AKQA Tokyo's Claudia Cristovao on Judging Adfest

Judging at ADFEST is a particular experience: the setting is relaxed and relationships feel very familiar, as this has become a regular place for meeting and discussing creativity in Asia over the past 20 years. Many of the delegates and visitors are regulars, and a few have been coming since the beginning, or for over a decade. So there is a palpable sense that it is a setting for updating opinions and gaining knowledge amongst not your peers, but your partners.

This year, the biggest emerging trend I saw while judging the Interactive and Mobile categories was a real emphasis on “technology as usefulness”. It does take time for a new technology to be integrated at a deeper level than novelty fireworks and simple entertainment, and there were a number of entries that helped technologies insert themselves meaningfully into people’s lives. Some of them related to medical conditions, to solitude in later life, to physical vulnerability, but also to mental frailty. It was interesting to see how much we are already projecting that emerging tech will help us overcome the intrinsic frailty of our bodies and even of our minds. VR and AR especially came to life as real tools that could bridge, or help solve, real problems.

The entries we judged show a growing awareness of societies that are ageing, where women are still pushing up through the workplace, where generation gaps are getting wider, and where societal relations are becoming more atomized. It wasn’t the year of amazing new developments in these two categories, more of a solidification of thoughts in regards to adapting new tools to great numbers of people, and often to overlooked users (the elderly and children in particular). Very fitting with a Festival that also chooses to honour, with the Lotus Roots award, the work that most represents intrinsic traits of the region.

In some cases that usage is still not entirely figured out – there were a number of entries that are more of a great idea than a great functioning idea. We tried to honour the path ahead, without wanting to judge “projects” as having the same weight as “work”. Those were perhaps some of the most stimulating discussions, as they really led us to explore the opportunity of a festival such as this one, as well as its DNA as a venue for shedding light on the best creative thinking that comes from this half of the world.

A few pieces really elevated the bar on outstanding design – something that is not always on par in interactive pieces. Many of the works used the astonishing penetration of smartphones in Asia to suggest entirely localised insights and usages, that nevertheless translate as cross-culturally interesting. Many of the integrated campaigns relied on tight film work, while the customisation of experiences was also well represented by a couple of outstanding pieces.

Very few pieces needed “cultural translation” – and the pool of judges was diverse enough for that to happen naturally during our discussions. I owe a number of enlightening talks to my fellow judges Charulata Ravi Kumar, Supachai Parchariyanon, Kyo Seo, Charlie Blower, James Noble and Yasaharu Sasaki.  No doubt it is a function of Interactive and Mobile that these categories will include some of the most forward thinking perspectives – all in all it was a pool of work that felt unequivocally from Asia, while universally resonant.