Hugo Manassei
Hugo Manassei is a Principal Partner of Participle. Prior to co-founding Participle, he was a Director at NESTA (The National Endowment for Science Technology at the Arts) founding the Creative Pioneer Programme, a national seed fund for new business models in the Creative Industries. In the first 3 years, with a £15m spend, over 65 new businesses were supported and launched.
As well as seed funding, a new type of 3 week intensive training programme was specifically designed for the programme. The progressive and groundbreaking approach to learning in this area, has resulted in a new Higher Education curriculum module for business development that is now being used throughout the UK.
Before joining NESTA Hugo co-founded Oyster Partners (now LBi). As Chief Creative Officer, Hugo was part of the executive management team that grew the company from 3 to 350 people. With a creative team of over 80 people, he pioneered new uses of information design, coining the phrase and developing ‘Experience Architects.’ His work includes early pioneering work for the internet, interactive television, telematics and mobile phone applications for clients such as the BBC, BT, Victoria & Albert Museum, Orange, Cancer Research Campaign, Royal Academy of Arts, Sky, Unilever and Rockstar Games. He oversaw and creatively directed MTV’s first ever interactive work in Europe. He specialised in culture online projects and has consulted for most major museums in the UK. The work delivered for the British Galleries at the Victoria and Albert museum remains the industry standard for developing interactivity within museums.
His creative work has been recognised through most relevant award bodies, including BAFTA, Milia d’Or, Art Directors Club of New York, D&AD;, Clio Awards, BIMA, IPPA, Communication Arts and New Media Age.
Before Oyster Partners, in the early 1990’s he co-founded Method Five a pioneering web-based design agency in New York, working on the very first web based projects for The American Lung Association, Apple and The National Geographic Society.
While Hugo co-founded these two companies, they received over £18m of investment, and were sold separately for a combined value of over £56m.
Hugo is a graduate of Product Design from the Glasgow School of Art. In his final year he specialised in Interaction Design and design for the internet, which at that time was solely the domain of programmers. His final year project was an interaction device for communicating with dolphins. His dissertation was based around the influence of computer based interaction on children. He left the GSA, with the accolades of an IBM Foundation Scholar in conceptual product design, the Wrights award for new uses for wood and the Bram Stoker award for the Most Imaginative Student of the Year. He was also a SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Pioneer Award winner for his early computer interactive work in 1993.