Arlington Visual Budget at Code for Boston's Demo Night
(co-hosted with IxDA)
MIT, Cambridge Innovation Center, 5th Floor, Havana Conference Room
July 30, 2013
Free & Open to the Public

“Have you ever been punched in the face?” That's what Scott Sullivan, User Experience Designer at Involution, wants to know. In his Fast Co. feature article, Designers: Learn To Code! Here's How to Start, Scott assures young designers learning to code isn't that bad. "The fear of getting punched in the face holds you back from being effective in a fight," he writes. "But once you’ve been punched in the face, you realize it’s not so bad." For many designers, learning to code can be as scary as bodily harm.

Scott Sullivan's article on Fast Co Design

For years designers have been lectured about how learning to code is an integral part of smart design. Lecturing and instructing are two different things, however. Scott provides a thoughtful and insightful walkthrough of his process of learning to code, one which young designers will ultimately benefit from. And through his experience he has learned that the lecturers were right. Knowing code will make you a more intelligent designer. "The better I get at coding, the more I understand how connected they are," he writes. "As a designer in the digital spectrum, you realize that your very work—your material, which exists in the world—is code. How can you design something if you don’t know how it works?"

Be sure to read through Scott's article, Designers: Learn To Code! Here's How to Start, at fastcodesign.com. In addition to his user experience design work at Involution, Scott has a background in technology-based art and visual design.

Many of us here at Invo have been using the Arduino quite a bit. From making claws for costumes to retail environment behavior to coffee electronics – it is incredible what you can do with these microcontrollers. However, there still is not a straightforward way of getting data out of your Arduino, onto the internet and accessible via a web app.

The personal project I've been working on has been tracking physical activity not covered by pedometers (vague, I know) and then having a web app to display that historical data. Coming from a design background with a light technical bend (some C++ and ActionScript) I am in familiar territory... but its been a while.

For Immediate Release
BOSTON, MA – April 29, 2013 – Bytes and Atoms, a micro conference exploring the Internet of Things and the interaction between the physical and digital, today announced the speakers for its inaugural program.

Organized by software and emerging technologies design firm Involution Studios and agile development consulting firm Pivotal Labs, and sponsored by O'Reilly Media and IxDA Boston, Bytes and Atoms is a one-of-a-kind event exploring the next great shift in interaction design and celebrating the region's groundbreaking technological accomplishments.

We're celebrating the 50th episode of Involution's podcast The Digital Life with a re-designed and re-imagined Web site — featuring complete transcripts of all the new episodes and back catalog and previous contributor search. The new Digital Life is live — ready to inform, entertain, and engage the digital design community worldwide.

The Digital Life online radio program — which made its debut in 2010 — explores important and pertinent topics in the world of digital design and technology. Co-hosted by Jon Follett, Principal of Involution Studios, and Erik Dahl, Involution’s Director of Design Strategy, the Digital Life explores a wide range of thought-provoking topics, from design for developing markets to the boundaries of digital privacy to the future of design education. The Digital Life began as the brainchild of Involution co-founder, Dirk Knemeyer, who, in 2010, saw a need for an online radio show covering the digital design world. In the current instantiation of the show, Dirk continues to bring his sharp and insightful commentary to the podcast, with The Human Factor segment, that focuses on the human element in digital design.

Under a provision in Governor Deval Patrick’s fiscal 2014 plan for the state, a "modern products" Massachusetts sales tax of 4.5% will be levied on the design and engineering services that create the digital world. Massachusetts is filled with software development companies — with verticals from mobile to healthcare to enterprise. It's a key innovation sector that drives the growth of our state economy and keeps our employment — which has consistently been better than that of the nation as a whole — at a healthy rate.

So, what will the consequences of this new tax be? For every $1 million in revenue, under the Governor's proposal, a software shop will pay an additional $45,000 — on top of the payroll, property, real estate, business and any other taxes it already pays. Consider this: For every $2 million in revenue, that's $90,000 in taxes, which could cover the salary of an entry-level software engineer including benefits. The 2011 Index of the Massachusetts Innovation Economy, indicates that software and computer services accounted for $31 billion of Massachusetts economic output. If, for the sake of argument, we consider just half of the economic output as taxable software design and development services, that would result in about $695 million in tax revenue, or roughly the equivalent of 7,750 entry-level software engineering jobs. Will this new proposed tax eliminate the creation of 7,750 high-quality jobs in Massachusetts? I'm not eager to find out. Now, to be fair, the Governor's budget estimates show a figure of just a quarter billion dollars in revenue to be realized from this tax, but the true consequences, like the law itself, remain unclear. The law is vague enough that the sales tax could cover all kinds of software, from mobile apps to even Web sites.