Design Thinking and Launching Your Idea with Iddris Sandu
Written by Brandon Alexander
Iddris Sandu was raised in Harbor City, Los Angeles, California. He is a Ghanaian architectural technologist. He was born in Accra, Ghana, and raised in Compton in Los Angeles, California. He created the world’s first smart retail store experience along with Nipsey Hussle. The store is called "The Marathon Store". He codes and creates algorithms.
Sandu was born in Accra, Ghana. His family moved to the United States when he was 3 years old. He started learning and doing computer programming at the age of ten using a public library. At the age of 13 Sandu was an intern and worked on several Google projects. One of the projects that he worked on was Google Plus. At the age of 15 he created a smartphone app that made it easier for his classmates to find their classrooms. Sandu also advocated for STEM in the high school curriculum. He chose to not seek attending a higher education institution after high school. He decided to go into interning and consulting, working with such companies as Boeing, Twitter, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Uber, Snapchat, and Instagram. At the age of 19, Sandu was creating his own apps and other software.
As a technological design consultant and engineer, he has consulted for companies such as Twitter and Snapchat. For Uber he created the software called Autonomous Collision Detection Interface, a software program that detects a driver's hand motion and position. Sandu is mostly self-taught. He has worked with Kanye West, Rihanna and Jaden Smith.
At the age of 15 he received a commendation certificate from Barack Obama.
WHAT WAS IT LIKE WORKING WITH FENTY SOCIAL CLUB?
Iddris: Working with Rihanna on any capacity is a real good experience. What even inspired me even more was the fact I started spatiaLABS last year and the roster of people we’ve worked with. We’ve worked with Prada to Versace to 2 Chains in just one year. An immersive visual studio company that was founded by a black/ African. To go on to work with all these people in under a year was crazy. The analytics were amazing. We had about 1.5 million people view our AR experience. 1.5 million people came to the website over the course of 24 hours. It was definitely a dream come through and to do that with “RiRi” was even more dope.
TELL US MORE ABOUT THE MISSION OF spatiaLABS?
Iddris: spatiaLABS is essentially an immersive visual studio/ agency that has experience and creates a lot of volumetric content. What is volumetric content? There’s a spectrum of Immersive experiences.
There’s one side which is AR, and then on the other side of the spectrum, you have VR right. Everything else in between can be defined between XR, which is experiential reality. AR, or augmented reality, is about overlaying things in your world in a more natural way. VR, or virtual reality, is about isolating you and taking you to a completely different space.
These two platforms are very huge and they’re very similar. The thing with VR is it voids your real environment. It gives you new experiences, but it requires you to leave a majority of your senses away. AR is about overlaying, includes all of your senses and adds on top of that. It’s about using what you have. VR is about adding senses.
At spatiaLABS we create a lot of immersive AR experiences using volumetrics. Volumetrics are pretty much 3D asset or content that’s displayed in either AR or VR. I started it because I wanted to be able to take these high-level things that are either used in a way that no one cares about or explained in a way that disinterests people. Rather than working on this technology for Microsoft, Google, how about we partner with cultural influencers where we can have a higher and greater penetration. Unless I’m working with individuals like yourself that really understand the importance of these technologies being attributed to the culture, it’s very difficult to have a high penetration in terms of your impact. A typical example of that is what just happened a couple of days ago between you know Baby face and Teddy Riley.
There was no one at that building advocating before for those things to happen until the minority affected the majority.
But with spatiaLABS it’s really about thinking about these things and how we can use volumetric content. How we can use technologies like AR, VR, XR to bridge that divide, create an eco-system for the culture, especially in arts, entertainment and fashion to showcase our work to the world in a way that puts us at the forefront instead of getting left behind.
“Nipsey instilled in me the importance of cultural ownership, the responsibility that I had to both of my heritages. ”
WHAT IS THE IMPORTANCE OF OWNERSHIP?
Iddris: One of the things that drew Nipsey and I together was the sense of ownership. Nipsey instilled in me the importance of cultural ownership, the responsibility that I had to both of my heritages. What does that mean? It means that I am a first-generation African kid that was raised in Compton.
I serve and I am as representative of the black community as I am representative of the African community. Nipsey instilled that into me to never forget that and to always advocate for that. I also instilled the importance of technology to impact into him. It was the duality of both of those. Ownership is everything that we do in terms of spatiaLABS.
EXPLAIN spatiaLABS’ BUSINESS MODEL?
Iddris: The collaborations that we’re doing make up about 30 to 40% of the revenue that we’re doing. We’re also a creative agency. We do a lot of creative, entertainment-based experiences.
We do a lot of consultations for companies outside of just creating immersive visuals. We do digital album covers, 3D scanning and we’re actually opening a new volumetric studio because we really are going to pioneer what digital artistry means. COVID-19 has made us all realize how the infrastructure was not all scalable and adaptable.
Imagine creating a whole pipeline for artists to keep making money, a whole pipeline for artist to perform virtually. Everyone is racing right now to think of what’s next when we should have been doing this.
That’s the wave that spatiaLABS has been on. To answer your question, about 30 to 40 percent of our revenue comes from creating experiences and the other is from consulting on creative projects with large scale artists to redefine what their brand is to where if we went through another wave of COVID, the artist would still be to arbitrage off of their artistry and connect with their fans.
HOW DO YOU DECIDE WHICH PROBLEMS TO SOLVE?
Iddris: My design thinking process is rooted in empathy. No matter what idea I’m creating, at whatever stage I’m in, in my ideation process, I filter things in two places: Aspirations and necessity
What are aspirations? Aspirations are changes I would like to see in the world, which are subjective and then the necessities are objective things that I can use my skillsets to improve. Can we design a better sweater or can we design a better coffee mug or coffee cup? Yes, is that a necessity? No. Is famine killing a lot of people every year? Yes, the water system is affected and compromised, yes.
Then I go to ideation and then from ideation I go to problem solving. At any stage in all my products I do some sort of focus group between a couple of people. Then, depending on the issues that they bring up I bring it back up to the ideation again and I repeat that process until it is the idea has the least discriminatory issues. After that, we prototype and present it.
We lack in design thinking in the black community. After World War 2, a huge shift happened in Germany where they started creating a design ethos as a principle for the whole of Germany – that’s how Bauhaus was established. They created design principles that are still used today. I think about so many things that have happened throughout black history and African culture; whether that was slavery or segregation.
spatiaLABS exists to say, “Bauhaus is cool, but where is Black House? Where is our design ethos, thinking methods and principles that we ask designers that are creating for the future to adhere to? The future is going to be volumetric and immersive media. How do we as a culture establish a specific set of guidelines so that any web developer, mobile developer, XR or VR developer creates experiences for the culture or when creating experiences.
WHOS ON YOUR MOUNT RUSHMORE OF INSPIRATION?
Iddris: Nipsey Hussle, Hov (Jay-Z), Diddy, DJ Cool Herc, Africa Bombata, KRS One, Grandmaster Flash. Hip Hop inspires me. I’m also inspired by David Hammons and Basquiat who are both artists. Last, but not least, Catherine Johnson, the mathematician from NASA who recently passed away.
I would say Rosa Parks, Dr. King, Malcolm X. All these people inspire me every single day because they were philosophers and I think those are the best leaders. The best leaders in the community are the philosophers or the people that question the status quo and say, “We don’t do this because it’s wrong we do this because it stops our people from advancing.
I’m also inspired by the people who create equations. I feel that my presence and the reason why God and the universe has me on this earth is to serve humanity, but before I can serve humanity I need to be able to serve my people first. I learned Ohms, Jules and about Charles Darwin. All of these people created equations, formulas, but how many of those people looked like me? How many people were black?
WHY IS HIP HOP IMPORTANT TO YOUR WORK RIGHT NOW?
Iddris: Hip hop is really important to me because it’s enabled me to think the way that I think. I think about being a kid from Ghana who moved to America when he was 3 years old and settled in Compton, California. Compton gave us NWA, which gave us Eazy-E, Buddy, and Kendrick Lamar. Had it not been for hip hop, I wouldn’t be able to be me. I wouldn’t be able to be here right now. There was an LL Cool J interview that I saw and he was talking about how he was one of the first OGs in hip hop to own his masters.
Back then it wasn’t a cool thing to talk about. He said, “Back then, you would talk about ownership and it wasn’t pleasurable. Now, everybody wants to be on ownership. We created hip hop as a culture. We don’t even know what hip hop is fully capable of. Hip hop isn’t just about writing rhymes or producing beats; hip hop is about technology; hip hop is about innovation. We just haven’t seen it yet because hip hop is a baby still. The founders didn’t even understand what they were doing, but that’s because we haven’t looked at it in an equation way. We haven’t looked at hip hop as a formula because if we did, we would understand that a formula solves problems. Hip hop is used as a form of meditation and healing.
“We haven’t looked at hip hop as a formula because if we did, we would understand that a formula solves problems. Hip hop is used as a form of meditation and healing.”
Interested in learning more or connecting with Iddris?
Instagram: @iddrissandu
Website: spatiaLABs.io