game designBloom is creating a new type of visual discovery experience on tablets, media consoles, and modern browsers that will provide you with playful, explorable, visually compelling views on personally relevant information from services like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and iTunes.
These Bloom Instruments aren’t merely games or graphics. They're new ways of seeing what's important.
Ben has worked for over 20 years on user interaction and experience design, concept prototyping, and strategy in the context of media applications, operating systems, web services, ubiquitous computing, and massively multiplayer games. Most recently, he was an advisor and strategist at Stamen Design, a leading visualization design studio. Previously, he was the founder of the Experience Design Lab at frogdesign, an international product design company, and a lead game designer and platform development strategist at Ludicorp, makers of Flickr. He is also the founder of the Amsterdam-based research foundation VURB, which investigates digital urbanism, and is constantly engaged in the investigation of innovative ways to improve the flow and play of a user's relationship with task or information.
Tom creates dynamic and interactive graphics, maps, and data visualizations for the web. At Stamen Design he created innovative software for clients like Microsoft, MSNBC, Trulia, and the London Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games. Previously, wrote passenger flow simulation software for YRM, a London-based architectural studio. He was an active and early participant in the Processing and OpenStreetMap communities and has spoken at conferences including South by Southwest, UX Week, ETech, and Where 2.0. He holds a B.Sc. in Artificial Intelligence with Mathematics from the University of Leeds and an M.Sc. in Virtual Environments, Imaging and Visualisation from University College London.
Jesper develops experimental online services designed to introduce emotional contexts into online relationships, creating more authentic experiences. He is also an accomplished data scientist, working on problems including home valuations for Trulia, credit card fraud for Visa, and social network analysis for Visible Path. Jesper speaks frequently at international technology and design conferences and has appeared in print and broadcast media for projects like Avoidr, Freerisk, and his Foursquare privacy hack. He holds a B.Sc. in Physics from Haverford College and an M.B.A. in Econometrics from University of Chicago.
Ryan Alexander is an artist living and working in San Francisco, California. There he experiments with programmatic artworks, live visuals, and procedural forms. His portfolio includes work with Stamen Design for National Geographic and Adobe, a recent performance at GAFFTA using the Plask framework and his contribution to the Written Images project.
Lydia has worked in the HCI research, film and video game industries building tools, pipelines, graphics and special effects. She started as an undergrad in Computer Science and HCI at Carnegie Mellon University, doing research under Professor Randy Pausch in the Stage 3 research lab. At Industrial Light and Magic, she worked as a tools programmer, camera layout artist and then lighting and effects technical director on films such as Star Wars: Episode 3 and War of the Worlds. In games she contributed to Spore at Maxis as an effects and cinematics engine programmer, and then at Double Fine as a technical artist on games including Brutal Legend, Costume Quest, and Once Upon a Monster.
People think of data visualization as output, and the insight that I think Ben has had with Bloom is that data visualization will become a means of input and control... Being able to manipulate data in real-time is an important shift. Data visualizations would then become interfaces rather than reports.
- Tim O'Reilly
email: info@bloom.io
