The creative process: it’s the backbone of innovation, and also an intangible, beautiful mess. After extensive work in a wide range of industries, a global workspace design firm saw the emergent potential for a virtual workspace that could elegantly enable—and simplify—the creative process, connecting teams across all devices, locations and time zones.

The Opportunity

Haworth is a well-established office design firm that creates products to inspire creative, collaborative workspaces around the world. In 2010, they perceived an opportunity emerging across all of their projects—the digital externalization of collaborative ideation.

The firm approached Substantial to co-create Bluescape: an infinite, collaborative, virtual workspace enabling anyone to create, communicate, and share their work across time zones and devices - from tablets to wall-sized multi-touch screens. The company sought a way to connect showrooms on six continents, digitalizing collaboration between people from Shanghai to San Francisco.

Design & Build

For our design team, the overarching consideration was the creation of a new product that felt familiar and consistent across multiple devices, including tablets, desktop, and touchscreen walls.

Creating Bluescape presented challenges to our design and development teams, who addressed technical challenges ranging from low-level input capture and hardware integration to architectural design for scalability and latency.

The design and development stage involved the prototyping and optimization of an interactive wall feature, which delivers elegant visualization of data at large scale, and exists as the central nucleus of creative sessions. We optimized Bluescape for desktop and tablet, enabling team members to manage their workspaces and contribute ideas directly, either in-person or remotely, contributing to past or future sessions at any time.