Hannah's IDEAS

Hannah's personal notebook for the m21 project

Identity Workshop 7th November 2008

‘In a organism...each part must assert its individuality, for otherwise the organism would lose its articulation and efficiency – but at the same time the part must remain subordinate to the demands of the whole.' (Arthur Koestler, c1964)

‘Synergy...means unique behaviours of whole systems unpredicted by any behaviours of their component functions taken separately.’ (Buckminster Fuller, 1970)

Questions

• In a highly adaptive, flexible, and 'light-footed' organisation 'identity' needs to be balanced with 'relations'
• For example, academic language and design industry language needs to be negotiated for there to be a shared understanding
• How can we balance emotive language with scientific language?
• How can we reflect the personalities of the project whilst creating a coherent image for the world to understand who we are?
• What identity work do we need to do to create the three-fold book? (i.e. logos, fonts, colours, imagery, language)
• Super brands use different colours and fonts for different cultures, can we create variants for different audiences/ clients/ academic communities? Maybe we need to develop synergy gauges to tune into different contexts, tweaking meta-levels to maintain our coherent identity?
• Is this a benchmarking issue?
• What about revisiting the avatars for action types?
• How do the brands we have worked with relate to our brand?
• How do the brands that we are competing with relate to our brand?
• How do other brands that share our values relate to our brand?
• Perhaps imagining the organisation 1yr, 5yrs, 20yrs, 100yrs into the future could help (e.g. cryogenic avatars)
• Also perhaps a scaling up or scaling down exercise could help. (e.g. what if we become a whole country? Or just a little piece of algae?)