Meet the Magnopians: Ivone Alexandre
Working in the space where physical and digital worlds meet, Ivone brings connected spaces to life through multi-platform storytelling and systems design. They’ve previously worked across a full spectrum of immersive experience projects, and been involved in research and development, the internet of things, augmented reality, virtual reality, and theme park experiences. They’ve also designed within Marvel, Star Wars, and Meow Wolf universes. And more recently, designed the quest system for Expo Dubai Xplorer, the multi-award-winning metaverse experience for the World Expo in Dubai.
What do you do at Magnopus?
My official title is Creative Director, but with a specialization in design. I provide creative direction to the team, bringing some of that design sensibility, so people can be a little bit more design-led on projects.
What’s your origin story?
I started out in film because I couldn't afford design school, so I completed film school and got into helping friends make movies and things like that. But, I always wanted to do design. So I took all the design classes I could in school, and then as soon as I got the opportunity, I started at Disney doing films for the theme parks.
I then explored the departments that were trying to integrate game design, experience design, or any kind of technology into parks, and I ended up in an R&D department at Disney that was working on IoT toys. It was the merging of technology and design, and I think any designer should do it at least once - because kids don't listen to anything that you try and get them to do. You can make the perfect toy on paper, and then a six-year-old will come in and they'll break it immediately. That’s a really good test of your design skills!
From that point onwards, I just followed the track of wherever technology was being paired with storytelling and spaces. Then ended up at Magnopus working on the Dubai Expo project.
What, or who inspires you?
This is going to sound strange, but I actually get a lot of my inspiration from the humanities. As we embark on this next stage of building the 3D/spatial internet, metaverse, or whatever you want to call it, we are focusing on how we can build digital and virtual spaces for people. How can we build communities? A lot of the best theory around placemaking comes from the humanities. The phrase ‘placemaking’ was coined by sociologists and historians when speaking about how marginalized people create communites. I take a lot of inspiration and learnings from this work to inform my design decisions, in order to make more human and authentic digital spaces.
What is the biggest lesson you’ve learned in your career?
Fail all the time! Fail fast, and fail often. It might seem a little bit trite, but it’s true. Having worked in R&D environments my entire career, I’m used to seeing stuff not work and knowing that over the hill of that is going to be a success.
What’s your favorite thing to do when you’re not working?
I’m an experience junkie. I play games all the time with friends, but I also love road trips. I’m actually planning a road trip to Evermore in Utah soon, which is a fantasy theme park built from the ground up with game lovers in mind.
My friends and I also have a thing we do where we buy random indie games, like 50 of them for $3, and go through and play them. We all love game design, so we like to appreciate what freshly graduated game developers have created, even if it’s a small project.
What attracted you to Magnopus?
Mine and Magnopus’ stories are very similar, with the move from film to design. Magnopus is pioneering the next frontier at the intersection of storytelling and interactivity, and I resonate with that.
If you could only eat one kind of cuisine for the rest of your life, what type would you choose, and why?
It’s not a cuisine, more of a category, but I am a huge soup fan. It can be so layered, you can put anything in a soup and it’s instantly homey. I always have a bunch of broths in my freezer so when I’m in the mood for soup I have it on demand.
