AGREEING TO BEGIN: STATUSOF THE SIGCHI IDENTITY PROJECT SUZANNE WATZMAN Over my career I have created and worked on many identity programs for a wide variety of organizations and companies. O f these, the SIGCHI Identity Project has truly been the most unique and challenging. months, for comment by as much of the SIGCHI community as possible. Three presentation boards were made, representing three visual directions, and these were placed at the SIGCHI booth at the conference. Feedback forms, with project update information, were used to gather feedback from anyone who walked by or was handed a form. About 46% of the conference attendees, as well as others, filled out these forms. ¢ I interviewed many individuals (SIGCHI members and others) during the conference to explain the project and to get detailed feedback. ¢ The Visual Interaction Design Special Interest Area discussed the project during their meeting at the conference in terms of design management and development issues and provided additional feedback. ¢ I presented a report on the Identity Project to the Executive Committee with exciting results! design is a conceptual analysis of the present organization and a vision of the future organization. These were things we didn't have two years ago when we began this process. Although SIGCHI was not a new organization when we began this project, it had the characteristics and the excitement of a startup. These qualities are sometimes a doubleedged sword. Things may progress quickly within the organization, but there is often little time to analyze that progress or its direction. Discussions on the vision.chi distribution list and from the December Long Range Planning Meeting contributed to our analysis process. After presenting these ideas, in addition to those of the Visual Interaction Design Special Interest Area and Maya Design, to the Executive Committee in Amsterdam, lots of healthy and useful discussion took place and the Executive Committee agreed that we, SIGCHI, need to more actively design and develop our identity. PROBLEM We must design an organizational image/identity for a maturing yet dynamically evolving organization in a very new and broad field. We will never meet with the clients (the SIGCHI membership) since they are geographically as diverse as their backgrounds and job descriptions. They have strong opinions and are quite willing to participate. However, in most cases, it is not possible to meet or speak directly with a group as large and as distributed as SIGCHI. This has been quite a challenge and the process has gone through many phases and changes over the two years I have worked on it. Many individuals from the Visual Interaction Design Special Interest Area have participated and, in particular, Joe Ballay and Hugo Cheng of Maya Design have worked on the latest phase of research, which was completed at INTERCHI '93. STATUS Anyone who has ever participated in the design, development, and implementation of a company or product identity knows what an involved process it is. A clear statement defining the characteristics and goals of the organization must be developed and provided to the graphic designer as a basis for the design. To quote myself from the April Bulletin, identity is the "visual representation of the past, present, and future of the organization." Developing an identity is hard work. What precedes identity RESULTS We have agreed to begin, to take a long, hard look at us, to evaluate where we have been and where we are going, and to keep moving on. As Aristotle wrote, "Thought is impossible without an image." To be continued... PROCESS In order to end the initial phase, Analysis and Research, we developed a market research project for INTERCHI '93 that involved the following parts: ¢ Maya Design developed several visual approaches, which represented work (sketches, interviews, more sketches) done by us during the previous six

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