Think

At Big Spaceship, we have weekly show-and-tells where either a staff member presents a current project or a guest speaker talks about a topic that relates to their specialization. A few weeks ago, Todd Zaki Warfel, author of Prototyping: A Practitioner’s Guide and Principal Designer at Messagefirst gave a fascinating presentation on the value and practice of prototyping to our team. In his book, Todd writes, “Prototyping helps you get ideas out of your head and into something more tangible—something you can experience, work through, play with, and test.”

With the hope of gaining a deeper understanding of the people and culture of startups, last Friday I joined the Walkabout NYC, a city-wide open house event for technology startups organized by Harvest.

Looking at the relationship between a company’s physical space and its philosophy and work culture, I talked to staff members at five of the 21 participating companies to find out how their work space influences them.

Two months ago, I was a Foursquare addict. From the G train shuttle bus to the Duane Reade to the 88th police precinct, I checked in everywhere. However, because of the lack of real-world benefits and limitations in its game mechanics, I seldom check in to places anymore.

This post explores the thought process behind the live action game, Radar Blip, created by Big Spaceship strategy intern Jim Babb.  You can play it this weekend as part of the Come Out and Play festival.  Any readers of Think are invited to join us June 4th at 9pm at the Brooklyn Lyceum.

We’re all too familiar with the expression “Thinking outside the box”.  In fact, you’ve probably heard it enough times that it inevitably elicits an audible sigh anytime it is mentioned.  For bringing it up, yet again, I apologize.  However, rather than tread on the old ground of thinking inside or outside anything, I want to describe a better box.  One designed for the purposes of play and excitement.

"You mustn’t say anything against the Machine," says the main character of E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops. Forster’s world is one that worships technology. Communication is virtual and constant. Like instant messaging. Friends in other countries materialize before you to chat. Like Skype. Information is omnipresent, but reverb outweighs originality. Like Twitter. Oh, and the story was first published in 1909.

Inspired by the documentation of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, our strategy team curated a list of links that illustrate how governments, NGOs and ordinary people are using media – both new and old – to document current events and encourage political engagement. Our interest lies in creative uses of technology – whether it is web-based or not.

It's time to add some baggage to the word "like".

While the conversation rages about Open Graph and Facebook's new grab to dominate the internet, I'm stuck on the change in semantics. Suddenly we're being prompted to "like" rather than "become a fan" of posts, pages and other content all over the web. This is more awkward than it might seem. No longer am I a "fan" of Coke or Guitar Hero, I'm now a... "liker"? "One who likes"? When I visit the brand's page, is that a "Like Page"? Maybe an "Online Community For Likers"? And don't banner ads seem a tinge bald and desperate when the call to action reads "Like Our Brand!"? It's a syntactic hornet's nest. So what is it about that four-letter-word that promotes it to such an integral position everywhere we look online?

As Whrrl launched the third version of their iPhone app yesterday, how exactly should we view it?  Is it simply another service in the rapidly crowding Location Based Service (LBS) marketplace or does it offer enough unique services that it is significantly differentiated?  While Whrrl does have some unique features to distinguish it from the likes of Foursquare and Gowalla, is it enough to slow the momentum of these dominant services?

We know, we know.  Things have been a little bit slow here at Think as we've moved into 2010, but one of our resolutions for the year is to change that.  Things have been busier than ever, but we're eager to commit more time to sharing our thoughts, ideas and observations -- and, selfishly, even more eager to learn from the wide range of experts, innovators and generally thoughtful, opinionated and diverse readers who take the time to join us and share their comments.

Since we're more interested in conversation than monologue, we wanted to take a moment to introduce -- or re-introduce -- the diverse group of people behind the blog.  Below, a quick self-introduction from each of our contributors... and if you follow this blog, we'd love for you to introduce yourself in the comments.

This post was originally shared on Adobe XD's INSPIRE, who were kind enough to ask me to blog for them last week. You can find many a great post from those in the user experience and design fields there. Please check it out.

We at Big Spaceship are always looking to incorporate new perspectives that will inform our thinking in projects, helping us shape insights that ultimately lead to ideas and execution. As we roll into 2010, there are a few disciplines we’ve been dipping our collective toes into that I think will have a big impact on the way we approach the experiences we design.