Built in Frederick. Carried forward since 1891.
A small number of partners each year get the workspace. Custom installations, product collaborations, rooms designed together from the floor up.
We build the whole thing — software, hardware, firmware, gameplay — under one roof in Frederick. We start with a working session: you walk us through the room, the people who use it, and the thing the room is supposed to do. We walk you through what we've already built that's adjacent, what would be net-new, and what's a real magic trick versus what looks like one. We write the scope together. The studio builds. You review. We finish.
Every build pulls from a kit the studio has been sharpening for years. The hand recognition that lets a camera read a letter. The atomic event log that lets a meeting state machine never lose a vote. The kiosk admin console an admin can run with their thumbs. The build-from-a-workbook pattern that lets your operations team edit the source of truth without learning a new tool. The deploy script that pushes a change from the workspace to the live room in under a minute. None of it requires you to learn what any of those things are made of. We handle the wires; you get the trick.
For partners who want the workspace on a standing basis, the studio offers an ongoing relationship — quietly listed on product pages as 1891 Pro. We take a small number each year.
A Studio Partner gets a direct line to the founder. Prioritized custom builds when the surface they need doesn't exist yet. Early access to new product surfaces before they go public. Co-creation rights on work that fits the studio's roadmap. A named seat in the case study when the work is ready. The room we design together becomes part of the studio's permanent body of work — and the partner is the admin who runs it.
Pricing is conversation-led. We talk about what the room is supposed to do, what the year looks like, and what the partnership has to deliver to be worth both of our time. Then we write the number down.
Short stories from the studio. Each one points at a technique without naming what it's made of. The longer write-ups live on the case studies.
The state machine for motions, seconds, votes, and points of order — installed at a reference Deaf-led organization, used at every monthly meeting since. The motion shows on the TV at the front of the room and on every phone in the hand. Adjournment-to-signed-minutes in under an hour. The format hasn't changed in eighty-six years because the format works.
We started with a laptop on the kitchen table and a webcam. Sign your order; the screen confirms it back; the ticket prints in the language the customer signed it in. Twelve weeks later the same flow was running on a tablet at a real drive-thru. The hardware didn't change. The room did.
The Imagination Town elevator started as a sketch on a napkin: what if the inside of the cab, while it moved, was the floor it was going to? We built it in a browser tab first — twelve floors, twelve hand-drawn vignettes, a hand and a camera and a kid laughing at the cab walls. The museum installation is the same software, mounted to a real call button.
A productized family-site platform: 144 people, 158 organizations, five generations of a Deaf lineage. Every member organization keeps its source of truth in a single workbook — members, dues, events, broadcasts — and the live site is built from that workbook on the next deploy. We didn't invent the workbook. We made it the spine.
We don't have a sales team. Send a note with what the room is, who's in it, and what it's supposed to do. Reply within one business day.