of the United Kingdom’s capitol city.
Two hundred futurists, strategists, and practitioners across the commerce realm converged at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) for VISIONS Summit: NYC, an event designed to explore how brands can create ecosystems of meaning, myth, and belonging.
Future Commerce, in partnership with Adobe, developed a curated half-day agenda focused on worldbuilding: what it is and how both brands and individuals can embrace it to break new creative ground and shape entirely new realities. Through keynote sessions, panels, and thoughtful Q&A segments, expert speakers investigated the vastness of the topic in highly nuanced ways. With backgrounds and experiences ranging from retail to content creation, media, internet ethnography, meditation, and gaming, they uncovered the following takeaways for brands:
- Balance cultural timeliness (powered by analytics) with authentic emotional connection
- Don’t be afraid to embrace new storytelling tools and platforms, from gaming sites like Roblox to immersive reality tools like the Apple Vision Pro
- Shape the reality of your brand’s existence by referring to tulpamancy and other meditative practices
- Remember that your brand is a participatory tool and should shape along with the culture and experiences of your consumers
Takeaway 1: Balance Cultural Timeliness and Emotional Connection
Future Commerce Co-Founder and CEO kicked off VISIONS Summit by exploring the cultural impact of time capsules. The emotional and logical exercise of curating a time capsule requires thinking deeply about the present, but also considering what you want to teach the future. Brands not only make up the contents of these time capsules, they also shape the creative direction of the future.
“When you think about what it takes to create a time capsule,you’re thinking about permanence. You’re thinking about what it takes to perfectly encapsulate what it means to inhabit the spirit of a culture?” – Phillip Jackson, Co-Founder and CEO, Future Commerce
Our keynote speakers, Andrew Huang and Dami Lee, are two popular creators who understand how intrinsically linked the creative process and the human experience are. Each has their own distinct focus areas as creators, Andrew is a popular musician while Dami creates videos focused on architectural concepts and phenomena. However, both reaffirmed that while digital tools and data help them understand at a macro level how the worlds they’re building resonate, their core focus is on cultivating personal connection and emotional resonance.
During a fireside chat with Future Commerce’s Phillip Jackson, Andrew expounded on how the YouTube algorithm influences his creative decisions; whether it is a source of empowerment or if it is actually a deterrent. He used an example of how he capitalized on fidget toys trending in 2016 to make a sound pack that was not only culturally relevant but aligned with real feedback from his fans.
“All my videos are always based on something I actually wanna do, but I can find ways to refine them or or tweak them in a way that will serve the moment. As one random example that comes to mind, I had a song that I wanted to promote. I am happy to hop in and out of these paradigms where something is just going to be for me and I'm not gonna worry about what the reception may or may not be. At other times I can say, you know, this could have an angle to it that we could really use in a compelling way that works with the algorithm.” –– Andrew Huang, Creator and Musician
In her presentation, Dami also walked through several of her more successful videos and how her team balanced art and science to immerse viewers into their world.
“What we’ve found is that no matter how many hours we spend making the thing beautiful, technical, or perfect, none of that really matters if we don’t make the time to make it human and frame architecture from a human angle.” –– Dami Lee, Creator and Architect
For one video focused on the Kowloon Walled City, Dami and her team investigated why many referred to this space as a “slum.” It was the densest city in the world, filled with crime and drugs, and yet many who visited here or once lived here had a fondness for it, largely because of its “compelling beauty.” This dichotomy created emotional tension, which was the heart of the city’s story.
Takeaway 2: Embrace New Storytelling Paradigms
While Dami and Andrew have mastered YouTube as a powerful tool for immersive storytelling and worldbuilding, retail and consumer brands are embracing other platforms to connect with consumers.
Walmart has broken new ground with its adaptive commerce strategy, which includes an expanding partnership with Spatial. The dramatic gaming experience spans three episodes and has Walmart branding and products embedded authentically and intentionally into the player journey. Taking these entertainment-first approaches, Walmart is able to show up in consumers lives in a more relevant and meaningful way.
“We never talk about target audiences as it relates to gaming in these emerging platforms. It is always about the communities that we're looking to engage with. And because the community has a seat at the table, it's helping drive the success that we've seen around positive brand interaction and positive shift in brand perception that then translates to those real-world transactions, either directly on that platform or through other mediums.” –– Justin Breton, Head of Brand Marketing Innovation, Walmart
While Walmart has focused on meaningful community-driven engagement, Kravet has prioritized education and empowerment. As a provider of luxurious home furniture, carpets, trimmings, and lighting, the fifth-generation family business doesn’t sell directly to consumers; it sells to designers. As a result, the company focuses on using technology and platforms that empower designer partners to do their best work. That means embracing apps like Pinterest, which drive designer-consumer collaboration and inspiration, as well as more emerging tech like the Apple Vision Pro, for which Kravet has a rich browsing and customization app.
“We’re constantly trying to think of ways to blend the digital and physical together so that when the need is to be in a brick-and-mortar location…you’re still able to find what you need and have that harmonious transaction at any one point. And we also look at how we can keep pushing forward? Sometimes, we are a little ahead of our customers because the interior design industry can be a bit technically laggard, but we want to keep showing them what’s feasible.” –– Jesse Lazarus, CIO, Kravet
Takeaway 3: Create Your Own Reality
Many connect the concept of “worldbuilding” to the creation of expansive realities; ones that many can see, feel, and experience physically, mentally, and emotionally. However, several sessions explored how we can embrace worldbuilding techniques to shape our own individual realities.
For instance, Luca Del Deo, who is a TedX speaker, scholar, and expert on meditation, revealed how the practice is a lot more than we believe it to be. Tulpamancy is one type of medication, where we can create our own “imaginary friends” that become so real to us we can interact with them. This burgeoning community has created meditation guides and visualization practices that allow us to create new life with its own agency.
“If you could go through your life with any way of being, what would you choose? What kind of world do you want to create?” –– Luca Del Deo, Founder, Contempla and Meditation Artifacts
Luca’s session tied seamlessly into Katherine Dee’s talk, which provided a quick history of animism, and how as humans, we have an innate impulse to animate the inanimate. From beloved teddy bears to cars to trusted AI assistants, our interactions with inanimate objects influence our stress levels, our connections to the world, and our everyday actions. With our reliance on AI only growing, animism is reaching a whole new level of nuance, making us question who really owns our lived experiences when we share them with inanimate objects and AI-powered platforms?
“For millennia, we’ve honed one-way devotion and commercialized it. Temple idols, dolls, plushies, Tamagotchis. What shifts in the 20th Century isn’t the depth of our love, but the direction of the feedback loop. Smart toys purr. Chatbots flirt. Our phones apologize. The question morphs from ‘Can humans love objects?’ to ‘What happens when those objects start loving us back?’” –– Katherine Dee, Internet Ethnographer and Culture Writer
Takeaway 4: Co-Create and Participate with Your Consumers
Worldbuilding has been presented as a “progressive alternative” to the traditional branding process. But Nikita Walia and Elliot Vredenburg of U.N.N.A.M.E.D. made a case for creating a more flexible ecosystem of identity and messaging that could adapt to a fluctuating, increasingly unstable reality. At the core of this new approach is an emphasis on public interaction and cultural and alignment.
Brands like Burberry have attempted to “modernize” their logos, only to lose their relevance and social standing among consumers. While they were trying to worldbuild around what they wanted their brand to represent, they completely lost sight of why the brand was loved in the first place.
“Cartography reframes branding as a system of orientation. It’s less about control and more about navigation…The solve is not really creating a new world, which is just imposing another set of rules, but in mapping what already exists.” –– Nikita Walia, Strategist, U.N.N.A.M.E.D.
Elliot and Nikita reaffirmed that the final form of a brand is decided by the public. This relates to the many new media spaces that are focused on catering to the needs that are underserved or to vernaculars that are underrepresented. The most successful media brands are the ones that create highly specific subsidiaries that serve highly targeted audiences through various mediums, both digital and tactile.
“There’s a fundamental strength in the structure of companies that look like an umbrella brand with distinct brands underneath them because of their ability to worldbuild. The more touchpoints you give somebody to interact with your brand, the richer the world is. There’s also something about this structure that creates a flywheel effect between each of those brands where the whole can start to feel greater than the sum of its parts.” –– Daisy Alioto, Dirt
Where New Ideas Become New Opportunities
After a jam-packed day at MoMA, attendees and speakers gathered at Papillon Bistro & Bar for cocktails and conversation. Together, we unpacked key takeaways and major mic-drop moments, so we could transform some of the day’s biggest ideas into actionable takeaways and projects for our teams. Many thanks to Brex for sponsoring the reception!
Build the Future of Commerce and Culture
The future of commerce is powered by authentic connections and candid conversations. VISIONS Summit: NYC brought together experts across disciplines to explore the distinct role that brands play in culture, and how we as practitioners build and shape that culture through worldbuilding.
Future Commerce subscribers analyze and scrutinize the present and, in turn, can effectively see around the next corner. They not only understand the current intersections of culture and commerce; they can determine how these intersections will evolve and change in the future. If you want to stay ahead of these trends, too, subscribe to Future Commerce Plus, which provides rich insights and benchmarking tools like our Word-of-Mouth Index, which are designed to help you elevate your brand amid constant change. Members also get early access to future VISIONS Summit events nationwide, as well as other curated networking experiences, such as our upcoming event during Shoptalk Fall.
Two hundred futurists, strategists, and practitioners across the commerce realm converged at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) for VISIONS Summit: NYC, an event designed to explore how brands can create ecosystems of meaning, myth, and belonging.
Future Commerce, in partnership with Adobe, developed a curated half-day agenda focused on worldbuilding: what it is and how both brands and individuals can embrace it to break new creative ground and shape entirely new realities. Through keynote sessions, panels, and thoughtful Q&A segments, expert speakers investigated the vastness of the topic in highly nuanced ways. With backgrounds and experiences ranging from retail to content creation, media, internet ethnography, meditation, and gaming, they uncovered the following takeaways for brands:
- Balance cultural timeliness (powered by analytics) with authentic emotional connection
- Don’t be afraid to embrace new storytelling tools and platforms, from gaming sites like Roblox to immersive reality tools like the Apple Vision Pro
- Shape the reality of your brand’s existence by referring to tulpamancy and other meditative practices
- Remember that your brand is a participatory tool and should shape along with the culture and experiences of your consumers
Takeaway 1: Balance Cultural Timeliness and Emotional Connection
Future Commerce Co-Founder and CEO kicked off VISIONS Summit by exploring the cultural impact of time capsules. The emotional and logical exercise of curating a time capsule requires thinking deeply about the present, but also considering what you want to teach the future. Brands not only make up the contents of these time capsules, they also shape the creative direction of the future.
“When you think about what it takes to create a time capsule,you’re thinking about permanence. You’re thinking about what it takes to perfectly encapsulate what it means to inhabit the spirit of a culture?” – Phillip Jackson, Co-Founder and CEO, Future Commerce
Our keynote speakers, Andrew Huang and Dami Lee, are two popular creators who understand how intrinsically linked the creative process and the human experience are. Each has their own distinct focus areas as creators, Andrew is a popular musician while Dami creates videos focused on architectural concepts and phenomena. However, both reaffirmed that while digital tools and data help them understand at a macro level how the worlds they’re building resonate, their core focus is on cultivating personal connection and emotional resonance.
During a fireside chat with Future Commerce’s Phillip Jackson, Andrew expounded on how the YouTube algorithm influences his creative decisions; whether it is a source of empowerment or if it is actually a deterrent. He used an example of how he capitalized on fidget toys trending in 2016 to make a sound pack that was not only culturally relevant but aligned with real feedback from his fans.
“All my videos are always based on something I actually wanna do, but I can find ways to refine them or or tweak them in a way that will serve the moment. As one random example that comes to mind, I had a song that I wanted to promote. I am happy to hop in and out of these paradigms where something is just going to be for me and I'm not gonna worry about what the reception may or may not be. At other times I can say, you know, this could have an angle to it that we could really use in a compelling way that works with the algorithm.” –– Andrew Huang, Creator and Musician
In her presentation, Dami also walked through several of her more successful videos and how her team balanced art and science to immerse viewers into their world.
“What we’ve found is that no matter how many hours we spend making the thing beautiful, technical, or perfect, none of that really matters if we don’t make the time to make it human and frame architecture from a human angle.” –– Dami Lee, Creator and Architect
For one video focused on the Kowloon Walled City, Dami and her team investigated why many referred to this space as a “slum.” It was the densest city in the world, filled with crime and drugs, and yet many who visited here or once lived here had a fondness for it, largely because of its “compelling beauty.” This dichotomy created emotional tension, which was the heart of the city’s story.
Takeaway 2: Embrace New Storytelling Paradigms
While Dami and Andrew have mastered YouTube as a powerful tool for immersive storytelling and worldbuilding, retail and consumer brands are embracing other platforms to connect with consumers.
Walmart has broken new ground with its adaptive commerce strategy, which includes an expanding partnership with Spatial. The dramatic gaming experience spans three episodes and has Walmart branding and products embedded authentically and intentionally into the player journey. Taking these entertainment-first approaches, Walmart is able to show up in consumers lives in a more relevant and meaningful way.
“We never talk about target audiences as it relates to gaming in these emerging platforms. It is always about the communities that we're looking to engage with. And because the community has a seat at the table, it's helping drive the success that we've seen around positive brand interaction and positive shift in brand perception that then translates to those real-world transactions, either directly on that platform or through other mediums.” –– Justin Breton, Head of Brand Marketing Innovation, Walmart
While Walmart has focused on meaningful community-driven engagement, Kravet has prioritized education and empowerment. As a provider of luxurious home furniture, carpets, trimmings, and lighting, the fifth-generation family business doesn’t sell directly to consumers; it sells to designers. As a result, the company focuses on using technology and platforms that empower designer partners to do their best work. That means embracing apps like Pinterest, which drive designer-consumer collaboration and inspiration, as well as more emerging tech like the Apple Vision Pro, for which Kravet has a rich browsing and customization app.
“We’re constantly trying to think of ways to blend the digital and physical together so that when the need is to be in a brick-and-mortar location…you’re still able to find what you need and have that harmonious transaction at any one point. And we also look at how we can keep pushing forward? Sometimes, we are a little ahead of our customers because the interior design industry can be a bit technically laggard, but we want to keep showing them what’s feasible.” –– Jesse Lazarus, CIO, Kravet
Takeaway 3: Create Your Own Reality
Many connect the concept of “worldbuilding” to the creation of expansive realities; ones that many can see, feel, and experience physically, mentally, and emotionally. However, several sessions explored how we can embrace worldbuilding techniques to shape our own individual realities.
For instance, Luca Del Deo, who is a TedX speaker, scholar, and expert on meditation, revealed how the practice is a lot more than we believe it to be. Tulpamancy is one type of medication, where we can create our own “imaginary friends” that become so real to us we can interact with them. This burgeoning community has created meditation guides and visualization practices that allow us to create new life with its own agency.
“If you could go through your life with any way of being, what would you choose? What kind of world do you want to create?” –– Luca Del Deo, Founder, Contempla and Meditation Artifacts
Luca’s session tied seamlessly into Katherine Dee’s talk, which provided a quick history of animism, and how as humans, we have an innate impulse to animate the inanimate. From beloved teddy bears to cars to trusted AI assistants, our interactions with inanimate objects influence our stress levels, our connections to the world, and our everyday actions. With our reliance on AI only growing, animism is reaching a whole new level of nuance, making us question who really owns our lived experiences when we share them with inanimate objects and AI-powered platforms?
“For millennia, we’ve honed one-way devotion and commercialized it. Temple idols, dolls, plushies, Tamagotchis. What shifts in the 20th Century isn’t the depth of our love, but the direction of the feedback loop. Smart toys purr. Chatbots flirt. Our phones apologize. The question morphs from ‘Can humans love objects?’ to ‘What happens when those objects start loving us back?’” –– Katherine Dee, Internet Ethnographer and Culture Writer
Takeaway 4: Co-Create and Participate with Your Consumers
Worldbuilding has been presented as a “progressive alternative” to the traditional branding process. But Nikita Walia and Elliot Vredenburg of U.N.N.A.M.E.D. made a case for creating a more flexible ecosystem of identity and messaging that could adapt to a fluctuating, increasingly unstable reality. At the core of this new approach is an emphasis on public interaction and cultural and alignment.
Brands like Burberry have attempted to “modernize” their logos, only to lose their relevance and social standing among consumers. While they were trying to worldbuild around what they wanted their brand to represent, they completely lost sight of why the brand was loved in the first place.
“Cartography reframes branding as a system of orientation. It’s less about control and more about navigation…The solve is not really creating a new world, which is just imposing another set of rules, but in mapping what already exists.” –– Nikita Walia, Strategist, U.N.N.A.M.E.D.
Elliot and Nikita reaffirmed that the final form of a brand is decided by the public. This relates to the many new media spaces that are focused on catering to the needs that are underserved or to vernaculars that are underrepresented. The most successful media brands are the ones that create highly specific subsidiaries that serve highly targeted audiences through various mediums, both digital and tactile.
“There’s a fundamental strength in the structure of companies that look like an umbrella brand with distinct brands underneath them because of their ability to worldbuild. The more touchpoints you give somebody to interact with your brand, the richer the world is. There’s also something about this structure that creates a flywheel effect between each of those brands where the whole can start to feel greater than the sum of its parts.” –– Daisy Alioto, Dirt
Where New Ideas Become New Opportunities
After a jam-packed day at MoMA, attendees and speakers gathered at Papillon Bistro & Bar for cocktails and conversation. Together, we unpacked key takeaways and major mic-drop moments, so we could transform some of the day’s biggest ideas into actionable takeaways and projects for our teams. Many thanks to Brex for sponsoring the reception!
Build the Future of Commerce and Culture
The future of commerce is powered by authentic connections and candid conversations. VISIONS Summit: NYC brought together experts across disciplines to explore the distinct role that brands play in culture, and how we as practitioners build and shape that culture through worldbuilding.
Future Commerce subscribers analyze and scrutinize the present and, in turn, can effectively see around the next corner. They not only understand the current intersections of culture and commerce; they can determine how these intersections will evolve and change in the future. If you want to stay ahead of these trends, too, subscribe to Future Commerce Plus, which provides rich insights and benchmarking tools like our Word-of-Mouth Index, which are designed to help you elevate your brand amid constant change. Members also get early access to future VISIONS Summit events nationwide, as well as other curated networking experiences, such as our upcoming event during Shoptalk Fall.
Two hundred futurists, strategists, and practitioners across the commerce realm converged at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) for VISIONS Summit: NYC, an event designed to explore how brands can create ecosystems of meaning, myth, and belonging.
Future Commerce, in partnership with Adobe, developed a curated half-day agenda focused on worldbuilding: what it is and how both brands and individuals can embrace it to break new creative ground and shape entirely new realities. Through keynote sessions, panels, and thoughtful Q&A segments, expert speakers investigated the vastness of the topic in highly nuanced ways. With backgrounds and experiences ranging from retail to content creation, media, internet ethnography, meditation, and gaming, they uncovered the following takeaways for brands:
- Balance cultural timeliness (powered by analytics) with authentic emotional connection
- Don’t be afraid to embrace new storytelling tools and platforms, from gaming sites like Roblox to immersive reality tools like the Apple Vision Pro
- Shape the reality of your brand’s existence by referring to tulpamancy and other meditative practices
- Remember that your brand is a participatory tool and should shape along with the culture and experiences of your consumers
Takeaway 1: Balance Cultural Timeliness and Emotional Connection
Future Commerce Co-Founder and CEO kicked off VISIONS Summit by exploring the cultural impact of time capsules. The emotional and logical exercise of curating a time capsule requires thinking deeply about the present, but also considering what you want to teach the future. Brands not only make up the contents of these time capsules, they also shape the creative direction of the future.
“When you think about what it takes to create a time capsule,you’re thinking about permanence. You’re thinking about what it takes to perfectly encapsulate what it means to inhabit the spirit of a culture?” – Phillip Jackson, Co-Founder and CEO, Future Commerce
Our keynote speakers, Andrew Huang and Dami Lee, are two popular creators who understand how intrinsically linked the creative process and the human experience are. Each has their own distinct focus areas as creators, Andrew is a popular musician while Dami creates videos focused on architectural concepts and phenomena. However, both reaffirmed that while digital tools and data help them understand at a macro level how the worlds they’re building resonate, their core focus is on cultivating personal connection and emotional resonance.
During a fireside chat with Future Commerce’s Phillip Jackson, Andrew expounded on how the YouTube algorithm influences his creative decisions; whether it is a source of empowerment or if it is actually a deterrent. He used an example of how he capitalized on fidget toys trending in 2016 to make a sound pack that was not only culturally relevant but aligned with real feedback from his fans.
“All my videos are always based on something I actually wanna do, but I can find ways to refine them or or tweak them in a way that will serve the moment. As one random example that comes to mind, I had a song that I wanted to promote. I am happy to hop in and out of these paradigms where something is just going to be for me and I'm not gonna worry about what the reception may or may not be. At other times I can say, you know, this could have an angle to it that we could really use in a compelling way that works with the algorithm.” –– Andrew Huang, Creator and Musician
In her presentation, Dami also walked through several of her more successful videos and how her team balanced art and science to immerse viewers into their world.
“What we’ve found is that no matter how many hours we spend making the thing beautiful, technical, or perfect, none of that really matters if we don’t make the time to make it human and frame architecture from a human angle.” –– Dami Lee, Creator and Architect
For one video focused on the Kowloon Walled City, Dami and her team investigated why many referred to this space as a “slum.” It was the densest city in the world, filled with crime and drugs, and yet many who visited here or once lived here had a fondness for it, largely because of its “compelling beauty.” This dichotomy created emotional tension, which was the heart of the city’s story.
Takeaway 2: Embrace New Storytelling Paradigms
While Dami and Andrew have mastered YouTube as a powerful tool for immersive storytelling and worldbuilding, retail and consumer brands are embracing other platforms to connect with consumers.
Walmart has broken new ground with its adaptive commerce strategy, which includes an expanding partnership with Spatial. The dramatic gaming experience spans three episodes and has Walmart branding and products embedded authentically and intentionally into the player journey. Taking these entertainment-first approaches, Walmart is able to show up in consumers lives in a more relevant and meaningful way.
“We never talk about target audiences as it relates to gaming in these emerging platforms. It is always about the communities that we're looking to engage with. And because the community has a seat at the table, it's helping drive the success that we've seen around positive brand interaction and positive shift in brand perception that then translates to those real-world transactions, either directly on that platform or through other mediums.” –– Justin Breton, Head of Brand Marketing Innovation, Walmart
While Walmart has focused on meaningful community-driven engagement, Kravet has prioritized education and empowerment. As a provider of luxurious home furniture, carpets, trimmings, and lighting, the fifth-generation family business doesn’t sell directly to consumers; it sells to designers. As a result, the company focuses on using technology and platforms that empower designer partners to do their best work. That means embracing apps like Pinterest, which drive designer-consumer collaboration and inspiration, as well as more emerging tech like the Apple Vision Pro, for which Kravet has a rich browsing and customization app.
“We’re constantly trying to think of ways to blend the digital and physical together so that when the need is to be in a brick-and-mortar location…you’re still able to find what you need and have that harmonious transaction at any one point. And we also look at how we can keep pushing forward? Sometimes, we are a little ahead of our customers because the interior design industry can be a bit technically laggard, but we want to keep showing them what’s feasible.” –– Jesse Lazarus, CIO, Kravet
Takeaway 3: Create Your Own Reality
Many connect the concept of “worldbuilding” to the creation of expansive realities; ones that many can see, feel, and experience physically, mentally, and emotionally. However, several sessions explored how we can embrace worldbuilding techniques to shape our own individual realities.
For instance, Luca Del Deo, who is a TedX speaker, scholar, and expert on meditation, revealed how the practice is a lot more than we believe it to be. Tulpamancy is one type of medication, where we can create our own “imaginary friends” that become so real to us we can interact with them. This burgeoning community has created meditation guides and visualization practices that allow us to create new life with its own agency.
“If you could go through your life with any way of being, what would you choose? What kind of world do you want to create?” –– Luca Del Deo, Founder, Contempla and Meditation Artifacts
Luca’s session tied seamlessly into Katherine Dee’s talk, which provided a quick history of animism, and how as humans, we have an innate impulse to animate the inanimate. From beloved teddy bears to cars to trusted AI assistants, our interactions with inanimate objects influence our stress levels, our connections to the world, and our everyday actions. With our reliance on AI only growing, animism is reaching a whole new level of nuance, making us question who really owns our lived experiences when we share them with inanimate objects and AI-powered platforms?
“For millennia, we’ve honed one-way devotion and commercialized it. Temple idols, dolls, plushies, Tamagotchis. What shifts in the 20th Century isn’t the depth of our love, but the direction of the feedback loop. Smart toys purr. Chatbots flirt. Our phones apologize. The question morphs from ‘Can humans love objects?’ to ‘What happens when those objects start loving us back?’” –– Katherine Dee, Internet Ethnographer and Culture Writer
Takeaway 4: Co-Create and Participate with Your Consumers
Worldbuilding has been presented as a “progressive alternative” to the traditional branding process. But Nikita Walia and Elliot Vredenburg of U.N.N.A.M.E.D. made a case for creating a more flexible ecosystem of identity and messaging that could adapt to a fluctuating, increasingly unstable reality. At the core of this new approach is an emphasis on public interaction and cultural and alignment.
Brands like Burberry have attempted to “modernize” their logos, only to lose their relevance and social standing among consumers. While they were trying to worldbuild around what they wanted their brand to represent, they completely lost sight of why the brand was loved in the first place.
“Cartography reframes branding as a system of orientation. It’s less about control and more about navigation…The solve is not really creating a new world, which is just imposing another set of rules, but in mapping what already exists.” –– Nikita Walia, Strategist, U.N.N.A.M.E.D.
Elliot and Nikita reaffirmed that the final form of a brand is decided by the public. This relates to the many new media spaces that are focused on catering to the needs that are underserved or to vernaculars that are underrepresented. The most successful media brands are the ones that create highly specific subsidiaries that serve highly targeted audiences through various mediums, both digital and tactile.
“There’s a fundamental strength in the structure of companies that look like an umbrella brand with distinct brands underneath them because of their ability to worldbuild. The more touchpoints you give somebody to interact with your brand, the richer the world is. There’s also something about this structure that creates a flywheel effect between each of those brands where the whole can start to feel greater than the sum of its parts.” –– Daisy Alioto, Dirt
Where New Ideas Become New Opportunities
After a jam-packed day at MoMA, attendees and speakers gathered at Papillon Bistro & Bar for cocktails and conversation. Together, we unpacked key takeaways and major mic-drop moments, so we could transform some of the day’s biggest ideas into actionable takeaways and projects for our teams. Many thanks to Brex for sponsoring the reception!
Build the Future of Commerce and Culture
The future of commerce is powered by authentic connections and candid conversations. VISIONS Summit: NYC brought together experts across disciplines to explore the distinct role that brands play in culture, and how we as practitioners build and shape that culture through worldbuilding.
Future Commerce subscribers analyze and scrutinize the present and, in turn, can effectively see around the next corner. They not only understand the current intersections of culture and commerce; they can determine how these intersections will evolve and change in the future. If you want to stay ahead of these trends, too, subscribe to Future Commerce Plus, which provides rich insights and benchmarking tools like our Word-of-Mouth Index, which are designed to help you elevate your brand amid constant change. Members also get early access to future VISIONS Summit events nationwide, as well as other curated networking experiences, such as our upcoming event during Shoptalk Fall.
Two hundred futurists, strategists, and practitioners across the commerce realm converged at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) for VISIONS Summit: NYC, an event designed to explore how brands can create ecosystems of meaning, myth, and belonging.
Future Commerce, in partnership with Adobe, developed a curated half-day agenda focused on worldbuilding: what it is and how both brands and individuals can embrace it to break new creative ground and shape entirely new realities. Through keynote sessions, panels, and thoughtful Q&A segments, expert speakers investigated the vastness of the topic in highly nuanced ways. With backgrounds and experiences ranging from retail to content creation, media, internet ethnography, meditation, and gaming, they uncovered the following takeaways for brands:
- Balance cultural timeliness (powered by analytics) with authentic emotional connection
- Don’t be afraid to embrace new storytelling tools and platforms, from gaming sites like Roblox to immersive reality tools like the Apple Vision Pro
- Shape the reality of your brand’s existence by referring to tulpamancy and other meditative practices
- Remember that your brand is a participatory tool and should shape along with the culture and experiences of your consumers
Takeaway 1: Balance Cultural Timeliness and Emotional Connection
Future Commerce Co-Founder and CEO kicked off VISIONS Summit by exploring the cultural impact of time capsules. The emotional and logical exercise of curating a time capsule requires thinking deeply about the present, but also considering what you want to teach the future. Brands not only make up the contents of these time capsules, they also shape the creative direction of the future.
“When you think about what it takes to create a time capsule,you’re thinking about permanence. You’re thinking about what it takes to perfectly encapsulate what it means to inhabit the spirit of a culture?” – Phillip Jackson, Co-Founder and CEO, Future Commerce
Our keynote speakers, Andrew Huang and Dami Lee, are two popular creators who understand how intrinsically linked the creative process and the human experience are. Each has their own distinct focus areas as creators, Andrew is a popular musician while Dami creates videos focused on architectural concepts and phenomena. However, both reaffirmed that while digital tools and data help them understand at a macro level how the worlds they’re building resonate, their core focus is on cultivating personal connection and emotional resonance.
During a fireside chat with Future Commerce’s Phillip Jackson, Andrew expounded on how the YouTube algorithm influences his creative decisions; whether it is a source of empowerment or if it is actually a deterrent. He used an example of how he capitalized on fidget toys trending in 2016 to make a sound pack that was not only culturally relevant but aligned with real feedback from his fans.
“All my videos are always based on something I actually wanna do, but I can find ways to refine them or or tweak them in a way that will serve the moment. As one random example that comes to mind, I had a song that I wanted to promote. I am happy to hop in and out of these paradigms where something is just going to be for me and I'm not gonna worry about what the reception may or may not be. At other times I can say, you know, this could have an angle to it that we could really use in a compelling way that works with the algorithm.” –– Andrew Huang, Creator and Musician
In her presentation, Dami also walked through several of her more successful videos and how her team balanced art and science to immerse viewers into their world.
“What we’ve found is that no matter how many hours we spend making the thing beautiful, technical, or perfect, none of that really matters if we don’t make the time to make it human and frame architecture from a human angle.” –– Dami Lee, Creator and Architect
For one video focused on the Kowloon Walled City, Dami and her team investigated why many referred to this space as a “slum.” It was the densest city in the world, filled with crime and drugs, and yet many who visited here or once lived here had a fondness for it, largely because of its “compelling beauty.” This dichotomy created emotional tension, which was the heart of the city’s story.
Takeaway 2: Embrace New Storytelling Paradigms
While Dami and Andrew have mastered YouTube as a powerful tool for immersive storytelling and worldbuilding, retail and consumer brands are embracing other platforms to connect with consumers.
Walmart has broken new ground with its adaptive commerce strategy, which includes an expanding partnership with Spatial. The dramatic gaming experience spans three episodes and has Walmart branding and products embedded authentically and intentionally into the player journey. Taking these entertainment-first approaches, Walmart is able to show up in consumers lives in a more relevant and meaningful way.
“We never talk about target audiences as it relates to gaming in these emerging platforms. It is always about the communities that we're looking to engage with. And because the community has a seat at the table, it's helping drive the success that we've seen around positive brand interaction and positive shift in brand perception that then translates to those real-world transactions, either directly on that platform or through other mediums.” –– Justin Breton, Head of Brand Marketing Innovation, Walmart
While Walmart has focused on meaningful community-driven engagement, Kravet has prioritized education and empowerment. As a provider of luxurious home furniture, carpets, trimmings, and lighting, the fifth-generation family business doesn’t sell directly to consumers; it sells to designers. As a result, the company focuses on using technology and platforms that empower designer partners to do their best work. That means embracing apps like Pinterest, which drive designer-consumer collaboration and inspiration, as well as more emerging tech like the Apple Vision Pro, for which Kravet has a rich browsing and customization app.
“We’re constantly trying to think of ways to blend the digital and physical together so that when the need is to be in a brick-and-mortar location…you’re still able to find what you need and have that harmonious transaction at any one point. And we also look at how we can keep pushing forward? Sometimes, we are a little ahead of our customers because the interior design industry can be a bit technically laggard, but we want to keep showing them what’s feasible.” –– Jesse Lazarus, CIO, Kravet
Takeaway 3: Create Your Own Reality
Many connect the concept of “worldbuilding” to the creation of expansive realities; ones that many can see, feel, and experience physically, mentally, and emotionally. However, several sessions explored how we can embrace worldbuilding techniques to shape our own individual realities.
For instance, Luca Del Deo, who is a TedX speaker, scholar, and expert on meditation, revealed how the practice is a lot more than we believe it to be. Tulpamancy is one type of medication, where we can create our own “imaginary friends” that become so real to us we can interact with them. This burgeoning community has created meditation guides and visualization practices that allow us to create new life with its own agency.
“If you could go through your life with any way of being, what would you choose? What kind of world do you want to create?” –– Luca Del Deo, Founder, Contempla and Meditation Artifacts
Luca’s session tied seamlessly into Katherine Dee’s talk, which provided a quick history of animism, and how as humans, we have an innate impulse to animate the inanimate. From beloved teddy bears to cars to trusted AI assistants, our interactions with inanimate objects influence our stress levels, our connections to the world, and our everyday actions. With our reliance on AI only growing, animism is reaching a whole new level of nuance, making us question who really owns our lived experiences when we share them with inanimate objects and AI-powered platforms?
“For millennia, we’ve honed one-way devotion and commercialized it. Temple idols, dolls, plushies, Tamagotchis. What shifts in the 20th Century isn’t the depth of our love, but the direction of the feedback loop. Smart toys purr. Chatbots flirt. Our phones apologize. The question morphs from ‘Can humans love objects?’ to ‘What happens when those objects start loving us back?’” –– Katherine Dee, Internet Ethnographer and Culture Writer
Takeaway 4: Co-Create and Participate with Your Consumers
Worldbuilding has been presented as a “progressive alternative” to the traditional branding process. But Nikita Walia and Elliot Vredenburg of U.N.N.A.M.E.D. made a case for creating a more flexible ecosystem of identity and messaging that could adapt to a fluctuating, increasingly unstable reality. At the core of this new approach is an emphasis on public interaction and cultural and alignment.
Brands like Burberry have attempted to “modernize” their logos, only to lose their relevance and social standing among consumers. While they were trying to worldbuild around what they wanted their brand to represent, they completely lost sight of why the brand was loved in the first place.
“Cartography reframes branding as a system of orientation. It’s less about control and more about navigation…The solve is not really creating a new world, which is just imposing another set of rules, but in mapping what already exists.” –– Nikita Walia, Strategist, U.N.N.A.M.E.D.
Elliot and Nikita reaffirmed that the final form of a brand is decided by the public. This relates to the many new media spaces that are focused on catering to the needs that are underserved or to vernaculars that are underrepresented. The most successful media brands are the ones that create highly specific subsidiaries that serve highly targeted audiences through various mediums, both digital and tactile.
“There’s a fundamental strength in the structure of companies that look like an umbrella brand with distinct brands underneath them because of their ability to worldbuild. The more touchpoints you give somebody to interact with your brand, the richer the world is. There’s also something about this structure that creates a flywheel effect between each of those brands where the whole can start to feel greater than the sum of its parts.” –– Daisy Alioto, Dirt
Where New Ideas Become New Opportunities
After a jam-packed day at MoMA, attendees and speakers gathered at Papillon Bistro & Bar for cocktails and conversation. Together, we unpacked key takeaways and major mic-drop moments, so we could transform some of the day’s biggest ideas into actionable takeaways and projects for our teams. Many thanks to Brex for sponsoring the reception!
Build the Future of Commerce and Culture
The future of commerce is powered by authentic connections and candid conversations. VISIONS Summit: NYC brought together experts across disciplines to explore the distinct role that brands play in culture, and how we as practitioners build and shape that culture through worldbuilding.
Future Commerce subscribers analyze and scrutinize the present and, in turn, can effectively see around the next corner. They not only understand the current intersections of culture and commerce; they can determine how these intersections will evolve and change in the future. If you want to stay ahead of these trends, too, subscribe to Future Commerce Plus, which provides rich insights and benchmarking tools like our Word-of-Mouth Index, which are designed to help you elevate your brand amid constant change. Members also get early access to future VISIONS Summit events nationwide, as well as other curated networking experiences, such as our upcoming event during Shoptalk Fall.
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