In a recent post, Austinite Michelle Greer wrote about visiting Pittsboro, NC, and being impressed with how so many businesses are really, truly locally owned and operated. Of Austin and the need to keep it weird, she says:

We need to support locally owned businesses. We should watch local acts… We should use Austin hosts and use Austin software. A person living in Austin should feel like he or she can open a business and people will support it. If it sucks, tell that Austinite what their business can do to earn your business. If we don’t support each other, who will?

These are good points. We have, from the beginning, vowed to be as local and green as we can be. That said, the process is a bit trickier in reality than it is when we’re sitting around scheming to come up with a plan that will not only be good and green, but ideally will single-handedly put an end to global warming and ultimately give Al Gore a chance to take a much needed vacation.

For example — we want to use as many local vendors as possible throughout LaunchPad Coworking. We’re using a local architect, local web developers and designers, and our extended team is culled locally. We’re using green materials everywhere, and of course we’re recycling (and believe me, you’d be astonished how many restaurants and retail stores don’t recycle). We’re even composting right in downtown Austin.

Going green and local on the menu is another story. We’re doing as much as possible, but the hurdles are impressive. It is not possible to run a smooth operation if we have a zillion small vendors making eight deliveries a day spread out over the week. Some local vendors don’t even deliver, which means if we use them, we have to commit to driving around and picking up. Gas prices are high, to put it mildly, and all that driving, even if gas was cheap, is not exactly green.

Another obstacle concerns the Venn diagram where “local organic” produce overlaps with “seasonal.” Sure a lot of folks say they prefer the local stuff. But that means our menu will have to change to accommodate Mother Nature. Big grocers offer all sorts of produce year round, but they get it from far, far away when it’s out of season here. So will you really be okay with it if we have to forego tomatoes for a stretch? The tradeoff being that, when we do have tomatoes, if we go 100% local, you can know for certain those tomatoes are fresh picked and from just down the road and, more importantly, as Tina Rosenzweig puts it, “will taste really frickin’ great.”

There’s the cost issue, too. Tina points out, “It’s easier and cheaper to just call [food distributor] Benny Keith and have a truckload of non-green stuff delivered. Being healthy and environmentally sound is really expensive.”

But we remain committed to the goal of green-as-possible. We’re getting one hell of an education learning about what’s available. We promise we’ll always have a weekly local salad. And we’re working to find other downtown vendors interested in combining our buying power to give us all more options.

Tina is going to make sure our café staff is educated so they can explain any seasonal menu changes and clarify when some items seem priced a bit high. We’ve already committed to using a local coffee roaster (Texas Coffee Traders), and Austin-based Luxe Sweets will supply all of our muffins, cookies and scones.

The challenge is worth it. “I’ve not had the luxury of trying to do this before,” she says. That’s how we like to look at the hurdles — luxury moments we can look back on clearing in awe.

Resources

Wheatsville Co-op has a great list of local vendors within a hundred miles of Austin.
Barr Mansion — the certified organic event venue in East Austin.
Whole Foods — which, though mammoth, did start here as a small shop.
Farm to Market — Independent grocer on South Congress.
Greenling Grocery — delivers local produce and produce from within a 200 mile radius.
East Side Café — grows a lot of their own ingredients.
Johnson’s Backyard Garden — delivers affordable boxes of local produce to private homes.

I love obituaries. Clarification: I don’t love the part of an obit that means that somebody, somewhere, is grieving the loss of a loved one. But you sure can learn a lot about a person, especially when an entire exciting life is crammed into a couple newspaper columns.

Such is the case with the recent obituary of David Caminer, who died on June 19th. He was 92. I’d never heard of him before but, as it turns out, he is credited with helping to develop “the world’s first business computer.”

Short version: Caminer was a leftist Brit who scoffed education and instead went to work for J. Lyons & Company, a big tea outfit in England, when he was 21. Tea being to England what coffee is to Seattle, the company thrived, operating tea shops, a catering branch, hotels, and other endeavors. Which meant they had a lot of information to keep track of.

As his obit reports, “Mr. Caminer’s role was finding ways to retain traditional clerical rigor while speeding up the company’s logistics and finances many times over.” So he took a look at early computer research being conducted in the U.S. and, using that came up with LEO — Lyons Electronic Office. “LEO performed its first calculation on November 17, 1951, running a program to evaluate costs, prices and margins of that week’s baked output.”

Quoting an article in New Scientist, the obit offers the following analogy: “In today’s terms it would be like hearing that… McDonald’s invented the Internet.”

The first LEO was turned off in 1965, earning the computer an obituary of its own, one crediting the machine for so many hours of service.

Reading the obituary, and all the data that Caminer had to manage, I had to think of our own adventures creating Spacer, the software application specific to our new business model.

Maybe we’ll name a teapot after LEO.

There’s been a deluge of blog posts recently examining how companies such as Southwest, Comcast, and Zappos are now using Twitter to improve customer service. Repeated examples point to instances where disgruntled customers send out a snarl of a tweet and get back near-instant replies offering resolution. To be fair, there are also numerous examples of positive tweets and the responses they net.

It got me wondering how I really feel about companies using social networks — originally designed for individuals to interact with other individuals — for marketing purposes. Because customer service is — or at least should be — a significant component of any marketing department.

David Armano notes among other things, that “The fact that Zappos and Southwest are finding success in a social network like Twitter is not surprising. These are companies that get both business and the customer experience.”

Over at ReadWriteWeb, Sarah Perez wrote an extensive post detailing several Twitter-based customer service incidents. She makes a good point when she cautions: “While it’s nice to know that Twitter is available as a way of getting a company’s attention, all methods of customer service and support should be treated with the same consideration. By pouncing on the Twitter complaints while ignoring the emails, one has to wonder if the company is, in fact, more concerned with reputation than they are with service.”

So is this all this recent grumpy-tweet placation a fast moving trend that will fade once companies are inundated by daily mountains of 140-character text complaints? Will there be some Twitter equivalent of the auto-reply? …Your tweet is very important to us…

I like to know who’s behind a Twitter avatar. If a group or company maintains a Twitter account, and I follow that organization and tweet in their direction, I like to know who precisely is listening. It might seem like a small thing, especially when logging a customer service complaint. But I had an incident where I tweeted one person — at least I thought I did — in a group and someone else picked up the tweet and it got me in kind of a jam.

On the personal side of things, I’ve noticed that when people I follow change their avatar from something abstract to a picture of themselves (even a cartoon rendering, in some cases) their tweets instantly get more compelling.

And really, it doesn’t feel terribly social or networky if I’m following a logo as opposed to a real, live human being.

Then again, paint me a hypocrite — I have a Twitter account for LaunchPad Coworking, just in case. But I maintain this to hang onto the name and to have a spot if someone comes looking for the company. Day to day though, I tweet as me, not my company.

Susan Price, my marketing guru, tells me There is no wrong way to use Twitter. She’s right, of course. This is something I love about Susan — the way she can kindly call me on my own stubbornness. And maybe, once we’re open, I’ll be tweeting from LPC all the time. It’s cool to watch how others are using Twitter for branding — less personal than an individual presence but, for now anyway, a lot more personal than a billboard.

And I confess I’ve even tweeted my own questions for corporations more than once, and had answers magically manifest. I was wishing for the capability to do a certain something on Evernote. So I tweeted it out there. Minutes later I got a tweet back saying, “You can do that now, here’s how.” It was great and in that moment, I didn’t care who was behind it — man, monkey or machine. I was heard. It rocked.

Another time @NPRpolitics tweeted the super-delegate count of Obama and Clinton. Clinton was ahead by .5 delegates. .5? I replied with “how can someone have half a delegate?” 2 minutes later I got the response — “The 1/2 comes from Theresa Morelli who lives in Milan. She is counted in DEMS Abroad. They split their del votes.” I couldn’t have found that answer any faster via Google. Very cool.

But can it be sustained? Getting a tweet back ten minutes after a complaint or compliment or request is just not a scalable model. I know — I used to do customer support. There are real hands behind those fingers twittering back responses. The expectation of getting immediate service as Twitter gets bigger is unrealistic. What happens when companies’ 1000 followers jumps to 20,000 and then to 50,000?

But the upside of the current Twitter flutter of customer service is that this is an entryway for other companies to start participating in the conversation about how social networking is changing the face of marketing and customer service. And it’s a clear reminder: You better watch and listen — people are tweeting about you.

Meanwhile, over on the consumer side, I sure hope folks don’t get spoiled and develop a sense of entitlement over these fast return tweets. If they do, it won’t be long before the squeaky tweeter stops getting the oil.

After interviewing a number of design firms to find just the right team to help us pull together elements to express everything from our logo to our swag to our mission to our excitement at building LaunchPad Coworking, we had the great fortune to connect with Erin Mayes of Em Dash LLC. I caught up with Erin to ask her about the curious world of design.

Before she answered my set of specific questions, Erin offered a little bit of preface to help me understand why it’s tricky trying to capture in words what happens in the world of design.

Erin’s Preface

Whoever said “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” was dead on, and that totally applies to talking about design and art. You can’t really ever TALK about things that happen visually. You can only talk AROUND them. In metaphors. Hence the quote. There’s not a verbal language for what you see. Or for the emotional response that goes directly to your brain from something you just saw.

Take the for-instance of the McDonald’s logo. You see it, but you don’t read it. It doesn’t tell you “M.” Yet it signifies all kinds of associations for the person looking at it. If you’re 2 years old and can’t read, it’s the symbol that THAT’s the place you go for treats — sugar-filled yummy lunch, a Playscape and a toy. If you’re me, it’s the symbol of everything that’s wrong with American corporations, the American workforce, yet my stomach is making that “Put a quarter pounder here NOW” feeling that just makes me more conflicted. See what I mean?

So as a designer, you’re dealing with a whole lot of minutiae of perception. And all that minutiae interacts too closely to change the overall perception that there’s no way to make standards — no way to quantify it. Like — you can’t really say blue is a calming color. Because if blue is combined with the big fuzzy monster that is slapping you in the face, the experience is not calming. That’s a pretty bad analogy, but when you start to deal in things like letterforms (which most people don’t think that they notice), that create quick associations in your head subconsciously to you feel one way versus another way — like letterforms that carry a particular cultural baggage in a particular time span (like Papyrus, which is used as the font for every yoga studio and DIY hippie-venture in the last 5 years) — it becomes even harder to quantify how design happens. The only way I can really quantify any success is if the design works. Did people pick up the magazine or product on the shelf? Did they have some sort of emotional connection and read it? Did they want to save it and not throw it away? Was the consumer’s first reaction “Oh cool!”. That’s they only way to really quantify design. And because there are so many factors that make good design, it should not be left to amateurs. HA!

The Interview

Spike Gillespie: Tell me about your business.
Erin Mayes: I started Em Dash LLC a couple of years ago. My recent co-worker is Kate Iltis. We work together very well because we have such a similar view of design — make similar choices, like similar things, have similar backgrounds. Yet, when I’m dumb, she’s smart. And when she’s dumb, I’m smart. It’s a good relationship. Simon Renwick is our designer. His background is in fine art - painting - but he’s spent his career in construction as a contractor. He was looking for a career change, so we did a trial internship to see if he liked it and if he had any potential. Funny thing — his background in construction makes him really good at building complicated designs like magazines, or identity systems.

Spike: What will you be doing for LaunchPad Coworking?
Erin: We’ll be in charge of the space’s graphic system. Their identity system. That means that we are refining the logo that they made at the beginning so it addresses the totality of the space and its personality. The graphic system will work with the architecture to create a really interesting and comfortable space for great ideas to be born.

Spike: What the heck is a graphic system?
Erin: The graphic system for a space is really a big problem to solve. It’s not just coming up with a logo that looks good on a business card. All the bits that come out of or are housed in LaunchPad Coworking need to have a consistent graphic voice, and a consistent personality and hopefully some playfulness. Since it’s not just a business, it’s a cafe, and sort of a social working network, all the different pieces have to play well together, yet be fun and individual on their own. We can’t just slap a logo on cups, on the wall, on the door, and on t-shirts and be done. That’s a missed opportunity where we should be creating an experience.

Spike: How did you get into design?
Erin: My background is in magazine design. I started out as a photojournalism major at UT and took the only design class offered. I really liked it, and started doing it on the side in school to make money. Back then, it was still mostly a paste-up based field, but the Mac had arrived a few years before that class and people were starting to figure out how to use it. I got my first job in design specifically because I knew how to operate a Mac, not for any design skills — I hadn’t even been in that class yet.

I went to Dallas after graduating to work at the Dallas Observer, then off to NYC where I freelanced in the Bloomingdale’s Special Projects department doing packaging and poster, the Village Voice, and briefly at Entertainment Weekly. Then I landed a full-time job at a weekly TV magazine called Total TV and a monthly called the Cable Guide. I left there for Premiere magazine, then Men’s Journal, then to work on redesigning consumer and trade magazines. That firm went through several transitions. At that point, I’d had enough of NY and started thinking about somewhere else to live. That’s when the job at Pentagram in Austin came up, and I moved back to Austin in July 2001. I worked with DJ Stout there and started designing books for the first time, more identity, and plenty of magazines.

Spike: What’s your process?
Erin: I’m always stumped at the beginning of a project. Once I do a lot of research and clean up the office, then I just start putting down things on paper — sketching, playing, whatever. Some dumb thing I do always gets the idea ball rolling if I do enough of it. Then you just have to put in the work (play, actually) and see what works, and what doesn’t. The answers always emerge in that process.

After crossing 713 Ts, dotting 562 Is, and leaving a small tissue sample with the City of Austin, we are finally starting. Yesterday evening, after a frustrating day, I said to Tina “I just want to go to sleep and wake up when the demolition starts.” And damn if Tina didn’t call early this morning, waking me up with “We’re starting, come on down and take the first whack.”

And I did. I took several whacks, as a matter of fact. I got a a good start taking down the marble around a structural support.

Tina and I even get our own hardhats. I’ve never been so happy to look like a dork as I was this morning :)

The demolition will not be televised, but it will be available via our Flickr Photoset. You can also subscribe to the whole LaunchPad Coworking Flickrstream.

We’ve had another great response to the call for shared stories about good will and getting started. Recently we posted some tales from Alex Hillman about how Indy Hall got a good running start with community help and some toys from Belkin. Now Susan Evans of Office Nomads is here to check in with a report all the good things — tangible and otherwise — that came to ON while they were getting off the ground. And she explains how she and her partner Jacob Sayles strive to give back to the community.

Here’s Susan on the topic of sharing:

We’ve gotten a ton of donations and they’ve all been super helpful in creating the foundation of what we have going at Office Nomads. Since we’ve started, people have bestowed upon us:

• Furniture (tables & chairs from a local business who was changing out their furniture)
• Coffee (a local business had a ton leftover after an event, and it has kept our caffeine buzz afloat for the first 6 months, and we still have more!)
• Donuts (oh how we love our local vegan donut shop — Mighty O)
• Chalkboards (from a local language school that was switching out to whiteboards)
• Plants (from a few friends who had some for us to adopt)
• Beer! (we love Sierra Nevada!)
• Catering services (also for our 6-month open house)

When we moved into our space, there were a few leftover desks in here from the last tenant. In the end all of this free furniture was unusable for us (it was all way too big and bulky for our space) so we were trying to figure out what to do with it. Insert Craigslist into the picture. Within a day, a lovely couple from a town nearby came to pick up some free desks from US to use in their tattoo shop. They could not have been more excited. We got to watch someone have the same reaction we did when we got the free furniture — so excited to have things that could work in our space and so thankful that someone was willing and ready to let us just take it all. A few days later we got a whole bunch of postcards and a thank you note from our new tattoo-designing friends who reported being thrilled with their things. The whole process made us all warm & fuzzy.

We’ve had some insanely fun and productive work parties here at ON, whether it be building conference tables, front desks, or painting walls in our space. The space reflects all of that hard work and fun for sure and it is palpable when people come in to check us out — the vibe is fun, casual, and (well, I’m a bit biased…) beautiful. We’ve had about 3-4 major work parties in the space to get everything looking settled and nice, and it is amazing to have the space finally in a place where there aren’t a half-dozen half-finished projects laying around. We feel all grown up now, and it’s thanks to all of the great work of our talented friends and colleagues!

There has also been a ton of bartering for us to do since we started up the space, including lots of wonderful resources for us. We barter with people who have been able to provide us office management help, blogging and marketing assistance, web design, postcard flyers, advertising on a local business networking site, networking assistance, interior design help and more. It’s been pretty amazing to watch people come in, love the space, and see what they can offer us in exchange that is not money. We feel lucky every day to continue to foster the growth of our business this way.

In addition, Jacob and I do a lot of reaching out to local organizations to bring them in here in exchange for growing our network. We both volunteer heavily with a few organizations, including Sustainable Capitol Hill, BarCamp Seattle, and a few other groups who use our space regularly (Passages Northwest is one of them — a local experiential education nonprofit for girls I volunteered with for years). I feel very much that we are able to give as much as we receive in our space, which is wonderful. In growing our community we have made some truly excellent connections that make our business network stronger and makes us feel like a strong part of our neighborhood.

Wordle is a neat, lightweight web application that lets you make beautiful tag clouds out of any text. I entered the text of LaunchPad Coworking’s Executive Summary directly from the business plan, did a bit of simple tweaking, and got this:

Here in the US, we don’t hear much good news coming out of the Middle East. I was thrilled this morning when I saw that the Coworking Wiki had been edited — Coworking Beirut had been changed from “Launching” to “OPEN!”

Rootspace, a community space for innovation and sustainable development, has opened in Beirut, Lebanon. We couldn’t be happier for you!

And thank you for helping us all feel like we’re part of something that really is changing the world :)

I first met Diana Prechter seventeen years ago when I was a waiter and manager at the Magnolia Café south, which she and her husband Kent Cole own (along with the other Magnolia Café on Lake Austin Boulevard). Diana and Kent know more than a few things about creating interesting spaces that are very Austin-centric. Diana also owned Prima Dora, a gift store. And now, moving from bricks and mortar, she and Ruth Framel have put their web development skills together to create TodayInAustin.com, which aggregates all the good things going on in Austin on any given day. I recently caught up with her via email to get her take on building community in Austin.

Spike Gillespie: What’s the purpose of TodayInAustin?
Diana Prechter: We want to be an entertainment web site that is simple to use and represents the broadest range of interesting events. Our web site reflects who we are: a couple of Boomers who have more free time, disposable income, and who want to know what our options are for entertainment without too much internet socializing or advertising getting in the way.

Spike: In a recent interview, you said it took about a year to get up and running. How do you get the word out?
Diana: I don’t think you can ever underestimate the power of word of mouth advertising. Little by little, the word is leaking out about our site. We’re getting close to 300 subscribers who want to get some thread of news from us daily. We’re thrilled and we anticipate more growth.

Spike: Do you see TIA as a community building tool?
Diana: Whereas other entertainment web sites are good at promoting art or music events, we are the only one I know of that’s inviting businesses to enter the “entertainment” calendar. We include any organization that has a bricks-and-mortar location and fun events for the public. That means that we need the participation of business and arts organizations to support what we are doing. The more they participate and cross-promote each other (and us) the better for all of them.

Spike: You’ve had a lot of business success in Austin, not just financial success, but also success in creating distinct, memorable locations. Did you and Kent accomplish this more in a learn-as-you-go fashion or did you have really specific goals and strategies?
Diana: Let me just say that the Magnolia Cafes only reflect who Kent, I and our employees are. We’re not very slick. We’ve never hired a fancy consultant, never even let a professional decorator give us (much needed!) advice. The permanent painting on the wall at the South location was done by an employee, the hanging dinosaurs by a customer, and the cooks in the kitchen are much better cooks than Kent and I. I would say that Kent has been an excellent leader and has a great sense for managing resources; but equally important is the idea of “strength from below” for our business. We’re there to clarify the vision for the Magnolia Cafes and provide our employees the resources to best serve the needs of our customers. We are so very grateful for the unique Magnolia Café community of employees and customers.

That sense of gratitude and community working together is the foundation for TodayinAustin as well. Ruth and I work hard, for no pay, learn-as-you-go, but ready to be in a place of giving something back to a community that’s been very generous and loving to us. And we are daily learning from the community and from “the ether” and trying to integrate what we learn into TIA.

Spike: When people visit TIA do you think they feel more overwhelmed by the possibilities or relieved there’s a way to sort them out?
Diana: Simply put, our goal is for people to feel relieved! It’s got to be simple for me to enjoy this information. I would never go to 2 or 3 web sites to find out what’s going on today, and Austin has over 100 of them. We are trying to sort the information in a simple way and we are evolving in response to the community. TIA offers an elegant solution. TIA does the reading and filtering from over 100 web site feeds. On a single day, there may be only 5 events or more than 25, but you can see them all in a few seconds in a Reader. Click on them to go to the web site that published the information.

Offering a mobile solution is also part of keeping it simple. People can be on the go, out in the world, and ask “what’s fun to do now?”  Our events look great in mobile devices like the iPhone and Blackberry.

Spike: Some people view the web and the wired life as isolating, others view it as a real community builder. At LaunchPad Coworking we look at it both ways — we’re building a space to help folks who do a lot of work virtually to have a physical space in which to commune. You’ve been online a long time — what’s your take on the online life and web as a tool/community fosterer?
Diana: Coworking sounds like it will be a great idea for some people. I hear about people who work at home and they (1) eat too much, (2) are too distracted, or (3) can’t stop working. Well, I sort of fall into that last category. Personally, I like being alone, and can concentrate for hours without hardly breathing. I need a support group for exercise!  Also, I’m beginning to feel repetitive stress injury at my desk and keyboard. Could I rent a space at the coworking office already equipped with some ergonomically correct desk/char/keyboard? Maybe I’m a candidate for a coworking space. Probably if I could read an online profile of the other co-workers who’ll be sharing the space, to understand what they’re hoping to gain, that would help me figure out if there’s a buddy for me in the group, overlapping my personal strengths and weaknesses.

Murray calls it the louver. Tina calls it the sombrero. I call it the vault. What is it? It’s the ceiling in the LaunchPad cafe — the beautiful brainchild of Murray Legge, inspired by Shigeru Ban — built to shield our view of the drab cubicles upstairs, but let in the natural light from the skylights.

Below are a couple of screenshots captured from a flythrough of the Google Sketchup file containing renderings of the architecture at LaunchPad Coworking. Granted, I’m biased, but I find these images quite beautiful.