Ink & Switch marks a decade with 'Tenfold' and a tour of its local-first research

Research lab Ink & Switch turned its homepage into an interactive celebration of its tenth anniversary, publishing a clickable art piece called Tenfold—ten letters for ten years—built on technology developed in-house. Beyond the anniversary flourish, the page doubles as a survey of the lab’s work and its guiding ambition: computing that augments human thinking, supports real-time collaboration, and keeps data available and under the user’s control.

The lab organizes its research around four themes—software architectures that return data ownership to users, malleable tools people can reshape in the moment, programmable ‘dynamic mediums’ that make sketches behave like spreadsheets, and versioning tools for exploring alternatives and history. Concrete projects span local-first access control using capabilities and end-to-end encryption, spreadsheet-like systems for decision-making, and shared object-memory environments for multi-user collaboration.

Two efforts have graduated into widely used tools: Patchwork, a visual canvas for organizing notes, sketches, PDFs, and other media, and Automerge, a library that syncs changes across devices—even offline—using conflict-free replicated data types (CRDTs). The lab, sustained by individual and corporate sponsors plus research grants, recently gathered in Berlin for Local-First Conf to share progress on Patchwork, PlayBook, Automerge, and related projects.