Last week, David Bliss and I presented at the 2012 Planning-ness Conference.

For those that haven’t had a chance to attend, Planning-ness is described as an "un-conference" for creative thinkers who want to get their hands dirty. Each session is half teach and half workshop where participants put the presented ideas into action. This year a two-day, two-track event was hosted at the Annenberg Community Beach House in sunny Santa Monica.

In our session, we mapped the ever expanding Internet of Things landscape, broke down the “anatomy” of connected objects, and described how personal connected objects have the ability to encourage new behaviors, even increase human potential.

After which we gave the following assignment: Think of a personal object. Imagine how you might embed sensors, log interesting data and connect it to the Internet for analysis. Consider what insights this new information would bring to light and what behaviors, or ideas those could inspire.

All of the participants embraced the challenge with passion and enthusiasm — generating ideas that sparked imagination, laughter and smart thinking for where the Internet of Things may go.

Our friends at the Awwwards asked some questions to Jason Hardy, one of the Creative Directors here at Odopod. He's on the panel of judges this year, so treat him right. Here's the interview, republished in full, for your viewing pleasure.

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Odopod is one of the best and most awarded agencies around, It’s based in San Francisco and is formed by top designers, developers, strategists and in general very inventive people. They’re responsible for works like: IWC, Sony Tablet S and many more amazing works. We’ve had the pleasure of talking to their creative director, Jason Hardy.

Awwwards: Please tell us a little bit about yourself: who are you, where do you come from and where are you going?

JH: My name is Jason Hardy, I am a Creative Director at Odopod in San Francisco. I originally come from Nebraska. I’m not really sure where I’m going, probably to get a sandwich or some coffee.

Awww: What did you do before becoming a designer / developer?

JH: I went to school for Journalism and intended to be a writer. When I graduated there were no writing jobs where I lived (surprise!) so I took a basic design job instead. I had always been interested in design, mostly through skateboard magazines and album art, the typical influences, but never really thought of it as an option for making a living. Once I went down that path, I became pretty driven to learn as much as I could and never really looked back.

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We've got a busy next few months, packed with projects launching, a growing studio space, and some amazing new clients coming on board. In the midst of all that good stuff, we're also sending some Odopod thought leaders out into the world to participate in some talks and some panels in some amazing places. Come meet us!

RE:DESIGN/UX Design
April 30 - May 1, San Francisco

Join Albert Poon, Odopod's Director of Interaction Design in his talk, Welcome to the Post-PC Era.

About this talk: The age of desktop being the primary platform for digital experiences is over. Yes, there are hundreds of millions of traditional PCs with web browsers. They will not disappear. But even the most cursory look at the sales numbers should make it clear that the era of the big screen-keyboard-mouse digital experience is waning.

Planning-ness
May 17 - 18, Santa Monica

Join Guthrie Dolin, Director of Brand and Strategy and David Bliss, Founder and Executive Technical Director in Connected Personal Objects: Getting Intimate with the Internet of Things.

About this talk: The Internet of Things is a vast and rapidly expanding landscape that encompasses complex infrastructural systems to the everyday objects found in our homes and even on our person. At its core is a network of uniquely identifiable “things” with the ability to sense their environment then communicate with one another and us. In our presentation we will breakdown the key attributes and technologies that define these connected “things” as well as demonstrate how some of the most progressive connected personal objects may be shaping our future.

C2-MTL
May 22 - 25, Montreal

Join Odopod Founder and Executive Creative Director, Tim Barber in The Eureka! Moment, a discussion lead by Dr. Rex Jung, assistant research professor in the department of neurosurgery at the University of New Mexico who is exploring the structural and biochemical correlates of intelligence, creativity and positive affect.

DMI Design/Management Thinking 24
June 19-20, Portland

Guthrie Dolin will be doing a talk on Little "i" Innovation: The Practice of Continual Incremental Improvement

About this talk: When it comes to design-led innovation, we love the big idea—those breakthrough inventions that signal a disruptive change. But these big ideas are rarely the result of a single moment of genius. Instead, it comes from the culmination of smaller ideas, developed over time, from the minds of many. The ideas that really stick in our fast-paced digital world are the ones that “live in beta”—embracing a culture of learning, adapting and improving every day. In Little “i” Innovation, we will explore how the process of continual, incremental improvement has been used to develop some of the world’s most innovative and dominant consumer brands.

If you're headed to any of these events, please be sure to join us or just stop by and say hello. We'd love to meet you!

We're extremely pleased to announced that IWC and EA have been recognized in the 16th Annual Webby Awards! IWC has been named as an official honoree, while EA has been nominated in the Games-Related category. Love the site? Help us win by voting for EA in the People's Voice Awards. Thanks!

Over the past twelve months, Odopod has worked with a few Kinect prototypes using open source drivers in conjunction with Processing and Flash.

The most robust examples have leveraged the full body (aka skeleton) tracking provided by the OpenNI and Prime Sense NITE libraries. Unfortunately, this level of tracking requires people to pose like they're about to get a pat down from airport security. Even if you just want to track a single hand, it requires a socially awkward wave to the camera.

In February, Microsoft released the Windows version of the Kinect hardware as well as its Kinect for Windows SDK and license. The hardware itself is only nominally different, supporting experiences that are closer than possible with the XBOX hardware. The software, however enables full skeleton tracking without the need to strike any particular pose. In fact the recognition is instantaneous.

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If you're familiar with working on large template driven CMS websites, you might occasionally find yourself looking for some light weight alternatives. Perhaps you have a project that doesn't have budget for backend development but which would benefit from a powerful design template system. Or maybe you have the technical requirement for your site to use static HTML files instead of a dynamic server application. Or for whatever reason you decide you just don't need a web-based CMS admin tool.

Meet the static website generator. This is a set of tools that can compile and publish a fully static website from templates and content files. When you want to make an update, you change the content in a series of simple text files, run a publish script that generates a new version of the full site, and upload the new files to your server.

There's a whole slew of these available for various coding environments and languages. We've reviewed and worked with a few of the ruby-based ones (namely Jekyll & Bonsai). We used Jekyll for the Google for Veterans and Families project as a way to easily apply a few consistent design templates to 50 pages of content for a quick turn around. I also really enjoyed working with Bonsai on my personal site to create a very flexible page hierarchy and navigation that can be altered just by re-arranging or re-naming folders. Jekyll has a lot of community support and is intended to be more of a blogging platform than a free-form page-based website.

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By now, I expect you know that the number of people using smart-phones, tablets and other devices to access the web is increasing and is expected to one day surpass the number of people using laptop and desktop computers to get online.

To address this shift away from desktop dominance, a contemporary web strategy must:

1. provide universal access for each piece of content
2. optimize layouts for a variety of screen sizes
3. support touch gestures in addition to mouse and keyboard interactions
4. deliver optimized content for devices with limited resources
5. fully optimize key experiences for the specific contexts of use

Contemporary web development techniques make it possible to deliver on these points with a single front-end code base that adjusts to the capabilities of devices rather than building multiple sites different categories of devices (e.g. Mobile and Desktop). A single site is more cost effective to build and maintain and is also more flexible, able to accommodate new devices that don't fall cleanly into existing categories.

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Pictured above:

I went looking for the future in Las Vegas. From the moment I walked into the first hall of the Consumer Electronics Show I was adrift in a sea of 3D TVs, bedazzled iPhone cases, iPad wannabes and a myriad of lifestyle headphones. “Beats” by Dre have been popular for some time, but have you heard about “Street” by 50? Or, “Soul” by Ludacris? Perhaps you’ve heard of “Chambers” by Rza? Then there was the candy colored assortment from iWave, iLuv and Nixon. One thing is clear — lifestyle headphones are more than a fleeting fad.

We Like to Watch
By sheer quantity, you’d probably surmise that the future is all about TV. Ultra-thin and ultra-big — one was 84 inches! 3D in every flavor — including the new kind with no glasses required. (Speaking of glasses, I saw a TV that up to four people could all simultaneously watch different programs by wearing special glasses with built-in earbuds. I didn’t try it, but I can tell you that without the glasses it could possibly cause seizures).

The 4K and 8K TVs that offer four to eight times the pixel resolution were certainly impressive. Sadly, it may only be an alternate future in which the broadcast industry supports these formats.

For me, TVs that boasted facial recognition and took voice commands showed the most promise. I’m ready to ditch my many remotes and own a TV that knows what volume I like it set at and can pull up my favorite show, based on a verbal description.

“Hey TV, play that episode of 30 Rock when Jack talks to his TV.”

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2011 was a huge year for Odopod. The biggest news of all was our merger with Nurun, the largest independent digital agency in the world. Together, Odopod and Nurun have an impressive combination of reach, depth, and talent that will enable us to do even more innovative work for our clients around the world. For more on the merger, read Tim Barber's article, Odopod and Nurun: Our Next Big Move.

Last year, we launched some of our most exciting work to date. Among the highlights, we redefined luxury online for IWC, establishing direct relationships with its fans. We helped EA revolutionize the way people buy, play and share games with Origin. With Tesla Motors, we created a series of interactive kiosks for their innovative new retail strategy. We also continued producing great work for Sony Electronics, Google, Plum Organics, and more.

Of course, we had some fun too. On Hack Days, we shut down our office and prototyped our own ideas. With the FWATV, we experimented with live video and Processing to give people a fun look inside our office. We shared some inside details about the culture of Odopod, we played a bit of dodgeball, and we won Advertising Age's Small Agency of the Year, West - what a year!

All in all, we couldn't be more proud of the people we've hired (and we're hiring more), the things we've done, and the projects we've launched (including the ones we can't share) during this amazing year.

Here's a round up of this year's work:

International Watch Company (IWC) :: Origin from EA :: EA.com :: Sony PIIQ
Ford Sync :: Plum Organics Quest for Yum! :: Tesla Retail Kiosks
Sony Tablet S :: Google for Veterans :: Plum Organics Contest :: Sony Personal 3D Viewer

Hack Days at Odopod is an incredible time of year. For 48 hours, we shut down the office, turn inward and focus on our own ideas. It’s a chance for us to build the kind of things that our clients don't ask for every day and just invent.

It starts off with an open call for ideas. Eight are picked and small teams are formed to produce the projects over two days. Everybody takes part - designers, developers, producers and strategists - all racing toward the same intense deadline, with a heightened sense of focus, creative energy and collaboration.

The culmination of Hack Days is a series of prototypes and proofs-of-concept.

Here are the results...

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