2024: Making What Will Remake Us
Each year, at the turn, we take a moment to reflect, review, daydream, and plan. Last year started with strange calmness. We could feel the storms coming. In many dimensions, the storms came.
The year held change. We navigated that change. With aplomb!
The coming year will hold more change. Surely.
13 years. We’ve been lucky, good, smart, and fiercely independent as an intentionally small studio. Against the grain, we’ve put together four strong years post-pandemic, including 2024. Working at the intersection of technology, design, and big, messy challenges.
We’re happy to celebrate that work again and the relationships that allow them to happen. Excited to contribute to major consumer tech product launches that make millions of people’s lives just a little brighter. Thrilled and slightly terrified of the projects we get to participate in as AI technology and interfaces rapidly become more real.
Honored to help companies trying to make a difference in family mental health, women’s health, and aging. Helping rethink early childhood literacy. Supporting organizations working for more sustainable, meaningful, and transparent journalism.
Continuing to invest time and energy into our communities and passions.
Thanks as always to the people who trust us with their work. Excited to share. Looking forward to focusing on things that matter in 2025.
Culture and Community
As technology, venture capital, and oligarchical wealth funnels their collective energy and resources into increasingly weird and dystopian fantasies, we’ve spent our humble extras trying to build community around culture we believe in.
Artful, truth seeking, compassionate. Striving for positive change in service of a more just and sustainable world.
For many of us in the studio, film is that universal language that brings so much of life forward in magical and frame-shifting ways. In 2024, we had the pleasure of collaborating on two projects sitting at the intersection of culture and community — Cinema Rodrigo and the Climate Film Festival.
Climate Film Festival
A chance and timely encounter with Alec Turnbull over Slack & Zoom brought the studio to the Climate Film Festival. Alec and J. English Cook put together an incredible first time festival during Climate Week in NYC.
The programming and energy were inspiring, with films from all over the world showcasing stories ranging from dire to hopeful. Alec and English were also wonderfully tasteful collaborators, helping to bring a design vision to life that was so fun to see in venues downtown and uptown. Thanks to Adam Augustyn, Aldo Juraidini, and much of the SR team on this one.
Cinema Rodrigo
Our second year of weekend programming with Cinema Rodrigo brought some great movies and afternoons this past year. Perfect Days. Eno. Totem. Complementing and amplifying our core philosophies. And so many more.
Captained by Aldo Juraidini, Cinema Rodrigo has become a monthly highlight, culminating in a special showing of Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog and an afterparty at Rialto Grande.
Make Impact on Big Challenges and Big Ideas
The studio has always been characterized by our ability to collaborate with people working on big ideas in society.
Trying to manifest something new into the world. Taking approaches that are unique, thoughtful, and diligent to messy challenges.
We were lucky to continue our work broadly across industries.
Health Care & Health Tech
Perhaps the messiest challenge is healthcare in the United States — an entrenched, self-inflicted mess with screwed up incentives. As life progresses in the studio, we’ve dealt with more health care challenges in our personal lives — from family planning, to mental health, to middle age, to aging and dying.
The reality of those lived experiences has made the opportunity to work with thoughtful founders trying to make a difference in how health care is experienced and delivered with the support of technology and design.
Waymark Care
The team at Waymark continues to be one of the strongest mission-driven health care teams with whom we have worked. We enjoyed our continued collaboration supporting Iman Rahim in communicating Waymark’s expanded community care offerings for Medicaid recipients and the results of their work — including Dr. Sanjay Basu’s Transforming Medicaid: A Blueprint for Equitable Care. Great job by Nick Emrich, Rebecca Brand, Sabine Ostinvil, Emogene Cataldo, and the whole team.
We are also excited for studio alumna Rebecca Brand to be joining Waymark Care’s product design team. Congrats, Rebecca!
Seen Health
We connected with Xing Su, Yang Su, and Meena Ramachandran who are building Seen Health, a culturally focused PACE program for API seniors in California’s San Gabriel Valley. Collaborating with their brand partners, we helped bring their digital vision to life and launch their first PACE center.
Beckie Choe and Christina No were critical in helping bring Seen Health to life, and we are excited to see how Seen Health grows in the coming years.
Care for Families, Parents, and Women
New York has a vibrant community of entrepreneurs solving problems in health care — and a particularly incredible set of female founders building care models for families, parents, expecting parents, and women. We’ve had the pleasure to work with the Elektra Health team, who are wonderful connectors, and in 2024 supported Evvy and Conceive in their missions.
And we are really looking forward to launching a lot of really thoughtful work with Little Otter in early 2025.
Magpie: Reading Reimagined for Young Students
Timea Hopp has been leading an effort with Magpie how early childhood literacy is delivered to young students in elementary education settings. Working collaboratively with educators, researchers, product folks, and technologists, Timea has been helping to rethink educational platforms for young students in a deeply research-informed way. It’s important work and we look forward to its continued adoption in classrooms across the country.
The National Trust for Local News: A Sustainable Model
Studio friend Jake Shapiro, with whom we collaborated in past roles at PRX and RadioPublic, connected us with the team at the National Trust for Local News. This highly motivated team of journalists and news media executives is rethinking a sustainable model for local news and has built major operational presence in Maine, Georgia, and Colorado working with some of the most trusted local news brands in those states.
Emogene Cataldo, Beckie Choe, and Catherine Park helped lead our work helping NTLN communicate their mission and impact across channels.
This American Life Partners
We have been longtime collaborators with Seth Lind and Julie Whitaker at This American Life. This year, we helped refine and extend their core identity as they launched their supporters program This American Life Partners. Our friends Maxime and Sabrina at Faire Type helped refine the wordmark lockup.
Center for Just Journalism: Changing the Narrative About Crime
The Center for Just Journalism has been working to change narratives and practice in newsroom when it comes to reporting about crime and public safety. Connie Chu helped lead our work supporting CJJ’s 2024 efforts and broader communication across channels.
Sonic Roofing: Roofing Made (Really) Easy
Herbert Moore runs a really solid construction company in Connecticut and saw an opportunity to scale a roofing business by making the process of customers getting quotes much simpler.
We helped Herbert build a brand for Sonic Roofing and working with our partners at Better Mistakes to launch a site serving Connecticut, Western Massachusetts, Westchester County, and the Hudson Valley. Ryan Consbruck led the work with collaboration from studio designers and Faire Type. If you need your roof repaired or are building a new house, call Herbert at Sonic Roofing!
People Project: Executive Search for Engineering, AI, & Data Leaders
Jodi Jefferson at People Project is one of the more thoughtful and connected executive search partners working in technology in New York City. Jodi has a reputation for cultivating relationships and careers of C-level technology leaders, helping find the perfect match between scaling tech companies and those leaders who can really make a difference. We loved collaborating with Jodi to bring her brand to the next level
Moab: A Modern Tech Stack for Equipment Rentals at All Scales
Aldo Juraidini and Ardavan Arfaei have been collaborating closely with the Moab product and engineering teams to build a robust stack of tools for managing every piece of an equipment rental business. We look forward to Moab’s continued growth and success in 2025.
Variational: Go Long or Short on Anything
Well, crypto’s at it again. We’ve enjoyed our continued collaboration with the very smart team at Variational in launching their institutional trading platform and their retail Omni platform. Whether you are a long or short king, go for it.
EngineEars: Make Music
EngineEars is a cool, insider-outsider platform for the music industry. Founded by Derek “MixedByAli” Ali and Luke Sorenson, EngineEars is building a platform to support studios, producers, and engineers. Nick Emrich has been working closely with the EngineEars product & design team to help accelerate the platform’s coming to market.
Embedded Collaborations
We’ve continued to deeply embed with product and engineering teams to launch experiences embracing the cutting edge of AI and often used by millions of people. We’ve been very proud to be trusted in these collaborations, with our work led by Greg Ervanian, Aldo Juraidini, Nick Emrich, Nathan Chen, Wednesday Krus, Beckie Choe, and contributions throughout our studio including Soyeon Kwon, Connie Chu, Nathalyn Nunoo, Ryan Consbruck, and others.
Our embedded work in 2024 included collaborating with the Peacock design team on their incredible Olympics experience (among things), supporting Google exploring new AI experiences and thinking about trust, relevance, and personalization in search experiences, working with JetBlue to improve their customer experience, rethinking WeWork’s brand across digital platforms, and other deeply collaborative relationships.
Making What Remakes Us
For at least 10 years, we’ve been working with teams using machine learning and artificial intelligence to try and solve complex problems, in clinical research, construction management, and software development.
For most of those years, the technology just didn’t seem ready.
In 2023, as OpenAI, Gemini, and other platforms became more widely available, it felt like things were changing. In 2024, the force and speed of that change is beginning to be more clear.
Will AI remake the world? Perhaps.
It’s a technology that feels like a fundamental shift. Like the emergence of the Internet. AI feels poised to remake white collar work, creative work. To destroy business models (and livelihoods) without much forethought to replacing them. To consolidate the economics of who gets to make money from this new technology.
In 2024, we‘ve spent time investigating how AI-powered tools change our ability to produce creative work. We’ve had some opportunities to collaborate on these tools, as well. The speed at which generative capabilities have gotten better in 2024 was head spinning.
Will the positives outweigh the negatives? It’s hard to know. It’s simply clear that this new wave of technology is coming and we have to figure out what to do with it.
Like the Internet, it’ll make a lot of things faster, easier, and cheaper. Those things, like making software, distributing digital media, disseminating information and disinformation, automating rote tasks, will definitely make some people rich. And some people disenfranchised.
Will it change how we eat, sleep, shit, fuck, find meaning, love? Jury’s out.
Will we have to rethink the production process for creative artifacts? Yeah.
In the meantime, we do the best we can. It’s a strange opportunity to have front row seats to the machines that might remake us.
Coda: Culture and Community
Everything seems to be getting a little harder and stranger. Whatever upside down we’ve collectively created or are just forced to participate in.
Eight hours, five days, forty to fifty weeks. We spend a lot of time at this thing called work.
Our best effort, within what we can control, is to continue to approach our work with intention and integrity.
To create things that make life better, in however small a way. To inhabit these days with humor, humility, joy, and awe.
To do so in a way that celebrates creativity, culture, and community. So thanks to all in the studio, our clients and collaborators, and those who ride with us.
