Google [x] Design Kitchen

As an early hire in the nascent special projects group at Google (later named Google [x]), I conceived of and built a new kind of capability within the company: a Design Kitchen. With a mission to radically shorten the distance between idea and prototype, I assembled a world-class team of designers, fabricators, and creative technologists to help realize audacious moonshots—and spark new ones.

Our work spanned everything from novel materials and digital fabrication to robotics, optics, and mechanical design. The Design Kitchen became an interdisciplinary engine for experimentation, invention, and high-craft prototyping at the heart of X.

Though I eventually left Google to raise a kid and explore the frontier of biomaterials, the Design Kitchen continues to thrive more than a decade later under the stellar leadership of my friend Joe Sargent—who is still cooking up the future.