Booreiland / platform for creative productions

Our approach

Our design approach Network Focused Design (NFD), licensed under Creative Commons, is a holistic approach we use to spot out innovative solutions right on the intersections between your customers, your business and the technologies available. We use NFD principles in all our projects, whether these are websites, apps, Meta Products with multiple services, or when new relationships of value between services, products, people and environments have to be identified. NFD consists of 3 phases:

1. Visualizing the network
This phase is all about understanding your context (your customer, your competition and your brand) and visualizing and discovering the relationships that build a particular network. By using design oriented qualitative and quantitative research techniques, this phase helps us gain empathy and gather valuable insights that will help us create meaningful solutions.

2. Setting a direction
This phase aims to criticize assumptions and push our creative limits to set a clear direction to new ideas. In this phase we use creative facilitation techniques to identify challenges and opportunities and reframe networks with new relationships of value. It can be a new way of communicating with your client, refreshing your brand identity or bringing a new service to your potential customer.

3. Designing the product or service
This phase guides us to design every detail of a website, an app, or a Meta Product in a coherent network where your brand, your service and your customer interact seamlessly. We use agile techniques to mockup and prototype concepts and our best visual and technical skills to design and develop them.

The Fact Club

About interactive infographics

De Publieke Zaak develops concepts to take on social problems. One of its latest initiatives is The Fact Club, which aims to support the public debate with facts, rather than let it be led by poor argumented individual opinions. The Fact Club covers themes like the labour market, living environment, energy, healthcare and immigration, each of them presented in so-called Fact Reports. Forming a team with De Publieke Zaak and Tijmen Brommet, we built up The Fact Club from scratch, translating complex data in friendly interactive infographics and presenting them in an accompanying website.

Each Fact Report is presented on a big canvas, which the user can explore via vertical scrolling. The user can interact with the infographics via handles and bars, changing data realtime. Presenting complex stuff on a big canvas like this gives the user the impression of a creative playfield, evoking the user to start playing with the presented data, while gaining insights along the way.

Enrise

About brand studies

Enrise develops web platforms and applications. They asked us to spice up their own website with a fresh new design. First, we carried out a brand study, in order to spot out opportunities for visual brand differentiation. Afterwards we translated their philosophy ‘Code Cuisine’ into a visual design meal, resulting in a strong icon driven website.

Brand studies are a great help for spotting out visual brand differentiation. By means of benchmarking techniques we can discover where your brand stands in the visual landscape between your competitors’ brands. This can give you clear insights if you still have that competitive edge or if things need to be changed.

GRESB

About data visualization

The Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark is an initiative to assess the environmental and social performance of public and private real estate investments. Based on an annual survey among its participants, GRESB asked us to design a digital scorecard showing the survey results of each participant. By means of data visualization we designed clear and crisp diagrams and charts, and embedded them in an online data portal. Next to that, we also designed the GRESB research report, which presents the final numbers of 2011.

Like infographics, data visualization is about plotting information, data or knowledge in an easy to understand and appealing way. Trends indicate cross-disciplinary teams, consisting of both developers and designers working parallel next to each other, are becoming more and more essential to successfully implement data visualization using high-end graphics and slick transitions, yet keeping everything technically feasible.

YES!Delft

About brandbooks

YES!Delft promotes entrepreneurship for students, professionals and scientists, and offers practical support for the foundation and development of technology companies. YES!Delft asked us to redesign their visual identity and various touchpoints accordingly. We translated the young energetic spirit of YES!Delft into a dynamic crystal landscape and mapped this pattern onto the various items in different variations. A brandbook was also created to guide YES!Delft when making their own promotional materials.

After having designed a visual identity, brandbooks with clear rules explaining on how to use this visual identity are a necessity when multiple people within larger organisations have to work with it. Rather than prescriptive we always opt for descriptive brandbooks, serving as a reference book when people need to know more about the rules of the game, yet keeping some flexibility and space for one’s own input.

Dutch Creative

About QR-codes

Dutch Creative is the ultimate index of creative agencies from Holland, covering practically all creative disciplines. This initiative founded by BIS Publishers aims at businesses that outsource creative work and for that purpose need an overview of Dutch creativity. Consisting of a series of eight books and a complete web index makes Dutch Creative the best of Holland.

We were asked to team up with BIS Publishers and create all visual touchpoints. Besides that, we built a smart integration between the books and the web index. We chose to integrate QR-codes in the books that smartphones can interprete as web links using their built-in cameras. They link to the online portfolios of the creative agencies. This is a nice way to quickly get an update of the newest works of these agencies.

A QR Code is a two-dimensional bar code. The QR stands for Quick Response, as it is intended to be decoded at high speed. QR Codes are mainly used in combination with mobile phones, known as mobile tagging. The codes usually store web addresses and they may appear anywhere in the physical world.

QR-codes proved to be the best way for readers of Dutch Creative to easily browse the books, while being able to check the latest works of creative agencies online in the blink of an eye.

Flex Innovation Lab

About interaction

Flex/The Innovation Lab is famously known for the many consumer products and packaging designs it has created over the past decades. Having clients like Grolsch, TNT post and Flexa, they know how to put down a good design. With their new tagline Creating a New Reality, Flex asked us and our technical partner Sunday Afternoon to build a completely new website supporting this new vision.

In collaboration with Flex we created a system of card stacks, which hold all the information in a uniform way. You can zoom in on the stacks and browse through its contents. Careful attention was paid to the interaction, which makes sense in every little design decision.

This project was all about the interaction. The challenge to present lots of information in a meaningful way is a task that requires you to take a step back. Sketching and wireframing are tools that we use to come up with a solid concept.

In getting our concept to the screen we decided to use Javascript as the core technology instead of Flash. As websites should work on a vast range of devices, including the iPad that doesn't support Flash, we opted for this technology. We also took great lengths to make the site Google friendly. While most users don't notice these background technology decisions, they play an important part of getting the same user experience to all browsers and all customers.

Find South Africa

About online games

Ever since the World Cup 2010 in South Africa took place, South Africa Tourism has started a massive campaign throughout the world to attract tourists to the country. Also in The Netherlands it marketed through all possible media. For its latest Dutch campaign it asked advertising agency One Big Agency to come up with a new interesting online concept to put South Africa even more in the spotlight.

One Big Agency asked us to build upon their idea of an interactive map of South Africa. We created an online interface in which people had to spot certain places on a higly illustrative map by looking through a photocamera lense. The faster you spotted the requested place and took the snapshot, the higher you scored.

Online campaigns increasingly show a game-like character. Businesses are discovering that games are a successful way to engage customers. A special kind of games starting to pop up more and more are so-called serious games. A serious game is a game designed for a different purpose than pure entertainment. It is generally used by industries like defense, education, healthcare and city planning. Keep an eye on this trend!

Unga Toys

About storytelling

Unga toys is an Amsterdam based toy development studio. They develop toys for big brands such as Chupa Chups, Tomy and lately for Dutch supermarket Albert Heijn as well.

Unga asked us to transform their company ethos into an adventure that could be directly transformed into a blasting online experience.

By means of storytelling we created an adventure in which the online visitor travels towards the so-called Unga Islands and experiences the magnificent world of Unga while guided by many creatures.

Storytelling is considered to be one of the most powerful marketing tools. By telling a story involving characters and a plot you can teach, entertain and convince people about certain matters. We used storytelling to communicate Unga’s company ethos, explaining their vision on toy development. The visitor gets sucked into an adventure and is immersed into all that’s Unga, leaving a powerful feeling rather than the usual dull information about a company.

So how is this beneficial? Well, first of all it totally fits to this age in which companies are using more soft and feminine approaches in marketing, trying to touch the consumer’s feeling. Secondly, a company’s vision and mission is often communicated in a better way when talking in metaphores instead of those dull corporate paragraphs you read on most websites.

BiD Network

About personality

BiD Network stimulates entrepreneurship and economic growth in emerging markets by matching them to investors. BiD itself serves as host, while the total community counts 24.000 members all over the world.

We were asked to do a total print makeover. We designed a book called 'People, Plans, Profit', telling all about BiD's achievements in 2008. Next to that we designed a brochure and their 2008 annual report.

Our vision on this project was to make it less corporate, and introduce more personality. After all, BiD is about real people, trying to make a fair living. We implemented personality through large photo spreads, personal quotes and lots of hand drawn shapes.

From the first moment we met BiD's staff, we knew it: BiD's got personality. Then why did their visual communication lack this personality? We think it's good to show personality. It's a direct communicator when searching for the likeminded.

While it's hard to fit personality in just a few lines of text, you can do a better job expressing it into images, colors and shapes. By using fonts in uppercase we expressed the business side of BiD, while the friendly hand drawn shapes act on the emotional level. Great mix!

Fronteer Strategy

About simplicity

Fronteer Strategy is a consultancy agency that’s into innovation, co-creation and brand development. They asked us to create their corporate identity and stationery. We did it, we kept it simple.

The paradox of keeping it simple is that it is one of the hardest things to do. People are easily tempted to make creations more complex than they need to be. We try to stick to what matters, therefore keeping it simple. In this way the message is as clear as it can be.

In case of Fronteer this resulted in an identity looking like the periodic table of elements and a stationery reminding vaguely of a medicin’s instruction leaflet. Anyway, great project, great outcome. Stick to simplicity.

Intivation

About total branding

Intivation develops highly innovative technology that increases the power output of solar cells. In doing so, they help handset manufacturers and network operators increase their mobile communication services.

Being a newbee, Intivation came to us asking to do a total branding job, starting with designing an identity and translating it to stationery and website.

In our design concept, we placed Intivation between the sun and the spectator, explaining their crucial role in empowering mobile devices. This is clearly seen in the logo, but also in the website, placing the sun behind the main window.

Total branding is something we like most. The challenge of streamlining an identity to multiple touchpoints keeps thrilling us. For clients it guarantees consistency, an important aspect in this fully branded and scattered world.

We think total branding nowadays should be far more flexible than it should be. We try to avoid heavy brand guides that leave your employees nowhere. Instead, we strive for lightweighted descriptive PDF's telling about ways to use the brand, rather than an endless summation of how you can't use it.

Stibbe

About infographics

Stibbe is an internationally oriented Benelux law firm. The firm's strong network around the world enables it to advise clients on major cross border activities.

Stibbe hired us to create an astounding infographic that would visualize its global network when still in alliance with Herbert Smith and Gleiss Lutz. To do so, we made up an urban setting in which cities are interconnected through roads. Each depicted city has one of more offices of the global network.

Making this thing fit on less than an A4 paper seemed a hell of a job, but also a great challenge that forced us to map everything as efficiently as possible, yet keeping it graphically appealing.

Infographics are visual representations of information, data or knowledge. These kinds of graphics are used where complex information needs to be explained quickly and clearly, and that's exactly where the challenge lies when designing one.

Infographics can also be used to overcome cultural barriers, such as language. In fact, infographics were there before language was (cave paintings!)

For the digital illustrator, making good infographics can be hard. However, when the outcome is finally there, it almost always results in great satisfaction having placed all those pixels in exactly the right place.

ABN AMRO

About co-creation

Global bank ABN AMRO discovered young professionals could use some extra help in their first years working in business life. Co-creation agency Favela Fabric was asked to research what kind of advise a bank like ABN AMRO could give to these young professionals and finally transform all this into a large social platform on the web.

We were asked to create this platform on the fields of interaction and design. For such a rather complex platform we created a highly intuitive interface, ensuring the user would not get lost in a maze of general info, personal advice, incentives, networks of people etc.

Co-creation is about creating work together with the people you are creating the work for. Nowadays we can see this more and more in marketing, in which the web is used as the number one tool. Together with Favela Fabric we created a platform on which both ABN AMRO staff and young professionals can give input and build on new initiatives together. These initiatives could range from ABN AMRO as guide and mentor for the young professional or ABN AMRO as provider of projects in which the young professional can participate.

Meta Products Book

About Meta Products

After two years of research, writing and designing, the book ‘Meta Products - Meaningful Design For Our Connected World’ is finally published. We both wrote and designed the book ourselves. We've tried to come up with a book that starts a conversation, sparks new ideas and most of all that inspires. The book talks about the phenomenon of Meta Products, and also presents Network Focused Design as a design approach, usable for everyone who wants to design successful solutions for our connected world. With this the book aims not only at industry designers, but also at students from design academies.

Mike Kuniavsky (author of ‘Smart Things - Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design’) wrote the foreword, and many other experts from both commercial and academic worlds contributed to the book by means of interviews (TNO, Philips Research, Umeå University, MIT, University of Oxford, Delft University of Technology etc). Next to that, many cases are provided along the way to support the theory.

In the next few years the web will keep on growing and will extend across new aspects of our lives. Products, services, places, knowledge and people will be web-enabled, creating new connections and new interactions; hence new networks. Business success will rely on harmonious and valuable networks, called Meta Products. Within these smart product-service networks the web will play a central role; it is the information stream that feeds the whole network. Think about examples such as Nike+, FedEx SenseAware and Fitbit.

Ferry Up

About Touch Interfaces

Ferry Up is a stunning iPad game, created as a cooperative project together with the marvellous Coding Dutchmen and Jornt van Dyk. Ferry Up puts you in the role of a rookie captain, whose mission it is to ship passengers from one shore to the other. Simple? Don't think so, as the waters are soon teeming with bigger, faster and meaner ships you have to avoid in order to savely get your precious cargo across.

The design of the game exposes our love for 8-bit arcade classics, as it features a powerful black and red colour-scheme, creating an exciting world where dark ships loom over a bright red river.

Ferry Up is inspired by the famous ferries of Amsterdam that continuously transfer passengers between Central Station and the northern sections of the city.

When designing for touch interfaces, totally different usability issues should be taken into account. Using your fingertip as a point and sweep device, we soon saw our hand getting in the way of essential interface cues. Then we introduced the so-called location independent joystick, which makes it able to steer and control your ferry from any location on the screen, a huge improvement of the interface. Try it for yourself by downloading Ferry Up from the Apple App Store!

RWM

About creative tools

Generating random words is easy. Producing pronounceable words is a whole other story. The algorithm of the Random Word Machine is based on neurolinguistic theories. This ensures that the whole space is explored of theoretical words that could have been. You can use this machine as a general brainstorm tool, for producing brand names, or just for fun.

Random Word Machine was born out of the idea that associating through random words greatly improves creative thinking processes. Next to that, we thought it could just be plain fun to generate random words. Random Word Machine comes in the form of a website and an iPhone app.

We ourselves often use various creative tools and techniques to spark our creativity needed for the projects we do. Especially in the early idea generating stages these tools come in handy. We discovered Random Word Machine plays an important role when seeking for brand names for our own self-initiated services.

Other creative tools we often use are braindrawing, metaphorical thinking and mindmapping. Whether this is for designing stunning web interfaces or for brand logos, they are just a means to fill the initial blank page. Go ahead and try them out for yourself, it works!

Okimok

About being dedicated

Okimok is a fun community where you can instantly share your photos with your friends. With the Okimok iPhone app you can easily upload photos to your photo stream on okimok.com. Your friends can follow you and keep up to date with your adventures.

This is a service from our own hand, one that combines a consumer product (iPhone) with the web, making it a meta service. Okimok was released in april 2009 and eversince it has been a growing community.

It's a great adventure to work on a project that involves not only design, but also aspects like research and marketing. Wow!

Okimok started off from our belief that things should be simple and dedicated. Unlike social services such as Facebook and Flickr on which you get lost in no time, Okimok chooses to do only one thing, and do that one thing very well. This is hosting your public photo stream. You could think of Okimok as a kind of Twitter for photos. In this way the message stays clear and the platform stays simple.

Vormator

About creativity

Vormator is the ultimate design challenge that requires artists all over the world to create dazzling visuals by using only eight shapes within a set of given rules. This project was kicked off by ourselves, together with the amazing Zeptonn. From over 500 contestants we made a selection of nearly 80 to appear in a book, called Vormator, the elements of design. We are proud to announce that the book is now published by BIS Publishers!

You may think creativity is stimulated when you get 100% personal freedom in what to make. For some this may be true, but for most people it seems that creativity is positively influenced when constraints and limitations are given. The Vormator project shows that even with a large number of limitations and just a few elements to work with a huge variety of quality graphics is still possible. Next to that, Vormator gives insights into the creative processes behind each artwork.

Social Mutator

About Arduino

The Social Mutator is a project that was originally intented to show how we think the web can evolve towards useful and playful physical products.

It's a social game that involves mutation of a digital creature, kept and stored in a device. In order to mutate, two devices have to be connected after which creature characteristics are mixed and two new creatures are spawned. An accompanying web platform visualizes this mutation process.

Once the concept was born, we asked students of Industrial Design Engineering at the TU Delft, Netherlands, to design and prototype the actual device and web platform. Three groups of students took on the challenge, each ending with totally different results. And now one group has even been selected to present their project at the Intel Developer Forum 2009 in San Fransisco. Great job guys!

Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on easy-to-use hardware and software. It can sense the environment by receiving input from a variety of sensors and can affect its surroundings by controlling lights, motors, and other stuff. It can also communicate with software running on a computer.

The arduino proved to be a nice platform for prototyping the Social Mutator designs of the students. We expect the Arduino will come in handy once again during our upcoming meta projects!

Check the ongoing progress of the Tate group, who are presenting their version of our concept to the Intel Developer Forum 2009 in San Francisco:

Workshops

Do you want to innovate on the cross section of products, services and the web, but you don’t know where to start? Or do you have a design challenge within your organization? You have your team in place, but you could use some help on how to approach this? Then book a workshop or masterclass for your specific challenge.

Workshops
In a world of data deluge, exploring interesting and meaningful uses of data in your service or product can increase your competitive strength. We put together the right team to help you discover new ways of building a seamless connection between your brand and your customer by means of a tailored workshop.

Masterclasses
Opening a dialogue for reflection is the first step to become a network focused organization. In a masterclass, your team will get familiarized with Meta Product examples, and will get inspired to embrace the mindsets from design and service design fields, co-design principles and customer oriented practices in order to respond to the needs of our connected world.