FRONT - A Strategy, Design and Technology Studio

Thanks to everyone who attended last month’s Conversations event in London.  A special thank you also to all of our speakers (you can see their videos below) and to Jeffrey Peel for helping to organise the event.

We had a great evening, with plenty of thought-provoking ideas and some great discussion between the talks.  We’re hoping to build on this positive start by holding the next event in June (provisionally the 25th).  We’ll be confirming the next batch of speakers over the next few weeks and you can register online (but spaces are limited).

Flickr Commons is a new initiative by the US Library of Congress to allow members of the public to view, tag and comment on their photo archives. The project launched with a set of colour images from the 1930s-1940s showing daily life in pre-war and wartime America, and a series of news photos from the 1910s. We really like this project because of the incredible quality of the images and the potential for interaction between the public and the archive; it’ll be interesting to see whether the tags and comments of users today can add fresh perspective on content produced over 60 years ago.

Elan Snowboards helps promote it’s products by building an active community through the website. The community is made up of both the public and pro snowboarders who use Elan’s product. I think most snowboarders would find this website engaging, whether or not they own an Elan snowboard.

Wee World is another online community based around the idea that you can create an Avatar of yourself and interact with other site users. The cartoonish avatar design process is a simple and absorbing way to attract users who then become part of the community. You can even create an avatar for MSN, myspace, skype, xanga.com or blog if you like. Here’s my attempt…