I’m a cultural theorist on a quest to know how style emerges, propagates, and comes to define time and place.
I advise companies, brands, and artists looking to create the next big thing. Like AkzoNobel, the largest coatings manufacturer in the world, whom I’ve worked with for more than a decade on color futures.
I’m a researcher, focused on narratives, visual and online culture. I recently led work at Harmony Labs to understand the narrative landscape for critical minerals across nine countries.
I’m a founding faculty member at the School of Visual Arts’ Masters in Branding program, where I teach cultural analysis. I’m a frequent lecturer at arts events, like the Conrad Festival in Krakow, and institutions, like the Academy of the Arts in Zürich.
I was the second hire at sparks&honey, Omnicom’s cultural intelligence and foresight consultancy.
I studied semiotics, design, and comparative religion in Tübingen and Milan and grew up on three continents, between seven languages. I live between New York, Rio De Jainero, and Lima.
I created the Sensing Zeitgeist workshop to supercharge team creativity with a novel method for turning cultural signals into high value intelligence, media content, products, and business models.
⇊
Sensing Zeitgeist
An experience for futures literacy
What do AI, Labubu’s, protein shakes, MDMA, and other sticky cultural phenomena have in common? Do they share an identifiable code? Can we use this code to create winning products, services, brands, strategies, and businesses?
Earlier thinkers referred to the code underlying popular phenomena as zeitgeist, translated literally as “time spirit.” We see zeitgeist expressed in the packaging that catches our eye, the fragrances that tickle our noses, the politicians we vote for, and the food we eat. Fashion, architecture, graphic design, academic theory, digital media . . . underlying all of it is an aesthetic language we can learn to sense, describe, and use as a decision making tool.
This presentation and workshop pairing posits the existence of zeitgeist and points toward a method for sensing and describing it, drawing on iconological analysis methods from art history and design, as well as on embodied cognition practices. We explore and gain experience in how zeitgeist offers a flexible, easy-to-use evaluative and predictive framework, to ensure powerful, culturally relevant outputs in innovation, design, communications, and business planning. Participants learn and practice how to reliably sense, isolate, and reproduce the DNA of what is emerging as culturally fresh, sticky, and salient.
⇊
Curious?
Get in touch to start a conversation.