Our special studio visit today is with Robert Wong, Vice President and executive creative director of Google Creative Labs. As the AIGA notes, the lab is “a contemporary think tank of the sort that’s been all but phased out of modern businesses, puts a small group of talented people from diverse creative backgrounds (writers, filmmakers, designers, UX developers) together to generate ideas that will help develop the Google brand through the power of storytelling and design.”

the Hong Kong-born Wong, who springs from an education in accounting, has created a Google team that visualizes possible futures, “distilling very complex ideas into products people are attracted to. Things that they want to use, things that engineers want to make. Imagine a dotted arrow connecting a Google product straight to a single user,” adds Wong. “We create along the whole spectrum, sometimes at the tip of the arrow, where the benefits of a product are so clear all that needs to be done is to tell people about it. Sometimes we create all the way back within the tech, where we may even help shape it into a product.”