The Gofor project was created to present an uplifting and inspiring vision of a drone-saturated future. Gofor imagines a world where drones can be called to complete just about any task, on-demand. As far fetched as they seemed at the time, many of the features touted by Gofor have come into existence as real products today.

To create the world of Gofor, the brand and iOS app needed to be designed first. The Gofor logo is reminiscent of old pilot’s pins, with the addition of a strange looking aircraft in the center. The iOS app was designed to feel positive, friendly and accessible; the consumer angle was the approach because it’s a more accurate guess for what our real drone future could hold.

We were intrigued by the idea of designing a UI for a consumer drone interface; often the future UI’s you see are so non-functional and clearly place aesthetics over any kind of real usability. This app envisions what a real drone app UI would be like — something that anyone could use, with obvious controls and intuitive functionality.

The videos were shot on a C300 with Angenieux zooms, as well as a tiny fleet of DJI Phantoms. The app was built and animated in After Effects and projected onto live-action phones using green screen. All of the graphic design was handled in Sketch and Photoshop. Gofor was shot on location in Palo Alto, San Francisco, and the Marin Headlands.

Gofor began as a single promo video, grew into two, and spawned a large minisite as well. The project wasn’t intended to fool anyone, but many press outlets covered it as if drones-on-demand were suddenly upon us. As with Our Drone Future, the Gofor project incited lots of interesting debate about the issues surrounding UAV technology.

While the app didn’t exist in real life, it was a fascinating exercise. In the end, it’s our way of contributing to the conversation about topics of interest, in this case, drones. There are a lot of different ways to get ideas out into the world, and we think a lot about how best to equip them to survive. The “completeness” of this project was our way of battle-dressing the ideas to spread and thrive on the internet.

In a lot of ways, Gofor is a form of concept art, in that half the experience is seeing the idea unfold out in the world and seeing people’s reaction. The audience response, often in the form of press, is part of the project. How the idea lives or dies, that timeframe is how we can evaluate the project’s success. That’s the metric. It’s a game, and as a gamer, the strategy involved with getting the idea to live longer is exciting to us.