Information Design & Media Art

This is the story of how I got into information design and media art, and then started this agency.

Growing up before the turn of the millennia I had both, the blast of the analog world with lots of time in nature, and the thrill of the digital world, when it started to take off. Running through tall grass and deep woods around “Am Hochkogl” (Gmunden) on one side, and surfing the early worldwide web connected through our ISBN modem on our custom-built i386 PC using Windows 95, on the other.

I’ve been watching my father sketch ideas on paper with charcoal and graphite, then turning them into real objects, using wood and steel. Looking ahead, pondering what kind of work to get into, I already knew I wanted to be involved in making beautiful things from stunning materials in collaboration with visionary people. Quickly the new world of digital media grabbed my attention. To make things in the digital world we had to push pixels, draw vectors, read and write code, all the while sitting in front of those stationary CRT screens. The new digital tools and services evolved fast.

I studied Information Design at the university of applied science in Graz (FH-Joanneum). Later I switched to a partner university in Aarau Switzerland (FHNW) for Multimedia Art, for about a year. Together with only ten other students we had lots of freedom to express ourselves in many crazy, sometimes beautiful, always challenging multimedia art projects.

I loved it. But at the same time, the prospect of working and living as an artist just didn’t match well with my vision of the next five to ten years. I was walking around those ateliers, most of them located in old industrial buildings, captured by a wonderful spirit of curiosity and courage. I knew I wanted to work with these kinds of people. Yet, I wanted to find people who have the skills and the mindset of an artist, but choose to use their talent in the field of product design or creative services. So I left art school, and went back to Austria to get my diploma for information design.

Early on, during my university years, I was already working for some clients on the side. I did an extended internship at a Vienna-based design studio (instant), but then decided to enter a new realm, to selectively look for talented people and interesting clients, and to establish a new creative collective. January 2008, I turned my shared apartment into a small design studio. Two fellow designers (Gregor and Karl) joined to collaborate on some client projects. At the beginning we were mainly working on brand design and custom tailored websites.

A couple of years into this journey two full-stack web developers joined us. We started planning and building web-based software. Whatever we did for our clients was custom tailored to their specific requirements.

Up until 2015 most of our revenue came through working for non-profits. Wonderful people with big visions but small pockets. We tried our best to empower them, always striving to find a way to move their dreams from out-of-reach toward actually possible. This idealistic pursuit of ambitious results for low-budget clients repeatedly maneuvered us into financial turmoil. We knew, we had to find a healthier balance. So we set out to increase the workload for business clients, and bigger non-profits, who could actually afford the kind of work assignments we felt best suited to deliver on.

Out of a multitude of books some became especially influential during the first ten years of Infound.

Looking back, a lot has changed compared to how things were organized, how work and life was structured, just two or three decades ago. Less paper, more screens. Loads of information freely accessible. New patterns of information consumption. Faster ways to dig through a never ending stream of messages, opening up new opportunities and giving rise to new tools. Most of it implying a sense of urgency to change your habits, and learn new behaviors, and buy new gadgets.

Yet, some things are same as ever.

Having access to all the information in the world is drowning us, unless we manage to understand its meaning and learn to operate with a certain level of clarity. Therefore, I’m convinced more than ever Information Design is as important as Product Design.

Our tools, however old or new, are a means to an end. Let us use them for a greater purpose, not getting carried away by the fascination of what technology can do, but always seeking clarity about, why we’re here, and what we’re supposed to contribute in our sphere of influence.

As we spend about a third of our adult lifespan at work, we better choose wisely where to put our energy, whom to invite and whom to avoid, and how to selectively shape the environment we’re working in together.

Infound should always be a place where designers and engineers and other makers, openly connect to learn more about the problems they‘re trying to solve, in order to find solutions far better than what anyone could individually accomplish.

Everybody is talking about teamwork, but very few organizations are able to really make it work on a continuous basis.

What a privilege to be free to focus on meaningful work, to live by design and not by default, and to walk this narrow path with a select group of extraordinary people.

— Alexander M. Pöll

Jimmy & James