Sem Devillart

Cultural analyst and futurist specialising in visual and digital culture. She has worked with leading organisations for more than two decades, developing innovative methods of transforming cultural signals into valuable knowledge, media content, products and business models. 

Her key fields of interest include the construction and improvement of decision support systems and cultural information flows through which different stakeholders can effectively deal with analytical overload, identify relevant phenomena and respond to cultural change.

She was the chief architect of Sparks&Honey, a data-driven creative agency within the Omnicom Group in New York. She has also developed and implemented a purposeful cultural analysis tool, helping ten guidebook publishers increase their cultural responsiveness for Penguin Random House. Since 2011, she has also been working with AkzoNobel on establishing global colour trends, transforming cultural phenomena into aesthetic visual languages.

She is currently associated with Harmony Labs, where she co-creates Narrative Observatory, a tool for identifying, measuring and tracking media narratives.

Sem Devillart is also a founding member of the teaching team of the master's programme in branding at the School of Visual Arts in New York, where she teaches trend forecasting methods.

She studied design, art history and comparative religious studies in Tübingen and Milan. She grew up on three continents and speaks seven languages, which gave her early training in pattern recognition.