Below are the links of the case studies featured at XPLANE | Dachis Group’s November 17, 2011 presentation at AIGA Shift 7 in Portland.
1. EXPLORE INTEL
The community had concerns about the environmental impact of Intel’s Rio Ranchero, New Mexico plant. We worked with Intel to design a website that transparently communicates key environmental information (click this link to view). It’s updated hourly and there are videos, links and a webcam providing additional info about the facility and the data.
Here’s a new video Dachis Group made for for Xylem:
The demand for water will increase 5 times by 2050 but the amount of fresh drinkable water on Earth always stays the same. Xylem finds ways to efficiently save, protect and control water. It’s what we do every day. It’s why we share a goal of solving the world’s water challenges…one drop at a time.
XPLANE | Dachis Group (now Dachis Group) announced today that it ranked #17 on the Great Place to Work® list of Best Small Business to Work in 2011. Presented by Entrepreneur.com the annual list recognizes companies that have exceptional workplace cultures. In its eighth year, the competition is divided into two categories, Small (50-250 employees) and Medium (251-999 employees).
Today we are happy to publish a new Dachis Group XPLANATiON about Social Business.
What’s a Social Business? It’s a business alive with energy and big ideas. It’s collaborative, authentic, customer-centric, trusted, open and real-time.
Over the past 18 months we’ve worked to integrate the value and heritage of the XPLANE services into the broader offerings of the Dachis Group as well as offer the Dachis Group value and services to XPLANE’s clients with the overall goal of delivering a unified approach and experience to all of our clients.
The web’s full of it. And social has dramatically increased it because so much can be said so quickly and so easily, from anywhere, by almost anyone. But social connects us — and a lot of us think of it as a purely personal experience. Friend to friend, person to person, fame to fan, etc. As individuals we struggle to make sense of it all as we juggle Twitter, Facebook and Flickr accounts, friends, contacts, comments and feeds.
A Keynote video we made for Nitin Nohria, dean of Harvard Business School.
1. On goals and purpose
Over the last few years we’ve found that in some cases, a Keynote-authored video is what you might call the “good enough” solution. Full animation can be complicated, expensive and time-consuming. Don’t get me wrong — we love it, it’s beautiful, but it’s not always needed. Keynote lets you create and edit presentations, make things move, is ridiculously easy to learn and exports to Quicktime, including easy exports for iPhone. That’s the “good enough” part — but of course technology isn’t all you need. You better have a good story and visuals too.
Once again XPLANE | Dachis Group has teamed up with Dr. Scott McLeod of Iowa State University to create a thought-provoking video. The brand-new “Iowa, Did You Know?” kicked off the School Administrators of Iowa Conference yesterday morning. This DYK video contrasts the world’s exponential growth in technology and learning with Iowa’s struggles to best prepare K-12 students for this new future.
Intended as a forceful wake-up call for Iowa educators, the video stresses the importance of an educational approach that moves away from “low-level mental work” and towards stronger development in critical thinking and problem solving.
This is a guest post by Jeff Manuel, Assistant Professor of History at SIUE.
As a history professor, I work with words. Pages and pages of them, in fact. Words to write, words to read, words to speak. I use pictures and images too, but they usually play second fiddle to the words. So it was challenging and humbling to visit XPLANE | Dachis Group for a recent Visual Thinking School (VTS) because it forced me to think deeply about using visual thinking to communicate history. It was also enlightening, as I came away convinced that history instructors should incorporate more visual thinking tools into our classrooms.
We started by creating empathy maps for students and teachers to help us get into their heads regarding what they’re seeing, hearing, thinking and doing while in class.
At XPLANE | Dachis Group we have some of those fun perks you often hear about at great workplaces — wine every Friday, free M&Ms, a pool table, and a duck pond to name a few. But we think the reason our workplace is so great runs a little deeper than that. For us, building a great workplace is a big commitment, and it’s all about building trust, pride, and camaraderie. We wanted to share a few of our practices with the hope that it might inspire you to think about how you could build a better workplace — wherever you work.
Check out this video we made for Kronos to help celebrate International Women's Day, 2011. Learn more in this xBlog post or jump over to YouTube and watch it there.
Azure poster
XPLANE | Dachis Group developed a A vibrant, engaging poster showing how Microsoft Azure enables developers to run applications and store data on Microsoft servers. The poster recently took top honors in the American Business Awards.
As you know, 
