We recently held an Open House in which we invited friends, families, and colleagues to enjoy our new space as well as some good food and drink. Since in our research, we do a lot of observation with video, we thought we’d turn the camera on ourselves, so to speak.

Although you can’t see the whole Matter space or hear the good conversations, it’s interesting to see night fall and the patterns of activity.

Here’s the whole evening in time-lapse form condensed to about 14 minutes. (You’ll need Quicktime.)

Project Photos

See the links below for additional information.

Games with a purpose:
Games for Change Fifth Annual Festival | June 2-4 New York City
Games for Change Organization
Serious Games

Big games:
Come Out & Play Festival | June 6-8 , 2008 New York City
Big Games Manifesto
MIT New Media Literacies Project overview of Big Games

Why games?
G4C’s Answer
Harvard Business Review Says Gamers Rule

Taking on a broad range of interpretations of “information design”, the book includes contributions from recognized firms such as frog design, Sagmeister, VSA Partners, and Pentagram. Matter contributed primarily to sections of the book about “Personas and Scenarios” and “Types of User Research and Testing”.

“Information Design is an aspect of nearly all our work,” says Matter principal Ash Arnett, “No matter what kind of system we’re designing, and whether we’re dealing with something as abstract as strategy or concrete as a specification, the clear and purposeful expression of information has everything to do with the meaning and experience of the content. We are glad to see and contribute to books like this, where knowledge and perspectives are shared.”

The Information Design Workbook is available at Amazon and through all major book retailers.

Working with WKKF, Matter is developing new ways to effect social change through design in philanthropy and new ways for grantmaking organizations to innovate and accelerate social value. Matter anticipates continued development in the arena of social value and views its membership in Kellogg Action Lab as an important part of that direction.

Anne is in the third and final year of the KaosPilots International School of New Business Design and Social Innovation in Denmark. She visited Matter this fall as part of that school’s World Internship program. To cap off their final year of school, Kaospilots arrange an eight-week internship to specialize in their chosen area of interest. We were delighted to have Anne direct her curiosity about service design and large systems design to our work here at Matter.

She hit the ground running working with Matter’s lead design team for the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s New Options Initiative where she lent a hand with planning user research, articulating high level requirements, generating an opportunity map, and capturing lessons learned. We wish Anne well and expect to be hearing future tales of her leadership in the development of very interesting, very large scale design projects.

Jim Combs received the readers’ pick for Best Local Electronic Music Act for his solo ambient electronic work as Sensitive Chaos. Jim has been recording in his home studio and performing music in various local venues and in festivals internationally for a number of years. He is one of several musically inclined “Matterlings” and his talent and efforts are deserving of this recognition.

Jenny Sun has worked with Matter for one year (as of this week) as a communications designer. In another nod to the extended Matter family, the Creative Loafing critics’ pick for Best Vegetarian Restaurant went to Café Sunflower, which is owned and operated by Jenny’s family. Jenny is actively involved with the restaurant and recently did the design and photography for a beautiful cookbook of the restaurant’s recipes.

The diversity of interests and skills among Matter people represents value to its clients in the form of broad-ranging sensibilities and expertise. Matter is proud of its excellence and reputation in its professional work and equally proud of its staff’s personal accomplishments.

Prior to joining Matter, Rob co-founded the Design Studio for Social Intervention. As Principal and Design Practice & Organizational Research lead, Rob guided the Studio in applying design thinking to the resolution of intractable social problems. Rob’s other previous work includes organization design, change management, user research, market research and information architecture. Past clients and employers include the Market Analysis & Strategy Group at IBM Research, the Cynefin Centre for Organizational Complexity (now Cognitive Edge, LLC), Razorfish Inc., the Southern Poverty Law Center, Brooklyn’s Park Slope Food Coop, the MIT Center for Reflective Community Practice and the Seasons Fund for Social Transformation.

Rob is a core collaborator on the echo::system transdisciplinary art/science project and is an Associate Researcher with London’s SMARTlab practice based arts research group.

Rob picked-up some basic theoretical tools while working on a Bachelor of Arts in Semiotics at Brown University. In the course of grounding that theory in practice, he went on to earn a Masters of Fine Arts and a Masters of Library Science, both from the State University of New York Albany.

Over the years, we have contributed to the organization’s growth by developing several iterations of the GOAL identity and building several versions of the GOAL web site. After seven years of providing camps and weekend programs for middle school girls, GOAL, a non-profit organization located in Atlanta, is now bringing its unique curriculum to more girls by working with schools, community groups and youth-serving organizations.

GOAL enlisted Matter to help take their brand and product to the next level. This meant transforming the heart of their product, their curriculum, into a highly functional, user-friendly, and highly valuable package system.

Founded in 1997, GOAL originally developed and delivered programs through an active outdoor summer camp and several follow-up weekends throughout the school year. In 2003, in an effort to maximize the number of girls reached, the GOAL Board of Directors made the decision to change the GOAL program delivery model by collaborating with partners who need effective, girl-specific programming. This strategic decision allowed GOAL to capitalize on the strength of its experiential programs and the proven training model, which addresses the issues that middle school girls face, and package those programs and models into a high quality, deployable set of content.

When Matter got a look at the content, it saw the enormous potential of the content being limited by its organization and presentation. GOAL needed a package that was portable, functional, durable, expert, and sophisticated. GOAL also wanted to reduce bulk, make the content basic but immediately usable, shippable, modular, all within preset budget guidelines.

This presented some interesting design challenges for the team, including creating intuitive wayfinding through the curriculum through consistent numbering and color-coding, cleaning and trimming redundant content across the curricula, editing and organizing content, researching vendors to reduce price per unit cost of a unique custom package, maintaining color consistency across vendors and materials, and developing an intuitive, easy-to-use interface for the electronic component of the package. Matter worked through many iterations to set the conceptual and stylistic direction for the encapsulated pieces.

In the end, Matter created materials including a GOAL curriculum box, activity cards, GOALpower cards, a CD with downloadable curriculum and training, a user interface for the CD, and module activities that enhanced and elevated the GOAL brand to become a nationally recognized girls’ curriculum. The box and pieces were multifunctional—they operate as a curriculum, but also as a gateway of communication between licensed partners and GOAL, and as a marketing tool all-in-one.

The new package is to be rolled out at GOAL’s annual fundraising event in October of 2007.

Often, foundations devise grant strategies targeted at specific issues. Recent research has suggested this “bottom up” way of approaching social change initiatives is ultimately ineffective. The end goal of this design process is to create a dialogue between the Kellogg Board, affected communities, and subject matter experts across the Kellogg Foundation to identify and choose the optimum directions the Foundation should pursue to address vulnerable children. Once these directions have been chosen, a number of Foundation initiatives will be spawned to model some key opportunities and gain valuable knowledge of the market. This will finally lead to grant strategies aimed at building and realizing the directions that have shown the greatest chance of success.

The Kellogg Foundation chose Matter because of the Matter team’s fast and flexible innovation design approach, and their familiarity with the Kellogg Foundation’s mission and operation.