Connecting The Dots

Technology promises more connectivity than ever before. A brilliant case in point is Bluescape, a forward-thinking visual collaboration technology from Haworth that makes authentic, productive interactions easy.

- Liz Stinson

Back in the early 2000s, JeffReuschel had a wild idea. Reuschel, the global director of design and innovation at Haworth, wanted to see his team’s entire portfolio of work at once, spread out before him like a desktop covered in papers—only minus the desktop and minus the papers. Reuschel wondered: Instead of looking at Word documents, InDesign files, spreadsheets, and scraps of notes in their digital silos, could he project these related bits of information onto a wall simultaneously? And better yet, could he manipulate those files with his hands as if they were physical objects?

The answer to both questions was a resounding no. Reuschel’s concept was ahead of its time. In the early 2000s, projection technology was becoming more sophisticated, but touchscreens were still nascent. “What I ended up doing was taking a lot of little cards and push-pinning them to the wall,” he recalls.

A handful of years later, smartphones and tablets had become commonplace, and the same touchscreen technology that powered those smaller devices could be blown up to wall size. “They have set us free to operate in much more creative and innovative ways,” says Haworth’s chairman emeritus, Dick Haworth. “They’ve dramatically changed the footprint of the office.” So under his direction, Reuschel, alongside a team of engineers and designers, set out to make software that would power the workplace of the future. Their vision: an interactive wall that displays Word documents, spreadsheets, images, and notes, and can be projected onto a touchscreen surface that employees—both on-site and remote—are able to manipulate in real time, as if they’re using a giant tablet. They called this technology for visual collaboration Bluescape.