As the smell of success wafts fragrantly through the Mint offices, we have been discussing the pros and cons of the novelty gadget - small, cheap products that usually have one or two humorous functions to keep you amused for hours.

Novelty products appeal because they’re fun - they have a simple, accessible interaction that instantly captures your imagination or makes you laugh. Of course, the flip side of this is that they can get old quickly - there’s only so many times you can use that whoopee cushion in the office before you A) tire of it or B) get the sack. And products that follow this super-fast pattern of consumption are wasteful - of materials, time, and money.

However, I don’t see them disappearing any time soon, and their capacity to make people smile and play around should not be sniffed at. In fact, at the moment, small cheap gadgets are providing wonderful starting points for people to experiment with electronics and digital interactions. Just a quick browse through object-hacking sites like Instructables will confirm this. A major consideration of ours recently has been how we can make these novelty gadgets less wasteful and more productive, and more in line with the experimental spirit that they can inspire in people.

The “novelty spime” is emerging as an intriguing way of doing it. I won’t go too much here on what a spime is here, for lack of space (try Bruce Sterling’s “Shaping Things” or, more immediately, the wikipedia page). The most memorable quote regarding spimes, for me, is this - that they are “material instantiations of an immaterial system.” Spimes exist in the real world only when they need to, and once the novelty of existence wears off, they can just as easily be taken apart and returned to a more immaterial state. 

The possibility of building an object-platform that allows people to build the thing themselves, modify it, and use it in as many ways as their imagination allows, is a really exciting one. When the novelty does wear off, its just as easy to break it down to its constituent parts and either redistribute it or make something else. It gives space for play and experimentation, but also imagines a multitude of long-term future use scenarios - crucially, few of which are wasteful.

Designing the novelty spime is mostly new territory for us, and brings with it an abundance of new considerations - how you design something to be downloadable from the internet, taken apart, re-coded, re-used and re-distributed takes in a lot of unique and complex interactions. But I, for one, am very excited about going through the process of working it all out. Watch this space!

- Chris

So this is it, the first post from Foundry - a team of designers from all walks of life, working together at Mint Digital, with the goal of producing web-connected physical objects that don’t exist on screens. 

This blog aims to document our research, process, outcomes and all the other exciting things we encounter along the way. All comments, praises, slurs and criticisms would be much appreciated - especially the criticisms.

Our first collaborative project is this site you are looking at right this second and the various social media outlets we have tethered onto the sides of it. It began with the creation of our identity - a name and brand which reflected the intentions of our project as well as our individual personalities. Thanks to our lovely “clients” at Mint Digital, that name is ‘Foundry’. 

(We would like to take a moment here to thank Mint Digital for successfully steering clear of any mint-related-puns including prospective gems such as Minterns, Fresh Mints, Mint Seeds and Softmints to name a few).

So to kick things off we thought it be suitable to explain a little about the process that took us to our new identity. After getting the first ideas out of the way (think Bauhaus + bad metal band + investment banker) we settled roughly on a bold layout of four blocks with a nice simple bit of type in the middle. Four blocks representing the four of us.

This produced quite a surprising response in the fact that the-powers-that-be (Utku and Tom) reckoned it all looked a bit corporate for such a motley crew of fledgling Designers. They weren’t wrong. To try and soften the edges a little, we decided to experiment down the route of hand drawn text.

This approach  provided some valuable results and set us off in a productive direction. For a start, it was off the screen - something that we’d been discussing and getting excited about from the outset. It was interesting because it was not as if we were completely ignoring the computer - far from it - we were using it as a tool alongside other design techniques, as it should be used for. We used tracing paper, printers, kitchen chopping boards, tape, scanners and a whole lot of pens to explore a more hands on and human approach.

Part of why we’re here at Mint is to do stuff that Mint, as a digital company, don’t really do. We want to take a step back from the computer screen, the mobile phone screen, the ipad screen and explore how we can create physical objects that exist alongside these everyday digital interfaces but, in turn, enrich our daily lives because of their tactile nature. Real world design demands concentration and a physical relationship with the tools being used; copy/paste means doing everything all over again and CTRL+Z simply doesn’t exist so there’s got to be a real passion in what you do and we want to reflect this passion in our outcomes.

But that’s not to say were neglecting computers, they’re actually quite useful! For instance, we’re aware that the documentation of what were doing will be primarily shared though digital screens and coming back to our logo - when we got the drawings scanned and onto the screen, they just didn’t work. The problem was that its tricky to tell that something is hand drawn when its 16x16 pixels on a twitter avatar. Were we wasting our time? 

We don’t think so.

The whole process of drawing, tracing and going though the iterations of developing the logo by hand had a massive impact on the entire aesthetic of the identity - one which we jut could not quite manage to find through computer design alone. The intensifying grid of lines within the blocks are a subtle reference to the graph paper we were using to draw on. The gradual gradient of complexity also signifies our own mixed disciplines, expertise, interests and the development we look forward to though working with Mint Digital (we’re actually all recent graduates, but shhh don’t tell anyone!). Had we not taken that step into the the physical world and gone through this laborious, messy but wholly enjoyable process, we may still be in the realms playing with garish color swatches on illustrator (though we would have developed a kickass logo for an upcoming investment banker heavy metal band!)

We look forward to whatever comes next!

-Ben, Chris, Genis and Tim