Selling Philadelphian Studios

If we value innovation in Philadelphia, it would be interesting for Philadelphia based design agencies (or studios) to not just sell innovation individually, but band together and sell Philadelphia web and ID studios as being innovative because they are Philadelphian.

So I have a vision: An area wide marketing effort: "Philadelphia - 200 Years of Innovation".

I am prompted to this thought having lived in California for most of my life. Ah, California. Apple has been very conscious of putting "California" in the front of everything they do.... IDEO is certainly riding this wave as well. They are part of, and reinforce, the California group brand. Not bad for a place that once used to be just a bunch of fruit trees.

Philadelphia has hurdles to overcome in making this shift. One is how we see ourselves. Philadelphia is also "Philly". By that I mean it has to overcome or integrate into this message of being innovators its love of being the rough, non-intellectual blue collar underdog.

I would start with the story of the first American Congress; innovation is so central to, and localized here because of it. So I think finding validation for ourselves, as residents of Philadelphia, that we can be innovative, that we should be the people you would look to if you need really new ideas, is possible.

Once we believe that, and rearrange ourselves to be that (reorg our companies, build incubators, lead as speakers, fund start-ups, etc.) I think we can begin saying this with confidence to the rest of the world.

ODE: Construct Internet Design

Still hot - and very defunct - is Construct Internet Design. In the 90's some of the most innovative work in the web was being done there. Browse through their products page to get an idea for what they were doing. I was lucky enough to work there for a time.

They did a lot of advanced interface design including virtual worlds work. Two memorable projects were the ZKM Difference Engine and the Sony Dating Game.

The Difference Engine allowed web users to interact with real world visitors to the ZKM Mediamuseum in Karlsruhe, Germany via a VRML world. Integral to this was the generation of avatars of the real museum users (grabbed by cams) that then wandered the VRML world before living eternally in a 3D avatar rouges gallery called the "Purgatory". Lynn Hershman Leeson has a good little video on it at her site. It was her concept.

The Sony Dating Game was notable for the engine that allowed the building of avatars (yes, avatars again) and being an early experiment with an online community using Internet Relay Chat (IRC) as its technical foundation.

It was the 90's but I still think there are legs on the concepts underlying these and other projects Construct cranked out.

You won't get flawless links on the site since it now lives on Archive.org but poke around. ...some cool stuff.