How I received right here: Hillary Coe, AKQA
The designer, drag racer and analog astronaut Hillary Coe joined AQKA after her position as Director of Design at SpaceX. She talks to us about creating roles for herself that didn't exist and embedding adventure in her life and work
On the wall behind Hillary Coe hangs a print of NASA's popular worm logo. This is a simple allusion not only to her previous role as design director at the private aerospace company SpaceX, but also to her career, which, despite constant changes in shape, is located exactly at the interface of design and innovation.
Growing up in LA, Coe developed a flair for curiosity and a penchant for storytelling that she later turned into a career at world-renowned companies. She previously held positions as Creative Director at TBWA Chiat Day and Google, and worked as a freelancer for clients such as Intel and Apple. In between, she's done modeling gigs, broken a world record in drag racing, and volunteered as an analog astronaut, conducting field tests in locations similar to extreme space environments (she recently returned from a simulated version of Mars).
As she fits into her role at AKQA, she talks to us about her journey from climbing trees as a child to adventures in aerospace.
An early education in storytelling I was a real key child. I didn't really have these family ties – my father worked, my mother worked, and I was always on my own. We artists are weird anyway – I always had problems communicating with people, so I would often make up stories in my head, especially because I had so much time to myself – climbing trees and so on.
I would create these worlds that I could take people into, or at least try to, and that would begin to distill for me the power of storytelling and what it could do for the human mind and how we connect with each other. This was the only way I could connect with other children.