Dear Friend,
Hexology is evolving - yet the core set of original, purpose-led ideas that inspired its inception and have fueled its mission has not changed. Our value proposition has been examined, cut and polished - like a gem - shaped to reveal its intrinsic beauty and gain a deeper vision into its potential. We have over time developed a handful of slogans to communicate our unique proposition; the most definitive of them all is this:
Empowering you to create a peak experience in the world around you, wherever you go!
Founded on the belief that a person’s experience of being in a specific location is enriched when they gain access to digital content that enhances their understanding in the moment - Hexology is designed to bring digital information into the physical world around us. Perhaps you are standing in a place that is steeped in history, or charged with the creative outputs of an expressive community. Our goal is to empower you to publish content into a location and engage audiences in the narratives that you create.
Example: Visiting Westminster Abbey is an experience - that is enriched if you know that Sir Isaac Newton, Stephen Hawking, Charles Dickens and Mary, Queen of Scots are buried there, in fact there are over 30 monarchs resting at the Abbey. Outside is a statue of King Richard I, who we remember as Richard Lionheart of the Robin Hood saga, is located in Old Palace Yard in the front of the Houses of Parliament - not far from the statue of the remarkable suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst.
Note: some people such as young people, tourists, international students & visa workers etc. may not know who these people are and what they achieved in life.
Now imagine a layer of digital information floating in the air as you explore the places you visit - giving you the ability to access content made specifically to enhance your experience of local history and culture. Suddenly, standing inside Westminster Abbey or in front of the statues of King Richard I and Emmeline Pankhurst is enriched with content that tells you an authentic human story.
To realise this vision, the Hexology platform has been built to empower you to write digital media into objects, spaces and places in the world around you, supported by a growing community of people who are using Hexology to write digital media content into statues, heritage sites and material culture bringing our ancestral knowledge and culture to the surface.
Our mission is to empower you...
…and our vision is to create peak experiences in the world wherever you go!
Your experience of traveling the world, and for example, visiting ancient sites such as…
The famous temple complex of Angkor Wat, which spans just over 400sq outside Siem Reap in Cambodia, the world’s largest religious monument!
The Hegra, in Saudi Arabia’s Al-Ula region, an ancient stone city of the Nabateans, whose origins go back to the 1st Century BCE.
…would be improved with Hexology!
Standing there, wouldn’t it be good to unlock stories that enrich your visitor experience, and access new kinds of 3D-powered forms of immersive location-based content that is contextually aware.
Enriching the visitor experience is not just limited to the production of content about cultural heritage. Writing digital media into objects, spaces and places in the physical world can be used to open other channels of communication about a cultural event; tourist information about a city or venue’s programme of events. Rewarding audiences with digital gifts is an incredible form of incentive that encourages people to visit.
Empowering ordinary people with ordinary smartphones!
As the promise of Augmented Reality technologies get closer to fruition, Hexology is in a unique position to empower people from all walks of life, who may have little time, resources and only a basic level of technical knowledge to enrich your world with location-based content.
Hexology is also equipped with the technology architecture to support the most advanced immersive technology experiences - for the most sophisticated of creatives.
Our business logic is simple, ordinary people do not typically have the technical and creative expertise, time and resources to produce advanced 3D powered immersive experiences. This is the domain of a very specialised group of people with particular skills, tools and equipment.
Whereas most people are able to create posts using text and images. To be inclusive and to enable people from any part of society to share diverse perspectives, Hexology allows people to post the simplest forms of digital media into location via our free mobile app - which we operate as a freemium service. Our free apps enable consumers to discover and share content around you, but it also enables you to write content into your current location!
Whereas, the ability to display augmented reality experiences that uses computer-generated digital overlays is also built into the free app, but the infrastructure needed to properly upload and moderate these experiences are still in development. Do not hesitate to get in touch if you want to learn more about this!
Moving individual participation away from online global forums to a geospatial, hyper-local one!
As Hexology grows, and more and more cultural content gets added to the platform, content moderation will play an increasingly more important role. The reality is social media is here to stay - and it is on the cusp of a new stage in its evolution. Where conventional social media platforms powered by Web 2 technologies have failed - the new generation of Web 3 platforms will surely succeed, and the key to their success lies in the interaction design.
Moving individual participation away from online global forums to a geospatial hyper-local one, Hexology is driving a paradigm shift in the way social capital operates. The location-based, user-generated content published on Hexology to enrich the visitor experience is authentic and typically produced to a very high-quality - its content you can trust!
Although we have implemented the facility to report offensive content, it’s never used. In any case, trolls who write unpleasant content into location get caught by locals, and the fear of being labelled a troll by your neighbors is such a powerful deterrent that it pushes people to maintain a healthy and clean digital ecosystem. We also enforce strict policies to prevent malicious use of the platform - a responsibility we take seriously. Yet empowering ordinary people with the ability to write content into the world is central to our mission - which is to give access to an evolving, diverse culture.
Why?
Example: The famous Bronze statues of Lions in the four corners of London’s Trafalgar Square guard the base of Nelson’s Column to symbolise strength and courage, honouring Admiral Lord Nelson’s heroism at the Battle of Trafalgar. Added to the square in 1867 they represent, from a white colonial perspective British strength and empire. But what do the lions mean for our Black-British community, whose ancestry is scarred by the legacies of slavery and oppression? Enabling the expression of multi-cultural viewpoints breaks down the social and cultural barriers between our diverse populations, promoting global empathy, harmony and peace as populations increase and the size and density of our inner cities continue to grow, making our multi-national cultures inevitably overlap. This context and environment is surely then a tremendous source of cultural content, and an incubator for its sociocultural evolution. If we have learnt anything about cultural diversity and its fusion to produce new artistic forms such as the Jazz and Rap genres, and societies that include: Rastafarianism, Buddhism, Christianity and even Druids that eat mushrooms, we all have a voice and a spot in the world where we belong.
We are driving new digital standards.
People’s expectations of digital media are becoming increasingly more sophisticated, the younger population, who have been hurt and scarred by mainstream platforms have in response developed strong moral and ethical values, and rigid boundaries. The world has changed, it is changing, and it’s easy to see how social innovation is driving the development of new kinds of interaction design - towards a new existential standard: augmented reality.
The outputs of the booming Digital Revolution over the past three decades have seeded all of the low-level tools that interaction designers need to create impactful and sustainable digital experiences. The Hexology experience moves interaction design away from online global forums to a geospatial hyper-local one, and in the process unlocks massive creative, social and commercial opportunities.
What began as an idea - perhaps even as an obscure feeling in the mind and heart of its founder - has now evolved into a progressive technology company with a profound philosophical perspective and the role digital technology can play in the digital cultural landscape of the future. This article scratches only the surface of what we are building, in partnership with an increasing number of cultural institutions across the globe - for business to be a force for good, to create sustainable and measurable positive social impact, and champion people and their culture wherever you go!
This is our first Substack post, we’re planning to publish occasional free posts and for our featured content, research deep-dives and sociocultural critiques, subscribe to this journal and join our community to become a part of the Hexology experience!