Monday Profile: Nook Studios
Right from the start, one of the things we wanted to do with our Scroll Magazine was bring some attention to the great work being done by Australia’s web design and development agencies. Often, these small companies bring together dynamic teams that create great results for their clients and bring the best out of their team members.
As we lead up to Direction 16 next month (and you should see the Scroll Magazine to go with that!), it seems appropriate to revisit the agency we profile in the Code 16 edition of Scroll: Nook Studios.
Agencies We Like
Nook Studios
Q Tell us a little about the history of Nook.
A Nook Studios was established in 2008 by Mel Flanagan to develop and produce stories and make software tools. Our experience traverses media, arts, museums, theatre and film, interactive content development and production, communications and audience engagement strategy, experience design, and web and software design and development.
We have a great team of collaborators with exceptional skills in design and development, sustainability, environmental science, cross media production and more. We apply our making, storytelling and audience engagement expertise to many kinds of products, services and projects.
We specialise in interpreting and transforming complex processes into simple and useful visualisations, and we design and make our own products, services and digital storytelling tools. We focus particularly on open government and data stories, knowledge sharing and the stories behind processes, projects and products, and making useful web services addressing social and environmental issues.
Q What are some projects you’re particularly proud of?
A We produced a project called Common Ground, a location based web service to help people find information about coal, mineral, petroleum and gas activities across New South Wales. Common Ground was a collaboration between a small lean service design team, community, industry and the NSW Government to bring clarity, transparency and openness to the community. We’re passionate about helping governments be more open and improve communications.
We developed the participatory design approach, and provided service design, creative direction, content production, stakeholder research and management, and content and communications strategy services to the project. Mel presented a case study of Common Ground at Transform, the Web Directions conference in Canberra. It was great to meet exceptional people from all over the world and to hear other ways people are using web to reshape the way government delivers services to the community.
We collaborated with the Community Recycling Network and Resource Recovery Australia to produce Waste to Wages, an 11 minute pitch doco about the work of community recycling enterprises and innovators around Australia. It was made to help raise awareness of their work and encourage local council waste managers and policy makers to support their own local recycling enterprises. This kind of storytelling is important to us – showing people how environmental, social and economic benefits can intersect.
We’re currently developing an interactive documentary series called Sacred Scraps. It’s a series of short stories exploring the lifecycle of everyday things and the connections between resources, materials, people, places, technology, innovation and the environment. We’ll produce interactive illustrations, maps, data visualisations, mini movies, podcasts, and process pathways. The intention is the stories will live on online and in real spaces such as art installations and museums.
Q What’s your ideal project? Client?
A One where we learn new things. We only work on projects that are very useful and have a social purpose. We’re particularly passionate about using digital technology, and our content and service design skills to produce open government services and social innovation.
If there is an ideal project for Nook, it would be having the time to work on our own projects, like the documentary series, content design tools and open government platform we’re developing. We’re suckers for being useful. Working with government has been a real eye opener. We’re currently working with NSW Procurement and NSW Planning, with some really great people who are trying to make change and improve things from the inside. They face big challenges that affect us all, and they need help from people like us.
Q Anything else you’d like to tell us?
A At Nook, we’re creative producers. We’re advocates for creative workers.
We have a diverse range of skills and experience. We can scope projects, develop strategies, build an awesome project team, make or reform services, wrangle and produce content, and create compelling visual communications.
We research and develop ideas and we’re across design and technical production, too. We’re participatory and audience focussed. Before we take things to market, we speak to our audiences directly so we build alliances and a sense of connectedness to what we make, from the earliest stage.
Nook’s kind of producing is the kind where we really only work on things we love. Things that we hope other people will love and value too.
We’re always on the lookout for new collaborators, designers and developers and fun people to work with, so drop us a line to say hi!
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