Where this comes from
For the better part of two decades, my biggest client was a product innovation team inside one of the world's largest electronics companies. They ran on research: deep consulting reports on what our homes, cars, and devices were about to become. Some of what sat in their pipeline arrived years before the versions of it the world eventually met. One of San Francisco's leading industrial design firms gave those ideas physical form. And at the end of every cycle, they'd call me to turn all of it into film. Motion pieces that made a speculative future feel present enough that leadership would keep funding it.
I used to call the work "internal sales and marketing" because nobody had a better name for it. The better name is this: I was the translation layer between research and belief. That role led to working with the design firm directly, and eventually to one of the world's most ambitious technology companies, shooting proof-of-concept films for speculative hardware. Different buildings, same seat: the moment where research either becomes conviction or gets quietly shelved.
What that seat taught me
Two things, watching it from the inside for years.
First, the most valuable documents inside these companies aren't the ads or the decks. They're the research reports almost nobody sees, the ones the real decisions rest on. I got to read them, work from them, and learn how they're built.
Second, research alone almost never carries the day. Even great research has to be translated into something designed, narrated, and legible before anyone will bet money on it. That gap between good thinking and belief is where futures quietly die, and closing it is a design problem. It also happens to be the exact problem I spent my career solving from the last seat in the room.
What BASE is
BASE moves me from the last seat to the first. From Beginning to End this time, which turns out to be hiding in the name itself: B and E bookend the journey, with Analysis and Strategy doing the work in between. Instead of being called in at the end to translate someone else's research, BASE authors the whole arc, from research through design to narrative, as one practice.
The output is a field report: a document with the rigor of a consulting study and the craft of a studio piece. Structured enough to base a real decision on, designed well enough that people actually read it, share it, and remember it. A team can get through one in an evening and know what to do the next morning.
The name
BASE works as an anchor before it works as an acronym. A base is a foundation, a baseline, a home base, even a forward operating base. That last one might be the truest reading: a secure position built at the edge of unfamiliar territory so it can be explored seriously. Forward-thinking, by construction.
The letters themselves stay deliberately open. Building Applied Strategy and Execution. Backed Analysis, Strategic Execution. Building Around Subjects I Find Engaging. Build Around Stuff You Enjoy. The serious readings explain how it works; the playful ones explain why it exists. And the last one is still the engine: find the thing worth loving, do the real work, and build the bridge from research to reality.
The practice publishes first
BASE runs its own serialized research program, all of it circling one broad question: how people actually live, work, move and play now, and how we're about to. That question breaks into a handful of standing fields I keep returning to: regions and place [NO-LO], housing [BXBX], shared living [MESH], neighbourhood culture [MHYC], and temporary build culture [B1RN]. Each field builds a continuing body of work rather than one-off projects.
That independent publishing is the proof of method. It's what the work looks like with no client in the room, and it means whatever subject eventually walks in the door, the practice has already thought hard about something adjacent to it.
Who it's for
The commissioned side of BASE serves anyone holding early, promising thinking that needs to become believable:
Product innovation and futures teams who need research to survive contact with a leadership meeting. Industrial design and architecture studios that need a research and narrative layer to wrap around the work they're already great at. Developers, regions, and institutions sitting on a place or asset with real promise and no legible plan. Brands and founders who need a fascination stress-tested and framed before committing to it.
The common thread: something worth building is stuck at the idea stage, and what it needs isn't more enthusiasm. It needs rigor it can stand on and a form people can believe in.
The bridge
BASE is the bridge, where a vision crosses over, learns to stand on its own, and earns its keep. And because the bridge connects back to a working studio spanning motion, brand, industrial design, and physical builds, a report doesn't have to be the end of anything. When the research greenlights a concept, the people who researched it can help build it.