Making Impact 3D
Upstatement had only six weeks to pull off an XR-for-good brand launch. Here’s how they embraced unfamiliar territory to expand their creative horizons.
Sometimes, you need a shift in perspective to make meaningful change. For Chief Design Officer Scott Dasse and his team at Upstatement, helping to launch Agog, a philanthropic experiential reality (XR) initiative, unlocked new insights into pulling off the seemingly impossible.
Despite its impressive digital, design, and brand credentials, Upstatement had never worked in XR before partnering with Agog. So how did they pull off a successful XR brand launch in just six weeks? And what did they discover along the way about how to work with — and in — new technologies?
Connecting the Dots
Upstatement’s previous work in the environmental space set the stage for its introduction to Agog and XR brand design. In 2018, it partnered with climate media leader Chip Giller on the rebrand of his website, Grist. In 2023, Upstatement helped launch the non-profit Earth Alliance, gaining a fan in CEO Brady Walkinshaw in the process.
Fast forward to 2024: Giller and philanthropist Wendy Schmidt were working on developing a groundbreaking, new startup. A journalist by trade, Schmidt was interested in new forms of storytelling that could positively change the world, while Giller recognized the power of XR, which encompasses augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality. After decades steeped in the world of traditional journalism, Giller had concluded that fact-based storytelling wasn’t powerful enough to change behavior; emotions needed to play a part as well. And what’s more emotional than an experience?
Giller and Schmidt foresaw the social impact of XR, and how creating an organization to empower non-traditional XR storytellers could help change a homogenous (mostly white and male) creator and user community. To harness the power of XR for social good, they founded Agog.
When the Agog team needed someone to bring their brand to life, Walkinshaw, who was also working with Schmidt, recommended Upstatement as the perfect partner. The catch? The brand needed to launch at SXSW 2024, only six weeks away. “We knew that was going to be really, really hard,” says Dasse, who was inspired by the innovative challenge but realistic about its difficulty. “We took the job knowing it was going to be back-breaking work.”
The Collaborative Advantage
While Upstatement had expertise in brand, digital, and even 3D work, it had yet to dip its toe in spatial design. What Dasse’s team needed was an XR advisor; enter 14islands, a Swedish agency specializing in user experiences.
“The unlock was working with them as brand partners because we were the brand and digital/web experts and they were the XR creators. That’s how I’d do it again in the future,” says Dasse, about partnering with specialists to complement Upstatement’s generalists.
To help mitigate the time crunch, Dasse also turned to former partners Goodside, a brand studio with the design and strategy chops to help the team get to Revision 1 (R1) in just two weeks. Collaboration — between 14islands, Upstatement (with an assist from Goodside), and the Agog client team — was critical as the project raced ahead.
“We had to figure out how to smooth out the edges and become a coherent, single, functioning team,” says Dasse. There was no time to waste.
A Sprint to the Finish
The key to delivering something spectacular in just a month and a half was to dive immediately into prototyping. Designing and writing foundational strategy happened in tandem, and Dasse calls the R1, “one of the most memorable I’ve had in my life.” Although it was Upstatement’s first time designing for a headset, their work floored the Agog client team.
The energy of that first round set them up for success in the iteration round, during which they designed and built a virtual experience-enabled website faster than they’d ever built a website before. The experience was exciting … and chaotic. When Agog launched in March 2024 at SXSW, Dasse and the team were still debugging even as Agog’s leadership was onstage presenting.
Though the launch was a success, Upstatement’s work was far from over. The month that followed was all about enhancement. Because the 3D materials and logos had been produced at such a breakneck pace, Dasse knew refining would be crucial. Berlin-based 3D modeler Joseph Töreki came aboard to create an array of materials representing different aspects of fantasy and nature, and science and art coming together, working with Upstatement to create high-resolution renders of the brand post-launch.
One of the biggest challenges for the Upstatement team was learning the differences between creating 3D in a 2D environment versus a spatial one. In XR, rendering 3D experiences in real-time means low fidelity even though the headset tricks the eye. The translation between working in traditional 3D and bringing that into the XR space “involved trade-offs, learnings, and sacrifices,” says Dasse. “Spatial branding adds an enormous amount of overhead which is why doing the whole thing in such a short timeframe for the launch, in retrospect, should’ve been impossible.”
While the Upstatement team initially kicked around many ideas (an early version Dasse remembers was “a ribbon tying stories and portals together”), the concept they landed on was one of “worlds within worlds.”
“When you step into Agog, you’re actually stepping into a house and every hallway has doors and those doors literally open to other worlds,” explains Dasse.
One early Agog XR grantee, Forager, aims to connect people with nature by having them live the life of a mushroom. Another Agog-supported project captures the long history of Indigenous people living in harmony with nature. Experiences like these can hook new types of creators and technical experts who may have only thought their skills were relevant to gaming.
Agog invests in its XR grantees and brings together people with different perspectives to create social impact. Upstatement’s “worlds within worlds” concept is meant to inspire everyone and anyone. It’s a focus on what is possible when we expand our viewpoint.
Looking Towards the Future
The next stage of Upstatement’s partnership with Agog is supporting its evolution into an operating organization. The V1 launch recently received three Anthem Awards, prizes that recognize purpose and mission-driven work. V2 is in the works for 2025. Agog only had a handful of grantees at launch and now has many more, which means Upstatement is building out deeper grantee pages and a more robust events experience. “Phase 2 is expanding to become more the fulfillment of the promise and not the promise alone,” says Dasse.
While Agog is still Upstatement’s primary XR client, the agency is open to doing more such work and the experience has helped them understand how they might approach other XR projects in the future. For Dasse, the inclusion of specialist partners is paramount. “Make sure you're doubling down on your core competencies — but understand how to expand them through partnerships,” he advises.
Beyond that, working on Agog has only further convinced Dasse that those at the intersection of design and technology must be open to continual learning. The rise of XR is just one instance of the changes ahead.
“The only path to truly being a creative technologist is staying on top of constant prototyping,” he says. “Agog is a good example; we prototyped our way to launch. And by prototyping constantly in life and your approach to work, you’re always experimenting with the new, learning when something is viable and when it’s not.”
Scott Dasse is the Chief Design Officer at design studio Upstatement.