Out of everything I’ve ever done, I hope the moisturizing pays off most of all.
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The tech giant has always been curious and willing to take risks, but now Google is increasingly being looked at as a sophisticated design company, an incredible opportunity to push further. Like most brands, when we speak about building “experiences,” we usually mean a few well-trodden gestures such as events and online conversations, all part of the modern marketing playbook, so I was invited by the Head of Cultural Initiatives to join the team and help dig deeper into how we might affect social behavior and norms in order to engage potential customers. Together, we learned that each moment is an opportunity to plant a seed. Those are cultural moments, and the opportunity was ripe for Google to become a cultural engine.
As Creative Director of Cultural Initiatives, I contributed to a few teams across Google Hardware, YouTube and Marketing.
I dream in technicolor. So when a company as dedicated to the craft of visual beauty as VSCO, knocks on your door, you open and you open quick! Tapped to help create ripples around the launch of the new Desktop Workflow, we imagined telling the story of one of their makers, the impressively talented photographer Nate King, from understanding his roots in Auckland, CA to witnessing the fruits of his labor at a group show he helped create in Brooklyn, NY. A hero’s journey to be sure.
“Can you get on a plane to San Francisco as soon as possible? It’s for a tech company, we’ll tell you more when you land” was all I heard on the phone. When I got there, I was told Intel wanted to re-think the rote tech conference. They needed a story and a director. I dove right in.
My team and I endeavored to create, not a mere gathering, but a story about technology that is seldom told in the valley, that of its impact. We didn’t want to demonstrate, again, what technology is, but what it can do, not talk about specs but what they allow, certainly not blabber on about chips, but about the feats of imagination they trigger. The result was COMPUTE, a new kind of conference, in which Intelligence would not be artificial, but assembled.
Auto-maker VinFast hired our Group of Humans to launch a duo of electric vehicles, the first Vietnamese company to set up shop in the United States since the war.. The challenge of a lifetime. I cannot divulge too much and will keep this one under lock, just ask me for the key and I’ll see what I can do.
No two projects are alike, and studying each client’s purpose and context before any ideas is launched is foundational. Thoughtful understanding of behavior and context is the cornerstone of a line well-drawn, and the following pieces of work are testaments to such consideration. Assembling targeted teams for different projects, from managers to designers to architects to filmmakers to set builders, is the main reason I love what I do, to be able to present bold new visions for each assignment that don’t merely borrow from the ones that came before. To invent, always.
Culture must be the foundation of our work because it places every idea, product and event within a frame of reference that people will recognize, identify with, and hopefully aspire to. Creating culture then becomes an objective greater in scope than storytelling, the borrowed term over-used by agencies, including my own, to persuade clients that we are more than technicians. When we marvel at the details stitched into an event or a launch, they show us that they care about creating something meaningful beyond a sale, and that gives consumers confidence that the company designs their products with the same attentive purpose. That is why cultural incursions are so important.
New York City. Nineteen Ninety-Nine: The Apartment Design Store is born. Set up as a functioning loft in SoHo, we presented objects of desire in a lived-in context, where you could lunch, watch tv, even shower, and buy everything you touched, from the Japanese toothpaste to the Italian sofa. We shaped our process around a simple philosophy: that since everything in the world is designed, we must be attentive and curate our lives only with those objects that we find personally relevant, useful and beautiful. Prioritizing community and consumer education, we were able to bring in a new audience to appreciate design for what it does, not just what it looks like.
Originating as a retail store, we quickly grew into an agency, doing for clients what we had done for ourselves. As a group of wildly influential individuals came together, we conceptualized events, designed products and built spaces, all to deepen our clients’ narratives.
Without an orchestra, I’m just a weirdo gesticulating on a podium.
Network
Through the last few decades of living in various countries and working in a variety of industries, I have been lucky to meet and join forces with exceptional people; hailing from the fields of design, art, film, music, theater, fashion and more, it has been my privilege to call them friends, mentors and collaborators. Moreover, it has been an honor to learn from all the members of this grand orchestra in order to become a more capable, knowledgeable and competent conductor. The opportunity to call on their gifts given a particular challenge is the moment I wait for every time a new challenge comes through the door.