We’re sitting at a hip hotel restaurant in Chicago, and Hans Neubert has commandeered all of the creamer. In fact, he’s assembled a small china cabinet of coffee cups, saucers, and a sugar bowl at our table to make a point.
Our homes and workplaces are filled with all these gadgets. Nest thermostats. Philips Hue light bulbs. August smart locks. He gestures to the pile of porcelain. They’re piecemeal solutions, each capable of making our environments a bit more smarter, but each fundamentally incapable of solving the gigantic problems in healthcare, urban planning, or physical retail. None of them alone builds the experience of a place.
Then he gestures to the open table he’s cleared. That’s what he’s interested in. A blank slate to build something better from the ground up.
Last year, Neubert was hired at the world’s largest architecture firm, Gensler, to fill a role invented just for him. He’s the global creative lead of digital experiences, tasked with leading the company into its new era in which physical buildings are designed with the digital experiences they enable in mind. He’s like the software to Gensler’s hardware.
“There are two majority roles in our life right now. Half the world is digital. Half the world is physical,” Neubert explains. “So I said, ‘How can I bring these two things together, where can I find a place to do that?”