Graphic Design
Visionary Design Meets Purposeful Impact!
From concept to reality, Pollinate Labs uses design as a powerful tool for transformation. Learn how they're shaping the future with innovative, purpose-driven projects.
Pollinate Labs is more than just a design studio—it’s a creative playground where ideas are nurtured and transformed into impactful realities. Founded on the belief that design can drive both business success and societal well-being, Pollinate Labs integrates sustainability, collaboration, and innovation into every project. This conversation explores the vision and values that drive their ground-breaking work.
What inspired the vision behind Pollinate Labs, and how did the idea of "pollinating" new ideas and realities come to life? Can you share the story of how the studio was founded?
We began the House of Two with a belief that design could do more than what we had learned or known. Our aim was not only to blend our diverse experiences across disciplines and domains but also to explore every new avenue where design could nurture, empower, and create impact.
In our first decade as the House of Two, we balanced commercial projects with what we called our “experimental work.” These experiments allowed us to test our hypotheses across as many facets as we could engage in.
The discoveries we made during this time fuelled our confidence and led us to strengthen our practice in a renewed direction—one that would allow us to scale our vision.
Pollinate was born from these discoveries and the vision that now guides us forward.
Your lab is all about collaboration and open-source ideas. How do you foster this culture within your team?
We’re deeply passionate about art, architecture, film, music, and culture—fields where singular visions often come to life through the collective efforts of a diverse team. Drawing inspiration from these collaborative processes, we’ve embedded this ethos into our work. To ensure that our designs are executed as holistic experiences, we don’t just rely on our internal team; we actively bring in specialised external talents tailored to each project. This approach allows us to harness diverse skill sets and foster lateral thinking, making every project a true product of collaborative innovation.
We’ve developed several tech products and design thinking tools that we’ve made available as open-source resources for the communities they were designed to serve. Our goal is to bring the open-source ethos of the tech world into our practice. We are actively working on releasing more, fostering a culture of shared knowledge and collective growth.
How do you ensure that sustainability is integrated into every aspect of your design process?
Sustainability emerges from the integration of three key principles:
Economic Viability
Environmental Care,
Social Equity
Balancing these three can be quite challenging, especially when incorporating them into the already established businesses, products, and services. In some projects, we manage to strike a fair balance among all three principles. In others, we focus on enhancing either environmental care or social equity. This is achieved by selecting ideas that align with one of these goals or by advancing our own initiatives that support them.
As a fundamental design principle, we embed sustainability early in every project and consistently drive it forward to realize its full potential.
