A Culture of
Experimentation
Celebrating twenty years of curiosity, craft, and making.
Click and Drag to move around.
WRITTEN BY VARIOUS CONTRIBUTORS
For twenty years, Instrument has been a place for making—where curiosity, craft, and play have shaped not only what we create, but how we create it. Experimentation has always been our default mode. From co-founder Justin Lewis teaching himself to code, to teams experimenting with video until it became an offering, we’ve always chased new possibilities. We’ve reimagined Google’s office tools as creative platforms, turned Google I/O’s save-the-date into an annual puzzle, built AR characters to explore emerging tech, and played with machine learning long before it was common practice. Our story has always begun with a simple question: What if?
That impulse—to follow a spark of curiosity, to make something just to see what happens, has quietly defined Instrument’s DNA. It’s why, as we celebrate two decades as an organization, we’re also celebrating a culture: one that values process as much as polish, experimentation as much as execution. Today, that same ethos lives on in our work, our partnerships and on Playspace, a newly dedicated place created with love by Lorraine Li and Vivek Thakker for prototypes, experiments, and tools—each born from that same “what if.” It’s our digital sketchbook, our evolving archive of creative inquiry, built to invite others to make, remix, and explore.
I see the power of ‘what-ifs’ as planting seeds that can grow into larger ideas. We hope the tools we publish on Playspace serve as those seeds—not only useful for their outputs, but also as beginnings, as hypotheses to be built upon.
The Long Game of Making
In an industry often driven by speed and efficiency, taking time to tinker can feel countercultural. Making is about curiosity, iteration, and the courage to explore uncertainty. The maker’s mindset isn’t about moving fast—it’s about moving deeply.
Experimentation demands patience. The first try rarely works. The second might break something. But in those moments of exploration—where intuition meets uncertainty—new ideas take shape. That’s where innovation happens: not in the rush to output, but in the rhythm of discovery.
This is where AI is particularly interesting. It’s a new space for imagination that the world has yet to entirely figure out, but as we tinker, explore, and play, we are rapidly learning what works best and what doesn’t. We’re discovering where efficiencies can be created—and where we want to dig deeper to build our own features and models in order to actually play and make more. Instead of spending our time resizing thousands of assets, we can be exploring the next creative idea, process, or emergent tool. We embrace this moment as just another one for experimentation, learning, and accelerating our making.
We’ve learned how to harness AI in a way that respects the craft of previous methods and evolves what it means to collaborate and communicate our ideas to one another. It enables different disciplines to communicate what’s in their head in ways that weren’t possible before. It allows repetitive movements to make way for creative growth.
Play as a Practice
We’ve always believed that play isn’t the opposite of work—it’s the root of it. From building internal tools to testing emerging technologies, we learn through doing. The prototypes, sketches, and half-finished ideas scattered across our digital shelves are evidence of curiosity in motion.
Our latest experiment—a p5.js-based tool built to animate and handle large volumes of images interactively—started as a technical challenge but became a creative breakthrough. What began as an idea for how we might interact with 20 years of archival material evolved into both the engine behind our 20th anniversary hype reel and a tool for ongoing creation, animation, and exploration.
The initial prototype—essentially a dynamic 3D ring of images and videos—was born from a simple “what if?” on a Figma board and took shape through a collaboration across a multidisciplinary team of designers, creative technologists and producers alike. As the project evolved, the underlying p5.js tool was developed, adding UI controls that made quick iteration possible—building a foundation that turned playful exploration into production-ready craft.
That experiment didn’t end there—it'll be open-sourced on playspace.instrument.com soon, extending the invitation to other makers to remix and build upon it. One idea became useful for many.
The play that comes in the beginning, when there’s no fixed outcome, just curiosity about what happens when certain ideas or systems come together. I always start with play, where form follows intuition. Over time, patterns emerge, and those playful iterations usually reveal something that can be built upon—a tool that’s useful, intentional, and uniquely our own.
Making as Culture
The heart of Instrument’s culture has always been its makers. Designers who code. Developers who design. Writers who prototype. There’s no single path to creativity here—just a shared belief that learning by doing is the best way forward.
In many ways, our evolution mirrors the larger creative landscape. Tools are changing, roles are blurring, and technology keeps redrawing the boundaries of what’s possible. But what remains constant is the courage to make—to try, to fail, to learn, to share.
An essential aspect of making things is a curiosity for how things are made. It’s empowering to play with new tools even if you make a mess of things.
Looking Ahead
As we enter our next chapter, the invitation is simple: keep making. Keep asking “what if.” Keep creating tools that invite others to join in. A rich future of creativity requires the courage to stay curious. At Instrument, we don’t wait for permission to experiment—we’ve built our identity around it.
Centering the maker isn’t just about celebrating the people who build, but about protecting the space where experimentation can thrive. Because when we make, we learn; when we play, we discover.
The people who love to create, to try, to share, are at the heart of everything we do. We inspire each other, and in sharing what we make, we remember how being curious rewards us all.
The line between serious work and play is mostly imaginary. That’s our spark, and it’s where we discover and shape what’s next.
