Our history
About us
People.
We are people and we listen to people.
We are professionals and we bring added value by listening.
We are a company that provides services to companies.
Companies made up of people who produce things or services for people.
People who, however, too often become not people but indices, numbers, percentages, consumers or, worse still, targets.
We should stop this drift and reconnect with our humanity.
A humanity made up of individuals – each one different, unique and unrepeatable.
The WITH of TSW is about people. Not generic people, but individuals. It is about how to do things with and for them and bringing quantitative and also qualitative analysis to companies, conducted in an immersive experiential environment for users and customers.
The history of TSW is rooted in digital technologies. The company has given much attention to experience design and usability. Today we want to help companies improve the experiences they offer to each individual, whether mediated by digital interfaces or not.
At the end of a forward journey of more than twenty years in the digital world we are aware of the need to make man and his experiences central to observation and listening.
Since 1997, we have developed real skills (i.e. non-opportunistic) for the creation of innovative projects. We started off with websites (seeking to match supply and demand), then moved on to visibility (supported by SEO and then SEM), before reaching measurement (first with analytics and then data analysis). More recently, we have seen the emergence of the study and design of user experience (“recently” meaning around 2006-2007 …), and content (strategy and the creation of editorial projects), and finally the last mile: the value of listening.
Listening to people, through people.
People as individuals and not customers, natural persons and not digital personas.
The new last mile
After more than ten years of experience in usability and UX design we found ourselves at a point where various disciplines converge. The approach changes for each discipline, but in the end, experience always lies at the heart of each of them, even if it is dealt with using methodologies and metrics.
This convergence of disciplines leads to the creation of a new space of inquiry, a new approach that is possibly holistic, definitely composite and integrated, with its own unique features – whose value far exceeds that of the “sum” of the individual inputs from different disciplines: sociology, psychology, ergonomics, linguistic, engineering, semiotics, anthropology, ethnography and economy, etc.
Our approach strongly tends towards the integration and construction of an integrated path where these various lines of inquiry coexist and mingle together.
Experiences are not what they used to be
Experience is the place where tools and culture intersect; the place where a civilisation, through its people, recognises itself and renews its intellectual, scientific, social and semiotic paradigms.
What we are trying to do, along with many kindred spirits who share not only intellectual affinities but also emotional and redemptive impulses, is to re-establish the Humanities; not in order to place them within the broad area of Cultural Studies but rather to reconnect them with the notion of Humanitas, that selfsame idea that inspired the humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
We are in a kind of time warp where we have made progress – recent progress – with a drive for improved living conditions, but also with progress as a research objective in itself. But we think that we have lost sight of man.
Our animating spirit is not nostalgia for the good old days, but the wish to move forward whilst looking back, without losing the driving force, the fulcrum of the argument, which is always man. We humans can dwell in a biosphere and in an increasingly digital or virtual ecosystem. But the point is we can do it sustainably and without losing our values, aspiring to leave our children a world to come and the hope of rebirth.
We are facing an important stage in the evolution of the study of experience. This must be constantly borne in mind by those who strive to move and act in the service of humanity. Our task is to become aware of the path that has led us thus far and that may point the way forward. Our history has led us to a desire to regain possession of Our History also of humans and humanity.
We want man to be the measure of development and it is to man we must look with the human sciences, helping us understand not consumers, but people, with their desires, their fears and their ineluctably human history.
Are we experience?
We are a company, an agency with a 20 year-plus history, with expertise and methodology rooted in digital technologies but extending to all spheres of experience.
We are professionals gathered together for an innovative project in a team of cognitive psychologists, ergonomists, advertisers, experts in information architecture and usability, anthropologists, marketeers, data analysts, copywriters, strategists, art directors and graphic designers.
We are human beings, individuals who at times draw a design or activate a thermostat; some of us might visit a website, enter a store, download an app, type coordinates into a satnav or pay a bill.