What is your title at Microsoft and when did you start with the company?
I am the Industrial Design Manager for Microsoft Hardware.  I originally started as an intern with Microsoft Research 7.5 years ago.  After that, I joined the Microsoft Hardware Group where I started designing keyboards, mice and communication devices and most recently, the Arc Touch Mouse.

What are the steps in developing a product? How do you go from conception to prototype?
This process is about a 12-month long journey.  We first determine what problem we are trying to solve for – what are the needs, how can we address them in a way that’s meaningful to consumer’s lives and complement what they already have.  We aren’t sitting in a design studio making assumptions about customer needs – we spend time with our customers, observe them using PCs, interact with them, speak with them about what they feel they aren’t getting with their computer peripherals.  Once we have that understanding, we come up with a solution.  There are a lot of iterations and prototypes ranging from foam core to a machined working prototype.  This process helps us make mistakes early on so our final product is flawless and executed perfectly.  Once we feel good about the engineering and design solutions we have made, we take the prototype to our manufacturing partners.  This is the most fascinating part for me – working with the rest of the team of nearly 40 individuals across a range of functions that are all working together to bring this to life.

What is the Arc Touch Mouse and what were your influences in regards to its design?
Arc Touch Mouse is designed for quick use, mobility and easy storage.  It curves for comfort and flattens to pack for people who still want the comfort and productivity of a mouse while on the go. When you’re done you can flatten Arc Touch Mouse to turn it off, and slip it into your pocket or bag as easily as a cell phone. The design principles we had in mind when designing Arc Touch Mouse were very much grounded in customer needs.   The customers wanted to have a mouse with them, but it was an inconvenience to have another object in their bag.  We wanted to create a mouse that was easy to carry, but also comfortable when you wanted to use it as a mouse. The design aspects that we spent a lot of time thinking over were pride in craftsmanship, authenticity and attention to detail.  These principles are not only relevant in software design, but hardware design too.

What do you think differentiates Microsoft Hardware from other companies?
We have the ability to impact such a broad range of customers and offer products that work seamlessly across all the different products and services Microsoft offers.  That is something not a lot of brands can do – having that range and scope as designers is something we take very seriously within the Microsoft Hardware Design Group.  There are only 12 of us in the whole world that have the opportunity to put a Microsoft logo on a product and we don’t take that for granted. We want to make it count on every product we design.

This is the 30 year anniversary for the Microsoft Hardware Group. How have products evolved over the years and what does the future hold?
For the past 30 years our organization has been focused on developing input devices for Windows PCs and we need to continue to focus on that as this will always be the goal of the Microsoft Hardware group.   People ask me if I think the mouse will be in our future and my answer is always yes. When you need to select that one pixel on your screen, there is no other tool better than a tangible object in your hand to do so.  We need to remain focused on developing input devices that define that best way to interact with PCs for the future and pave the road for peripherals as interaction models shift and evolve into different platforms and operating systems.

How has Microsoft’s reputation changed over the last few years within the design community?
What’s amazing is that Microsoft as a brand has a tremendous amount of respect in design. It’s not often that we get to interact with designers across the country let alone from overseas. At a recent event hosted by the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) for their International Design Excellence Award Ceremony (IDEA), we had a chance to not only interact with designers from all around the world in different industries, but we were also recognized by this community as the best in category for Industrial Design. We don’t strive to win awards. That’s not our end goal… But to be recognized by this community is something we don’t take for granted. It’s very gratifying to be recognized for design as a Microsoft brand. In fact, Windows Phone Design Team was also recognized as People’s Choice Award and Best in Category. It really came to life for me when we were being recognized by multiple organizations… We received the Good Design Award from The Chicago Athenaeum/Europe and also received the prestigious Red Dot Design Award. And then the Smithsonian, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum added the Arc Touch Mouse as part of their permanent collection! It’s very cool to see all design groups across the company being recognized for their hard work. I think it’s a result of us hiring the right people and fostering creativity while demanding perfection from everyone in the team.

What advice do you have for young designers?
Overall, young talent should learn just enough to get motivated and don’t try to understand the entire process, it can be daunting for someone with a creative mind — ignorance is bliss in this instance and is the key to get going.

What are some of your other hobbies outside of work?
I enjoy house renovation and have been renovating my home for the past three years.  It’s hard for me to zoom out and do things quickly, but I enjoy it – it’s just like designing a product but on bigger scale.  I enjoy traveling and have recently been to Hong Kong and Tokyo.  I also enjoy cooking – my wife is a pastry chef and I’m trying to learn the savory, culinary part of the meal and my wife takes care of the desserts.

- Hardware Team

What city do you currently live in?
Los Angeles

What about this city makes you feel most creative?
I love the mix of environments and scenery here. You can go from the beach to the mountains to the hills to a super busy city street all within one place. It never gets boring!

How long have you been a designer/ making art?
Since 2001.

How would you describe your style?
Feminine and whimsical. I love to mix patterns, color, and texture in all the work I do and the pieces I design.

What is your favorite tool or medium?
My computer is like my right hand! So much happens virtually these days that I couldn’t imagine my day-to-day life without it.

What or who is the biggest inspiration for your work?
The mix of color, patterns and texture found in nature, on buildings, in fabric, on anything…really inspires what I do.

Who is your favorite artist or art movement/era and why?
I love the mid-century modern era for interiors, and the abstract/Picasso era for art.

What was your inspiration for this work?
I love florals and nature, so I’m always inspired by them. This pattern mixes playful florals with rich metallics for a mix of sophisticated whimsy that I always try and bring into my work.

What three words best describe your design?
Spring-like and sunny—as if you’re working in a field of flowers.

How do you want people to feel when using the mouse with your design?
Happy. If I can make someone’s work day just a little bit better by using my mouse, then I’m content!

What advice would you give to young designers?
Work hard, practice your craft and trust your instincts.

Joy’s mouse is now available for purchase at Microsoft Store for a limited time, so pick up yours now and download the free wallpaper for your PC!

- Hardware Team

What about living in Montreal makes you feel most creative?
Character, charm, French, the people, the grungy places, the beautiful places, the snow, the summer heat, the festivals.

How long have you been a designer/ making art?
I have always made things, but only recently did I start to think that my work may be considered art.

How would you describe your style?
Mashed-up, glitchy, colorful, visceral, experimental, playful.

What is your favorite tool or medium?
A computer.

What or who is the biggest inspiration for your work?
I think that the actual process of making work is the inspiration itself.

Who is your favorite artist or art movement/era and why?
There are too many, I can’t pick just one. I love all kinds of art, especially work that is very different from my own. Experiencing a great work of art in person can be very inspiring. One such work for me was Martin Creed’s Work No.200 half the air in a given space. Cindy Sherman is another artist I look up to for her dedication to her practice and the humor and depth in her work.

What was your inspiration for this work?
I chose one of my Cloudscape pieces because clouds are loaded with meaning, and I recently read that the exact shape of a cloud cannot be predicted.

What three words best describe your design?
Bright. Unpredictable. Dreamy.

How do you want people to feel when using the mouse with your design?
Imaginative.

What advice would you give to young designers?
Find a process or activity you love because you need to immerse yourself in it, grow with it and work at it. I really believe it is called a practice for a reason.

tchmo’s mouse is now available for purchase at Microsoft Store for a limited time, so pick up yours now and download the free wallpaper for your PC!

- Hardware Team

What city do you currently live in?
Stockholm.

What about this city makes you feel most creative?
That nature is so integrated into the city. My home and studio are surrounded by trees.

How long have you been a designer/ making art?
I have always been making things—a true child of the ‘70s.

How would you describe your style?
I am constantly searching to strike the right balance between the edgy and the elegant, the beautiful and the raw.

What is your favorite tool or medium?
Ink.

What or who is the biggest inspiration for your work?
My creative friends and the surrounding thrift stores.

Who is your favorite artist or art movement/era and why?
I like The Vienna Secessionists a lot.

What was your inspiration for this work?
Patterns and shapes from the ‘70s fabrics I find in flea markets, and the leaves outside my studio window.

What three words best describe your design?
Organic. Colorful. Interesting.

How do you want people to feel when using the mouse with your design?
Creative.

Stina’s mouse is now available for purchase at Amazon.com for a limited time, so pick up yours now and download the free wallpaper for your PC!

- Hardware Team

Originally from Hyogo, Japan, Minami graduated from Parsons School for Design with a bachelor’s degree in product design. He resides in New York City, where he produces work that has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, Men’s Vogue and Fashionize.

In 2003, Kenzo was the first artist commissioned to create a mural painting for Nike’s art project space in New York, and he was one of four artists chosen in 2007 to be featured in the FAMOUS CARS + FAMOUS PEOPLE show, along with Andy Warhol, Robert Longo and David Hockney.  Keep reading to discover his biggest influence and the three words he uses to describe his mouse.

How long have you been a designer/ making art?
I’m sure if you ask anyone who does the kind of stuff we do, many will say we’ve been doing it “our whole lives.” Officially (or professionally), I was first paid for my work as a TV set designer. At the time, I was still a product design major, so I would say 15 years.

How would you describe your style?
Precise.

What is your favorite tool or medium?
At the moment, I’m pretty into using colorless acrylic medium for its texture. I’m also having fun silk-screening my designs, as well as printing them on newsprints.

What or who is the biggest inspiration for your work?
Words.

Who is your favorite artist or art movement/era and why?
I’m not sure if they are exactly “artists” (though they definitely are to me), but some of my biggest influences as a kid are people like Douglas Trumbull, Rick Baker or Stan Winston, and all the very creative effect work they have done in the field of special effect supervision, production design and film production.

What was your inspiration for your mouse design?
It started off as the bone structure of a hand holding the mouse. I then expanded and combined it with motifs of the nervous network system, biological neural work, architectural structure, pipings, biomechanical wings, primal patterns and so on. I also wanted to keep the feeling of it still being under construction, or in the process of expanding.

What three words that describe your design best?
Biomechanical. Interconnecting. Accelerating.

How do you want people to feel when using the mouse with your design?
That you are connected to, and becoming part of, information networks and architectures.

What advice would you give to young designers?
Work hard. If you think that you work hard enough already, work harder—since someone else out there certainly does.

Kenzo’s mouse is now available for purchase at Microsoft Store for a limited time, so pick up yours now and download the free wallpaper for your PC!

(Check back throughout the month for more interviews with our mouse artists.)

- Hardware Team

Sally began drawing when she was five and hasn’t stopped since. She is currently a member of MOMOROBO and the EDGE Creative Collection, and has collaborated with various brands—including Nike, Converse, Lacoste and Tiger Beer—on an array of projects including tees, mobile apps and beer bottles.  Read on to learn more about her style, inspiration and advice for young designers.

How would you describe your style?
Versa-style! I don’t really want to limit my artistic expressions to a fixed style.

What is your favorite tool or medium?
I prefer the old ‘skool’ way… Plain-old simple pencil and paper!

What or who is the biggest inspiration for your work?
I try to find inspiration outside of the visual art mediums I work in. So, I look to things like movies, music, and food for inspiration.

Who is your favorite artist or art movement/era and why?
Damien Hirst and the French New Wave (La Nouvelle Vague). I really admire the former’s absurdness and the latter’s spirit and aesthetic style.

What was your inspiration for this work?
A mix between The 1961 Monkey King “Havoc in Heaven” Chinese animated film and The Beatles’ “Magical Mystery Tour.”

What three words best describe your mouse design?
Swag, swag and swag!

How do you want people to feel when using the mouse with your design?
I hope they feel thrilled and creative— and that they use it to design something else!

What advice would you give to young designers?
Always save your work!

Sally’s mouse is now available for purchase at Microsoft Store for a limited time, so don’t miss your chance. And while you’re at it, download the free wallpaper for your PC!

- Hardware Team

How long have you been working with generative and algorithmic art? How did you get started?
First I must state that I rarely, if ever, think of myself as an “artist.” At least, not in any proper sense of the word. So I don’t feel that I’m pursuing any particular style or movement within the “art world.” Rather, I consider myself just a “tinkerer,” though my interests seem to lie primarily along lines that are now described as generative/algorithmic/procedural works.

I may be dating myself, but my earliest experiments were on an Apple II and TRS-80 in the early/mid-80s. I can remember writing a rough game, somewhat like the old arcade game “Robotron,” though all of the actors were controlled by the computer (no human player). Its only real purpose was to accumulate the “debris” resulting from the simulated combat play as its “artistic” output.

I’m not even sure I know what the proper definition of “Generative Art” really is, though to me it implies that at least part, if not most, of the output is created by semi-autonomous “agents.” That is, I enjoy crafting code that might simulate something like a virtual ant farm (used merely as an analogy) where the output might be the pattern of trails and caverns they dig out for their virtual colony.

Your Art of Touch creations are striking and unique, and one of your pieces won our weekly prize package. Can you share any secrets about your technique?
The rules clearly forbade “robotic” entries and voting, but said nothing about submitting a human-drawn entry created with altered code.  So I figured that anything not expressly forbidden must be allowable and fair game, right? To my thinking, this was exactly in keeping with the spirit of generative art.

I began by simply playing with the various tools provided.  Unfortunately for me, the tools seemed better suited to those with more traditional sketching talents, and didn’t seem entirely appropriate for creating the types of images that I tend to work on. So I began to wonder if there was something I could do to alter the given tools to better suit my style.

A bit of poking around revealed the underlying javascript. Then using the debugging facilities provided in most modern browsers, I altered a few prototypes of the existing objects, so that whenever a new “brush” was created, it was created using some of my own code.

At first, I simply replaced the mouse handlers, and quantized the coordinates onto a larger rectangular grid (effectively like a “snap to grid” type function, as is common within illustration software). I then killed the mouse move handler so that only mouse downs and ups had any effect. Those “tweaks” allowed me to more precisely draw the types of hard geometric figures I was interested in.

By the time of my third submission, I had grown tired of red, so I altered the palette as well. I also had the code automatically spawn some “workers” that generated the actual line work.  Thus the entire piece was created with about a dozen human mouse clicks, just to initially position the workers and give it some sense of directed composition.

By the time of my fourth submission, I had replaced the entire brush logic with my own, based on a prior piece I had coded in Java. This code was again more brush-like, in that I “painted” the piece by hand, but had the code “augment” my simple strokes with additional complexity.

What is your favorite tool for artistic expression?
Code, clearly. Java is my preferred language these days – specifically the variant present in the processing.org project. I’m fluent in a number of programming languages, but the Processing environment does a wonderful job of “getting out of the way” of artistic creativity, handling many of the more mundane and tedious aspects, providing a framework from which you can just start coding the fun part, almost in a rapid-prototyping sense. Recommended.

Where do you find inspiration?
I’m an admitted geek when it comes to anything related to math and science. I’m no great master of either, but again just a “tinkerer” and fascinated observer. So my work tends to reflect that: strongly geometric, purely abstract, often in response to some new bit of math/science trivia that I’ve just learned of…wondering “what would that look like?” if used as part of the “behavior” of an autonomous agent, for example.

Many thanks to Dave for sharing his insights with us!

-Hardware Team

Last week we were happy to announce the big winner of the Art of Touch project. Rose Saxena tapped into her creative side, and she received the most votes for her Art of Touch artwork. In addition to becoming a Featured Artist on the website, Rose also won a sweet prize package, including Microsoft Hardware gear like a Touch Mouse and LifeCam Cinema Webcam, as well as a 13” Samsung Series 9 Notebook with Windows 7 and Office Professional 2010.

Learn more about Rose in this Q+A.

Where are you from? Do you think your background has influenced your style of creative expression?
I was born in beautiful Rio, and lived several places in Brazil. At a young age, we moved to eastern Canada and then to many places in the US…south, mid-west and west. By the time I was 18, we had moved 15 times. This has definitely had a direct influence on my style, having experienced such a variety of places and people, each having unique aspects that have shaped my outlook and creative flair. Adding to the mix is my keen interest in horticulture and astronomy.

Have you had any kind of formal artistic training?
While not having any direct art training beyond high school art classes, I did train in ballet, tap dance, baton, and music (clarinet and flute), which definitely were avenues for a lot of creative expression.

You work in technology…do you see yourself as a creative person?
Absolutely. I feel that everyone is creative, the only difference being in how they express it. Working in the technology development field does require creativity in many ways to envision, architect, and put together easy to use solutions. It requires ‘outside-the-box’ thinking to stay in the forefront of the ever-changing world of technology.

What do you think about the relationship between art and technology?
They go hand-in-hand. Tools have always been used to express art…paintbrush, pencil, sketchbook. It’s only natural that the high-tech field would play a big role in enabling art to be expressed in new and exciting ways; using electronic tools that were themselves created by a collaboration of artists and technologists.

What inspired your Art of Touch creations?
The Art of Touch project really excited me and quickly drew me in to explore all of the possibilities with the variety of brushes, colors and effects. Microsoft did such an excellent job in putting this together that it was easy to get inspired and experiment. Pairing art and technology is a great way to draw out the artist in everyone, and creates excitement for both disciplines.

Any advice for young artists or technologists out there?
No matter what you are doing, it is important to be excited about it, have fun, and experiment; pushing the boundaries of what you think you can accomplish.

Any quotes or mottos that you live by?
I believe the mind is a powerful thing. A couple of quotes that I like are…
“If it can be dreamed, it can be done” — Walt Disney
“GIGO – Garbage In, Garbage Out” meaning that the quality of computer output depends on the quality of the input. This is so true for your mind as well.

Anything else you’d like to share with the Art of Touch or Microsoft Hardware audience?
The Art of Touch team did a great job in putting this together!  Hopefully, the Art of Touch web site will remain available so we can continue to have fun and explore the possibilities.

- Hardware Team

Our winner scored a sweet prize package too, including an Explorer Touch Mouse, a Samsung Series 9 laptop with Windows 7 , a Lifecam Cinema Webcam, and Microsoft Office Professional 2010. Rose also gets to enjoy her masterpiece on a custom laptop skin and a 36”x24” wall decal created by Zazzle.

But guess what, we are still giving away weekly prizes! So try your hand at the Art of Touch today, and get your friends to vote for you. It works. Just ask Rose.

*pending eligibility confirmation

- Hardware Team

We’ll be announcing our Grand Prize winner and final featured artist this week.

We’ve already been honored to have three renowned artists participate in the Art of Touch. Each brings a distinct style and visual signature to the experience. Be sure to explore each of their unique brushes to create your own masterpiece.

Dr. Woohoo! gets cyclical with his Spinning Top.