Google+ Campaign Exploration
Goodby, Silverstein & Partners
Our goal was to inspire the telling of human stories in a human way, with real, tangible, worn-in humanity.
A long-time client, Goodby Silverstein & Partners brought me and Erik Natzke together for a unique collaboration: We were tasked with assembling creative technology and artistic expression to inspire new ways of looking at Google’s new product, Google+.
With that, we took over an empty floor of one of the agency’s San Francisco buildings, and embarked on a materials exploration of the city, with the intent of capturing tactile, warm, natural textures that exuded humanity to us.
I wrote prototypes in ActionScript (Adobe Animate) and JavaScript, to create the web-based experiences, incorporating a full-fledged physics engine, and building tools in JavaScript that allowed us to customize physics-based interactions in our demo, pitch the creative direction team at GS&P, inspire them, and encourage them to push the boundaries of interactivity for this new campaign.
Roles:
Digital Artist
Creative Technologist
Collaborator:
Erik Natzke
Client:
GS&P, San Francisco
Launched:
2011
Erik and I collected and created thousands of elements - buttons, typography of all kinds, wood, felt, wallpaper, toys, plasticine, and more. We employed a laser-cutter, set up a stop-motion capture rig, and began experimenting with these beautiful materials.
As we experimented, we captured out output, via photographs, videos, software prototypes, and created a 45-page coffee-table book, which we delivered to creative teams on the Google+ campaign.
A critical aspect to the collaboration was that Erik and I are both creative technologists, and so, along the way, we developed several working protoypes - this included a tactile typography message-writing engine, a physics-based interactive doodle created using claymation techniques, and several data visualizations for Google+ feeds.
Collaborating with Erik Natzke and GS&P was a tremendously rewarding artistic experience, and the effort resulted in expressions that, to this day, are still inspirational to me.
