Image courtesy of ooh_food

ACF’s GreenHome online strategy

Digital Eskimo is working with the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) to design the online strategy for the GreenHome program. ACF is one of Australia’s most effective environmental NGOs, and it’s flagship GreenHome program is it’s most successful grass roots initiative to date.

This program is designed to engage with and educate communities about environmental issues within the household context and help people effectively reduce their individual and collective eco-footprints. We will be completing a Scoping project for ACF as an initial step towards the redesign and development of GreenHome’s online presence. We look forward to working with the GreenHome team and the broader community to define appropriate functionality, content and design strategies for the site.

With our 3-Councils Ecological Footprint Project in full swing we’ll be drawing knowledge from a raft of work we’ve done to date, including ethnographic research and co-design activities. We look forward to sharing insights with both clients through our collaborative process.

Rethinking the way we do things and inspiring positive environmental action is crucial to creating a more sustainable world and we are delighted to partner with ACF on this project.

Related posts:

1. 3-Councils Ecological Footprint Project

Everything we do impacts on the environment, whether through the electricity that powers our computers, the hospitality we provide our guests or how we get around. We wanted to know what our impact was and then use that data to inform our strategy to reduce it. As the saying goes, you can’t improve what you don’t measure.

View our Ecological Footprint Infographic.

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March greenUps is all about Design, so what better place to have it than Object Gallery, home of the new State.Respond exhibition.

When: Tuesday 2nd March 2010, 6.00 – 8.00pm
Where: Object Gallery, 417 Bourke St, Surry Hills NSW 2010

State. Respond explores the role of sustainability in design and features provocative written statements, images and examples of real and speculative works from 5 NSW based designers, including Digital Eskimo, studio one8one7, Lava, Bird Textile and Schamburg + Alvisse.

The greenUps crowd are in for a treat as Brian Parkes, curator of the exhibition and Object’s Associate Director talks about the thinking behind the exhibition and the exciting new path Object has embarked upon with the exhibition.

RSVP now

(Due to capacity limitations at the gallery an RSVP is essential!)

I look forward to seeing you there.

Related posts:

1. Agents of Change at Object gallery
2. Sparks fly on the dancefloor at July greenUps
3. greenups – Sydney Green Drinks launched

(Image courtesy of 010lab)

Digital Eskimo celebrates Sydney’s visual arts scene with the launch the Art Month Sydney 2010 website.

Something is afoot in the Sydney art scene; the arts community, a community that has not traditionally been notable for it’s collaborative outlook, is coming together with a common vision to share their love of contemporary art with the people of Sydney.

Throughout March, over 70 commercial galleries, artist-run initiatives, public art museums and auction houses will host more than 130 exhibitions, studios tours, gallery talks, art bars and family events across the city. It’s all part of the inaugural Art Month festival, which aims to broaden our community’s awareness and appreciation of Sydney’s vibrant contemporary art scene.

We worked with Art Month to create a website that would bring the art to the people. Our focus was on presenting the venues and the exhibitions throughout the festival in an extremely accessible format while celebrating the Sydney art scene.

“… you have built something fabulous. It is a dream to use – the thing is so intuitive. It looks beautiful. It is our market. The board love it. And even at the most stressful point of the operation, as a group we reckon it was a truly inspired choice to go with you… ” Kate Dezarnaulds, Art Month

Thanks to the eskimos who worked on the project, all the contributors over at Art Month and to Hayman Design for their great work on the ID. We’re stoked to have been a part of this project, which will have a significant impact on Sydney’s arts community.

Art Month runs from March 1 – 31. Visit www.artmonthsydney.com for details on the events and exhibitions in your area. Keep an eye on the site for some sneaky iteration 2 updates that are on the way.

You can also keep up with Art Month on Twitter (#AMSyd10) and Facebook

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Launching last Friday and running over the next seven weeks, Digital Eskimo will feature in Object Gallery’s exciting new STATE. RESPOND exhibition.

Along with four other NSW-based designers we’ve been invited to respond to a statement addressing the challenges of sustainability in design. These responses have been translated into physical installations that are displayed within the gallery space.

We chose to use this opportunity to introduce our upcoming Change Agents project which is a collaboration with the Creative Industries Innovation Centre (CIIC) at UTS. The project’s ambitious aim is to co-create an open source resource which will aid the design industry as it responds to the rapidly approaching low carbon economy.

We’ve included several participatory design methods in the exhibit to expose elements of our Considered Design methodology, while collecting input from the design community that will help shape the strategic direction of the project.

You can check out STATE. RESPOND from 6 February – 28 March at Object Gallery, which can be found at 417 Bourke St in Surry Hills.

To see photos from the exhibition launch night, as well as shots of our installation, please visit our Flickr page.

Related posts:

1. Exploring sustainable design at GreenUps

Dr. David Vincent, head of International Programs at Carbon Trust and an actual P.h.D. carrying scientist, is visiting Australia hot on the heels of self proclaimed Nobel laurette Lord Monckton. Last Thursday 11th February, we heard his thoughts about climate skepticism and how small businesses could position themselves for the imminent low carbon economy.

David is currently in Australia on a mission to inspire our small to medium business (SME) owners to start thinking about ways to prepare themselves for the move to a low carbon economy.

Carbon reduction will create significant business opportunities, and not just for the bigger players in the market. Because of their trademark flexibility, innovation and close ties with the community, SMEs are ideally positioned to leverage the low carbon economy for growth.

Carbon Trust has already done some great work with businesses in the UK, helping them identify effective and affordable ways to reduce their carbon footprints, develop low carbon technologies and, ultimately, lower costs.

This DE Talk was presented in collaboration with the British High Commission, and held at a new venue, Object Gallery, where we are currently exhibiting for the State.Respond exhibition.

To see photos from the event, please visit our Flickr page.

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For those of you whose first language is English rather than binary: Drupal is a software product called a Content Management System (CMS for short). It’s used to power dynamic web sites with features such as blogging, media integration and community participation. Digital Eskimo has been using Drupal for several years, and we’re proud to support Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and its largely volunteer community. In terms of ethics and philosophy, Drupal is closely aligned with Digital Eskimo. We’ve launched several successful Drupal sites recently, including our “experiment full of experiments” live local.

Quick wrap of my favourite presentations this weekend:

• Liz Henry: Abandonment Issues. First talk of the conference, and in my opinion the best. Liz came out here all the way from the USA, to discuss with us the cold hard fact that Drupal sites need to be maintained, often for a very long time, and that developers often don’t stick around for terribly long at all to do so.
• Angie Byron (webchick): Drupal 7. D7’s mega-enthusiastic lead developer (especially visiting from Canada) gave us a terrific demo of the highlights of the upcoming new version, which is currently in alpha. Angie also invited us all round to her place last night for a hackfest, where I learned how to write about 2% of a core SimpleTest.
• Chris Burgess: doesn’t play nicely. Just when I thought there was nothing new to hear about Drupal module development gotchas, this talk (which rapidly expanded into a facilitated discussion) clearly summarised some issues that Drupal coders experience far too much, and talk about far too little.
• Giuseppe Maxia: Blaming the unknown. Database guru Giuseppe’s talk was more of a general coding talk than a Drupal-specific talk. His basic message hit home to everyone: “it’s always your fault”. We always blame first what we least understand. Honest, upfront, and very informative.

I also gave a quick lightning talk, in which I gave a demo of the Migrate module, which (of late) I’ve been working with extensively here at Digital Eskimo. I’ll be blogging in geekier detail about the conference on GreenAsh — I’ll post the link in the comments (below) when it’s written.

Related posts:

1. DrupalCon DC: reporting back

We’re thrilled to announce that the online presence of the live local project has been listed as a finalist in the 16th AIMIA Awards.

The site has been nominated in both the Best Non-profit or Government and Best Science, Health or Environment categories.

The AIMIA Awards are Australia’s longest running and most prestigious Interactive Media awards and it’s fantastic to be recognised for our work on a low budget not-for-profit project such as live local.

Big ups to Piers Dawson-Damer who had the vision and courage to invest in the project. Also the project team here at Digital Eskimo; John Macfarlane, Jeremy Epstein, Chris Gaul and everyone in the project team for all their hard work. I should also thank all of the live local community who are what it’s all about in the end.  (We haven’t won yet so I’ll hold off continuing the acceptance speech until the awards night perhaps!)

Related posts:

1. the live local Foundation
2. live local
3. Tweeting the live local challenge

Local living, global communications

In March 2009 we had just completed live local, an ambitious project which aimed to inspire people to improve their communities by experimenting with new ideas and sharing their stories. With the launch of the live local website fast approaching we needed an online strategy that would enable us to reach a broad audience without much of a media budget and few internal resources.

We decided to challenge two established bloggers, Kate Carruthers and Rebecca Varidel, who collectively have well over 30,000 twitter followers, to ‘live local’ for a week and to document their experiences on Twitter. The subsequent tweets created a fun, authentic real-time story that Kate and Rebecca’s community could  share with the blogger and created a buzz around live local that gathered steady momentum in the lead up to the launch of the site.

Read the full article by John Macfarlane, the Experience Architect on the project.

Related posts:

1. live local officially launches!
2. live local nominated for two AIMIA Awards
3. live local

(Image courtesy of uBookworm)

If you hang out for any amount of time at the Digital Eskimo studio, you’ll discover that the people who work here are interested in a fascinating array of things.

Have a seat on the couch and chat to someone and you may end up talking about iPhone apps, British comedy, Drupal conferences, Australian indie bands, cultural theory, motorbikes, zombies, or something that I’ve somehow left off that comprehensive list.

Those numerous interests often serve as the inspiration for cool ideas that emerge from Digital Eskimo. But this website divulges very little about the quirks and affections of Digital Eskimo’s staff, save for the fleeting glimpse provided by our compelling, eloquent biographies. Until now.

Distinct from this blog, which offers up a range of more company focussed news, analysis and opinion, is All Things Considered, a free-form blog that collects the things that inspire, amuse, enrage and confuse us. Everyone in the studio can contribute. Some of the posts are highly relevant to the practice of design, while others are much less so.

All Things Considered is built on Tumblr, an elegant little web application made for quickly sharing snippets of thought, quotes, videos and pictures. We have great appreciation for Tumblr’s user experience, and the fact that the look and feel is fully customisable – the visual design is an in-house job.

Think of All Things Considered as an evolving record of the studio’s collective online stream-of-consciousness. And think of it also as a further example of our belief in transparency: we want you to know more about who we are. So dive in, and, of course, talk to us. Feel free to comment, share and reblog whenever you want.

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