News

Earlier this month our friends at Digital Control Inc. (DCI) released their newest bore planning product, the TeraTrak R1. A real-time terrain mapping tool, TeraTrak R1 easily creates continuous topography marked with utilities and waypoints. The TeraTrak R1 features: visualizing underground hazards, measuring and mapping precise elevations and distance along drill paths, and determining rig placement. With TeraTrak R1, DCI hopes to streamline job site bore planning to be more accurate, efficient, and cost-effective. Tactile is proud to be a part of the design collaboration. Congrats to DCI and the design team!

Our Tactile studio in Boston is looking for superstar Senior Industrial Designers with two available opportunities—freelance and full-time. You will have the chance to collaborate with cross-disciplinary teams from idea to conception with design at its core. We work on a wide spectrum of exciting and challenging projects that allow our designers to gain new experiences, learn and advance their craft. If you’re interested in either opening, please click to learn more and apply: Freelance Senior Industrial Designer and Senior Industrial Designer (full-time). We hope to hear from you!

To boost our UX capabilities, we are excited to announce our newest addition to the Tactile team, Marcus Pape. Welcome to the team! Marcus joins us as the UX Director to lead our UX design team to help facilitate collaboration from idea to conception. Here’s a little more about Marcus: Marcus is a designer, builder, and creative leader with over 20 years of experience. His passion for solving challenging problems and delivering meaningful experiences has shaped a diverse career spanning physical and digital product design, marketing, and branding. During the dawn of digital marketing, Marcus worked at agencies and startups creating immersive interactive experiences, before spending the next two decades helping product companies bring ideas to life. Prior to Tactile, Marcus spent over six years as a design leader at Amazon, helping build the global advertising design and user experience organization. He also oversaw the cross-platform customer experience, brand systems, and creative optimization. Marcus left Amazon last year, taking half the year off before spinning up a consulting practice which eventually brought him to Tactile. When not working, he can be found in Magnolia with his wife Jenny and dog Eva walking the neighborhood or exploring the beaches and trails of Discovery Park. Other passions include a diverse background and interests in sustainability, travel, history, culture, (all) water sports, and anything 80s. One fun fact—at the ripe age of five, Marcus lived in the jungles of Papua New Guinea with his family.

Next month Tactile has the pleasure of sponsoring IDSA’s Medical Design Deep Dive in Boston on October 9-11. We’re looking forward to learning more about how the role of the design and the designer is evolving to keep up with the rapid changes in healthcare. Tickets are still available–click HERE to purchase. We hope to see you there!

Last night at the 2019 IDEA ceremony, it was an evening to remember. Tactile and Milwaukee Tool received an IDEA Gold Award for the Milwaukee REDSTICK Digital Level in the digital interaction category. Recognized as one of the most prestigious design awards programs, the International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) recognizes exceptional achievement in industrial design, design strategy, branding, digital interaction, and many more categories. All IDEA winners become part of The Henry Ford Museum’s permanent collection. It’s truly an honor to be among the winners awarded for design excellence, and we’re so proud to be a part of the design collaboration. Congratulations to Milwaukee and the Tactile Design Team!

Last week Tactile visited Recology’s recycling center in Seattle to get an idea of where our trash goes and how it’s repurposed. Recology’s mission is to “create a world without waste by developing and discovering sustainable resource recovery practices that can be implemented globally.” Just let that sit with you for a minute and imagine living in a world without waste. Recology wants to educate in order to advocate and initiate change. A few highlights from our visit: 1) Seattle fills a mile long, double-decker train with garbage to Oregon every day because we create way too much garbage and we’ve run out of landfill space, 2) in America alone, each person produces about three pounds of trash per day (not including recyclables), 3) the recycling logo on products and packaging doesn’t always mean it’s recyclable, 4) depending on the recyclable, it gets processed at various locations: bottles are local, cans are sent to California, and much of the plastics are sent overseas, and 5) although much of the sorting is still done by hand at the facilities, they use a machine that’s equipped with AI and IR to identify and eject plastic into the recycling bins using compressed air. Check out our Instagram post for more photos and videos from our visit. And now, consider yourself informed—reduce and recycle responsibly!

After completing a one-week zero waste challenge, it was obvious that achieving zero waste in our everyday lives is very hard to do. Key takeaways for us (in order of priority) are to reduce what we consume overall, compost as much as possible, find alternatives that are reusable and recyclable. Here are some of our findings from the week and the immediate changes we can make. Whenever and wherever possible: 1) use reusable coffee mugs for buying coffee-to-go, 2) carry a hanker-chief for drying clean, wet hands, 3) use reusable bags for shopping and storing food, 4) buy from the bulk food section whenever possible, 5) shop at farmers markets to eat more fresh, whole foods, 6) use a soda stream for carbonated water and other beverages, and 7) buy refillable beer growlers. We hope our small changes continue to grow into large scale changes for ourselves and others. Now it’s your turn. We challenge you to find ways to minimize waste and reduce your carbon footprint. Go!

Climate change continues to make headline news and as designers of things, we’re constantly tasked with designing long-lasting products. On top of mind for us at Tactile is designing for a sustainable future and lowering overall carbon emissions. To better understand our own consumption and waste and to be a part of building awareness of how humans contribute to global warming, starting today we’re doing a zero waste challenge (including recyclables) for a week. Our ultimate goal is to reduce, reuse, and compost as much as possible. The average person makes about three pounds of garbage a day! We hope our zero waste challenge sparks change in others. We’ll keep you posted on our results!

Tactile is hiring! We’re looking for senior level industrial designers (contract-only) for both our Seattle and Boston studios (must be local). You will have the opportunity to collaborate with cross-disciplinary teams from idea to conception with design at its core. We work on a wide spectrum of exciting and challenging projects that allow our designers to gain new experiences, learn and advance their craft. For Seattleites, apply HERE. For Bostonians, apply HERE. We look forward to hearing from you!