Shared Awareness Center
The idea behind Gepio was born at Domus Academy in Milan Italy 1991. I was attending Domus for a master course in Design Management. There I started the development of DesignGenetics, a method for translating design to behavior and vice versa. I saw a lack of understanding how design and behavior are intertwined and a lack of tools for implementing a design direction that is equally rooted in the company's behavior. I saw a need for an IT-based "Shared Awareness Center" in order to work with design from its core.
The Human Perspective
Even though Gepio's original idea was for organizations the focus is human, the individual. We have a soul, our own inner selves, our own personalities that we need to understand. That is what we bring into the organization, the building block for the group. Hence a tool that can work for both.
Leaders are designers
Every aspect of a company's being communicates something about their personality. The same minds, in the management team, that gave birth to a product such as a sofa also creates the leadership in the company producing it. Leaders are designers, Business Designers. Design and Behavior are signals acting like a mirror to personality. That's why design have a deeper meaning than just a surface on a product or the identity communicated through an ad. This is the first reason to why Gepio has come to life, to develop Gepio as a tool for leadership.
An organic entity
The mind can be a powerful thing, but we know that it's not just the mind that forms our daily life. Feelings and intuition plays an equally important part. If we are serious about leadership and leading a group of people to the best of our ability as human beings we must start to see a company for what it is. It's an organic entity with feelings, thoughts, and other hidden layers of influence equal to a single person.
I have never understood why business should keep these layers hidden and not take advantage of the power and information they may contain. Serious leadership requires seriousness about the human nature. We need to bring these layers to the surface.
100% truth
The development of Gepio may have started from a pure design perspective but there is more to design than we can imagine. The visual aspects of life is integrated in everything.
Our mind see the world in one rational analytic view and one visual. They are dependent of each other. This is something I would like to address with Gepio on a group level.
My aim with Gepio is to create an IT-based awareness center that can act much like our own brain and awareness where one part stands for logic and rational thought and the other visual and symbolic meaning. A center that can collect the thoughts, feelings, and perceptions of each employee and merge that into one, presenting the personality in a visual manner.
Pål Bergström
Developer and owner of Gepio.
