Fellow

George Oates is an Australian-born designer who has spent nearly three decades making it easier for people to find and explore digital collections. She was part of the founding team at Flickr, and in 2008 invented Flickr Commons — a program to make public photography collections freely available online — launching first with the Library of Congress.

She later directed the Open Library project at the Internet Archive, served as director of design at Stamen Design, and founded heritage design studio Good, Form & Spectacle, working with institutions including the British Museum, the V&A, and MoMA. A consistent thread in her work is the belief that a search box is a poor welcome to a rich collection — and that good design can do much better.

George is the founding Executive Director of the Flickr Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to ensuring Flickr endures as a cultural resource for future generations. Her attention is now turning toward the longer horizon — establishing new frameworks for what it means to preserve, describe, and make digital collections genuinely usable across generational timescales. She is based in London.