Experience Innovation Studio:
At the core of our offering is the ability to generate a new perspective, the new structure of our awareness of context, relations, resources, and possibilities - an agile, transformative perspective.
Kinetic Optimism Studio is an experience innovation practice bringing together design, social imagination, and a system-based approach to find unique solutions for emerging technology products and new social frameworks.
Working together with our client’s product architects, we are designing experiential frameworks, unlocking the product’s participatory potential, and focusing on new roles and relationships that connected objects are starting to participate in through unfolding new techno-social situations: personal, social, and public.
Whether it means supporting people in treatment through mobilizing benevolent awareness of our healing resources & relations or unlocking the service potential of connected cars, our designs aim to make the experience of a connected world meaningful and disarmingly human.
Our Experience:
We are the catalyst for change, for new ideas, systems, and experiences that help people find new doors to product meaning and purpose.
As an experience innovation studio we were lucky to find unique partners and collaborate on special projects for Ford, AstraZeneca, United Rentals, J&J, MERC, Lincoln, Mazda, VitaminWater, and others.
Since 2018, k_o studio has partnered with Ford Product Development - bringing together experience design and technological architecture to unlock the experiential potential of Software Defined Vehicle /with a US patent granted and several joined patent disclosures and unique experience prototypes/.
The essence of this unique collaboration is about technology and experience design, coming together at the architecting stage, making room for new, compelling human experiences that have the ability to differentiate what otherwise would be a conventional function.
There is always a surplus of social possibility in any situation and object that is not revealed by current interaction patterns.
Who is k_o ?!
k_o studio is a creative partnership between two designers, Wojtek Szumowski and Shabnam Hosseini, and the constellation of generous contributors in synergy with the courage, vision, and trust of our clients and partners.
Wojtek envisions studio commitment to experience as a design objective. Wojtek’s energy draws from a life perspective of a poet who studied product design and sociology, particularly interested in how technology takes hold in social relationships, redistributing relations between people and objects and inviting new techno-social contexts. As designer, Wojtek continues to draw from social imagination and agile, poetic perceptiveness, making connections, composing relations, revealing meaning, and the why. Wojtek’s journey is defined by sharing creative energy with people seeking to do things they haven't done before, probing new forms of relationship between people, culture, and products in collaboration with clients such as Virgin Atlantic, IKEA, Volkswagen, Dominos, American Express, Ford Product Development, Lincoln, Hotels.com, OnStar, and others.
Shabnam is an artist, designer, and educator. Shabnam is the studio's imaginator and visual narrativist with a melancholic eye for emotional detail. Shabnam creates disarming experiential narratives, emerging out of everyday context while offering openings for people to inhabit these spaces and objects with their energy and meaning.
We envisioned Kinetic Optimism Studio because we see human experience as more than "life in a permanent task mode." We want to expand how people and technology co-participate in experience. We are curious about room for delight, meaning, purpose, and the broader social values of the projects and are interested in the relations these experiences support.
As designers, we want to inspire awareness of our emotions and relations, making it an active & distinctive resource for designing meaningful experiences and innovating our relationship with technology and each other.
Some early framework for our practice is archived at Room for More Possibilities.
