Back in December last year Cogapp was honoured with a Design Week award nomination for our work on MoMA.guide. The awards ceremony took place last week and we were delighted to welcome along Allegra Burnette from MoMA and Matthew Cock from the British Museum.

I spoke to Cogapp’s Design Director Colin Jenkinson about his experience of the awards.

We entered MoMA.guide which is a project that launches this month for the Museum of Modern Art. It’s an interactive public access kiosk system that guides visitors in their experience of MoMA. We entered it in the Digital Design Information category and we were shortlisted. I think, in the whole of the Design Week Awards there were 20 categories. Of which, there were only 2 core digital categories, Digital Design Commercial and ours.

One of the interesting things for us was entering the Digital Design Information category but not knowing who we were nominated with. When the nominees were revealed, we discovered that we were up against the Apple iPhone. So, obviously, we didn’t win but on a plus point we lost to the best in show! It’s nice to be in that field as a positive profile for Cogapp and I think there’s a general understanding that perhaps we wouldn’t win against such a high level device with such popularity.

Colin’s highlights:

The iPhone, which is winning every award out there at the moment for product design, interface design, packaging, you name it.

The Science Museum was really strong. They were entered into the hall of fame actually, which was great. And I think that was really interesting in terms of the projects they’re doing with interactive media as well.

The Natural History Museum - this was great! It’s educational packs for the Natural History Museum which are fantastic actually, they’re kinda’ little masks which you can look through and it’s just quite playful to see the Natural History Museum brand being used in this way. I’d love to see this happening on the web a lot more because there’s some really exciting stuff happening in print.

We’re delighted to be sponsoring the second Barcamp Brighton, which takes place on the weekend of March 15th-16th at the University of Sussex. In case you’re wondering the Barcamp wiki explains all:

BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants — often focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats.

Our very own Tristan Roddis attended the first Brighton iteration last September and blogged his experience here and here. These are fantastic events for the Brighton digital community and the participatory nature of the event gives physical form to many of the high ideals of web2.0. A worthy goal for our digital outpost by the sea.

There was also Powerpoint karaoke.

At least two of our number will be there and tickets are going fast. Head over to the Barcamp Brighton2 site for more info.

This year we decided to send out our seasonal greetings without chopping down any forests. After much head-scratching about how best to do this, the elves of Cogapp proudly present for your enjoyment…

The Infinite Snowflake!

It takes less than a minute to make one. Once done you can email your creation along with a suitably festive message to anyone deserving of your handiwork. The messages and the names (but not email addresses) are displayed alongside your beautiful flake on our giant snowflake.

Merry Christmas.

dConstruct takes place today in our fair town of Brighton and this year Cogapp are proud to be one of the sponsors.

We’ll bring you a full round up of our thoughts on the day’s events next week but today I’d like to talk about cookies.

One of the perks of sponsoring the event is that we get to place an item within each delegate’s bag. After throwing out our Cogapp branded Battenburg cake idea (with green squares - obviously) we arrived at the cracking notion of foisting pearls of (user experience) wisdom on the delegates in the form of fortune cookies. For those not lucky enough to have snagged a ticket (or snagged a cookie) here are our favourites:

• Just because nobody complains doesn’t mean all parachutes are perfect.
  [Alfred Hawthorn Hill (aka Benny Hill)]
• A designer knows that he has achieved perfection not when there is
  nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
  [Antoine de St-Expurey]
• However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the
  results.
  [Winston Churchill]
• You need to “listen deeply” - listen past what people say they want
  to hear what they need.
  [Jon Meads]
• People’s behaviour makes sense if you think about it in terms of their
  goals, needs, and motives.
  [Thomas Mann]
• Make it as simple as possible. But no simpler.
  [Albert Einstein]
• Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
  [Dali Lama]
• If the user can’t find it, it doesn’t exist
  [HFI button]
• You can use an eraser on the drafting table or a sledge hammer on the
  construction site.
  [Frank Lloyd Wright]

We’re also using today as an opportunity to officially launch this blog out into the world!

We’ve got quite a varied series of posts and articles up already. Expect to see more from the staff at Cogapp around the ideas of Engagement.