Agency to Studio

How we're building a lab for creative/cultural technology

uzoma.studio grew out of my freelance web developer practice. After some years creating apps, websites and games mostly for independent artists and creative practitioners, I began to desire a system to help me work more efficiently and with more clients.

I registered the business, assembled a wonderful team and started to design processes to attract and manage more clients. It was all good for a season.

Poster from our very first Instagram post

But as all freelancers and client-facing service providers may know, working with clients can be an unpredictable process. Work is not assured, conditions vary and scope creep can set in on many a project. Before long I started to think: there must be a better way.

And there is: building products (at least I think/hope so). I have always wanted us to be a product development studio, combining client work with developing and launching our own ideas for apps, websites, games and even whole startups. But in the past, I imagined that client work would take up the bulk of our work focus and that product development would be something that we do in the spaces between projects.

Now, I’m thinking of inverting that equation. I’m intent on building uzoma.studio into a lab for creative digital development, not just an agency that responds to external projects. Our re-worked studio description reflects this:

uzoma.studio creates digital products and experiences that shape the future of culture. We design and develop digital products that bridge the gap between art, culture and technology and offer services that help artists, brands and cultural organisations tell their stories and grow their communities online.

https://uzoma.studio

I imagine us one day designing these art-tech-culture products across multiple expressions, including studio (apps & software), labs (technology research), xp (immersive experiences), games (video games) and many more (these names are a work in progress please). In the meantime, we have a number of apps in development or in view, mostly informed by the work we’ve done with clients past and the desire to scale processes:

• Portal, a webspace builder for creative people

• Baffs, a thrift fashion marketplace app

• Corpus (working title), a digital archiving platform

• South of the Earth, a video game set in a futuristic African city

I’m excited to bring these ideas to life and to be doubling down on this new direction. Like I said we are simply inverting the client work-product dev equation; we will still take on clients but maybe just not prospect as actively or depend on it as exclusively. It’s a shift in approach.

Let’s see where this switch takes us. I rest assured that just as our name declares, the road will be good 🛣️