Government Digital Service (GDS)

“100 Years of Design” is a microsite created by Second Story to celebrate AIGA’s centennial and the profound impact of American design on our culture, bringing to life exemplary works from AIGA’s digital archives, insightful interviews with leading designers, and significant moments from the organization’s history.

Small to medium sized shops account for 80% of the machining market. 70% of parts are programmed manually at the CNC machine — on an interface stuck in the 80’s. Designit partnered with Sandvik to redefine industrial machining workflows with Prism, the first computer-aided manufacturing app for iPad. It manages the entire cycle of machining and enables less experienced operators to create the programs that control CNC machines to drill, mill and carve out the parts we want to create.

India’s 200 million+ farmers did not have access to a personalized farmer support app. Seedworks partnered with NetBramha to create a comprehensive digital platform to address farmer problems.

The Inc. 5000 Marketplace is a virtual world created for the Inc. 5000 Vision Conference where attendees could meet other attendees, share ideas and make lasting connections. The Marketplace is the first-of-its-kind, virtual experience specially themed for the conference.We integrated Inc. 5000’s history of honoring the fastest-growing private companies in America by designing the world around a fictitious Main Street, the heart of the Marketplace. Here, honorees from all over the country converged to walk the red carpet, play a round of golf, socialize at the virtual bar, take pictures at the art gallery and challenge one another with social games at the recreation center.The Marketplace combines the beauty of the real world, walking down the street with a friend chatting, with the power of a virtual world — where people from all over can immediately be present and explore. We achieve this through playful design, integrating game technologies and enabling all attendees to participate.Honorees poured glasses of bubbly at home and then joined in the fun with their live-streaming avatars. They bumped into friends on Main Street, popped into the local art gallery to add their photos to a mosaic, and wandered into the local bar to play trivia quizzes together. Finally, honorees stopped by the Inc. 5000 theater to celebrate each other’s accomplishments with a group photo. The challenge was to successfully create a virtual version of attending an event, where chance meetings and side conversations make the night that much more fun and interesting.

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.

21 Balancoires (21 Swings) is an urban scale collective instrument, a game where together we achieve better things than separately. The installation consists of a series of 21 musical swings. When in motion, each swing triggers different notes. When used all together, the swings compose a musical piece in which certain melodies emerge only through cooperation. It's a game where, from the start, you need to adjust to the actions of others.The notes that are played are determined by how high a person swings. The color of the swing indicates the instrument it plays: piano, harp, guitar, vibraphone. The instruments are distributed differently within each set of three swings to create different musical configurations.When multiple swings move in synchronicity, a mini scale is played, revealing more notes and melodies. When all swings are in use, a secret musical mode is activated to give a special reward to players a synthesizer sound plays on all swings and transforms the experience.The result is a giant collective instrument that stimulates ownership of the space, bringing together people of all ages and backgrounds, and creating a place for playing and exchanging in the middle of the city center.

School in the Cloud takes Sugata Mitra’s vision for the future of education beyond the seven TED Prize Labs in the UK and India and turning it into a global movement for self-organised learning.

The way music theory is traditionally taught makes it seem intimidating and complex. This is essentially what Musiclock seeks to change and disrupt.

People are increasingly interested in sustainable lifestyles and urban community gardening to grow their own food, but the challenges in maintaining these spaces include the limited time and skills for beginning gardeners, and the lack of organization to coordinate community gardening efforts. There are many advances in computer vision and AI technologies that can be used in agriculture. We see an opportunity for AI technologies to solve problems facing framers such as climate change, yield-reducing pests and weed infestations, and to speculate on autonomous systems that can help urban farmers manage and care for their gardens. In collaboration between communication design and industrial design students, GardenSpace and Eden were proposed as conceptual solutions to this problem.

Earth Bits is a data-driven journey to raise collective awareness around the environmental crisis, allowing visitors of maat - Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology in Lisbon - to experience climate change from scientific evidence. Earth Bits stimulates reflection on the relationship between science, humanity, nature, and technology in a very objective way. It shows the energetic transition and the current crisis, inviting visitors to explore the intrinsic relationship between people and the planet, understanding the repercussions of our choices and the impact of our actions. As designers, we facilitate the flux and translation of data as fuel for creating knowledge, cultural value, and critical thinking. Not merely providing information or solutions, but creating a new grammar of understanding, to read the complexity of our fast-changing time. Visitors can explore and experience knowledge with all their senses in the storytelling of four parts: four digital and interactive installations, graphics, animated videos compiled with data based on scientific evidence. An example of this approach is a digital wallpaper “painted” with data from the ESA – European Space Agency’s Copernicus program Sentinels (satellites to monitor our planet) that visually translates the scientific information for the public. The video – updated every month – shows the correlation between CO2 emissions by human activity, global warming, and natural phenomena such as floods, ice melting, rising sea levels.