A boundless creative playground: Zeus Jones takes us inside the fourth issue of Athena Jones

“It takes a magic mix of open-mindedness, humility and courage for us to go on this journey together,” Zeus Jones’ Strategist Morgan Hay-Chapman tells us about the making of Athena Jones. First started in 2019, Athena Jones is a “creative playground” for the agency, where the team gets to explore a chosen topic, carte blanche. A sense of discovery is woven into this practice – team members bounce ideas off of each other, work in lockstep, experiment freely, and let the process steer them to the final output.

This year, brainstorming sessions led the team to the idea of ‘Joyful Resilience,’ and they peeled back the layers of the concept through footloose experiments. Prioritising a playful approach, they instinctively jumped from one experiment to the other, creating art, conducting interviews, and exploring the many dimensions of the topic before finally landing at a four-track EP, kitted out with digital listening rooms.

To take a closer look at the process, we spoke to Hay-Chapman and Designers Alex Register and Denzel Boyd, who tell us about the deep, intellectual collaboration that leads to each issue, and underscore the importance of not being too precious about the work.

It’s a playground for our team to use creativity and imagination.

RB Congratulations on releasing the fourth issue of Athena Jones! Could you tell us a bit about what led you to start this project in the first place? Also, where does the name come from?

MHC Thank you! We started Athena in 2019 as a way for us to explore what we call ‘uncommon wisdom’ – emerging ideas from culture, business, and everything in between. It’s a playground for our team to use creativity and imagination to investigate topics that will be critical to the future of brand and business, and shape new thinking for our clients in the process. Each issue has a set of experiments and actions that help us explore the chosen topic. These have ranged from creating the first-ever fan-contributed music video entirely made of Instagram face filters with Dua Saleh to a qualitative study on resilience in the workplace during our latest issue.

The name comes from Athena, the goddess of wisdom, and the name of our agency, which is a play on the idea of dualities.

RB What led you to ideas of resilience and joy for this year’s issue?

AR When we first started brainstorming topics for this issue, the ripple effects of the pandemic were still very front-and-centre. Collective discourse was celebrating all these acts of resilience in hardship, but there was rarely an acknowledgement of how that kind of resilience was actually breaking us down as people.

We were also collectively feeling this tension as co-workers, as we’d just spent the last few years gritting our teeth through multiple, layered crises. So we really grabbed onto this notion of Joyful Resilience – a new type of resilience that prioritises play, collective agency, and expressions of humanity – without enduring a toxic status quo in the pursuit.

We create a series of experiments that help us to learn more about this topic through various lenses.

RB How does an Athena Jones issue come together – where do you begin, and how does the creative process flow?

MHC We kick off each issue by brainstorming ideas we think are worth pursuing. The goal is to find a topic with a lot of interesting ideas that sit underneath it – one that begs a question that we can pursue throughout the entire issue. We assemble a new team for each issue and each member is empowered to explore themes within the topic that they’re personally interested in. This always leads us to surprising places, expanding our understanding of the topic in unexpected ways.

From there, we create a series of experiments to help us learn more about this topic through various lenses. The team pitches ideas –  from interviews and artist collaborations to written articles or original research – and we align on the final mix as a group.

RB Could you break down this issue for us, from the collaborations with artists like Vincent Schwenk to the EP? How did one thing lead to the other?

AR Once we had the initial creative vision we reached out to a few artists with whom we could expand where we were headed, which led us to work with George Stoyanov and Vincent Schwenk. Vincent actually wasn’t immediately available, so we bought one of his 3D starter packs to create our own artwork instead. That choice wound up being incredibly beneficial to our creative process, and we thankfully reconnected with him for artwork later in the issue.

MHC We also wanted to connect with people outside our agency to help sharpen our thinking. We reached out to Alice Katter of Out of Office Network to see if there was something we could do together, and we quickly sparked a deep connection. We interviewed her as part of the issue, and one of our team members contributed to her latest Reimagining the Nature of Work booklet as well. We’re actually still cooking up some fun things with Alice for the near future.

AR We try to do at least one tangible experiment in each issue—something to manifest the things we’re writing about. Our CEO Christian Erickson had an existing connection with Tim Exile of Endlesss and had been an active community member for quite some time. During one of our conversations, he was talking about why he loved the community and the tech behind the app, and we realised the way Endlesss fosters musical creativity was actually really in line with how we were thinking about this new type of resilience. So we reached out, made some more connections, and began the experiment that would lead to the creation of the EP.

We knew we’d need someone who could take the contributions from the Endlesss community and remix them into some kind of finished piece of work, so we tapped record producer Lazerbeak to bring it all home. Co-creation and collaboration has been a huge part of his music over the years, and he was incredible. I’m honestly still surprised at how smoothly it came together. We were able to carry that co-creation into every part of the experiment, and brought all of the art, music, and collective creativity together with the launch of the EP and the companion web experience.

RB When you start the project, do you have any idea of what the final output will look like? For example, with this issue, did you know that the process would lead you to ‘The Joyful Resilience Project,’ the four-track EP?

MHC We had no idea where we would land in the early stages of our planning. In fact, the idea for this EP gradually grew out of an exploration into the connection between sound and resilience by one of our team members, Dustin Studelska. It’s a great example of how allowing everyone room to follow threads that they find personally interesting can lead to unexpected outcomes.

The EP explored how technology can manifest a more emergent, communal creative process via music. Together with Web3 music platform Endlesss, each track was constructed from an Endlesss jam – essentially a collectively-generated evolving soundscape. Endlesss community members were asked to consider a prompt for each jam and create their own interpretation alongside other music makers from over the world. After a week of collective creation, Endlesss members curated their favourite moments and passed them off to record producer Lazerbeak to play with and remix into the final tracks.

The culmination of the issue was a web experience that was created to celebrate the launch of the EP. The website turns the tracks into a series of listening rooms with music, art, and commentary that bring the collective creativity to life, capturing the full sense of play and spontaneity for everyone to hear, see, and feel.

RB Does the Athena Jones project help the team to unwind creatively, so to speak? What’s the most rewarding part of working on it?

DB It definitely gives us space to experiment with ideas, formats, and collaborations that excite us. The most rewarding aspect is making connections outside our immediate network to co-create with people around a shared purpose and interests. It also really drives our own personal growth in pushing our creative abilities and mindsets. We can individually explore ideas we’re interested in, and shape new thinking for Zeus Jones as a collective in the process.

RB How and when do you work on each issue? Do you set some time apart, or work on it alongside client projects?

AR Working on an issue is factored into each team member’s workload right alongside client projects. Part of the original intention was to explore the connections between our client work and other tangential ideas out in the world, so it’s important that we don’t overly separate the two. Each issue has had a rotating team of people, so that also helps it function as a tool for both individual and collective growth within the agency.

I think we really stumbled onto something powerful.

RB Do you think working on Athena Jones brings the team together in new ways?

MHC Definitely. It’s an opportunity to connect with colleagues that we would not otherwise have been able to collaborate with. Working on an issue of Athena also provides an opportunity for a really deep style of intellectual collaboration that’s unique from how we partner on client projects. It always feels like a magic mix of open-mindedness, humility and courage is required to go on that journey together.

RB What are some of the learnings from this issue that you’ll carry into your studio practice?

AR I think we really stumbled onto something powerful with how we set up our creative process for this issue, so moving forward we’re looking for ways to codify that a bit more and create time during each project for lightweight experiments, visual studies, and play.

Something we’ve been exploring for a long time is how to create brands that thrive in the paradoxes that modern brands are faced with. How can you be both familiar and unexpected? How can your brand be cohesive and open to the ways your fans and other communities might reinterpret it? I think some of the processes we’ve created here will help us continue to crack that.

DB I was deeply inspired by our take on Joyful Resilience as a concept and as a call to action. It gave me a renewed sense of creative energy and made me more curious about the environment and the changing reality that surrounds us. The humility to understand ourselves as part of a large-scale systemic process, full of small incremental changes, and the empathy to embrace joy and play as a pioneering approach that incorporates different needs and sensitivities. In essence, turning crisis into opportunity with creativity at its core.

Zeus Jones