The world of augmented reality has been democratized in the past few years, through packages or platforms such as Lens Studio, Spark AR Studio or 8th Wall. It places inventions such as Perfect Corp’s YouCam SDK at risk of being recreated via a drag and drop process. This is great as it becomes more about the creative and application of the technology rather than the technology itself and encourages leaders to push past their existing offering.
While many prefer specializing in one area or another, some creatives can offer extra benefits to the clients by crossing disciplines thereby making the work more engaging and cohesive. Our team is pleased to introduce Oscar de la Hera Gomez (Founder and CEO of delasign), an award winning multidisciplinary designer & technologist and founder of delasign. His work is sold in over 30 countries by the Museum of Modern Art and can be found in over 200 Apple stores around the world.
Oscar, born in Basel, Switzerland, is Spanish and was raised in The Netherlands. He holds a Masters of Engineering in Mechanical Engineering from Imperial College London and an MFA in Products of Design from the School of Visual Arts.
delasign’s mission is to create design technology solutions that strike at the nucleus of client or customer’s challenges via a fluid, seamless collaboration. They are doing this by specifying clear KPIs that drive a prototype centric process that takes a product from fiction to reality.
A multidisciplinary designer & technologist
As the Founder and CEO, Oscar helms multidimensional roles in the company. He treasures the work and makes sure it is done precisely. Besides, as employees play a crucial role in any organization’s success. Oscar ensures the recruitment and management of trusted talent. Alongside, identifying the importance of client retention, he also takes care of his clients. Oscar has been instrumental in driving the company towards growth since its inception.
Oscar skills were first reflected during the Products of Design × MoMA partnership in the form of the Illusion Spinner and the Ambi Chopsticks and Holders. However, he was set in stone while working with R/GA. Consequently, upon arrival from Portland after working on the Apple Watch Nike+ in 2016, he established delasign, a design and technology consultancy that creates intentional, seamless experiences. delasign consults on and executes design, technology, and strategy contracts for renowned clients including the Museum of Modern Art, Apple & Nike and many more.
Exploring the alternatives
delasign was established in 2016 with the purpose of creating a vessel for excellence, freedom and multidisciplinary interaction. delasign™ is a boutique consultancy whose work sits between the physical and the digital, and engages in products, services and experiences across industries that span art, beauty and sports to electronics, advertising and marketing.
The company’s core values are to provide a space for individuals to fluidly collaborate as multidisciplinary individuals, in contrast to the industries focus on boxing individuals into one discipline. To be end to end, offering teams that concept, design and execute from start to finish, in contrast to the industries process of passing things to teams who deliver on specific sections. No Smoke and Mirrors and thus, to be transparent in what they are offering. This involves R&D into technologies to validate and deliver them at scale before offering them to our clients.
delasign’s services include Augmented Reality, Design Technology, Product Design, Connected Experiences and Advertising. Most of the projects begin with a Design Technology ask that quickly expands to other offerings, something that motivates the delasign team as it meets their core values allowing them to cross disciplines and provide a holistic, innovative service. This has best been seen in their contributions to Beats Tempo, which started with localizing and formatting a suite of application from one language on an iPad to 20 languages and all formats and led to a product design, in the form of creative development, as well as a connected experience, in the form of an AppleTV-iPad experience. Another example is their work on the MAC Innovation Lab, which started with Augmented Reality & Design Technology and quickly expanded to include a connected experience & a piece of product design.
Oscar is focused on expanding his work in the United States of America but seeks to expand his offices in Portland and San Francisco in the 5 years. The company is focused on expanding their Sans Hands platform, which will bring hand based and gesture based interactions to the general public. Also focused on flourishing their model and providing individuals with a space to grow. This model includes products, services and experience for the general public and helping start-ups accelerate and enhance their outcomes as well as working with established companies to fulfill their KPIs.
From start to finish, delasign place their clients first. This begins with a clear analysis and identification of their business KPI’s and leads to the team that delasign put together to work exclusively for the client. Through daily conversations, delasign’s tight knit process allows their clients to be aware of where they sit and delivers progressive technology that allows them to validate their thinking. This validation includes customer discovery and on-going research as well as analytics that enables them to make changes which match via delasign’s agile methodology whose future thinking architecture empowers them to implement changes quickly.
Finally, when a client selects delasign for one of their offerings, they benefit from all of them. This provides immeasurable value to clients by allowing them to quickly turn things around with the same team that’s executing a task, on requests that appear out of nowhere during the evolution of the project. This speeds up executions and reduces costs by reducing on-boarding times, the need to align on KPI’s or the vision.
Flexible, Future Thinking philosophy
Oscar believes that the pandemic has created an opportunity to make a change, and several organizations are capitalizing on the opportunities by leveraging digital technologies such as AR and VR. Although the company is doubling down on their expertise in Augmented Reality & Mixed Reality, He believes that the ones that will thrive in this technology driven scenario are those that can design technology to fit human needs and meeting the KPI’s of a business. Having been trained by Frog Design & IDEO, delasign are leveraging their learning and applying their own take on it, in hope of creating impactful products, services and experiences.
The pandemic has certainly caused several changes in the way businesses are operated. Due to the lockdowns and social distancing norms, people have moved to remote work and are working in their own time. As more people stay home, the demand for digital solutions has also increased thereby boosting the world’s digital transformation. Conversations about the need for touchless technologies have also opened up due to the digital boost.
In the current times delasign has been focused on learning of augmented reality, focusing on hands-free technology as they believe the next frontier is an interface that reacts to gestures and sounds rather than touch. Both of which they are exploring as part of our Sans Hands platform.
