This week sees the launch of Material, Found’s new research initiative, designed to explore and shape the aesthetics of the future. It channels their curiosity into an evolving visual language to guide new work and give their clients a powerful creative edge.
By investing genuine studio time, they have created space for innovative thinking and conceptual making that feels adaptive, generative and alive. Every experiment and prototype fuels creative breakthroughs and sharpens the visual identity that distinguishes their work.
The industry is changing rapidly, with an ever-accelerating cycle of faster, cheaper, AI-assisted output. Found sees dedicated, structured R&D as the most meaningful response to this acceleration. Material gives the team focused time to explore emerging tools and methods, ensuring Found’s work remains sophisticated, elegant, and human-led.
“Each experiment we run and every prototype we build fuels creative breakthroughs. Material demonstrates that the future of intelligent design depends not only on the ideas we develop, but also on the technology and aesthetics that bring them to life. Material will become the engine for an evolving visual language at Found, sparking new thinking and giving clients a distinct creative advantage.”
Dan Moore, Managing Director
Making space for discovery
In a fast-paced, ever-changing industry, Found is creating space to slow down and focus. Dedicated studio time gives their team the freedom to learn, experiment, and create without the pressure of commercial constraints. This environment fosters exploration, embraces risk-taking and accepts failure as a path to creative innovation. Material will run quarterly, with each round building on previous insights to continually push thinking forward.
Clayton Welham, ECD says of their Material findings so far:
“Initial explorations have taken us into the worlds of physical states and machine vision. I love that these projects are more than just a technical exercise; by putting our controlled design methods to one side, we’re seeing aesthetics emerge organically.
These unexpected outcomes are really pushing our collective idea of how we reach and define visual solutions.
In response to a growing requirement for work with depth and integrity, we’re excited to launch Material. It’s our platform for open creativity and a space to harness our team’s drive to break the mould, add more explorative layers to our design process and evolve our studio’s visual vocabulary.”
First research findings:
From Meta States to Digital Perception
Today Found reveals the first two explorations to emerge from Material:
Project 1: Meta States
The Insight: Exploring how physical matter can be controlled at its base level. We’ve taken standard industrial materials, altered their physical states and observed the threshold at which those changes occur. Custom-built generative tool sets have given us unique drivers that have pushed the materials in really interesting, unexpected ways.
Visual Vocabulary: The resulting work presents familiar materials that move beyond their conventional roles, uncovering generative, cellular, and evolutionary aesthetic signatures that require a second, closer look.
Project 2: Digital Perception
The Insight: Revealing how autonomous systems ‘think’ rather than just ‘see’, Found explored sensing technologies such as LiDAR and event-based cameras, moving beyond passive imaging to illuminate machine perception.
Visual Vocabulary: By turning raw spatial data into analytical structures, Found has created a unique visual language for moments of recognition, bringing to life the intuition behind everything from automotive AI to nanoscale technology.
