Jacob Waites Visual & Interaction Designer

Jacob Waites is a Visual & Interaction designer specializing in brand design & experience. Living at the intersection between designer & developer, Jacob seeks to bridge the gap between digital and physical. Jacob co-founded Foremost, a creative collective working around the globe, and is currently working at IDEO CoLab. Jacob is also an avid instant photographer and a big fan of tacos.

Department of Possibilities Brand

The Department of Possibilities is an environment, an experience, and a movement. Our mission is to create the space for civil servants, experts, and makers to safely experiment with radical ideas, and then migrate them into the mainstream of public life.

The Department of Possibilities became the UAE Ministry of Possibilities publicly in April in Dubai, acting as a space for radical collaboration and experimentation between the UAE government and its citizens. I was part of a design team collaborating with IDEO’s Palmwood studio in Dubai, along with Mitch Sinclair, Luca Ponticelli, and Takashi Wickes. I helped flesh out the communications and brand design across physical and digital artifacts in prep for the brand’s launch in Dubai.

I focused on refining wordmarks into a system and creating visual assets for the brand, along the way applying them to collateral pieces that would be given out as part of the program at the physical space.

Introducing the Department of Possibilities

The system

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Physical collateral

Since this was the first year that blueprint ever happened, we commemorated the event with a 90 page book cataloguing what CoLab was, our approach, point of views on each portfolio area that we were researching, and case studies with members that happened during the year.

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The UAE’s Launch of the Ministry

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