A designer and director working at the seams where design, technology and futures meet.
For three decades I’ve helped teams make complex systems feel human, useful and present. That’s taken a lot of forms: news websites, a social network for travellers, connected products, planetary-scale machine intelligence, home energy systems, and — currently — satellites looking back down at the Earth.
I started at the BBC in 1997, as creative director for the launch of BBC News Online — one of the first, and still one of the largest, news sites on the web. Since then I’ve co-founded Dopplr, been a principal at the invention studio BERG, spent the better part of a decade at Google (first at Creative Lab in New York, then in Google Research, working on ambient and on-device AI), led design as Head of Design at the clean-energy startup Lunar Energy, shaped AI design direction at Miro, and I’m now Head of Brand & Design at ICEYE, the world’s largest operator of synthetic-aperture-radar satellites.
Across all of it, a few things stay constant. I believe the best work is done by teams, not lone geniuses — so I try to build environments where good people can do their best work, and make sure they get the credit for it. I believe in making things to think, not just thinking about making things. And I believe that the job of design, especially around powerful new technology, is to make the complex legible: to turn capability into something people can understand, trust and act on.
I also think design is culture — not a neutral layer laid over it. The work has to reference and live inside the culture it’s made for: the films, music, books, images and in-jokes people already carry around, not just user-needs or technology trends. There’s a pop element to what I do — I’d rather make something legible, resonant and a little bit beloved than something merely correct.
I’ve been writing about all of this at petafloptimism.com since June 2000 — thinking in public, working ideas out where people can argue with them. I also give talks and lectures, turn up in the occasional interview, and in the press, and hold a number of patents for the work. Work I’ve been part of has found its way into the V&A, MoMA and, somewhat improbably, Marvel Comics.
I’m based in London.
Get in touch: hello@moleitau.com · LinkedIn · Resume / CV