Crafting a Brand Identity
I've got enough ideas at the moment to keep myself busy prototyping, and after meeting with Cynthia we determined the best thing for me to do today was focus on crafting the overall packaging that my projects will live in. Doing so now would also provide me a means of presenting them in a larger context tomorrow at the small Web Ecology symposium that's being held in Brooklyn. The logical direction seemed to be presenting my projects as the initial suite of a web development company. To that end, I've come up with 2 different marketing concepts and tag lines. I also have been doing extensive domain name investigations using domainr, which is an awesome tool for finding clever domain names. I Let me know which name and/or idea you prefer!
irratio.nl - Making the Internet unpredictable since 1265433808*
So this idea focuses on the fact that Americans are leading increasingly digital lives, and in doing so, ceding more and more control to computers. As designed, the Internet celebrates the logical prowess of the machine through structured and predictable experiences. This is evident in the way Captcha's are designed, URL shortening services, and even the "404" and other cryptic error messages we get back from websites. Instead of treating human behavior like a bug or virus that needs to be purged, we should celebrate what makes us unique, both good and bad. If humans are a little irrational, shouldn't the web be too? Irratio.nl seizes control of the web from our logical overlords by creating experiences that have are unpredictable, illogical, and irrational - just like people.
fix.it - Building technologies that make people more human, not less
Do you habitually take photos to immediately post on Facebook? Let your Twitter followers know how slow your work day is going? Check in on Foursquare every time you hit the town? If the answer to any of those questions is yes, then you are feeding the Internet's obsession with metadata. Our increasingly digital lives are causing psychological changes that most of us aren't even aware are taking place. If the Internet continues to be designed and used from a machine-centered point of view, we risk becoming increasingly machine-like ourselves. Fix.it looks to solve our growing problem by designing online technologies that focus on what makes humans unique - our capacity for irrational and unpredictable behavior.
As you can see, both ideas are still rough right now and need to be fleshed out further. I'll likely present the top one since I think it's the stronger of the two at the moment. My goals for tomorrow are to get some concept feedback and ideas from my fellow Web Ecologists while spending some time working on further prototyping. Any and all feedback would be appreciated, thanks!
*Note: Those numbers are the Unix timestamp of the current time. I thought it'd be a nice geeky touch.
