argodesign Amsterdam — End of Year Report 2020
For the Amsterdam Studio, this has been our sixth year in operation, and our second year since joining argodesign where we continue to assist companies in delivering innovative digital products.
It goes without saying, 2020 has been exhilarating, frustrating, and above all else unique. As a studio, our culture and DNA have proven to be invaluable during this year, providing foundation and strength as everything around us shifted. Despite making a huge shift in being distributed we managed to produce the best work in our studios history! We never thought of this year as a hindrance that would handicap us. Instead we chose to focus on how we could still have the most positive impact with our client partners. While we have encountered challenges, our body of work for the year has become even more robust — from Fortune 100 companies to assisting in start-ups across the globe. Even taking on our largest programs to date with DreamWorks, Universal, and Microsoft.
Over our studio’s six year history, we have opened each year with a word that reflects our shared purpose, such as Mature (2017), Growth (2018) and Integration (2019). This year, almost as foreshadowing we didn’t lay out a word. Instead now at the end of the year, we clearly recognise the word was Adapt.
We have kept in mind parts of our studio that have needed extra attention, such as, community, collaboration, culture, and cross pollination. With that extra attention, we have maintained our close knit ties. We held online studio magic shows, went geocaching, had a [social-distanced] wedding, and held workshops for pasta and music creation. Over Slack we shared our lunches in a competition of who could make the best toastie (Dutch Sandwich), and like many others, we were caught up in the sourdough revolution. Our team worked from all over Europe including Genova, Paris, Copenhagen, Bavaria, and so many other locations.
Our work
The big challenges of the year have also brought us our largest programs. For the entire year we have worked with DreamWorks and Universal, focused on delivering a complete suite of applications that is meant to enable a completely new cloud based way of producing movies, and enabling a global partner ecosystem — a true industry changing program.
But that is only one piece of the picture for the studio. We’ve worked on applications for the Dutch railways, shipping work to their 10M+ users. We’ve continued to deepen our relationship with Elsevier and Facebook doing in-depth research programs with both companies. We have long aspired to be a beacon across the argo offices globally for research and strategy, and this year we completed over 100 remote user interviews for different clients, contributing to strategic and product adjustments. Finally we continued our delivery work with Pepper, a Smart Home white label based out of the US, and worked on business insight tools for IBM.
Throughout the year we’ve had individuals from the team speaking and engaged with events and conferences. Lily speaking at IxDA, I ran workshop events in Kenya for start-ups, Bessy speaking at Austin Start up Week, and Prima being a judge for the Thought for Food Start-up competition, are some of the top highlights.
Shifting working styles
This year saw three major shifts in how we worked in Amsterdam, and really across argo. While we were thrown into this challenging situation, our ability to adapt and grow globally allowed us to create an environment that will make us stronger in the future.
First, the clear shift to remote and distributed working due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In Amsterdam, we ran an internal studio questionnaire that resulted in providing the foundation of our work policy for the remainder of the year. During a time of ambiguity and unrest, the best we could do was provide clarity within our own walls.
Second, due to being distributed, collaborative software became king. We nearly abandoned the Adobe Suite and Sketch in favour of Figma, Keynote, Miro, Meet, and Google Drive tools. We also shifted all studio communication into Slack abandoning email.
Finally, the first two shifts then enabled the greatest shift, which has been to stop thinking in terms of studios and locations and really think of ourselves as one argo — one global studio and community. During the last year almost every program in the Amsterdam studio became a cross-studio program. Location is now eroding and slowly becoming irrelevant. Something I hope happens more in the future! It has brought new inspiration, programs, and produced stronger results!
Looking back, our ability to shift perspective with new contexts was invaluable to adapting — making trade-offs on the small scale to support the big picture. We accepted that what brought us to our current destination is not what will ultimately take us to our next destination. Our shifts in 2020 were not about surviving the year, but about ensuring we survive in the future.
Looking forward
Personally, I’ve never felt more optimistic looking forward. 2021 is still unknown in so many ways. However across the board, our skills that have proven invaluable to so many clients have also proven invaluable to our own studio. Our abilities to listen, work towards higher standards, and build on each other, have sustained us.
These, alongside our ability to reflect on our current context, be brutally honest about our failures, and then adapt, will continue to guide us in a brighter future and stronger character. We have long known the old saying, culture will eat strategy for breakfast — and I’m thankful that 2020 has made us that much stronger, both in Amsterdam, and globally.
Our goal as argo has always been to create something more than what has existed. Something bigger than each one of us individually, and with more impact than what we have seen before. It’s all of our responsibility to drive towards building this — we never get ahead alone! And we choose to do that not because it’s easy, but specifically because it is hard!
Joe, on behalf of the entire Amsterdam argodesign team!
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