Guidance & Architecture
Our Unique Perspective + Your Real-World Problems = Life’s Technology
“Give people enough guidance to make the decisions you want them to make. Don't tell them what to do, but encourage them to do what is best.”
-Jimmy Johnson
“So act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.”
-Immanuel Kant
Somewhere between football and philosophy, they have it right. At GroundWork Design, our principle asset is the experience that we have accumulated, which through analysis, turned into expertise. We build applications based on that expertise; and provide those applications as part of the solutions we offer.
We’ve built our applications in response to emerging and evolving real-world problems. Our guidance directs people how to best use our applications. Yes, that primarily means that we always have our own wares on our mind. But it’s also true that our applications are constructed the way they are in order to solve structural problems that keep popping up as we work with clients.
Through Codification and Conversation
GroundWork has a term for applications that embed guidance in them: Prescriptive Applications. These applications (most of what we build) cajole and arm-twist content into behaving in a way that maximizes the impact of what is being shared.
In order to produce web applications which prescribe behavior of people providing content and ideally present content to people who want to consume it, you need to spend some serious time concentrating on the ways information is shared and consumed. We’ve spent years—as in, tens of thousands of hours—hand-wringing, noggin-scratching, and day-dreaming to get a grasp on this interchange of information, knowledge, and knowledge systems. And we’d like to help you by using that generated expertise to solve your structural problems.
Education and Guidance are the first and last things GroundWork does when working with a client. We’ve created tools like the FlashCards so that you can experience our perspective without billable hours. We know that solutions without understanding aren’t really solutions. And we also recognize that frequently, software isn’t part of a solution—but discussion is enough to tackle certain issues.