Carried forward since 1891.
1891 was the year the founder's family went Deaf, on the western side of Pennsylvania, in a farm valley called Daniel's Run. It was also the year American Deaf people first physically gathered as a national community — the convention that became the foundation of Deaf civic life in the United States.
The year is the name because the year is the point.
1891 was the year the founder's family went Deaf, on the western side of Pennsylvania, in a farm valley called Daniel's Run. It was also, by coincidence, the year American Deaf people first physically gathered as a national community — the convention that became the foundation of Deaf civic life in the United States. The family didn't go to the convention. They had a farm. But the two facts have lived next to each other ever since: a family figuring out how to move through a world it wasn't designed for, and a country slowly figuring out that the people doing the figuring had been right about how to design things all along.
Five generations followed. A great-grandmother who was the first president of the Monongahela Valley Silent Club in 1940. A grandmother who kept the minute book — motion, second, vote, result, signed at the bottom. A father who taught and built and led. A founder who solders, builds firmware, hand-codes the website you're reading right now, and runs the studio out of Frederick, Maryland. A daughter, born 2024, who will be the sixth.
The studio is named for the year because the year is the point. The studio's product is the same product the first generation made: a way for people to gather and understand each other, in the room they're actually in, without anyone needing to translate themselves into someone else's idea of normal first.
A hundred and thirty-five years of practice, made into software.
The patterns we use to design weren't invented in a lab. They were invented at kitchen tables, in residential-school hallways, in the corner of a noisy restaurant where a Deaf family figured out how to flag the waiter. They're a hundred and thirty-five years of practice, made into software.
That's why the products are the way they are. Captions default-on, not opt-in behind a settings menu. Audio additive, never sole. Plain English at a sixth-grade ceiling. Channel sovereignty for every member of every organization we build for. A meeting engine that runs on the same shape Gertrude Wilson's minute book had in 1940. An elevator that reads your hand because reading a hand is what this family has been doing in public for a hundred and thirty-five years.
Designed For Us, Built For Everyone. The line isn't a slogan. It's an accurate description of who's in the room when the work gets made.
That's the throughline. Everything we build is a current draft of the same project — the gathering, brought forward.
Five generations — and we never stopped inventing games.
There are three of us in this generation — Anthony, Jon, and our sister Amy — and we grew up inventing games together. Card games at the kitchen table. Made-up tag rules in the yard. Friday-night quizzes between slices of pizza. By the time we were teenagers we'd designed more games than we could remember.
So when the studio's demonstrations finally worked, the catalog didn't grow by accident. It grew because this is what the family has always done — turn a room full of people into a reason to play. A door that opens to a signed PIN, a music booth you feel instead of hear, a mirror that smiles when you sign I love you: same instinct, better tools.
“Our family has been Deaf since 1891. The interfaces we design are the ones we've been quietly working around our whole lives. They aren't speculative — they're solutions to problems we live every day.”
— Anthony Mowl, founder
One workshop in Frederick. The room is the team.
The founder is the lead. The same hand that solders the board writes the firmware, draws the SVG, hand-codes the page, and pushes the deploy. The partners we bring in for a given build — fabricators, illustrators, electricians, the people who've helped on the rooms we've already made — come in for the specific work and leave the way a film crew leaves a set. The studio is the same studio that built the thing five years from now, when the room is still running.
The lineage is the warranty. The contract is the work.
Read the universal-design contract →