The Imagination Machine

LoopLoop is an interactive music toy for Sifteo cubes. LoopLoop uses hyper- minimal visuals and rich, smile-making sounds to let anyone make music without knowing a thing about music. Because of the Sifteo cubes' 1.5" screen, it might just be the world's smallest music sequencer. Stimulant was the only third-party design and development agency engaged by Sifteo to create a launch game for the Sifteo Intelligent Play platform.

Given the current global movements to quell diversity it’s apparent that, as designers, we could be doing something about it. So we asked: How could we help celebrate culture and diversity, rather than suppress it? Considering the many ways we could go about helping to change the conversation, we recognized an opportunity space within the emerging world of Voice UI. Given the trajectory of Voice UIs—looking beyond seemingly inconsequential interactions like adding things to calendars, turning on lights, and triggering music—we envisioned a tool that could actually help immigrant parents raise their children as American while maintaining a meaningful connection to their native culture.

Can Metaverse today replace reality? As the global COVID-19 pandemic distanced humans from each other, an expedition for new ways of communication began to rise. The concept of ‘Metaverse’ became widespread as a solution. However, VR interaction methods developed so far are biased toward audiovisual aspects. There should be more elements to reproduce for actual communication. Considering the early concept of VR suggested in Stanley Weinbaum’s 1935 SF novel <Pygmalion Glasses>, which included vision, hearing, touch, heat, and smell, humanity is still half as successful.

The Practice Fusion iPad app empowers doctors to review and chart patients medical history while meeting with patients. The application liberates the doctor from the desk-bound keyboard and mouse, letting them engage more with their patient than with their technology. Our design delivers an EHR experience that matches the thinking and workflow of doctors. With a patient's entire history at their fingertips, they can see the context for the visit, and easily capture details about their condition through touch or voice. The complexity of the underlying system has been pushed to the back, giving the doctor a simple schedule-driven interface to guide their day. The iPad leverages a doctor's existing data in Practice Fusion's EHR and gives her a lighter, less intrusive tool for working with it.

New York City’s municipal website, NYC.gov, serves more than 35 million unique visitors per year and gets over 250 million page views annually. It’s the primary resource for New Yorkers to accomplish tasks such as paying parking tickets or determining the right school for their child, and for the city to share its initiatives and accomplishments with its citizens. It had not been redesigned since 2003 and, over time had become a disorganized hodgepodge of text and links. It had become difficult for users to find what they needed, and they were increasingly calling 311 (the city’s public help line). The city had already started to invest in a new technology infrastructure and make city data more open and accessible – this was the final effort to bring more power, information, and transparency to the people of New York. Our goal was to create a more intuitive, usable, and efficient experience that would be easy to search and browse, and a delight to use. The experience had to beat accessibility standards and work in many different languages. At a higher level, our goal was for NYC.gov to set the standard for the way governments communicate with and empower their people.

The BioDesign Studio is a new permanent exhibition created by The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose and NYC-based experience design studio, Local Projects. For the first time ever, it makes the burgeoning — and complex — fields of synthetic biology, bioengineering, biological design and DIY biology accessible to the public in an engaging and tangible way. To demystify these cutting-edge fields and technologies, visitors are able to play, tinker and design with the building blocks of life…literally.

The HP Live UI: App-Assisted Printer Setup is the UX design for an app assisted and guided set-up experience for HP printers as part of the larger HP Smart App. The app-assisted printer setup instructions were developed to guide users, step-by-step, in loading paper, installing ink, and additional tasks by utilizing detailed 2D animations and translated instructions—a big improvement over printed instructions which only provide static illustrations. This new UX provides a robust instructional experience, eliminating ambiguity and potential frustration for users during printer setup. It also presents the OS-detected language, so users don't have to search for their particular text translation.

Data Cubed has developed a fully integrated electronic data capture platform and cross-platform app, designed using gaming mechanics and reward-driven behavior change to increase participation and improve retention for clinical trials. Data collection is fully automated, gamified, and engaging, using human centered principles and modern technology.

New drug therapies and medical devices save lives. In some cases, patients wait for years to participate in a clinical trial for a new drug or for that drug to come to market. It takes over a year just to complete study startup, the process of getting all the hospitals, private practices, and government health institutions that are part of a clinical trial ready to see patients. Why? Study startup is burdensome and complex–a large number of documents have to be routed and approved, and many regulatory requirements have to be met. Communication happens mostly through time-consuming methods like phone, email, and fax.