contribute to people experiencing the power i felt when the BMX track was announced”, he says.
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Here at Digital Eskimo, we’re finding more and more success in the power of storyboarding to help us and our clients to think more creatively … and then to help us communicate to others exactly what it is we’re thinking. A very useful tool when your job is to ‘imagine that which is yet to be’ (one definition of Design i like)

We sketch out storyboards as a way of generating ideas and solutions for client projects. We also use it as a fun and insightful activity in our co-design sessions, where all participants get to illustrate their own experiences on storyboard templates. We also find storyboards to be a really compelling way of communicating user experience and business strategy to our clients and their teams, from designers and developers, through to business analysts, project managers and executive decision-makers.

We love them so much that Senior Design Strategist Ben Crothers has just written a series of articles on storyboarding over at Johnny Holland that show you how you can make storyboarding work for you and your team too.

Have a read, then try storyboarding for yourself:

Storyboarding & UX – part 1: An introduction
Storyboarding & UX – part 2: Creating your own
Storyboarding & UX – part 3: Storyboarding as a workshop activity
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This Thursday 29th September we’ll be hearing from John Seed – Australian environmentalist, director of the Rainforest Information Centre, recipient of an Order of Australia Medal (OAM) for services to conservation and the environment and prominent figure in the Deep Ecology movement.

Deep Ecology is a philosophy of nature that invites us to experience ourselves as part of the living Earth, rather than separate from it, and supports us to find our own role in powerfully protecting the planet.

The late Arne Naess, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy from Oslo University, Norway who coined the term “deep ecology” pointed out that our “ecological ideas are not enough to protect the Earth, we need ecological identity, ecological self”.

Through music, film and poetry, John will show us how to nourish our ecological identity and align ourselves with Earth.

When: Thursday 29th September from 6:00pm
Where: Our studio – Level 2, 44 Foster St, Surry Hills
RSVP: Through Eventbrite by Tuesday 27th September

RSVP now

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