Pivotal Labs

Pivotal Labs is a global software development consultancy rooted in agile methodology now operating under the name VMware Tanzu Labs. I worked at Pivotal for 5 years as a Design Manager during which I founded the original Design Department. As the company grew, we expanded our office space and I saw an opportunity for us to showcase our work in a statement piece for the new lobby entrance. Working with the architects and an AV specialist, we constructed a flexible video wall for the space. For the design I collaborated with developer Ian Smith-Heisters, creating a data-driven visualization that displays the current projects in production.

Using the Pivotal Labs logo mark as a symbol, each fan blade represents a client project. The color is determined by location and the size is equal to the number of team members. Kinect sensors detect the flow of people back and forth through the office, sending a virtual gust of wind across the fan blades in response to their movement, direction, and velocity.

The Continuous Integration Monitor is a tool used by developers to keep track of the health of a project codebase. At Pivotal Labs we had CI Monitors throughout the office which displayed all of the client projects currently being worked on. This data set was the same as was used for the interactive video wall above. This instance of the data was designed for ultimate utility so that a developer can raise their head and quickly check the status of their project. I interviewed developers in the office to ensure that the right information was prioritized and accessible in terms of their ability to see and understand the information from anywhere in the office.

If a project is “healthy” it is colored green, if “broken” it is colored red, and a project with unknown status is grey. It also displays the time since last polled and the recent build history. The Velocity refers to how many tasks the team is able to address in a given week.