Since January we have been working closely with Cardiff Business School and Cardiff University's Web Services Team to design and implement a content managed website for the school.

Cardiff Business School is ranked second in the United Kingdom for its leading research. With over 150 faculty members, the school educates over 2500 students each year from over 120 countries, so it was imperative that the website was produced to be as flexible as possible, but with simple navigation and a clear design.

Before we began working with the Business School, their exiting website was managed by a select few, through a large number of Dreamweaver templates. Which is great for smaller websites, but with a website of this size it could only be described as madness, giving us a headache just thinking of the complications.

With well over 5,000 pages of content we proposed to simplify the management of content using our old favourite: Drupal (an open source content management). After a comprehensive planning stage we were then able to produce a robust multilingual website that can be updated by multiple members of staff, allowing for the website to updated instantly and securely. The site has slowly launched over the last week and its already receiving great feedback from the school faculty.

Its going to be great to see the website develop overtime as the Business School staff take control. Visit their new website at http://business.cardiff.ac.uk

So after my first piece about the Cardiff Design Festival and some of the more business/design related events I thought I would write a bit about the smaller events that centred around designers socialising and generally getting to know each other. It's an odd paradox while most designers spend their entire day developing to things to communicate and make lives easier we sometimes aren't the most social of people. So I think the social events are really at the core of Cardiff Design Festival. Without designers on board then the festival is never going to be what it could. So the events that I went to were (for obvious reasons) the NakedWales pub quiz, and the Design Wars out the back of Milgi.

I think both offered something totally different. The quiz was a great chance for people to catch up or meet, have a few drinks, and answer (or maybe not) some quiz questions. The great thing is that we have done three of these quiz's over the years and each time it has got busier and busier until this year when we ran out of chairs. So while I can't say what it was like as I had to read the questions out I think people had a good time? Let us know what people thought.

The Design Wars started last year and I think from hearing about it from other people it was a highlight. So this year I had to pop in and see what it was all about. I think the idea is great and it pulled in a variety of of students, practicing designers and just people interested in what was going on. I think the thing it made me think was that the Design festival did start to bring together recently graduated designers together. Almost the length of the festival has allowed them to grow up with the festival and now as people who are practicing they are now supporting it.

The first two weeks of October have gone by and with it, so has Cardiff Design Festival 2011. I managed to miss most of last years festival as I was busy working on a project. So this year I was determined to go to as many events as possible. Firstly I think from the year break it has really shown me that the festival feels a lot more solid and a great two weeks of events. I think there are levels of events now, within the festival. Events for designers and business, to social events for designers, right through to events that were put on by designers that attracted a public audience. Definitely from the 2009 event there seems to be a big progression. So I am going to give you a quick over view of some of the events I attended and give you an idea of what I thought.

I think I might go in reverse order. So the last event I attended was Design Wales' Service Design seminars at the Pierhead building. speakers were Ben Reason from Live|Work and Nick March from Sidekick Studio's. Both companies practice service design at different levels. Live|Work are a huge established service design company working with large clients from all over the world. Where as sidekick studio's are, (as the name implies) a much smaller studio working on smaller digital service design projects.

So what did I think?
For me the work Live|Work showed and how Ben described the way they felt design was going was bang on. But I don't think it gave me much insight into them as a company. I think for people just getting into this arena then I could see it being really interesting, but it didn't really hold the attention. Second up was Nick. Who discussed the transition sidekick studio's are going through right now. Instead of just doing client based work. They are now developing projects internally and then trying to sell them. The projects he discussed such as Buddy and the Amazings were really interesting and it will be interesting to see if they do manage to get this going long term. I think Designers have for a long time made off shoot businesses. It is nothing new. Elmwood for example have for many years had their own tea brand and more recently launched a boutique beer. Traditionally designers have often sold one off designs within the shop section of their websites.

What I felt was slightly different about Nick's viewpoint were the requirements of the project in the first place. A mini value set, or mini brief if you like. This helped them decide on whether the project should go forward. In a nutshell all the projects had to be "digital products that make money, change lives and put a smile on people's faces" with the aim to "make our society better". So for me with general interest in this subject it was interesting to see this type of model within a commercial company. Granted they do get a lot of their initial start up funds from research pots and other funding schemes, but long term it left me questioning is this the way we should look at developing projects and companies for the future?

This thought brings me nicely to another event I helped out in at the Old Library. EDC had for a few months now been talking to Llamau – a Welsh based charity that do great work with young people. For many years they have worked with them to develop social enterprises. So we worked them to try and develop their projects in a one day design workshop. Working through the business generation workshop diagram, we developed a number of small exercises that allowed people to explore their initial business ideas and hopefully get them to think about their potential customers, and also who would be needed to make the business a success. I guess looking back on both these two events. Design has a real opportunity to make a difference within lives for good and also generally across society in general. I think regardless of the client. We should be looking to advise about how to make things 'better'.

I will write another post about other events soon.

Even though it's called the Cardiff Design Festival it always covered design from all over Wales, sometimes outside of Wales. Last year was the festivals biggest year and this year it's looking even bigger with interest from design agencies in Newport, Swansea and Wrexham putting on their own fringe events in the cities.

With this in mind we created sub brands for each city, highlighting that there are Cardiff Design Festival events going on in those cities. The idea behind the brand being, Cardiff is always central in the brand, with each city sitting alongside it as it would sit geographically to Cardiff.

The festival hopes in the future that more cities will come on-board creating a whole network.

This morning I went on a magical mystery tour of a ride around Cardiff. Every now and again I catch a bus from Canton to the Bay. It is one of those routes that goes everywhere and pretty much circles the city. This morning the driver accidentally took a wrong turn. I think this is only the second time in my memory when this has happened to me but it did get me thinking about service and services breaking down. It is probably best to describe it through three different perspectives.

PERSPECTIVE ONE - the bus driver
He regularly drives through Canton on the number 17 bus route that arrives opposite central station. He is used the route in fact the route has become routine. He is on autopilot. This week after many months on the 17 route he is doing 2 this is a different route going to the Bay but is does share a section of the road that is the same as the number 17. So routine kicks in and before he knows it he has passed the turning he should have taken.

He instantly panics and tries to correct by turning around with no roundabouts nearby and it being rush hour he is unsuccessful and aborts his attempt. The traffic has been manic all morning and he already is a bit late so he decides to try and get back on track but unfortunately he is going to miss a few stops out of the regular route. He is now late and frustrated probably under pressure to be on time and is now rushing to catch up.

Could this have been helped?
Local knowledge is a great thing it helped the driver out to re-find his route, however the familiarity probably also caused the issue. Would it be best to give drivers totally different routes from their last?

PERSPECTIVE TWO - the passenger
For me as a passenger this novelty has given me many things. A quick bit to talk about in the morning in the studio. The novelty has allowed for a different feel to getting to work. A different perspective almost.

Could this have been utilised?
Broadly thinking could routes be random? would this create newness to getting to work? would we be better off?

PERSPECTIVE THREE - the potential passenger
This is the most interesting for me in the scenario. They have no idea what has gon on. There is no empathy of the issue and as far as they are concerned another bus has not turned up.

Could this have been helped?
Would it have been possible to bring the story to this passenger. Give them the understanding of the issues and what has happened?

I think ultimately what I saw today made me think about services are as strong as the people who deliver them. We are all human and make mistakes. But I think it is the way organisations open up to these mistakes that will be the making of future great services.

Julian Sykes - I built my first Tank at age 6 from Ignite Cardiff on Vimeo.

We have just been sent the video of my recent Ignite talk in Cardiff a few weeks ago. It's the first Ignite I have done and I have to say it is so much harder than Pecha Kucha. Having 5 seconds less for each slide makes a huge difference. Hope you enjoy it even though I babbled a bit.

Thanks to www.crimzn.co.uk for the video and www.ignitecardiff.wordpress.com for letting me talk about play and games. There are also some other great talks that you can see on ignites vimeo account www.vimeo.com/user6011980