Daniel Sytsma discusses bridging the Innovation Gap

Daniel Sytsma started as a designer and ‘grew up’ as a creative and art director. He later became creative director and founded Studio Kraftwerk. He now divides his time between his role as Chief Design Officer EMEA and Executive Creative Director in Amsterdam. On 15 October he will speak at Emerce DARE about the innovation gap — you can read the original interview in dutch in emerce, written by Nicole Pickett-Groen.

What was the reason for your creative career?

My digital adventure started the moment my parents bought a Compaq 486 at home. I started experimenting with Photoshop and HTML, and learned how to make a website. At the age of 15 I had my first SME clients and earned my pocket money with design. I never really stopped.

I always loved to immerse myself in a new world that I knew nothing about. To discover in a few conversations what the essence of a brand / product was and then the best way to convey that.

After a year of communication science I discovered that that was far too theoretical for me. I wanted to make things, not consider them and examine them afterwards. Eventually I followed the Media & Art Design course and completed my internship as a freelancer at various agencies.

Which recent ‘digital design’ projects — yours or your agency — are you proud of?

The work we do takes place at the intersection of brand communication and innovation. The projects where it comes together in a beautiful way are the most interesting to me. We bring brand communication and innovation together.

A good example is Highway Fairy Tales. We have developed an app for Volkswagen that allows children to look outside in the back seat instead of on their phone. We do this with location-based audio books that respond in real-time to objects along the highway. In this way bridges, buildings, windmills and forests become part of the story that you listen to when you pass by.

To achieve that, we had to come up with a system that can put together a story based on modular chapters that are triggered by one of the 7,000 objects that we tagged. We collaborated with well-known children’s book writers such as Joke van Leeuwen and Babette van Veen, who had to be written in a new way.

Crisp is a very different project . A new supermarket app that delivers fresh food. They fill the gap between Picnic (budget supermarket, home delivery) and Marqt (good food, only physical stores). It is a super relevant product that I use regularly. We have worked on the positioning, the name, the brand identity and the design of the app. It is very nice for us to be able to build such a brand from the base.

What can you say about the success of the work you mentioned above and the results for clients?

Highway Sprookjes has delivered a spike in brand perception in the field of innovation and sympathy for Volkswagen. In addition, this project scored well in Cannes with six silver lions.

Crisp has proven itself as a business. That is of course primarily the merit of the Crisp-team, but I am proud that we have been able to contribute a part.

How do you keep innovating, both in your creative process and in your thinking?

I still learn every day from strategists, designers and creatives with whom I may work. I have been working at the same agency for almost twelve years, but fortunately new, interesting people are added every year.

Our profession is constantly evolving. That is why we are actively working every day to redefine our own desk model and to build new propositions. For me, that started with the launch of Kraftwerk. We set this up because we noticed that our customers were increasingly aware that a brand is not only built with beautiful stories, but that you also have to apply the same focus on creativity and design to the digital user experience of your brand. This fitted in nicely with Achtung’s digital brand activation background!

And last year, together with Isobar, we set up NowLab. This is our innovation lab where we explore the future with customers and make it tangible, in the form of prototypes. We have built a physical space of 120 square meters for which we hold design workshops, organize events and do design sprints. NowLab’s promise is that we can bring a distant future close by moving from idea to validated prototype in a few weeks, so that you as an organization can better organize your roadmap.

What are ‘digital design’ examples that the Netherlands can be proud of?

We have a number of Dutch people in very nice places internationally. They shape the most successful and innovative brands on a daily basis. Remon Tijssen has for years invented new interfaces at Adobe and now works as a principal designer at Uber. We also have Bas Ording of course. He has designed some of the most iconic interface elements of MacOS and iOs, such as the dock, the elastic effect that makes your page bounce back when you reach the end of a page, and the Apple Watch interface. At Tesla he is now thinking about the user experience of their future models.

Which themes do you think creatives can think about more?

That depends on which creatives you are talking about. There are still many places where creativity lives in a silo. You have (more traditional) creatives who put a brand at the center, but don’t think much about the digital brand experience. And you have (digital) creatives who make full use of the opportunities of technology and innovation, but sometimes forget the brand story. Brands increasingly consist of a digital brand experience. So it is important to close the traditional versus digital gap. It must feel like a single brand experience.

Could you tell us something about cool projects that you are currently working on?

We are working on an interactive installation for a museum in which we show the future of connected mobility. I am working with international colleagues on a worldwide campaign on malaria in which Augmented Reality (AR) plays an important role, and we are working on a redesign of brand and platform for a Dutch unicorn *. All very different, but all super interesting for different reasons.

Do you have a ‘tip from the top’ for young ‘digital design’ talents?

Get very good at one thing. But try to show as much interest as possible for all disciplines, because only together will you progress.

Daniel is one of the speakers at Emerce DARE that will take place on 15 October in Pakhuis de Zwijger. During this one-day event, the best creatives of today share their vision of our digital future with topics such as design systems, multi-dimensional user experiences, artificial intelligence and new visions of creative processes.