Google Creative Lab Summary
❓ What is the CL?
In early 2017, I was chosen to join the Google Creative lab 5 program, alongside 3 others. The creative labs explores the intersection of technology, culture and the arts, and every day was filled with experimentation, only a tiny fraction of which made it out into the world.
⚒️ What did we do?
The entire team participated in ideation and our brains were squished and squeezed for a year straight, imagining new futures, tech applications and creative coding projects. My role was to be a bit like glue, acting as producer, conducting UX research, design and testing, writing and delivering decks designed to share learnings from our experiments. One deck I wrote was used by Tea Uglow to campaign for the inclusion of the transgender flag emoji (a 3+ year battle).
CL Behind The Scenes
One of the experiments that made it out was XY-Fi in collaboration with the British Museum; you can read about here and here. I was responsible for collaborative ideation, rapid prototyping with holograms, UX wireframing and testing.
After our year in the labs, Deb and I went on to co-found Talu Tales… and play Dungeons and Dragons. To follow are a few photos from prototyping: a LEGO messenger, holograms for the British Museum and a musical jellyfish for a primary school.
Collab credits
Emila Yang
Simon Blanckensee
Deborah Ho
Hugh Kennedy
Jennifer Nunez
A little LEGO prototype to send digital messages to distant friends
Prototyping holograms for British Museum
Early interaction design flows for users activating the holographic displays using XY-Fi on their phones
Final British Museum installation
XY-Fi in use with SBS
Jellyfish prototype (part of around 30 ideas for a primary school activation)
As a side project during some downtime Deb Ho and I created a set of sustainability posters, notecards, landing page and a keep cup reality TV style story to encourage Googlers to use less single use plastics/coffee cups. At the time, over 5000 plastic water bottles were going to waste in the office per week. A week into sharing the posters Google purchased a water bottle and keep cup for every Googler featuring these assets: water bottles with faces, and stickers to decorate your very own sassy sustainable character. Artwork by Deb!
