While we draw upon a rich heritage of graphic and typographic design fundamentals, we’ve been pushing pixels designing for digital interfaces from day one. Some of our earliest work focused on reimagining familiar physical experiences for a connected digital world. We envisioned cloud media storage, digital font catalogs, social networks, shared calendars, and more, all long before the tech giants of today capitalized on the like. And we were mobile-first first, designing for some of the earliest popular consumer cell phones and digital cameras.

Before the iPhone, before the app store, there was the flip phone, the candybar, the PDA, and there was Punchcut. We pioneered the early days of mobile devices with soft keys and D-pads, creating interfaces for nearly all the major cellular carriers and hardware manufacturers.

And we ushered in the age of smartphones and touchscreens, helping design the mobile operating systems of the future. Most people thought it was just about the tech, but we focused on the universal human need to be and stay mobile.

Tablets, and TVs, and trackers, oh my! As sensors and smart devices proliferated, we began exploring the wonderful world of IoT. We developed seminal product experiences for connected devices of all kinds and helped establish foundational protocols and patterns for interactions between them. Inspired by aspects of service design and living natural ecosystems, we developed our Experience Systematics methodologies to research, map, and design for the rich complexity of emergent digital ecosystems.

We’ve been advocating for more natural interfaces since our inception, but the rise of VR and voice agents brought new opportunities for more immersive sensory experiences in our designs. Our work began to take a veritable tour of the senses with forays into voice, audio, gestures, haptics, biometrics, 3D, and beyond. Even more exciting was the possibility of using these inputs in concert. We developed our immersive design practice as a multisensory orchestration of the digital noise to create simpler, easier, more natural experiences.

We’re now living and working in unprecedented times. It’s an era of technological revolution and societal transformation that demands more from designers and companies. We believe it’s our collective responsibility to ensure the development of AI benefits humanity as a whole, and this calls for new, more mindful, more conscious forms of design. We call this Conscious Experience Design, a form of user experience design for working with intelligent machines in a way that’s more mindful of the nature, intentions, and values of human beings.