Credit: Photo provided by Avocado Toast
Denis Astakhov is the Founder and Creative Director of Avocado Toast. Avocado Toast describes themselves as “A multimedia storytelling company” who “design live experiences, destinations and projects in extended reality.” The company has an office in London and used to have their second office in Moscow, which they moved to Dubai at the onset of the Russia-Ukraine war.
Avocado Toast has been involved in projects globally. When we decided on CS#7’s topic of “Metaphors and Misalignments” I wanted to have a conversation with someone who came from a very different experience design background, but who also overlapped with my engineering foundation. Denis, with his background from different cultural environments, was the perfect candidate!
Following is a digested and paraphrased version of a conversation that Denis and I had.
Denis and I live in Dubai. However, Denis has had much more exposure to the mega projects that are going on in the wider region, such as those in Saudi Arabia.
The Gulf region’s government-based projects have a stereotype of being hyperbolic. The visions that pushed for the Burj Khalifa, The Museum of the Future, and now the seemingly ludicrous and yet real Neom Project, all play into this stereotype of things needing to be superlative.
They are, at heart, about telling very large-scale stories. We could call them “global scale interactive experiences.”
Denis: We started our engagement intersecting culture, entertainment and tourism.
What we've learned is that all the GCC countries have a program called something vision. And there’s a completion date to it. I think it’s much more interesting than having a concrete plan.
Because if you have a vision, you kind of have the goal where you want to be like in 2031 for UAE’s “We the UAE 2031”, or in the case of “Saudi 2030”. And then you build a road map according to how you see from today, how are you going to reach this goal.
These “visions” are like our overused term “experience.” The mega-projects are a combination of festivals, cultural platforms, branding and all the different ways we talk about “experiences.” We really need another word. Because when you tell people that you do experience design, you know, I find myself at a loss for how to describe it because I define experience by using the word experience.
Exactly. Because now, even clients don't understand what it means, right?
This is kind of where this idea of the metaphor comes in, like I always find myself going, “I will try and translate what I'm talking about into something that you understand because the word ‘experience’ people digest in so many different ways, you know?”
You asked me, how I answer at a party the question, What do I do?
Actually, my grandmother kind of helped me to come up with the answer. After I explained some of our work, she said, “Ah, so you create memories, for those moments where people come together and that's the celebration?”
So metaphorically, we create memories!
Could you speak a bit about your defined approach, or your processes that help your team?
In terms of the internal creative process, one of the techniques is “creating a headline.” We might need 200 slides to convey an idea, to show all the mechanics, all the components, how it's going to work, how it's gonna look, how the audience will feel it, experience it. I always say to my team, you need to be able to create a headline about your idea as if this has already happened. You know, if you cannot put it in the headline, it’s like I'm making it up.
So this is how I would also communicate this to the client when we are meeting for the first time.
This is just one of the creative techniques that we use, it’s a checkbox that we need to mark off, What’s the one sentence of how you describe it?
Comparing commercial and cultural projects, is one easier to define? Is there less friction getting one from idea to implementation?
What we do doesn't really depend on the industry that the client is, whether it's cultural or private sector or government sector etcetera.
I think it's more dependent on people, in particular how much experience the people have.
The staff on the client side might not yet understand the needs because they don’t have enough experience in their position, or with the organization.
We've been in those situations before, so I don't think that the difficulty itself is dependent on the industry. I would also say that metaphor is a very good word for that, because we always calibrate what we say based on the industry that the client is in, because the goals might be measured differently.
We have done maybe over 50 car launches worldwide, from very small niche events to two world premieres of Bentley. Those brands, those companies, those particular marketing directors and those decision makers have specific directly measurable goals. They have a clear sense of their budget and ROI.
The cultural sector doesn't necessarily have those types of numbers in mind.
I was at the Culture Forum in Abu Dhabi (in October 2022), and I attended a panel supporting the creative industry. The moderator asked the panelists who included the ex-Director from the Tate Modern in London, “What KPIs does the institution need to have in order to be successful and to work successfully with partners and patrons.”
And I remember that the Director of the Tate said something “You cannot apply KPIs to culture.” He was very expressive about that.
I don't necessarily agree that culture is not a place to apply KPIs. They're just very different. That’s why we need to calibrate when we talk about how we measure success when we are creating exhibition design for a state-owned museum versus how do we provide the service of experiential design for corporate space?
With cultural institutions, sometimes it's less organized. But I would say that it's a calibrating process of how do we identify the goal that we want?
How do we identify the headline?
Are there examples you can share of how you have had to try to translate a challenging idea, both internally to your team and to clients, and how well that has worked?
Well the request from clients it's always, you know, “create something new.” So if it doesn't exist, how do you write about it? How do you show the references for something that doesn't exist?
If I have a picture in my mind, then I would try to kind of break it down and to say, Okay, this is the reference for the color.
Then mostly it will be visual metaphors. Sometimes I get mad at myself that I have to say something like “It needs to feel blue, you know?” And so how do you translate this?!
Or, you know, “It needs to sound like a comet.” But a comet doesn't have sound because it's in space, right? And of course, due to media and pop culture and the information that we have absorbed from books and movies and music, the comet may sound differently for you than for me!
As an artist and creative director, how do you combine all that? Is there a specific toolset that you go to?
Actually that's something I learned from architecture and the early sketches architects do for the future space, and that's the careful use of illustration.
We never do a storyboard in color because it's always a conversation that kind of veers out from the main point of having a storyboard, which is to confirm the story, not to confirm the look and feel, because that will come later.
We always stuck to black and white, because let's focus on what's going on instead of how it looks.
Do you think that there’s a universal idea of how metaphors work? I feel like a lot of American culture has pervaded how we think of experiences, and our references are often from American media, such as Marvel movies or books or food. As a Russian, what's your feeling about this? Do you start with a maybe Russian metaphor, and does that get translated to an American metaphor and then you come to Dubai where you have a team that is from so many different places.
Yeah, absolutely, personally, yes. This is what always fascinated me about working globally and across cultures. But it’s not just about expanding our team’s diversity. Because on the agency side, such as us, you have clients from all over the world from all the spectrum of backgrounds.
To be honest when you asked whether we are using idioms and approaches coming from America versus somewhere else, I don't even know what an American idiom is! I guess we have a global pop cultural phenomenon. But we try to learn and research the local context before proposing anything, or even coming up with any metaphors. Because what we have learned while doing a number of national celebrations and government events, such as in Saudi Arabia, is that we can still apply the same approach as we’ve done with other projects such as in Turkey.
But the context will be different.
Are there cases where things have not worked out as you expected from the use of metaphors? When things have gotten misaligned?
I will give you an example. So we were contracted to do a national celebration, and we didn’t want to just do a historical slideshow. We were working on the projection show on a palace in Saudi.
The history of the region is all related to water because it is still hosting the largest well in Arabian Peninsula. So the whole film was about the history of water in the region and how they were an oasis 90,000 years ago, etcetera.
At some point the client sent us the link to a film sequence. It has a persistent flying camera flying through very thin golden things that kind of transform. It’s a very beautiful title sequence.
And we were like, wow, we love this reference because we think that it's something new for the projection mapping. It will help us tell the story because the story will have a lot of those historical images of kings and architecture and maps, etcetera.
And then we started. We created style frames for the content based on this reference.
And what we've learned from the client’s response to our presentation, was that they're not using it as an example. They were using it as a metaphor for this to be golden. And to have continuous camera motion, without cut scenes. That's it.
I mean, and you can kind of break it down and ask, “Okay, what is this example for?! For the color and for the camera movement. Okay, but then there are so many other references that you can pick!”
So and then we even digested this further to the metaphor.
Here was a situation where we had to go “Do we understand what they want?”And we need to say, “You're right, that you want this we don't know. You need to show us.”
When we had discussions internally or even inspiring clients you might buy a metaphor. But we need to keep in mind why we use it, and “how are we going to do this?”
You might lose yourself in the metaphor instead of the objective of the story!
Is there a guiding principle you would suggest for our audience?
I think that's the biggest challenge... keeping the balance between trying to explain everything, trying to come up with metaphors for everything, and being specific enough for people to actually do their job and make the solution.
This is a very good point. I have a tendency to talk too much from metaphors, and sometimes what’s needed is the specifics of how to get the job done. Sometimes we use metaphors because we’re too lazy to define the specifics of the implementation, or we just don’t know. And we need to be honest about that for this discipline.
This is the biggest complication of experience design. I don't want to say it's impossible to define what it is because then it becomes diluted and can be defined as anything you want, which is not what it is at all.
It's a very clear thing, because it is about storytelling in a very emotional stage.
But you also have to be very careful about how everyone on the team is creating.
You know, actually I would also define this as an engineering approach to creating the experiences, and making them relevant in a way. We can engineer the right situation.
That's the only way you can get to good Experience Design.
A huge thanks to Denis for multiple hours of very deep conversation about the stuff we do. You can reach Denis Astakhov on LinkedIn and @denis.astakhov on Instagram.