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Geodesia (at Wolff Olins)

Geodesia was a set-up by Peter Rouse from Rouse & Co, a law firm specialising in intellectual property (IP). Geodesia hope to create an integrated web-based application that would primarily create secure, collaborative workspaces. Initially tailored to the IP market, the tools would be sold on to and then customised to the specific needs of organisations.

The initial inspiration for the company came from the inefficiencies of international law cases. These cases can involve a plethora of different law firms, companies and laws - both national and international. For example, a case that attempts to close down a factory in the Far East making illegal replica toys is highly complex. The ‘old’ way of managing such things involved a wide variety of different media, including fax, letters, emails, etc. Furthermore, keeping a log of all the meetings and chargeable activities could be chaotic. Geodesia believe that the internet could be used to improve information management and by integrating related functions, such as email, time-management, etc. enormous savings could be made.

As one of the largest projects undertaken by myself at Wolff Olins, my role was to help Geodesia formally express and name the various concepts and ideas that they initially struggled to define, and then specify how it could actually become reality. To help in this we created various prototypes and proof-of-concepts in the process. Internally at Wolff Olins, I worked with brand consultants, producers and print designers, and externally I worked with the management and technology team at Geodesia, and their technology partner, Merant.

There were four key elements to the offering: Workrooms, Business Development, Service Search and Marketplace. The heart of the Geodesia offering became the ‘Workroom’ concept. When a new project (or in ‘law-speak’, matter) is started, all work is kept in this space. This includes email, time-keeping, calendar and contacts features, as well as a whole array of other productivity tools. All these features can be transparently tied in with Microsoft Office.

The Business Development feature is an attempt to help people run their business by the sharing of knowledge. It worked as a help tool that could be added to by users and editorial staff. The Service Search enabled people to search for skills within the Geodesia community, while the Marketplace offered an area for companies and entrepreneurs to sell their intellectual property to Geodesia members.

Wolff Olins created the brand expression – the key features being the logo and hand motifs. It was then my responsibility to take the brand to the web. Coming up with a usable design solution for a web-based application, that not only works, but also expresses the brand, was highly complex. It is similar to redesigning an application such as Microsoft Word, with its vast array of features and screens with the added limitations imposed by the web.

While web-based applications have been around for a long time and were one of the driving forces behind Internet take up (for example, Hotmail), they are only now beginning to develop as interactive technologies (both client and server-side) have improved. Due to this we are in a transition period where users are comfortable using complex (and often poorly designed) software applications, but are less comfortable taking those metaphors to the ‘pages’ found on the web.

Find out more in the Work section.