Yesterday I had an unexpected treat from a friend, Addy, who gave me a full tour around Ideo in Palo Alto. This tour made me wistful of architecture, so many tech offices are so boring or like Google’s HQ, have slightly forced and oh so obvious eccentricity – bean bags and lava lamps and a Segway.
Ideo, like many design operations has a real feel of creativity, an Exploratorium for grown ups – it has all the toys, from video editing suites, photographic studios, model shops, paint shops, electronics assembling etc. but there are some nice touches. Everywhere you look, gleaming high-tech bicycles hang from the ceiling – each desk has a pulley to hoist your bike above your desk and drawers full of high tech goodies are scattered around the office. My favorite of these was the ‘tech box’ which had drawers marked ‘cool mechanisms’ and ‘amazing materials’ full of – well what they said. All the items within were catalogued and could be looked up in a database via the intranet.
The highlight, however, was a demo of a thing called a Sound Spotlight – an invention that Ideo have been given the task to productize. A foot square rectangular box, rather like a speaker, is attached to a CD player – in this case playing bird noises. Point the box at any surface and the sound appears to emanate from the surface rather than the box. By moving the box in our hands we had a flock of birds appearing to be nesting in the rafters 50 feet away and then in the palm of my hand a second later.