i/0 360 digital design
I’m not sure why I’m compelled to write this, but I am. (It’s probably because I’m cleaning out my studio for the first time in six years.) I’ll keep it brief.
In summer 1996, I graduated from the University of Cincinnati and moved Brooklyn (Greenpoint) the following week. I worked at Two Twelve Associates for three months under David Peters. Cait and I came back to Ohio to get married in the fall. When we returned to New York, I worked for Abbot Miller at Design Writing Research for a few months. While there, I learned about i/o 360 on page 59 of the January/February 1996 issue of I.D. magazine (thanks Janet and Chee). These were the stats:
Firm: i/o 360 digital design
Location: New York
Principles: Dindo Magallanes, Arek Banasik, Nam Szeto, Gong Szeto, Robert Clyatt, Ralph Lucci
Ages: 29, 24, 23, 28, 35, 23
Staff: 7
The first paragraph of the one-page feature captures the time and place:
In the back of i/0 360’s New York studio lurks the Monster: hard-drives individualized with given names like Elvis and Yoda, snaking cables and Houston Mission Control-style colored lights blipping in sequence aloft a console whose monitors are arranged side by side. It’s emblematic, like the firm’s title, of i/o 360’s modus operandi: Input/Output, all-rounders, around the clock.
After an interview with Gong Szeto in winter 1997, I started making websites (the information architecture and visual design) at i/o 360 as my profession. As we started taking on more ambitious projects for companies like The New York Times, J.P. Morgan, and Microsoft I shifted into design direction. i/0 360 was an amazing place at a pivotal time. It mixed energy, experimentation, and humor with rigor and excellent design. I worked with fantastic people including the principles, my fellow designers (Judith Park and Jeff Piazza), and Joshua Davis at the start of Praystation; I later worked with Khoi Vinh and Chris Fahey after the unfortunate dot-com-style merger with Rare Medium in fall 1998. With the merger and the dot-com crash, i/o 360 disappeared and Behavior rose from the ashes. i/0 360 is not well archived or known today, but it was exceptional while it lasted. I have the best parts of the website on a hard drive and I expect others probably do too. Maybe it will escape back onto the web one day, but not today.
In spring 1998 I met John Maeda through Gong. (I was obsessed with Maeda’s The Reactive Square.) At the meeting John demoed Design By Numbers. That started the series of events that led to my resignation in Winter 1999. I starting at the MIT Media Lab during the summer of that year. And that’s another story.