Round 1 of 8: September

SAM KEENE, LEAD UX ENGINEER AT GOOGLE

Sam Keene is a San Francisco–based Australian who works as a Lead User Experience Engineer at Google, with previous experience at YouTube, R/GA NYC, Soap Creative and Ogilvy. His current work focuses on solving real user needs with world scale virtual and augmented reality platforms. As a kid in the late ’80s, he started programming on a Commodore 64 and has worked professionally as a mobile software engineer and interaction designer for more than a decade designing and building game-changing products such as Nike FuelBand, Nike Running, YouTube VR, and Google Maps World-Scale AR. Sam has lectured in Interactive Media at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, and his work has won numerous industry accolades including Gold Cannes Lions, IxDA, D&AD, and One Show awards. Keene is the author of The Google Daydream VR Cookbook, the seminal book on Daydream VR and ARCore (aka the only book on Daydream VR and ARCore). He now spends most of his spare time with his wife and daughter collecting records, skateboarding, and when possible, playing early ’90s arcade games.

Portfolio: samkeene.net
Twitter: @_SamKeene

Brief: "SEARCH SKATEBOARDING"

I love skateboarding, but as a graph above shows, global interest in it (as a search term) is waining.

Imagine if a wealthy anonymous donor gave you the money to turn this trend around.

How would you get people across the globe, in particular teenagers, to start searching the term skateboarding?

Awarded ideas will be ones I believe will best drive 1) search volume, and 2) an increase in skateboarding participation amongst teenagers.

(And no, don't think you must use VR or AR as part of your solution to impress me).

Good luck!

Deadline for Round 1: September 30th 2018, 11:59pm Los Angeles time.