Overview
Haworth is a well-established office design firm that creates products to inspire creative, collaborative workspaces around the world. In 2010, they perceived an opportunity emerging across all of their projects — the digital externalisation of collaborative ideation. They approached Substantial to co-create Bluescape: an infinite, collaborative, virtual workspace enabling anyone to create, communicate, and share their work across time zones and devices, from tablets to wall-sized multi-touch screens.
The challenge
Beginning with an initial strategy from Obscura Digital and a single hardware screen that posed myriad technical challenges, Haworth needed a partner who could push the Bluescape vision forward into reality. The assignment started as hardware testing but quickly expanded to include product strategy, design, development, and taking the product to market. The company sought to connect showrooms on six continents, digitalising collaboration between people from Shanghai to San Francisco.
“Substantial had the fearlessness, and chops. There are very few companies out there experienced in creating large, interactive virtual workplaces. They quickly grasped how to translate our requirements into an executable, achievable, cost-efficient plan.”
What we did
We paired with Bluescape to turn Obscura Digital’s initial strategy — a multi-screen digital collaborative ecosystem — into an MVP launch. The overarching design consideration was creating a product that felt familiar and consistent across multiple devices, including tablets, desktop, and touchscreen walls. The technical challenges ranged from low-level input capture and hardware integration to architectural design for scalability and latency.
Prototyped and optimised an interactive wall feature that delivers elegant visualisation of data at large scale, serving as the central nucleus of creative sessions.
Expanded the digital workspace from one screen to a matrix of up to fifteen connected screens through research, prototyping, and experimentation — enabling Haworth to demo Bluescape at NeoCon just six months from the start of the engagement.
Optimised Bluescape for desktop and tablet, enabling team members to manage workspaces and contribute ideas directly, in-person or remotely, contributing to past or future sessions at any time.
Helped Bluescape — now its own business entity — revisit the original strategy four years later, aligning teams, resetting the roadmap, and launching a re-envisioned product sustainable by their in-house teams.
Built for two audiences: remote individuals accessing the digital workspace, and project groups working together at the wall-sized touchscreen. Enhanced the cloud-based experience for easy access from any device and built an administrative experience to manage digital workspaces over time.
The results
145 football fields of virtual space
Across devices worldwide, Bluescape covers the equivalent of nearly 145 football fields of virtual collaborative workspace.
Concept to trade show in 6 months
From the start of the engagement to a live demo at NeoCon — one of the largest commercial design trade shows — in just six months.
Platform that changed how teams work together
Bluescape accelerates project timelines, decision-making, idea generation, and business results in a visualised, immersive environment — used across industries from law enforcement to architecture.
Bluescape became its own company
What started as a Haworth initiative grew into an independent business entity, returning to Substantial four years later to re-envision and scale the product further.