Design & innovation studio
New York — est. 2006
Ideas are better when you can touch them.
We help companies imagine, prototype and build new businesses, products, brands and experiences — from the first executive conversation to something running in your hands.
Email us01 / 06 — Services
Four things you can hire this studio to do. They run into each other on purpose: the same people carry a piece of work from the question to the thing you can use.
For an organisation that knows it needs something new and does not yet know what. We run the search deliberately — where the opportunity actually is, what to build first, and how it would make money — and stop at a prototype rather than at a recommendation.
Opportunity discovery · innovation strategy · BreakBias workshops · value proposition · business and service concept · MVP definition · pilots
Turning an idea into something usable and testable. We are the people who design it and the people who write it, which is why the interaction survives contact with the code. AI sits inside this work as a material, not as the point of it.
Product strategy · AI products · UX and UI · service design · interaction design · creative technology · games · interactive installations · rapid prototyping
Business, product and brand designed as one thing rather than handed between three suppliers. The advantage is not that we make identities; it is that the identity is made by the people who also know what the product does.
Brand strategy · identity · naming · creative direction · digital brand experience · storytelling · launch
A design and innovation perspective at the table where the decisions are actually made — reviewing products and brands, judging where AI is worth the trouble, and turning an executive conversation into something built well enough to argue about. Not another vendor, and not a day rate.
Fractional CDO · strategic advisory · product and brand review · AI opportunity evaluation · portfolio decisions · design leadership · agency and vendor review
Tell us what you are trying to build and where it currently stands. We reply from New York.
02 / 06 — Playable
Don't just look at our work. Play with it. Eight working experiments in interaction, AI and games, built to test ideas by making them real enough to touch — and where the input is a voice, a hand, a drawn line, or every phone in the room. Input that isn't a keyboard. Four of them open right now, in this browser.
Type a word into the dark and it condenses out of drifting particles, holds as a constellation, then dissolves back. The opposite of a feed.
1,200 real stars from the HYG catalogue
Scribble on your phone, throw it at the wall. A QR code joins any number of phones to one big screen — no app, no install.
Snap Pair · Firebase RTDB
The body becomes an instrument. Which fingers you raise is the chord; stopping is a held note. All tracking runs on the device — the video never leaves it.
MediaPipe · Web Audio · on-device
Tic-tac-toe, rebuilt until the feel was right. A solved game is a good place to work on nothing but touch, timing and weight.
Canvas · game feel
A game you play with your face. Pull the expression it asks for, and muscles you never train get a workout you want to repeat. Works without a camera too, on the keyboard.
478-point face mesh · 25 games
Shout, and your voice bursts into comic-book onomatopoeia on the screen. Level is measured on the phone; no audio ever leaves it.
Snap Pair · Web Audio
An emoji-only arcade shooter, two players head to head. The scroll direction changes every stage, and the boss learns where you like to stand.
WebRTC direct · no relay · single file
The card game, dealt to the phones already in the room. Nobody hands anything to anybody, and nobody sees a card that is not theirs.
Snap Pair · shared screen
Every piece here was self-initiated — nobody commissioned them. They sit alongside the products and tools we build for ourselves.
03 / 06 — Work
Eight engagements, across business, product, brand and experience. Every one says who engaged us, because work done as this company and work our founder did before it are not the same claim.
A sustainability consultancy repositioning for new markets. Brand DNA, then an identity system, then a sub-brand launched out of it — DO! NUTS TOKYO.
Brand & creative · Venture & innovation
creativity is everywhere
An open-source high-school English curriculum, published free, spanning four grade levels. A large body of teaching material needed one credible identity — rigorous, but not forbidding in a classroom.
Brand & creative
creativity is everywhere
Citizen engagement for Tokyo's zero-emission goals: a social innovation platform with a youth ambassador programme attached.
Brand & creative · Venture & innovation · 2021 American Graphic Design Award — with KUDOS Design Collaboratory
creativity is everywhere
Identity and site for Konosaki, live and viewable now rather than described after the fact.
Brand & creative
creativity is everywhere
A new drink that needed creative endorsement it had not bought: a short film series made with real New York creatives rather than actors reading lines.
Brand & creative · Experiences
creativity is everywhere
A dance education platform where the interface had drifted apart screen by screen. Rebuilt on one design system so the next screen would not drift again.
Products & AI
creativity is everywhere
Vocabulary learning, designed around the fact that the hard part is returning tomorrow rather than understanding today.
Products & AI
creativity is everywhere
Post-login experience for prepaid, and an AI workflow that put 10 agents in front of 42 designers across 6 brands.
Products & AI
Independent — engaged directly, not through the LLC
Every client, including the ones from before this company existed, is listed with the relationship spelled out.
04 / 06 — Ventures
We help other people build new things. We build our own too — four products nobody commissioned, and seven tools we needed, could not find, and published.
A way to build software that starts from intent rather than from screens. Eight context tokens carry what the user is trying to do; three memory layers keep it true across a session.
Context tokens · memory layers
A short cognitive self-check. The model scores it and returns a written profile of how your own attention and memory actually behave — prose, not a score out of ten.
React · Vite · Firebase · Gemini
A link-in-bio page for promo codes and events. Point it at a flyer and it reads the dates, codes and venue off the image instead of asking you to type them.
Image understanding · web · in production
A self-initiated concept for buying from the sofa: a ten-foot interface where the remote has five buttons and the basket has to still make sense.
Concept prototype
Self-initiated concept. Not affiliated with, or commissioned by, Amazon.
A suite of skills that routes a build from idea to shipped product, and assigns a model tier per subtask instead of running everything on the most expensive one.
Pair phones and browsers with a QR code, then share live state across every device in the room. No install. The engine underneath Rakugaki Jam, Koe Baku and Werewolf.
The judgement behind installation and interactive work — format choice, technical selection, throughput and running cost — written down so it can be applied rather than re-derived.
How to make something a first-time player understands with no tutorial, and how to fix a jump that feels wrong. Affordance, coyote time, input buffering, juice.
A structured capsule that lets work move between models and tools without losing context — Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, Cursor.
Debugging memory that survives the session. Past failures are recalled before diagnosis and new ones recorded after, in a file that gets committed.
Keeps a README correct in five languages at once, so the translation does not quietly rot away from the code it describes.
The interactive pieces are ours as well, and they are the fastest way to see what this studio actually makes.
05 / 06 — Clients
Grouped by what the relationship actually was. Most studios show a wall of logos and let you assume the rest; this is the same information with the assumption removed.
Independent — engaged directly, not through the LLC
Earlier work by our founder, in-house or at an agency
No public case study exists for these, so none is claimed. They are named here for the record.
Teams who have taken part in a BreakBias session. They are participants, not clients, and the distinction is deliberate.
Workshop participants have included innovation teams from Olympus, Hakuhodo, Ricoh, and Microsoft.
06 / 06 — Studio
creativity is everywhere works across business, product, brand and technology — from early ideas and executive decisions through to working prototypes and launched experiences. Founded and run by Takao Umehara, from New York, since 2006.
A structured way to get past the three ideas a team would have had anyway. Frameworks gathered, researched and recombined over fifteen years, aimed at the assumptions that quietly narrow the search before it starts. We run it as a workshop.
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.
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.
Takao Umehara founded creativity is everywhere in 2006 and runs it from New York. The first fifteen of those years went into learning how people actually behave in front of a screen, which turns out to be the part that does not change when the model underneath it does.
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.
Tell us what you are trying to build and where it currently stands. We reply from New York.