It’s fall, so you must be thinking about an Involution Studios internship next summer.

Whether you are a university student or already working full time, it’s fun to get a look behind the scenes at the studio. This past summer we had six interns, each with a great story to tell. Perhaps you’ll be inspired to join us next spring or summer!

As the news has spread in all directions we have discovered that the 2014 Ebola outbreak represents not only a healthcare crisis with global impact, but also an information crisis. Even highly respected news outlets can have conflicting information on a single event, so that the stories are confusing and hard to trust. Hours spent poring over the NIH and CDC and WHO sites revealed the common threads of truth, but the details were scattered. There was no straightforward way to get a complete picture.

So, we decided to create a single source of graphical information that could become an international resource. Something that could compliment the Wikipedia page. Clean lines, a classic readable font, with unambiguous colors and icons. Headers in black and white, red for critical information, gray text to let pictures do the talking. Easy to scan and locate the topics before reading closely for details.

And now we come to the last installment in our series of summer-intern stories! In this case, we bid adieu to our new French Invo'ite and resident pastry chef, Clément.

We've said good-bye to another, already-missed summer intern. We'll continue to share our intern stories with you over the next few weeks. Read the first and second installments, too!

We've said good-bye to two more of our fantastic summer interns. We’ll be sharing their stories with you over the next few weeks. It’s been pretty amazing!

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

Amy Loomis is a Master’s student at MIT, studying Product Design. Sara Berndt worked on installation art during the summer at both Involution Studios and Anthropologie. She is studying industrial design at Pratt Institute in New York.

Talk about the projects you worked on.

Amy Loomis: I didn’t even really know what part(s) of the software design process Invo was a part of until I started working there in June. I did know, from a visit in January, that the space is like a rough-hewn hipster haven with a serious appreciation for food. Funny enough, no one person who works there seems to fully fit that description. I am a mechanical engineer by training, and product designer by more training (grad student here) so when my projects turned into designing data visualizations and developing an interactive art installation, I was pretty excited for something different from my prior internship experiences.

Sara Berndt: Starting work at Involution for the summer I was asked to work on an entryway display to transition from the “office building” exterior and create a passageway into a creative environment. I wanted the first impression of the space in the studio to establish a sense of awe and welcome at the same time. Working together, Amy and I decided to use the Design Axioms cards, which are so iconic in the studio, and repurpose them to make a display built quite literally on the foundation of the studio values.

What were some of the most difficult problems you faced?

AL: It’s when you’re actually given freedom at an internship that things get difficult. With somewhat ambiguous projects, particularly the wall installation, it was hard to scope out how long each stage of the process would actually take. For my last week at Invo, I had dreams that I was carrying around a glue gun and making tetrahedrons everywhere I went. (That essentially became the real-life case anyway!) The hardest part about both my projects is looking back at them and wanting a chance to iterate on how I went about working on them. It is well proven that iteration is key in finding an optimal design for any scenario, so having approached both projects with that expectation and time built in for more thorough iteration would have been fruitful. Even so, I’m pretty happy with the results.

SB: The most difficult part of the whole process in my opinion was the space. Working above a stairway posed difficult angles and barely reachable corners. We pushed our patience (and our ladders) to unsafe limits, but in the end we were able to get the whole display up. We have become quite proficient in the art of ladder placement!

Talk about the studio environment.

AL: How many companies have the capacity to—and then encourage—cooking bacon and eggs for breakfast? One would think more companies would realize how inviting this is as an attribute of a workspace, but this must really still be a secret. My favorite work space for the last couple of weeks was the kitchen table, right where I get my most efficient work done at home as well. With other work options like a couch so big that it makes you feel like a little kid and a color-organized library of design books to peruse and find inspiration from, there’s hardly a reason to take a break for a nerf gun war, but there is abundant opportunity anyway. The studio space reads “fun, quirky, and easily distracted by toys,” yet Invo’s collective portfolio reads “beautiful, intense, and we’re OCD about quality.” Like the bacon and eggs, there has got to be a secret that correlates these resources to their outcomes.

SB: The studio environment is a progressive one. There is a lot of creative nurturing that goes on that I can really appreciate. It’s not about being there to do one job, it’s about bringing your specific set of skills into the mix to benefit the whole. I’ve come to learn that being a designer doesn’t mean just having the skills to design one single entity, it is about having an ingrained creativity to improve what aspects of design interest you.

How did your art inform your work?

AL: There is a much more substantial emphasis on sketching here than I expected, which I loved immediately. I don’t think my past artistic endeavors (yes I started drawing unicorns at age 2) informed my projects as much as thinking about conveying complex data in a beautiful and highly accessible way. Whether designing data visualizations or figuring out how to create an interesting and exciting effect with a few thousand Design Axiom cards, the nature of the projects naturally lent them to incorporating “art” in a deliberate and useful way. This was especially cool for me to see: that the added value of aesthetic intent is so substantial on top of a digital or a physical structure.

SB: As an industrial designer I am often thinking about my user. What kind of person will use my product and what will their experience be? The entryway display was not unlike this thought process, as I had to imagine the user experience and how they interacted with the installation. In the end Amy and I wanted the guest to feel like the display was almost personalized as they entered, lighting up at their arrival to reveal the Invo text.

Were you breaking new artistic ground for yourself at Involution?

AL: As an engineering student for the past five years, the majority of my “artistic ground” has looked like nicely gridded, green engineering notebook paper. That’s not to say I don’t love stepping back and sketching for a few hours, but this was the first time I was effectively commissioned to be an artist—and it was especially scary in that capacity! Particularly so when just about everybody in the studio was helping us really assemble our installation. It was especially great to work collaboratively on this design with Sara (it was initially her project and I totally shoved my way into working on it). I have never had the chance to do a “group art project” in any real capacity before, so it was a cool artistic experience from that perspective alone.

SB: I’ve definitely never worked as large as I did at Invo this summer! I learned a lot about space and planning when it comes to large displays and how to use materials in unconventional ways. This has changed a lot of how I think about the design process as well, specifically prototyping, which Invo helped me accomplish more successfully.

Final thoughts? What will you take with you from this experience?

AL: I’m so glad I bothered Juhan about the possibility of an internship with him this past spring. I had known him and Sarah Kaiser after working with them at MIT in the fall of 2013, and I had a good feeling that the human aspect of Invo would be pretty great, judging by those two. Invo has a pretty cool gig happening with the people there. It’s quite obvious that everybody loves working there; the environment is hardly just about the work. Invo hires humans, not just the skills they use during working hours, and it has been really great to learn from these people, about them personally and about their skills too.

SB: As long as you are flexing that creative muscle I think anything you do has significance and learning value. Art installations are not my professional creative field per se, but the experience I gain from such projects is often more rewarding than the ability to carry out the process. I can apply the lessons I learned being a part of the design and building to all aspects of my creative education and become a more well-rounded and experienced designer because of it. Meeting new people along the way is also a big plus. I’ve met so many interesting people with so much passion for the work they are doing—it’s hard not to get excited about it along with them!

Thinking about joining Involution Studios as an intern? Learn more!

The leaves aren’t falling quite yet, but the sun is already setting earlier and the UHauls are showing up on the streets of Cambridge and Boston. It’s time to say farewell to our fantastic summer interns. We’ll be sharing their stories with you over the next few weeks. It’s been pretty amazing!

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

Quentin Stipp (left) is a rising junior at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, studying digital art. Noah Baker (right) is a rising sophomore at Washington University in St. Louis, studying Communication Design and English.

Talk about the projects you worked on.

Quentin Stipp: I was astonished the first time I set foot in Involution Studios. Walking into its nondescript building in Arlington on my first visit, I expected to find a typical office. Instead, I found a cross between an antique ballroom, an Apple store, and a hipster coffee shop. My appreciation of the studio as a kind of large display case for clever designs was probably what inspired my first project, an installation on the ceiling of the indoor balcony, intended to give the impression that a massive fissure had opened up a view of the night sky.

Additionally, I made illustrations for a presentation about non-invasive health monitoring systems that could be installed in people’s bathrooms. I created sketches for a section in a book about emerging technologies, and, over the course of my internship, also made whimsical portraits of the staff.

Noah Baker: My “thing” coming in was that I made cool stencil art a couple times in high school and college. As much as I love that “thing” I was really hoping to get genuine studio/design-firm type experience as well. I started out doing a research project on CHIA, which was a bit dull, especially as a first assignment. However, having a two-week deadline to present to the whole studio (whom I barely knew) motivated me to finish strong, and see what lay ahead. What lay ahead was a colorful re-do of a client’s survey analysis application.

I was immediately partnered with designer Sarah Kaiser, and we started sketching. Sketching what? I wasn’t really sure. But at each stage, Sarah and I would convene and plan out our ideas for the next stage. At first, I was happy just to get a pat on the back saying, “Cool idea, Noah,” but eventually Sarah and I would truly be working together to deliver our product. I stayed on SSI with her as Invo moved on to the next stage of work for SSI. This project required a completely different approach, more focused on grouping information efficiently and finding ways to showcase relevant data. Throughout my time, I also sketched a crazy amount, mostly for an as-of-yet unfinished alleyway mural piece (maybe someday).

What were some of the most difficult problems you faced?

QS: The ceiling project continually presented me with both little problems and major challenges I had to overcome. When I first conceived it, I wanted to create an image that based on false perspective. (This would mean, among other things, that if you stood in one place it would look as though supporting pillars were projecting up into the ceiling.) But this turned out to be a nightmare of planning and positioning, forcing me to change direction.

I came across the idea of displaying a large, fake crack on the ceiling from looking at sidewalk art. But I needed more than that to make it visually interesting. Eventually I decided that depicting an image of outer space through the crack would work well—it would both simplify the perspective issue and fit with the whimsicality of a giant faux crack. However, having never printed such a large piece before, I failed to realize how big the digital image would have to be in order to print correctly. The final image was nearly 5 gigabytes and almost crashed my computer every time I opened it. When I finally finished tinkering with cut lines and problems with image resolution, I sent it off to the printing company Blik.

The most difficult challenge of all came when we received the image printout as a set of giant stickers and had to put them up on the ceiling. Each of the seven sections into which the image was divided was so large that at least three people standing on ladders were needed to put them up. I spent a week agonizing over how to make sure the sections would be perfectly aligned in the irregular ceiling space they were designed to fit into. Finally I gave up trying to figure out the optimal technique and just went ahead and stuck the first one up. Luckily, the positioning came out better than I had expected—it was nearly perfect. But the sticker wound up with some bubbles and creases. We did what we could, but there were only so many bubbles we managed to flatten out. Luckily, we figured out how to put the rest of the stickers up by cutting them into smaller pieces, avoiding bubbles in the remainder of the image.

NB: One of my biggest issues was getting into Idea Funks. I would sit there in front of an empty page, or worse, keep hammering out slight variations on the same idea. Then I’d nail something, think it was good, and then just kind of wonder what would happen next. Some great doodles happened in those Funks. These mental walls I was hitting were also related to my time management. Eventually, when I was fully involved on a client project, I could go for hours on a couple ideas. But before that (and at times, during) I had trouble sorting out priorities. Should sketch-time be pre-lunch? Throughout the day? With music? I sorted these things out as I went until I found a routine I was comfortable with.

Another big one was balancing independence and reliance on others. Obviously there was a lot I didn’t know about UI/UX/Photoshop/Clients/Life, but I didn’t want to annoy people or ask too many questions. But once I started asking questions, I got the feedback necessary to point me in the right direction from Sarah, Juhan, Jon, and others.

Talk about the studio environment.

NB: At its core, it’s just a really cool place. You know that when you walk in. When I told friends and family about the studio itself—the high ceilings and windows, the wooden balcony, the lit trees, massive old desks, and massive shelves of color-coded design books—they all rolled their eyes and smiled with jealousy. Of course I would end up here. People my age are either serving coffee at Starbucks or serving coffee at a law firm, and to have an internship in such an awesome place, surrounded by people who shared my passions was an unheard-of college commodity. And the people really are what transformed my experience from a cool opportunity to a genuinely interesting learning experience. Not only were they willing to share their lunches and their coffee, they were there when I asked for help. At almost any point in time, I could ask a question, even a pretty basic one, to any of my coworkers. This was especially useful once I was working on UI design, because I had so much to learn from others’ criticism and advice. It was this feedback that made me feel that I was on the same level as my fellow designers, and allowed me to try completely new things.

QS: I walked by the building without a second glance for 20 years, and I never guessed that it housed an old ballroom on the third floor that had been transformed into a impressive creative platform. The space invites creativity with its roominess and abundant, witty artwork, as well as with the way its high, overarching ceiling comes into view as you walk into the room—there’s even a balcony. As I said earlier, Involution’s remarkable space had a lot to do with my inspiration for the ceiling piece. In addition, Involution staffers were particularly helpful for feedback on my projects because many of them have some background in art or design. When it came to the actual installation part of the ceiling piece, I relied on advice from several people who knew more about the process than I. The main impression I have of the studio, and one of the main things that drew me to it in the first place, is that it conveys a sense of lightheartedness and an appreciation of intriguing things even if they are not immediately related to the project at hand. Nerf guns are scattered about for occasional battles, and I spent a happy hour one day constructing a castle wall out of some interlocking cardboard building blocks. Creative inspiration sometimes flows better with the aid of an amusing diversion every now and then.

Watch the video of the ceiling graphic being installed. It was an all-hands-on-deck effort!

How did your art inform your work?

NB: For me, sketching ideas for the mural kept my creative brain working. It also served as an outlet when I wasn’t sure where my other projects were going. Though I didn’t directly work with materials that I knew well, my artistic sensibilities definitely informed many of my designs and introduced me to expression in a new medium.

QS: I’ve always been interested in visual representations of things’ internal, functional parts. I find the complexity exhibited by the structural supports inside a building, or the gears behind the face of a watch, visually and intellectually interesting. This fascination with seeing behind the curtain led to the initial idea of illustrating a portion of the balcony ceiling to make it seem as if a variety of structural components were visible. When this proved too difficult to create, I simplified it to the basic idea of being able to see past the building’s outer shell. The whole thing was also visually based on the kind of art I hope to do in the future, creating concepts for video games and movies.

Were you breaking new artistic ground for yourself at Involution? 

QS: Though I’m very familiar with illustration, I don’t usually have my pieces printed, and I’ve never worked at such a large scale before. Making art for an installation is a different experience from simply painting in Photoshop, and many more things must be accounted for besides just making the image look nice on a computer screen. Bringing everything together to get the end product was more complicated and demanding than anything I’d attempted before, and it taught me a lot about how to do large-scale art for public display.

NB: Definitely. I initially thought that my summer would be more 50-50 “my art” and “other stuff,” with no promise that I’d be able to contribute directly to projects (because I had little to no experience with UI/UX/Photoshop/Clients/Life). I was very much fine with this, but my true goal was to get involved in the studio’s work, and to be a part of a team, hopefully getting some design experience along the way. And my summer exceeded that summer in every way. Not only was I able to be part of a small team, I was treated like any other designer at the studio as far as my ability to contribute and the value of my own criticisms or thoughts. Once I was fully involved and had a basic understanding of my tools, I was able to get the “my art” part through a totally unexpected medium. I could still experiment with color and form, and bring some ideas to SSI that came from a different background and perspective. This was especially helpful in the sketch stages of both projects.

Final thoughts? What will you take with you from this experience?

QS: Aside from the obvious—new things to add to my portfolio—I gained an improved understanding of large-scale printing and the various complexities involved in it. I’d never before attempted a site installation of any sort, let alone one of such size. Most of the process was new to me, so I was forced to learn on the go, which ultimately gave me a lot more confidence in my abilities although it was daunting at first. I also got a lot of valuable experience working out illustration ideas with different people at Involution—batting ideas around to get the concepts right, and sometimes going through an iterative process to refine them, taught me a lot about the kind of collaborative process I may encounter in the future.

NB: I got a real working understanding of a studio environment, and a great sense of how a relatively small team works together on multiple projects. I was really looking for immersion this summer, and I totally got it. I also got great pointers on design and was able to learn from example with all of Invo’s projects available to me.
I think at least at first, the feedback loops need to be more immediate. I got to a point where I felt comfortable enough with my purpose in the studio to self-direct, but definitely didn’t start there. At some points, all you want is some quiet so you can bear down and do your work, but I started out needing a few more check-ins, critiques, and brainstorming with other people than I was initially getting. I think this was in the spirit of “You’re an artist, you’ll do your own thing and let us know”, but I was happy to have check-ins and critiques.

Invo prepared me to interact with customers and clients, as well as how to effectively work cooperatively on design. Both of these skills will be extremely useful in the future, whether I’m selling my art, doing freelance design, or working as part of a team as I did here.

Thinking about joining Involution Studios as an intern? Learn more!

In Greek mythology, Mentor was the tutor of Telemachus, son of his friend Odysseus.  At one point in the story, the goddess Athena disguises herself as Mentor and advises Telemachus to go out into the world and discover his father’s fate.

Interns here at Involution Studios are on a kind of odyssey themselves—with only a year or two of college, along with the occasional grad student, they walk into our grand but funky space full of … well, we’re not always sure, but there is usually some level of trepidation. Day 1 might seem oddly quiet with its minimal paperwork, log-ins, and wiki exploration. Day 2 usually brings a real project (or two), maybe something along the lines of an intern’s portfolio plus a client deliverable. A deliverable that might involve sketches and comps and coding (oh, my!)

I don't think there's any question that the creative class jobs that drive our innovation economy — designers, engineers, scientists, architects, entrepreneurs, writers, etc. — are all positions that require constant learning and evolution. In a larger sense, our economy, the companies that survive and thrive, the types of jobs in demand, and the skill sets required to successfully compete for these positions, are changing at a rate faster than we ever could imagine.

The Fast Company article, "This Is Generation Flux: Meet The Pioneers of the New (and Chaotic) Frontier of Business", has an interesting take on this phenomenon, framing the current economic environment as a system caught in the throes of creative destruction, brought on by rapid technological innovation and radical business model changes. A related article, "The Four Year Career", examines the imminent demise of the long duration job and the well defined career path.