Last year, Isobar expanded our NYC office by leasing an adjacent space. While the extra room was great, it also created an unexpected challenge: the new space felt isolated because our headcount didn’t grow. The way we experienced and socialized in the office changed.
Before the expansion, there was a sense of social cohesion. Seating was first-come, first-served—you never knew who you’d end up next to, which led to open conversations and cross-team interactions.
After the move, however, that dynamic shifted. People naturally clustered around their project teams. Instead of office-wide cohesion, we began sitting in based on project assignment. Some days, you didn’t even know who else was in the office.
During a hackathon, my team decided to tackle this problem: how could we bring back a sense of playful connection across the office?
We started by experimenting with light and sound to create ambient experiences—for instance, translating office traffic and movement into soundscapes. But while ambience was interesting, it felt too passive. We wanted something more active, something that would raise awareness and encourage interaction between the two office spaces.
That’s when we developed the idea of an office gesture.
An office gesture is a playful way to blend physical actions with digital feedback, using ubiquitous computing and interaction design. We built a system that could recognize a physical gesture, translate it into digital form, and broadcast it across the office.
Our chosen gesture? The high five.
High fives are simple, instantly recognizable, and full of energy. They naturally create camaraderie because they require two people to connect. At the office level, the metaphor was clear: don’t leave your colleagues across the hall hanging.
So, we built two giant, Mickey Mouse-like high five machine, a dashboard to visualize data, and called the project Up High. We used Arduino, cardboard, and glass climbers to build the prototype. It turned an everyday gesture into a fun, collective experience—bridging the gap between the two spaces.
And of course, ever the documentarian, I captured our process through photos that became the highlight of our final presentation.
