From The Head Of Zeus Jones

Hi, Christian Erickson here with my first ever post to the Zeus Jones blog.

Last week we participated in Microsoft’s PhizzPop Minneapolis event. The concept behind the contest is simple: agencies field 3-person teams who get trained in Microsoft’s design and development tools and are then given just a few days to create something that answers a brief. The event is regional, and in previous versions the brief has ranged from reinventing K-12 education to helping Chicago win their Olympic bid.

Because part of the challenge is to actually build a prototype, the teams are typically made up of a combination of designers and developers. Our team was myself, Chad Hancock and developer Greg Wurm of Sierra Bravo.

This time around, the problem was retail, and the brief was pretty far-reaching. It laid out the business situation of a fictional big box retailer and asked the teams to create a presentation to the company’s board that could ease their fears about the current business situation by pointing a way forward.

Each company that participated approached the brief from a slightly different angle (something that Microsoft intended) and seemed to bring what they do best to the solution. Moov showed a Surface-based kiosk that was integrated with Microsoft Tag. Hanson focused on giving people tools to shop within their budget. Space150 brought amazing-looking design and some cool ideas for making the store more experiential. Finally, Colle+McVoy also used the Surface and showed how it could be used to bring online-style shopping to the store environment.

Our approach was to first try and define the business problem more succinctly and then make an honest assesment about whether their business was viable in its current form. Our presentation was really about re-inventing Indigo for the future, and using technology to drive a new business model.

We were named the audience favorite, and the winner, and will be going to SXSW to participate in a national “final” in March. I’ve put the slides from our presentation up on Slideshare, including screen shots of the application we were running up on stage.

©.

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 19th, 2009 at 1:31 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.