As you may remember, a few months ago Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers hit shelves. Today, I’m excited to share with you a new XPLANE video that offers a sneak peek into the inner-makings of the book and why it is so unique, and useful, in today’s business world. The three-minute video, created by our ever-brilliant creative team, can be seen on both Vimeo and YouTube:
For the most part, the video was created with markers, whiteboards, sticky notes, paper and other “low-tech” tools commonly used in Gamestorming.
Written by XPLANE founder and business design mastermind, Dave Gray, XPLANE consultant James Macanufo and Sunni Brown of Bright Spot Information Design, Gamestorming is a collection of 80 games to help teams break down barriers, communicate better, and generate new ideas, insights, and strategies.
XPLANE has been named to the 2011 list of the 100 Best Companies to Work for in Oregon by Oregon Business Magazine. Winners will be celebrated at a banquet on March 3, at which time specific rankings will be unveiled.
To make the list, organizations are ranked based on confidential employee surveys and a benefits report completed by each company’s human resources representative. For the 2011 list, 263 companies participated and more than 14,000 employees were surveyed.
“It is a great honor to have XPLANE recognized as one of Oregon’s best places to work by Oregon Business Magazine,” said Aric Wood, chief executive officer, XPLANE. “This is fantastic validation of the special kind of employee experience we’ve worked hard to build, and I couldn’t be more proud of our team for turning those ideals into a reality.”
ABOUT XPLANE
XPLANE, A Dachis Group Company, is an information design consultancy that drives better results for many of the world’s leading organizations including Microsoft, Nokia, ITT, and BP. XPLANE is a new kind of consultancy that drives innovation through the combination of its employees’ diverse expertise, including journalism, consulting, technology, marketing, training, illustration, interaction, process improvement, information design and architecture. Global XPLANE headquarters are in Portland, Ore. USA; European headquarters are in Madrid, Spain; additional locations are in St. Louis, Mo. and Amsterdam, Netherlands. www.xplane.com
We worked hard, traveled the world, learned a lot, met a bunch of wonderful people, had some fun and expanded our family — in April we joined the Dachis Group and now count the folks from Dachis, Headshift, Stuzo and Archrival as colleagues (Update: And as of yesterday, the folks at Powered!).
So to celebrate, we asked our new friends from around the world to send us their favorite local holiday recipes: Amsterdam, Austin, Lincoln, London, Madrid, Philadelphia, Portland, St. Louis and Sydney. And as an added bonus, we’ve thrown in some silly charts about the chow along with some serious information about infodesign.
The recipes include Marionberry cobbler, Cocido madrileño, Grilled tri-tip, Texas pecan cake, Boerenkool Met Worst, Pavlova, Philly cheesesteaks, Mince pie and Gooey butter cake.
We hope you enjoy these dishes as much as we do — and here’s to an amazing 2011 and beyond.
What a great time of year. Soon people all around the world will be exchanging gifts and celebrating Christmas with their families.
If you celebrate the holiday, you must remember the utter excitement that you had as a kid on Christmas Eve — how you wanted so badly to catch Santa in the act but were told he wouldn’t come unless you went to sleep. Kids throughout time would doze off dreaming of gifts ranging from record players and Barbie dolls to iPads and Zhu Zhu pets.
What if you could put together a greatest hits collection (K-Tel anyone?) of the best gifts ever and spread them around one tree?
In case you haven’t seen it, a TED talk has been buzzing around lately, given by Jason Fried, co-founder and president of 37signals and “workplace expert.” (Coincidentally, Fried’s company produces software that enables teams to work together online.) Here’s an opinion piece by him on CNN, along with the TED video clip.
So, I’ve been stewing over it for the last few days. Well, maybe stewing is a bit of a stretch, but I’m definitely leaning toward some defense of the office and its environment. I’m not disagreeing with Jason on the number of potential distractions in a day (notice the key word choice of “potential”). What I am disagreeing on is the office worker’s ability to navigate their day in a way that allows them to be productive.
I happily operate on the vaguely defined belief that there are benefits to serendipitous interactions that happen throughout the day. The simple fact is that we need distraction sometimes; we need breaks. I’m not buying the parallel that Jason is trying to set up where concentration works like sleep patterns. While we need to sleep deeply for a good period of time, our attention spans are not built like that. At least mine isn’t. I’m pretty sure I’m unable to hold a single line of thought for longer than an hour. Regardless of my lack of hard data, I’m not convinced we need to be socially isolated to get the benefit of deep thought. In fact, the opposite can happen.
Every day you come to work, open your email, process paperwork, return calls and head to meetings. Have you ever really paused for a moment to look at all the stuff that surrounds you?
Yeah, things may look a little chaotic but you’ve probably got a system going and you know exactly where everything is. Some desks might look shipshape and others like a tornado ripped through your office. Either way it’s your life and because of that it’s worth documenting. You could take a picture… but that’s too easy.
This week for our Visual Meditation, take a few minutes to sit back and appreciate all the little things in life. Specifically all the stuff that surrounds you every day at your desk! Sketch it out for us, scan it and upload it to our xBlog activities Group on Flickr.
Exercise: Draw your desk area and all the objects usually found there. Use labels if necessary.
Seen on Dave Gray’s site: “A short, 5-minute chat with Jason Fried about nature and how it influences his work.”
A refreshingly different and light podcast touching on design and creativity, nature and springtime, inspiration and solutions, evolution and adaptation, complexity and simplicity — with sketches!
Most of us have our favorite apps and our guilty pleasure apps, some of us have those “it’s for my kids” apps and all of us have our can’t-live-without apps. And everyone has their own system for arranging things. Click the image to see mine… Read the rest of this post »
XPLANE recently collaborated with the non-profit Caregiver Relief Fund to produce a simple but powerful video to inform, inspire and support the more than 49 million Americans currently serving in the role of caregiver. The two-minute video can be viewed on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUtRhnfLmSc. Read the rest of this post »
Wouldn’t it be great if you could come to work and really focus on just one thing? Your sole function would be geared toward doing just that one thing — and doing it really, really well.
Yeah. Okay. Back to the reality of spinning plates, burning fires and high priority emails that seem endless. Your job requires doing many things at once, but you only have two arms. But what if you had four? Or six? Read the rest of this post »
This 3-minute overview animation is being used to drive adoption and usage of IHG’s Green Engage program, which helps individual hotels analyze their energy usage and devise action plans to reduce their environmental impact. Check it out on our YouTube channel.
XPLANE | Dachis Group drives breakthrough results with Business Design Thinking. Our approach includes a set of comprehensive business architecture solutions that combine research, collaborative consulting, design thinking, social media technology and incredibly effective visual communications.
It’s what makes us different. And better. The world’s biggest brands have found success with XPLANE. Are you ready for results too? Contact us.
Founded in 1993 by Dave Gray, XPLANE has evolved from an information design company into a global communications and business transformation consultancy. As part of the Dachis Group XPLANE drives results for the world’s leading corporations through the sophisticated process of Business Design Thinking.
XPLANE founder Dave Gray, along with XPLANER James Macanufo and our friend Sunni Brown, have written a playbook for innovators, rule-breakers and changemakers. It's called Gamestorming and it's filled with useful, fun knowledge games — games designed to help you get more innovative, creative results in your work. More info at gogamestorm.com.
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.
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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.
XPLANE founder Dave Gray, along with XPLANER James Macanufo and our friend Sunni Brown, have written 
