Thursday,
June 1st,
2017
Brooklyn
NY

Greetings,

We were a hybrid research group, working at the intersection of technology, culture and education.

We built user-focused tools, public space interventions and forward-looking prototypes in the service of understanding and humanizing complex data systems.

In the past you may have caught us recording a collaborative mapping experience, bringing dialogue about immigration to the busiest place on earth, helping protect elephant populations in Africa, creating public art installations visualizing pain data, engaging citizen scientists to connect joint pain with weather conditions, explaining viral predictivity with the poop emoji, visualizing the resonance of Einstein's theory of general relativity, publishing a journal, performing MoMA's 120,000 object collections database, mapping ambulances in rural India, visualizing the history of space travel in NASA's own words, empowering individuals to reverse engineer ad targeting, giving voice to vast criminal bot networks, investigating systems of drug counterfeiting in Nigeria, mapping millions of meetings across one of the world's largest corporations, staging a live data expedition through one of Africa's most biodiverse wilderness areas, augmenting a stage performance of a Supreme Court Case, breaking down a 500 millisecond online ad auction, showing the origin of the fruits and vegetables we eat, remixing the works of Shakespeare, examining eBay as a cultural artifact, imagining the inner lives of literary hotel guests, projecting the nightly news onto a five story building in Texas, exploring the history of popular science, analyzing sharing activity over social networks, and designing an algorithmic layout system for the 9/11 memorial.

We were also good at answering e-mails, posting things on the internet, and hiring exceptional people.

Founded in 2013, The Office for Creative Research was Jer Thorp, Noa Younse, Zarah CabaƱas, Genevieve Hoffman, Kate Rath, A'yen Tran, Chris Anderson, Jane Friedhoff, Eric Buth, Gabriel Gianordoli, and Erik Hinton. Past OCR alumni include Ian Ardouin-Fumat, Ellery Royston, Ashley Taylor, and Sarah Hughes.

Warmly,
The Office for Creative Research