Control Group
As Managing Director at Control Group, a New York studio for digitally enhanced spaces, David led work that millions of people use without ever being told it was designed.
Executive read
Physical places — a subway system, a civic institution, a city street, a store — needed digital experiences that worked for everyone, in the real world, at the scale of a city.
This is the kind of work people use without noticing. When it fails, a rider misses a train or a citizen can’t take part. The bar is dependability in public.
Context
Control Group designed and built digitally enhanced spaces — places where the screen, the architecture, and the crowd are all part of the same experience. As Managing Director, David led that practice across some of New York’s most public work.
Strategy
The strategy was never the interface for its own sake. It was the rider trying to find a platform, the citizen trying to be heard, the visitor trying to understand a story. Get that person through, and the technology earns its place.
System
The work spanned the official wayfinding and mapping system for the New York City subway (MTA); the full visitor experience for the Edward M. Kennedy Institute; and Talking Transition, the first open mayoral transition, which gave the public a real voice as New York moved from Bloomberg to de Blasio.
Alongside it: digitally enabled pop-up retail for Kate Spade, and engagements for Royal Caribbean, OTG, and Google.
Execution
These weren’t prototypes. They were installed in stations, institutions, storefronts, and tents — built to survive weather, crowds, and the messiness of real use, not the calm of a demo.
Adoption
Adoption wasn’t a launch metric. It was a commuter who found their train, a resident who spoke into the transition, a visitor who left the Institute understanding the Senate a little better.
Impact
The proof is that the work entered the daily life of a city and did its job. Talking Transition opened the door of a mayoral handoff to the public for the first time — and people showed up.
Through a storefront tent on Canal Street, a street team of more than a hundred canvassers, and a survey offered in seven languages, nearly 70,000 people weighed in — logging close to 400,000 responses on the issues facing their neighborhoods. It became one of the most expansive public-opinion efforts in the city’s history, and it told the incoming administration, in residents’ own words, what they most needed to hear — starting with the affordability of housing.
Reusable lesson
You can’t design the screen and ignore the station, or design the experience and ignore the crowd. Treat them as one system and the work holds up where it matters most — in public.
The digital and the physical are one system.
Different contexts, the same way of working.
Work together
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