Big Internship

The interns at Big Spaceship ran the weekly office show and tell last Friday.  The nine of us met a few times during the week to think up a way for our colleagues to learn about us and what we’re working on at Big Spaceship.  The crew was blown away by the result.

I’ve been interning at Big Spaceship as a strategist since June.  Big Spaceship is a digital creative agency.  Companies and institutions that need to engage with people in digital space hire Big Spaceship to produce playful, engaging, and useful experiences that advance the client’s goals, be that to sell more products, improve on an online experience, or rework public perception of a topic or brand.  Strategists are essentially responsible for the values, content, and narrative that drive each project.  In addition to familiarizing myself with the client’s values and the interests they bring to a project, I research market trends and precedents that inform the team’s creative work.

Big Spaceship is often cited for its culture, which has been calibrated to promote creative collaboration across disciplines. All four disciplines, strategy, production, design, and development, are involved from start to finish on each project.  Big Spaceship also does an amazing job of keeping the workplace fun and personable, which manifests in odd places, like the kitchen knife rack. The interns unconsciously reproduced Big Spaceship’s collaborative culture as we put together our show and tell.  Everyone lent their strengths to planning and executing the presentation, calibrating things based on constraints and ideas as we went.

Four interests came up during our brainstorming sessions.

• riff on a company inside joke to establish ourselves in the office culture
• play a game that would help our colleagues get to know us
• present what we do and what we’ve learned
• thank everyone for the opportunity to intern at Big Spaceship

We decided to take the company joke of mashing up employee portraits to create odd hybrids to an extreme.  Tyson Damman takes each employees picture for PR and fun use.  Here are mine:

Design intern Caroline Caine struggled to make one photoshop portrait that took from each intern portrait and found that the various attempts were collectively more amusing than the final success.  The intern show and tell began with a slide of six mash ups:

Our game, Guess That Intern, folded into the presentation of what each of us was up to.  The crew had to correctly match an object and three hints to the intern it belonged to.  This was the Big Spaceship crew’s opportunity to jovially tease us about the quarks in our personalities as they attempted to match the objects to the people. Development intern Nick Hardeman threw in a wild card hint, claiming to have no toes on his left foot.  A moment of enthralled surprise among the crew quickly broke into boisterous suggestions of who it could be.  Nick eventually had to remove his shoe to prove that he did indeed have 10 toes.

After each intern was identified, they presented a slide about themselves and talked about who they are and what they are up to at Big Spaceship.  The slide presentations were later described as a variety show.  Some were funny, some were quaint.  Mine was inspirational and to the point as I let everyone know that what I’m learning here at Big Spaceship will soon be put to the service of HIV/AIDS orphans in Ethiopia.  We designed a show and tell that was fun and interactive for the crew, and let each intern play to their strengths while strutting their personality.  I was shocked to look at my watch when it was all done and realize that 2 hours had passed.  It felt like it could have been 20 minutes.

To thank the crew for being so welcoming and treating us like full members of the Big Spaceship team, production intern Toph Brown gave out coupons entitling the holder to one cup of coffee purchased and delivered cheerfully by the intern of their choice.

Nick Hardeman was immediately sent out on a coffee run, but not before he put on his personal item from the Guess That Intern game: a cow suit (photo by Jamie Kosoy).

Big Spaceship currently has internship positions open for the fall.