Brand + product direction
Creative Director & Creative Technologist
I shape brands, tell stories, and make ideas playable.
Founder of Wizzo Labs. Creative director, designer, and hands-on founder working across brand, entertainment, and interactive experiences. I use AI and code to carry an idea from concept to something you can experience.
Mike Chaves
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Selected creative work
Selected work
Interactive storytelling
Playfold
Visual and interaction direction for Playfold, Wizzo Labs’ product that turns social posts into characters, worlds, and playable stories.View Playfold
Voice-first XR accessibility
SpeakEasy
A voice-first mixed reality thesis: research, visual feedback, and hands-free interaction for people with low muscle tone.View SpeakEasyBrand, entertainment, and experience design
Creative roots. Hands-on range.
From directing creative work across all Knitting Factory venues and subsidiaries to designing spatial and interactive experiences.
Knitting Factory Entertainment
Creative Director / August 2008 - January 2016
Creative direction for live entertainment
Directed digital creative projects and managed teams across all Knitting Factory venues and subsidiaries, unifying brand identity, visual storytelling, and promotional standards across web, campaign, and event experiences. Redesigned the ticketing platform and supporting digital experiences while coordinating event visuals and interactive assets for live productions.
Public professional summary
POWER Engineers
Front-End Web Developer / June 2020 - October 2021
Spatial storytelling and experience design
Led design and frontend development of GeoVoice, a web and VR platform for spatial storytelling. Built responsive interfaces and high-fidelity prototypes for geospatial and data-rich tools across web, AR, and VR, translating infrastructure data for non-technical stakeholders.
Public professional summary
Astrocade
UGC Engineer / November 2025 - April 2026
Production AI game-quality operations
Supported production quality and publishing operations for an AI-powered game creation platform. Worked across UGC review, human evaluation, QA operations, creator feedback, documentation, and cross-functional issue resolution. Detailed interfaces, policies, datasets, evaluation methods, metrics, and operational procedures are confidential.
Confidential high-level summary
Snorkel AI
AI Expert Contributor / April 2025 - October 2025
Approved public contribution
Authored and validated original, high-difficulty, graduate-level exam-style problems; assessed AI-generated responses; identified reasoning flaws; and refined model outputs. Contributed to proprietary datasets used for LLM fine-tuning, benchmarking, and reinforcement learning.
Employer-approved public summary
Ford Motor Company
Unity Developer / October 2021 - March 2022
Production manufacturing system
Developed a production Unity3D and WebGL system for manufacturing time studies, operational analytics, and stakeholder review. Translated complex manufacturing workflows into interactive tooling used in production environments. Specific interfaces, factory data, plant details, implementation methods, and unapproved metrics are confidential.
Confidential high-level summary
Starbucks
Lead UX/UI Designer III / March 2022 - December 2022
Emerging technology prototypes
Designed exploratory mobile, Unity, and speech-to-text prototypes within an emerging technology team. The work tested spatial learning, retail operations, accessibility, and high-noise communication concepts through research, prototyping, and usability evaluation. These were experiments and prototypes, not production systems. Specific interfaces, pilot materials, participant evidence, metrics, and internal project names are confidential.
Confidential high-level summary
How the work connects
Capabilities
Creative direction + brand
Concepts, visual identity, campaigns, and live-event visuals with a coherent point of view.
Storytelling + interactive media
Characters, worlds, game UX, motion, and experiences people can take part in.
Design + hands-on delivery
Visual and interaction design, high-fidelity prototypes, design systems, and production code.
Immersive interaction
XR, voice, accessibility, motion, and spatial interfaces.
Ideas in the open
Writing and public practice
Let’s make something memorable
Give your next idea a point of view.
Let’s talk creative direction, art direction, brand, or an interactive experience that needs both imagination and hands-on craft.
Based in Los Angeles, California. Open to creative direction and art direction conversations.