I was at Refresh Belfast at the Black Box in Hill Street again last night, for another installment of this informal get-together for local developers and creatives. This month there was a definite creative feel as the speakers were from Atto, a Belfast based design partnership and think-then-do-tank.
Following the pattern of previous evenings there were two talks, What is Responsible Design and Should I Care? followed by How to Tell Authentic Stories that People Enjoy Telling Other People.
In the first session, Atto spoke about how genuine transparency and integrity can be great for business and lead you towards the Holy Grail of finding or creating clients who will pay you what you want to do whatever you want. We’ve all had awkward conversations with clients – the customer isn’t always right in this industry – but Atto have made something of a religion of their policy of “Actual Honesty”, believing that success is directly proportional to the number of these awkward conversations they have with their clients.
It’s a refreshing approach to business relationships and Atto have made it work by being brave enough to plough headlong into those tricky chats you’d probably rather avoid. In return, their clients are (mostly) just as honest and the benefits to both sides are clear. The client gets what they need instead of what they think they want, and Atto get extra, repeat and referred business because they’ve provided more value than the price of the contact. Win-win.
The Atto team takes questions
The second session attempts to teach an important lesson that I refer to as the “Chinese Irrelevance Theorem”: no matter how clever and good you think you (and your products) are, there are about a billion people in China that just don’t care. The session restated this as 6 billion people in the world that don’t care, but the point is that no one starts off caring about your product. To make them care, you have to make it worth talking about: make something remarkable.
Atto’s work in this area was illustrated with a couple of fun examples that also helped raise money for charity and raise the profiles of the charities themselves. Build A Beard Workshop and Your Name On Toast are both what Atto call “Friday Afternoon Projects”. Technically both are very simple implementations, but it’s the creativity, inventivness and sense of fun obvious in them that makes them remarkable. It’s this remarkability that makes visitors care about the projects, and that drives them to tell other people.
The Atto team clearly love what they do, and this is another important pillar of their philosophy. They believe that, all other things being equal, the best person for the job is the one who cares about it most and therefore wants the project to succeed and will go the extra mile to reap rewards for the clients. Sometimes they realise they are not the best team for the project and, applying Actual Honesty, will pass on work to other organisations they trust and who will do a better job. Being able to do this is a great position to be in as it means you get to work only on projects that you like.
Refresh Belfast was well attended
Refresh Belfast was well attended again, perhaps even more so than last month’s, and there were more freebies handed out in the shape of posters and buttons from Atto. I had time to stick around for a while after the talks and got to put real faces to some folk that I’d been chatting to online, though I had to pass on the offer of a drink from Design By Front’s Paul McKeever as I’m doing a charity 100Km cycle event in a few days!
Another evening well spent all the same.
Hello Atto
I even got a badge!
About Atto
Atto is a Responsible Design partnership based in Belfast. We think and design for businesses and non-profits who share our passion for design thinking, effective communication, transparency and creating organisations with a positive net effect. We sometimes draw pictures too. Our names are Heather, Karys and Pete.
John Girvin is an experienced a software engineer and web developer based in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He draws on over 14 years of hard won, real world experience of different projects, clients and working environments.
John is currently working with the Art Technology Group (ATG), developing J2EE based, market leading e-commerce technology.
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