Architect Gone Rogue - Zinc Week 13

For myself, friends, family, former colleagues, future colleagues, clients, collaborators, acquaintances, investors, interested bystanders picked up on the way and other generally nosey people...

This is the journey of an Architect gone rogue and trying something different.

Week 13

As described in my week 12 write up, having narrowed the focus to one area of interest, on Monday Stayce and I agreed that we would 'commit' to one another ??

We join the steady flow of teams in the 65 strong cohort formalising working relationships and testing them until they break or don't ????

The Polaroids went on the board, and we took the advice of Paul Kirby to give what we'd been working on a name. Introducing...

The Name

Coming up with a name is hard!

I remember back to 2015/2016, relatively fresh out of Masters at 英国谢菲尔德大学 , and working for James Soane and Christopher Ash at Project Orange in Shoreditch. The story about how Project Orange was named is not mine to tell (nor can I remember it properly), but there I learnt that as a services company, some people will always get the name embarrassingly wrong...

At the same time, I was discovering the world of podcasts. One of my favourite podcast series to this day is Startup, a podcast about the process of starting a podcast company ??. One particular episode, later re-released as The Name Game, focussed entirely on name creation. There are lots of different approaches to take: name's that relate to things; names that are unique and good for SEO; names that are short and memorable; names that are available as a top level domain name; names that aren't already in use or have trademark restrictions.

My own opinion on names is that they will almost always sound bad until they can be judged alongside the product and its positive or negative associations. For example, the name of my partner's employer, Dezeen (design + magazine), is probably a dreadful name to most people, but amongst architects and designers it is thought of highly due to reliable high quality design-led editorial direction. Well done Benedict Hobson for continuing this!

So what is domie?

In short, at this early stage domie is just our hunch that understanding of the health of our homes and our health at home is little understood. domie is the vehicle we are going to use to explore whether or not commercial opportunities exist to develop said understanding.

What is the problem?

"Statistically we spend most of our money on our homes and 80-90% of our time indoors, but we have no effective regular way of measuring the holistic performance and condition of our assets or the spaces we inhabit, nor the link & effect of domestic environments on health."

What is our solution?

We're not sure yet, but you can help us get there by filling out our survey here ????

You can help us doubly by sharing it with anyone you know who might be interested ????????????

Why this space?

As written about in a previous week, commercial entities are already beginning to monitor their buildings more intelligently. The growth of the IoT market shows no signs of slowing and is heading down a path of becoming more integrable with the Matter standard. Looking just at the UK, the building stock is degrading and there is an absence of knowledge as to what problems exist with our homes, what effect they have on our health and what can be done about all of it. At the same time, AI and Machine Learning is developing at pace, enabling automations and predictions based on learnings from data sets. We think this means opportunity...

Stayce

So, who is stayce cavanaugh? Her bio writes itself. You can be a LinkedIn creep and check her out yourself, if you want. I'm sure she won't mind.

A few personal insights I can share, having been working together on and off since week 4 of the venture builder:

• Stayce likes to automate and use GenAI for most things.
• Stayce shares mine and Sam Altman's passion for skipping the capitalisation of words, including her own name.
• Stayce builds things, and it occupies most of her time. From a bot for promoting the selling of castles (yes, castles), to her own custom GPT summarising scientific journals for personal use.
• Not content with Wordle, Stayce plays Duotrigordle, which is 32 Wordle's at the same time.
• Stayce once had a pet rooster, and does not always wear a hat.

Asks

1. Again, please fill out our user research survey on home health here ??
2. If you're feeling extra generous, please share the survey with others ??
3. If you're interested in the subject and would be up for a 1/2 hour qualitative user research interview, please let us know so we can try and find a convenient time in the coming week/s ??
4. If you or anyone you know has built and sold a consumer electronics product or other hardware, or who has raised grant money to do so, please get / put us in touch! We'd love to hear about your / their experiences ???
5. Preferably by direct message, let me know what you think of 'domie' ??

Thanks

Hannah Abdel-Hadi for pushing????

stayce cavanaugh for signing up to this and dealing with my tech illiteracy ????????

Rebecca Phythian for agreeing to start reading these posts like a good friend ??

Stephen Brittain of Insurtech Gateway for giving us some insurance insights ??

Matthew Baker for facilitating part 4 above cough cough

Thought of the Week

Is an egg a good symbol of domestic life? More on eggs later...