Stimulant

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Stimulant, they’re a design firm in San Francisco that creates “smart spaces”. To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t familiar with Stimulant until I read an article on them in Communication Arts Design Annual 57. At Stimulant they redesign the way that we are able to interact with physical space by positioning them as a software problem.

“In Seattle’s Space Needle, Stimulant goes one better, turning the display into a portal. There, visitors can participate in a walking dream, zooming in and out of the landscape to magically teleport themselves into an entirely different place. Through built-in hotspots on the display, viewers zoom from a bird’s-eye view of the city to the interior of the Seattle Aquarium, and from the aquarium to a fish tank, where they are seemingly swimming with a virtual octopus.” (http://www.commarts.com/features/stimulant).

From their inception in March of 2007, Stimulant had a rocky road ahead of them. It wasn’t until the release of the first iPhone that mainstream America discovered an intuitive love for tapping. According to, CEO Darren David, “Before the iPhone went mainstream, we had to fight tooth and nail to get people to touch a computer screen.” But two years later at CES, David had the revelation that everyone had become “touch-curious”. Developing a new desire for interactivity in their screens.

Stimulant has gone on to create immersive, and interactive installations all over the country. Introducing everyone to a new iteration of user-centered design interaction.