Sketch Piston

teamLab, 2009-, Web

Sketch Piston

teamLab, 2009-, Web

Your canvas is your world, when you draw a line, the line becomes part of the world, the characters in your world bounce and slide on the lines, or objects like balls bounce and resonate sounds.
Sketch Piston is an artists tool and web contents project that gives new value to the act of drawing and creates new enjoyment from the act of drawing. This is the concept we call, “New Value in Behavior”.
The concept of a user interface and game and tool contents being combined into a “Contents Interface” was behind the development of corporate sites and promotion site Sketch Piston interfaces by teamLab.


Depending on the world drawn and created the characters in Sketch piston will jump or slide. Place a stamp on the canvas and it will start to move. For young children with great imagination, we have created a fantasy world, draw in this fantasy world and the imaginative possibilities are endless, the fantasy world they create starts to spring into action. It doesn’t matter if, as an adult your are no longer as imaginative as you were as a child, or that you are not so good at drawing pictures, through the process of drawing a line and starting the fantasy world in motion you can freely enjoy creating pictures and return to your childhood imaginative days – at least that’s what we would like.


There is also a musical versions of Sketch Piston. Sounds are produced by drawing lines or balls bouncing. At the time of childhood, free from the constraints of adult knowledge, things around us, everything, was an instrument. When you become an adult we become constrained by knowledge, and we can wonder why we are not musically talented. We created sketch Piston to give back the chance for anyone to freely enjoy making sounds, the world which you draw and create becomes an instrument and the instrument makes music.


Before the information society, design was about making high quality contents that could be appreciated. In the information society, however, all users can express themselves, the things that your friends have expressed become contents. Design in the information society has become a free form of expression. For us, design was t o make a tool that would enable the expression of a non professional user to make high quality contents.