GOOGLE | Creatability | 2019
Creativity Was Supposed to Belong to Everyone / GOOGLE "Creatability"
Moving your face to make music. Drawing a picture by listening to sound. Turning your whole body into an instrument. This wasn't a tool made for people with disabilities—it was an experiment that asked, "What do we even mean by creativity?"
The problem
More than 56 million people around the world live with disabilities that keep creative tools out of reach. Google set out to close that gap with AI, teaming up with a deaf musician, a blind scientist, and technology educators to build tools that let your entire body become an input.
The insight
Something designed for people with disabilities ends up being something for everyone. Creatability wasn't aiming for accessibility compliance—it was trying to open up the creative process itself. Judge Richard Ting put it this way: if you can't access these tools, you're shut out of the world of creativity. Google is rebuilding that structure.
The idea
Eight experimental tools: a keyboard you play with facial movements, Seeing Music which turns sound into something you can see, Body Synth which turns body movement into sound, Sound Canvas which lets you draw with sight and sound, and more. They all run with nothing but a browser and a webcam, and all the code is open source—built so anyone can pick it up and keep building.
What happened
It won the Grand Prix in the Design category at Cannes Lions in 2019, beating out the Microsoft Xbox Adaptive Controller. The deciding factor was how open the project was for anyone to join in, since it was open source. It also won in two categories at the Webby Awards.
Afterthought
I love that they answered the question "who does creativity belong to?" by actually building something. And then they called it an experiment, released the code, and left the rest up to other people. It's not something that ends once it wins an award—it feels like it's still unfinished, still in progress, and I like that. Honestly, it makes me want to try making music with my face too.
Awards
- Cannes Lions Grand Prix 2019
