2024

The truth is, 2024 was one of the hardest years I've faced in recent memory. Client work slowed, and we were faced with a lot of difficult personal decisions. That's not even getting into the state of the world beyond our privileged creative industry. But through all of that, we have persistently gone after the type of work that we want to do more of, and turned down work we don't want to be a part of. A lot of our energy has been manifesting through internal experimental projects.

Three of these experiments have slowly evolved into full-fledged tools:

• IssueBuilder transforms written Statement of Work documents into GitHub issues using AI, making project kickoffs smoother and more systematic, speeding up a process that we go through every time we start a new project.
• Connectology brings network visualization into a modern web interface, letting you explore and edit force-directed graphs with nodes and edges, even generating network structures from text. We were frustrated with the existing tools for creating, editing, and sharing network visualizations, so we decided to create our own.
• And Coach Artie, our AI studio assistant, has grown beyond our wildest expectations, accumulating over 3,000 memories from being part of our daily studio life. He keeps getting refactored and improving incrementally, and we're beginning to look into make it easier to create sub-instances of him for others to use more easily.

In the near year, I'd like to open up our kitchen. We're looking into launching Room 302 Studio VIP memberships - planning on giving our members access to our entire toolkit, from Connectology to private tests of our upcoming tools, as well as access to our Discord community. I want to build a community of data visualization enthusiasts, researchers, and people who want to support the use of technology to make the world better.

We're adapting; evolving from a traditional client services studio into something exciting: a dynamic platform for creating tools and public experiments. A place where the things we've built in isolation can finally be shared, improved, and put to use by people who share our vision of a world made better through the intentional applications of technology.

If you have an idea, or want to collaborate, get in touch: [email protected]