I haven’t really thought this post through, but somehow I’d feel a bit empty if I didn’t try and put down some words to acknowledge the journey. People tell me 10 years is a long time. Maybe there’s some inspiration to get in there or maybe some insights, but I’ve warned you now 😄 It’s gonna be long. (This also isn’t the official Molamil bio. I’ll leave that to Jorge to write some day. This is just me.)
10 years ago, I was studying 2nd semester Interaction Design at DMJX and some funky fellows came to teach us Flash. Jorge, Ramiro and Patrik had a company called Molamil where, it turned out, they secretly did all the cool interactive stuff for the big danish agencies. Molamil never put itself in the spotlight, so we hadn’t heard of them in class. They just showed up and tried to teach us Actionscript. I’d dabbled with code at that point, but was probably more into Motion Graphics, I thought. Turned out I was wrong.
3 weeks later I signed as a student helper. I free scraped Toyota wheels and removed shadows so they could get animated and slow and steady I started to do more and more coded work myself. Think about banners whatever you want, but if you wanted to learn code, they were a brilliant way to do so. They were like small puzzles to solve, requiring you to balance the size and be as creative as possible within a small space. If you remember the Tivoli banners, that was us 🤗 I really had the best teachers in Ramiro, Jorge, Patrik, Abel, Martin, Jakob, Mathias and Chris ❤️ (Yes, it was a boys club back then)
Breaking the system
Luckily we didn’t find it fulfilling to make banners and campaign sites our entire business. In stead we wanted to get closer to the end client rather than being the tool of the agencies. Enter the design award shows: As it happens, when you are one of the only digital/interactive companies in the country, you end up building most of the interactive work.
Here’s how I think it went:
Agencies like to win awards, and we worked with a lot of them. At some point we started requesting to get credited in the award shows.
Most agencies bring their clients to the award show as a treat. This incidentally gives the client a really good idea of who actually made their project and even more importantly; who made the work of their competitors.
Because of our position as one of the only digital houses in a city of communication houses, as soon as we began getting credited, we were pretty much part of winning everything! It became so crazy that one year, it started getting awkward. We were the digital partner on all the competing projects within the same categories. When our own website was nominated and won as “Molamil,com, by Molamil, for Molamil” next to other projects we’d also done, we couldn’t hold it back. We felt like we’d broken the system.
Since then we turned our heads towards building for clients. We build apps and websites. We of course wasn’t so alone in the digital domain anymore. There are some amazing studios in Denmark, pulling off amazing work which we now competed with. To be able to compete, our team grew with new friends in Anne, Christina, Thomas, Joachim and Kasper, whom all has meant such a big deal in my personal life too. It started to feel like a Mola-family.
Creative Technology
At this point I’d also returned home from internships in London (Unit9) and USA (TBWA/Apple) and I remember meeting a guy who had an amazing job title: “Creative Technologist”. I had no idea what he was really doing and I’d never heard of anyone in Denmark called that, but I could see how clever the title was for my ideas. I signed full time contract with Jorge as a Creative Technologist. In the beginning lots of people laughed at that title 😄 But I must just say, I’ve noticed many friends and colleagues in other companies has adopted it too (some only recently), so joke is on the industry 😉 Still I’m not sure what the title actually stand for. I feel like we all practice it very differently.
Initially the Creative Technology I got to practice was more akin to UX design. Molamil didn’t really have UX as a practice at this point, so I leaned into this and invented some rules. Later on, way greater UX’ers than me joined in, but for a period I got to think about creating creative architectures and technical prototypes for the likes of McKinsey, Radio24Syv (RIP), Forsvaret, Ørsted, Experimentarium etc. Anders, Anders, Morten and Anne Leigh joining was a big part of this transition!
I also started teaching at DMJX myself, the same course as Jorge and Ramiro taught. I’ve been teaching there every year since then and lightning struck again when I taught Caroline who turned out to be an absolute master of code and UX 🙏
Finding a creative outlet
Molamil was at all times a small team of max 14. We reflected a lot on what we in general wanted to do. At one point we took in an intern from Hyper Island, specialised in creative workshop facilitation, who later worked with us full time and is now my best friend. His name is Habla and he transformed mine and everybody else’s way of thinking about work. He later transformed himself, pivoted to be an expert developer and designer and is now a full time magician/unicorn in a startup, but that we got some years working together meant the world to me.
This was the first time I started reflecting on if I wanted something else. I remember having many talks with Jorge about if it was possible to have more creative storytelling outlets through Molamil. I wanted to work with actors and directors and I wanted to create projects that made very little financial sense, but would utilise our skills for other things too. Jorge didn’t flinch when he said that was ok with him which to this day still blows my mind. (In retrospective, our current strong position in the XR space heavily points back to this moment, so financially long term it is paying out to do art!)
This was the same year as VR broke through with the Oculus DK1 and I found some new friends in the crazy “no compromise” art company Makropol. With them I build a number of side projects, culminating with the massive VR installation Anthropia (where I also met Karina, that for a good while did amazing game development and UX work with us. Now she works in the coolest games company, Triband) and part of the engine behind their End of Night experience. It’s also how I found friends in the young company Khora, whom I’ve since been greatly inspired by. From then on, doing technology art projects within or next to Molamil became the everyday.
Pivoting
At one point, I heard about a crazy project, I had to be part of: An AR fashion show for the brand WeAreTheFaces at Copenhagen Fashion Week, and this is where I met Hannah. She’s without a doubt the most transformative person in the creative technology world that I have ever had the chance to meet, and to mine (and Molamil’s) luck she wanted to work with us. Together we put more focus on technology at Molamil. We created a new division called MolaLAB with the focus on exploring and applying new drivers within emerging tech before they become widely applicable. Around this time we’d also been joined by Dan who tamed and completely transformed our design practice to completely new heights and Justus, who somehow manage to effortlessly mix design and technology in everything he does.
Probably the craziest thing we did in MolaLAB was X-Ray Fashion in 2018 where we were contacted by another Danish VR company called MANND. The two owners, Maria and Signe, reached out to us with a crazy idea: Can we build a physical VR installation with physical sensorial surfaces and effects, that can be shipped to Venice Film Festival in 2 months? The whole process of building this installation is worth making an entire documentary about. The director was Francesco Carrozzini and the client was the World Bank and the cofounder of Microsoft, Paul Allen.
It was such an undertaking by everybody involved, but we did it and in September we shipped a 2 ton heavy installation to Venice and Hannah and I traveled there ourself to facilitate it. After some bug fixes and a few days of observation I could relax, drink sangria in the sun and fall in love with Maria, the most hard working visionary woman I know in the tech industry (and who continuously bless me with new fun and daring tech challenges ❤️) I feel very blessed to have experienced Venice in this special setting. We and the other artists and directors were the only people roaming the entire island after 9pm the whole week. An experience impossible to compete with outside of the art world.
When we got home we did a few more special projects. We did an AR Opera called Silent Zone w. Tue Biering and Louise Alenius and a couple other VR experiences and sensor based installations, but Hannah and I started talking about what next step would be. We wanted to use XR to drive change within bigger organisations and impact the world, but to do that we would need to rethink Molamil. I remember talking with Jorge about it in Kings Garden and he told me to “just wait a little”.
Reaching global w. Manyone
Again the mola-timing was perfect and a few months later we were part of starting Manyone, a strategic design and technology hybrid aiming to take on the biggest consultancies in the world. With applied technology in focus. Basically everything I could have dreamt of. Once more the ceiling lifted above us right when we needed it. We’ve met an ocean of new talented friends in Denmark and across the world. Hannah, Andrew and I are leading an amazing team of bright minds within emerging technology and we get to apply strategy around technology on world scale.
The next big leap for us is still in the works, but I have a good feeling it leans heavily towards a mix of Spatial Computing (XR), strategic creativity and Data Science for communication.
Hint! Reach out to me or Hannah if you are passionated about storytelling with data!!!
This is the end for my post, but in no way the end for the mola-journey. The spirit of a small tight knit team lives on in our team and the teams around us in Copenhagen and around the world. The passion and love for well thought through craftsmanship is spreading like wildfire. We have the chance to form a global work environment however we want. The only top-down requirement we are met with is, to strive for doing so with a humanity perspective in mind.
I don’t believe in luck or fate, but I believe in rewarding good intentions, solid work and dedication. I’ve definitely felt rewarded by my work and I strive to pay that forward through my own privilege. I genuinely think work places should strive to be a family. Not everybody would ofc. want that, but I wouldn’t have had it anyway else myself. It’s what kept me asking for more at Molamil 🤗
Ps. It’s also my birthday today. 🎉 31 years. Yeah, I signed the contract on my birthday…