The new firm “Bond Art & Science“, a partnership with ex-Razorfish managers Josh Rubin and Evan Orensten, and Razorfish co-founder Jeffrey Dachis.
And the interesting quote
Fancying Bond more of a consulting company than an ad or marketing agency, Orensten said the company will focus on “experience design.” He stressed the firm won’t be in the ad business, and shied away from the “marketing” label; though he said Bond will be involved in developing branding efforts for clients.
Cool, that sounds great!
“Everything’s matured to a point where the technology can deliver the kinds of experiences we always wanted to deliver,” observed Orensten. “Users are more comfortable with having those experiences we always wanted them to have.”
Uh-oh, take foot and insert into mouth. “Deliver the experiences WE always wanted to deliver.”
Ok, well I’ll cut them some slack because they were razorfish when it was cool 
but if your going to talk about experience design, try and include the customer in the statement, seriously, good luck guys.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Great post Karl. And atta boy for being a little skeptical. Jeff and crew have missed out on some critical years. Experience Design has come long way and those of us who have been WORKING have gotten very good at it. The smoke and mirrors that was pulled during the bubble will not work now.
And you were right on the money. You can’t have good experiences without the customer being at the center of it. That at least deserves a mention.
-DA
Karl/Dave, here’s a company that’s talking the talk and walking the walk:
http://www.teehanlax.com
Toronto-based. Check them out.
Nice Scott,
I’m always looking for examples like this. I’ll spend some quality time here.
can I just say WTF is up with canada? are they quietly taking over the “experience” space? These guys, blast radius, ludicorp (behind flickr), the guys behind shopify.com
I’d say there’s an innovation defect that the US needs to be looking at
Hey – don’t forget my current employer, the biggest of them all; Critical Mass.
http://www.criticalmass.com/
The Bond Art & Science announcement email from Jeff on the ex-razorfish list was so full of hype and marketese speak that it got caught in my spam filter. Some things don’t change, apparently.
Having worked at Razorfish for a brief period of time, I have to say it wasn’t that much smoke and mirrors as you might expect. Razorfish had a huge library of tools for delivering user/customer experience projects, when most (web shop) people didn’t even think about the world revolving around the customer. So massive were the toolkit and the efforts to share and implement it, that I would even attribute it to being one of the reasons for Razorfish’s failure. It was simply a too big investment of time and money, and probably too soon.
His character aside, credit needs to be given to Jeff and other people behind Razorfish for having the guts to try and execute their vision of delivering great user experiences to all. In hindisght, a Getting Real approach might have worked better.
Wohoo for that.