PROFILE: PRCA [2022]

Since launching the PRCA’s LGBTQ+ Role Models series we’ve had the privilege of both talking to and sharing the stories of incredible leaders in our industry. It’s almost unbelievable that our 2020 workplace advocacy report—in partnership with YouGov—found that while inclusivity is improving, 29% of survey respondents were not aware of any LGBTQ+ colleagues holding senior leadership positions.

Today is International Transgender Day of Visibility, founded in 2009 to raise awareness of the discrimination towards transgender people around the world, marginalised for embracing their true identity.

As a group, we believe that acceptance is only the first step to progress. Now is the time to speak up and celebrate one another for the differences that make us unique, creative and special. We don’t all have to agree with one another all the time – or any of time – but we all have an equal right to a voice, an opinion and to be listened to.

With that, we bring you words from one of the great creative minds in our industry at the moment: Tea Uglow, Creative Director of Google’s Creative Lab in Sydney.

1. What is your greatest achievement in life?

I don't have any great achievements. I am very proud of small things that matter to me, like a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with the Royal Shakespeare Company, or a blockchain project / digital book called The Universe Explodes with Visual Editions in 2018.

I am really proud of my book Loud & Proud - an anthology of speeches from the first 150 years of gay liberation. I didn't know when I started how much of gay rights was born and devised in Germany in the 19th century, or how they made up the words homo- and heterosexual, or that the first gay rights movement in the US didn't occur until 1924 and that was led by a German too. And there are all these amazing, amazing people so it was such a joy to dive into.

1. What is your greatest professional achievement?

I don't have any great professional achievements. We won a Peabody award for the books we made during the five years window of EditionsAtPlay.com. Is that a professional thing? I feel like saying I got nominated for a special bonus for work on Chrome, or Search, or Photos. Or YouTube. I did meet the Queen after we built her YouTube channel. And I got to build the Vatican's first YouTube channel as well.

1. In what way, if at all, do you believe being a member of the LGBT community has affected the professional opportunities you’ve had?

Oh. I find that I can now work on Gay for Google around the world as a side-hustle. And more of my time is spent writing up articles about the challenges of being female, or trans, or bisexual, or queer, or autistic. Less so, mental health. My company’s awareness of my mental health has been the most damaging to my career - I am wrapped in cotton wool and intellectually gaslit whilst losing everything that mattered to me.

But it is hard to say so, because now, as a woman, I cannot complain. Being autistic I am easy to dismiss out of hand whenever I get particularly focused on one aspect of injustice or another. As a person, all these labels have helped lift me out of a place of total despair - but it is very interesting to see how powerfully goodwill can compound discrimination and make you feel increasingly distanced and excluded.

I think the British government have had the biggest impact on my life. I am a child of Thatcher and a casualty of Section 28. From 1988 it became illegal in the UK to teach awareness of LGBTQ issues in schools, and as a result the culture of fear meant that no aspect of my puberty or childhood ever mentioned gay people or bisexuality, or trans people. Section 28 should be seen like we look at the unthinkable 1960’s psychology experiments on children. Every child in the country took part in that experiment - there was no opt out. 

I feel that any adults in that position sounded so scared that children, like me, knew far more about Santa than they did about queers. Even years later, I still didn’t really know how little I knew. Instead of being educated, I was home-schooled by Ace Ventura, growing up ignorant of myself, and utterly illiterate. Section 28 lasted 25 years.

If it had been an experiment at least we would have data. The deep psychological scars so many of my age carry would have borne fruit, however bitter. But it wasn’t, so no one gets to learn a thing. And you cannot look at the singularly English version of transphobia without thinking that maybe, just maybe, a complete absence of social and sexual education may have left a mark there too.  This is a battle I will fight all my life - not the one with the TERFS - the one with my own deep-rooted disgust and self-loathing.  

1. What positive change have you seen or personally managed to effect for the LGBT community over the course of your career?

I actually feel like the gay flag emoji made a huge difference and it was the starting gun on my desire to get a transgender pride flag emoji. It took over four years and a small but amazing group of people. Seeing Monica Helms' flag in the beta releases last year was a day that I cried about.

More prosaically, I am proud of getting Google to extend their trans healthcare worldwide. I am quite old, so my career has a lot of space to SEE things. When I think most seriously about the question, I think that the repeal of Section 28 in 2004 and, less stand-out but a huge sweeping impact has been in medicine - the life, personal and professional success of a very dear friend called John. In 2000, when he was diagnosed HIV positive, we all assumed he would be dead within five years or so. We mourned. That he is still here is a testament to progress, to science, to evidence-based treatment

1. What do you hope the near future holds for progress in inclusivity in the communications industry and how can individuals make a difference?

I'm about to begin a project to push for the erasure of gendered pronouns (just he/she. his and hers). They are unnecessary and dangerous words. It might be another one of these autistic obsessions, but I cannot understand why any woman demands that 'she' be labelled as a demographic that is distinct from the dominant and which provides a level of discrimination that is so ingrained, so visible, and evidenced in every data set.

It is a violent inequity, and it is enforced primarily by defining every human into one of two camps. In almost no situation does that distinction make a difference. We have learnt to eradicate, or at least acknowledge the implications of describing a person's skin pigmentation, why are we still adamantly defending the necessity of describing their gender? I think if you dealt with the far simpler problem of a new word for a plural 'they' (like, theys) then we could limit the structural discrimination that we know exists but can do so little to resolve.

PROFILE: Design Matters [2020]

Design Matters: Tea Uglow

Design Matters · Design Matters from the Archive: Tea Uglow

It’s hard to describe exactly what Tea Uglow does. But know this: She has your dream job. Within Google, as has been said before, she is, essentially, paid to play.

The gig didn’t come easily. Uglow started as a Fine Art student, came across design and navigated the tides of the Dotcom boom and Dotcom bust, and then grabbed the laptop from her severance package and taught herself HTML. She bounced around a few design jobs, and then happened upon a one-month contract position to make Powerpoints for the sales team at Google.

… And then she founded Google’s Creative Lab in Europe.

How?! In this episode of Design Matters, Debbie Millman explores just that—and, of course, digs into what Uglow does today as creative director of Google’s Creative Lab in Sydney.

Uglow’s work may not be the easiest thing to nail down in a nutshell, and it’s best seen in action. So here we present a tapestry of Tea, from her personal writings to a medley of her striking projects that reveal the key to her swift rise and all the rest of it: her raw brilliance.

Midsummer Night’s Dreaming“The Royal Shakespeare Company put on a unique, one-off performance of ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ in collaboration with Google’s Creative Lab. It took place online, and offline—at the same time. It was the culmination of an 18 month project looking at new forms of theater with digital at the core.”

XY-Fi “XY-Fi allows you to mouse-over the physical world, with your phone.”

Editions at Play “Editions At Play is the Peabody Futures–award-winning initiative by Visual Editions and Google’s Creative Lab to explore what a digital book might be: one which makes use of the dynamic properties of the web.”

Hangouts in History “Google’s Creative Lab teamed up with Grumpy Sailor to help a class of year 8 students from Bowral ‘video conference’ with 1348, in what we became the first of five ‘Hangouts in History.’”

The Oracles “The Oracles is a cross-platform experience, developed for primary school children in Haringey. Digital and physical environments are blended, alternating between gameplay and visits to Fallow Cross, where enchanted objects know where you are so that your moves trigger the story.”

Story Spheres “Story Spheres is a way to add stories to panoramic photographs. It’s a simple concept that combines the storytelling tools of words and pictures with a little digital magic.”

Bar.Foo “Google has a secret interview process …”

Debbie talks with Tea Uglow about experimental digital projects that are pushing the boundaries of tech and art. “This is very much the principal with all my projects, just draw a line in the sand and put a flag there. Then at least someone might come over and look at the line and ask ‘What’s the flag for?’”

PROFILE: Sydney Morning Herald [2020]

Lunch with Google creative director Tea Uglow

Before our lunch at the Sydney Opera House, where Google Creative Director Tea Uglow will next month be one of the headline speakers at the All About Women festival, I receive a handy guide titled: “What to expect when you’re expecting Tea.”

It is for people who are new to working with the head of Google’s Creative Labs in Sydney: a transgender woman who indentifies as queer.

Tea Uglow, Creative director of Google.CREDIT:LOUSIE KENNERLEY

“I am happy for you to know (and to talk to us) about this – rather than guess because it’s helpful (for all of us),” the document explains and goes on to list some specifics.

Pronunciations of names: Tea (like the drink); surname U-glow like You-Glow as in Unicorn. Preferred pronouns: she / they . Links to the times she has written and spoken publicly about the transition from a man called Tom to a woman called Tea which started in 2016.

“It was certainly a complicated few years … After a lifetime of thinking I was unusual (doesn’t everyone?) or at least an unusual boy (as in teetotal, chocolate-loving, vegetarian, yogi feminist) it turns out I was completely normal just not 100 per cent boy,” the document explains with refreshing candour and a self-depreciation that I will come to understand as trademark

The cheat sheet even covers what her children – two boys aged eight and five – call her: Tea, rather than mum or dad. Why does parenting need to be gendered, she asks in the same manner she will encourage her audience at All About Women, which takes place on International Women’s Day, to consider how technology can be harnassed to change gender stereotypes.

It is such a concise compendium of questions and answers, I wonder if we will have anything to talk about when I arrive at the Portside Restaurant.

When we meet we discuss the fact that our companies used to share the same office space in Pyrmont, as Google expanded taking up more office floors, our company office space shrank, a metaphor reflecting the changing fortunes of our industries she suggests. The company she joined in 2006 pretty much as a start-up, is notorious for providing nap rooms and free food cooked by chefs but she tells me if she’s in the office she will usually just have a cheese sandwich.

Uglow, now 45, started working at Google in London’s Soho office, when it was half a standard office floor and a far cry from the tech giant it is today employing about 200,000 worldwide.

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“When I first joined we got free lunch but it was just a baked potato. It was a group of people who wanted to change the world via tech and it has changed the world of the internet, creating search engines and building browsers ... When I look back I am very proud of all we have done,” she says.

We order sparkling mineral water and sourdough bread with Pepe Saya butter to start and decide to share a salad and a main: Heirloom tomato, Burrata Stracciatella, olives, confit onion dressing with oregano and Truffled orecchiette pasta, cauliflower polonaise with brown butter.

Truffled orecchiette pasta, cauliflower polonaise with brown butter at the Portside restaurant.CREDIT:LOUISE KENNERLEY

She sees her job as creative director, sometimes as head of a team of 100 people, as more like a gardener, who nurtures “geeks like me” and helps them grow. She’s recognised as a gifted communicator, a TedX talk she gave has been viewed 1.7 million times, and is often asked to address large crowds. She first spoke publicly about her transgender journey in July 2018 in a talk called “how to lead when you don’t know what you’re doing”. In it she lined up all her Google security passes and put them in a Powerpoint slide to illustrate her transition from Tom to Tea in pictures. She included it to show how true creativity, as with the scientific inquiry she oversees at Google, means not knowing where you are going, and to not be afraid to take risks. Throughout life, Uglow has always taken the “least boring option.”

Born in 1975 in Kent, southeast England, to a father who was an academic and a mother in publishing, Uglow, is the eldest child with two younger brothers, a sister and a half brother. From the age of six she taught herself computer coding from magazines.

Growing up she played rugby and studied ballet with her sister, went to an all boys school, where she was head boy, then headed to Oxford University to study fine arts (also coaching the women’s rugby team while there). Here they were told only two of them in the class would make it as artists, so she decided to head in a different career direction: “one where you could get a job.”

After a string of different dotcom jobs, she took a contract for a month making Powerpoint slides at Google, where her off-the-charts intellect, found a home with “fellow geeks”. She has worked at the internet Behemoth ever since, at the intersection of art and technology, moving to Sydney in 2012, with her former Australian-born partner and mother of her children.

The impact of her transition on her family has been immense and complicated. She wrote the tips for “dealing with Tea”, to make things a bit simpler for everyone.

“It’s a bit like coding, it is complex but it is also exciting. Shouldn’t that be what being alive is,” she says.

The only people her trans status really impacts is her and her “long suffering family”, who it is clear she is keenest to protect. Most people aren’t bothered when she speaks openly, she said.

Finding her voice as a transgender women has helped her emerge as a leader in that community, and she’s been stunned by the tweets and letters she’s received in support.

“If that’s what leadership is I’ll take it,” she says.

When lunch arrives on this hot summer day we eat slowly, and she talks about her sons and the hope that they grow up in a world where they are not defined by their gender. She’s written a book already on doubt, but another called Loud and proud, will be published in May, which brings together 50 speeches from the past 150 years of LGBTQI activism. It is dedicated to the affirming parents of transgender children.

Heirloom tomato, Burrata Stracciatella, olives, confit onion dressing with oregano at the Portside Restaurant.CREDIT:LOUISE KENNERLEY

“I am uncomfortable with putting people in boxes according to their biology at birth. It is quite nice to know we live in a world that acknowledges it doesn’t have to be that way,” she tells me.

“I’ve done the white male privileged thing – boy scouts, rugby, drinking with the lads – and people asked why would you give it up? I tell them it’s not a choice. I drew the short hormonal straw in the womb, it’s not like you choose to become a chess prodigy or get cancer. I don’t want to be anything except happy. And I am happier. Reeling a bit, but happier.

“My idea of hell was going to a barbecue when the mums were at one end of the garden on blankets playing with the kids and I was down at the other end with the men drinking beer (I don’t drink alcohol), cooking meat (I’m a vegetarian) just thinking I don’t want to be here, I want to be with the women. I was fundamentally not interested in the conversations the men had. I’ve always preferred what women talk about and most of my friends are female – I just prefer the company of women.

“I have had some mental health issues but they are about the fact I spent 30 years pretending the things I felt were twisted and broken. When I stopped pretending, denying and hiding part of myself that felt broken it was great.

“In my case I need to acknowledge Tom exists and that it is important to not keep him in the cellar the way he kept me in the cellar. But I am not ashamed of who I am anymore … Transitioning was like a grief. It’s surprising how potent that grief is,” she says.

She believes it is only convention and language that defines and creates the expectations we have of men and women, not individuals. As for gender in the tech world, Uglow’s unique perspective will be what she will talk about at the Opera House next month.

“I’ve been on both sides. I’ve seen women not behave well to other women in the workplace, and men playing the ‘guy card’ leaning on their physicality like you can in rugby. My suggestion to women would be don’t ‘lean in’ and play like the boys – we need to drop sexist views and language on both sides,” she says.

She sees gender as a spectrum (“I’m more fem on that spectrum”) like autism (she also is autistic.)

Google employee Tea Uglow speaking as a trans woman.CREDIT:LOUIE DOUVIS

“Autistic people often change the world because they are used to not belonging. We are very useful in the fight to change the world because we are so single minded,” she says.

Uglow has been working tirelessly for four years on developing a trans flag emoji. (We talk the day it is approved and she is elated.) “It’s a symbol to society we are here and we’re not going away,” she tells me.

After two and a half hours of talking so intensely our food goes cold before we order coffee, we are the only ones left at the restaurant when I ask for the bill. The conversation takes a slightly shallower twist toward fashion, Tea telling me what a delight it is to go shopping for women’s clothing compared to the staid options and limited colours for men. She’s wearing a silk Bianca Spender blouse, a necklace with her name Tea and a love heart, a Sunray pleated skirt, completed with billowing white hat and heeled sandals. She never understood why women used to wear heels given how uncomfortable they can be, but now she’s a convert and will carry Band aids in her handbags to deal with any discomfort. Our waiter bids us farewell with a “thanks ladies.”

“I’m always so thrilled and surprised when I hear that,” Tea tells me, leaving with a little extra bounce in her high-heeled steps.

Tea Uglow will be appear at All About Women on March 8.

PROFILE: The path to creativity is a zigzag

Tea Uglow is Creative Director at Google’s Creative Labs and works in Sydney. Google Translate once translated her role as ‘experimental person in charge at Google’ where she runs a small team at the intersection of digital technology, arts and culture working on innovative, global, creative and collaborative projects. In this episode of #PitchPodcast Pitch guest editor and cofounder of Utopia Nadya Powell interviews Tea. They talk about Tea’s childhood obsession with drawing and how interactivity formed a key part of her art as a student at Oxford’s Ruskin School. Tea discusses the importance of moving from being settled to being unsettled throughout your life and career; recounting a multifaceted career which includes her working in a bar, doing book art degree, learning how to code and freelancing at Google for a year and a half. We learn that following a wiggly path is sometimes the best thing to do, as when you do finally end up where you’re supposed to be you’re ready for it. Tea is a trans woman and talks about the project of inclusion and diversity, challenging cultures and the importance of allowing people to bring a perspective that is not in the room into the room.

PROFILE: WOW / Tatty Devine [2019] →

We first met Tea Uglow at WOW Festival this spring, where she joined forces with our Creative Director Harriet Vine on a panel discussing ‘The Genius Gap: Women and Creative Confidence.’ Tea specialises in marrying technology and the arts as creative director of Google's Creative Lab, Sydney and we've found that her quote, 'the creative process is about not knowing what you're doing' has somewhat resonated within our studio at times! We've managed to sit down together (pronounced just like the drink) and find out what makes her tick, from Margaret Atwood to our classic Aarrghhhh Necklace. Drink up! ☕

CAN YOU SUM UP WHAT YOU DO IN FIVE WORDS?

Experiments in non-linear non-contiguous narrative. LOL!

FROM FILM TO FINE ART, WHAT DO YOU LOOK TO FOR INSPIRATION?

Is this all 5 words? If not, I don't really look to anything, I am massively uncool. If I look anywhere it is normally by accident. I like ideas. I like watching people using computers, and not using computers and understanding what is good about each. I really like physics and neuroscience and behavioral psychology and fashion. I follow a lot of very odd people on Twitter and I get inspired by working with people who are as invested in what they do as we are in what we do, they inspire me. At the moment, I like what's coming out of places like the RSC, Punchdrunk, the British Library, The Royal Opera House, and the Watershed in Bristol and an overall enthusiasm to explore. That's all very inspiring.

IF YOU COULD WORK WITH ANYONE, WHO WOULD IT BE?

In history? Da Vinci or Picasso, Orwell, or Feynman. Today? Um. Richter (Gerhardt or Max), Margaret Atwood, Pipilotti Rist, Tom Stoppard, Bjork. So many people really.

WHAT DO YOU PERSONALLY REGARD AS YOUR BIGGEST ACHIEVEMENT?

Surviving my transition. It was the hardest thing I have ever been through or put anyone through. I still feel like I need to apologise and thank the people of my world for their support.

WHAT’S THE BEST DECISION YOU EVER MADE?

Taking a part-time gig making powerpoint slides for a UK Sales team at Google in London.

WORST DECISION?

Ouch. This question is causing me to spiral. So many to choose from... probably not coming out sooner. But it's complicated. I also feel a bit of an idiot for not investing in things I truly believed in, like Apple in 2000, or Bitcoin in 2014. I have made many many bad decisions creatively, and in life, picking a 'worst' is quite impossible. It is probably, again, something that hurt people I love.

PROFILE: Editions at Play (we think...) [2017]

I have no real recollection of what we said - but I LOVE the splash they ran for the article: