Our Team
Advancing Ideas, LLC is a worker-owned, cooperative enterprise currently composed of approximately 10-15 core staff members, most of whom hold an equity stake. We are a team of experienced professionals, most of whom have been working together as such for nearly ten years. We take our work just seriously enough - we're passionate about what we do and our enjoyment of it is infectious. We staff each project with a unique, interdisciplinary team of experienced professionals. Let us introduce you to YOUR team.
"To make the world work
In the shortest possible time
Through Spontaneous cooperation
Without ecological offense
Or the disadvantage of anyone."
- R. Buckminster Fuller
Defining Characteristics
Worker-Owned
Rather than working to increase shareholder wealth, we work to meet the needs of our worker-owners and their communities. By eliminating the need to generate a profit for capital investors, our clients typically enjoy lower rates while the staff is still compensated competitively. Given our collective worker-ownership, you can expect your team members to stick around and develop a deep understanding of your domain regardless of complexity.
Socially Responsible
Meeting the needs of our communities requires that we account for the social and ecological costs and benefits of our company and its work. We structure staffing, equity agreements and pricing to allow us to work with organizations that might not otherwise be able to afford an agency of our caliber and choose to work primarily with other organizations whose values are aligned with our own.
User-Centered
Users > Humans > Humanity is at the heart of our process. The value of the most sophisticated technology and the most useful products ever conceived is worthless until perceived and found to be usable by a user.
Culturally Attuned
Through intelligent process, user research and localized testing, we develop cost-effective and appealing cross-cultural, globalized and localized designs. This is achieved by continually accounting for cultural preferences and biases (users' and ours) as well as the technical considerations inherent in designing for localization or multicultural/multinational audiences.
Contextually Aware
Understanding context of use is critical to effective user-interface design. Through the exploitation of micro printing, GPS, sensor networks, and other emerging technologies, it's now possible to know more than ever before about where, how, when, by whom and for what purpose a system is being used. Along with an understanding of the user and their culture, our team develops and exploits an intimate awareness of context of use through research and scenario development to discover and address unknown and unmet needs.