Ten years ago, I was on a trip to New York City with my wife. It was already a life-changing vacation, since we found out on the day of our arrival that we were expecting our first child. The day after, I found out that I was without a job. I had joined BlackBerry straight out of university and had been there for 10 years. It had been an amazing journey that had taken me from Canada to the US, China, Finland and finally Sweden, where I had joined the design studio BlackBerry acquired in 2011, working out of the Malmö office, which was now being closed.
After checking up on my team to see how they’d taken the news, I reached out to a few of my favourite designers and engineers with a simple message:
“Don’t sign up for anything. We’re starting our own company.”
“Doing what?”
“I’m still figuring that out.”
I had been lucky to work with some of the most brilliant minds of the time, doing pivotal work in a smartphone revolution that had changed absolutely everything in our daily lives. I had learned so much at every stage. From the power of technical ingenuity and systematic problem solving, to the invaluable role of user research and user experience design, and the various tools and methods for bringing ideas to life fast, test them out, then iterate on them.
But everything I had done was concentrated in a single, albeit endlessly fascinating, industry. Now I was free to focus on others, and I wanted all of them. So we founded Block Zero with the assumption that the mindset and toolbox we had honed over the years was not only applicable to other industries, but that there was a far greater need for our skills and experience in the transportation sector, automotive industry, shipping and logistics, energy and utilities, healthcare, construction, and many others.
Ten years later, we’ve been proven correct. We’ve been able to utilize a user-centric, scenario-driven approach to give direction to future products and services for Google, Electrolux and Briab. We’ve distilled our passion for stories and narrative into the codified Narrative Process™ and told impactful stories for Securitas, E.ON and Porsche. Turning our passion for hybrid, physical/digital experiences led us to developing the platform Presentation Engine™ and creating lasting, immersive storytelling tools for C.H.Robinson, Microsoft and Qvantum. Our endless faith in the power of transforming data into insights, insights into action, and action into value served us well in building data-rich platforms for Geotab and TELUS that were as powerful as they were intuitive. Our fundamental belief in the intertwined nature of business, technology, design and communication formed the foundation of industry-shaking collaborations with Finalis, Briab and Parsd.
And so ten years into this journey, our toolbox is richer than when we started, and tools are sharper than ever before. The son I found out about in New York City that Summer is now 9, and I have a second child. Along with that growing family, the team at Block Zero has become like a second family to me, and I look at them with the same sense of pride and unshakable belief in their abilities and potential as my two sons.
Fads have come and gone. Bubbles have been blown and burst. It’s the mentality, the principles that have endured. Our curiosity is still insatiable, and after working across dozens of wildly different industries, we’re still looking for the next dozen to dive into. It’s a privilege to get to do what we’ve been doing at Block Zero for the past ten years.
Here’s to ten more years of it.