Why we exist
That is the first thing most clients say to us, and it is the whole relationship. You know your business. We know how to make the technical side of it clear, fast, and quiet. Neither of us has to pretend to be the other.
Rochester Designs started as an attempt to take habits from the university, where the job is to work out exactly what a thing is and how it relates to everything else, and put them to use for businesses. It turns out that is most of the work. A website that does not convert is usually a business that has not been described clearly yet. A firm that cannot scale is usually a firm whose processes live in one person’s head. We draw those things out, and then we build the systems that run them.
We are optimistic about automation, and we do not think that is naive. People have been automating work since the first mills on the Genesee. What is new is how much of it is now within reach of a three-person shop or a family manufacturer, and how much time it gives back. We would like to spend the next twenty years handing that time to Rochester businesses that intend to be here in twenty years.
That last part is a filter. We are at our best with owners building something to last, and we are honest when we are not the right fit.
The studio
Founder · design, systems
PhD candidate in Applied Ontology, University at Buffalo. MA in Linguistics. Spends the working day making businesses explicit and the rest of it reading Dante.
Role · to come
Full name, role, and one sentence to come.
Placeholder
Name, role, and one sentence to come.
How we think
Before we automate anything, we name the parts and how they relate. This is the map we start from: the people, the business concepts, the systems, and the AI, joined by what each one actually does to the others. Hover a concept for its definition. Drag it to rearrange the map.
To be is to be the value of a variable.