Animism

One of the most ancient forms of spirituality is animism. The tenet of animism is that, in addition to all living beings, also objects and natural phenomena have a soul, a vital principle. Even if modern science has completely disproved any foundation for animism, the majority of people “believes”, even though at a subconscious level. There are people who talk to their car, or with their computer. There are people who assign to objects a will of their own, saying, for example, “my radio doesn’t want to tune in on that station”. People expect objects, at least the more complicated ones, to behave in an “intelligent” manner, or at least “intelligible”; they compare objects to pets: a dog’s behavior, for example, may be puzzling at times, but most of the times we can understand the reasons behind its actions.
Modern technology has exasperated this, but at the same time pushing it to the back of our brains: a few decades ago a phone was only a kind of “voice pipe”, whereas now we expect to be able to use one to play, write, draw… and speak, if we must.
All this to say that, just maybe, we expect a clock to do something more than tell the time. To have some “smart” function, a kind of thought process. To interact with its environment…
Inspired by Rob Faludi

And now, our logo

While waiting to present the first details about our products, I'm going to finish the story of our name and logo, started in the previous post.We wanted a logo that would draw attention to the fact that our name is the union of two words, "thing" and "think", so we tried to highlight the end of the name, the two letters gk. Here are some drafts:




The only drawback was the lack of an icon or a pictogram. After several retries, we noticed that the "gk" combination in the first draft resembled a stylized stick man. Better yet, a men with a club (Do you remember our manifesto? We are the new men with the club, and our club is irony).At that point we blended in the "thin" theme, and obtained this:

The letter are only half-drawn, to highlight the fact that the name is a half and half combination of "thing" and "think".

To really resemble a men, though, we were still missing a head. No sooner said than done:

What's more, the logotype resembles a bunch of PCB tracks. That is soo geek, and we love that ;)

Nomen Omen

While waiting to present you the first details about our products, I think it's a good idea to tell the origin of our name and logo. I will split the tale in two separate posts.
Stay tuned!

We started from the core values of our project, values emerged that night out drinking we told you about in this blog's first post. From the set go, we tried and looked for an English name that would use well-known words and terms, so that anyone with even a small smattering of English could understand them. The core ideas behind our project, however, were too many to be easily identified in a single name (design, made in Italy, open hardware, innovation, high tech, etc...), so we decided to focus on just a few of them: we chose to put the emphasis on innovation, and on the intelligence of our products, because we think that is what differentiates us the most from other Italian products. At this point we jotted down a lot of words related to the concept of "intelligent and high tech object", and came up with these:

smart, thing, intelligent, innovation, think, hi-tech, object, tool, cool, product

We thought of possible combinations and play on words, and eventually we narrowed down to list to three candidates:
thingk
innovathing
tcool

The first name plays on the concept of smart, thinking things; the second on innovation, but aimed to the world of things; the third on the concept of cool, interesting tools. Tcool was discarded, however, since we thought it out of our focussing on innovation and the smartness of our products. We had a difficult choice between the two remaining candidates, but in the end we opted for thingk since it is shorter, and more peculiar, able to stick in the mind of everybody. In addition the pronunciation (thin-g-key) also resembles the word "geek" :) Finally, the initial part, "thin", is an essential element of high tech design.

And so this is our name: thingk, the union of thing and think, things that think, things able to interact intelligently with us.

Our philosphy

We are what we think.

We are tired of dumb objects, of inanimate pieces, of single-function products.

We believe in elegance and beauty.

We are the the ideas we share, not the ones we keep secret.

We want to interact intelligently with everything we have around us, because this is our way of life: fast, mobile, parallel.

We are extreme, but willing to listen.

We believe that job society is finished. We believe interaction society has started.

We are the evolution of the species. We are the new men with the club and our club is irony.

We are immersed in technology, but we are not slaves, we are interpreters.

We are the ones that when someone say "Stop daydreaming", answer "You told me to stop breathing".

We are proud of our past, but we believe and think and live in the future.

We are constantly changing, because the ability to adapt to our time is what characterizes us.

We are a mass, not an elite. It may not look like it, because we are widespread, not concentrated.

You have to observe from above to understand us.

We would like only one epitaph: "They had every right to teach, because they spent all their time learning".

Coming Soon

September the 3rd, 2011: we are proud to announce the creation of Thin-gk.
But what is Thin-gk?
Thin-gk is a crazy experiment, born over a beer (ok, more than one).
We looked at each other and said: "Milan is the capital of design!"
"Yes, but furniture and interior design, such as tables, couches, nothing technological"
"What do you mean by technology? Apple?"
"No, I did not want to bother Uncle Steve... I meant something like Oregon, Lacie, Casio, imagine if there was an Italian company that developed products like those, imagine how beautiful they would be!"
"Yes, but Italy lacks the capacity for innovation, lacks the technological know-how!"
"But that's not true! Arduino is an Italian company, Olivetti was another..."
"Ok, let's do it ourselves!"
"Ok!"
"But there's a problem: you need a lot of money to patent the products... and then you need a lot more money to defend them..."
"But who wants patents anymore! Patents, licensing and copyright are outdated, are part of the ancient world... now we have internet, open source, we are in the era of sharing, of interaction! Let's do it like Linux, like Arduino, better yet, let's go even further! We can do everything open source, not just the software, not just the hardware, but the mechanical part too!"
"Cool! We'll enter the most protected market of the world, design, with open products... it is so crazy I like it already!"
"Count me in, but only if we make smart products..."
"Yeah, me too... I'm tired of stupid things that do not think... the internet of things is at hand, everything around us has to interact with us..."
"Okay, okay... deal?"
"Deal!"
"A toast to the things that think, then!"
"Let's toast to that!"
So, that's Thin-gk: an Italian design company, that wants to make attractive and intelligent products, able to think and interact with us; a company that wants to go past the customer-supplier barrier, which aims to promote the exchange of ideas.
As the development of our products progresses, we will update this blog: follow us!





- GKrew