Where design agency This Also thrives: hardware-software mashups

This Also isn’t a TV-oriented design agency, despite the fact that two of its first major products relate directly to new hardware for televisions. The company made the first multiplayer game for Chromecast, Big Web Quiz. Once a user fires up the game on their Chromecast, everyone can play with the game’s app on any Android or iOS device.
It was the company’s first project and, as Brett Bergeron, design director and one of the company’s three partners, explained, it was design inspired by the limits of the platform. For example, animated movies look great on Chromecast, but actually rendering animations on the device and the mobile devices is trickier. This Also had to find styles and shortcuts that would look good and fun while also working well.
“We’re one of the first places doing a combination of physical and digital at the same time,” Bergeron told us, during a recent visit to the office.

The next big project the company took part in was the Ray Super Remote, a project of David Skokna, the founder of Huge. Also working on the project is HBO Go alum Hans Deutmeyer. The remote control aims to use touchscreens to make the complex remotes we’re familiar with today much easier and capable of controlling all the devices in your entertainment center, primarily using infrared (though it can use WiFi if it’s available).
See a thorough product review at Re/code. The Ray is not quite shipping yet, but it can be pre-ordered for $199.
Skokna and Deutmeyer knew the This Also founders from their time at Huge. Both Bergeron and his fellow partners, Brian Baker and Becky Soto, had worked on HBO products at the Dumbo creative agency.
As Skokna’s team was building the actual device, This Also made a design for the user interface. Bergeron explained that coding talent in house allowed the team to work on the UI while the device itself came together. Plus, they were able to work with a prototype that actually sent commands to the device in HTML.
This was important, because there were a lot of technical details to work out. There’s a flow to how commands have to go to televisions, cable boxes and what not. Some of them take a few seconds to boot up, first of all. If commands go in the wrong order, then they won’t work. The other trick is that infrared is a one-way street. The devices generally don’t confirm back to the remote that they have successfully executed the command.
“We were trying to code at an incredible pace,” Bergeron explained. “We were able to move several sprints ahead by using web code and native technology together.” When the design was complete, of course, they ported all the finalized code into the native code format for the Ray.
This Also learned a lot about the nature of the television industry as it exists today and how it still hasn’t embraced the culture of opening up information like the web has.
For example, Bergeron said, the cable industry doesn’t have open APIs, so you can’t quickly get access to a provider’s list of channels and basic information about what’s showing at a given time.

Bergeron said that he and Baker had wanted to found the company because they had a very open way of working with each other, and they wanted to see if they could build a whole company around that approach. In the simplest terms, Bergeron said he and Baker realized that they could basically work looking over the other one’s shoulder without creating any tension. They wanted a company without hard and fast lines between disciplines, where designers could work in tandem.
The transparent approach has extended to their approach to client work — sharing a lot with the process-driven methodologies that we discussed during our last visit to Huge.
More hardware-related projects are in the works.