Design Direction, etc.
Pacific Northwest, USA, Earth
hi.donica@gmail.com
RoleArt Direction, Design Direction, UX, Accessibility
Made withGoogle Brand Studio
Google Creative Lab
Google DEI
john a. powell
R/GA
Siberia
The Search for Belonging Project was a year-long initiative dedicated to exploring a singular question: What does it mean to belong? In partnership with Google’s DEI team and civil rights activist john a. powell, we developed a multisensory experience based on powell’s five pillars of belonging. Our research—which involved interviewing over 300 Googlers across 25 countries and eight languages—happened to coincide with a global inflection point: the beginning of the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd. As a result, the 2,500 audio stories we captured became an unintentional but vital archive of a tumultuous, emotional time in our world’s history.
Each story was tagged using a custom semantic API and paired with meticulously crafted type animations, live-coded particle animations, and generative music. Depending on a person’s own reflections on identity, the platform surfaced a handful of stories designed to either validate their lived experience or reveal a shared emotional landscape with those seemingly different from them. This approach ensured that no two paths through the archive were the same, leading every individual on their own unique journey.