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

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.