Inspirational office boasts a century's worth of creative history

Made by Many's New York studio is located on Greene Street - an iconic brick street in Soho. Built in 1900, it originally served as a factory and warehouse until the 1970s when it became home to an artist and his studio for the next 40 years. It's a classic makers' space - perfect for digital product craftspeople like us.

We made a point of preserving the incredible details hidden under a century's worth of wear and paint splatters, including refinishing and levelling the 115-year-old wood floor and stripping decades of paint off the original steel fire door.

Respect the past

Honouring our studio's history gives the space a workshop vibe where we can focus on designing, developing and building great next-generation products like our own Hackaball, a connected device that teaches kids to code through game creation and play.

At Made by Many, we make new stuff for the internet: products and services that are used habitually by millions of people; things that last and grow and become indispensable. In doing so, we've adopted a range of methods that let us rapidly get to product ideas that can be pressure-tested out in the world, with users.

Starting a journey

In almost all cases, these journeys begin with sketching our ideas by hand. We have custom Made by Many sketch pads pre-printed with various screens - smartphone, tablet and computer – so we can get lots of visual ideas down quickly and efficiently.

Our sketching is the output of lots of different inputs - including a voracious appetite for books ranging from business strategy to startups, software development, design and even science fiction.

We don't have the physical space to spare for a library, so we created a shared digital library and give everyone in our studio his or her own Kindle e-reader to access it and add to it anytime, anywhere.

And what studio wouldn't be complete with its very own Design Dog? We're lucky to have Klein around – keeping us grounded with his honest and somehow oddly insightful input.

Words: Gavin Becker

Gavin Becker is a managing partner at the New York office of product innnovation studio Made by Many. Follow the agency on Twitter at @madebymany.

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