Introducing the Lab

What this is

Viable has always had a side that doesn't show up in the portfolio — experiments that didn't become products, visualizations built to understand something rather than to ship, hardware projects that live on a shelf in various states of done.

The Lab is where we're going to start sharing that work. Not polished case studies. More like: here's what we were trying to figure out, here's how far we got, here's what was interesting about it.

On the workbench

There's an electronics lab on the first floor of the studio. It's been accumulating microcontrollers, sensors, displays, and half-finished things for years. Some of it feeds into client work — environmental sensing, hardware prototypes, field data collection experiments. Some of it is just curiosity with a soldering iron.

On the software side, we've been exploring animation and interactive storytelling as a direction — building pieces that go beyond maps and dashboards into something closer to narrative. Data that moves. Interfaces that respond to the shape of the information rather than a generic template.

Why share it

Partly because the process is often more interesting than the outcome. Partly because writing about how something works forces you to understand it better. And partly because the clients we want to work with next are probably curious about the same kinds of problems.

If something here sparks an idea about your own project, get in touch.