The Nightly Magazine: Innovation edition interview

SpaceDraft founder and CEO Lucy Cooke sat down with Cheyanne Enciso from The West Australian Nightly Magazine to talk about the other AI: Australian innovation

Read the full article in The Nightly’s Innovation Edition digital edition or in today's copy of The West Australian.

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Despite all the changes to communication technology over the years, former Hollywood visual effects specialist Lucy Cooke found there was still a “communication gap”, one she believed her innovation could bridge.

She concocted the idea for her visual planning tool SpaceDraft in 2018 while on the set of action thriller film Sicario: Day Of The Soldado.

Working in Albuquerque, New Mexico at the time, she became fed up with watching Hollywood directors and actors map out scenes with toy cars and figures for hours on end. Filming blockbuster films can cost anywhere from $10,000 to $1 million a minute.

“In Hollywood, you’re building huge cinematic worlds, you’re bringing that imagination of the director to life,” Cooke says.

“I realised on set that the real challenge wasn’t the technology. It was communication — that complex ideas were always getting lost in translation between the scripts, the spreadsheets and people.”

Cooke describes SpaceDraft as a tool that can help “create a movie of your mind”.

“It’s a visual storytelling and forward-planning platform that lets people show what’s going to happen, when and where, in a way anyone can understand in seconds,” she says.

“Instead of static PDFs, or Gantts (a project management tool that uses horizontal bar charts to represent tasks) or PowerPoints, SpaceDraft turns complex scenarios into interactive time-based maps and storyboards.”

Since going live, Cooke says there have been more than 60,000 SpaceDrafts created globally across the mining, energy, healthcare, education and entertainment sectors.

“(SpaceDraft) evolved from a prototype built for film production crews,” Cooke says.

It was used in the 2024 Australian post-apocalyptic adventure film Mad Max: Furiosa starring Chris Hemsworth.

“But then . . . we started seeing proof built beyond film.”

SpaceDraft’s valuation is “secret squirrel”, Cooke says. She did, however, rattle off a string of high-profile companies such as Mineral Resources, Iluka Resources, Woodside, and the Harry Perkins Institute of Medical Research, as well as entertainment conglomerate Disney and streaming platform Stan among its major customers.

“In mining and oil and gas, people are the most expensive problem when it comes to safety,” Cooke says.

Compliance is the “coolest value proposition of SpaceDraft”, Cooke adds as she points to the ICAM, or incident cause analysis method — which is a process mining companies use to understand the root causes of workplace incidents.

“The value of those (safety) investigations get lost just because of how they are delivered, which is big fat PDFs that people just don’t have time to read,” she says.

“But by watching a SpaceDraft, they can visualise the gas leak, or visualise how the truck verged off the road, or why that crane wasn’t in the right place at the right time.”

As for Cooke’s most innovative and ambitious project to date, it’s seeing the tool used at the newly opened Lyn Beazley Academy in Perth — a school dedicated to the needs of students with autism.

“These beautiful, neurodiverse young people are using SpaceDrafts to communicate to the other students if they’re non-verbal,” she says.

“When I see people make SpaceDrafts to be less misunderstood, that just lights my heart on fire.”