September 2007

Last night Dave and I presented the freshly-minted Raise The Bar Campaign site at WebJam. The site was well received, resulting in our presso being voted third favourite. Big thanks to WebJam and SitePoint for the prize and for everyone that voted for us!

Congrats also to the other winners, especially Dmitry for the Optimus Microformats Transformer. The project is a great contribution to the standards community – and he was sooooo pumped about winning the prize (which included an iPod Touch contributed by Binalogue)… it was a delight to see.

WebJam will be posting videos from the night to Viddler shortly. But in the meantime, Priscilla, who attended the event on her birthday – happy birthday P – has posted a note about the campaign (and why she’s supporting it) on her blog.

The media interest in the campaign, plus getting the site up and live and ironing out the bugs have prevented us from writing about the site here. Hopefully Dave will have a few moments in the coming days to write a bit more about the campaign and the site…

I’m off to Chicago in November to present our paper ‘Engaging With Stakeholders: Mobile Diaries for social design’ at the Conference on Designing for User Experience. The paper describes our work on mobile diaries and design research methods over the last 18 months. The act of doing these kinds of collaborative design activities with our clients and their stakeholders produces rich results. As well as generating data that inspires our future design work the research facilitates a co-design process in itself. This can lead to the generation of content by participants, as well as a reflection on, and change in existing practice. Kinda of a Participatory Design meets User Generated Content.

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Researching the sustainability of paper stock for our album packaging project lead us to consider two interesting questions: how do we find the balance between the needs of the project and the need to be sustainable; and to what extent can we justify using extra resources and creating more waste in pursuit of an aesthetic?

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Politics Online have announced nominees for the “The Top 10 Who Are Changing the World of Internet and Politics“. We’re very excited to see the ACTU, one of our clients, appearing in the list for the Your Rights at Work website. We designed and built the site (with our good friends and tech team Mooball) a few years ago as a hub to the ACTU’s very successful campaign and continue to provide strategy, creative and technical support for it.

If you get a moment, check out the nominees and cast your vote (for us!)

P.S. congrats also to our friends over at GetUp!, who have also been nominated.

This is an international award often presented to projects with much bigger audiences and budgets, so it’s great to see Australian representation among the nominees. And although we’ve already won an Effectiveness award from the Australian Graphic Design Association for the site it’s still exciting to be up for another!

**UPDATE: We won! We’re very excited to hear that the campaign site was awarded first place. Watch a video of the award ceremony

Priscilla has posted about an interesting report looking at the use of “Web2.0″ tools by non-profits.

The crux is that non-profits are finding it hard to work out what might work to them. My experience is that fundraisers usually want to use these tools to cut to the chase and ask for money. Unfortunately, that rarely works.

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Just a quick note to mention that we’ll be presenting at the next WebJam in Sydney on 29 Sept.

We’ll be trying to distill some of our guerilla research techniques into a 3 minute presentation – certainly a challenge, but one we’re up for!

So if you’re interested in learning a little bit more about how the Eskimo’s work, or just simply want to share a bevvy or three, pop down on the 29th.

Also – I’ll be attending the Web Directions South conference next week in “participant” not “presenter” mode. If you’re keen to catch up some time drop me a line…

We recently upgraded our old colour printer and purchased at new Xerox Phaser 8560 multifunction printer for our studio.

We seek to use every opportunity we can to reduce our impact on the environment and the first step to doing so when it comes to printing is to simply print less.

But given we cannot reduce our printing to none at all, we had a number of questions about our new printer’s environmental impact that we hoped would guide our choice (apart from the crucial question of whether it produced high-quality prints).

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It was with a profound sadness that i read the news that one of the great inspirations of my own journey into a sustainable way of living and working had passed away today. Anita Roddick will of course be well known to anyone who is aware of our fragile planet and the impact we have upon it, but for business people especially I think she has been one of the greatest beacons of light during those dark years when it seemed the mainstream business community would never take the issue seriously.

The Body Shop and Anita herself have forged so much ground over the years that all of us “trailblazers” are in many ways just catching up to her great achievements. And of course Al Gore and others have taken up the mantle of celebrity bellwethers of late but it was Anita for many years who made business stand up and take notice.

She left the planet and it’s inhabitants with a much better chance of survival than if she had not been born, a better legacy I cannot imagine there being.

Last week we mentioned we were taking our rubbish home with us. We decided half-way through the week that it would be far more enlightening for us to actually keep it (on or under our desks) and audit it at the end of the week.

Unfortunately the Eskimos are a reliable bunch, and many had already taken their rubbish home. But this week, we’re going to do things differently.

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This originally appeared on my personal blog, but I thought it relevant to repost here. Sorry for the repost for the two of you that read both

After having a late night coffee, I sat up last night and finished reading Cradle to Cradle by William McDonough and Michael Braungart.

I’d heard good things about this book, especially from the folks at work, and given I’ve been thinking a lot lately about where I want to go professionally, and eco-design being a big part of that thinking, I thought I’d borrow a copy and have a read.

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