A New Era for Holonomics

Last year, 2020, was a year of transition for Holonomics. While the global pandemic brought many challenges to people, businesses and organisations, it also saw leaders take a new and profound interest in developing new authentic purposeful organisations and learn how to genuinely bring out the best in people while at the same time developing platform-based business models.

We spoke with many large organisations about how to improve not only their customer experience but also their employee experience, and how to help their people flourish while also thinking about the wider context of how to create a positive impact of human activity on our natural ecosystems and planetary resources.

These conversations, workshops and programmes were all presented within our framework of the New 4Ps—platforms, purpose, people and planet—which we developed in 2015. Our projects expanded in scope from a focus on strategy, cultural transformation and customer experience to also include digital transformation, deep tech and employee experience. We launched our Deep Tech Network in partnership with 1STi and Vai na Web and we took part in a wide range of extremely interesting projects which brought organisations in the private and not-for-profit sectors together to produce new platform-based value propositions with social impact.

Because of our expansion in relation to the scope of our work and our move into platform development and deep tech design, we also spent last year developing an entirely new visual identity for Holonomics. We are therefore extremely pleased to be able to introduce our new website which integrates our English and Portuguese business consulting websites with Holonomics Publishing and our CX with Soul blog, providing visitors with more extensive information about our purpose, history, services, books and feature articles.

We took this opportunity to create an entirely new brand language for Holonomics, which includes our new logo and strapline as well as having new single url, holonomics.co, which will redirect visitors to their preferred language, at present English and Portuguese.

Our new logo is a representation of the Holonomic Circle, our framework which articulates the meaning of soul in a design, business and technology contexts. It provides an approach for executives, entrepreneurs, designers and those starting a new business or initiative to explore the principles underlying the dynamics of more soulful and humane organisations.

Photography with Meaning

In developing our new website we wanted to achieve two things. The first was to find a way to express the essence of Holonomics in a visually striking manner. We were looking to find a way to articulate the depth of both our thinking that we bring to our consultancy work as executive advisors and the core concepts which we have developed such as our Holonomics approach to cultural and digital transformation, our Customer Experiences with Soul framework, our creative way of developing deep tech and the New 4Ps.

 At the same time we also wanted our site to be more than just a destination explaining who we are and how we work. We wanted our website to be an experience in itself.

For this reason we were delighted to work with Brazilian photographer and visual storyteller Paulo Fabre whose photographs you can view throughout our site. Each photograph has been carefully curated to express the essence and idea in each page in which they have been located. In this way, we wished to recreate the experience of an art gallery, with the photographs collectively narrating in an artistic manner who we are, our Holonomics approach, our values, philosophy, products, services and design and business methodologies.

Our website has not just been designed as a visual experience. We invited Paulo also to artistically curate every one of his photographs as alt text, ensuring that those visitors with visual impairments can also enjoy the depth of thinking and poetic narrative behind the visual narratives on each of our pages.

Paulo had the great idea to express each photo in the form of haiku. (You can see some examples on our Photography page.) We believe that this is the first time where alt tags have been used artistically to express both the visual experience in this manner as well as the creative idea behind the website as a unified whole.

Acknowledgements

While we designed our website together with Paulo who provided the photography and artistic curation, there were of course other people who we would also like to thank. Our story was written with the help of journalist Damien Walter and our pages written with the help of copywriter Eliya Fishman. We have been provided with much support along the process from 1STi, especially Igor Couto, Patricia Arouck and Igor Postiga. And finally we would like to thank Flávia Miranda and Guilherme Lacerda da Costa from Alaska Marketing Digital who built and implemented our website.