06 / 06 — Studio
Studio
Ideas are better when you can touch them. That is
the whole method: we enter situations where the answer isn’t obvious yet, find the
opportunity, and make it tangible enough to see, use, test and believe in — as client work,
as our own experiments, and as our own ventures. A design and innovation studio, founded in
New York in 2006 and kept deliberately small.
- Established
- 2006
- Location
- New York
- Entity
- creativity is everywhere LLC
- Operates as
- Client work · Playable R&D · Ventures · Executive partnership
A small studio with an expandable brain
The core is intentionally small. Around each opportunity we assemble the right combination
of people, technology and AI: a network of designers, engineers, strategists, researchers,
makers, writers, producers and subject-matter experts we have worked with before, and a set
of AI systems we build and run ourselves — for research, synthesis, prototyping, software,
coordination, and the memory of a project. The shape of the work decides the shape of the
group, not an org chart.
AI is part of how we work. It doesn’t define
what we work on.
Most of what we make with it is judgement arriving sooner: what to build, what to stop,
which of six directions is worth a prototype this week. Seven of the tools we needed for
that did not exist, so we wrote them and published them —
superforge,
Snap Pair,
interactive-experience-skills,
intuitive-game-design,
cross-model-handoff,
failforward
and multilingual-readme.
They are open on GitHub, which is where what each one does is written properly.
And a good deal of what we take on has none of it in it at all — a festival, a brand, a
room.
Creativity is not a department
The studio began with that one belief. The next idea can come from a designer or an
engineer, a founder or a customer, a child, a tradition, a new technology, an algorithm, an
accident, or an unusual connection between two things that had nothing to do with each
other.
So we keep no walls between strategy and execution, creative and business, technology and
culture, brand and product, physical and digital, thinking and making. We move between them,
and the work is better for it.
The point was never to produce more work. It is to find the things that should exist, and
make them real enough that people can decide.
Methods
BreakBias
A structured way to get past the three ideas a team would have had anyway. It developed
from the creative inquiry behind Extra Ordinary, co-authored by our founder in
2005, into a framework for exposing the assumptions that narrow an innovation search
before it starts. We run it as a workshop, and as the facilitation inside an executive
engagement.
The book, framework, and workshop
intentfirst
We design from what someone is trying to do, not from the screens that get them there.
Eight context tokens carry the intent through a product and three memory layers keep it
true across a session, so the system does not forget what it was asked halfway
through.
It is also a venture
Strategic prototyping
An idea that stays abstract cannot be judged, only debated. We make it real enough to
use, early enough that being wrong is still cheap — which is why almost every
engagement here ends in something running rather than something bound.
Founder
Takao Umehara — founder; design and innovation lead; venture builder.
Takao founded creativity is everywhere in New York in 2006. The work has moved in layers —
brand, then interactive, then product and customer experience, then innovation strategy,
and most recently AI inside large organisations — and each layer was a new medium to find
out what people would actually do with. That is the thread: not a discipline, but the
beginning of things, and the habit of making an idea real enough to decide on before the
path is obvious. Takao’s own archive of that work is at
takaoumehara.com,
and the direct line is takao@creativityiseverywhere.com.
Earlier and independent engagements are listed separately, with the relationship stated,
so nothing here reads as a client of this company that was not one.
The index of organisations
