Wojtek Szumowski

About Wojtek Szumowski

My creative energy draws from a life perspective of a sociologist, poet and inventor, moving across different cultures and fields of human experience, applying social imagination and poetic perceptiveness, making connections, composing relations, revealing emotions, and the why.Call it transformative perspective, call it creative strategy, call it social imagination, call it experience design, call it making room for more possibilities.Sociology and poetry invite awareness of our emotional relationship with the world, offering a way to understand things, to make our experience with things meaningful, and to feel at home with them. My practice is about disarming formulas and inviting curious, imaginative and resourceful human energy, agile awareness of emotions and relations as strategic resource, transforming the world into kaleidoscope of possibilities.The role of experience designer and a poet is not just to find ultimate solutions and optimize tasks flows but to compel us to love life in all its unexpected manifestations.I haven’t given up enthusiasm and hope, facing the world around me with childlike astonishment and curiosity, probing innovation through making awareness of our emotions and relations tangible and disarmingly human.My journey, work and bio: it means supporting people in treatment through mobilizing benevolent awareness of our healing resources & relations /Astra-Zeneca, FluMist - Ticklish Response, MERC, Keytruda - Get Well Glow/, unlocking the experiential potential of connected cars /Ford - Electriquette, Walk with Me, Mazda - Emotional Onboarding/, turning digital flows inside-out and re-connecting data transformations with what they stand for, human emotions and relations /Dominos - Pizza Tracker experiences, On-Star - Coming Home, Ford - Anticipatory Energy System/, or using experience innovation to help people find new doors to brand and product stories /VW GTI - Fast, V2Guitar, Hotels.com - Sound Capsules/- my design practice is about expanding awareness of new possibilities, aiming to make experience of connected world meaningful and disarmingly human.I am an inventor holding a US Patent for new forms of benevolent communication between different participants of connected mobility; with several concepts in Patent Disclosure process.Patent No: Date: Nov 30,

Experience

1. Partner

   Kinetic Optimism - Experience Design And Concept Inquiry Studio

   Dec 2016 — Present · Detroit, MI, US

   Kinetic Optimism Studio is an experience innovation practice orchestrating experience design, social imagination, and a system-based approach to find unique solutions for emerging technology products and new social frameworks.My approach is about unlocking product’s potential for novel, experiential narratives, where AI become a protagonist in shared human experience.Whether it means supporting people in treatment through mobilizing benevolent awareness of our healing resources & relations, or unlocking service potential of connected car, our designs aim to make experience of connected world meaningful and delightfully human.At the core of our approach is the ability to generate the new perspective, new structure of our awareness of context, relations, resources and possibilities - agile, transformative perspective.Articulating strategy and product architecture through compelling human experience, helping people find new doors to brand meaning and purpose.As an experience innovation studio we were lucky to find unique partners and collaborate on special projects for AstraZeneca, United Rentals, Johnson & Johnson, MERC, Mazda, VitaminWater, Ford, Lincoln, and others.Partnering with Ford Product Development to unlock participatory potential of connected world, recasting systems & services as adaptive companions, engaged in immediate context, inviting new relations, and opening new experiential narratives.k_o studio process is focused on inspiring new relations between people and technology. We see these relations as always open and becoming, inviting evocative situations for people to explore.We believe simply there is more to life than being in a “permanent task mode”.Studio design process uses values and ethics as both a lens of its own and as a site for design inquiry and intervention.Studio approach investigates how objects and systems can act as disarming instigators of embodied social values and relationships.

Education

• Jagiellonian University

  MA, Sociology

  1990 — 1995

• Akademia Sztuk Pięknych im. Jana Matejki w Krakowie

  Bachelor of Fine Arts - BFA, Industrial and Product Design

Skills

• Creative Strategy
• Customer Insight
• Integrated Marketing
• Digital Strategy
• Interactive Advertising
• Digital Marketing
• Interactive Marketing
• Brand Development
• Strategy
• Brand Architecture
• Experience Design
• Marketing Research
• Outdoor Advertising
• Mobile Marketing
• Marketing Strategy
• Social Media Marketing
• Strategic Planning
• Advertising