Projects by Luca Vergano — Business Strategy, Experience Design & Innovation

Who Prompts Who? — LJAV — 2026 — creative research

I wanted to investigate something that had been bothering me for a while: who is actually in control when a human sits down with an AI system? We assume the human is the author — the one doing the directing. But the more I worked with generative tools, the more I suspected that assumption was worth challenging. Who Prompts Who? is an immersive installation where participants interact with algorithmic agents in a controlled environment, and the system makes the power dynamics visible in real time. The question it asks is simple and uncomfortable: are you directing the machine, or has the machine's predefined logic already shaped what you think you're choosing to do?

ObliqueAlphabet.ai — LJAV — 2026 — creative research

I've been thinking a lot about what it means to communicate in a world where every piece of text, every image, every gesture is being read, sorted, and categorized by machine vision. ObliqueAlphabet.ai started from a provocation: what if you built a visual language that humans could read fluently but that algorithms couldn't classify? Drawing on Brian Eno's oblique strategies and Deleuze's philosophy of difference, I developed an alphabet designed to resist automated categorization — legible to people, noise to data-mining agents. It's both a research tool and a functional communication platform, and an ongoing investigation into what privacy and identity mean when machines are always watching.

The Next Strategist [prototype] — LJAV — 2025 — creative research

There's a lot of strategic knowledge locked inside individual careers that never gets passed on — or when it does, only the most well-connected people benefit from it. I built The Next Strategist as a pro bono prototype to change that: a digital platform that makes professional mentorship accessible and scalable, and routes the fees to charitable causes rather than to the mentor. The idea was to design a model where industry knowledge becomes a form of philanthropic capital. The prototype maps the transition from individual coaching sessions to a sustainable digital infrastructure — one where expertise is shared and the act of sharing creates social impact.

AI Thought Leader [prototype] — LJAV — 2024 — creative research

What happens when a thought leader's ideas can be represented — accurately, coherently — by an AI agent acting on their behalf? That's the question I built AI Thought Leader to explore. The prototype develops an agentic interface that ingests a specific person's linguistic patterns, conceptual frameworks, and intellectual positions, then interacts with audiences in their voice. This isn't about replacing the person — it's about examining what personal authority actually consists of, and whether it can be extended through a digital proxy without losing its essential coherence. The research sits at the edge of service design and generative AI, and it raises questions I don't think we've begun to answer seriously.

Grayscale Design Identity — Grayscale — 2023 — brand strategy

Grayscale was trying to do something genuinely difficult: move from being a product that sophisticated crypto investors trusted, to a brand that mainstream financial audiences could understand and believe in. Those are very different relationships, built on very different assumptions. The work involved rethinking the entire visual and service design system — not just how Grayscale looked, but how it communicated stability, expertise, and institutional credibility to people who were new to decentralized finance. The challenge was to simplify without dumbing down, and to build a bridge between two worlds — legacy finance and emerging technology — that don't naturally speak each other's language.

The Doggy Bag Nation — LJAV — 2022 — creative research

I became fascinated with the visual language of American political polarization — not the talking points, but the actual symbols, objects, and vernacular expressions that signal which side of the divide someone is on. The Doggy Bag Nation is a digital zine that approaches this through an anthropological lens: archiving the cultural artifacts that define contemporary American divides, and examining how visual communication doesn't just reflect polarization but actively reinforces it. It's a document of a specific moment in American life, but the questions it raises about identity, geography, and visual language feel like they're going to be relevant for a long time.

Xfinity Gamified Retail — Xfinity — 2022 — service design

The challenge with selling connectivity in a retail environment is that the product itself is invisible. Nobody walks in and sees speed — they see boxes and cables. In this 2022 iteration, we used immersive XR technology to make the invisible visible: to let people actually feel the difference in network performance through active participation rather than passive explanation. The goal was to turn the store from a point of sale into an experience center — somewhere you went to understand what the product could genuinely do for you, not just to look at packaging.

Benjamin Moore AI Designer — Benjamin Moore — 2022 — service design

Choosing a paint color sounds simple. In practice, most people find it completely paralyzing — too many options, too little confidence, too much fear of getting it wrong. I worked on an agentic, conversational AI tool for Benjamin Moore that changes that dynamic: it uses your input to generate personalized color palettes and interior design recommendations, and it walks you through the decision like a knowledgeable friend would, rather than leaving you alone in front of a wall of swatches. The design challenge was to reduce friction without removing agency — to make the tool feel like genuine expert consultation, not a chatbot guessing at what you might like.

Xfinity Gamified Retail — Xfinity — 2021 — service design

Network performance is one of those things people only notice when it fails. The design challenge was to make people feel what good connectivity actually delivers — before they need it, in a retail environment, through their body rather than through a spec sheet. This 2021 installation used XR and immersive environmental design to translate abstract data — speeds, stability, latency — into a tangible physical experience. The objective was to give people a sensory memory of what the product does, not just an intellectual understanding.

Comcast Metaverse [prototype] — Comcast — 2021 — service design

If the metaverse was going to become a real space for entertainment, what would the theater experience need to look like inside it? That was the design problem we were given. The prototype explored the functional requirements of shared entertainment in a virtual, three-dimensional environment — how you recreate spatial acoustics when there's no physical space, how you maintain social presence when everyone's avatar, how you integrate streaming content into a virtualized architectural experience without losing the feeling that you're somewhere specific, with other people, watching something together.

Xfinity Contactless Retail — Xfinity — 2021 — service design

COVID-19 forced a fundamental rethink of what a retail environment could be. For Xfinity, we developed a contactless experience built around gestural interfaces and motion sensors — a store where you could browse, interact, and learn about products without touching anything. The design challenge wasn't purely technical; it was about making touchless interaction feel natural and empowering rather than sterile and anxious. We wanted people to leave feeling like the technology had served them, not protected the brand from them.

Pastoral.ai Regenerative Farming — Pastoral.AI — 2020 — business innovation

Regenerative farming is one of the most promising responses to the climate crisis, and one of the least accessible for the people who actually need to implement it. Pastoral.ai uses an AI platform to give livestock farmers practical, actionable guidance on reducing carbon emissions while maintaining or improving their profit margins. I was drawn to this project because it sits at an intersection I find genuinely compelling: environmental data infrastructure, agricultural management, and the question of how you design a tool that works in the hands of someone whose primary job is farming, not technology.

UntuckIt Untucked Tweets — Untuckit — 2020 — brand strategy

UntuckIt sells a specific idea: that there's a shirt designed to be worn untucked, with intention. Not everyone was convinced. Rather than ignore the skeptics, we went directly to them — using Twitter data to surface real criticisms of the brand and address them publicly, in real time, through advertising. It was a campaign built on the premise that transparency is more persuasive than polish, and that engaging honestly with doubt is a more powerful brand move than projecting confidence. The campaign turned skepticism into a dialogue, and dialogue into trust.

Peacock Streaming Platform — Peacock — 2020 — service design

Launching a streaming platform in 2020 meant entering one of the most competitive content environments ever created, with a legacy media brand that people associated with linear television. The strategic work was about designing the interaction layer — how you organize a vast content library so that people find what they want without feeling overwhelmed, how you create a sense of familiarity for audiences migrating from traditional TV while building habits that belong to on-demand culture. The decisions made at that interaction level determine whether people stay or leave, which made this as much a retention strategy as a launch strategy.

Xfinity Gamified Retail — Xfinity — 2020 — brand strategy

Connectivity is a utility until it becomes an experience. The 2020 brand strategy for Xfinity's retail spaces was built around that idea: using gamified touchpoints to make the speed and reliability of the network something you could feel and play with, not just read about. We developed a visual system that integrated real-time network data directly into the store environment — making the infrastructure the entertainment, and the store a demonstration of what the product could do.

Blockbuster The Last Billboard — Blockbuster — 2020 — service design

There's one Blockbuster left in the world — in Bend, Oregon. We built the Callgorithm around it: a human-powered movie recommendation hotline that positioned the store's staff as the antidote to algorithmic fatigue. Instead of a machine guessing at what your data says you might like, you call a real person who asks how you're feeling and tells you what to watch. The project repositioned a physical limitation — there's only one store, so you can't go there — as a premium, high-touch service. It was a case study in how constraints, embraced honestly, can become a brand's strongest asset.

Apple at Work — Apple — 2020 — brand strategy

Apple has always been thought of as a tool for individual creativity — the artist, the designer, the person who does things their own way. The strategic challenge was to show that the same qualities that make Apple products powerful for individuals make them even more powerful for teams. We grounded the work in ethnographic research, spending time understanding how people actually collaborate in modern organizations — not how companies say they work, but how work actually happens. The platform we built showed Apple's ecosystem as infrastructure for collective intelligence, not just individual expression.

Mars The Lion's Share Fund — MARS — 2019 — service design

The Lion's Share Fund started with a simple, elegant idea: every time an animal appears in an advertisement, the brand behind that ad contributes a small percentage of its media spend to wildlife conservation. The harder problem was making that idea real — building the financial model, the digital tracking infrastructure, the AI-driven system that could identify animals across millions of pieces of advertising content and automatically redirect the capital. The UN administered it. MARS was the founding partner. It won the Cannes Grand Prix and D&AD White Pencil. And it works — not as a campaign, but as a permanent, self-sustaining mechanism for channeling advertising budgets into biodiversity protection.

Turn Off The Air Con — LJAV — 2018 — creative research

Singapore has a punk scene. It's small, fiercely independent, and almost completely invisible to anyone who doesn't already know where to look. I made a physical zine to document it — not from the outside, as a curious observer, but as close to the inside as I could get. The anthropological challenge was to capture the visual languages, subcultural codes, and social environments of a community that defines itself in opposition to the mainstream, without flattening it into something palatable for people who weren't there. It's a record of a specific place and time, and a study of how identity gets built in resistance.

Nike Rise Academy — LJAV — 2017 — business innovation

The best basketball coaching has always been inaccessible to most players — you needed the right connections, the right geography, the right resources. Nike Rise Academy used computer vision and data analytics to change that: an AI-driven training platform that watches how you move, identifies what needs to improve, and gives you personalized feedback in real time. The design challenge was to make high-level coaching feel genuinely personal — not like a generic algorithm, but like someone who had actually watched you play and knew what you specifically needed to work on.

Uber YearWithUber — Uber — 2017 — brand strategy

Every trip you take with Uber generates data — where you went, when, how often, what the city looked like from your path through it over the course of a year. YearWithUber turned that data into a personal story. Each user received a visualization of their year in the city — their patterns, their rhythms, the places that mattered to them — framed not as a data report but as a narrative. The strategic idea was that the most powerful thing a brand can give someone is a meaningful reflection of their own life. That's a different relationship than a receipt for a ride. It won the Campaign Tech Award and the Markie Award.

Uber Ramadan — Uber — 2016 — brand strategy

Ramadan creates a specific urban rhythm — the city empties during the day, then surges at iftar, then quiets again late at night. In the Middle East, that means traffic patterns that are unlike anything else in the calendar year. The strategy for this activation was built around that rhythm rather than around a generic campaign idea: how do you design a service that meets people where they actually are, during one of the most specific and meaningful periods of their year? The answer was less about advertising and more about genuine utility — using the platform's real capabilities to solve a real problem in a culturally intelligent way.

P&G AI Salon — P&G — 2014 — service design

Hair coloring at home is one of those experiences where the gap between what people want and what they get is enormous — and almost entirely due to the absence of expertise at the moment of decision. The P&G AI Salon was an early attempt to close that gap: an app that analyzed user characteristics and guided them through a personalized coloring process step by step. We were building this before the current wave of generative AI tools, which meant the design challenge was as much about making a limited system feel genuinely intelligent as it was about the underlying technology.

Infiniti F1 Sponsorship — Infiniti — 2012 — brand partnership

Formula 1 sponsorship is one of the most expensive forms of brand marketing, and one of the hardest to make feel like anything other than a logo on a car. The question I was interested in was: what does the track data actually tell you about engineering, if you treat it as material rather than metrics? We took race track characteristics — corner angles, surface conditions, elevation changes, speeds — and correlated them with engineering data to produce a series of data-driven art posters. The posters communicated Infiniti's technical sophistication in a way that felt genuinely beautiful rather than merely informative.

Adidas Bounce — Adidas — 2011 — brand strategy

Adidas Bounce had a performance story — a specific cushioning technology with measurable benefits for athletes. The strategic challenge was to make that story relevant to people who weren't competitive athletes but who cared about how they moved through the world. We built a creative platform around the idea that physical achievement is part of everyday urban life, not something reserved for the track or the court. The goal was to expand the product's appeal without diluting what made it genuine — to find the version of performance that belonged to everyone.

McDonald's McItaly — McDonalds — 2009 — business innovation

McDonald's wanted to do something that sounds almost contradictory: convince Italian consumers — people with one of the world's great food cultures and an appropriate level of skepticism about global fast food — that the brand was genuinely committed to Italian ingredients and local supply chains. McItaly integrated regional Italian products directly into the menu, and built a digital platform to tell that story with enough specificity to be credible. The strategic work was about earning trust with an audience that had every reason to be skeptical, which meant the evidence had to be real and the storytelling had to be honest.

Vergnano Coffee Lessons — Vergnano — 2006 — brand strategy

Italy's coffee culture is one of the most codified and seriously held in the world — there are right ways and wrong ways, and Italians know the difference. Vergnano asked me to build a content series that would position the brand as a genuine authority within that culture, not just another espresso. We produced Italy's first educational content series on coffee — lessons on preparation, origin, and ritual — featuring Dustin Hoffman. The strategy was to lead with knowledge rather than with product, to earn the brand's place in the conversation by contributing something of actual value to it.