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Asia Abroad It’s a new world and Asian designers are at the heart of it Asia in Venice Grassroots architecture is the star at this year’s architecture biennale Red Dot Awards designing for a better future
Everett Katigbak
Media Hybrid Facebook Communications Designer Everett Katigbak is an analogue designer living in a digital world. WORDS Carren Jao
108 Surface Asia
If you’ve seen Social Network, you know the gist of Facebook’s story, from scrappy start-up in Harvard to a mammoth social network that boasts 955 million active users. Chances are, when someone’s not paying you any mind, they’re on Facebook. But this company has a deep, dark analogue secret. Inside an unassuming warehouse on its campus in Menlo Park, California is Facebook’s Analog Research Laboratory, a glitch amid the company’s undoubted tech roots. The “lab” is actually a workshop filled with tools designed to make actual physical objects. Think silk-screening gear, letterpress and worktables. The lab was an under-the-radar project of Filipino-American designer Everett Katigbak and partner-in-crime Ben Barry, two of the four original designers that started the communication design team four years ago. “[Facebook] wasn’t aware that it was an investment that they were making until we just did it,” says Katigbak. “It was this grassroots thing that we did. We had a warehouse, so we just brought in our own
Everett Katigbak
“proceed and be bold” pop out against a row of clear high-rise glass windows, a clear sign that this was no ordinary day at the office. Not only does Katigbak bring to life Facebook spaces, he also adds colour and flavour to many of Facebook’s new features through videos, events and pretty much anything outside the Facebook realm. For f8, Katigbak worked with engineers to design an RFID-integrated platform that allowed attendees to link their tags with their Facebook accounts, bringing Facebook into the physical world. Their user-generated data then became a beautiful graph projected on an 80-foot by 20-foot wall. It’s a daunting task for Katigbak to stretch himself from medium to medium, but it suits him just fine. “That’s the type of person that I am, media agnostic,” he says. “I don’t say that I’m a filmmaker or a print designer. I like to think of the high-level problem and then find a medium that fits that solution.” typochondriac.com
(OPPOSITE) Graphically gorgeous internal messaging that comes out of Facebook’s Analog Research Lab on a regular basis. Here, designers can find an outlet for their creativity in solid physicality. (THIS PAGE, FROM TOP) Everett Katigbak inside the warehouse where the Analog Research Lab sits; The Analog Research Lab is a designer’s playground, filled with tools meant to inspire ideas for bridging the gap between the physical and digital.
equipment and we just started doing it. That’s very much the culture here. You can talk about things all you want, but until you do something only then will you be able to demonstrate the value of it.” The lab was an attractive anomaly, where “poke” postcards were made to correspond with friends and posters proclaiming “the foolish wait” remind employees to strike while the iron is hot. By producing physical objects like flyers, pins, videos accompanying new website features and office spaces, among many other things, Katigbak’s job supports Facebook’s famed “hacker” culture in more tactile ways. In a public letter applying for IPO, founder Mark Zuckerberg defines “the Hacker Way” as “an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete.” Katigbak applied this principle when designing Facebook’s first major campus at 1601 South California in Palo Alto. Instead of hiring an architect to give them a sleek office building, Katigbak made sure the space was scaled back to the barest minimum. “It was a shell of a building when we moved in. That was strategic on our part. It sent the signal that we’re building this together.” In the Austin office, Katigbak repurposed objects from f8, Facebook’s annual developer conference. The space became an engagingly dissonant mix of polished and raw. Barcodes intermingle with wall graphics. At Facebook’s New York office, the words Surface Asia 109