Session 7
What if branding isn’t the act of creating a world, but of making it navigable? Commerce leaves behind more than artifacts—it scripts the myths, metaphors, and memories of culture. In an age of accelerated meaning-making and cultural co-authorship, what does it mean to build a brand? Strategy Director Nikita Walia and Creative Director Elliot Vredenburg reframe branding as mapmaking—not as representation, but as a generative act.
Brands, they argue, are not static identities but evolving terrains: ecologies of meaning shaped in motion through friction, flux, and feedback. Drawing from systems thinking, semiotics, and design practice, they explore how strategy and design work together not to define a world, but to render it navigable. The result is not a blueprint, but a compass. Not an answer, but a wayfinding logic for navigating—and shaping—the commercial and cultural landscapes brands inhabit.
Speakers:
Nikita Walia, Strategy Director and Writer, U.N.N.A.M.E.D.
Elliot Vredenburg, Creative Director, U.N.N.A.M.E.D.
