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Learn more about Sky Factory's vision, design framework, and business mission

Vision

We envision a world wherein the pristine beauty of nature is brought inside, where fine art and technology, within a proper architectural context, help to deliver the peace and balance that come from authentic experience of the depths of nature. We are committed to providing practical, affordable ceiling and wall installations that evoke the visceral experience of nature's vastness in a pure and profound way.

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Formed in 2002, the Sky Factory is a company of 35 people in a 12,000 sq. ft. facility on five acres in Fairfield, Iowa. Our business is to provide you with the highest quality Illusions of Nature and to do so affordably. “We” also includes assorted “partners” in various countries around the world. These are business associates, but more significantly friends, who, inspired by the beauty of nature, are bringing the sky inside for the people of their country. Many of us are artists of one kind or another but fortunately, we also have our share of engineers. Everyone has a healthy respect for magic—necessarily so—since our art lies in creating illusion.

Sky Factory is also a creative business experiment. Drawing on founder Bill Witherspoon's decades of entrepreneurial success and failure, and a desire to put nature's own organizing principles into practice, Sky Factory is an incubator for powerful new ways to organize, motivate, and inspire the work of a group of people in the service of creative, quality products that improve life.

Implementing some of the key practices of Jack Stack's Great Game of Business, especially Open Book Management, along with dedication to Extreme Customer Service, Lean manufacturing, Fine Art Aesthetics and Quality, and a deep reverence for Nature, Sky Factory is a unique young company with some engaging ideas about the role of culture in life and business.

Artists' Statement

It is our opinion that Sky Factory's SkyCeilings and related products are not just pretty pictures, nor are they simply design elements. In the deepest sense, the imagery is not even about the sky. Rather, they are illusions of nature designed to deliver a fundamental experience of vastness to occupants within interior built environments.

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We think of our work as technology—an artistic technology—whose purpose is to introduce the power and purity of nature into our living and working environments. We do this in an architecturally appropriate way that profoundly impacts human physiology and psychology.

John Keats, in his Ode on a Grecian Urn, concludes by telling us,
          "Beauty is truth, truth beauty, -- that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know."

At Sky Factory, it is our belief that by delivering the full beauty of the sky, we can deliver a fundamental truth—the inner truth of nature—and nature, we believe, is not limited to the world around us, but includes the very essence of who we are. Our goal then, is to deliver an experience of our innermost nature or self.

The Sky as Universal Experience

Why are we focused on the beauty of the sky? The sky is humanity's most universal experience of nature and, because of its scale and spatial nature, it automatically brings our awareness to vastness, the most abstract and fundamental cognitive experience underlying both inner and outer nature.

No matter who we are or where we live, we all see and love the sky. Everyone, in every culture, has experienced lying on their back looking up into clouds floating across a blue canopy. Even our bodies are attuned to the blue of the sky. It is no accident that our eyes and mind register the coolness of blue as distant space. (This is a fundamental principle behind Impressionism and bright red stoplights.) It should be no surprise that "blue sky" is the symbol for freedom and infinite possibilities.

Furthermore, the vast stillness of the sky is conditioned by ever changing patterns of clouds. These patterns are actually exquisite visual expressions of physical laws of nature that govern fluid dynamics. (We can see the same patterns repeated in the sand at the seashore, the bottom of streams or even in the large-scale erosion patterns on Earth and many of the outer planets and moons.) In short, the sky is not only beautiful, but it is also a place where the workings of nature are easily accessible by all.

Given a focus on the experience of truth, how do we attempt to create a beauty that is Truthful? To begin with, all Sky Factory products are illusions. We go to great lengths and use every possible tool to create hyper-real illusions, illusions that have the power to elicit our desired outcomean experience of the reality and depth of nature.

One of our favorite compliments came from a child who, while looking at a SkyCeiling, asked her dentist: What do you do when it rains?

Our Artistic Framework: Open Skies Image Technology

To accomplish truthfulness, we starwt by respecting gravity and verticality. While we love mountains and the seashore, they do not appear above our heads, so we don’t put such things on the ceiling!

We control the perspective of our images so that the sky we place on the ceiling is accurate and properly scaled for the observers' position and architectural frame of reference (as if we had cut a hole for the observer to look through). We use large format digital photography and Digital Cinema to ensure that our images contain as much real-world information as possible. In our Digital Cinema footage we use only real, unedited time.

We work with 6500K lighting or circadian systems that are designed to create luminous, time-based, daylight equivalents. We carefully control color, hue and contrast, and in that way express humidity, altitude, season and the time of the day.

One of our most important tools is composition—we emulate the organizing principles used by the great masters to ensure that a work of art is self-contained, continually moving, and attractive. We carefully select dynamic compositions and place them in the ceiling so that the observer's eye and mind respond by moving, and in that movement, experience the full journey, the full truth of the image. This movement of eye and mind is on the surface—from one element to the next—but there is also always a movement inward, into the depths of the image and its self-referral content of vastness.

Transcendental Experience — Beauty is Truth

It is in the "depth" of the image that we experience the ultimate "truth"—the experience of vastness and silence. Hence, it is our wish to lead the attention of viewers from trees and clouds to the formless infinite freedom of a deep blue sky. From this progressive movement, we expect them to emerge refreshed and reawakened.

In viewing SkyCeilings and SkyView, it is this exposure to nature's mechanics, her deepest truth, and the resulting resonance of that truth with our own individual nature that restores our psychology, our physiology, and our innermost self.

Does this work? If Keats is right, and if we do our job, we expect a powerful "yes!"

But the real question is: Does it work for you?

We certainly hope so.

Sky Factory People

The people at Sky Factory love nature — how nature looks, operates, creates and maintains itself. We are a diverse group of people hailing from many parts of the U.S. and around the world. We get along extremely well. Getting on the Sky Factory bus requires more than just a ticket, we've had to earn (and, in some cases, make) our seats—a multi-pronged interview process, trial periods, team reviews, and consistently good work with attention to the quality of our products, our service, and our culture.

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At the Sky Factory, we look for people who are comfortable with our core values, which include accountability, flexibility, self-improvement, and teamwork. As a group, we're interested in sustainability, pure food, fitness, and the best image-making technologies. And as a company, we’re vested in the design of outstanding art and technology products, as well as providing superior service.

Community is important to us. We care for each other in our little Sky Factory community, and the result is that the group is more than just a number of individuals. We are actively engaged in a variety of other communities that intersect with aspects of our own multifaceted identity, and we like our town. We are engaged in sustainable farming activities and initiatives on a local and national level through our non-profit; we're connected to the national Open Book Management community; and we're networked with researchers and designers pursuing a greater understanding of our inherent love of nature — biophilia.

Culture

Culture is to the corporation what DNA/RNA is to the life of living organisms - the internal blueprint and communication system by which a cell and the entire organism is created, maintained and grows. A healthy organism results from functional DNA/RNA and its related systems. Disease results from corrupted DNA/RNA. Similarly, culture is the internal fabric that is both formative and expressive of the behavior of all individuals (cells) and the corporate body.

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Recognizing the fundamental role of culture, Sky Factory is deliberately built around five cultural principles — transparency, flat hive-management, service, consensus and performance.

Transparency. With the exception of individual HR matters and compensation, all information throughout the company is open and displayed to all Sky Factory staff. Weekly all-company meetings include review of current company financials and performance metrics as well as discussion of all significant short and long-term business issues. There are no secrets.

Flat, hive-management. Sky Factory does not have a hierarchal system of management - no managers or supervisors. Sky Factory is a 'bottom up' organization of self-motivated individuals who participate in multiple job-teams and take periodic responsibility as the “facilitator” for one or more functional groups. The goal (recognized as unachievable, though worthwhile) is that everyone should know and be able to do everything. Individuals rotating through different jobs and teams as well as transparency support this goal.

Service. Service is the foundation that underlies our contractual relationship with each other, our customers, the corporation itself and our community (which extends to the world). However, as we extend our experience of service, it has become increasingly common that many find themselves engaging in service spontaneously - without consideration of return.

Consensus. All business decisions are made by a consensus within small teams or by the entire company. Complete transparency, alertness to the full range of the company's goals and business activities combined with flat management ensures that gaining consensus is highly efficient. Consensus ensures maximum input of group intelligence and results in maximum buy-in as well as insightful decisions.

Solar Powered

In keeping with our commitment to a green and sustainable business model, in 2012 Sky Factory installed a 54kw solar array, designed to generate more than 100% of Sky Factory's power needs. At the time, it was the largest private installation in the Hawkeye State (Iowa). For more details about our solar installation, including live and historical power generation figures, are available on our Solar page.

100% Sustainable & Organic Garden

Sky Factory is located in the heartland of America—Iowa. As a tribute to all those educators, co-ops, and farmers growing food in a sustainable manner, Sky Factory operates a 3.5 acre organic farm and garden. Faith Reeves, our resident farmer and soil expert, not only teaches sustainable practices, but also grows a range of assorted veggies that Sky Factory staff enjoy as an added bonus throughout the year.

We Support the Local Economy

As a small family-owned company with deep roots in the local economy, we work with local and regional suppliers to source as many domestic components as possible. Our products are designed and manufactured in the United States with domestic and foreign components. We ship worldwide from our headquarters in Fairfield, Iowa.

Contact Us

Sky Factory Israel
www.TheSkyFactory.co.il


Jonathan Bitton
jona@theskyfactory.co.il

Phone: +972-9-7410742
Fax: +972-9-7441972
Cell: +972-54-4511590

6 Rambam st
P.O.Box 752
Hod-Hasharon
Israel
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