A family of untethered objects built on inspiration, exploration and productivity

Next Tuesday, PSFK Labs will launch The Nomad Class: an insights report which examines the new technologies and services that enable people to maintain productive and fulfilling working lives, while still living a life of adventure and exploration. Within the report, PSFK offers expert insights from brands like Moleskine, Automattic (WordPress), Neuehouse and more who celebrate the untethered lifestyle, empowering professionals to build careers and find inspiration as they travel.

If you’re a thinker, a doer, an artist, a writer, a business professional, a student, a list-maker, a calendar keeper, and so on and so forth, the chances are favorable that your pen or coloring tool have once grazed the inside pages of a Moleskine object. The Moleskine brand has traveled around the globe—inside bags, on trains, around the table at a co-working hub—allowing anyone with an idea to capture and actualize it in myriad creative forms. Whichever product we choose to engage with (a bag, a diary, a writing accessory), the Moleskine brand has become synonymous with both place and displacement: a portable home for our most intimate thoughts and a platform for our ingenious ideas in Anywhere, USA.

Maria Sebregondi, co-founder of Moleskine and its Brand Equity Senior Advisor, was no stranger to the untethered lifestyle 18 years ago at the company’s inception. In 1997, she noticed an upward trend of individuals living the nomadic life: creative professionals picking up and going when their intuition told them it was time to do so. According to Sebregondi, these individuals were tired of being sedentary—in work and in life. They started appearing in countries (also hotels, airports and cafes) around the globe. They explored new identities of self, such as the ability to be fluid and adapt in foreign environments. In fact, they much resembled the new nomad of today, but with less Wi-Fi connection and more emphasis on the tangible.

With this new and experimental community in mind, the Moleskine narrative began, serving the nomad journey from page one. The vision was to create objects that offer a sense of belonging and well-being; to empower location-independent individuals with simple, essential tools fueled by emotional and symbolic charge; to deliver a perfect trifecta of design, functionality and meaning. And today, the Moleskine brand continues to provide an open “platform for creativity and self-expression.”

When it comes to the notorious little black notebook itself, each product is designed with a strong emphasis on the story so that when “you buy a Moleskine object, there is something related and a community around that you can connect to,” explains Sebrogondi. Blank bookends are referred to as ‘waiting rooms for ideas,’ and the inside contents reveal a story of personality and sense of self.

“The new nomads are not in their original countries anymore. They’re not surrounded by their family. When we are on the move, the strongest address that we might have is our Twitter account, so we should recognize ourselves in the objects that we carry along. The need that this group has, and will have, is simple, light, essential and meaningful tools. These tools should act as a solid identity reference point,” she explains.

In designing products to create a sense of belonging, Moleskine continues to emphasize value in the analog, but not entirely without listening to new digital behaviors. Recently, the company has innovated to marry physical and digital in a way that considers the connected life without veering too far from its strong belief in paper.

“We call this new world ‘phygital,’ and it is a bridge between the two experiences. Young hands are still particularly interested in making things by hand, but at the same time they consider technology as something that is in their lives and will be there all of the time.”

The nomad of 2016 requires Wi-Fi, digital connection and social media gratification as much as they like to romanticize about physical textures when it comes to stimulating creativity. Portable productivity on the go is not just a luxury but a necessity when collaborating with a remote team and capturing their developing ideas in the cloud.  

“We are working on making paper evolve and expand to new dimensions. We strongly believe in paper. We strongly believe in the physical texture of creating, sketching, writing with your hands wherever you are. We believe people should always have paper or pen in their pocket or pack, but at the same time make it very easily editable so that you can curate and share everything in a digital way.”

To appeal to this productivity-seeking nomad, Moleskine, in partnership with Adobe, introduced a cloud-connected smart notebook to turn sketches into digital files from virtually anywhere. The most recent innovation to be soon released is a thin, practically invisible texture on paper that is recognized by an accompanying app to create a streaming dialogue with our devices. Another is a next-gen tablet made of paper, so that a Moleskinner (the term colloquially adopted for the brand’s devoted customer) can write in a normal gesture and see their notes immediately digitized.

Moleskine also partnered with Evernote, a three-year engagement and “something quite special in the digital world that’s so fast and changing,” on a collection of smart products to send notes to private or public areas in the Evernote cloud. Such items are designed for location-independent teams in mind so that in any moment, people can pool and share ideas on the Web.

“In our everyday life, we don’t make a distinction from the analog to the digital and we continually switch back and forth. This is why Moleskine has been experimenting to create a complementary system.”

Offering a platform for connected productivity and inspiration is how Moleskine can help to encourage the nomadic lifestyle. For the freelancer and free spirit, anyone who yearns for career opportunities that take them off-the-grid, they can rely on such tools as an emotional support mechanism and place to share their ‘daily idea’ journey to the wider creative community.

“You can dial up in real time, or later with your colleagues in an easy way,” said Sebregondi of the intimate bridge to the digital world. “Those are the most productive things that we have now, let’s see what the future will offer. We are working really hard for that—we want to offer a solution in this new age of information. We want to continually make it easier to select, curate and share what is most important. There’s a lot to do, there are plans and there are opportunities, but what you really want to preserve is the uniqueness of the physical and analog experience that bring in the warm side of technology. We will continue to create these kind of warm connections.”

Taking the leap from stability to uncertainty—from office life to nomadic life—is not an easy one, which is why the creative community remains central to the nomad on their journey. As these untethered individuals seek out opportunities that will empower them with time and freedom, and the ability to claim control over their creative identity, they want to know what’s possible from other nomads around the world.

“In order to be productive, we need to be comfortable with our emotions and we need to widen our comfort zones. Our comfort zones are represented by the objects that we carry around. What we need then, as nomads, is creativity, ideas and the ability to be in touch with our most meaningful experiences.”

Inspired by a new generation of borderless creatives and professionals, PSFK Labs‘ Nomad Class Debrief examines the emerging technologies and services that are connecting individuals as they work and travel around the globe. Download the full report here, request a presentation at your office and join the conversation on Twitter with #NomadClass. For full access to all of PSFK’s reports, debriefs, articles and archives, become a PSFK member today.