a global guild for designers

E-⁠resident entrepreneur and UX Designer Thabo Mbuyisa is co-founder of Elaborate Studio, a collective guild and forum for designers

Thabo Mbuyisa is in the business of design. Like many designers, he takes his business with him, or sometimes he goes to where the business is. He's the co-founder and product design lead for Elaborate Studio, a collective of similarly minded designers from around the world. The idea behind Elaborate is not only to keep clients satisfied but to pool talent and ideas. Elaborate is just as much a forum to brainstorm ideas as it is for creating a smoother user experience for partners.

Thabo is originally from South Africa, but he grew up in London. He's worked in New York and Tokyo and sleeps in Berlin. He was residing in Japan though when the idea struck to create Elaborate with a fellow designer who is an American by birth. At first, they considered incorporating as an agency in Tokyo, but understood this had bureaucratic strings attached. Also, Thabo was heading back to Berlin for another project. He would no longer even be in Japan.

"This pushed us to find another way of making this possible," says Thabo,

Thabo was interested in Estonia anyway. He knew the country because of its reputation in the tech world and its many unicorns. "Skype was from there, famous hackers are from there, and the products that have come out of there have been incredible," he says about Estonia.

In a way, the concept of Elaborate Studio and Estonian e-⁠Residency overlap. Elaborate Studio is more or less a design guild, where designers can collaborate, wherever they happen to be based. Estonian e-⁠Residency provides the framework to support such an endeavor, by allowing the company to submit invoices and access other services in an EU country, regardless of location.

In 2020, Thabo applied and got his kit at the Estonian embassy in Tokyo. He says that Elaborate also used Estonian lawyers to register the company. Elaborate Studio was now an Estonian firm.

Prior to Elaborate, Thabo lived a lifestyle common to those in the design field, in that he worked for companies to realize their aims. He worked project to project, and when it was finished, he moved on. There was always work. Thabo was an experience designer at Degica in Tokyo, where he relied on user experience (UX) design methods and techniques to improve user engagement, for example. He then held similar positions at other Japanese companies, and later moved to work with companies in the US and in Germany.

But he was growing restless by the time he hit upon the idea of creating a collective. "It's singular, limited, and in the end, what does it all amount to," he says of working company to company. Instead, by working with a collective, design becomes more of a fun, artistic process, where different designers collaborate on projects.

The result is more motivated designers and better output.

"The work quality that comes out of this kind of collective is insane," says Thabo.  "I work with people who are almost psychotic in the way that they think about design," he says.

The world Thabo operates in is both familiar to the average person and unknown. Almost everybody is a user of a digital product, and thus has a user experience, but it is Thabo's job to understand what kind of experience his clients want to offer, and to design it so that it works. There is also the question of how to measure a user experience, to increase its value, to improve upon it. It's not limited to the online world, he notes, as the automotive industry has a strong interest in UX. Elaborate helps its clients develop their user experience in an objective way.

"We show people how to do it, so they don't waste R&D money chasing after a ghost," he says.

While this may seem like a complicated business, it developed out of Thabo's interest from an early age in design. From childhood on, he was a consummate artist, sketching away his hours and soaking in ideas from cartoons, comics, and graphic novels. He would copy images from magazines and make them his own. Later, he would break down his toys and rebuild them to his liking. A remote-controlled car was disassembled and he built a new vehicle using its generator.

"I was always fascinated by these sorts of things, I was always tinkering with stuff, and then when I was older, I got my first computer," he says.

Thabo applied the same interest in mechanics and design to PCs, breaking them down, adding hard drives and RAM. He became fascinated by graphic design at this time and studied multimedia and digitally interactive design. In particular, he has tried to better understand how ideas can be turned into virtual experiences. "There is this bridge between digital and physical reality that interests me," Thabo says, "and I still haven't figured out how it happens." Add AI to the mix, and the boundary between the real physical world and virtual one grows more opaque.

"AI has become a universe of its own," he says, "and there is stuff here in the real world enabling it, but it's not clear how the real world becomes digital."

Such is the "magical fairy land" that UX exists in, Thabo acknowledges, but it is one that he has chosen as his own.

"I am looking forward to making the brand more established," he says of his immediate plans for the Elaborate Studio collective.

Empowered by e-⁠Residency, Thabo has set his sights on developing and investing in the collective's resources, raising awareness of its existence, and enticing other gifted designers to join.