When I heard that someone from Google will be speaking at Design Indaba 2020 I had two thoughts. First, this is going to be cool. (Have you seen The Internship movie? The Google Campus looks amazing!) Second, I thought that the talk would be all about technology and engineering. What I did not expect was to cry. More than once….
Robert Wong is the creative director of Google Creative Labs. His talk centred around how people in the creative fields are actually the ones who are shaping the future. They are the ones who dream and create, and science and engineering follow. Then he shared some projects Google made, to showcase their work and initiatives, and that’s when things got emotional. Here are the projects he shared:
1. Dear Sophie
When thinking of ways to market Google Chrome, Robert says they were inspired by one of their employees, Daniel Lee. When his daughter was born, he opened up a Gmail account for her and started writing her e-mails. The idea was when she was older, he would give her access to the account, so she can read what he wrote. This is the ad Google made based on that story.
2. Tribute to Margaret Hamilton
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3. Stonewall Monument
Time for a brief history lesson. The Stonewall Inn was a spot in New York where LGBTQ+ people used to go and have fun. On 28 June 28 1969, early in the morning, the inn was raided by police – not for the first time. But on this day the patrons stood up and fought back. They were tired of having their rights violated, and thus the pride movement was born. Barack Obama made the site of the Stonewall Inn a heritage site, and Google helped create an interactive virtual monument so that stories of the LGBTQ+ people from the past, present and future can be told.
4. How captions change the way deaf and hard-of-hearing people use the Internet
One of the most fascinating things that Wong said was that so many inventions, like the telephone or the keyboard, were created to help the differently abled. In 2009, Google got together with members of the deaf community to see how they could make their services better for them. They said they would like to be able to read captions on their phones as they do on TV so that they could be included in the conversations. So Google made that happen.
5. Loretta
This was the 2020 Super Bowl commercial that made everyone cry. Once again, this was based on a Google employee’s actions. Her grandparents were one of the most loving couples she knew. About two years ago, her grandmother died. She and her mother decided to introduce some technology into her grandfather’s life to make things a little easier for him. Google decided to share this story. The voice in this video is the actual employee’s grandfather and I’m not crying, you are!
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