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Tektronix Releases the 5 Series MSO
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Microsoft Unveils Motion Controllers
Last week our partners at Microsoft unveiled the first Windows Mixed Reality motion controllers with no markers required. Available this holiday, a Windows Mixed Reality headset paired with motion controllers will provide a rich and immersive experience across creativity tools, productivity, games, and entertainment. The motion controllers offer precise and responsive tracking of movement in your field of view using the sensors in your headset. There is no need to install hardware on the walls around you. Learn more here. Great work team!
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Tactile Sponsors UW Awards Event
Last month Tactile was honored to sponsor the UW School of Art + Art History + Design’s first Anne Focke Arts Leadership Award event. It was a memorable evening honoring the 2017 award winner Beth Sellars, learning about the School’s recent projects, and raising over $62K to provide funding for their graduate students. The Anne Focke Arts Leadership Award recognizes individuals who pave the way for art, art history, and design to enliven and strengthen the community through their visionary and active leadership. Congratulations to the award winner, Beth Sellars!
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Intel Unveils Foot Scanner
In an effort to continue Intel’s vision to improve the retail experience, Intel called on Tactile to help further develop a foot scanner to accurately measure shoe sizes. Tactile partnered with Intel previously on a foot scanner concept applying Intel’s RealSense camera technology and using only one camera. This new concept features four Intel RealSense cameras that scan simultaneously around your calves and feet. Unsure if a boot will fit? The cameras will also capture calf width to provide proper measurements for boots too. With more and more people taking their shopping online, Intel hopes to not only improve the overall shopping experience, but to also reduce logistics and costs of returns. Once customers get their in-store measurements, it can be used to make confident online purchases. Brick and mortar become showrooms to get a sense for styles and materials. Intel’s latest foot scanner was recently unveiled at the NRF Big Show in New York and will be showcased at Intel’s internal sales conference later this month.
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Genie Z60 Wins
The Genie Z60 wins Construction Equipment’s Top 100 New Products of 2016 Award. We’re proud and honored to have worked with Genie on this product. Read more about our collaboration with Genie in designing the visual brand language across a family of products. Congratulations to the Genie team!
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Popular Science Honors The DripAssist
At Tactile relationships matter most to us. Last year our close collaboration with Shift Labs resulted in designing the DripAssist. The DripAssist improves the accuracy of IV medication administration with simple-to-use read measurements. An innovation to help shape the future, the DripAssist was thoughtfully designed in line with Shift Labs’ mission to provide well-designed medical devices for fast-growing healthcare sectors, everywhere from specialty health care in the US to clinical care in emerging markets. Winner of a 2015 IDEA Silver Award, the DripAssist recently was honored in Popular Science’s 2016 Best of What’s New in Health Innovations. Congratulations to our friends at Shift Labs!
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Mwahahaha
It’s almost here! Tactile’s 8th annual Halloween party is October 29 in South Lake Union. It’s an event to remember where the Seattle design community and friends come together to celebrate the scariest night of the year. Hope to see you there! Email us for more details.
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New Hires
As Tactile has grown, our team has expanded to accommodate new projects and deepening relationships with partner clients. We recently brought on two new additions to the team: Christoffer Hart, user experience (UX) designer, and Taylor Thomas, industrial designer. Christoffer adds support to our growing UX team. “The marriage between industrial and UX design is one of the reasons why I came here,” Christoffer says. “To a certain extent, the disciplines merge in many ways. The benefit is a different form of empathy you create for the user. I think those two varying perspectives on the same thing is really valuable. You get really amazing projects out of that.” Taylor is looking forward to working on projects that rely on deeply understanding both the client and consumer: “It gets me really excited about it to think about the fact that I could be working on something that’s actually going to make a change. I came from … a product development firm, but a very different environment,” she says. “They’re about 30 engineers and three designers. I’m really excited to be in this environment—to be back in a place that just lives and breathes design. It’s exciting, it’s exhilarating.”
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WWU ID Junior Projects
Three of Tactile’s designers (Jonah Griffith, Adam Weisgerber, and Carson Massie) partnered with their alma mater, Western Washington University (WWU), to mentor students in the school’s industrial design program. The students were given an open-ended prompt: Design something that would move a single person from one place to another, as an alternative to other typical methods like cars or bikes. Students identified three initial directions they could take their concepts, then created sketches. They broke into teams to complete research, where they met the Tactile team for the first time. Adam, Jonah, and Carson critiqued the concepts and suggested to each student which path to take, given the time available and the idea itself. During the meeting the students presented their research findings. “That’s typical of what we do in our projects at Tactile,” Jonah says. “We’ll try to research enough to understand the market, doing competitive research and usability research.” After students chose their initial idea, the Tactile team met with them over the span of two months at different intervals to review their progress and provide mentorship. Jonah describes their goals this way: “What we really wanted them to get out of the project was a portfolio piece—or learn how to build a portfolio piece. A big part of that is having a concise and easy-to-understand story at the end. We told them, ‘Try to have a real story behind it, whatever idea that you’re trying to get across.’” Professors want to make sure that students see what it’s really like out in the professional world. When students visited the Tactile offices, they were able to get a sense of the professional industrial design world waiting for them after graduation. “We shared with them the work that we do,” says Adam. “The goal is to strengthen and broaden the network of industry designers in our local area, especially so there’s some sort of networking between students and professionals.” “It feels good to have a chance to give back a little bit to students, because we were once students,” he says. “It allowed them to have a chance to maybe have a leg up; to offer our experiences to them, so that it may be easier for them when they’re trying to get a job.”
