What we do
Four kinds of work.
Taxonomies and controlled vocabularies
Deciding what things are called, once, and writing it down somewhere the decision survives the person who made it. Includes the unglamorous part: what to do with the terms already in use.
Metadata and records design
Which fields a record carries, which are required, and which are allowed to be wrong. Designed so the record still answers questions years later, when the system that produced it is gone.
Content models for narrative systems
Schemas for writing that has to be queried: storylets, requirements, variants, localisation. Authoring tools live or die on this, and it is where our games and this practice are the same work.
Search and findability reviews
Why people cannot find the thing that is definitely in there. Usually a vocabulary problem wearing a search-engine costume.
How an engagement works
Three steps, in order.
Read the collection
We start with what exists: the documents, the schemas, the spreadsheet everyone actually uses. No recommendations before that.
Write it down
A short document with the decisions, the rejected alternatives, and the reasons. Short enough to be read, specific enough to be argued with.
Leave it maintainable
Whatever we build has to be editable by the team afterwards, without us. That constraint shapes the design from the first day.
Get in touch
Tell us what you can’t find.
The useful first message is a concrete one: what you were looking for, where you looked, and what you found instead.
The Notes are the longer version of how we think about this work.