Our focus is environments and the stories they tell us – either directly or implicitly. Man has been telling stories in environments since the first cave painting. The stained glass windowed cathedral offered a visual story to those participating with the space – a necessity in times of illiteracy. Today Nike Town is the cathedral of retail, telling stories throughout its environment to an audience that has learned how to read but now thinks visually — after just a generation or two of 24 frames a second entertainment, music video camera cuts, GPS visualization of the path to work, and a business day of PowerPoint and surfing web links. We have become visually astute (visually anticipatory) and at the same time proficient at ‘reading’ environments. What we have experienced as a design consultancy is the underserviced desire to apply the storytelling in human nature and visual merchandising techniques of retail to the enterprise workplace. At first we provisioned the company store and the visitors center and then headquarters lobby and the briefing center; today we can imagine every aspect, R+D to factory floor, now prototyped with visual messages and display media.

At this same moment, in parallel, two channels of visual communication are having their own evolution — though it often appears to observers to be more akin to revolution. On-screen display technologies now enable us to serve up, project out, walk thru, interact with, a kaleidoscope of electronic media whose size in itself can often be building scale. The other revolution, digitally printed imagery, allows us to print on a vast array of materials from silk to steel and as well print visual imagery at a scale that can blanket whole skylines. While these two thrusts are the news, other progress in media asset management (content storage and retrieval) and visual arts software (content restoration and recombination) feed our creative capabilities and provision vast new content options.

And just in time because the workplace is about to experience a sea change in generations. The black and white TV generation that watched John Wayne without special effects is giving way to the Xbox generation playing interactive HALO — followed by the new millennium where it is now commonplace to post one’s self to YouTube. There will be an expectation for an info-tainment worklife, and as Facebook teaches us, it is one in which you expect to participate in authoring the messages. Or as Farmville, Second Life, Pinterest, Vine, Instagram all illustrated, you will gravitate to media in which you share in the authoring of messages and commentary on brands.