no gods. no masters. (NGNM) focus on technology-driven design & systems thinking as the basis for concept development.
Any competent agency can build a tool to a specification; every one of those agencies likely has work to show from successful projects with corporate clients, and we’re right there with them. But that’s not enough. NGNM offers industry-leading practical and theoretical insight, and a creative process that is constantly on the cutting edge of what is technically possible.
Beyond the simple “can it be done?”, we also examine if a concept should be done, and look at how and why people will interact with it. Exploring a concept is a process that should be engaging for everyone involved, undertaken with the intention of working together towards a better result.
Our unique combination of experience with emergent technology (from AI to AR), software engineering (from C+ to Python to JavaScript), and hardware development, provide our partners with a toolset that goes well beyond what is offered by digital agencies. This cross-discipline approach has been employed in integrated projects for the some of the biggest names in technology, to overseeing the founding of groundbreaking start-up organizations.
“A designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist.” - Buckminster Fuller
Make It Better
Design Thinking, and Systems Thinking are flexible frameworks to ensure the quality of the products we deliver. This may sound like meaningless jargon, but we can speak to each aspect of our approach in detail.
Design Thinking
“I still don’t know what (design thinking) is, but we charge for it.” - Mike Monteiro
At NGNM, we live, sleep, and breath design. It is part of who we are, and what we do. Design dictates execution; they cannot be separated. Using design thinking we make decisions and move forward with a degree of intention and attention to detail that helps us tease out unintentional results, and exposes novel solutions that may have otherwise been missed.
Systems Thinking
Concepts tend to be outlined using ad hoc processes, often from the perspective of a siloed engineering, strategy, or product department. As an anathema to this, organizational inclusivity through systems thinking has shown promise when put into practice, and allows for input from all stakeholders in each phase of the creation cycle. At any point prior to the execution process (and in rare instances, during execution), the cycle can return to ideation if required. If we can’t justify what we’re building, we need to go back and find out why.
For Good
Lots of people talk about doing things “for good,” but few actually do it.
For the last seven years NGNM have been collaborating on technology to reduce civilian casualties in conflict areas, as well as tools that provide those in the field (photographers, reporters) with the ability to provide attribution around the events they witness. Coverage of this work can be found in Wired, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times; the results have been a demonstrable reduction in harm for hundreds of thousands of civilians.
Building tools that - if they don’t work - can put lives at risk, has been fundamentally instructive to the approach we take with all of our work. A deep understanding of the hardware and software we use is second nature, and ensures that whatever we build, we can be transparent about potential points of failure, and aim to mitigate them. Not everything is easy, nor should it be.
Moving Forward
To learn more or discuss how we can solve your challenges, email us.
Each project requires a unique approach — the frameworks we implement are not a paint-by-numbers solution to the problems we are asked to solve. They are bespoke, flexible, and proven effective.
