Flow.

This is flow. Flow is what happens when you look holistically at a landscape. When you get out of the trenches, see beyond the tip of your nose or the next bump in the road. Flow comes with experience and confidence, knowledge and craft. Flow is a byproduct of practice and skill aquisition. Flow allows us to move faster and more cleanly, to fluidly avoid obstacles in our path. It is frequently beautiful and terrifying because it requires extreme self-confidence and the banishment of uncertainty. With uncertainty comes a backing off, a slowing down, starting to see the individual bumps again and avoiding them one by one. Uncertainty is the death of flow. Flow is one way to think about design. It's in how we try to structure our project plans, prepare presentations and design our layouts. Where do you flow, gliding from step to step? Where do you slow down the pace and go deep into individual elements, extracting features you may have missed in overflight? Flow exists in many different worlds. Surfing is all about flow; Skiiing, snowboarding and skateboarding as well. Here's an great example of flow in mountain-biking... Check out the flow and fluidity on this guy. Sam Hill is a pro-downhiller from Australia and this ride, from the 2008 world championships, is getting all kinds of notoriety in the cycling world. Sam is fundamentally surfing rocks and berms (the commentators are a little excitable, so you may want to turn the sound down!).

This next one is from the north-shore up past Seattle. Epic trail, head-mounted camera and a good example of flow from the riders perspective.

And finally, what happens when the flow comes from another source? In this case the camera provides flow and the riders interact within the framework.

As frog's Executive Creative Director, Nick de la Mare leads frog’s cross-disciplinary teams in the pursuit of strategic design solutions across product, service and experience. His work focuses on the convergence of digital and physical media to create branded experiences for Nike, Chase, Disney, Johnson & Johnson, among others. His projects have been recognized by the IDSA, AIGA and others, and published widely.