Making the OMATA Brand

OMATA was a design technologist’s project: an engineered object, a product story, a visual system, investment of time and money by people who believed — and a feeling that effervesced through the entanglement of all of those things. This happened in the beautiful intermingling of humans collaborating — people working together. I led this work through and across the instrument, an app, an identity, making books, shooting photography, dangling out the back of my car making films, and rushing off to Finland on many occasions to sort out a factory issue. All of those things tested my resolve, explored what the product was and how it should be encountered.

The Brand Books were one kind of container that held the materials and the connections between the thing that was an idea, an image in the imagination, the thing that required engineering, soldering, tooling, and grit, the experience of riding with it, and the world that was effervesced around a little device.

This is one surface upon which the story landed. Brand is often where a story for such an endeavor lives. As I’ve been drawing from the many, many pages of documents, emails, notes, and my project diaries and git commit messages and social media archives, I learned that a human endeavor can be carried a myriad ways. Amongst many things, one thing I learned is that not everyone can carry all of that is necessary to carry so as to achieve the collective objective. And when you can’t carry all the things forward, well — you lose your part of the story. You can’t try to make something, then decide you want nothing to do with it, then expect that later you can say you were a part of it. That’s like having a kid, abandoning them, then when they go on to do great things, you call them yours when you had no part of shaping who they become.