The airport in Austin, TX is filled with droning organ music this morning. It's a little weird. I've stopped here for a two day workshop with XOXCO on my way home from a winter holiday in the US. We spent the days developing a solid plan for the web presence of HDL2010: lots and lots of little things to line up with September only eight months away.
One of the central issues for us is how to capture all of the content related to HDL in a format that is more meaningful than a blog full of posts ordered by reverse chronology. We need to be able to capture the evolution of thinking around a topic and to make that evolution legible. XOXCO has some great ideas so I'm very excited to see what they come up with for us.
Meanwhile, the geniuses at Rumors are cooking on a refined design of the site and we had the chance to review comps for the first time. This thing is becoming real.
Back in the office Marco, Minna, and Justin have begun settling in to our new space while tending to the daily business, preparing for our HDL away day, and giving Low2No some special attention. Joining us for the away day are three colleagues from Sitra who are all joining the HDL team: Elina (media/press), Hanna (project assistance), and Jaana (event management). Welcome!
Drafting up the agenda for that meeting was a Good Thing To Do because it helped discretize some of the larger outstanding issues. We're pretty comfortable with looking after loose ends and handling uncertainty, but some of the items on the docket are more like entire ropes of unsorted issues that appear deceptively simple by virtue of being tightly woven together. Writing an agenda is a good way to force yourself to unravel those ropes, and unraveled they have been.
CASE STUDY Strategically redesigning social housing to act as a stepping stone towards the formal economy