If you've only known Paul Casey at one point in this journey, a multi-discipline company might seem puzzling. But when you view the entire journey, it all falls into place. This journey spans diverse domains, from community support and technical excellence to research insights and design.
Community
The greatest community influence during this journey would be the founder’s grandmother, Dort Tynan, who extensively supported their community and was recognised with multiple Australian of the Year awards.
Development
I entered the digital industry right after the dot-com bust. Working in digital was not a cool or desirable job in those days. The pay wasn’t great, and you were considered a nerd. However, being both a designer and a developer was relatively common in those days, making it a perfect fit. I designed and developed Vision Australia’s first website that adhered to WCAG 1.0 and dabbled in various financial companies and small agencies for the first few years.
Interactive UI and flashy games got me my first major corporate job working for Channel Nine and Microsoft. It was an era that I remember fondly, where creativity and technology were unified to push the boundaries every week.
I was in Chanel Nine’s innovation team, and we predicted the 2007 election within a 0.3% margin, paving the way for big data and data visualisations in journalism. We were nominated for a Walkley Award, Australia’s most prestigious journalism award.
Machine Learning
In 2011, I became interested in what became some of the foundations of Machine Learning when I moved to Toronto; I started a company and worked for clients like Microsoft and Toyota. I developed tools using bigrams and trigrams to determine relationships between videos and written content. I created custom text classifiers just before deep learning started to take off. Then, I developed a social graph tool that built relationships between Facebook users and licenced it to Channel Nine.
Customer Experience
After returning to Australia, I moved to Melbourne to delve deeper into customer experiences, connecting the physical and the digital worlds with Digital identities, Digital Mailboxes and Parcel Lockers. Our team was on a successful roll, and Australia Post asked me to lead a team of designers and researchers to incubate new revenue streams.
Then, moving back to Sydney in 2018, I was hired by Isobar, ranked highest in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant that year, to lead Qantas' broadest research into customer experience, exploring all the opportunities in the end-to-end travel journey.
Purpose
2020 kicked off looking for purpose in my work, so my next goal was to uplift the research and design capabilities of the NSW Government. What was expected to be a 3-month contract with NSW Government at the beginning of 2020, I somehow ended up leading projects to address the pandemic, creating mandatory QR codes to monitor the communal spread of COVID, and helping the public find clinics to test for COVID with new location capabilities at NSW Government. What an unexpected journey.
Founding Dort Studio
In 2022, I resigned from my safe management role in government to pursue further education in data science and AI.
In June 2022, I quietly founded a small design, research and technology company, Dort Studio.
With a team of four, we focus on socially impactful projects that create a better world.
Blurring the lines
So, if you have known me for a small slice during this journey, I may seem like a quiet introvert who excels at one specific thing. But the entire picture illustrates my strong belief that blurring the lines between fields of study leads us to untapped insights and unexpected solutions.
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