N A B A z TA G , A N A m B I G U O U S AVATA R 247 16.5 design process Violet's development process was largely informal. The founders were experi- enced technology creators, yet followed an intentionally contrarian, unstruc- tured development process. The twelve people who made up the core design and development team regularly met and discussed ideas, then coordinated among each other as needed. As Violet grew from its four initial founders to the thirty people who worked there at its peak, their development process became somewhat more structured, but (according to Haladjian) they never followed a formal methodology. Nevertheless, Violet's highly informal, highly iterative development history (see Sidebar: Violet's Early products, From Displays to Characters) can be divided into two broad phases, with the design of open- ended hardware preceding the design of behaviors that exploited the capabili- ties of that hardware. 16.5.1 hardware: the alphabet One Violet founder is an electrical engineering professor. He and his students developed a basic hardware platform that was designed to maximize possibili-