Up For The Next One

She practically sits on a pile of very cool inventions, but Ms. Silka Miesnieks, who heads the Design Lab at Adobe, does not feel that she has seen it all – in fact, what’s keeping her excited is what lies ahead

- Silka Miesnieks

Back in 2010, I co-founded an Augmented Reality (AR) startup, Dekko. The discoveries we made and the solutions we built shaped who I am and the leader that I strive to be,” says Ms. Silka Miesnieks, head of Adobe’s Design Lab.

Augmented Reality (AR) empowers designers to place digital designs anywhere in the world, allowing their designs to respond to voices, body gestures, the physical dimension of a space, and even with other objects, she elaborates. Immersive technologies, such as AR and Virtual Reality (VR), also call for a new way to design, thus creating a completely new design discipline.

At Dekko, Ms. Miesnieks and her team pioneered new tools for designers by prototyping new solutions with the use of AR; for example, navigating a retail store or event, visually searching for information about an object or a place one can see through a mobile device, and designing new ways to communicate remotely in a more human way using the physical space, voice and bodies. The work they did led to major breakthroughs in understanding how AR was going to impact how people interact with each other, and even led them to build the first real-world multiplayer game.

Unrelenting Curiosity

Working at Dekko provided Ms. Miesnieks with the skill set to lead a team charged with exploring a new design discipline. And today at Adobe, she “builds on top of these learnings with my team as we continue to invent tools that will empower designers to build new and inspiring immersive experiences”.