Mary Franck joined Hyperquake’s Experiences Team in 2025 as creative lead for experiential, cultural, creative technology, and digital media projects. Leveraging over 15 years’ worth of expertise, which builds upon extensive training in architecture, art, and technology, Mary specializes in infusing built environments with data and stunning digital media to inform, inspire, and connect audiences.
Her expanding body of work in the experiential field has grown from staff Creative Director roles with Future Colossal, IBM, and NBBJ/ESI Design; stints as Lead Creative Technologist for the New York Times’ experiential agency Fake Love and Senior Interactive Engineer for Obsura Digital; and extensive freelance work alongside many of the world’s most pioneering innovators. The resulting culture-defining projects for renowned brands, visionaries, and artists have often generated global media attention and brought home prestigious creative-industry honors.
Also an acclaimed artist whose works have been showcased internationally, Franck earned her B.A. in Conceptual and Information Art from San Francisco State University before completing her Masters in Design Research from the Southern California Institute of Architecture. Currently residing in Brooklyn, Franck remains deeply committed to the alchemy of collaboration and teamwork – and to pushing what’s possible in experience design.
What principles guide your design decisions?
My principles are: 1. Affect, then message: emotion creates memories; even informative design needs an emotional component. 2. Design to cultivate attention. I strive to create space and focus to draw people in rather than overload them. 3. Think in systems. Technology today allows design to scale, take advantage of it. 4. Design holistically. Tailor designs to context for maximum impact. Controlling context is the power of experiential. 5. Show the beauty in complexity. Our world is complicated and designers are uniquely positioned to make and reveal meaning in that complexity. 6. Universal design. The best design empowers and includes.
How do you stay relevant in an industry that changes so quickly?
I’ve stayed relevant by designing for new and emerging fields. My career focus has been experiential design, an area that has seen tremendous growth in the last decade. And within experiential my focus has been on emerging technology. I use tools and apply design to totally new formats, whether that’s volumetric light sculptures as public art or interactive, immersive AI explainers for IBM. Approaching new challenges and formats has made me a versatile designer. Design is a vast and multifaceted field, I’ve found the most relevance at the edges.
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