Industrial designers sketch objects that don't exist yet. For eight years, my job with HUGE Design was making those objects move like they'd already shipped.
A disambiguation first, because the collision is real: this is HUGE Design Inc., the San Francisco industrial design studio, hardware and form factors and physical things, not Huge Inc., the Brooklyn digital agency. The SF one sits upstream of marketing, where products get figured out before the world hears about them.
I came into their orbit around 2014, routed there by the Samsung work, and stayed until 2022. The deliverables were product visualization, pitch films, and interaction concepts for GoPro, LG, Samsung, and more. The real job was narrower than that list sounds: I was the person they called when they needed to make their thinking legible to a client. A studio full of brilliant industrial designers can sketch, prototype, and argue a form factor into existence, but at some point the thinking has to survive a screening for a decision-maker with eight minutes between meetings. That compression was my department: take months of design reasoning and cut it into something that moves, demos, and convinces. Make the thing pop without overselling it. Make the hardware look inevitable.
The education ran the other way too. For eight years I got to watch how a great small studio actually runs: paid work funds the spec work, spec work attracts the paid work, and every so often the two meet in a fully built concept that does both jobs at once. I didn't know it at the time, but I was taking notes. A lot of how I run my own practice traces back to watching theirs.
One of the relationships from those years also led directly to the Google job on this page.
A longer essay version of this case study is in progress.