Creative Director Franzi Sessler: How Design Brings Us Together
Season 2 Episode 5
Can graphic design be a force for good?
In this episode of How We Future, Lisa sits down with Franzi Sessler, the co-founder of global design agency Kreatives, to explore how design, storytelling, and creativity can shape better futures.
Recently, Franzi and her team have made stunning sports explainers for the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Games. Their partnership with Allianz and the International Paralympic Committee started in 2024, when her team created animated explainers for all 22 Paralympic sports, helping millions of viewers understand and enjoy the amazing athletes and games.
The conversation also touches on projects like All Vote No Play and Futures Happening, revealing how design can activate civic imagination, build momentum, and turn uncertainty into possibility. Throughout, Franzi shows what’s possible when constraints are treated as creative fuel and when imagination is taken seriously.
In this conversation, you’ll learn:
How design can close the gap between confusion and connection
Why constraints often unlock the best ideas
What it takes to design with trust, empathy, and impact
Links from the episode:
Franzi’s favorite Paralympic Disciplines to Design for: Boccia and Swimming
Franzi’s All Vote No Play designs
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Lisa Kay Solomon: I’m Lisa Kay Solomon, and this is How We Future, where I talk to some of my favorite changemakers about shaping tomorrow starting today.
This week’s guest, Franzi Sessler, has been part of my life for over a decade. So many of the ideas I brought into the world started with a phone call to Franzi. When something feels ambitious, a little wild, or deeply important, she is the person I call first.
Franzi is the co-founder of Kreatives, a global design studio built on the belief that creativity can be a force for good. She brings strategy, design, and storytelling together in ways that both look beautiful and move us towards a better future. In this episode, we talk about what it really means to design for impact, and it’s fitting that we’re releasing this conversation at the start of the Milano Winter Olympics.
You’ll hear how Franzi’s work helped bring Paralympic sports to millions of people around the world. It’s an incredible story of how design and storytelling can break down barriers and bring us closer together. You’ll also learn how she turns constraints into creative breakthroughs, and how she builds teams and cultures that make space for experimentation, play, and trust. Get ready for a conversation about imagination, fun, and what’s possible when we choose to build futures with intention, purpose, and care.
Huzzah.
Franzi Sessler: Dah, dah.
Lisa: We’re off. Dah, dah, dah. Franzi Sessler, we’re so excited to have you on the How We Future podcast because you’ve been there from the very beginning. We’re just so grateful to have a conversation with you about your work, how you and the Kreatives are shaping better tomorrows by the storytelling, design, and relationships that you’re building, and just a chance to hear a little bit about the magic and the intention that goes behind everything that you do. Thank you so much for joining us.
Franzi: I’m so happy to be here. I feel like we’re having a conversation like this every other week, and now we’re getting recorded while doing so. This is amazing.
Lisa: I know, and the reason why it’s every week is because you’re usually my first phone call when I have something absolutely wacky, ambitious, important to bring to the world, and then you help shape it, and you help give it form. That’s the way we’ve been marching through life for pretty much the last decade. It’s absolutely awesome to share your genius with everybody else in the world. Maybe we’ll start there, Franzi. Tell us about the work you’re doing at Kreatives. I want to start at your current place that you’re shaping the future. What is Kreatives? What kind of work do you do?
Franzi: Amazing. Thank you. By the way, that’s the best calls one can get. A wild idea. Let’s go. My co-founder and I, we started Kreatives almost a decade ago with truly the belief that creativity can be a force for good. We really set out with the belief that we can utilize our creative capabilities to really shape on where we can go in the future. This idea was really rooted a long time ago. I was trained as a graphic designer. I was working in advertisement like many other creative people, because that’s the only career path that is shaped for you as a creative person. You become an artist, or you become a designer in some sort of an agency.
I was on the latter path, and I found that a lot of creative people are trapped. A client comes in with a crap idea, and you’re then there to color it in, make it green, make it blue. You’re not really asked to be part of the, “What should we do? Why should we do it? For who should we do it, and what else could we do?” Which is where creative people are actually used at their best, I would say.
Fast forward, our studio today is really focusing on bringing strategy, so why, how, for who, all of the things together with the design. Then what does it look like? What does it feel like? What else can we do to enhance experience and touch all senses? Then we do storytelling. The best ideas die sometimes in a PowerPoint deck in the strategy world, and in the design world, in a bin because there are so many ideas that we trash. Storytelling is really what brings out the meaning and gives us the ability to connect.
That’s really what we do, strategy, design, and storytelling. Because it’s a lot of work to bring all of that together, we cherry-pick the clients that try to do something better for this world. We would not just take a project for money’s sake. We take projects with people that want to push the world forward. That’s how we choose our clients, and that’s the fun work we get to do every day.
Lisa: It’s fantastic work. It’s clear when you look at your projects and your case studies, and we’re going to talk about some of them, that it is beautiful work, but it’s emotional work. When you see your work, you feel something. I think that’s what makes for great storytelling, is that it moves you at the very human level. It’s emotional. I want to maybe start there because, Franzi, we are going to be airing this right around the time that the Winter Olympics are going to be kicking off and talk about moving people. Sports moves people. The Olympics gets everyone together on the international stage, something that we need right now.
You’ve been working with Olympic athletes, and particularly Paralympic athletes now, for a number of years to tell their story. It’s one of my favorite examples of how design and storytelling can change the world. Of course, I’m wearing, for those of you watching, my sporty outfit to honor that work. Maybe tell us a little bit about that project. I think it’s such a great example of what you were just talking about.
Franzi: One of these cherry-picked clients of ours that we have is the world’s number one insurance brand. They’re called Allianz. You might have heard of them. They’re based in Europe, where we are based as well. They really, for a couple of years now, are already an official partner of the Olympic and the Paralympic movements. Specifically, in preparation for Paris, they were trying to look for ways to enhance their impact on the Paralympics. Because of the Olympics, everybody is throwing money there already. The world is looking at the Olympics. For the Paralympics, there’s still a lot of lifting to do to really get the best out of it.
Allianz is really invested into that. In fact, 2026 marks their 20th anniversary for their official partnership with the Paralympics. They were the first-ever global corporate partner that believed in this movement, which I think is just so special. They were looking at ways to really engage the audience in a new way for the 2024 Paris Olympics and Paralympics. They looked at the data, looking at, what could we do? We started looking at data. They found that 90% of the people that watch the Olympics, they don’t watch the Paralympics. 90% of the people that watch the Olympics don’t watch the Paralympics. Of course, any good designer would ask, why? Why is that happening?
We also looked into that. Allianz did very deeply look into that. Together with the Paralympics, we found, of course, people don’t understand what’s actually happening in the sports. When you have watched the Paralympics and are a bit familiar with it, to make the games fair, they use, even though it might be a similar sport like basketball and wheelchair basketball, they might use same methods and same principles of the sports. The equipment is different. The rules are different. The classifications exist to really make it fair. To give access to people with many different levels of abilities to really compete on a fair level.
When you watch it on TV or in a stadium, you might not understand what’s going on, and after 30 seconds, disengage and switch off because what I watch, I don’t understand. Allianz really had the idea to bring out the best and invest in helping the public out there understand Paralympic sports. As simple as that. How might we make the people understand Paralympic sports?
That’s where we were brought in. The first idea was actually an infographic series. Starting with plain infographics that explains each of the sports with little call-outs, things. I will never forget our first prototype that we had was this printed-out magazine-size sheet of a wheelchair basketball player. It was a black-and-white picture. We added all the details, things that we made up. At that time, we had no idea how wheelchair basketball actually works. We were really invested into going all in and trying to explain this. We needed to learn ourselves first. None of the people on our team were Paralympic athletes, obviously, so we needed to start from zero.
First prototype was an infographic. Even though we worked with one of the best infographic designers of the world that was trying to make this thing work with me on my side, we both looked at it and said, “This is not doing the trick. If the goal is to help people understand, how do we get this thing into more hands than somebody that happened to open this page in this magazine?” We said, “We need to go into the 21st century and make this thing moving. We need to try to engage and use time and storytelling as a way to get there.”
We pitched the idea. I think some of the people at the Paralympics and Allianz also had that conversation in the past. How do you use video to make that happen? We came together and articulated the idea to do a video series to explain Paralympic sports. How hard could that be? [laughs] How hard could that be? We started, and we did the first prototype. We tried to understand the first sport, brought it together, and then, how do we actually do this? How do we make this? It turns out 22 sports to be explained with a short timeline until the Paris Games is not that easy.
Doing that with one illustrator, which is still the haptical way to draw all the frames and then you animate it together, even though we can use digital tools and AI on all fronts. The hard labor of putting artwork out there is still done by humans. Just one illustrator doing that for all sports is not possible. We were faced with the technical challenge that we could embrace doing multiple illustrators. We sat there for this moment, if we do multiple illustrators, all of the videos will look different. Some of us are like, “Oh, we can’t do that, we can’t do that.”
Then one brilliant mind, again, the design lead on our team said, “What if they all look different?” We made it part of the storytelling that we’re bringing the world of illustrators together. As diverse as athletes are that come together for the Paralympic Games, we bring together diverse illustrators that have their different styles in their different artwork. We added a little cherry.
Because the games were happening in Paris, we added a reference to Paris art or French art, because the first Olympic Games that happened in the last decade in 1924, so exactly 100 years ago, was kind of cool. We played on that, and every sport got a designated French artist’s masterpiece that the illustrators had to reflect as well. We turned what was a challenge into the magical part of this project. Woo-hoo, here we are. Fast forward, 22 sport explainers in all formats and languages you could imagine later. We’ve done it. We explained all sports.
Lisa: It’s incredible. Thank you for that overview. I think it beautifully describes why I’m so passionate about design as a method of moving the world forward. You created something that didn’t exist and it was a process of diverging and converging. First, how might we explore bringing the sports closer to people that don’t understand them? Not taking the assumption at first blush that, “Oh, they’re just not interested.” No, it’s not about interest. It’s about lack of understanding. How do we shrink the gap so that they get invested in these athletes and the sports and they understand?
Our job is to help explain and then realizing that after an infographic, that first prototype, it wasn’t doing that emotional job of what you wanted to do, so going back again. It’s a process of experimentation and discovery back and forth, that diverging, converging, getting information. The last piece, which is just so extraordinary that I really hope our friends listening take away, is how do you take a constraint and turn that into an opportunity?
This constraint that, “Oh my gosh, this is a huge ask, 22 sports, one illustrator, how might we do this?” To, “Wait a minute, why don’t we turn that constraint into a possibility and turn it into a feature? Make it a series honoring illustrators and their different styles from around the world.” I wonder if you could share, Franzi, a little bit like what happened. These had enormous impact. How did they go?
Franzi: First of all, I want to go one step back to the process that you just described, Lisa, and just add a little nuance. The tough things about designing for the future, really, nobody’s ever done it before. This was truly one-of-a-kind project that none of us has done before. Not the clients, not the Paralympics, not Paris, not us. Nobody knew how to do this. We truly had to embrace figuring out how to do this together and trusting the different expertises, doing an experiment, sailing with it, and doing it again.
I just wanted to celebrate all these partners involved in here for leaning in. It’s not easy to do when you have to do reporting and all of these things to just lean in and try something completely different. I think that’s so important.
Lisa: Can I just add a little bit?
Franzi: Yes.
Lisa: One of the things that I think you are so brilliant at is being a strategic translator. Having to, first of all, build the trust that says, “Hey, listen, come with us. We’re going to do something ambitious. We don’t exactly know how it’s going to play out, but you’re going to trust us.” Building that relational trust. Then along the way, being able to interpret and experiment what you learned, how it’s still advancing, even though you haven’t gotten there yet. It speaks to the comfort with ambiguity that I think design demands that we have. I think so many more people need to practice. They’re like, “Just because that first one didn’t go, we’re going to get there. We’re going to try. We’re going to keep at it.”
We’re going to stay focused on something you said earlier around the why. If we have clarity on the why, then we can iterate on the how. I think that’s so important to distinguish, because it gives you that north star to keep going when frankly it feels crappy when you haven’t nailed it. You’re like, “Oh, we’ve just spent hours and hours and hours and we’re still not there and they’re not happy.” You really have to pull through. When you have that clarity of why and you have someone at the helm who’s able to translate between the visuals, the motion, the artist, the impact, the value, that is just invaluable.
Franzi: Absolutely. Building on that, looking ahead to where we are now, post the Paralympic Games from last year, I think there’s a couple of moments that made us really proud looking back at that work, which is, one, we reached over 23 million people, which is an incredible number for the Paralympics. They have not seen numbers like that. Just like that, in that way. Nobody knew how these videos would turn out, so nobody made any promises during the process.
In the end, while the games were happening, people were scrambling to get them on the TVs because we need to show them in the stadium on the TV. Broadcasters wanted to use them. They’d seen them and they needed to get it into German TV now. The momentum started building, and that’s when you do something great, you feel the momentum start happening. For me, there’s two highlights here. One, these were the most watched Paralympic Games in history.
Lisa: Oh.
Franzi: Most watched Games in human history.
Lisa: Incredible.
Franzi: I think we played a small portion into that huge milestone for the Paralympics. They do so much wonderful work, and you got to check out their social media. It’s just so brilliant what they do in storytelling. We had a small piece of helping them get there. Then the second part was-- this is a very personal moment. We got to get to the village, the athlete’s village. One of the wheelchair basketball athletes wheeled up to me and asked if she could buy a printed version of some of the frames in the video from us that we could maybe even sign because she felt so seen in these videos.
Usually, when they’re shown in media, et cetera, sometimes the disability isn’t the focus. “Look what they can do even with their wheelchair.” That’s not what it’s about. They’re freaking athletes and they work hard. It’s a fun game to watch. That’s what we need to show. They felt so seen and heard. That moves me to tears just thinking about that because that’s, in the end, why we did this work. We wanted to shine light on a otherwise marginalized portion of society that shouldn’t be like that.
Lisa: It goes back to when you tell the story in ways that honor the humanity and the strength and values that you’re trying to bring forward, what it can do at every level. Even that beautiful story, and I think we can all visualize what that must have felt like. Here you are working, working, working weeks, really just trying to get it right. Then there’s that moment of impact when the person that you’ve really been designing for has the chance to tell you what it meant for them at that micro level, that individual level.
Then moving out to say what it might have felt like for the team, what it felt like for the fans that were there. I know before every game these videos were played. They were played in these enormous stadiums, which just must have been incredible to see your work.
Franzi: Right under the Eiffel Tower. It was so cool.
Lisa: Oh my gosh. It’s incredible, right? Again, didn’t exist. I think you and your partner have a name for this, the idea of dream storming. You’re just really pushing out how far. Then the impact that it had on social media. That’s, I think, the courage and the boldness of saying, “We don’t know exactly how we’re going to do this, but if we have that clarity about what it is that we’re trying to do, how we’re trying to tell these stories, maybe there’s no limit to what we can do.” Just extraordinary. Franzi, real talk here. 22 sports, was one harder than others to get the story right or illustrate or really honor?
Franzi: The hardest one to do were the ones where there’s not a comparison. There’s some sports that you don’t find in the Olympic sport roster. You can’t watch a, “How does nah, nah, nah, sport work? Then see how you can figure out how to tell your own story, which humbled us. We really had to go back to the IF, so the International Federations and really go to the root of, what is the origin of the sport? Why are we doing this? Really help tell the full story.
One example of that is boccia, which is one of the only sports in the Paralympic roster that includes all abilities and disabilities. It’s a full-on inclusive sport. It has the most beautiful-- I encourage you all to watch it, the most beautiful rules of helping each other out on performing the sport, which was really cool and hard to draw as well, in an elegant and respectful way as well.
Lisa: Oh, we’ll definitely link to it in the show notes. I love the appreciation of what is it about the sport that we want to highlight, that we want to emphasize. Each of the videos are less than two minutes. They’re vibrant, they’re animated, they’re beautiful. They’re really extraordinary. It reminds me of something I know we talk a lot about when we’re using design to bring forward new ideas in the world in concrete ways is that a lot of times there are no metrics that exist. We have to invent the metrics. That is part of the design process, which is to say, this doesn’t have a comparison, but we’re going to pioneer a new way. Then all of a sudden, we set a new standard of how we talk about it.
Franzi: I want to add one more favorite, just if we’re adding links here. I think one of my favorites is also a model of taking a challenge and making it the best it can be, which was para swimming. One of the hardest things to do in the world of animation is to do full-on cycles of movement, especially in fluid way. I imagined that in water. Doing that is really, really hard to draw and to animate. We had very limited resources, shortest timelines, so we really had to figure this out. I think the team here did a wonderful job in getting to that level of excellence, so check it out.
Lisa: Oh, we’ll definitely add to that. We’re going to come back to it in a little bit, Franzi, your philosophy about how you build teams and your culture. I think it is one of the just extraordinary ways that you lead that inspire me so. I want to really get into that in a minute because I think a lot of people are really struggling to figure out, how do I put a team together right now amid all the complexity? You’ve just done such a beautiful job.
I want to stay for a second on the athlete theme. You and I have done some work, again, in the spirit of one of my first phone calls, about trying to infuse civic engagement into student athletics at the college level. I just want to pick up on that thread of, how do you meet people where they are and take them to new places? This didn’t exist yet. This was a project that I started working on with a basketball coach named Eric Reveno, who following some of the uprest in 2020 leading to the presidential election, following the murder of George Floyd, he was coaching down in Georgia. His basketball team felt very distraught, we were in pre-pandemic, about what they could do to ignite change.
He, in a team meeting, was trying to encourage his team to get more active. There was a senior on the team named Malachi Rice who said, “Listen, if we all care about the future, how many people here are registered to vote?” Nobody raised their hand. At that moment, Coach Rev basically had a midlife crisis on the spot and said, “Oh my gosh, I’m probably one of the most important adults in these young students’ lives. I’ve never thought to encourage them to vote and be active.” He got on Twitter and said, “Hey listen, as coaches, we should encourage our athletes to vote on Election Day. We should cancel practice and play, #AllVoteNoPlay.” It became a national movement.
The NCAA turned it into an annual legislation that they would not practice or play on Election Day, not just 2020, but days to come. Incredible idea. Really incredible idea. A log of momentum around 2020. After 2020, the movement died. He called me up and said, “Listen, I hear that you know how to design things that work. Can you help me make this a national movement?”
Then I, of course, called you immediately and said, “Franzi, we have some work to do. We need to together design some materials that speak athlete, that encourage them to build on what they’re already doing in ways that are exciting and build momentum, as opposed to your eat your beats approach to civic engagement.” That’s just a little bit of context for the project that I want to now turn to about your leadership in helping bring what has become a national movement to bear around student athletes acting as courageous citizens. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what it was like to work on that project.
Franzi: Oh, absolutely. First of all, I want to say that really speaks to my core, because I grew up in a war-torn family with a dictatorship. We all know about World War II and the past decade behind us. I strongly believe that when you have a chance to shape democracy and have your hands in shaping society, that gets really exciting. When you, Lisa, called me and talked about this, “You haven’t heard of this thing yet. Are you willing to say yes to yet another crazy adventure that is around democracy and athleticism and really activating student athletes?” I was, of course, jumping up and down.
When you explained the concept of All Vote No Play to me, and really having that one day, that started really as one day where we designate the practice time to doing civic activities, such as voting or other things moving forward, it was really, really, really inspiring. Also, All Vote No Play has such a catchy ring to it as well. Of course, you can’t just show up on a pitch and say, “No, we talk about civic and enthusiasm and engagement.”
Lisa: Especially to athletes.
Franzi: Exactly. You really needed to go to the essence of what would speak to an athlete. I think one thing that we identified very quickly is democracy is a team sport too. We need to work together, and we need to figure out on how we can have fun and really learn how to build on each other, and what really the qualities are that we’re looking for as well. We had to build this brand around All Vote No Play that had a bit of this nuance of being a good civilian in the United States while also speaking to athleticism and sports and active and let’s go attitudes so we are keeping people engaged. That was super fun to work on.
Lisa: It was just incredible. By the way, award winning. We won a number of awards for that incredible interpretation of, again, I think honoring the strength, the movement, the vibrancy, really changing the way we might think about how civic engagement is taught. Just foundationally different. I want to call out-- There’s so many aspects of that project that I loved working in partnership with you. One was this idea that came from a former student of mine who was a basketball player at Stanford that said, “Look, we need a rallying call. We need a civic tailgating party.” He said, “I’m going to make it happen.”
He personally reached out to Dr. Condoleezza Rice to get her involved, Coach Tara VanDerveer. He got all these great athletes from Stanford and from around the country. Steph Curry was involved. These student athletes were interviewing these greats and goats of sports athletics. It was still pandemic land. We decided to have a live streaming of it around the country and have civic tailgating parties across just hundreds of schools and teams to bring people together. We got it catered by Pizza to the Polls. We were using it as a team bonding.
Then, Franzi, your team, of course, part of every step of the branding of what it looked like, turned around probably the best two-minute video I’ve ever seen, capturing the highlights. I just, again, want to honor that a big part of the storytelling is synthesizing and creating narratives in different forms to help people feel a part of what happened, even if they weren’t a part of it. Again, I want to invite you to talk about your team and what that was like for you to be a part of it.
Franzi: For sure. It was very hard, of course, to build a movement in COVID days. It’s already hard to step on a pitch and get people activated and let’s go. It’s even harder to get people to log into a Zoom. It started already there with the storytelling and the engagement we had to do. It started really with the branding and what it looks like and feels like, the way we talk, the way we address things, the way we frame things. Then, really utilizing video as a way to draw people in and also capture these magical interactions. As you mentioned, there’s Condoleezza Rice and Steph Curry. You’re their first semester student, basketball or whatever other sport.
All of a sudden, you’re on the same call, on the same eye level with other people that are modeling already what the future can hold. There was so much hope and inspiration in that that had to be captured. Really, our team here had a very easy job to cut together the best of so that we can tell that story and really maximize the impact from the people that were live with us. We saw right away that just having this live moment is not enough. We need to scale it and bring it to more people so that everybody can organize their own parties as well and engage more students. That was really the goal.
Lisa: That helped kick off a fellowship that is still going, that’s growing, almost doubling every year of student-athletes that are engaged year-long in doing that. Again, it’s because I think that highlight reel inspired them. In fact, just this past week, I saw one of the students that was a part of that hasn’t been at Stanford for four years. He just reposted what that experience was like for him to interview Steph Curry.
These moments are more than just moments. They are really pivot points, I think. Transformational opportunities for particularly young people that didn’t even know it was possible to feel how they felt, to be seen the way that they’ve been seen. I think it is because of your ability to observe, to listen, to try to understand that empathetic work that, again, when done well, design is so good at, and translate it. It’s not even a mirror. It’s like a prism. It’s like, “Listen, we see you, and now we are going to shine the light even brighter.”
Franzi: I want to jump in here quickly because I think I just noticed, I know you for so long, but I think I’m just noticing really a big parallel in both of our work. As designers, it’s our job to look at this prism from all angles and bring things together. I believe in these experiences such as All Vote No Play when we had everybody together in that Zoom call. The way that you orchestrated the type of people that need to have a conversation together that otherwise wouldn’t is just so magical. That’s like our designers bringing together ideas that would’ve otherwise not existed. We’re shaping, really, and creating what could be by assembling things that were otherwise not connected.
Lisa: Absolutely. I’m a huge believer. I think Steve Jobs even said this, that creativity is about assembling different parts and creating the conditions. I think that another part of that you do so beautifully is recognize that part of is to reduce the temperature of the anxiety and fear when we’re going into something new and increase the belief, increase the interest, the intrigue. Those are subtle choices that really make the difference.
It’s a good segue, actually, to one final project I want to talk about that we’ve worked on together that just, again, remains such a highlight, which is The Future’s Happening, that we architected and designed at Stanford in 2024 to really ignite civic imagination. Listen, it’s not an easy time for democracy in general. I think that there’s a lot of reaction and worry and response and fear to what’s going on, and rightfully so.
I think you and I had an instinct that said we also need to fill our conversation, our communities with positive possibilities, not Pollyanna, but bright spots about what could be so that we’re not just spending our energy responding and reacting, but we are diving into our human capability to imagine and to collectively imagine. We worked on The Future’s Happening, and it was for democracy makers, movers, and multipliers, which was an idea to honor the makers, the folks that were doing innovative work. The movers were teachers and folks leading communities that had the ability to share some of those ideas, and the multipliers, the funders, the networks that could spread this widely.
To do it at Stanford where we could craft the conditions at the hub of the makerspace, so it was really from the beginning, not about fixing legal issues or regulatory issues which are important, but just not the lane we were playing in, and to invite people to dream together, which was a big ask in 2024. I want to really talk through this project a little bit, specifically around some of the smaller choices that we made in order to quickly get people to lean into the possibility and not to have their defense mechanism up.
I think one of the most important things were the welcome, the way that we created a makerspace honoring all of those folks that were pushing the envelope, whether it were professional sports leagues that were infusing civic engagement into their program like Athletes Unlimited or Citizen University that is all about trying to ignite a civic renaissance. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what it was like to work on that project, and specifically some of the design choices that you helped bring to life to create what was, I think, one of the most powerful 24 hours for many people in that whole year.
Franzi: Yes. The beginning of this project was similar to the Paralympic project, to be honest. It started with a hunch, an idea, there’s a challenge out there, how do we figure it out? Elisa, you had this roster of people in the US that were doing wonderful things in order to shape our communities, our society, our democracy. You witnessed firsthand that some of them are doing wonderful work, let’s say in Colorado, on the East Coast, wherever they were, and they might feel even lonely in their pocket. Bringing them together in one space to just have an exchange, it had never been really done before like that. There was this question of, what would happen if we brought people together?
To set the tone right, to welcome people into the space, you created this idea of having a display for each of the people that were participating. We created these posters that had a visual and a little descriptive text that explained what’s behind that and what impact this organization has been creating. Some were really big organizations that everybody knows, and some were really small. There’s just a two-people team trying something new. They were all equally leveled, lined up on these massive boards at the entryway of Stanford’s d.school. If you have been there, you know there’s this beautiful atrium at the stage.
Just leading up to the big stage, we had left and right these cool posters that just welcomed people. You could see in every coffee break, every moment we had, people were gathering around them and scanning-- We added a little QR code so you could connect and find each other as well. It was really, really cool to see how-- There was new bonds shaped with just a design asset that was put there on a wall. This was really the seeding ground for new friendships, new connections, and new possibilities, really.
Lisa: Again, I think there was a huge theme of honoring. The other thing, Franzi, that I think you helped inspire is rather than just say, “Here’s the Urban Library Council,” it was, what if libraries could become the public hubs of civic engagement? Turning that opportunity into an inviting question to get people to lean in, to want to learn more. That QR code was there in the descriptor to help proactively address the likely response in that moment. Which was, “That would never happen.” Oh, but it’s happening.
Franzi: It is happening. Look at it.
Lisa: It’s happening. This idea-- Look at it. By the way, Shamichael Hallman is here. Go talk to him. You mentioned Warm Cookies of the Revolution. Just even hearing that name, you want to know about Warm Cookies of the Revolution. Of course, they’re doing incredible stuff out of Colorado, in the rural areas of this country. Again, like, “Oh, that would never happen,” but it’s happening. It’s happening. Go find them. Go meet them. The most incredible collaborations happen because I think the design laid the foundation for trust. We honored people in the room.
As you said, much like the Paralympic Explainers, how do we hit at that micro level, but also encourage people to dream big, even when they’re feeling a lot of pressure? To me, the thing that I continue to come back to, and why I love working with you, I think we’re such a good pair, is that we both believe that design can have outside influence. This is very much what I’m trying to teach with my students, that if you can learn to spot an opportunity and then bring it to life in a concrete form, in a visual that gets us emotional, in a story that wants us to move from where we are to where we could be, it’s like one of the most powerful levers that you have.
Franzi: Our common friend Nathan Shedroff always defined design, really, a good design being things that trigger the right response. I believe that makes us all designers. In the end, we all want to trigger the right response. In this case, we really wanted to spark that moment of connection. With that twist of, let’s make this an optimistic festival. Let’s model the bright spots. Let’s show that there’s goodness out there and that we can shape and have an impact on that future ahead of us.
Lisa: Thank goodness for you, Franzi, because as we were putting it together, I can’t tell you how many naysayers were whispering in my ear. “Lisa, we don’t have time for this. Lisa, this isn’t important right now. Lisa, we got to fix what’s broken.” I’m personally grateful for your friendship and support and belief in this. We have to create a little bubble around us as we’re prototyping forward. My gosh, did it take a lot of prototyping.
Then I just want to say one more piece about this project that I just found to be so incredible because we couldn’t have planned for it is that we had a relatively small gathering at Stanford. It’s not a huge space. There was about 100-plus people there. We were sharing it online. Then I remember I got a note from the First Lady of Albuquerque. It also happened to be a futurist. She said, “Wait a minute, we need some of that civic imagination. Can you figure out a way to get it to our community?”
Then you and I basically spent the entire summer following that event creating a playbook for civic imagination, a Futures Happening playbook to allow anybody, teachers, school administrators, boys and girls clubs, to take pieces of it that would fit their local community to, again, just shift it a little bit from the reaction to a sense of possibility and possible and positive futures. Again, it’s this like, we put things out there and then new emergent opportunities. What do you do with that? How do you take that in? It’s one of the projects I feel most proud of and could not have done it without you.
I want to maybe talk a little bit, Franzi, now as we close up this conversation about some of the design choices you make with your own firm. I had the great opportunity of visiting you recently in Munich in your headquarters. I was just blown away by the details of your space. For a long time, I’ve known about how much you think about culture. Really building on that great definition that Nathan talks about around design is about making choices that trigger the right responses.
Here you are, you’ve got a team that you’ve got to try to encourage to push boundaries, be creative, extend their craft. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you think about that internally. I think a lot of people listening to this might take a lot of inspiration from some of the choices that you make.
Franzi: If it’s never been done before, that’s a reason to do something. Our studio really started in our living room. We convinced our early clients that in order to be close to the community we’re designing for, we need to be in their environments. This is why we’re designing in a living room. That was really the reason. Everybody loved it so much as a concept that throughout our studios, we’re now in our third studio, we kept that feeling of feeling at home, living roomy, because we felt that’s where we do our best work. If I want to be in a space and I feel inspired and I can co-create and I can drop something and nobody cares. That is a great place to be when you need to create something really, really hard.
That’s a fundamental principle in our studio. I’ll start talking about the physical space before I go into how we work together. The physical space really informs how we interact. We have an area in our studio that we call the playground. For our nine people, small little design boutique team here, we have a massive studio. The reason for that is because we feel the need and we see the need out there to co-create and create this space for people to come together in one space and create and do and try and try again and try again. That’s why we have the playground. Sometimes it’s a photo studio, sometimes it’s for workshops, and sometimes it’s really to dream up the wild next thing.
We physically move into the playground when we need to do things where we don’t have the answers to. Maybe you have a mental place where you go, the playground, when you embrace yourself. I don’t have the answers, and that’s where you create. I think that is a great anecdote of our studio because it also shows how we work. We create pockets for what do we know, what do we not know, and then for the what do we not know, what do we need to do to figure out until we know.
This is also how we started our team. We started with, what do we know? We know that there is a need for strategy and design to come together, so we hired strategist designers. We tried, and it worked. We added the storytelling angles because that was missing. We really looked for diversity of crafts in our team, and that just happened to be a diverse group of people from all around the world where people don’t even speak German, even though we’re in Germany, and that’s a no-no here. Like, “Oh, if you’re here, you need to speak German.” We don’t care. We want the best of their crafts and bring their best selves and their best work, and magic happens. Look at the Paralympic project.
Lisa: Incredible. I love the idea of just we got to go to the playground. We recently had Jill Vialet on who wrote Why Play Works, and I think she would agree with you that play is the place to discover, to push boundaries, and to take a risk. Even when you got this latest space, knowing we need a bigger space. We have to be able to do our work and push boundaries, and we’re going to need the space to do it. There’s all these great signs everywhere. There’s a sign that says something like 13 ways to increase talent. Tell me about that sign.
Franzi: 13 things that require zero talent, [chuckles] which is really to get the basics right in our team. Being on time, showing up, being prepared, all of these things that really don’t require talent, but set each other up for success. Just an easy entry to be part of a team.
Lisa: Just even, again, putting out the expectations, the standards, but doing it in a lighthearted way. Not being like, “Listen, you better, or you’ll get fired, or you’re done.” Like, “Hey--” I think you said that’s the most photographed. It’s hand-drawn. It’s a flip chart up there. Throughout the whole office, there’s just invitations to be playful. There’s so much humor. You do some serious work.
We don’t have time to get into some of the work that you’ve done with the UN on food security. A lot of very, very serious projects that we’ll make sure to link to on your site. It requires that humanity and recognizing that we don’t have to take ourselves so seriously to do this important work. I just think that there’s a consistency and a congruency with the way that you lead that I just find to be so inspiring.
Franzi: It’s really rooted in this belief that we have an impact. We’ve collected the proof points. We can have an impact. Let’s do it and let’s do it again. I recently listened as well to the Dan Roam episode of How We Future. He’d be very pleased to see that we have a massive whiteboard that we completely wipe as a process that we do before big ideas need to happen. It’s a ceremony to clean the whiteboard. Then we start mapping out the most complex things. The gnarliest problems, the most complex issues, you can start simplifying and start making sense of it together. With the belief that you can do it, I think, in a space that allows for it, the world is your oyster.
Lisa: I love that, Franzi. Maybe a great place to end this conversation, but certainly not ending our incredible work together because I honor so much who you are and what you do. I’m so grateful that you are doing the hard work of meeting people where they are, even in these difficult times, and believing that the future can be better than it is today if we lead into our humanity. We continue to show up with care, with humor, with empathy, and with courage. Franzi, thank you so much for being a part of How We Future, for the work that you do. As always, I leave our conversations more excited for what’s next. Thank you.
Franzi: Thank you, Lisa, for creating this podcast format because that was yet another thing that didn’t exist before. Thank you for creating this format for all of us. Really excited for the next episodes to come. I would just love to invite everybody here because that’s still my mission. Watch the Paralympics. They’re starting. You should see the videos coming up leading up to it too. Be a fan. Be a fan of the Paralympics. They’re so cool.
Lisa: Yes, absolutely. Be a fan. Share with others. Now you know the story of how they happened, so you’re brought in. Not just be a fan, be an ambassador. Thank you, Franzi. I’m so excited. Can’t wait to see them, and we will share them with the world.
Franzi: Yay.
Lisa: Thanks for spending time with me and Franzi Sessler. There’s so much to learn from her passion, joy, and belief that tomorrow can be better than today. Here’s a simple challenge for you this week. Notice a story that moves you. Maybe it’s an Olympians journey to the Winter Games or a colleague’s breakthrough at work. Pay attention to the moment that the story turns a stranger into someone you’re suddenly rooting for.
As Franzi reminds us, there are no others in this world. Only stories we haven’t heard yet. When we choose to listen, we turn a stadium of strangers into a community of shared human effort. If this episode sparked something for you, I’d love for you to rate or review How We Future or share it with someone who believes creativity can move the world forward. I’m Lisa Kay Solomon. Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you next time.