The brand-experience agency Freeman hosted an event to announce the creation of its Freeman Design Leadership Council—and then created an impactful design moment of its own involving that combined colorful visuals with technology.
At the October 19 event at Samsung 837 in New York, some 150 guests were handed white umbrellas that could change colors according the users' choices. “The M.I.T.-designed illuminated umbrellas allowed us to bring the group together in an immersive, visually compelling, and unexpected way that involved everyone making something simple and beautiful together,” a Freeman rep said.
The Freeman Design Council—created and selected by Freeman chief design officer Bruce Mau—is a group of experts that will present innovative design ideas for the brand-experience industry. The council's first 10 members are the World Building Institute's Alex McDowell; former Walt Disney Imagineering creative executives Bruce Vaughn and Peter McGrath; Charles Adler, a founder of Kickstarter and Lost Arts; Coca-Cola's David Butler; Lululemon Athletica's Gina Warren; Personal BlackBox's Haluk Kulin; Pilobolus's Itamar Kubovy; Robert Schmidle Jr., a retired Marine; and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies' Sergei Gepshtein. The members of the council were revealed one day before Mau was honored by the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum as a 2016 National Design Award winner. Mau is also co-founder and C.E.O. of Massive Change Network, an agency for design, branding, and publishing.
Live experiences will be an important part of the council's work. Mau said at the event, “What is the future of live experiences? We see it as a synthesis of digital and physical. ... We have the potential to create massive change in a really extraordinary way."
