Rich Loen spent thirty years running InGenius, which builds software to make call centres run smoother for some of the world's largest companies. When he sold his company in 2019, he made a list of everything he'd ever wanted to build but hadn't afforded the time for. The question was where it could all be built.
He had been watching a vacant six-bay garage on Carling Avenue in Ottawa for years, driving past it on the way to his kid's hockey practice, thinking it looked like exactly the right kind of place. He took it over in 2019, spent two years building it out into a full machine shop with woodworking equipment, welding stations, and a row of 3D printers; this was the Loen.Design Studio, until in 2024 Rich opened the gallery space adjacent the studio, and called it, the Salon des Bananes. Then, out of that and the gallery, over the better part of four years, he built what would become Databells: a room of roughly 100 bells, each wired to its own circuit board, each striking to the rhythm of a real-world statistic.
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