Creativity and innovation have always depended on collaboration – whether people are making art, building structures or innovating tech. But how does collaboration work in times of distancing? How do we hack our way to health? Creatives often say they need to be in a room together and ‘feel the vibe’, yet we’re constantly finding new ways of creating togetherness apart. In this series, Kerrie Finch – founding partner of Futurefactor – will sit down with creative collaborators to discuss how we can apply their insights to business and the world of creative communication. How have they adapted to the current situation? Have they discovered new ways to work, play, and perform together? Join us for a left-field conversation on how to stay creatively connected during and post-pandemic.
Dr. James Beacham searches for answers to the biggest open questions of physics using the largest experiment ever, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. He hunts for dark matter, gravitons, quantum black holes, and dark photons as a member of the ATLAS collaboration, one of the teams that discovered the Higgs boson in 2012. His talk, “How we explore unanswered questions in physics”, was featured on TED.com and has been viewed more than 1.5 million times. He contributes to podcasts, radio shows, and documentaries, and has been featured in The New York Times, Wired, and Gizmodo, among others. In 2015 he launched Ex/Noise/CERN, a project exploring the connections between particle physics and experimental music and film.
Nick Bailey was named by Adweek in 2011 as one of the world’s top 10 creative minds in digital, Nick Bailey has held leadership positions as ECD of AKQA Amsterdam, CEO and CCO of Isobar London and Creative Director at Digitas LBi. Along the way he’s picked up over 100 international awards and sat on juries for the Cannes Lions’ inaugural Glass Lion, D&AD, eurobest and the One Show. As futurefactor’s CEO and creative partner, Nick brings both his creative and commercial leadership experience to the earned space.
Alain Sylvain is the Founder and CEO of Sylvain Labs, a strategy and design consultancy that helps companies seize the reality and potential of their business, products and brands. Clients include Google, American Express, Airbnb, Spotify, BlackRock, Samsung, Pepsico, Diageo, Hilton, AB InBev, IKEA, GM, Sonos, the NBA and others. Founded in 2010, the company is headquartered in NYC, with offices in Amsterdam and Richmond, VA, and is a Certified B-Corporation. Alain is a partner and investor in several ventures, including Master + Dynamic, a design-driven, premium audio brand, So Choice Softworks, a mobile gaming company, Lilo, an açai bowl company, and PetMio, a smart pet food startup. He is on the board of Plus Pool, an ambitious project to build the world’s first floating, filtering swimming pool in NYC harbor, and a member of the New York City Mayor’s Creative Council.
In 2013, Tessa Wernink co-founded Fairphone, a social enterprise that uses the production of smartphones to create social impact and drive positive change in the electronics industry. Recently, she initiated a storytelling platform called What If We Get It Right? By bringing out the voices of people in business across the globe, whose curiosity has led them to question current systems and develop more ethical and sustainable business practices, she is exploring and making available alternative narratives. Tessa is a public speaker, advisor for Tada: a movement around data ethics and responsible digital cities, and strategic advisor for the Amsterdam-initiated Creatives for Climate. She holds an MA in English with a minor in International Development Studies. She has in trained in Deep Democracy, Non-violent Communications, Journalism, Brand Management and is a THNK Creative Leadership Alumni.
Cassia Attard is a 19-year-old AI developer and solar nanotechnology researcher from Toronto. She is passionate about using nanotechnology to make solar energy technology more scalable using quantum dots, and has done many projects in the field. With the help of experts from the University of Toronto, the University of Waterloo and Amp Solar Group, Cassia has worked at several labs advancing quantum dot research with the goal of turning windows into solar panels. She has also focused on cellular agriculture — specifically altering hormonal growth factors to decrease the price of lab grown meat, an environmentally efficient alternative to farmed meat. Now at The Knowledge Society, she is engaging high school students to join the TKS community and start innovating themselves.
