I'm Dave,
Experience Designer.
Dave is gifted at thinking differently. He painlessly brings others through journeys in a way that feels challenging yet comfortable. A true creative.
17 YEARS
EXPERIENCE
I help leadership teams figure out where they are going next.
As an Experience Strategist and Creative Director, I take messy, complicated business challenges and turn them into clear, moving stories that everyone can rally around. I do this by running 'Creative Quest' workshops - highly collaborative, human-centered sessions where we use master facilitation and smart AI tools to take big, abstract ideas and make them completely real.
Creative Director Delivering Experience Strategy & AI‑First Storytelling through Creative Quests
Stage 1:
Asymmetric Input
- Immersive Creative Deep Dives
- Tuning in to Real Employee Voices
OUTCOME
Stage 2:
Live Synthesis
- Finding Common Threads Live
- Fast, Visual Prototyping
OUTCOME
Stage 3:
Exec. Alignment
- Quick, High-Impact Alignment
- Experiential Rollout & Buy-In
OUTCOME
Let's take a look at my work...
PMX - The Penn Mutual Experience
Turning a wide-open blank slate into a massive, forward-looking story and visual space that brought a whole company together during a time of change.
The Challenge We Faced: Penn Mutual was going through a major transition and needed to shift how they tell their company story. They handed me an open-ended "celebration" brief with zero initial direction. The real goal was to honor 179 years of heritage while making the entire organization feel excited and safe about where they were headed next.
The Creative Approach: I worked with AI tools like Microsoft Copilot right inside our live brainstorming sessions to grab raw ideas from the room, spot patterns immediately, and use those insights to shape the next parts of the experience on the fly. On the design side, I art directed a wide-canvas scenic layout using modular square screens to serve as visual windows into the company's future.
What We Built Together: We created an incredible, consumer-grade journey featuring a massive physical environment, an immersive mirrored LED tunnel, and custom interactive audience sentiment captures (both AI and media-based). It turned abstract corporate strategy into an emotional, human experience, giving leadership a brand-new storytelling model that aligned the entire company.
The CPG Curveball & Ulta Beauty Creative Quest
How I designed an agency-wide creative framework to protect multi-million dollar accounts, and built a bespoke, high-end "Tastemaker" experience to pitch unprompted, boundary-pushing ideas to Ulta Beauty.
The Challenge We Faced: We lost a major client to another agency simply because they snuck in with a cold call and pitched a fresh, wild creative concept we hadn't been given an opportunity to pitch. It was a massive wake-up call. I realized we could never let our relationships seem stagnant. I pitched a bold new strategy to our executive leadership called The CPG Curveball: from now on, every single pitch or renewal - no matter how small or routine - must include one outlandish, boundary-pushing, "Big Hairy Audacious" idea. It could be a brand new format, a festival, a late-night show format, or a custom gospel choir song. The point was to make sure we are always the most creative people in the room, whether the client asked for it or not. Leadership loved it, and gave me the green light to build the flagship framework.
The Creative Approach: My first live rollout of the Curveball strategy will be a bespoke, immersive two-day Creative Quest for the executive team at Ulta Beauty. The entire North Star of this experience is positioning us as their ultimate Creative Tastemakers. I designed every single human touchpoint of their journey to reflect this - from stocking the airport limo with their exact favorite snacks to organizing a hyper-personalized shopping experience where every single piece of tech or fashion has been curated just for them based on their unique tastes.
What We Built Together: This highly personalized journey culminates in a master-level facilitation session where I am pitching five brand-new, unprompted projects that radically advance Ulta’s business goals in ways they never saw coming. By shifting our relationship from a standard vendor to a trusted, forward-thinking tastemaker, we ensure our clients never look elsewhere for fresh thinking. It is a powerful, repeatable model that turns passive account management into an active, high-growth creative powerhouse.
BREAKING BARRIERS, BUILDING BRIDGES
An immersive executive workshop designed to heal cultural strain, unpack tension, and realign leadership around their core mission.
The Challenge We Faced: This leadership team was under intense pressure and political strain regarding their mission to elevate Black leaders. It was causing a lot of friction, and they were stuck. They didn't need another generic corporate strategy presentation; they needed a genuinely safe, deeply human space to bring unspoken tensions to light and find a way forward together.
The Creative Approach: I designed a Creative Quest anchored in emotional intelligence and physical metaphors. We started with a moment of vulnerable, symbolic release: every executive wrote a personal barrier they had overcome onto a ceramic plate, shared that story out loud, and smashed the plate. We then took those broken fragments and literally glued them together to build a balsa-wood bridge alongside their newly written core values.
What We Built Together: By turning raw vulnerability into a physical, shared piece of art, we broke through months of corporate paralysis. The experience brought a heavily divided executive team into tight alignment, leaving them with clear, practical commitments and a shared future vision they actually believed in.
AI-Orchestrated Breakout System
Pioneered a real-time synthesis model using AI as a live co-creator to capture insights, cluster themes, and scale storytelling across large groups. Acting as a director of intelligent systems to turn live workshop conversations into beautiful, high-fidelity visual assets in hours instead of weeks.
The Challenge We Faced: Big corporate brainstorming sessions usually hit a wall after the event ends. It normally takes weeks to type up notes, summarize findings, and make a presentation slide deck. By the time leadership sees the results, the energy is dead, and momentum is lost. We needed a way to co-create with teams and lock down executive alignment in real time.
The Creative Approach: I operated as a creative director of intelligent systems, integrating generative AI directly into our live workshop workflow. As groups talked, we used text-to-image and multimodal AI to turn their spoken concepts into polished, consumer-grade visual storyboards and concept designs right on the spot. One room's output automatically fed into the next room's creative prompt.
What We Built Together:
We built a highly scalable, live-facilitation system that completely reimagined how design happens. By treating AI as an active creative partner, we condensed weeks of traditional corporate alignment and asset production into a few high-energy hours.
Bosch Leadership Experience
Using intentional discomfort, physical metaphors, and honest conversations to break through corporate walls and completely transform executive behavior.
The Challenge We Faced: Bosch needed to drive a massive shift in how their senior executive tier worked together, but standard corporate compliance and typical slide presentations just weren't cutting it. The real challenge was breaking through those polished executive walls to get people to be vulnerable, confront friction, and actually change how they lead day-to-day.
The Creative Approach: I designed a high-impact leadership experience built around the concept of "The Vital Few." Instead of a safe, predictable meeting, I used master-level facilitation to guide these enterprise leaders through moments of intentional discomfort. We used physical and rhythmic metaphors to literally map out the friction they were feeling in the organization, forcing them to strip away titles and look at their team dynamics with total honesty.
What We Built Together: We delivered a deeply resonant, emotionally charged experience framework based on street drumming that completely shifted how Bosch approaches global leadership development. By replacing abstract strategy with an unforgettable, shared physical experience, we gave their executive tier a practical behavioral playbook they still reference today to drive clarity, trust, and cross-functional teamwork.
