Tim White and his
wife Susan had a baby today. It’s the first ever Deeplocal baby! This is a major step for the office. Welcome to the world Clare Elizabeth.
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It’s a Girl!
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Last week Chloe and I went to Context, AIGA Pittsburgh’s annual exhibition and award night. It was great to see Pittsburgh’s design community gathered in one place—namely SPACE gallery Downtown—to share the fruits of our efforts. I remember earlier years (okay, I’m not that old; it was like 3 years ago) when the featured work was mostly print design and, as a student, my “experimental narrative” project sat meekly in the corner on a laptop with a small handful of other interactive and digital projects.
I’m pleased that the range of work has become increasingly diverse, and this year was no exception. Screen printed posters hung alongside with digital projections, along with shelves of all sorts of design artifacts. I’m also very pleased to announce that both of Deeplocal’s featured pieces—Nike LIVESTRONG Chalkbot, and the 2009 Pittsburgh bike map—received awards of distinction at the show. For me, it’s a nice message of acknowledging both high-tech interactive work and more traditional printed work.
We often talk a lot about design and technology but not enough about the value of marketing. In the past few days, Deeplocal and/or it’s associated work has appeared in Wired, Fast Company, and Communication Arts, and received a best of interactive award from Communication Arts, two Pittsburgh AIGA awards and an award from MassTransit Magazine. 
I just returned from a transit conference where we were presenting our RouteShout project (featured in Wired and MassTransit) where I was astounded how many in the industry knew exactly who we are and what our product did. This comes from two things: 1. having a great product, and 2. making sure people know your product exists. Most companies, including our own at times, fail horribly at making sure people know their product exists. We have no big marketing department or budget, we are just diligent and responsive. We pay attention to what is being said about us, thank people that help us or go out of their way for us, respond to questions and phone calls, and keep people informed when something cool or exciting is happening here at Deeplocal. This has worked very well for us. We remain a small but driven team, we are growing slowly and expanding our national client base. We are doing this because of yes, technology, but also, because of marketing.There is no real formula for this that I can share. It is literally just following leads, staying in touch, and treating your product or company’s network as you would your personal network. Stay in your room and watch TV and people start to forget about you. Be visible, active, and help the world in some way and you will make friends.
So consider this a thank you to our team that works hard to let people know all of the cool stuff we are doing here.
Thankfully our team keeps delivering cool and fun stuff to talk about but I promise you that alone is never enough. Being from a smaller city (Pittsburgh) that is outside of the major U.S. media centers like NYC and LA make it a challenge for us to get noticed. Thanks also to the journalists and writers that work to support companies like ours in Pittsburgh. So yes, there is nothing that important or enlightened in this post but I just was feeling all warm and fuzzy lately. I am proud of our team that has managed to stand out among some very large competition and continue to let people know that we have something special here and we built it from the ground up here in the great city of Pittsburgh. Now come eat waffles with us.
Don’t actually use methamphetamine – think metaphor (I think this is a metaphor…) people.
Just a quick update on our post-digital development. Here’s a variation on an LED activation, controlled through Twitter:
So if you’d like to control an LED on my desk, just tweet @dltest, “LED ON” or “LED OFF”. More exciting things to come soon.
-Eamae
Sometimes understanding and developing technology involves years of research, testing, documenting and publishing. Other times, though, it’s just a couple hours of messing around and posting a video online. When applicable, we really like the latter approach.
Here’s one such project. We do a lot of work in mobile, and we also have a decent amount of experience working with electronics. Yesterday afternoon I put together a quick proof of concept combining the two. Here’s controlling an LED from a text message:
The SMS is handled by our Gumband API. We then have a small PHP script on a server that returns new text message data from Gumband. A small program running locally on a laptop pulls that data and parses it for defined commands—in this case “on” or “off”—and then translates those into events which it sends to an Arduino microcontroller. The Arduino can then activate hardware circuits like turning on a light, or any manner of other physical changes.
Deeplocal is going to open up our doors a bit to the outside world. Our clients like to work with us because we are constantly trying new things and learning how to creatively combine technologies to create new experiences. In our research blog, we will share with you a little of what we are working on and playing with (that is not under NDA of course). Have fun and watch us play.
I will be in LA all day Wednesday and Thursday. We don’t get out to the west coast all too often. I would first like to invite you to what will likely be a great event in LA. Presented by Trailer Park and Contagious Magazine, Next Generation Content will tackle the challenges of figuring what comes next for brands and advertising. Deeplocal will be presenting our approach to working that we like to call Gutter Tech. If you would like to meet, please call our office and they will put you in touch with me. I expect warmth and sun.
If you can’t make it to the event, no problem (I think it is actually sold out!). I’ll still be wandering around and if you want to talk about potential projects, just reach out to our home base in Pittsburgh. We won’t bite.
When the Deeplocal team journeyed to France last summer for the Nike Chalkbot project, we were excited to be involved with the Tour de France, but we had no idea how much the Chalkbot’s messages would affect each of us. We also couldn’t have anticipated what the words that Chalkbot printed would mean to the individuals who were currently battling or who had battled cancer.
Each early morning (think 4 or 5am), our team would get the Chalkbot prepared to print, and as it was printing, many of us would walk behind it and read message after message. Long after we’ve returned home from the Tour, we’re still seeing the Chalkbot’s affect on individuals and their families. One story that we want to share with you is about a four-year-old girl who is battling the rarest form of a pediatric brain tumor; her name is Carly Mitchell.
We found out about Carly when a family friend submitted a message for the Chalkbot that was printed on the course of the Tour. Carly has been undergoing chemotherapy and keeping an eye out for clinical trials that she’s eligible for. Her family has been fundraising to pay for Carly’s medical bills; one of their recent fundraising efforts is selling short and long-sleeve shirts with Carly’s chalkbot message on them, “Keep Fighting Carly.”
We wanted to pass along the information about how you can purchase a shirt or make a donation:
To place an order, email keepfightingcarly@yahoo.com
Checks and money orders can be made payable to Keep Fighting Carly, P.O. Box 182, Plainfield, PA 17081
We’re expanding our RouteShout.com sales team and we’re looking for smart, upbeat, articulate, well-organized individuals with experience in sales and a proven track record of success. We have a great product that has been named one of the top new tech innovations in transit, and we want everyone in transit to know about it.
If you’re interested or know someone you think would be perfect for the opportunity, take a look at the job description here
You should be comfortable with the following for this opportunity:
- Managing the entire sales process from prospecting to close
- Making dozens of cold calls per day, generating interest, qualifying prospects, and closing sales of $15-150k
- Understanding customer needs and and requirements
- Technology: you don’t need to have a technical background, but you should be able to understand and learn basic computer and mobile technology
- Make presentations, webinars, and demos and articulate what RouteShout is and how it works
- Close sales and meet or exceed quarterly sales quotas
The position has very high earning potential; it is not an entry-level position.
The coolest aspect of this opportunity is that you’ll be working for an exciting company (last year we helped to develop the Nike Chalkbot and our entire company went to Europe for more than a week for the Tour de France, not to mention that we have an extremely smart, talented team of engineers and designers who work fast and love what they’re doing). Also, you’ll be selling a product that’s truly valuable and has already garnered tremendous interest from the transit industry.
If you think you’re up for the challenge, email me directly: heather@deeplocal.com with your resume and a cover letter.
As a designer, people are sometimes surprised to learn that I write code. A good friend of mine is a talented furniture designer, and I doubt anyone is surprised that he understands joinery and actually makes things. It makes sense: to design a good chair, he has to know how chairs work. To me, we’re both doing the same fundamental thing, developing fluency with our materials.
So why is it that so many interaction designers don’t program? (I’m not going to delve into a dissertation about what interaction design is; in this case, I’m referring to designers who work with people and digital machines.) In my experience, interaction designers tend to be among the humbler, or at least nerdier, subsets of creative professionals, so I don’t think it’s that we feel designing software mechanics is beneath us.
I think the challenge is that, until relatively recently, the barrier to entry into writing software was dauntingly high. I remember my sophomore year of college, after finishing a semester and a half of introductory programming classes. I had learned all about variable types, data structures and principles of object-oriented programming, but I still had no idea how to actually program anything I could actually see. Disheartened, I dropped programming and went back to my diagrams and screenshots.
Then something happened. I took a programming class for artists and designers, taught with Processing, an open-source Java library and IDE for visually-oriented programming. Suddenly I wasn’t implementing arraylists and sorting strings, I was editing pixels and animating shapes. Suddenly I wan’t limited to conveying interaction through indirect descriptions, I could specify interaction explicitly, through code. Approaching programming as hacker, rather than as a computer scientist, lowered the barrier to entry because I was focused on the end-experience rather than the computational theory.
Hacking has it’s limitations. As I learned more about software, Processing and I eventually had a falling out. As many developers have criticized, larger programming projects just became too unwieldy to manage inside Processing. It’s like trying to write a novel on post-its. So switched to writing programs in “real” java, and then C-based languages, along with some web development (less hacking) and microcontroller programming (lots of hacking) somewhere in between.
Recently, Dave and I were working on an iPhone project, and hit a couple nasty bugs. The app was compiling and running error-free, but things were just not happing the way they ought to be. So I paid a visit to my old friend. By making quick proof-of-concept sketches in Processing, we could quickly isolate, test, and solve problems, and port the code back into our main project in Xcode. As Nathan would put it, it allowed us to let poor solutions fail quickly, so we could develop better ways to solve the problem.
Processing works best as a prototyping tool. It’s allows programmers to put aside lower-level optimization and strict object-oriented principles and quickly hack together some code that works. Hacking makes it easier to approach code as a beginner, and faster to “sketch” ideas as a more experienced programmer.
For design, understanding basic programming is as important as drawing, diagramming, speaking and Adobe-ing. It’s another means to communicate ideas and, moreover, it’s sometimes the only way to accurately describe digital interactions. For development, I think it’s important to differentiate between prototyping and production. If you’re building a proof of concept that won’t be part of production code anyway, don’t be afraid to hack it.