Although the idea of writ­ing week­notes has been tempt­ing at times, start­ing a new com­pany has turned out to be a lot like par­ent­ing, “the days are long, but the years are short.” Both so much and so little hap­pens in the space of a week, a month, a year, it’s dif­fi­cult to find perspective.

But a year it has been since Pre­cip­ice star­ted in a very empty, ser­viced office near Pad­ding­ton Sta­tion. The empty room turned into a cramped shoe­box with the addi­tion of people, extra desks, print­ers (which seem to mul­tiply like rab­bits), white­boards, stacks of data, pro­to­types and products. So, the new year will start with a shiny, new space and new respons­ib­il­it­ies, like find­ing clean­ers, pay­ing coun­cil rates, and buy­ing teabags.

When we launched this Web site, I wrote a post called Why New, Why Now? We’ve learned a lot in a year of trav­el­ling the world, talk­ing and doing meaning-centred design with busi­ness of all sizes, stripes and sec­tors. At every junc­ture we’ve chal­lenged ourselves, “are we doing it this way because it works, or because it’s how we’ve worked before.”

This has led us to innov­ate our HR and work­ing prac­tices (good­bye time­cards!), meth­ods (hello neur­os­cience!), and busi­ness model (good­bye shares!). But just as import­antly, it con­tin­ues to lead us back to the pat­terns and the­ory that under­pin it all in the first place. The trends and whis­pers we saw com­ing over the hori­zon have turned into loud, demand­ing con­ver­sa­tions and busi­ness chal­lenges. Nice to get that part right!

So, what’s in store for 2012? Along with a big new stu­dio, we’re look­ing for­ward to our first product launch in Janu­ary, a few fresh faces in the office, our first TEDx talk and lots of inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tions about dis­rup­tion, innov­a­tion, design and meaning.

A big thank you to every­body who has been on the jour­ney with us so far!

–The Pre­cip­ice Team (Julie, Diane, Miles, Brian, Nick, Aji, Karla and Donna)