lorem ipsum

Matters of Experience
Matters of Experience is a podcast about the creativity, innovation, and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. Each week Abby and Brenda dig into the who, how, so what and why of exhibitions, branded experiences, events, spectaculars, and all the crazy things designers and creatives are putting out there for people who just can’t get enough.

Recent episodes

Espionage and Engaging Exhibits with Kathryn Keane

Espionage and Engaging Exhibits with Kathryn Keane

November 29, 2023
Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts and Spotify
Have you ever wondered how a museum turns the secret world of spies into an exciting experience? Join Abby and Brenda in a captivating conversation with Kathryn Keane, Vice President of Exhibitions & Collections at the International Spy Museum, as she discusses how to create exhibits that are both serious and seriously fun. Explore the challenges and successes of bringing history to life and gain insights into the art of making historical narratives both informative and immersive.
Kathryn Keane is VP of Exhibitions and Collections at the International Spy Museum. She oversees the permanent and temporary exhibitions at this popular DC destination and is also responsible for the museum’s large onsite artifact collection. Kathryn has 25 years of experience in the museum field overseeing the development and creation of dozens of exhibitions, multimedia experiences and public programs. Before coming to the Spy Museum, she was the director of the National Geographic Museum and started her career in the art museum world.
Kathryn Keane is VP of Exhibitions and Collections at the International Spy Museum. She oversees the permanent and temporary exhibitions at this popular DC destination and is also responsible for the museum’s large onsite artifact collection. Kathryn has 25 years of experience in the museum field overseeing the development and creation of dozens of exhibitions, multimedia experiences and public programs. Before coming to the Spy Museum, she was the director of the National Geographic Museum and started her career in the art museum world.
Espionage and Engaging Exhibits with Kathryn Keane

Espionage and Engaging Exhibits with Kathryn Keane

November 29, 2023
Breaking the Silos with Gretchen Coss

Breaking the Silos with Gretchen Coss

November 16, 2023
Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts and Spotify
Gretchen Coss is a passionate educator and industry luminary who has been a driving force in cultivating and supporting students and emerging professionals in experience design. Her transformative work as the Senior Vice President of Strategic Partnerships at G&A (formerly Gallagher and Associates) mirrors her commitment to fostering talent. Tune in to this episode of Matters of Experience as she sheds light on the challenges and triumphs of experiential design education and shares her vision for the designers of tomorrow.
Gretchen Coss is a visionary leader, educator, and designer with extensive experience in global brand management, experience design, and placemaking. Prior to G&A, Gretchen was Vice President/Director of Graphics for Gensler LA; and owned her own agency, Coss Creative, where she led design and development for large-scale, mixed-use projects for over 11 years. Gretchen joined G&A at its inception to lead strategic visioning and pursuits, contributing to the firm’s worldwide growth and esteemed reputation. She is a passionate educator and active industry leader, serving on the board of the Society for Experiential Graphic Design for six years, where she was a past president and helped to launch their education foundation; and as a past adjunct professor for the Master of Exhibition Design at the Corcoran College of Art + Design, where she won a faculty award for exemplifying innovative teaching techniques. Gretchen continues to lead museum planning and visioning workshops throughout the world for organizations such as IMCC, MAAM, CTA, SEGD, and AAM.

Transcript

 

[Music]

 

Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience, a podcast produced by Lorem Ipsum, an experience design company headquartered in New York City. Our podcast explores the creativity, innovation, and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. If you’re new to the show, welcome and to our regular listeners, thank you for tuning in and supporting our conversation. My name is Abigail Honor.

 

Brenda: And I’m Brenda Cowan.

 

Abby: So today, Brenda, we’re focusing on the future of our profession, a pretty big topic, but who better to talk about this ambitious topic than Gretchen Coss. Gretchen is the Senior Vice President of Strategic Partnerships at G&A, formerly known as Gallagher and Associates. She’s a designer with extensive experience in global brand management, experience design, and placemaking. A passionate educator and an active industry leader serving on the board of the Society for Experiential Graphic Design, and as their past president. And previously, Gretchen was the adjunct professor for the Master of Exhibition Design at the Corcoran College of Art and Design, where she won a faculty award for exemplifying innovative teaching techniques. Gretchen, a big welcome to the show.

 

Gretchen: Thank you. What a nice intro. Thank you very much.

 

Brenda: Gretchen, your work centers on cultivating and supporting new and emerging professionals. So as a part of your 30 plus years in museums and experience design work, you’ve always been a mentor and a leader to the next generation and most recently with your work at G&A, you’ve been developing a whole arm of the firm for education. So, can you tell us why? Why is it that educating the next generation has become a focus for you?

 

Gretchen: What we do is so hard to understand as it is, right. It is so incredibly energizing to sit in a room of smart young designers who are just exploring and figuring out who they are, what they love, why they’re passionate about this and see if you can spark that flame and learn from them. Every single time I walk out of one of these workshops or one of the classes, I feel like I learn something from them, and they really push me.

 

Abby: Well, I remember when I was at university, there just were no courses that could have trained me in our profession at all and not even any workshops I could go to. So, seeing the plethora that have really sprung up over the last decade and the change that’s happened has been incredible because this is the next generation. And so, tell us about some of the initiatives you started up and why they seem to be working.

 

Gretchen: I’m really lucky because I have the backing of our firm sort of following me down this path and realizing that really as part of our corporate responsibility, that building of the next generation, trying to diversify the field, looking at how we can expose some of these students earlier is something that they feel really strongly about.

 

So, I actually started some of what I’m doing from professional education and doing workshops that were about how we work, why we do things a certain way, what are our responsibilities as the experiential and interpretive designers as opposed to an architect or a specialty lighting designer, and how do we actually cross over into those sort of different lenses that we work from. And the more we educate each other and our clients, hopefully the easier it gets to do our job.

 

That then sort of crosses over with the in-class work that Brenda and Christina and I have done over the past decade or more, and some project based learning where we bring the students to our client, we introduce them to the clients, and then we let them do a project that not only has check points with Brenda, Christina, myself and our staff, but also with the client. So, it’s a real-world learning experience where they get feedback and they feel what it’s like to work in this industry because I think that’s really, really difficult to replicate unless they do it.

 

Lastly, you know, I started a series of workshops that really spawned from the idea that I have a feeling that we talk about multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary design as if we are actually teaching it. And I do not believe we are doing a good job of that holistically. So, I decided to do a workshop that brought together professors, students, colleagues, clients to just peel back the layers of that conversation and talk about it. And interestingly, the conversation went so well, we actually had to just kind of shoo people out of the room at the end of the day, because we were out of time and we realized that it’s such an explosive subject that everybody wants to talk about, that it bears more discussion.

 

Abby: Tell us some of the things, like you say, it’s explosive, tell us some of the things that are often brought up in the workshops. What are the hot topics? What are the bones of contention?

 

Gretchen: I think that the biggest problem that we see or challenge, let’s just call it, is that, the siloed approach to especially undergrad and graduate programs. You have your graphic design programs, you have your interior design, your architecture and so forth, your industrial designers and media. And they typically do not learn to do a project together. They aren’t in the same room together. They don’t realize that while they are on separate tracks, what they are doing creates a holistic experience by coming together as opposed to working separately. And so I think that one of the things that we talk so much about is that all these colleges and these departments have their own numbers, their own budgets, their own quotas, their own criteria, that makes it very, very difficult for these programs to break down those walls and to work together more cohesively.

 

Brenda: You know, I think that what you’re talking about is so important and so valid. And, you know, in my grad program, we work very hard to break down the silos. It is, I think, the requirement of an individual to know the languages of our industries and maybe not be an expert as a lighting designer, but you need to know the language and to also know that if you’re going to work in museums, you’re going to really do a great job if you understand how marketing environments work and how branded environments work, and vice versa. And this is I think this is our responsibility, and I really appreciate hearing how much you dedicate your time to bringing together bodies of people to really dig in to that and to understand that because frankly, I think it’s the only way that we’re going to really cultivate really useful, productive and powerful talent in our professions.

 

Gretchen: I mean, my pipe dream is that in addition to sort of exposing them, that, for instance, the kids who are taking UI and UX design and the ones who are doing content development and the ones who are doing architecture actually sit in the room together so that they learn to work in a way where their specialties come forward and they inform each other.

 

I mean, listen, it’s hard enough in the real world to do that and sort of leave the ego at the door and have everybody do what they do well and listen, learn to listen to each other. But I do think that we suffer from not having enough of these programs coalesce with each other.

 

Abby: Yeah, I want to add that Lorem Ipsum was fortunate enough to work with DTech over at FIT on a project for Ogilvy, and it literally brought in different disciplines, so completely different areas of study, from fashion to the marketing team to the experience design, the exhibition design folks, to the IT team.

 

So, they brought in groups of students to collaborate together on this project, which resulted in an exhibition. They started separately, you know, brainstorming on their own, and then immediately realized that they needed to come together and share their ideas and create this together and utilize their individual experiences. And, you know, there were there was a lot of overlapping of experiences as well so that they could all talk and share in telling this story.

 

They all learned a lot. I know from working closely with the exhibit design students and mentoring them that they needed to understand that their voice was important to the marketing team, to the design, and what the piece of clothing was going to look like for whatever the AV, whatever the AR, whatever the interactive is going to be, and that their voice needed to be in the conversation. Just understanding that was sort of like a watershed moment, you know, and vice versa.

 

Brenda: Well, we’re speaking in ideals and not everybody is on board with this idea of multifaceted learning experiences or might have a very different definition of what a very talented or multifaceted, you know, working professional is. And as a part of this ideal, I’ve got to say I really love that the three of us are having this conversation from the different perspectives that we are. And part of me keep thinking, well, it’s my job to educate and I’m fortunate to have the resources to be able to work as an educator. But I’m looking at Abby across the table from me and thinking, my gosh, you know, on top of everything else, Abby does work as an educator and really has to allocate a lot of her time and her energy and a lot of her, her mental capacity to thinking about how to educate a client, how to educate her own internal team. And Gretchen, how on earth did you get yourself into a position where you have a firm really supporting these initiatives and providing you the opportunity to really shine in this way?

 

Gretchen: Education is a subject that everyone wants to talk about. I don’t care who it is, they care about it and they want to talk about it, but you have to give them a reason to get involved and a way to get involved. So, I think that because the firm has seen that I am very serious about what it means to us to be a leader in showing by doing as opposed to talking about it.

 

You know, we’ve seen how this, especially this last year has gone, and I have to tell you, this last set of workshops where my goal was to invite students into the process of community engagement and the idea of talking about difficult subject matters and the fact that they have a voice and that when you do this kind of work we do, we are so lucky that we have the ability to have a voice, to create a place of dialog and incite action and caring and relevance to subjects, you know, when you see these kids walk out of the room, you were, you were there. I was so stunned by some of the reactions that these students had. And I’m still getting emails from the students saying how much they appreciated sitting in the room together. And so you realize you’re actually at least getting them to realize that we’re out here, we do this, and it’s something you could get excited about.

 

Abby: So, thinking about technology and how that all fits into this, how are you teaching approaches to new technology and sort of what are any of your thoughts on AI and, you know, emerging design talent and the tools they’re going to be using in the future?

 

Gretchen: I’ll tell you, I think that there is this real, I don’t know, there’s this confusion, I’m going to call it right now with where to go from what we had to be thrown into at COVID, and God knows Brenda knows that better than anyone, being thrown into the virtual world and then coming back out of it and having a choice. So, the idea of how do we use the advantages that the virtual world brings us in teaching, in working with our clients, in doing focus groups and reaching out? And then where do we use the value of the energy in the room that cannot be replaced by a virtual platform in any way, shape or form? I do not believe we have that solved yet. I don’t believe we have it solved in people coming back to the office or not.

 

Abby: Are you guys back to the office, Gretchen? Are G&A back in?

 

Gretchen: We are partially. We do not have any stipulations on number of days to come into the office, but we do have an office space now in both New York and in DC, and the DC space is a shared space and we’re testing right now to see how things go. So, you know, it’s, it’s baby steps back to the office at this point.

 

Abby: And what about AI?

 

Gretchen: That’s another one where I think that we are very much in the midst of figuring out where it is a tool that is being used to its highest and best advantage. And I don’t think that we have a stance yet, but we are doing a lot of prototyping, especially in our lab in New York, and looking at where some of this AI technology is something that brings a totally new dimension to a project. So, I think, I think we have a lot more work to do, and I’m not sure how you feel about it, but I think we have a lot more sort of testing and trying out some of the different avenues to figure out where it’s best to use.

 

Brenda: What a debate it currently is in the college setting, because you’ve got everything from, you know, the necessity to teach AI, to teach new tools and especially in these creative industries and to enable students to really master a lot of these tools and be able to really continue to grow and hopefully take leadership with a lot of the new AI tools. And at the exact same time, we’re having to really limit and restrict and create policies towards the utilization of AI on campus.

 

Gretchen: Interestingly, I read an article yesterday that was talking about a building that was designed partially with AI, and all I could think, and it was a museum. All I could think to myself was, oh my God, that’s the exact opposite of what I want students to learn when we talk about the fact that form follows function, that when we’re looking at what we want people to do, feel, how we want them to circulate, what we want to unfold, AI cannot do that for us. It has to be something more intentional and not sort of some AI algorithm pulling together what it can pull from all these different places. It just, that to me is a misuse of a tool in my estimation.

 

Abby: So, Gretchen, it’s interesting your response to that, because I actually have the opposite response because I don’t feel that it’s AI doing it for someone. So, we’re using AI to design and when we say using AI to design, AI is being guided by a collaborator, by a creative. So, we’re using it to go along the journey with us to offer up ideas in answer to our questions. It iterates along with us, so it’s always guided design and guided production.

 

Gretchen: So important. It’s like asking the right questions, right, it’s just not letting it do your work for you.

 

Abby: Hundred percent, yeah.

 

Brenda: Well, part of this too, is bringing me back to when you were talking about the importance of community in the projects that you do and you know, and in particular, I know your personal interest in and investment in social justice. I’m really curious to know how is it that you bring areas of fostering community into your development process as a part of your educational work?

 

Gretchen: There’s been no time in my professional career that I have seen more of a focus on designing with people as opposed to for people, right? So the idea that, you know, years and years ago we would go into these initial meetings and we would show a design presentation and we would have this focus group of people and we would lay things out for them and say, well, you know, what do you think and how do you feel, and, you know, they would be reacting to something that we had designed primarily by virtue of conversations with the client team and research and so forth.

 

As we look at things, especially now, the idea is that we go into a client and or a team and say, let’s sit down with no preconceived notions until we actually ask the right questions. We get reactions from the community, from the audience, from different staff members, from the idea of, as Abby, you were saying earlier, asking the right questions so that we get actionable reactions back and then we go back and we design from there. And I’ll tell you, even our own staff has had to remind each other that we must stop designing before we have the right information from the client team.

 

And it all depends on what kind of client we have, because we may have a client who doesn’t have the time, the money to go out and do months or years’ worth of community engagement. So, there are projects where we can do more and there are projects where we’re limited in the amount of that community input that we can actually take the time to mine from the audience on that.

 

Abby: It doesn’t often go the exact way you want. You mentioned the time and the money, either one of them is not there or both aren’t there, and so, you’re full sometimes is to make assumptions and based on your experience or education, and what you’ve learned before, in a similar case, you bring that, and you can unpack that to help solve and help create a museum. That’s what I find is doing sometimes when there isn’t the time or the money, is you make a bunch of assumptions for want of a better word, based on what you’ve known.

 

Gretchen: And sometimes you’re right, you know, you’re lucky you’re right. And sometimes we have to make adjustments if and when we are not correct. And I will tell you, living in the nation’s capital and working on some projects that are highly charged from the political standpoint, we may or may not have the opportunity to voice a highly charged opinion in the work that we’re doing because we’re not permitted.

 

Abby: So, can we talk a little bit about that for a second? Because that’s clients and educating clients and this is sort of a particular pain point, and one of the reasons why we started Matters of Experience, so please share this, these episodes with potential clients, with clients you have, is to try and educate them about what we do. I think there’s a huge misunderstanding and as you said, like oftentimes keeping us quiet at the table when we’re the team that they should be asking directly to help with the solutions to the problems they have. So, you know, as well as educating students or people who’ve just started out or people like me who’ve been doing this a while, what do you think about educating the clients and how would you go about possibly doing that?

 

Gretchen: So, when we were talking earlier about sort of some of the professional development and education I’ve been doing from that standpoint, I’ve done a number of workshops and last year I actually changed one of the modules for a workshop we’ve done in several different cities and countries and added an entire module on community engagement and focus groups. And it was really, really rewarding to see how much the people in the room were paying attention to what we were showing.

 

Sometimes we come into a project and I’m sure you do too, and a client says, you know what, we’ve already done that. You know, we’ve gone out to the community, we’ve gone to the staff, we got that, so we’ll give you what we learned. And a lot of times what we’ll say is thank you, you know, so wonderful. Except part of getting actionable feedback is to ask exactly the right question for what it is that we’re trying to learn.

 

And so, I think the techniques and Brenda, you saw this in the workshop where what we do a lot of times is we start in an anonymous way so that people don’t have to reveal who they are and what their answer was. They don’t have to stand up in front of a group until they start to feel more comfortable. They don’t have to get in a group of people they don’t know until they get a little bit farther down the line. So, as we start in a more anonymous fashion and we go and get more sort of, fidelity of the information gets greater, and the trust starts to build, and the people start to feel more open, and they feel like you’re not just there to get something from them. You’re actually there to hear what they have to say.

 

Brenda: So, Gretchen, back to emerging talent and all of the work that you do to educate not just your clients, but also folks who are coming in new into the industry from various places. I’m really curious to know how have you or in what ways have you been reaping the benefits of all of this education work that you do?

 

Gretchen: Well, I’ll tell you, we have gotten some of the best talent that we could possibly have gotten in the firm. When I have the opportunity to sit with these students and or email back and forth or Zoom with them afterwards and stay connected, and even in a lot of cases, especially with students, Brenda, from your program, just being open enough to say, I’m not going to just tell them they need to come work for us. I’m going to answer their questions about anywhere they could work and hope that if there is a synergy with us that we end up having them come to work with us. So that’s like the lowest hanging fruit in terms of benefit.

 

But I would say the other part is what I am starting to see that I really am excited about is that we are starting to access younger and younger students, students from the high school programs and some of the undergrad students. And, you know, obviously the graduate level are closer to hiring. But when I actually see students send an email that says, we sat in that workshop you did, and I changed my major because I’m so excited about this profession. I mean, to me, that goes back to the return on impact as opposed to maybe we don’t get to hire them, but they actually go into this profession and we are growing the profession and getting people to understand that the profession exists, that it’s really exciting and they actually have the skill sets, but they didn’t know they had them.

 

So, I am really seeing some excitement and it’s a very long road. I think that we have to hope on that, but we have to stay with it, and we have to be mentors and we have to bring along the students that we feel we can bring into this industry.

 

Brenda: Well, growing the profession, that’s really, I think, the most important thing for all of us to be thinking about and that means growing from the inside, growing by bringing folks from the outside in all of these different ways. So, I, for one, very deeply appreciate all of the work that you’ve been doing with young people of many, many different ages and from many, many different backgrounds, Gretchen.

 

Abby: Yeah, thank you, Gretchen, for inspiring us all today on how we can give back and really support future designers, engineers, writers, programmers, managers, you name it, who may want to work in our industry. So, thank you so much for joining us.

 

Gretchen: It was, as always, an absolute delight with the two of you and like I said earlier, my, my happy place, so it’s good to be on a Friday talking about the happy place.

 

Abby: And thanks to everyone who tuned in today. If you like what you heard, subscribe for more episodes of Matters of Experience wherever you listen to podcasts. Make sure to leave a rating and a nice review and share with a friend. We’ll see you next time.

 

Brenda: Take care, everyone.

 

 

[Music]

 

Producer: Matters of Experience is produced by Lorem Ipsum Corp and recorded at Hangar Studios. Tune in next time for more fun discussions about experience design.

 

Show Notes

Gallagher Design

DTech Lab

Gretchen Coss is a visionary leader, educator, and designer with extensive experience in global brand management, experience design, and placemaking. Prior to G&A, Gretchen was Vice President/Director of Graphics for Gensler LA; and owned her own agency, Coss Creative, where she led design and development for large-scale, mixed-use projects for over 11 years. Gretchen joined G&A at its inception to lead strategic visioning and pursuits, contributing to the firm’s worldwide growth and esteemed reputation. She is a passionate educator and active industry leader, serving on the board of the Society for Experiential Graphic Design for six years, where she was a past president and helped to launch their education foundation; and as a past adjunct professor for the Master of Exhibition Design at the Corcoran College of Art + Design, where she won a faculty award for exemplifying innovative teaching techniques. Gretchen continues to lead museum planning and visioning workshops throughout the world for organizations such as IMCC, MAAM, CTA, SEGD, and AAM.

Transcript

 

[Music]

 

Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience, a podcast produced by Lorem Ipsum, an experience design company headquartered in New York City. Our podcast explores the creativity, innovation, and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. If you’re new to the show, welcome and to our regular listeners, thank you for tuning in and supporting our conversation. My name is Abigail Honor.

 

Brenda: And I’m Brenda Cowan.

 

Abby: So today, Brenda, we’re focusing on the future of our profession, a pretty big topic, but who better to talk about this ambitious topic than Gretchen Coss. Gretchen is the Senior Vice President of Strategic Partnerships at G&A, formerly known as Gallagher and Associates. She’s a designer with extensive experience in global brand management, experience design, and placemaking. A passionate educator and an active industry leader serving on the board of the Society for Experiential Graphic Design, and as their past president. And previously, Gretchen was the adjunct professor for the Master of Exhibition Design at the Corcoran College of Art and Design, where she won a faculty award for exemplifying innovative teaching techniques. Gretchen, a big welcome to the show.

 

Gretchen: Thank you. What a nice intro. Thank you very much.

 

Brenda: Gretchen, your work centers on cultivating and supporting new and emerging professionals. So as a part of your 30 plus years in museums and experience design work, you’ve always been a mentor and a leader to the next generation and most recently with your work at G&A, you’ve been developing a whole arm of the firm for education. So, can you tell us why? Why is it that educating the next generation has become a focus for you?

 

Gretchen: What we do is so hard to understand as it is, right. It is so incredibly energizing to sit in a room of smart young designers who are just exploring and figuring out who they are, what they love, why they’re passionate about this and see if you can spark that flame and learn from them. Every single time I walk out of one of these workshops or one of the classes, I feel like I learn something from them, and they really push me.

 

Abby: Well, I remember when I was at university, there just were no courses that could have trained me in our profession at all and not even any workshops I could go to. So, seeing the plethora that have really sprung up over the last decade and the change that’s happened has been incredible because this is the next generation. And so, tell us about some of the initiatives you started up and why they seem to be working.

 

Gretchen: I’m really lucky because I have the backing of our firm sort of following me down this path and realizing that really as part of our corporate responsibility, that building of the next generation, trying to diversify the field, looking at how we can expose some of these students earlier is something that they feel really strongly about.

 

So, I actually started some of what I’m doing from professional education and doing workshops that were about how we work, why we do things a certain way, what are our responsibilities as the experiential and interpretive designers as opposed to an architect or a specialty lighting designer, and how do we actually cross over into those sort of different lenses that we work from. And the more we educate each other and our clients, hopefully the easier it gets to do our job.

 

That then sort of crosses over with the in-class work that Brenda and Christina and I have done over the past decade or more, and some project based learning where we bring the students to our client, we introduce them to the clients, and then we let them do a project that not only has check points with Brenda, Christina, myself and our staff, but also with the client. So, it’s a real-world learning experience where they get feedback and they feel what it’s like to work in this industry because I think that’s really, really difficult to replicate unless they do it.

 

Lastly, you know, I started a series of workshops that really spawned from the idea that I have a feeling that we talk about multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary design as if we are actually teaching it. And I do not believe we are doing a good job of that holistically. So, I decided to do a workshop that brought together professors, students, colleagues, clients to just peel back the layers of that conversation and talk about it. And interestingly, the conversation went so well, we actually had to just kind of shoo people out of the room at the end of the day, because we were out of time and we realized that it’s such an explosive subject that everybody wants to talk about, that it bears more discussion.

 

Abby: Tell us some of the things, like you say, it’s explosive, tell us some of the things that are often brought up in the workshops. What are the hot topics? What are the bones of contention?

 

Gretchen: I think that the biggest problem that we see or challenge, let’s just call it, is that, the siloed approach to especially undergrad and graduate programs. You have your graphic design programs, you have your interior design, your architecture and so forth, your industrial designers and media. And they typically do not learn to do a project together. They aren’t in the same room together. They don’t realize that while they are on separate tracks, what they are doing creates a holistic experience by coming together as opposed to working separately. And so I think that one of the things that we talk so much about is that all these colleges and these departments have their own numbers, their own budgets, their own quotas, their own criteria, that makes it very, very difficult for these programs to break down those walls and to work together more cohesively.

 

Brenda: You know, I think that what you’re talking about is so important and so valid. And, you know, in my grad program, we work very hard to break down the silos. It is, I think, the requirement of an individual to know the languages of our industries and maybe not be an expert as a lighting designer, but you need to know the language and to also know that if you’re going to work in museums, you’re going to really do a great job if you understand how marketing environments work and how branded environments work, and vice versa. And this is I think this is our responsibility, and I really appreciate hearing how much you dedicate your time to bringing together bodies of people to really dig in to that and to understand that because frankly, I think it’s the only way that we’re going to really cultivate really useful, productive and powerful talent in our professions.

 

Gretchen: I mean, my pipe dream is that in addition to sort of exposing them, that, for instance, the kids who are taking UI and UX design and the ones who are doing content development and the ones who are doing architecture actually sit in the room together so that they learn to work in a way where their specialties come forward and they inform each other.

 

I mean, listen, it’s hard enough in the real world to do that and sort of leave the ego at the door and have everybody do what they do well and listen, learn to listen to each other. But I do think that we suffer from not having enough of these programs coalesce with each other.

 

Abby: Yeah, I want to add that Lorem Ipsum was fortunate enough to work with DTech over at FIT on a project for Ogilvy, and it literally brought in different disciplines, so completely different areas of study, from fashion to the marketing team to the experience design, the exhibition design folks, to the IT team.

 

So, they brought in groups of students to collaborate together on this project, which resulted in an exhibition. They started separately, you know, brainstorming on their own, and then immediately realized that they needed to come together and share their ideas and create this together and utilize their individual experiences. And, you know, there were there was a lot of overlapping of experiences as well so that they could all talk and share in telling this story.

 

They all learned a lot. I know from working closely with the exhibit design students and mentoring them that they needed to understand that their voice was important to the marketing team, to the design, and what the piece of clothing was going to look like for whatever the AV, whatever the AR, whatever the interactive is going to be, and that their voice needed to be in the conversation. Just understanding that was sort of like a watershed moment, you know, and vice versa.

 

Brenda: Well, we’re speaking in ideals and not everybody is on board with this idea of multifaceted learning experiences or might have a very different definition of what a very talented or multifaceted, you know, working professional is. And as a part of this ideal, I’ve got to say I really love that the three of us are having this conversation from the different perspectives that we are. And part of me keep thinking, well, it’s my job to educate and I’m fortunate to have the resources to be able to work as an educator. But I’m looking at Abby across the table from me and thinking, my gosh, you know, on top of everything else, Abby does work as an educator and really has to allocate a lot of her time and her energy and a lot of her, her mental capacity to thinking about how to educate a client, how to educate her own internal team. And Gretchen, how on earth did you get yourself into a position where you have a firm really supporting these initiatives and providing you the opportunity to really shine in this way?

 

Gretchen: Education is a subject that everyone wants to talk about. I don’t care who it is, they care about it and they want to talk about it, but you have to give them a reason to get involved and a way to get involved. So, I think that because the firm has seen that I am very serious about what it means to us to be a leader in showing by doing as opposed to talking about it.

 

You know, we’ve seen how this, especially this last year has gone, and I have to tell you, this last set of workshops where my goal was to invite students into the process of community engagement and the idea of talking about difficult subject matters and the fact that they have a voice and that when you do this kind of work we do, we are so lucky that we have the ability to have a voice, to create a place of dialog and incite action and caring and relevance to subjects, you know, when you see these kids walk out of the room, you were, you were there. I was so stunned by some of the reactions that these students had. And I’m still getting emails from the students saying how much they appreciated sitting in the room together. And so you realize you’re actually at least getting them to realize that we’re out here, we do this, and it’s something you could get excited about.

 

Abby: So, thinking about technology and how that all fits into this, how are you teaching approaches to new technology and sort of what are any of your thoughts on AI and, you know, emerging design talent and the tools they’re going to be using in the future?

 

Gretchen: I’ll tell you, I think that there is this real, I don’t know, there’s this confusion, I’m going to call it right now with where to go from what we had to be thrown into at COVID, and God knows Brenda knows that better than anyone, being thrown into the virtual world and then coming back out of it and having a choice. So, the idea of how do we use the advantages that the virtual world brings us in teaching, in working with our clients, in doing focus groups and reaching out? And then where do we use the value of the energy in the room that cannot be replaced by a virtual platform in any way, shape or form? I do not believe we have that solved yet. I don’t believe we have it solved in people coming back to the office or not.

 

Abby: Are you guys back to the office, Gretchen? Are G&A back in?

 

Gretchen: We are partially. We do not have any stipulations on number of days to come into the office, but we do have an office space now in both New York and in DC, and the DC space is a shared space and we’re testing right now to see how things go. So, you know, it’s, it’s baby steps back to the office at this point.

 

Abby: And what about AI?

 

Gretchen: That’s another one where I think that we are very much in the midst of figuring out where it is a tool that is being used to its highest and best advantage. And I don’t think that we have a stance yet, but we are doing a lot of prototyping, especially in our lab in New York, and looking at where some of this AI technology is something that brings a totally new dimension to a project. So, I think, I think we have a lot more work to do, and I’m not sure how you feel about it, but I think we have a lot more sort of testing and trying out some of the different avenues to figure out where it’s best to use.

 

Brenda: What a debate it currently is in the college setting, because you’ve got everything from, you know, the necessity to teach AI, to teach new tools and especially in these creative industries and to enable students to really master a lot of these tools and be able to really continue to grow and hopefully take leadership with a lot of the new AI tools. And at the exact same time, we’re having to really limit and restrict and create policies towards the utilization of AI on campus.

 

Gretchen: Interestingly, I read an article yesterday that was talking about a building that was designed partially with AI, and all I could think, and it was a museum. All I could think to myself was, oh my God, that’s the exact opposite of what I want students to learn when we talk about the fact that form follows function, that when we’re looking at what we want people to do, feel, how we want them to circulate, what we want to unfold, AI cannot do that for us. It has to be something more intentional and not sort of some AI algorithm pulling together what it can pull from all these different places. It just, that to me is a misuse of a tool in my estimation.

 

Abby: So, Gretchen, it’s interesting your response to that, because I actually have the opposite response because I don’t feel that it’s AI doing it for someone. So, we’re using AI to design and when we say using AI to design, AI is being guided by a collaborator, by a creative. So, we’re using it to go along the journey with us to offer up ideas in answer to our questions. It iterates along with us, so it’s always guided design and guided production.

 

Gretchen: So important. It’s like asking the right questions, right, it’s just not letting it do your work for you.

 

Abby: Hundred percent, yeah.

 

Brenda: Well, part of this too, is bringing me back to when you were talking about the importance of community in the projects that you do and you know, and in particular, I know your personal interest in and investment in social justice. I’m really curious to know how is it that you bring areas of fostering community into your development process as a part of your educational work?

 

Gretchen: There’s been no time in my professional career that I have seen more of a focus on designing with people as opposed to for people, right? So the idea that, you know, years and years ago we would go into these initial meetings and we would show a design presentation and we would have this focus group of people and we would lay things out for them and say, well, you know, what do you think and how do you feel, and, you know, they would be reacting to something that we had designed primarily by virtue of conversations with the client team and research and so forth.

 

As we look at things, especially now, the idea is that we go into a client and or a team and say, let’s sit down with no preconceived notions until we actually ask the right questions. We get reactions from the community, from the audience, from different staff members, from the idea of, as Abby, you were saying earlier, asking the right questions so that we get actionable reactions back and then we go back and we design from there. And I’ll tell you, even our own staff has had to remind each other that we must stop designing before we have the right information from the client team.

 

And it all depends on what kind of client we have, because we may have a client who doesn’t have the time, the money to go out and do months or years’ worth of community engagement. So, there are projects where we can do more and there are projects where we’re limited in the amount of that community input that we can actually take the time to mine from the audience on that.

 

Abby: It doesn’t often go the exact way you want. You mentioned the time and the money, either one of them is not there or both aren’t there, and so, you’re full sometimes is to make assumptions and based on your experience or education, and what you’ve learned before, in a similar case, you bring that, and you can unpack that to help solve and help create a museum. That’s what I find is doing sometimes when there isn’t the time or the money, is you make a bunch of assumptions for want of a better word, based on what you’ve known.

 

Gretchen: And sometimes you’re right, you know, you’re lucky you’re right. And sometimes we have to make adjustments if and when we are not correct. And I will tell you, living in the nation’s capital and working on some projects that are highly charged from the political standpoint, we may or may not have the opportunity to voice a highly charged opinion in the work that we’re doing because we’re not permitted.

 

Abby: So, can we talk a little bit about that for a second? Because that’s clients and educating clients and this is sort of a particular pain point, and one of the reasons why we started Matters of Experience, so please share this, these episodes with potential clients, with clients you have, is to try and educate them about what we do. I think there’s a huge misunderstanding and as you said, like oftentimes keeping us quiet at the table when we’re the team that they should be asking directly to help with the solutions to the problems they have. So, you know, as well as educating students or people who’ve just started out or people like me who’ve been doing this a while, what do you think about educating the clients and how would you go about possibly doing that?

 

Gretchen: So, when we were talking earlier about sort of some of the professional development and education I’ve been doing from that standpoint, I’ve done a number of workshops and last year I actually changed one of the modules for a workshop we’ve done in several different cities and countries and added an entire module on community engagement and focus groups. And it was really, really rewarding to see how much the people in the room were paying attention to what we were showing.

 

Sometimes we come into a project and I’m sure you do too, and a client says, you know what, we’ve already done that. You know, we’ve gone out to the community, we’ve gone to the staff, we got that, so we’ll give you what we learned. And a lot of times what we’ll say is thank you, you know, so wonderful. Except part of getting actionable feedback is to ask exactly the right question for what it is that we’re trying to learn.

 

And so, I think the techniques and Brenda, you saw this in the workshop where what we do a lot of times is we start in an anonymous way so that people don’t have to reveal who they are and what their answer was. They don’t have to stand up in front of a group until they start to feel more comfortable. They don’t have to get in a group of people they don’t know until they get a little bit farther down the line. So, as we start in a more anonymous fashion and we go and get more sort of, fidelity of the information gets greater, and the trust starts to build, and the people start to feel more open, and they feel like you’re not just there to get something from them. You’re actually there to hear what they have to say.

 

Brenda: So, Gretchen, back to emerging talent and all of the work that you do to educate not just your clients, but also folks who are coming in new into the industry from various places. I’m really curious to know how have you or in what ways have you been reaping the benefits of all of this education work that you do?

 

Gretchen: Well, I’ll tell you, we have gotten some of the best talent that we could possibly have gotten in the firm. When I have the opportunity to sit with these students and or email back and forth or Zoom with them afterwards and stay connected, and even in a lot of cases, especially with students, Brenda, from your program, just being open enough to say, I’m not going to just tell them they need to come work for us. I’m going to answer their questions about anywhere they could work and hope that if there is a synergy with us that we end up having them come to work with us. So that’s like the lowest hanging fruit in terms of benefit.

 

But I would say the other part is what I am starting to see that I really am excited about is that we are starting to access younger and younger students, students from the high school programs and some of the undergrad students. And, you know, obviously the graduate level are closer to hiring. But when I actually see students send an email that says, we sat in that workshop you did, and I changed my major because I’m so excited about this profession. I mean, to me, that goes back to the return on impact as opposed to maybe we don’t get to hire them, but they actually go into this profession and we are growing the profession and getting people to understand that the profession exists, that it’s really exciting and they actually have the skill sets, but they didn’t know they had them.

 

So, I am really seeing some excitement and it’s a very long road. I think that we have to hope on that, but we have to stay with it, and we have to be mentors and we have to bring along the students that we feel we can bring into this industry.

 

Brenda: Well, growing the profession, that’s really, I think, the most important thing for all of us to be thinking about and that means growing from the inside, growing by bringing folks from the outside in all of these different ways. So, I, for one, very deeply appreciate all of the work that you’ve been doing with young people of many, many different ages and from many, many different backgrounds, Gretchen.

 

Abby: Yeah, thank you, Gretchen, for inspiring us all today on how we can give back and really support future designers, engineers, writers, programmers, managers, you name it, who may want to work in our industry. So, thank you so much for joining us.

 

Gretchen: It was, as always, an absolute delight with the two of you and like I said earlier, my, my happy place, so it’s good to be on a Friday talking about the happy place.

 

Abby: And thanks to everyone who tuned in today. If you like what you heard, subscribe for more episodes of Matters of Experience wherever you listen to podcasts. Make sure to leave a rating and a nice review and share with a friend. We’ll see you next time.

 

Brenda: Take care, everyone.

 

 

[Music]

 

Producer: Matters of Experience is produced by Lorem Ipsum Corp and recorded at Hangar Studios. Tune in next time for more fun discussions about experience design.

 

Show Notes

Gallagher Design

DTech Lab

Breaking the Silos with Gretchen Coss

Breaking the Silos with Gretchen Coss

November 16, 2023
Crafting Emotions in  Experience Design

Crafting Emotions in Experience Design

November 1, 2023
Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts and Spotify
Dive into a rollercoaster of emotions with our latest podcast episode and join Abby and Brenda as they explore the fascinating interplay of emotions in the world of experience design. From understanding the emotional volatility of historical figures to managing creative teams and clients, this episode delves deep into the power of emotions in storytelling and design. Don't miss this insightful journey into the heart and soul of experience design.

Transcript

 

[Music]

 

Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience, a podcast produced by Lorem Ipsum, an experience design company headquartered right here in New York City. Our podcast explores the creativity, innovation and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. If you’re new, a hearty welcome to you and to our regular listeners, thanks for tuning in and supporting our conversation. My name is Abigail Honor.

Brenda: Hello, this is Brenda Cowan.

Abby: We would first like to share a note from today’s show sponsor, POW!

Sponsor: This is Paul Orselli, Chief Instigator at POW! (Paul Orselli Workshop), and we’re delighted to sponsor this episode of the podcast. Please check out our website at www.Orselli.net for more information about our work, as well as free resources and articles. Thanks.

Abby: So today, Brenda, I’m really excited, we’re going to focus on emotion. So, for example, designing for emotional experience in exhibitions and interpretive spaces and the next, maybe looking at emotion in the creative process.

Brenda: So, we have a very big agenda here today, and you came into the studio this morning filled with emotion about a very blustery sounding day that’s very busy and you’re operating very quickly, and you clearly are in a heightened state of intense emotion. But we will try and make that a positive emotion. We will see how things go.

Abby: Well, wait a minute. You mean all my years of acting, my acting career, you know, my mom is a drama teacher, I couldn’t hide how intense I was feeling this morning?

Brenda: I was also being very kind, so, which we’re going to talk about because a little bit later on in this particular program, we’re going to talk about how it is that we who work with creative teams and work with others, how it is that we can manage emotions and manage scenarios for people.

So, understanding emotions is a complex field of study and in preparation for looking at this, I was looking up some of my favorite resources, including the work of Pablo Tinio, who works at the Creativity and Aesthetics Lab at Montclair State University. He does work with the study of emotions and how it is that emotions are some of the very least understood aspects of human experiences, but some of the most talked about.

So, understanding thinking about emotions, it’s a lot to ask of ourselves as designers, even as coworkers, and definitely as visitors in storytelling environments. But it’s really important. And the better that we can think about, plan for, anticipate, learn from and listen to other people’s emotional experiences, the better we’re going to be able to do things like prompt curiosity, encourage deep engagement and participation, understand responses and behaviors, build empathy, and even communicate content.

Abby: Thinking back about one of the projects that we did for the Jewish Museum in Moscow. It was all about Stalinist period after World War Two and the anti-Semitic repressions. And so this was an exhibition within the museum at large, and the topic itself sort of immediately suggests an emotional response, right? It’s horrifying. It’s a series of tragic events. So, emotion in a way is on the surface. So the task really for us was not to lose it, not to try to hide behind the factual side of the story, but rather find a way of focusing that emotional response, which is tricky. And it can often become all consuming, especially into specific moments as you take viewers through these strong emotions step by step.

Brenda: So our friend and earlier podcast visitor Ellen Lupton, she provides a brilliant example of how to plan for emotional arc in storytelling environments. She talks about emotion mapping where you can map out high and low elements in an exhibition, such as experiences that build anticipation, then deeply engaging, dramatic moments. Maybe this is with experiencing stuff like dramatic scale or a rarity, or the exposure of a mystery, deep multisensory engagement.

Then there are things like moments of challenges in the exhibition needing to be overcome and by challenges that could be within the content, maybe some difficult content, or when it looks like there’s no resolution or we’re not sure what’s going to happen, there could be an obstruction in the story that is addressed and hopefully resolved, or maybe not, if intended.

But then there are emotional moments of reflection, of calm, of pause and rest, which in my experience can oftentimes be overlooked. So I really want to emphasize that when you’re doing emotion planning and emotion mapping, really thinking about, okay, if you’re bringing people through a really profound emotional arc, are you enabling folks to digest, to pause, to reflect. The exhibition story as well, should have moments of achievement or the journey’s end.

And all of these different elements, they impact how we design the flow of the space, the composition or incorporation of critical objects, engaging designed elements, and the changes of pace in the visitor. Right?

Abby: Completely, completely agree. I remember we did a project called the Zoya Museum, and it was essentially a story of a late teen who was excited to leave high school and ready to go to university. And then World War Two broke out. They all get enlisted, and then after three days of learning, you know how to be a soldier, they’re out there fighting against the Nazis.

She’s eventually caught on a mission. One of the first few days when 98% of these kids were caught and killed within the first few days because they had no experience. So we were charged with telling this woman’s story. And the story starts with that anticipation. It actually starts with looking at what her life was like, what she was learning at school, the same things everybody was learning at school.

And so you look and feel how she felt. And then the story and the emotion changes to the challenges and all the things that she was taught over these three days. The challenge, the mission she was sent on, what she underwent during this mission in the snow, trudging how she tried to complete her mission and ultimately how she was caught and died.

And then within there, there are dramatic moments where we will reveal what was happening with the tank battle around her. And so there’s definitely that anticipation, the challenges she faced, the dramatic moments, the actual war, and then that reflection. This is a very hard, tough story. Her story is very hard to swallow. It’s hard to see. It was a museum made for teenagers.

And so we had built in, when we designed the space, a central atrium, which was for repose and reflection, a place where you could sit on your own and a place we could come together as a group. And it was really important when we designed this space that at every moment throughout the story, the visitor has access to it because you never know what it is that’s going to push somebody over the edge who needs to then go and reflect or what’s going to particularly resonate with that visitor and they’ll need that space.

Or if you’re bringing through groups of schoolchildren, enabling the docent or the teacher to be able to take those kids all out together at the exact moments they need that, to be able to have that quiet. And we purposefully designed it using very organic, earthy materials so that it was a place that felt cozy and warm and comforting, yet simple.

There was no more imagery in there at all. Nothing. So, people could just take the time they needed. And then at the end, you were talking about this idea of, well, I’ll turn into that idea of the achievement. And in this case it was about sharing. We’re always thinking that it’s this conversation. It’s not one way from museum to the visitor.

It has to be the visitor giving back and sharing and being involved with the story. And so at the end, there’s an opportunity for people, for these teenagers to share their family’s war story and become part of this narrative. And often the narrative turns then to hope and what they have now because of their ancestors that they might not have had. So, it does end on a very happy, peaceful note. But there are moments of definitely deep, deep sadness and shock. There’s a lot of shocking imagery in there as well.
 

Brenda: You know, understanding visitor emotional experiences. It’s so critical. And learning how to evaluate or measure impacts of existing spaces can aid us in more deeply understanding how to design for emotion. And this is where, back to Pablo Tinio’s work, he talks about creating heat maps where visitors can reflect on an experience and identify hotter and cooler areas of intensity throughout their experiences.

So if you are interviewing or surveying visitors about their exhibition experience in, say, like a summative style evaluation, they can design their responses, not even necessarily in words or language, which sometimes can be difficult, but they can identify, like I said, these hotter areas, these cooler areas, and really talk about the nature of the emotional experiences.

It enables visitors to share from an emotional perspective so that we really understand where is it that we even hit the mark in terms of our intentions when we were going through the initial process.

Abby: Thinking about the content and the story you’re trying to tell is one path. Parallel to that needs to be the emotions you’re trying to convey or elicit. So it starts with that big picture. Immediately, when we know the top line story of an exhibition, we can think of 2 to 3 overarching emotional responses or outcomes. That’s how we think about it.

And then next comes the breakdown of the story into the storylines or the chapters. And then along with that content, each story block has an emotional response that we need to orchestrate. Then come the specific design decisions, and again, we always ask the question, how does this installation or program fit into our emotional story? And you’re, you’re right. I’m going to use a very humble example that some people will cringe at.

But you think of when you go to Disney, if you’ve ever been to Disney and there’s moments of huge, huge joy and then you have to walk to the next moments of huge, huge joy. And so…

Brenda: Is the walking the moment of…

Abby: The moment…

Brenda: …drudgery and despair.

Abby: Yes, you got it! Between, between the rides or the or the entertainment, between whatever you’re getting entertained with, there’s that moment where you share what you just experienced. You laugh, you giggle, and you talk, and then you look at the next thing and you walk over. And that’s the moment of repose. We naturally ebb and flow with our emotions, and they go through cycles.
 

Brenda: You know, thinking about the highs and the lows, what do you think, shall we talk about the creative team process and emotions in the workplace, Abby?

Abby: I think that’s a great idea. Let’s jump straight into that.

Brenda: So, Dr. Zorana Pringle, this is another amazing individual who’s a great resource when talking about emotions. Zorana comes from the Yale Center for Emotional Experience, where she studies emotion, creativity, and how it is that emotional intelligence can be brought in to workplace practices. So, Zorana specifies emotions as data. Emotions are not things that are bad or good.

Emotions are information that we can use towards productive outcomes. So there’s psychological. They’re also physiological and not to be confused with moods. So moods are longer lasting and moods can be much less intense even than the short lived emotional reaction or emotional response.

Zorana talks about the need for thinking about emotional experiences in our team processes, such as, we’ll use the example of the classic ideation session where we take moments to utilize high energy bursts of ideas, output of thoughts and design solutions, and then how we can intentionally shift people into a more critical emotional space, more subdued, where we can step back, take a look at our ideas from a critical lens. So, she says that this particular point of the process of an ideation session, thinking somewhat pessimistically, can even be helpful because we are better at critical thinking when we’re a little bit pessimistic.

So, in other words, we don’t want to be happy constantly. You can’t ride that high constantly and really be maximally productive. You want to shift the thinking and understanding people’s emotions is important to facilitating these shifts. Do you want to talk about how you experience this and how maybe you facilitate these different kinds of shifts with your team?

Abby: What I do is I bring everybody together, set up what the RFP is or the task or the challenge and let them go and think, because you need time to be creative and they go away and they think, and then we bring people together. So there’s already been a journey made by each individual down the path, so there’s been some thought.

And then as they start sharing their ideas with our team, then you want all the voices at the table. Then people can add and build. But we do it in a way that is, everybody at the table understands why we’re doing it, because it’s necessary to be successful and to get the results you’re looking for. The thing we’re not talking about is that there has to be a final decision maker.

There has to be a creative director or somebody at the end of the day who goes no, because and gives the real reason, not just because I don’t like it, but because why they don’t think it’s going to be the most effective solution. And this one, because this is going to be the most effective solution because you need them to understand so that the better informed for next time when they’re coming up with solutions to problems, what the problems really are.

And you need them to understand because everybody’s got to be on board. It’s not about ego, it’s not about what I want. It’s what we all think is going to be best for the visitor and best for telling the story. And I think as long as everybody can get on board with that and understands that that’s where everything’s coming from, then it’s fantastic. Nobody minds.

Brenda: I think that you’re describing so many different emotional states that people must go through throughout this process. It’s reminding me of when I was first starting in exhibition development and ideas would be generated and there would be an idea on the table, and if you were lucky, it came from your own brain, that just was just gorgeous, that solved the challenge, that, you know, created great opportunities and you would just feel this elation, and my colleagues said, well, that’s developer’s high, which is such a wonderful thing.

And it’s wonderful when you’ve got a room full of people who are brainstorming and you’ve got this high energy and this synergy that’s created, but like you’re describing, you necessarily then have to go through those other shifts, and a really talented facilitator can work with leading the creative team through those different emotional states, very much so like you’re describing

They’re shifts in thinking and these can really maximize productivity and engagement. That’s what a great facilitator knows what to do. You’re managing shifts and emotions. Now, you’re not manipulating, okay, but you’re managing. And I think in an example about my classes and how I teach and where we might begin in the classroom by exploring, let’s say, some exhibition content where we need to be really thoughtful, really careful.

And I’ll have us working really slow. I’ll focus on an empathetic environment, very gentle, sharing, especially if we are working on an exhibition where the content is very, maybe it’s controversial, maybe it’s very sensitive content, whatever it really might be. But then I’ll need to shift my students into an ideation work session in response to that content, we’re going to really begin going through a brainstorming process, let’s say, where we’re going to be working on developing out an exhibition space.

Now I need to elevate the pace. I need to get folks into quick bursts of ideas, which can lead to a lot of positive chatter, and suddenly the room has a lift in tone. And then we need to take a step back and we need to think critically about what we just produced and refine the work. So that’s yet a different headspace altogether.

And it’s where I lead the students to make some really tough decisions. And this is very much so what you’re describing in the workplace and certainly in your own company, the tone of the room becomes quite serious and it’s supportive. It’s respectful but critical of the ideas. And I have to be very aware, as a professor and you as, you know, a team leader, we need to be very aware of the emotions that folks are experiencing so that we can cover a lot of content, so that we can learn, so that we can grow.

Overall, the classes though, they need to be positive. Now, that doesn’t mean that everybody’s happy and bouncing and giggling and everything else. It means that positive productivity is happening and that’s really critical. You know, I got to say, Abby, sometimes by the end of a class day, I am like totally exhausted. We’re all exhausted because we literally have laughed, we have cried. We have just gone through it all.

Abby: Kudos to you, as well Brenda, because that’s incredible. I’ve seen you doing it and you give of your all, you are your work, and so, which is why I think you’re so successful and you really inspire all of these students. No, it’s true. She’s got her hand on her heart, everyone. It is 100% true.

Brenda: I’m holding my little heart, everybody.

Abby: And anybody who’s ever seen Brenda at work and seen the incredible work she produces out of the students at FIT knows I’m right. I think one of the other interesting things is that our projects can last months and then years. And when you’re thinking about the emotion of some of the harder stories that we’re trying to tell, it’s hard.

You know, we can’t pretend emotions don’t exist or that they’re always positive. And we know all too well like how bleak everything can feel when we’re all so stressed and tired in our personal life. I really try and my team really tries to pay close attention to all our team. We really find ways to comfort each other, motivate each other, calm each other down, or sort of like this human empathy and understanding which has to go on.

It’s not just having to go on when you’re actually brainstorming or working together. I think it has to go on throughout the relationship in the, I’ll do air quotes, office, whether it be in-person or over Zoom. So, for all of those leading a team or interacting with clients as well, we haven’t even started to talk about the emotions that our clients can induce or need to have induced within them, it’s often important to channel a very stable, calm, emotional setting for everything.

Brenda: When we’re talking about the creative team clients, the manager, you know, folks might think, well, don’t we need to be objective and not emotional in their work? And you know what? We’re human, just like you’re describing. People are walking, talking, emotional feeling beings and it’s really not possible to leave emotions at the doorstep. And it’s all about what we do with these emotions, that’s really important.

So, one thing that we can do at the workplace, even with our clients, with our teams that I can do with my students, we can begin a day with an acknowledgment of how people are feeling, asking folks, how are you feeling today, and validating them. So, this is something that Zorana talks about and how this can actually lead to what she says are magical results.

It provides opportunities for people to help and support each other. Now, there are no guarantees. And, you know, when I think about this, I think about the tremendous amount of trust and vulnerability, you know, involved in having an environment where you can openly do a check-in, do an emotional check-in or a feeling check-in with others.

But nevertheless, it can happen well, if you cultivate this kind of culture within the workplace and including with clients as well. And if nothing else, this is a better place to operate than being in a very repressed or a very oblivious kind of workplace.

Abby: I think it starts long before the meeting. It starts understanding that you’re hiring a human being and a person, and our job is to take care of them as best they can. So that’s supporting their needs, if they need to leave, to go and take care of family members or for whatever reason, it’s trusting that they’re going to get the work that you need them to do done.

So it starts there with that trust, and so being empathetic and supportive as an employer to their needs beyond the work is critical.

Brenda: Many years ago I was a project manager on an exhibition project and I, you know, it was all teamwork and the clients could get very stressed out and look, we ask a lot of our clients, right? We ask for a lot of suspension of disbelief that this is going to work, that these solutions are going to be really on target and we will, to the best of our ability, stay on budget.

And, you know, the schedule, all of it. We ask a lot of clients. We really do. And I was working on this project team and we were having a lot of meetings in the midpoint of a project. So there’s a lot going on. And there were, increasingly, conflicts and folks getting very heightened emotionally at the table, and there was just no mystery whatsoever to the client feeling very irritated, you know, irate, very irritated.

And folks were starting to get…

Abby: Yeah, they like to make that clear, right? Totally no mystery.

Brenda: So but it was about the content and this was in a way, an opportunity because it just so happens that the project that we were working on was about two historical figures. We were interpreting the story of two historical figures who had a sort of love hate relationship.

Abby: Very interesting. This sounds like a fantastic project.

Brenda: It was amazing. The George Washington Carver Educational Center out in Diamond, Missouri. And at any rate, so we were doing a lot of work about the creative conflicts and how it is ultimately that Carver did brilliant work, even though he was at odds oftentimes with his colleague Booker T. Washington. Everybody agreed on this content. Everybody loved Carver, everybody loved this story, had very deep held beliefs in the importance and the positivity of the story.

And I found a moment as the manager to take a pause with everybody and talk about the tensions between Washington and Carver and say we are experiencing the same thing that our two historical figures experienced. And they did great things. And I said, we too are going to do great things and let’s put ourself in a framework of thinking about how it is that when you achieve something really beautiful and really graceful and really important, it can come out of tremendous tension.

And it was just one of those moments that, you know, Zorana referred to as magical because it worked.

Abby: People 

are only passionate and emotional because they care and goodness me, never lose that. But you’re right how you channel it and it can be overwhelming for all of us at one point in the process. So just understanding that that moment is going to come and how you deal with it and have compassion and understanding for others in that moment as well. The way you’d like to be treated, treat them, because I think we all too easily forget.

Brenda: Absolutely. So, Abby, how are you feeling?

Abby: I’m feeling fantastic. I’m feeling like I really hope we said something today that has helped and sort of even beyond exhibition design and in their daily life understands it’s okay to have emotions. It’s okay to feel. It’s what motivates us, helps us and makes us vulnerable and all that wonderful thing. And most importantly, it’s how we grow and experience the world around us.

So don’t cut yourself off for emotions. Have them, cry, laugh, be scared, push yourself through. We didn’t even talk about fear. We didn’t even talk about the emotions. But really, yes, feel. I would say feel. As soon as you start to go numb, then, you know, that’s a really bad thing. So, keep feeling, everyone out there.

Brenda: Well, listeners, I hope you’re feeling pretty good.

Abby: Yeah. Thank you, everybody who tuned in today. If you like what you heard, please subscribe for more episodes of Matters of Experience. Make sure to leave a rating and a review and share with a friend. We’ll see you next time.
 

Brenda: Buh-bye everybody.

[Music]

 

Producer: Matters of Experience is produced by Lorem Ipsum Corp and recorded at Hangar Studios. Tune in next time for more fun discussions about experience design.

 

Show Notes

The Secrets of Emotion — Pablo P. L. Tinio

Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center – Lorem Ipsum Corp

Designer and Curator Ellen Lupton on How Storytelling Shapes Design

Lorem Ipsum’s experience design shows the “power of dramatic narratives”

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle, Ph.D.

Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence (YCEI)

Transcript

 

[Music]

 

Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience, a podcast produced by Lorem Ipsum, an experience design company headquartered right here in New York City. Our podcast explores the creativity, innovation and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. If you’re new, a hearty welcome to you and to our regular listeners, thanks for tuning in and supporting our conversation. My name is Abigail Honor.

Brenda: Hello, this is Brenda Cowan.

Abby: We would first like to share a note from today’s show sponsor, POW!

Sponsor: This is Paul Orselli, Chief Instigator at POW! (Paul Orselli Workshop), and we’re delighted to sponsor this episode of the podcast. Please check out our website at www.Orselli.net for more information about our work, as well as free resources and articles. Thanks.

Abby: So today, Brenda, I’m really excited, we’re going to focus on emotion. So, for example, designing for emotional experience in exhibitions and interpretive spaces and the next, maybe looking at emotion in the creative process.

Brenda: So, we have a very big agenda here today, and you came into the studio this morning filled with emotion about a very blustery sounding day that’s very busy and you’re operating very quickly, and you clearly are in a heightened state of intense emotion. But we will try and make that a positive emotion. We will see how things go.

Abby: Well, wait a minute. You mean all my years of acting, my acting career, you know, my mom is a drama teacher, I couldn’t hide how intense I was feeling this morning?

Brenda: I was also being very kind, so, which we’re going to talk about because a little bit later on in this particular program, we’re going to talk about how it is that we who work with creative teams and work with others, how it is that we can manage emotions and manage scenarios for people.

So, understanding emotions is a complex field of study and in preparation for looking at this, I was looking up some of my favorite resources, including the work of Pablo Tinio, who works at the Creativity and Aesthetics Lab at Montclair State University. He does work with the study of emotions and how it is that emotions are some of the very least understood aspects of human experiences, but some of the most talked about.

So, understanding thinking about emotions, it’s a lot to ask of ourselves as designers, even as coworkers, and definitely as visitors in storytelling environments. But it’s really important. And the better that we can think about, plan for, anticipate, learn from and listen to other people’s emotional experiences, the better we’re going to be able to do things like prompt curiosity, encourage deep engagement and participation, understand responses and behaviors, build empathy, and even communicate content.

Abby: Thinking back about one of the projects that we did for the Jewish Museum in Moscow. It was all about Stalinist period after World War Two and the anti-Semitic repressions. And so this was an exhibition within the museum at large, and the topic itself sort of immediately suggests an emotional response, right? It’s horrifying. It’s a series of tragic events. So, emotion in a way is on the surface. So the task really for us was not to lose it, not to try to hide behind the factual side of the story, but rather find a way of focusing that emotional response, which is tricky. And it can often become all consuming, especially into specific moments as you take viewers through these strong emotions step by step.

Brenda: So our friend and earlier podcast visitor Ellen Lupton, she provides a brilliant example of how to plan for emotional arc in storytelling environments. She talks about emotion mapping where you can map out high and low elements in an exhibition, such as experiences that build anticipation, then deeply engaging, dramatic moments. Maybe this is with experiencing stuff like dramatic scale or a rarity, or the exposure of a mystery, deep multisensory engagement.

Then there are things like moments of challenges in the exhibition needing to be overcome and by challenges that could be within the content, maybe some difficult content, or when it looks like there’s no resolution or we’re not sure what’s going to happen, there could be an obstruction in the story that is addressed and hopefully resolved, or maybe not, if intended.

But then there are emotional moments of reflection, of calm, of pause and rest, which in my experience can oftentimes be overlooked. So I really want to emphasize that when you’re doing emotion planning and emotion mapping, really thinking about, okay, if you’re bringing people through a really profound emotional arc, are you enabling folks to digest, to pause, to reflect. The exhibition story as well, should have moments of achievement or the journey’s end.

And all of these different elements, they impact how we design the flow of the space, the composition or incorporation of critical objects, engaging designed elements, and the changes of pace in the visitor. Right?

Abby: Completely, completely agree. I remember we did a project called the Zoya Museum, and it was essentially a story of a late teen who was excited to leave high school and ready to go to university. And then World War Two broke out. They all get enlisted, and then after three days of learning, you know how to be a soldier, they’re out there fighting against the Nazis.

She’s eventually caught on a mission. One of the first few days when 98% of these kids were caught and killed within the first few days because they had no experience. So we were charged with telling this woman’s story. And the story starts with that anticipation. It actually starts with looking at what her life was like, what she was learning at school, the same things everybody was learning at school.

And so you look and feel how she felt. And then the story and the emotion changes to the challenges and all the things that she was taught over these three days. The challenge, the mission she was sent on, what she underwent during this mission in the snow, trudging how she tried to complete her mission and ultimately how she was caught and died.

And then within there, there are dramatic moments where we will reveal what was happening with the tank battle around her. And so there’s definitely that anticipation, the challenges she faced, the dramatic moments, the actual war, and then that reflection. This is a very hard, tough story. Her story is very hard to swallow. It’s hard to see. It was a museum made for teenagers.

And so we had built in, when we designed the space, a central atrium, which was for repose and reflection, a place where you could sit on your own and a place we could come together as a group. And it was really important when we designed this space that at every moment throughout the story, the visitor has access to it because you never know what it is that’s going to push somebody over the edge who needs to then go and reflect or what’s going to particularly resonate with that visitor and they’ll need that space.

Or if you’re bringing through groups of schoolchildren, enabling the docent or the teacher to be able to take those kids all out together at the exact moments they need that, to be able to have that quiet. And we purposefully designed it using very organic, earthy materials so that it was a place that felt cozy and warm and comforting, yet simple.

There was no more imagery in there at all. Nothing. So, people could just take the time they needed. And then at the end, you were talking about this idea of, well, I’ll turn into that idea of the achievement. And in this case it was about sharing. We’re always thinking that it’s this conversation. It’s not one way from museum to the visitor.

It has to be the visitor giving back and sharing and being involved with the story. And so at the end, there’s an opportunity for people, for these teenagers to share their family’s war story and become part of this narrative. And often the narrative turns then to hope and what they have now because of their ancestors that they might not have had. So, it does end on a very happy, peaceful note. But there are moments of definitely deep, deep sadness and shock. There’s a lot of shocking imagery in there as well.
 

Brenda: You know, understanding visitor emotional experiences. It’s so critical. And learning how to evaluate or measure impacts of existing spaces can aid us in more deeply understanding how to design for emotion. And this is where, back to Pablo Tinio’s work, he talks about creating heat maps where visitors can reflect on an experience and identify hotter and cooler areas of intensity throughout their experiences.

So if you are interviewing or surveying visitors about their exhibition experience in, say, like a summative style evaluation, they can design their responses, not even necessarily in words or language, which sometimes can be difficult, but they can identify, like I said, these hotter areas, these cooler areas, and really talk about the nature of the emotional experiences.

It enables visitors to share from an emotional perspective so that we really understand where is it that we even hit the mark in terms of our intentions when we were going through the initial process.

Abby: Thinking about the content and the story you’re trying to tell is one path. Parallel to that needs to be the emotions you’re trying to convey or elicit. So it starts with that big picture. Immediately, when we know the top line story of an exhibition, we can think of 2 to 3 overarching emotional responses or outcomes. That’s how we think about it.

And then next comes the breakdown of the story into the storylines or the chapters. And then along with that content, each story block has an emotional response that we need to orchestrate. Then come the specific design decisions, and again, we always ask the question, how does this installation or program fit into our emotional story? And you’re, you’re right. I’m going to use a very humble example that some people will cringe at.

But you think of when you go to Disney, if you’ve ever been to Disney and there’s moments of huge, huge joy and then you have to walk to the next moments of huge, huge joy. And so…

Brenda: Is the walking the moment of…

Abby: The moment…

Brenda: …drudgery and despair.

Abby: Yes, you got it! Between, between the rides or the or the entertainment, between whatever you’re getting entertained with, there’s that moment where you share what you just experienced. You laugh, you giggle, and you talk, and then you look at the next thing and you walk over. And that’s the moment of repose. We naturally ebb and flow with our emotions, and they go through cycles.
 

Brenda: You know, thinking about the highs and the lows, what do you think, shall we talk about the creative team process and emotions in the workplace, Abby?

Abby: I think that’s a great idea. Let’s jump straight into that.

Brenda: So, Dr. Zorana Pringle, this is another amazing individual who’s a great resource when talking about emotions. Zorana comes from the Yale Center for Emotional Experience, where she studies emotion, creativity, and how it is that emotional intelligence can be brought in to workplace practices. So, Zorana specifies emotions as data. Emotions are not things that are bad or good.

Emotions are information that we can use towards productive outcomes. So there’s psychological. They’re also physiological and not to be confused with moods. So moods are longer lasting and moods can be much less intense even than the short lived emotional reaction or emotional response.

Zorana talks about the need for thinking about emotional experiences in our team processes, such as, we’ll use the example of the classic ideation session where we take moments to utilize high energy bursts of ideas, output of thoughts and design solutions, and then how we can intentionally shift people into a more critical emotional space, more subdued, where we can step back, take a look at our ideas from a critical lens. So, she says that this particular point of the process of an ideation session, thinking somewhat pessimistically, can even be helpful because we are better at critical thinking when we’re a little bit pessimistic.

So, in other words, we don’t want to be happy constantly. You can’t ride that high constantly and really be maximally productive. You want to shift the thinking and understanding people’s emotions is important to facilitating these shifts. Do you want to talk about how you experience this and how maybe you facilitate these different kinds of shifts with your team?

Abby: What I do is I bring everybody together, set up what the RFP is or the task or the challenge and let them go and think, because you need time to be creative and they go away and they think, and then we bring people together. So there’s already been a journey made by each individual down the path, so there’s been some thought.

And then as they start sharing their ideas with our team, then you want all the voices at the table. Then people can add and build. But we do it in a way that is, everybody at the table understands why we’re doing it, because it’s necessary to be successful and to get the results you’re looking for. The thing we’re not talking about is that there has to be a final decision maker.

There has to be a creative director or somebody at the end of the day who goes no, because and gives the real reason, not just because I don’t like it, but because why they don’t think it’s going to be the most effective solution. And this one, because this is going to be the most effective solution because you need them to understand so that the better informed for next time when they’re coming up with solutions to problems, what the problems really are.

And you need them to understand because everybody’s got to be on board. It’s not about ego, it’s not about what I want. It’s what we all think is going to be best for the visitor and best for telling the story. And I think as long as everybody can get on board with that and understands that that’s where everything’s coming from, then it’s fantastic. Nobody minds.

Brenda: I think that you’re describing so many different emotional states that people must go through throughout this process. It’s reminding me of when I was first starting in exhibition development and ideas would be generated and there would be an idea on the table, and if you were lucky, it came from your own brain, that just was just gorgeous, that solved the challenge, that, you know, created great opportunities and you would just feel this elation, and my colleagues said, well, that’s developer’s high, which is such a wonderful thing.

And it’s wonderful when you’ve got a room full of people who are brainstorming and you’ve got this high energy and this synergy that’s created, but like you’re describing, you necessarily then have to go through those other shifts, and a really talented facilitator can work with leading the creative team through those different emotional states, very much so like you’re describing

They’re shifts in thinking and these can really maximize productivity and engagement. That’s what a great facilitator knows what to do. You’re managing shifts and emotions. Now, you’re not manipulating, okay, but you’re managing. And I think in an example about my classes and how I teach and where we might begin in the classroom by exploring, let’s say, some exhibition content where we need to be really thoughtful, really careful.

And I’ll have us working really slow. I’ll focus on an empathetic environment, very gentle, sharing, especially if we are working on an exhibition where the content is very, maybe it’s controversial, maybe it’s very sensitive content, whatever it really might be. But then I’ll need to shift my students into an ideation work session in response to that content, we’re going to really begin going through a brainstorming process, let’s say, where we’re going to be working on developing out an exhibition space.

Now I need to elevate the pace. I need to get folks into quick bursts of ideas, which can lead to a lot of positive chatter, and suddenly the room has a lift in tone. And then we need to take a step back and we need to think critically about what we just produced and refine the work. So that’s yet a different headspace altogether.

And it’s where I lead the students to make some really tough decisions. And this is very much so what you’re describing in the workplace and certainly in your own company, the tone of the room becomes quite serious and it’s supportive. It’s respectful but critical of the ideas. And I have to be very aware, as a professor and you as, you know, a team leader, we need to be very aware of the emotions that folks are experiencing so that we can cover a lot of content, so that we can learn, so that we can grow.

Overall, the classes though, they need to be positive. Now, that doesn’t mean that everybody’s happy and bouncing and giggling and everything else. It means that positive productivity is happening and that’s really critical. You know, I got to say, Abby, sometimes by the end of a class day, I am like totally exhausted. We’re all exhausted because we literally have laughed, we have cried. We have just gone through it all.

Abby: Kudos to you, as well Brenda, because that’s incredible. I’ve seen you doing it and you give of your all, you are your work, and so, which is why I think you’re so successful and you really inspire all of these students. No, it’s true. She’s got her hand on her heart, everyone. It is 100% true.

Brenda: I’m holding my little heart, everybody.

Abby: And anybody who’s ever seen Brenda at work and seen the incredible work she produces out of the students at FIT knows I’m right. I think one of the other interesting things is that our projects can last months and then years. And when you’re thinking about the emotion of some of the harder stories that we’re trying to tell, it’s hard.

You know, we can’t pretend emotions don’t exist or that they’re always positive. And we know all too well like how bleak everything can feel when we’re all so stressed and tired in our personal life. I really try and my team really tries to pay close attention to all our team. We really find ways to comfort each other, motivate each other, calm each other down, or sort of like this human empathy and understanding which has to go on.

It’s not just having to go on when you’re actually brainstorming or working together. I think it has to go on throughout the relationship in the, I’ll do air quotes, office, whether it be in-person or over Zoom. So, for all of those leading a team or interacting with clients as well, we haven’t even started to talk about the emotions that our clients can induce or need to have induced within them, it’s often important to channel a very stable, calm, emotional setting for everything.

Brenda: When we’re talking about the creative team clients, the manager, you know, folks might think, well, don’t we need to be objective and not emotional in their work? And you know what? We’re human, just like you’re describing. People are walking, talking, emotional feeling beings and it’s really not possible to leave emotions at the doorstep. And it’s all about what we do with these emotions, that’s really important.

So, one thing that we can do at the workplace, even with our clients, with our teams that I can do with my students, we can begin a day with an acknowledgment of how people are feeling, asking folks, how are you feeling today, and validating them. So, this is something that Zorana talks about and how this can actually lead to what she says are magical results.

It provides opportunities for people to help and support each other. Now, there are no guarantees. And, you know, when I think about this, I think about the tremendous amount of trust and vulnerability, you know, involved in having an environment where you can openly do a check-in, do an emotional check-in or a feeling check-in with others.

But nevertheless, it can happen well, if you cultivate this kind of culture within the workplace and including with clients as well. And if nothing else, this is a better place to operate than being in a very repressed or a very oblivious kind of workplace.

Abby: I think it starts long before the meeting. It starts understanding that you’re hiring a human being and a person, and our job is to take care of them as best they can. So that’s supporting their needs, if they need to leave, to go and take care of family members or for whatever reason, it’s trusting that they’re going to get the work that you need them to do done.

So it starts there with that trust, and so being empathetic and supportive as an employer to their needs beyond the work is critical.

Brenda: Many years ago I was a project manager on an exhibition project and I, you know, it was all teamwork and the clients could get very stressed out and look, we ask a lot of our clients, right? We ask for a lot of suspension of disbelief that this is going to work, that these solutions are going to be really on target and we will, to the best of our ability, stay on budget.

And, you know, the schedule, all of it. We ask a lot of clients. We really do. And I was working on this project team and we were having a lot of meetings in the midpoint of a project. So there’s a lot going on. And there were, increasingly, conflicts and folks getting very heightened emotionally at the table, and there was just no mystery whatsoever to the client feeling very irritated, you know, irate, very irritated.

And folks were starting to get…

Abby: Yeah, they like to make that clear, right? Totally no mystery.

Brenda: So but it was about the content and this was in a way, an opportunity because it just so happens that the project that we were working on was about two historical figures. We were interpreting the story of two historical figures who had a sort of love hate relationship.

Abby: Very interesting. This sounds like a fantastic project.

Brenda: It was amazing. The George Washington Carver Educational Center out in Diamond, Missouri. And at any rate, so we were doing a lot of work about the creative conflicts and how it is ultimately that Carver did brilliant work, even though he was at odds oftentimes with his colleague Booker T. Washington. Everybody agreed on this content. Everybody loved Carver, everybody loved this story, had very deep held beliefs in the importance and the positivity of the story.

And I found a moment as the manager to take a pause with everybody and talk about the tensions between Washington and Carver and say we are experiencing the same thing that our two historical figures experienced. And they did great things. And I said, we too are going to do great things and let’s put ourself in a framework of thinking about how it is that when you achieve something really beautiful and really graceful and really important, it can come out of tremendous tension.

And it was just one of those moments that, you know, Zorana referred to as magical because it worked.

Abby: People 

are only passionate and emotional because they care and goodness me, never lose that. But you’re right how you channel it and it can be overwhelming for all of us at one point in the process. So just understanding that that moment is going to come and how you deal with it and have compassion and understanding for others in that moment as well. The way you’d like to be treated, treat them, because I think we all too easily forget.

Brenda: Absolutely. So, Abby, how are you feeling?

Abby: I’m feeling fantastic. I’m feeling like I really hope we said something today that has helped and sort of even beyond exhibition design and in their daily life understands it’s okay to have emotions. It’s okay to feel. It’s what motivates us, helps us and makes us vulnerable and all that wonderful thing. And most importantly, it’s how we grow and experience the world around us.

So don’t cut yourself off for emotions. Have them, cry, laugh, be scared, push yourself through. We didn’t even talk about fear. We didn’t even talk about the emotions. But really, yes, feel. I would say feel. As soon as you start to go numb, then, you know, that’s a really bad thing. So, keep feeling, everyone out there.

Brenda: Well, listeners, I hope you’re feeling pretty good.

Abby: Yeah. Thank you, everybody who tuned in today. If you like what you heard, please subscribe for more episodes of Matters of Experience. Make sure to leave a rating and a review and share with a friend. We’ll see you next time.
 

Brenda: Buh-bye everybody.

[Music]

 

Producer: Matters of Experience is produced by Lorem Ipsum Corp and recorded at Hangar Studios. Tune in next time for more fun discussions about experience design.

 

Show Notes

The Secrets of Emotion — Pablo P. L. Tinio

Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center – Lorem Ipsum Corp

Designer and Curator Ellen Lupton on How Storytelling Shapes Design

Lorem Ipsum’s experience design shows the “power of dramatic narratives”

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle, Ph.D.

Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence (YCEI)

Crafting Emotions in  Experience Design

Crafting Emotions in Experience Design

November 1, 2023
Live at the Gilder Center

Live at the Gilder Center

October 17, 2023
Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts and Spotify
Coming to you live from the American Museum of Natural History, Abby and Brenda provide their unique perspective on museum design as they explore the new Gilder Center on the latest episode of Matters of Experience. Join them as they share their unfiltered impressions about their on-site visit, revealing the museum’s impressive aspects while also addressing elements that fell short of their expectations. Dive into a conversation about the nuances of empathy and education within museum exhibits and the often-overlooked transitional spaces that have the power to create truly welcoming experiences. If you’re a museum aficionado or an experience designer, this is a special episode you won’t want to miss.

Transcript

 

[Music]

 

Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience, a podcast produced by Lorem Ipsum, an experience design company headquartered in New York City. Our podcast explores the creativity, innovation and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. If you’re new, welcome, and to our regular listeners, thanks for tuning in and supporting our conversation. My name is Abigail Honor.

 

Brenda: And this is Brenda Cowan.

 

Abby: We just want to share a note from today’s show sponsor, POW!

 

Sponsor: This is Paul Orselli, Chief Instigator at POW! (Paul Orselli Workshop), and we’re delighted to sponsor this episode of the podcast. Please check out our website at www.Orselli.net for more information about our work, as well as free resources and articles. Thanks.

 

Abby: Today we are off the tracks. Where are we, Brenda?

 

Brenda: We are in the American Museum of Natural History experiencing the new Gilder Center.

 

Abby: Well, Brenda, I’m really excited to talk about some of the phenomenal things, fantastic things we saw today and some of the things that we found a little underwhelming.

 

Okay, so let’s kick it off. Let’s start positive. Let’s start with things that impressed us, intrigued us, things we enjoyed.

 

Brenda: Well, I think for me, the thing that really knocked my socks off, on each floor, they have open storage areas that are layered with displays of objects, and the graphic rails talk about the people who do the jobs with the specimens, with the artifacts that you’re seeing, and you get to see the storage behind, you get to see what’s going on sort of behind the scenes. And it’s really visually dynamic.

 

The thing that also makes those areas on each of the floors really, really perfect in my mind’s eye is that the label copy is all question-based. So, all of the headlines are questions and they’re very natural questions that you would wonder when you’re looking at these really sometimes bizarre, sometimes strange, sometimes really familiar-looking objects.

 

Oh, the question leads you in. You get a nice hit of content and then you’re on to the next thing. It’s perfect. It’s great exhibitry, and it was fascinating. And I want all of the jobs of all of the people who I saw displayed in all of these areas, because who knew.

 

Abby: One of the really nice things that I enjoyed about that moment on the floors was being able to see faces, names, and very simply understand the varied jobs that are associated. It was all done in a very easy-to-digest, informative way that I think was inspirational.

 

Brenda: It was inspirational, and it was just really human, and another thing that I think is really smart – they put objects of material culture next to specimens in jars and fossils and so on and so forth. So, there was this great sort of mix of the human story within the story of the animals.

 

Abby: And everything that was there had been clearly curated down. Nothing felt overwhelming and everything was very intriguing. I was like, oh my goodness me, what is that? And I thought the use of large interactives with questions like who uses our collections and a very, very simple click-click to get your answers. You didn’t need a lot of ramp up for using the, the interactives. They were very straightforward. I saw kids using them. I saw adults using them. I saw older people engaging. They were just very simple and complemented the themes.

 

Brenda: Those displays which line the halls, in line the major gallery areas are, I think for me, the very, very best of the Gilder Center. And it’s not to say that there aren’t other really good things going on. Abby and I were just at the Insectarium, which is beautifully designed. It’s a nice open space and yet it’s cohesive. And again, it’s simple, it’s straightforward. They’ve got specimens next to really beautiful graphics. There are some touch screens where you can get more information and it’s a really playful, open area with a lot, a lot of content, a lot of actual living creatures, and it just makes a lot of sense. It’s a very pleasurable exhibit.

 

Abby: Yeah, I would echo. The Insectarium is gorgeous. It has this amazing ceiling, ribbed ceiling that I think makes it feel very cocoon-like. And then you have these very large recreations of flowers and strawberries that really break up the space and make it feel more immersive and a bit different from a more traditional exhibition. And then having a mix of the live animals, very small moments, they’re not huge, they’re small moments where you can go and see the live animals, and right next door is again some very brief relevant text that’s enjoyable to read, and then you have a very small quick video moment. What I really like here is that you can click through the video moments and they’re about 10 seconds long and it’s all very easy, it’s all digestible and it’s not overwhelming, and you don’t feel like you’re walking through a book.

 

Brenda: Well, walking through a book. We did start out our journey here in the Hall of Gems and had in so many ways almost the opposite experience from what we’re starting out with right now. It was absolutely stunning to look at. It was like being in a jewelry store, as you would perhaps anticipate, and yet it was so difficult to experience. It was difficult to gain content. It was difficult to do all of the reading. And it was very unapproachable as well. And we’ve got, you know, fascinating content that was really, really a struggle to get a handle on.

 

Abby: I mean, the collection itself is phenomenal, but the text panels were boring. They were heavy. They were intellectual. They were very heavily scientific. And I couldn’t touch a gem. I wanted to touch one or a cheap version of one. I wanted to feel what they were like. And the only thing we found, or the only thing I found in there was some metal recreations of the shapes inside the gemstones and a scientific and mathematical drawing about them, again, which is very analytic. A lot of the questions I had, the straightforward questions, weren’t answered.

 

Brenda: There wasn’t anything that really tapped into the culture of gems. You know, people collect, you know, quartz. They collect different gemstones; they collect different types of semi-precious stones. There are so many different types of gems in our everyday lives that people see as being numinous, as being, you know, alive or life-giving or energy giving, and I wanted to understand some of that. I wanted to, I wanted to understand my people a little bit better and why it is that people have relationships that are very, very powerful with gems. And there just wasn’t anything to sort of give me a clue.

 

Abby: That’s interesting. You bring up the human relationship because I feel like there also wasn’t a real global perspective. There was no real perspective except from a scientific perspective. And I wondered about kids. There was nothing for them to do. Even the interactive that we did was a question and answer interactive. And you know, you needed to be able to read long, complicated words and understand what these were or at least try to understand what these minerals were. And I think that that precluded anybody under the age of 12 or 13.

 

Can we talk about the floor?

 

Brenda: I don’t know what it says about us, Abby, or what it says about the museum or, you know, maybe we just are just too enmeshed in our own profession, but we were both really stunned by how beautiful the floor was. This beautiful, beautiful, deep slate gray color that is reflecting back the colors and the lighting of all of the stones all throughout the hall. It was sumptuous.

 

Abby: Sumptuous is the exact word. It was, it was incredible. Another sort of miss for me was the Minerals are Elementary, exclamation mark, which was this huge. It was about nine screens, and on it was the periodic table. Everybody knows the periodic table. It’s how scientists organize elements. And over we walked, well at least over I walked, and I went to touch one because each of the elements was rather large and it had Cr on it or Mo or Tc, and I was like, oh, this is cool, touch. Nothing happened. It, in fact, was not a large touchscreen at all. It was a piece of media. And what it was telling me, what it was doing, I still don’t know. There was four speakers, and no sound coming out of those speakers. So, I think maybe something was broken, but I had to sit there as they turned a color and then showed me that, you know, almond is made of this. And I felt like interacting with the periodic table could have been so fun.

 

Brenda: It would have been really, really cool, because as it is, unless you’re already kind of in the club, you just don’t get it.

 

Abby: And I think that that’s a problem because it definitely hits, yeah, I’ve got several friends and acquaintances who are really into this subject and they loved it, but I think that that’s a miss. I think it’s about getting those people as well as people who’ve come to just learn a bit more. And I do want to say one of the highlights was What Makes Clay Useful. There was a moment when we went into clay and clays are a family of fine-grained aluminum-bearing silica minerals that form sheet-like layers with large surface areas that attract water. Wow. Okay, that’s great. This was this was one of the more interesting text panels. This makes clay moldable when wet while also allowing it to hold its shape when dried.

 

Brenda: I just, I love that they showed bricks. They just showed ordinary bricks. And then they, they had a lovely image of a person at a potter’s wheel making a clay pot. And then there was the clay pot that was on display. It was so, that was very simple and really quite lovely.

Abby: Yeah, so, bringing it to life with relatable images. And I personally loved the, the clay-based cat litter, which was invented in 1947, and was a boon for pet owners. So, they had a nice little picture there of kitty turned away, so we couldn’t see her cute eyes. But making, I think, some of these things relatable to the visitor, looking at minerals and gems in our everyday life, they could have done a lot more with that; those were the moments that I really connected.

 

Next, Brenda, we went into Invisible Worlds. So, what’s your perspective on that?

 

Brenda: I loved it. I hated it. So, I’ve gone there twice and they were very, very different experiences. The first time I went, there were so many people that it was really, really difficult to connect with anything. It was very difficult to have any kind of a really thoughtful experience. The time that you and I just had in the exhibition, far fewer people and I was able to take in the content. I was able to have more of an in-depth experience with the content. So, it’s a ticket entry, but if they could better regulate the number of people that go through, especially the big sort of immersive experience at the end, because the first time I did Invisible Worlds, I hated it. I didn’t get it. I thought that there wasn’t a cohesive story. I didn’t understand how come some things seemed very visible and I understood other things that were invisible. But there are a lot of themes there that didn’t seem connected to me in any way. I was able to have a better time, more focused time, and get a little bit closer to the content with better control of…

 

Abby:  Better flow of traffic.

 

Brenda: Thank you. That’s what I was looking for. Better traffic flow.

 

Abby: Yeah. So, it was my first time. So, I read the opening statement about what I was about to see: things that are all around me, small and big, that I’ve never seen before. Very excited. I walked in and sorely disappointed by the initial media pieces where they have sort of material that’s in these swathes around the room, these large white swathes projected just on the center, and you have the stereotypical drone sound, we’re creating an atmosphere, everybody. And then you have one image in the middle, and you’re looking, and there’s a text quote above, and there’s no story, there’s no narrative. I can’t follow anything.

 

And so, I stood there for a minute or two. I’m like, okay, imagery, walked around the corner, a large area of darkness, and then come to something else, which is another swath and another projection, and then objects inside the projection, physical objects, which are all illuminating. And I’m standing there, and I can’t work out what they’re telling me. I’m like, okay, are they all related? Okay, their genes, they have similar genes, but why is some lighting up and then the next, so I’m not being enabled to guide my own learning. I have to stand and watch and be told.

 

And it’s that monologue that I think is ancient, and we should stop doing it. It needs to be a dialogue, and I want to touch and access what I want to touch and access. I don’t want to have to stand and try to work out what you’re trying to tell me.

 

Brenda: Yeah, if there, somewhere, if there was an element that explained the overarching idea in some form, then I missed it. You missed it, which is a real problem, and that’s what was really very necessary. It was not clear in the introduction area what this was all about, and again, you know, we were both really looking really hard. Maybe we were overthinking. I don’t know. Maybe we’re just really jaded, right? Perhaps. But it was really difficult experiencing it. The things that worked the most effectively were these little interactive digital games.

 

Abby: Yeah, they were superb.

 

Brenda: They were great. And you could sort of follow specific questions, get quick hits of content. It was a little bit of fun. You got some answers, right, you got some answers wrong. And it was really nice, quick, you know, sort of what do you know, kinds of facts, information, fun facts.

 

Abby: Yeah, like one was an interactive about our ancestors and that was fun. It was interesting. It was, as you said, easy to use. You know, I didn’t know I was close, more closely related to mold rather than moss. I found that interesting.

 

Brenda: Oh, you’re more closely related to the whale than you are the big shark.

 

Abby: All things, yeah, I was like, wow, this is really cool. So, there were elements of how we connect to nature and how we connect to our history and our evolution, which didn’t really remind me of the title Invisible Worlds.

 

Brenda: Yeah, that’s, that’s what I’m just, I’m really struggling to kind of get that because, again, you were able to pick up on specific thematic areas or chunks of content, but the big message was just really missing, and I think that there was an opportunity in the big culminating event portion of the exhibition, which is this immersive 360 really gorgeous, gorgeous.

 

Abby: Yeah, gorgeous.

 

Brenda: It’s stunning. The immersive experience led you through several different environments, and it was really difficult to get the main message, though, like what the takeaways were.

 

Abby: I totally agree. It was absolutely gorgeous. The visuals were stunning, the sound was amazing, but it felt like a factoid video. So again, they’re telling us something informative. And I found again when I walked out, I’m like, okay, what’s my takeaway? What’s the lasting impression? And it’s, oh, that was a good bit of fun, nothing, like that was great for my Instagram, but I didn’t, I wasn’t moved, I didn’t connect, I didn’t understand what they were trying to tell me.

 

Brenda: Yeah, and again, and it’s not to, the whole thing is not a loss. It’s not, it’s not like, you know, we think you should scrap the whole thing and start, start all over again. But it is frustrating when so much, clearly, so much time, effort, so much money went into this exhibition, and what we were looking for is really relatively simple. Just give us the big take away and the title itself just seemed to be a little bit misleading.

 

Abby: One of the moments that I thought resonated best in this 360 experience was when they asked us to step on the brainwaves and shoot, was it shoot the, what did they ask us to do, do you remember?

Brenda: We were shooting synapses? Is that what we were doing?

 

Abby: That’s what we were doing. I was shooting some synapses, and I was moving and I was running over to my dark bubble and I was shooting out my synapse, but what I liked was it shot along the room to somebody else who was then shooting their synapse back to me. And suddenly I was aware of other people in the room with me and we were doing a communal activity, and I loved that moment.

 

Brenda: Yeah, the reactive, responsive floor experience was a lot of fun, was really, really compelling and had you, you know, experiencing more of the entirety of the space, which is, which is really great. With a clear story, you would have been all in.

 

Abby: And there was no drama, right? There was no conflict. There was no adversity that we’ve beaten to get where we are today. I felt like there was none of that. And it’s easy to get excited about, about evolution. So, I, yeah. Then I had another thought. Brenda, which is, you know, as we’re in the business, maybe we overanalyze, and maybe it’s enough for people to take out their phone and go, wow, a whale flying, you know, flying, felt like it was flying around me in the water, cool, making a noise, awesome. But then I walk out, I’m like, no, that’s not enough. I want people to understand why the whale was there, why it was significant, so that they can go away, and it can change who they are, their destiny. And you have a lovely story about your daughter coming here many, many years ago. Tell us about that.

 

Brenda: So, as with probably just far too much in my life, major milestone moments are entirely about my daughter and I just remember taking her here when she was about four years old, many, many, many years ago, and she could not get enough of the Big Bang video and you sit, you’re watching the video. It’s contained. It is clear. And this tiny person was absolutely enthralled. And she is not a scientist 20 plus years later, but she was captivated because the story was clear and it used powerful images and it was, you know, certainly much less expensive than the experience that we just had. But the story was complete.

 

Abby: And I agree. I think that I’ve seen it, I went, my kids have seen it, and it makes you feel about, it makes you question your place in the universe. At least it made me question my place in the universe – Brenda is stunned and stunned, shocked in awe. Okay, so let’s move on to the butterflies.

 

Brenda: Who doesn’t love butterflies? Butterflies are lovely. Here’s the thing that I was a little bit frustrated about. Gorgeous space. Absolutely beautiful, and what a rare delight to be able to be completely immersed in this really, genuinely magical world of these gorgeous plants and butterflies and learning about them in these, you know, tiny little ways through little fact panels here and there that were really thoughtfully integrated.

 

But my issue, my stumbling block, is that when you got in there, you weren’t supposed to touch the butterflies. And there were occasional little signs that said, don’t touch the butterflies, right, with a little, a little icon. That’s fine. Why, Abby, did we not get information before going in that not only informed us to not touch the butterflies, but why? Because it would have been a great opportunity for empathy, a great moment to really just, if it was through video, you know, while you’re waiting to get into the space or if it was even just a text panel with some images or one of the, you know, people who is stationed there. If somebody could have just said, here’s why we don’t touch butterflies, right? Here’s how we care for butterflies.

 

Abby: Yeah. That might have prevented the young man I saw trying to get the butterfly on his hand from damaging the poor butterfly’s leg.

 

Okay, so let’s move on to a space that is probably just as important, I would argue, as any of the touted exhibition spaces that we’ve discussed. It is the connective tissue; it is the joining moment between old and new. It is the moment between the old building and the new building. And Brenda, just describe right now what it’s like.

 

Brenda: It is like walking through the basement of some kind of business complex. The interstitial connecting areas are white walls. You feel like you are in the wrong place. You feel like you are not supposed to be going through them. There’s little to no signage anywhere that tells you you can enter into the rest of the museum this way.

 

Abby and I just kept thinking, maybe they’re not finished yet. Maybe they just haven’t gotten to these interstitial spaces yet. And at the same time, fine. Okay. Right. Lots to go, I’m sure. However, do something. Give us some signage that says it’s okay that you are walking in this space right now. And no, you are not about to get lost. You are about to enter the old part of the building and there was just nothing, and this is on all of the floors.

 

Abby: It’s just very odd. It’s that, transitional spaces are just as important as the main exhibition spaces. They set people up. They’re the prelude before you walk in to the space, and they’re also another place to communicate information. They’re a place of repose. There was nowhere to sit, nowhere to reflect. And it did. It felt like a basement. And I didn’t realize the rest of the museum was there. It sort of is on a bend away from you and it looks like you shouldn’t go there. And so, listeners, Brenda had to tell me to go there, so I would have missed the rest of the Natural History Museum completely had I not known that.

And as Brenda says, I think it’s, it’s simple design things. It’s not expensive. You could do beautiful connecting images or a design that was thematic that would really help. And with these spaces, you know, as we were going up the main staircase, they’d put a beautiful quote from a fellow museum lover. “Learning goes both ways,” and I feel like that’s not what I’ve seen and experienced here today. There was nowhere for me to give back, for me to interact, for me to share my thoughts and ideas. And so, looking at these epic spaces, transitional spaces between the museums, between these times, between these subject matters, I feel, Brenda, these will be wonderful moments where we as the visitors can give our opinions, our thoughts and really play more. There felt like not a lot of play here, and I feel like that we could really seriously use those spaces.

 

Brenda: Yeah, I think there’s a whole lot of inspiration. There’s a whole lot of prompting, of wonder, prompting of imagination. There’s a lot of care and thoughtfulness here in terms of the design and the visitor experience. And yet, I agree 100%. Wouldn’t it be so much richer if, you know, we were able to share a little story somewhere in a video booth or share a little story or do a little piece of, you know, writing and a feedback wall somewhere and talk about, you know, what kind of scientist I would love to be or which of, you know, all of the different areas in the museum that I saw today, what I most want to live inside of.

 

Abby: I’ve seen amazing insects I didn’t know ever walk the planet. Gorgeous colors, beautiful textures. And it’s just, it’s been so inspiring. And I feel like I’m going to walk out, unable to do anything about all of these feelings and thoughts I have. There’s so much more that we could do here.

 

Brenda: It’s making me think of Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which my students know is a book that I am absolutely obsessed about. Annie Dillard, who won the Pulitzer Prize for the book, wrote, “I’m no scientist. I merely explore the neighborhood” when writing this remarkable book that captures an entire year spent literally on her belly in the mud at the side of a creek and documenting the unbelievable beauty, wonder, just it’s a lustful book about science and the natural world. And I wish that that feeling were here. I wish that that feeling of I, you know, may not be a scientist, but I can explore the neighborhood in a way that is personal. I wish that experience were here.

 

Abby: Well, Brenda, I’ve really enjoyed our time here today. I encourage everybody listening to come. You should see it for yourself, judge for yourselves. Judge us as well as well as the museum. And let us know your thoughts on what you feel works and what doesn’t work. You know how to reach us, but this has been really interesting. It’s been a fantastic way to spend an afternoon.

 

Brenda: Highly recommend the visit as well and come explore this neighborhood, enjoy it, and take from it what you will.

 

Abby: Thanks for everyone who tuned in today. If you like what you heard, subscribe for more episodes of Matters of Experience wherever you listen to podcasts and make sure to leave a rating and a review and please share with a friend. See you next time.

 

Brenda: Thank you everyone.

 

[Music]

 

Producer: Matters of Experience is produced by Lorem Ipsum Corp. Tune in next time for more fun discussions about experience design.

 

Show Notes

Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation

Susan and Peter J. Solomon Family Insectarium | AMNH

Mignone Halls of Gems and Minerals | AMNH

Davis Family Butterfly Vivarium | AMNH

Invisible Worlds Immersive Experience | AMNH

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)

Transcript

 

[Music]

 

Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience, a podcast produced by Lorem Ipsum, an experience design company headquartered in New York City. Our podcast explores the creativity, innovation and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. If you’re new, welcome, and to our regular listeners, thanks for tuning in and supporting our conversation. My name is Abigail Honor.

 

Brenda: And this is Brenda Cowan.

 

Abby: We just want to share a note from today’s show sponsor, POW!

 

Sponsor: This is Paul Orselli, Chief Instigator at POW! (Paul Orselli Workshop), and we’re delighted to sponsor this episode of the podcast. Please check out our website at www.Orselli.net for more information about our work, as well as free resources and articles. Thanks.

 

Abby: Today we are off the tracks. Where are we, Brenda?

 

Brenda: We are in the American Museum of Natural History experiencing the new Gilder Center.

 

Abby: Well, Brenda, I’m really excited to talk about some of the phenomenal things, fantastic things we saw today and some of the things that we found a little underwhelming.

 

Okay, so let’s kick it off. Let’s start positive. Let’s start with things that impressed us, intrigued us, things we enjoyed.

 

Brenda: Well, I think for me, the thing that really knocked my socks off, on each floor, they have open storage areas that are layered with displays of objects, and the graphic rails talk about the people who do the jobs with the specimens, with the artifacts that you’re seeing, and you get to see the storage behind, you get to see what’s going on sort of behind the scenes. And it’s really visually dynamic.

 

The thing that also makes those areas on each of the floors really, really perfect in my mind’s eye is that the label copy is all question-based. So, all of the headlines are questions and they’re very natural questions that you would wonder when you’re looking at these really sometimes bizarre, sometimes strange, sometimes really familiar-looking objects.

 

Oh, the question leads you in. You get a nice hit of content and then you’re on to the next thing. It’s perfect. It’s great exhibitry, and it was fascinating. And I want all of the jobs of all of the people who I saw displayed in all of these areas, because who knew.

 

Abby: One of the really nice things that I enjoyed about that moment on the floors was being able to see faces, names, and very simply understand the varied jobs that are associated. It was all done in a very easy-to-digest, informative way that I think was inspirational.

 

Brenda: It was inspirational, and it was just really human, and another thing that I think is really smart – they put objects of material culture next to specimens in jars and fossils and so on and so forth. So, there was this great sort of mix of the human story within the story of the animals.

 

Abby: And everything that was there had been clearly curated down. Nothing felt overwhelming and everything was very intriguing. I was like, oh my goodness me, what is that? And I thought the use of large interactives with questions like who uses our collections and a very, very simple click-click to get your answers. You didn’t need a lot of ramp up for using the, the interactives. They were very straightforward. I saw kids using them. I saw adults using them. I saw older people engaging. They were just very simple and complemented the themes.

 

Brenda: Those displays which line the halls, in line the major gallery areas are, I think for me, the very, very best of the Gilder Center. And it’s not to say that there aren’t other really good things going on. Abby and I were just at the Insectarium, which is beautifully designed. It’s a nice open space and yet it’s cohesive. And again, it’s simple, it’s straightforward. They’ve got specimens next to really beautiful graphics. There are some touch screens where you can get more information and it’s a really playful, open area with a lot, a lot of content, a lot of actual living creatures, and it just makes a lot of sense. It’s a very pleasurable exhibit.

 

Abby: Yeah, I would echo. The Insectarium is gorgeous. It has this amazing ceiling, ribbed ceiling that I think makes it feel very cocoon-like. And then you have these very large recreations of flowers and strawberries that really break up the space and make it feel more immersive and a bit different from a more traditional exhibition. And then having a mix of the live animals, very small moments, they’re not huge, they’re small moments where you can go and see the live animals, and right next door is again some very brief relevant text that’s enjoyable to read, and then you have a very small quick video moment. What I really like here is that you can click through the video moments and they’re about 10 seconds long and it’s all very easy, it’s all digestible and it’s not overwhelming, and you don’t feel like you’re walking through a book.

 

Brenda: Well, walking through a book. We did start out our journey here in the Hall of Gems and had in so many ways almost the opposite experience from what we’re starting out with right now. It was absolutely stunning to look at. It was like being in a jewelry store, as you would perhaps anticipate, and yet it was so difficult to experience. It was difficult to gain content. It was difficult to do all of the reading. And it was very unapproachable as well. And we’ve got, you know, fascinating content that was really, really a struggle to get a handle on.

 

Abby: I mean, the collection itself is phenomenal, but the text panels were boring. They were heavy. They were intellectual. They were very heavily scientific. And I couldn’t touch a gem. I wanted to touch one or a cheap version of one. I wanted to feel what they were like. And the only thing we found, or the only thing I found in there was some metal recreations of the shapes inside the gemstones and a scientific and mathematical drawing about them, again, which is very analytic. A lot of the questions I had, the straightforward questions, weren’t answered.

 

Brenda: There wasn’t anything that really tapped into the culture of gems. You know, people collect, you know, quartz. They collect different gemstones; they collect different types of semi-precious stones. There are so many different types of gems in our everyday lives that people see as being numinous, as being, you know, alive or life-giving or energy giving, and I wanted to understand some of that. I wanted to, I wanted to understand my people a little bit better and why it is that people have relationships that are very, very powerful with gems. And there just wasn’t anything to sort of give me a clue.

 

Abby: That’s interesting. You bring up the human relationship because I feel like there also wasn’t a real global perspective. There was no real perspective except from a scientific perspective. And I wondered about kids. There was nothing for them to do. Even the interactive that we did was a question and answer interactive. And you know, you needed to be able to read long, complicated words and understand what these were or at least try to understand what these minerals were. And I think that that precluded anybody under the age of 12 or 13.

 

Can we talk about the floor?

 

Brenda: I don’t know what it says about us, Abby, or what it says about the museum or, you know, maybe we just are just too enmeshed in our own profession, but we were both really stunned by how beautiful the floor was. This beautiful, beautiful, deep slate gray color that is reflecting back the colors and the lighting of all of the stones all throughout the hall. It was sumptuous.

 

Abby: Sumptuous is the exact word. It was, it was incredible. Another sort of miss for me was the Minerals are Elementary, exclamation mark, which was this huge. It was about nine screens, and on it was the periodic table. Everybody knows the periodic table. It’s how scientists organize elements. And over we walked, well at least over I walked, and I went to touch one because each of the elements was rather large and it had Cr on it or Mo or Tc, and I was like, oh, this is cool, touch. Nothing happened. It, in fact, was not a large touchscreen at all. It was a piece of media. And what it was telling me, what it was doing, I still don’t know. There was four speakers, and no sound coming out of those speakers. So, I think maybe something was broken, but I had to sit there as they turned a color and then showed me that, you know, almond is made of this. And I felt like interacting with the periodic table could have been so fun.

 

Brenda: It would have been really, really cool, because as it is, unless you’re already kind of in the club, you just don’t get it.

 

Abby: And I think that that’s a problem because it definitely hits, yeah, I’ve got several friends and acquaintances who are really into this subject and they loved it, but I think that that’s a miss. I think it’s about getting those people as well as people who’ve come to just learn a bit more. And I do want to say one of the highlights was What Makes Clay Useful. There was a moment when we went into clay and clays are a family of fine-grained aluminum-bearing silica minerals that form sheet-like layers with large surface areas that attract water. Wow. Okay, that’s great. This was this was one of the more interesting text panels. This makes clay moldable when wet while also allowing it to hold its shape when dried.

 

Brenda: I just, I love that they showed bricks. They just showed ordinary bricks. And then they, they had a lovely image of a person at a potter’s wheel making a clay pot. And then there was the clay pot that was on display. It was so, that was very simple and really quite lovely.

Abby: Yeah, so, bringing it to life with relatable images. And I personally loved the, the clay-based cat litter, which was invented in 1947, and was a boon for pet owners. So, they had a nice little picture there of kitty turned away, so we couldn’t see her cute eyes. But making, I think, some of these things relatable to the visitor, looking at minerals and gems in our everyday life, they could have done a lot more with that; those were the moments that I really connected.

 

Next, Brenda, we went into Invisible Worlds. So, what’s your perspective on that?

 

Brenda: I loved it. I hated it. So, I’ve gone there twice and they were very, very different experiences. The first time I went, there were so many people that it was really, really difficult to connect with anything. It was very difficult to have any kind of a really thoughtful experience. The time that you and I just had in the exhibition, far fewer people and I was able to take in the content. I was able to have more of an in-depth experience with the content. So, it’s a ticket entry, but if they could better regulate the number of people that go through, especially the big sort of immersive experience at the end, because the first time I did Invisible Worlds, I hated it. I didn’t get it. I thought that there wasn’t a cohesive story. I didn’t understand how come some things seemed very visible and I understood other things that were invisible. But there are a lot of themes there that didn’t seem connected to me in any way. I was able to have a better time, more focused time, and get a little bit closer to the content with better control of…

 

Abby:  Better flow of traffic.

 

Brenda: Thank you. That’s what I was looking for. Better traffic flow.

 

Abby: Yeah. So, it was my first time. So, I read the opening statement about what I was about to see: things that are all around me, small and big, that I’ve never seen before. Very excited. I walked in and sorely disappointed by the initial media pieces where they have sort of material that’s in these swathes around the room, these large white swathes projected just on the center, and you have the stereotypical drone sound, we’re creating an atmosphere, everybody. And then you have one image in the middle, and you’re looking, and there’s a text quote above, and there’s no story, there’s no narrative. I can’t follow anything.

 

And so, I stood there for a minute or two. I’m like, okay, imagery, walked around the corner, a large area of darkness, and then come to something else, which is another swath and another projection, and then objects inside the projection, physical objects, which are all illuminating. And I’m standing there, and I can’t work out what they’re telling me. I’m like, okay, are they all related? Okay, their genes, they have similar genes, but why is some lighting up and then the next, so I’m not being enabled to guide my own learning. I have to stand and watch and be told.

 

And it’s that monologue that I think is ancient, and we should stop doing it. It needs to be a dialogue, and I want to touch and access what I want to touch and access. I don’t want to have to stand and try to work out what you’re trying to tell me.

 

Brenda: Yeah, if there, somewhere, if there was an element that explained the overarching idea in some form, then I missed it. You missed it, which is a real problem, and that’s what was really very necessary. It was not clear in the introduction area what this was all about, and again, you know, we were both really looking really hard. Maybe we were overthinking. I don’t know. Maybe we’re just really jaded, right? Perhaps. But it was really difficult experiencing it. The things that worked the most effectively were these little interactive digital games.

 

Abby: Yeah, they were superb.

 

Brenda: They were great. And you could sort of follow specific questions, get quick hits of content. It was a little bit of fun. You got some answers, right, you got some answers wrong. And it was really nice, quick, you know, sort of what do you know, kinds of facts, information, fun facts.

 

Abby: Yeah, like one was an interactive about our ancestors and that was fun. It was interesting. It was, as you said, easy to use. You know, I didn’t know I was close, more closely related to mold rather than moss. I found that interesting.

 

Brenda: Oh, you’re more closely related to the whale than you are the big shark.

 

Abby: All things, yeah, I was like, wow, this is really cool. So, there were elements of how we connect to nature and how we connect to our history and our evolution, which didn’t really remind me of the title Invisible Worlds.

 

Brenda: Yeah, that’s, that’s what I’m just, I’m really struggling to kind of get that because, again, you were able to pick up on specific thematic areas or chunks of content, but the big message was just really missing, and I think that there was an opportunity in the big culminating event portion of the exhibition, which is this immersive 360 really gorgeous, gorgeous.

 

Abby: Yeah, gorgeous.

 

Brenda: It’s stunning. The immersive experience led you through several different environments, and it was really difficult to get the main message, though, like what the takeaways were.

 

Abby: I totally agree. It was absolutely gorgeous. The visuals were stunning, the sound was amazing, but it felt like a factoid video. So again, they’re telling us something informative. And I found again when I walked out, I’m like, okay, what’s my takeaway? What’s the lasting impression? And it’s, oh, that was a good bit of fun, nothing, like that was great for my Instagram, but I didn’t, I wasn’t moved, I didn’t connect, I didn’t understand what they were trying to tell me.

 

Brenda: Yeah, and again, and it’s not to, the whole thing is not a loss. It’s not, it’s not like, you know, we think you should scrap the whole thing and start, start all over again. But it is frustrating when so much, clearly, so much time, effort, so much money went into this exhibition, and what we were looking for is really relatively simple. Just give us the big take away and the title itself just seemed to be a little bit misleading.

 

Abby: One of the moments that I thought resonated best in this 360 experience was when they asked us to step on the brainwaves and shoot, was it shoot the, what did they ask us to do, do you remember?

Brenda: We were shooting synapses? Is that what we were doing?

 

Abby: That’s what we were doing. I was shooting some synapses, and I was moving and I was running over to my dark bubble and I was shooting out my synapse, but what I liked was it shot along the room to somebody else who was then shooting their synapse back to me. And suddenly I was aware of other people in the room with me and we were doing a communal activity, and I loved that moment.

 

Brenda: Yeah, the reactive, responsive floor experience was a lot of fun, was really, really compelling and had you, you know, experiencing more of the entirety of the space, which is, which is really great. With a clear story, you would have been all in.

 

Abby: And there was no drama, right? There was no conflict. There was no adversity that we’ve beaten to get where we are today. I felt like there was none of that. And it’s easy to get excited about, about evolution. So, I, yeah. Then I had another thought. Brenda, which is, you know, as we’re in the business, maybe we overanalyze, and maybe it’s enough for people to take out their phone and go, wow, a whale flying, you know, flying, felt like it was flying around me in the water, cool, making a noise, awesome. But then I walk out, I’m like, no, that’s not enough. I want people to understand why the whale was there, why it was significant, so that they can go away, and it can change who they are, their destiny. And you have a lovely story about your daughter coming here many, many years ago. Tell us about that.

 

Brenda: So, as with probably just far too much in my life, major milestone moments are entirely about my daughter and I just remember taking her here when she was about four years old, many, many, many years ago, and she could not get enough of the Big Bang video and you sit, you’re watching the video. It’s contained. It is clear. And this tiny person was absolutely enthralled. And she is not a scientist 20 plus years later, but she was captivated because the story was clear and it used powerful images and it was, you know, certainly much less expensive than the experience that we just had. But the story was complete.

 

Abby: And I agree. I think that I’ve seen it, I went, my kids have seen it, and it makes you feel about, it makes you question your place in the universe. At least it made me question my place in the universe – Brenda is stunned and stunned, shocked in awe. Okay, so let’s move on to the butterflies.

 

Brenda: Who doesn’t love butterflies? Butterflies are lovely. Here’s the thing that I was a little bit frustrated about. Gorgeous space. Absolutely beautiful, and what a rare delight to be able to be completely immersed in this really, genuinely magical world of these gorgeous plants and butterflies and learning about them in these, you know, tiny little ways through little fact panels here and there that were really thoughtfully integrated.

 

But my issue, my stumbling block, is that when you got in there, you weren’t supposed to touch the butterflies. And there were occasional little signs that said, don’t touch the butterflies, right, with a little, a little icon. That’s fine. Why, Abby, did we not get information before going in that not only informed us to not touch the butterflies, but why? Because it would have been a great opportunity for empathy, a great moment to really just, if it was through video, you know, while you’re waiting to get into the space or if it was even just a text panel with some images or one of the, you know, people who is stationed there. If somebody could have just said, here’s why we don’t touch butterflies, right? Here’s how we care for butterflies.

 

Abby: Yeah. That might have prevented the young man I saw trying to get the butterfly on his hand from damaging the poor butterfly’s leg.

 

Okay, so let’s move on to a space that is probably just as important, I would argue, as any of the touted exhibition spaces that we’ve discussed. It is the connective tissue; it is the joining moment between old and new. It is the moment between the old building and the new building. And Brenda, just describe right now what it’s like.

 

Brenda: It is like walking through the basement of some kind of business complex. The interstitial connecting areas are white walls. You feel like you are in the wrong place. You feel like you are not supposed to be going through them. There’s little to no signage anywhere that tells you you can enter into the rest of the museum this way.

 

Abby and I just kept thinking, maybe they’re not finished yet. Maybe they just haven’t gotten to these interstitial spaces yet. And at the same time, fine. Okay. Right. Lots to go, I’m sure. However, do something. Give us some signage that says it’s okay that you are walking in this space right now. And no, you are not about to get lost. You are about to enter the old part of the building and there was just nothing, and this is on all of the floors.

 

Abby: It’s just very odd. It’s that, transitional spaces are just as important as the main exhibition spaces. They set people up. They’re the prelude before you walk in to the space, and they’re also another place to communicate information. They’re a place of repose. There was nowhere to sit, nowhere to reflect. And it did. It felt like a basement. And I didn’t realize the rest of the museum was there. It sort of is on a bend away from you and it looks like you shouldn’t go there. And so, listeners, Brenda had to tell me to go there, so I would have missed the rest of the Natural History Museum completely had I not known that.

And as Brenda says, I think it’s, it’s simple design things. It’s not expensive. You could do beautiful connecting images or a design that was thematic that would really help. And with these spaces, you know, as we were going up the main staircase, they’d put a beautiful quote from a fellow museum lover. “Learning goes both ways,” and I feel like that’s not what I’ve seen and experienced here today. There was nowhere for me to give back, for me to interact, for me to share my thoughts and ideas. And so, looking at these epic spaces, transitional spaces between the museums, between these times, between these subject matters, I feel, Brenda, these will be wonderful moments where we as the visitors can give our opinions, our thoughts and really play more. There felt like not a lot of play here, and I feel like that we could really seriously use those spaces.

 

Brenda: Yeah, I think there’s a whole lot of inspiration. There’s a whole lot of prompting, of wonder, prompting of imagination. There’s a lot of care and thoughtfulness here in terms of the design and the visitor experience. And yet, I agree 100%. Wouldn’t it be so much richer if, you know, we were able to share a little story somewhere in a video booth or share a little story or do a little piece of, you know, writing and a feedback wall somewhere and talk about, you know, what kind of scientist I would love to be or which of, you know, all of the different areas in the museum that I saw today, what I most want to live inside of.

 

Abby: I’ve seen amazing insects I didn’t know ever walk the planet. Gorgeous colors, beautiful textures. And it’s just, it’s been so inspiring. And I feel like I’m going to walk out, unable to do anything about all of these feelings and thoughts I have. There’s so much more that we could do here.

 

Brenda: It’s making me think of Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which my students know is a book that I am absolutely obsessed about. Annie Dillard, who won the Pulitzer Prize for the book, wrote, “I’m no scientist. I merely explore the neighborhood” when writing this remarkable book that captures an entire year spent literally on her belly in the mud at the side of a creek and documenting the unbelievable beauty, wonder, just it’s a lustful book about science and the natural world. And I wish that that feeling were here. I wish that that feeling of I, you know, may not be a scientist, but I can explore the neighborhood in a way that is personal. I wish that experience were here.

 

Abby: Well, Brenda, I’ve really enjoyed our time here today. I encourage everybody listening to come. You should see it for yourself, judge for yourselves. Judge us as well as well as the museum. And let us know your thoughts on what you feel works and what doesn’t work. You know how to reach us, but this has been really interesting. It’s been a fantastic way to spend an afternoon.

 

Brenda: Highly recommend the visit as well and come explore this neighborhood, enjoy it, and take from it what you will.

 

Abby: Thanks for everyone who tuned in today. If you like what you heard, subscribe for more episodes of Matters of Experience wherever you listen to podcasts and make sure to leave a rating and a review and please share with a friend. See you next time.

 

Brenda: Thank you everyone.

 

[Music]

 

Producer: Matters of Experience is produced by Lorem Ipsum Corp. Tune in next time for more fun discussions about experience design.

 

Show Notes

Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation

Susan and Peter J. Solomon Family Insectarium | AMNH

Mignone Halls of Gems and Minerals | AMNH

Davis Family Butterfly Vivarium | AMNH

Invisible Worlds Immersive Experience | AMNH

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)

Live at the Gilder Center

Live at the Gilder Center

October 17, 2023
The Climate Crisis is Simple with Tom Bowman

The Climate Crisis is Simple with Tom Bowman

October 4, 2023
Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts and Spotify
This week’s guest genuinely believes that solutions to the world’s most challenging problems, including climate change, are well within our reach. In this episode, hosts Abby and Brenda sit with accomplished advisor, speaker, and changemaker Tom Bowman to explore the intersection of climate change and the design industry, unveiling how innovative design concepts and practices can drive positive environmental impact.Tom shares his wealth of knowledge and experiences, shedding light on the pivotal role that decision-makers and the design industry can play in mitigating climate change. Tune in now to gain valuable insights and be inspired to make a difference.
Tom is founder of Bowman Change, Inc., a consultancy dedicated to helping organizations reap the benefits of working with purpose—making social and environmental transformation central to their missions. A social entrepreneur from the get-go, Tom combines his academic training in social ethics with 25 years of experience in business ownership, marketing communication, and informal education. In the late 1980s he founded Bowman Design Group, an award-winning exhibit design and management firm that works with the leaders of Fortune 1000 corporations, start-ups, and science museums and aquariums. Tom is the author of three books. The Green Edge is a sustainability guide for the meeting and events industry. What if Solving the Climate Crisis Is Simple? has been called “an inspiring, concise a primer on climate action.” And Empowering Climate Action in the United States, which Tom edited with Dr. Deb Morrison, outlines a framework for a national engagement strategy that was co-developed by 200 diverse climate leaders in response to a provision of the Paris Climate Agreement.

Transcript

 

[Music]

 

Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience, a podcast produced by Lorem Ipsum, an experience design company headquartered in New York City. Our podcast explores the creativity, innovation and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. If you’re new, a hearty welcome to you and to our regular listeners, thank you for tuning in and supporting our conversation. My name is Abigail Honor.

 

Brenda: I’m Brenda Cowan. Hello, everyone.

 

Abby: Before we begin, we just want to share a note from today’s show sponsor, POW!

 

Sponsor: This is Paul Orselli, Chief Instigator at POW! (Paul Orselli Workshop), and we’re delighted to sponsor this episode of the podcast. Please check out our website at www.Orselli.net for more information about our work, as well as free resources and articles. Thanks.

 

Abby: And now it’s my pleasure to welcome Tom Bowman to the show.

 

Tom: It’s my pleasure to join you.

 

Abby: Tom, welcome. You’re the founder of Bowman Change, Inc., a consultancy dedicated to helping organizations reap the benefits of working with purpose, making social and environmental transformation central to their missions. Tom regularly provides counsel to federal agencies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Science Foundation, NASA and the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

 

Going way back to the late 1980s, Tom founded Bowman Design Group, an award-winning exhibit design and management firm that works with leaders of Fortune 1000 corporations, startups, science museums and aquariums. He is the author of three books, which we have links to on our site, and I urge everyone to check them out. Tom’s appeared on Marketplace, CNN, in The New York Times, Yale Environment 360, and now finally here on Matters of Experience. Tom, a huge welcome to the show.

 

Tom: It’s finally good to step up to something really good.

 

Brenda: Oh, my goodness.

 

Tom: Thanks for having me.

 

Brenda: So, Tom, you and I first met, it was around about 2014 and this was through our engagement with Exhibit Designers and Producers Association and Exhibitor Media Group. And you were talking with the exhibits industry about things such as the alarming amount of waste and the damage being caused and exhibit practices and how we can make a sea change, how we can turn towards becoming leaders, how we can turn towards becoming advocates in addressing climate change. Are there changes that you have seen in the exhibits industry?

 

Tom: Let’s take one step back first and talk about changes that are happening in our society more broadly. The majority, now, of Americans are pretty concerned about the changing climate and changing environmental conditions that we’re living with. You know, the intensity of storms and drought and flood and all the expensive catastrophes and tragedies that are happening.

 

There is a shift also in corporate boardrooms. It’s no longer considered acceptable to be a climate denier in the C-suite. The challenge, though, is to see how that trickles down to an industry like the events, exhibits and experience industry, because we exist well below the level of the C-suite for the most part. It’s a very, very diffused industry. It’s made up primarily of small companies that are independently owned.

And if you own a small company on the production side, you know, design, fabrication, and show services and so forth, margins are small and doing things in ways that are reliable and routine and that are making clients happy is really a powerful driving force as it needs to be. And so, introducing new criteria like let’s reduce waste, let’s reuse properties longer, let’s shift to Energy Star rated electronic and electrical equipment as often as we can, these moves feel like extra burdens, and so I’ve spoken with a couple of the other sort of thought leaders in this space who are pioneers in greening their companies and they say that they’re struggling now that they have established this to keep their younger employees engaged with these issues. You know, the, the first wave was kind of the easy part.

 

And now making it a standard part of the culture is the challenge they’re facing. Most of the people on the client side in this industry, which would be exhibit managers, event managers, meeting managers, tend not to have the same level of authority as directors and vice presidents do in their companies. Now, obviously, there’s a wide range, you know, if you’re in a bigger company, you might be an exhibit manager.

 

If you’re a smaller company, you might be a vice president or even the owner. So, across that range, in large companies, by and large, the drive to make sustainability a priority in the events industry is not terribly strong. There is a sort of a generally much more welcoming attitude toward green proposals from exhibit houses and, designers and producers. I don’t yet see that it’s become the kind of trend that is driving the industry, though.

 

Abby: Well, I actually wanted to back up before we sort of jump into the industry and focus on, you know, when we all look back, there’s always been climate change. I mean, we’ve gone from one ice age to the other ice age, and the difference now is the speed of it, right? It’s happening so quickly.

If we take a bigger, even larger view, you know, mankind, I mean, our modern civilization has only been here for about 12,000 years, 11,700 years. Why do we think we’re going to be here for another 11,000? We’ve only been here for a blip. What if climate change caused by us is just part of Earth’s natural progression? It won’t accommodate how we like to live on it, but the Earth will be here in another 4 billion years.

 

Tom: That’s a really good question, Abigail because that 12,000 years or so that human civilization has existed corresponds to an unusually stable climate period. So, in the short term, the rapid change in climate that’s being caused by all the greenhouse gasses that we’ve been adding to the atmosphere for the last 250 years or so are changing the conditions in which all of human civilization has been established and created.

 

And it means that the places that we’re living and the places we’re growing food might not all be particularly hospitable to people in the very near term. You know, we’re seeing more floods, more hurricanes, more drought in the West, all of the wildfires in Canada. These are circumstances that are not good for us.

 

There’s another less well known and really profound change that’s happening. And that is, scientists say that we have entered into the sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s history. Well, in mass extinction events, you lose something like 90% of species. And so, biodiversity is dramatically reduced and these periods of reduced biodiversity can last a million years or so. And that’s happening now, and it’s being driven largely by environmental change caused by civilization.

 

We’re compartmentalizing ecosystems, so that species don’t have the freedom to move over large areas the way they’re used to. We’re literally killing off species. And so, in the long run, yes, Earth will be here. Life will be here. Whether it’s good for humans or not is an open question. And it’s a, you know, scientists call it a grand experiment. And it’s up to us collectively as a species to decide how much this is going to change.

 

Brenda: So let’s talk more about that, the element of human psychology within all of this. I was really taken in your book, What If Solving Climate Change Is Simple?, what a grand thought that is, you talk about how the population has the opportunity to shift the status quo, despite our tendency to not want to. And I’m wondering, are you seeing through the work and the engagement that you have, are you seeing this kind of necessary psychological shift that will enable us to actually address these realities? Or are we just stuck in the why bother?

 

Tom: No, I don’t think we are stuck in the why bother. I really think society has moved beyond that point. One of the things that I’ve talked about for a long time is that there is a very powerful narrative about all the innovations that are taking place across our economies that are making a tremendous difference, and we don’t hear about them as if they’re a coherent story.

 

We hear about little fragments from time to time. But, there are innovations taking place in battery technology. California, which has the fifth or fourth largest economy in the world all by itself, is decarbonizing its economy and is really sort of driving economically the push toward electrification of transportation and things like that and the decarbonization of our electricity supply through renewable energy.

 

There are all kinds of people working in all sorts of different processes. You know, there are people who, executives who left Tesla to form a company that recycles batteries, all of the material in batteries from everything from computers to phones to cars. And there are changes in agriculture that are happening that are about sort of rejuvenating the soils, using less water and all of that.

 

And so there is a groundswell of change occurring. A lot of these changes are going to come to us through businesses, through government, through governance, and we’re going to adapt to them. And it’s not necessary for everybody to get on board with a feeling that environmental action should be their top priority, because for many people, it will just become that without, without their having to really do too much about it.

 

Brenda: Again, in your book, you talk about Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, and you liken the hero’s journey narrative to how it is that we are experiencing and looking at climate change today on an individual level. Tom, tell us about your own hero’s journey. Let’s, let’s focus on you for a second. When did this path become clear to you? Where did this all begin?

 

Tom: So, I first really learned about what’s happening in climate back in 2003 and 2004, when my design firm, Bowman Design Group, created a museum for the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. And that meant that our climate exhibit was informed by a steering committee of some of the most eminent climate scientists in the world. That’s who my tutors were.

 

And I remember leaving that project feeling worried about what the future holds. And I asked one of the scientists, What do you think about this, this is 2003 and 2004, and he said, well, you know, humans aren’t stupid. Thank goodness we have time to work this out. Well, it turns out that just five years later, 2000, well, less than that, 2007, we were invited to do a second exhibit on climate change for Scripps Institution of Oceanography, which has a public aquarium.

 

And so, there was another steering committee of some of the world’s most eminent climate researchers. And the attitude among the researchers had utterly changed. I mean, instead of this feeling like that we have time to work this out, what they had seen is because of the economic expansion and industrialization of China, carbon emissions were climbing at a rate that exceeded what they had forecast as the worst possible case.

 

And I was sitting in a meeting and I mentioned just kind of casually that the folks at the National Academy had told me to pay attention to the ocean because the ocean can hold so much heat before ocean temperatures start to rise that once temperatures do begin to rise, we’ll be committed to a changing climate, a different climate for 500 to 1000 years.

 

And she just blithely said, oh, well, we’re part of this project that has robotic floats all over the world, and we’ve already measured warming in every ocean basin in the world to a depth of a thousand meters. Just, just imagine that, three-quarters of the world’s surface covered 3000 feet deep in water has warmed up already.

 

And I write about this in the book, you know, the, the term epiphany is usually used in a religious context, but the definition is, it’s a sudden intuitive insight into the reality of something. And it applied in that moment because in a heartbeat, everything I had ever known about the potential dangers and impacts of climate change just came home to roost all at once.

 

Brenda: Talk about a call to action.

 

Tom: Yeah, I drove home from that meeting thinking, can I put this toothpaste back in the tube and go back to life the way I knew it 2 hours ago. And, of course, the answer was no. And so, I began experimenting with my company to see if we could cut our emissions., and it turns out you can, and it’s easy.

 

I mean, it didn’t seem easy as I did it. But once I figured it out and had it measured, it’s remarkably simple. I became, as you mentioned, the EDPA’s sustainability chair. I started writing a column for Exhibitor Magazine, that I wrote for eight years. I ended up writing books, and I also began working with social scientists and scientists and economists and others to, because I looked around me and I didn’t know anyone else who worked in the communication business, who seemed to have as much sort of background in, in what the climate story was than I did.

And so, I went searching for people who did. And I sort of, I started Bowman Change because I needed a vehicle to do work that didn’t involve running a design agency.

 

Abby: So, Tom, what are some of the initial things you mentioned you went back to, and you did some really simple things to cut emissions. For people listening who are part of smaller companies or own companies or part of bigger companies, just so they can have something to like a next step, just real low hanging fruit. What can people do and think about?

 

Tom: I like to think about it as staging. What are the things I can do this week versus the things that are going to take me a quarter versus the things that are going to take me a year. And so, you look at the things you can control. Can you change your lighting? Every light in the world should be an LED now.

Plug everything in your company into power strips that you can shut off, or get the smart kind that shut off automatically if the thing’s not in use, because anything that has a chip in it is using electricity when the power is turned off. And in the average household, that can be 10% of your electricity bill, believe it or not. They call it vampire power.

 

The next big thing to do is look at what you’re driving. Often, the biggest percentage of a company’s emissions come from transportation. Either the company owns vehicles or, you know, you’re paying your employees for the mileage for using their personal vehicles, which of course, are beyond your control. But anything that you own, consider retiring it early if it’s not a high mileage, high MPG, really high MPG vehicle or an electric vehicle.

 

And I think we’re at the point now where electric vehicles are becoming commonplace enough. And we’ve learned that the cost of ownership is as low as a pretty low-cost gasoline-powered car, if you factor in that you don’t need maintenance, and electricity costs a lot less than gasoline. Those are kind of the, the easiest steps to think about.

 

And I would start there. And of course, now we live in a world where we can conduct an interview clear across the United States over an electronic platform, like we’re doing right now, right? And so that means all of that travel, all that air travel, all that driving, just got eliminated from my business’s carbon emissions. Those things are so simple to do. And, you know, we did those kinds of things, and we reduced our emissions by two-thirds, literally two-thirds, in a little over a year.

 

Abby: Just to add one thing, just because it’s top of mind on a project we’re working on; I do want to make it clear that advocating for just not being in person and the mental health things that happen when we all don’t get together, because I’m a big believer in also taking care of people and their mental health, and when you work together and you see each other. So, you know, living in a city, I get to walk around everywhere, take public transport. So, I just don’t, I just want to mention that, you know, when people are thinking about cutting emissions, not seeing each other sometimes has other ramifications.

 

Tom: Well said.

 

Abby: Now, talking a little bit more about the sustainability and the exhibits you’ve been working on over the years, it was interesting at the 50th anniversary SEGD conference this year in D.C. I’ll call them the next generation of designers, you know, have the stage and they’re talking about hardware that they’ve been using in their companies and looking at sustainability. And there was a lot of indignation from the older generation, let’s say, I’ll maybe pop you in that, the more established generation.

 

Tom: Yeah, I’m one of those.

Abby: Who were like, you know, no, we know this. Like, we get this. This is what we’ve been doing, as if it was something potentially new, because, you know, as the next generation come up, they find they discover things for the first time. So, it’s just part of maturing as a designer or it has been until now, when I know Brenda at university, sustainability is the hot topic that everybody now brings into their practice, and it’s very difficult. I don’t also want to make this sound like it’s an easy thing to do because it’s not, especially when, you know, we’re dealing with hardware as well, and like, how does that look? Do you feel like sustainability is just one of the very important key points in for all design now and moving forward?

 

Tom: Oh, absolutely. I mean, I just don’t think that the next generation of consumers is going to tolerate ignorance of sustainability or a lack of attention to sustainability. And it’s also becoming better equated with cost savings in business. We had a client that went to a lot of trade shows a year, sometimes 40 trade shows a year, and they came to us one year and said we can’t afford to build any new exhibit properties, or at least not any brand-new exhibits, you know, because they were on the, the five-year cycle, the depreciation cycle like everybody else.

 

You build a new exhibit and once depreciation goes to zero, you throw it away and build a new one and by then you’re sick and tired of it anyway. And so, what we decided to do was reconfigure the properties they had and recolor them. And we built odds and ends, little panels to fill in and new reception counter here and a new theater screen there.

 

But we discovered that those properties, those wall panels, and basic exhibit furniture remained viable and looked good, not for five years, but for 15 years before they wore out. And it turns out that this fits perfectly with a strategy that I discovered in a book called Sustainable Materials: With Both Eyes Open, and it’s a very simple rule of thumb: if something you own doesn’t use energy, use that thing for as long as you possibly can.

 

That’s the most environmentally efficient thing you can do with it, right, so you don’t have to make a new one. If it does use energy, but energy efficiency isn’t improving at all, use it for as long as you can because it’s still better to use a thing rather than pour energy into making a new thing. But if it uses energy and energy efficiency is improving over time, replace it more quickly because the energy savings from a more efficient product is going to exceed the energy spent creating that product.

 

So, TVs, refrigerators, computers, all lighting, all these systems that we use to animate our exhibit experiences fall into that latter category, but the basic properties fall into the first category. So, this created for us, you know, we got to experience the fact that this new system of preserving properties longer and reconfiguring it worked for our client. They had a, one of the fellow exhibitors came up to then and said, how do you guys afford so many new exhibits?

 

And she said, we don’t come look at all the show stickers on the backs of these panels, you know, and there’d be 30 or 40 stickers on a panel. And it worked for the exhibit fabricator because, the exhibit house, because they were spending time redoing the labor part, they just weren’t replacing material part of the projects. And it worked for the creative firm, that was us, because we were reinventing things all the time, and the environmental footprint was greatly decreased.

 

Brenda: Tom, it sounds like you’re very optimistic about upcoming decision-makers and leaders. Am I, am I gauging this correctly? Because…

 

Tom: Yeah, I am.

Brenda: You know, I also get, between my students and also, you know, my daughter who’s 25 and her peers. You know, there’s also a lot of folks who are just feeling defeated and who are too young to be feeling defeated. So is your take that overall, in your experience, that the folks who will be our decision makers that they are going to be feeling the confidence and the ability to, even in some cases, rebound and continue to make the necessary change with the right sort of psychology driving them.

 

Tom: Yes, there are people who rise to leadership positions. Not everybody does. Not everybody wants to, but the people who do, I mean, I think it’s fair to say that just about everybody in the generations you’re talking about are keenly aware that the impacts on their generations and their kids’ generations are going to be far worse than on my generation and your generation.

 

So, you hear all the time in surveys and in the news that younger people are really motivated and frustrated with, you know, the pace of governmental change and societal change, which is leaving them in the lurch. So, the people who rise to leadership positions, who have that mentality, are going to be much more aggressively focused on this than the prior generations were.

 

When I did the Caution Museum in Washington, D.C., everybody thought that it would take 30 or 40 years for power plants to switch from coal to natural gas. Natural gas has a lower carbon footprint than coal by a pretty dramatic amount, at least it was believed at the time. And everybody thought that the investment in, you know, natural gas cost twice as much as coal and these were long-lived investments, so it would be 30 years before anybody changed so we were stuck with coal for 30 years.

 

And then fracking happened and the price of gas plummeted to below that of coal. And in a matter of a few years, everybody switched, you know, and the thing that we can never predict is state change like that. Big changes like that, because a technology or a market factor or a consumer factor just changes the game in, overnight, in ways that we didn’t expect.

 

And so, I’m hopeful that decision makers, the young decision makers, are going to have opportunities that our generation didn’t have. The question is, and it’s absolutely fair on this question is how much change will we cause while we’re also in the process of cleaning things up, how bad are we going to let it get? And nobody knows the answer to that question.

 

Abby: Yeah.

 

Brenda: Let’s talk about passion. Let’s talk about what it is that you currently in your work feel passionate about. When you start your workday, every day, what is something that is really either exciting you or just really telling you, yes, yes, this is all possible?

 

Tom: There are a couple of things. One is very direct and one’s very indirect. I’ll tell you the direct one first. I’m in the process of designing a sustainability education center for a water and power utility company, and their primary target audience is fourth-graders on field trips, and they have challenged us to do something I’ve always wanted to do but never had a client that would do it.

 

And that is, can we get every insight across without having to put a single word on a wall, so that the words we have to put on the wall are there because they really need to be? But the insights are intuitive and experiential.

 

Abby: Can we just pause for a minute, Tom?

 

Brenda: We’re jumping up and down.

 

Abby: This sounds like the perfect client. How did you find them, how they know the visitors so well? Wow. You don’t have to spend weeks and months getting on the same page with who’s coming and how they learn and understand and play? Wow.

 

Tom: No, we had to spend weeks coming to understand they really meant it.

 

Abby: Okay.

 

Brenda: Yeah, right, seriously.

 

Tom: Right? Because every other sustainability client I’ve had has been driven by engineers and scientists and, you know, bless their hearts, scientists want you to be excited about everything that excites them. And so, they want to tell you a lot of information that bogs you down, and you can’t even see the forest for the trees anymore. And so encouraging museums and aquariums and others, utility companies sometimes, to simplify in an accurate way that gives somebody an insight that then they can do something with rather than barraging them with facts and data is hard work, and it’s always felt like a compromise. I mean, we’ve been through the entire three rounds of conceptual design iteration that are, you know, exhibits that are really thought through and detailed and we haven’t put a single piece of text on any drawing.

 

Abby: Fantastic.

 

Brenda: Wow.

 

Abby: Fantastic. I want to, I want to go, I want to see this, it sounds incredible.

 

Tom: I do, too. I mean, it looks like this could be a fun experience because by interacting with something, you’re getting the message.

 

Abby: Yes.

 

Tom: And then there’ll be some words on a screen or something that give you some context for it or tell you a factoid about it or something. But you’re going to get it. You’re going to get that it takes a lot of effort to generate electricity. You’re going to get that water is a precious resource. You’re going to get all these things intuitively. That’s pretty cool, right?

 

Abby: It’s really, really cool. And also, I do just want to add, seeing as you mentioned, and we’re very focused at Lorem Ipsum on media, you don’t have to necessarily have text in the media to help tell these stories.

 

Brenda: I love hearing this from the both of you. It’s called developmental interaction, which is a primary way that humans learn, which is by doing. Love you both.

 

Tom: And by mimicking also.

 

Abby: Mimicking.

 

Brenda: You bet.

 

Tom: And we don’t change people’s minds by explaining climate change to them.

Abby: No, no.

 

Tom: There was an educator I got to interview once named David Sobel, who wrote a book called Beyond Ecophobia, and he said that all their research shows that teaching kids about environmentalism isn’t the thing that causes them to become environmentalists when they grow up. The thing that hooks them and creates environmentalists is the amount of time the kids got to spend in an unstructured way in natural settings.

 

In other words, they had experiences that meant something to them, and because they valued those intuitive and experiential events, they treasured them, they wanted to preserve them. And that became a driving force in their adult lives. And, you know, I think back to my childhood, and that’s exactly what happened to me. So anyway, yeah, I’m as, I’m glad you’re excited by this because that’s the thing that makes me feel like I’m finally doing a sustainability exhibit that targets the general public in a way that’s going to, that might actually do a lot of good.

 

Abby: Yea.

 

Brenda: I’ll bet it will.

 

Abby: Have an impact and make changes.

 

Brenda: Absolutely amazing.

 

Abby: Tom, this is so enlightening in so many ways that I didn’t anticipate. I just want to thank you so much for joining us today and this challenging, thoughtful conversation.

 

Tom: Well, thanks to both of you. It’s really an honor to be part of this with you folks.

 

Brenda: I also have to say our sponsor, Paul Orselli Workshop, Paul just bought his first all-electric vehicle, and I feel like that is a necessary plug into this conversation.

 

Abby: It very much is. Congratulations, Paul. Thanks to everyone who tuned in today. If you love what you heard, subscribe for more episodes of Matters of Experience wherever you listen to podcasts. Make sure to leave a rating and a review and share with a friend. We’ll see you next time.

 

[Music]

 

Producer: Matters of Experience is produced by Lorem Ipsum Corp and recorded at Hangar Studios. Tune in next time for more fun discussions about experience design.

 

Show Notes

Books — Tom Bowman

Bowman Design Group

Sustainable Materials: With Both Eyes Open | The Use Less Group

Beyond Ecophobia — David Sobel

Tom is founder of Bowman Change, Inc., a consultancy dedicated to helping organizations reap the benefits of working with purpose—making social and environmental transformation central to their missions. A social entrepreneur from the get-go, Tom combines his academic training in social ethics with 25 years of experience in business ownership, marketing communication, and informal education. In the late 1980s he founded Bowman Design Group, an award-winning exhibit design and management firm that works with the leaders of Fortune 1000 corporations, start-ups, and science museums and aquariums. Tom is the author of three books. The Green Edge is a sustainability guide for the meeting and events industry. What if Solving the Climate Crisis Is Simple? has been called “an inspiring, concise a primer on climate action.” And Empowering Climate Action in the United States, which Tom edited with Dr. Deb Morrison, outlines a framework for a national engagement strategy that was co-developed by 200 diverse climate leaders in response to a provision of the Paris Climate Agreement.

Transcript

 

[Music]

 

Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience, a podcast produced by Lorem Ipsum, an experience design company headquartered in New York City. Our podcast explores the creativity, innovation and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. If you’re new, a hearty welcome to you and to our regular listeners, thank you for tuning in and supporting our conversation. My name is Abigail Honor.

 

Brenda: I’m Brenda Cowan. Hello, everyone.

 

Abby: Before we begin, we just want to share a note from today’s show sponsor, POW!

 

Sponsor: This is Paul Orselli, Chief Instigator at POW! (Paul Orselli Workshop), and we’re delighted to sponsor this episode of the podcast. Please check out our website at www.Orselli.net for more information about our work, as well as free resources and articles. Thanks.

 

Abby: And now it’s my pleasure to welcome Tom Bowman to the show.

 

Tom: It’s my pleasure to join you.

 

Abby: Tom, welcome. You’re the founder of Bowman Change, Inc., a consultancy dedicated to helping organizations reap the benefits of working with purpose, making social and environmental transformation central to their missions. Tom regularly provides counsel to federal agencies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Science Foundation, NASA and the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

 

Going way back to the late 1980s, Tom founded Bowman Design Group, an award-winning exhibit design and management firm that works with leaders of Fortune 1000 corporations, startups, science museums and aquariums. He is the author of three books, which we have links to on our site, and I urge everyone to check them out. Tom’s appeared on Marketplace, CNN, in The New York Times, Yale Environment 360, and now finally here on Matters of Experience. Tom, a huge welcome to the show.

 

Tom: It’s finally good to step up to something really good.

 

Brenda: Oh, my goodness.

 

Tom: Thanks for having me.

 

Brenda: So, Tom, you and I first met, it was around about 2014 and this was through our engagement with Exhibit Designers and Producers Association and Exhibitor Media Group. And you were talking with the exhibits industry about things such as the alarming amount of waste and the damage being caused and exhibit practices and how we can make a sea change, how we can turn towards becoming leaders, how we can turn towards becoming advocates in addressing climate change. Are there changes that you have seen in the exhibits industry?

 

Tom: Let’s take one step back first and talk about changes that are happening in our society more broadly. The majority, now, of Americans are pretty concerned about the changing climate and changing environmental conditions that we’re living with. You know, the intensity of storms and drought and flood and all the expensive catastrophes and tragedies that are happening.

 

There is a shift also in corporate boardrooms. It’s no longer considered acceptable to be a climate denier in the C-suite. The challenge, though, is to see how that trickles down to an industry like the events, exhibits and experience industry, because we exist well below the level of the C-suite for the most part. It’s a very, very diffused industry. It’s made up primarily of small companies that are independently owned.

And if you own a small company on the production side, you know, design, fabrication, and show services and so forth, margins are small and doing things in ways that are reliable and routine and that are making clients happy is really a powerful driving force as it needs to be. And so, introducing new criteria like let’s reduce waste, let’s reuse properties longer, let’s shift to Energy Star rated electronic and electrical equipment as often as we can, these moves feel like extra burdens, and so I’ve spoken with a couple of the other sort of thought leaders in this space who are pioneers in greening their companies and they say that they’re struggling now that they have established this to keep their younger employees engaged with these issues. You know, the, the first wave was kind of the easy part.

 

And now making it a standard part of the culture is the challenge they’re facing. Most of the people on the client side in this industry, which would be exhibit managers, event managers, meeting managers, tend not to have the same level of authority as directors and vice presidents do in their companies. Now, obviously, there’s a wide range, you know, if you’re in a bigger company, you might be an exhibit manager.

 

If you’re a smaller company, you might be a vice president or even the owner. So, across that range, in large companies, by and large, the drive to make sustainability a priority in the events industry is not terribly strong. There is a sort of a generally much more welcoming attitude toward green proposals from exhibit houses and, designers and producers. I don’t yet see that it’s become the kind of trend that is driving the industry, though.

 

Abby: Well, I actually wanted to back up before we sort of jump into the industry and focus on, you know, when we all look back, there’s always been climate change. I mean, we’ve gone from one ice age to the other ice age, and the difference now is the speed of it, right? It’s happening so quickly.

If we take a bigger, even larger view, you know, mankind, I mean, our modern civilization has only been here for about 12,000 years, 11,700 years. Why do we think we’re going to be here for another 11,000? We’ve only been here for a blip. What if climate change caused by us is just part of Earth’s natural progression? It won’t accommodate how we like to live on it, but the Earth will be here in another 4 billion years.

 

Tom: That’s a really good question, Abigail because that 12,000 years or so that human civilization has existed corresponds to an unusually stable climate period. So, in the short term, the rapid change in climate that’s being caused by all the greenhouse gasses that we’ve been adding to the atmosphere for the last 250 years or so are changing the conditions in which all of human civilization has been established and created.

 

And it means that the places that we’re living and the places we’re growing food might not all be particularly hospitable to people in the very near term. You know, we’re seeing more floods, more hurricanes, more drought in the West, all of the wildfires in Canada. These are circumstances that are not good for us.

 

There’s another less well known and really profound change that’s happening. And that is, scientists say that we have entered into the sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s history. Well, in mass extinction events, you lose something like 90% of species. And so, biodiversity is dramatically reduced and these periods of reduced biodiversity can last a million years or so. And that’s happening now, and it’s being driven largely by environmental change caused by civilization.

 

We’re compartmentalizing ecosystems, so that species don’t have the freedom to move over large areas the way they’re used to. We’re literally killing off species. And so, in the long run, yes, Earth will be here. Life will be here. Whether it’s good for humans or not is an open question. And it’s a, you know, scientists call it a grand experiment. And it’s up to us collectively as a species to decide how much this is going to change.

 

Brenda: So let’s talk more about that, the element of human psychology within all of this. I was really taken in your book, What If Solving Climate Change Is Simple?, what a grand thought that is, you talk about how the population has the opportunity to shift the status quo, despite our tendency to not want to. And I’m wondering, are you seeing through the work and the engagement that you have, are you seeing this kind of necessary psychological shift that will enable us to actually address these realities? Or are we just stuck in the why bother?

 

Tom: No, I don’t think we are stuck in the why bother. I really think society has moved beyond that point. One of the things that I’ve talked about for a long time is that there is a very powerful narrative about all the innovations that are taking place across our economies that are making a tremendous difference, and we don’t hear about them as if they’re a coherent story.

 

We hear about little fragments from time to time. But, there are innovations taking place in battery technology. California, which has the fifth or fourth largest economy in the world all by itself, is decarbonizing its economy and is really sort of driving economically the push toward electrification of transportation and things like that and the decarbonization of our electricity supply through renewable energy.

 

There are all kinds of people working in all sorts of different processes. You know, there are people who, executives who left Tesla to form a company that recycles batteries, all of the material in batteries from everything from computers to phones to cars. And there are changes in agriculture that are happening that are about sort of rejuvenating the soils, using less water and all of that.

 

And so there is a groundswell of change occurring. A lot of these changes are going to come to us through businesses, through government, through governance, and we’re going to adapt to them. And it’s not necessary for everybody to get on board with a feeling that environmental action should be their top priority, because for many people, it will just become that without, without their having to really do too much about it.

 

Brenda: Again, in your book, you talk about Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, and you liken the hero’s journey narrative to how it is that we are experiencing and looking at climate change today on an individual level. Tom, tell us about your own hero’s journey. Let’s, let’s focus on you for a second. When did this path become clear to you? Where did this all begin?

 

Tom: So, I first really learned about what’s happening in climate back in 2003 and 2004, when my design firm, Bowman Design Group, created a museum for the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. And that meant that our climate exhibit was informed by a steering committee of some of the most eminent climate scientists in the world. That’s who my tutors were.

 

And I remember leaving that project feeling worried about what the future holds. And I asked one of the scientists, What do you think about this, this is 2003 and 2004, and he said, well, you know, humans aren’t stupid. Thank goodness we have time to work this out. Well, it turns out that just five years later, 2000, well, less than that, 2007, we were invited to do a second exhibit on climate change for Scripps Institution of Oceanography, which has a public aquarium.

 

And so, there was another steering committee of some of the world’s most eminent climate researchers. And the attitude among the researchers had utterly changed. I mean, instead of this feeling like that we have time to work this out, what they had seen is because of the economic expansion and industrialization of China, carbon emissions were climbing at a rate that exceeded what they had forecast as the worst possible case.

 

And I was sitting in a meeting and I mentioned just kind of casually that the folks at the National Academy had told me to pay attention to the ocean because the ocean can hold so much heat before ocean temperatures start to rise that once temperatures do begin to rise, we’ll be committed to a changing climate, a different climate for 500 to 1000 years.

 

And she just blithely said, oh, well, we’re part of this project that has robotic floats all over the world, and we’ve already measured warming in every ocean basin in the world to a depth of a thousand meters. Just, just imagine that, three-quarters of the world’s surface covered 3000 feet deep in water has warmed up already.

 

And I write about this in the book, you know, the, the term epiphany is usually used in a religious context, but the definition is, it’s a sudden intuitive insight into the reality of something. And it applied in that moment because in a heartbeat, everything I had ever known about the potential dangers and impacts of climate change just came home to roost all at once.

 

Brenda: Talk about a call to action.

 

Tom: Yeah, I drove home from that meeting thinking, can I put this toothpaste back in the tube and go back to life the way I knew it 2 hours ago. And, of course, the answer was no. And so, I began experimenting with my company to see if we could cut our emissions., and it turns out you can, and it’s easy.

 

I mean, it didn’t seem easy as I did it. But once I figured it out and had it measured, it’s remarkably simple. I became, as you mentioned, the EDPA’s sustainability chair. I started writing a column for Exhibitor Magazine, that I wrote for eight years. I ended up writing books, and I also began working with social scientists and scientists and economists and others to, because I looked around me and I didn’t know anyone else who worked in the communication business, who seemed to have as much sort of background in, in what the climate story was than I did.

And so, I went searching for people who did. And I sort of, I started Bowman Change because I needed a vehicle to do work that didn’t involve running a design agency.

 

Abby: So, Tom, what are some of the initial things you mentioned you went back to, and you did some really simple things to cut emissions. For people listening who are part of smaller companies or own companies or part of bigger companies, just so they can have something to like a next step, just real low hanging fruit. What can people do and think about?

 

Tom: I like to think about it as staging. What are the things I can do this week versus the things that are going to take me a quarter versus the things that are going to take me a year. And so, you look at the things you can control. Can you change your lighting? Every light in the world should be an LED now.

Plug everything in your company into power strips that you can shut off, or get the smart kind that shut off automatically if the thing’s not in use, because anything that has a chip in it is using electricity when the power is turned off. And in the average household, that can be 10% of your electricity bill, believe it or not. They call it vampire power.

 

The next big thing to do is look at what you’re driving. Often, the biggest percentage of a company’s emissions come from transportation. Either the company owns vehicles or, you know, you’re paying your employees for the mileage for using their personal vehicles, which of course, are beyond your control. But anything that you own, consider retiring it early if it’s not a high mileage, high MPG, really high MPG vehicle or an electric vehicle.

 

And I think we’re at the point now where electric vehicles are becoming commonplace enough. And we’ve learned that the cost of ownership is as low as a pretty low-cost gasoline-powered car, if you factor in that you don’t need maintenance, and electricity costs a lot less than gasoline. Those are kind of the, the easiest steps to think about.

 

And I would start there. And of course, now we live in a world where we can conduct an interview clear across the United States over an electronic platform, like we’re doing right now, right? And so that means all of that travel, all that air travel, all that driving, just got eliminated from my business’s carbon emissions. Those things are so simple to do. And, you know, we did those kinds of things, and we reduced our emissions by two-thirds, literally two-thirds, in a little over a year.

 

Abby: Just to add one thing, just because it’s top of mind on a project we’re working on; I do want to make it clear that advocating for just not being in person and the mental health things that happen when we all don’t get together, because I’m a big believer in also taking care of people and their mental health, and when you work together and you see each other. So, you know, living in a city, I get to walk around everywhere, take public transport. So, I just don’t, I just want to mention that, you know, when people are thinking about cutting emissions, not seeing each other sometimes has other ramifications.

 

Tom: Well said.

 

Abby: Now, talking a little bit more about the sustainability and the exhibits you’ve been working on over the years, it was interesting at the 50th anniversary SEGD conference this year in D.C. I’ll call them the next generation of designers, you know, have the stage and they’re talking about hardware that they’ve been using in their companies and looking at sustainability. And there was a lot of indignation from the older generation, let’s say, I’ll maybe pop you in that, the more established generation.

 

Tom: Yeah, I’m one of those.

Abby: Who were like, you know, no, we know this. Like, we get this. This is what we’ve been doing, as if it was something potentially new, because, you know, as the next generation come up, they find they discover things for the first time. So, it’s just part of maturing as a designer or it has been until now, when I know Brenda at university, sustainability is the hot topic that everybody now brings into their practice, and it’s very difficult. I don’t also want to make this sound like it’s an easy thing to do because it’s not, especially when, you know, we’re dealing with hardware as well, and like, how does that look? Do you feel like sustainability is just one of the very important key points in for all design now and moving forward?

 

Tom: Oh, absolutely. I mean, I just don’t think that the next generation of consumers is going to tolerate ignorance of sustainability or a lack of attention to sustainability. And it’s also becoming better equated with cost savings in business. We had a client that went to a lot of trade shows a year, sometimes 40 trade shows a year, and they came to us one year and said we can’t afford to build any new exhibit properties, or at least not any brand-new exhibits, you know, because they were on the, the five-year cycle, the depreciation cycle like everybody else.

 

You build a new exhibit and once depreciation goes to zero, you throw it away and build a new one and by then you’re sick and tired of it anyway. And so, what we decided to do was reconfigure the properties they had and recolor them. And we built odds and ends, little panels to fill in and new reception counter here and a new theater screen there.

 

But we discovered that those properties, those wall panels, and basic exhibit furniture remained viable and looked good, not for five years, but for 15 years before they wore out. And it turns out that this fits perfectly with a strategy that I discovered in a book called Sustainable Materials: With Both Eyes Open, and it’s a very simple rule of thumb: if something you own doesn’t use energy, use that thing for as long as you possibly can.

 

That’s the most environmentally efficient thing you can do with it, right, so you don’t have to make a new one. If it does use energy, but energy efficiency isn’t improving at all, use it for as long as you can because it’s still better to use a thing rather than pour energy into making a new thing. But if it uses energy and energy efficiency is improving over time, replace it more quickly because the energy savings from a more efficient product is going to exceed the energy spent creating that product.

 

So, TVs, refrigerators, computers, all lighting, all these systems that we use to animate our exhibit experiences fall into that latter category, but the basic properties fall into the first category. So, this created for us, you know, we got to experience the fact that this new system of preserving properties longer and reconfiguring it worked for our client. They had a, one of the fellow exhibitors came up to then and said, how do you guys afford so many new exhibits?

 

And she said, we don’t come look at all the show stickers on the backs of these panels, you know, and there’d be 30 or 40 stickers on a panel. And it worked for the exhibit fabricator because, the exhibit house, because they were spending time redoing the labor part, they just weren’t replacing material part of the projects. And it worked for the creative firm, that was us, because we were reinventing things all the time, and the environmental footprint was greatly decreased.

 

Brenda: Tom, it sounds like you’re very optimistic about upcoming decision-makers and leaders. Am I, am I gauging this correctly? Because…

 

Tom: Yeah, I am.

Brenda: You know, I also get, between my students and also, you know, my daughter who’s 25 and her peers. You know, there’s also a lot of folks who are just feeling defeated and who are too young to be feeling defeated. So is your take that overall, in your experience, that the folks who will be our decision makers that they are going to be feeling the confidence and the ability to, even in some cases, rebound and continue to make the necessary change with the right sort of psychology driving them.

 

Tom: Yes, there are people who rise to leadership positions. Not everybody does. Not everybody wants to, but the people who do, I mean, I think it’s fair to say that just about everybody in the generations you’re talking about are keenly aware that the impacts on their generations and their kids’ generations are going to be far worse than on my generation and your generation.

 

So, you hear all the time in surveys and in the news that younger people are really motivated and frustrated with, you know, the pace of governmental change and societal change, which is leaving them in the lurch. So, the people who rise to leadership positions, who have that mentality, are going to be much more aggressively focused on this than the prior generations were.

 

When I did the Caution Museum in Washington, D.C., everybody thought that it would take 30 or 40 years for power plants to switch from coal to natural gas. Natural gas has a lower carbon footprint than coal by a pretty dramatic amount, at least it was believed at the time. And everybody thought that the investment in, you know, natural gas cost twice as much as coal and these were long-lived investments, so it would be 30 years before anybody changed so we were stuck with coal for 30 years.

 

And then fracking happened and the price of gas plummeted to below that of coal. And in a matter of a few years, everybody switched, you know, and the thing that we can never predict is state change like that. Big changes like that, because a technology or a market factor or a consumer factor just changes the game in, overnight, in ways that we didn’t expect.

 

And so, I’m hopeful that decision makers, the young decision makers, are going to have opportunities that our generation didn’t have. The question is, and it’s absolutely fair on this question is how much change will we cause while we’re also in the process of cleaning things up, how bad are we going to let it get? And nobody knows the answer to that question.

 

Abby: Yeah.

 

Brenda: Let’s talk about passion. Let’s talk about what it is that you currently in your work feel passionate about. When you start your workday, every day, what is something that is really either exciting you or just really telling you, yes, yes, this is all possible?

 

Tom: There are a couple of things. One is very direct and one’s very indirect. I’ll tell you the direct one first. I’m in the process of designing a sustainability education center for a water and power utility company, and their primary target audience is fourth-graders on field trips, and they have challenged us to do something I’ve always wanted to do but never had a client that would do it.

 

And that is, can we get every insight across without having to put a single word on a wall, so that the words we have to put on the wall are there because they really need to be? But the insights are intuitive and experiential.

 

Abby: Can we just pause for a minute, Tom?

 

Brenda: We’re jumping up and down.

 

Abby: This sounds like the perfect client. How did you find them, how they know the visitors so well? Wow. You don’t have to spend weeks and months getting on the same page with who’s coming and how they learn and understand and play? Wow.

 

Tom: No, we had to spend weeks coming to understand they really meant it.

 

Abby: Okay.

 

Brenda: Yeah, right, seriously.

 

Tom: Right? Because every other sustainability client I’ve had has been driven by engineers and scientists and, you know, bless their hearts, scientists want you to be excited about everything that excites them. And so, they want to tell you a lot of information that bogs you down, and you can’t even see the forest for the trees anymore. And so encouraging museums and aquariums and others, utility companies sometimes, to simplify in an accurate way that gives somebody an insight that then they can do something with rather than barraging them with facts and data is hard work, and it’s always felt like a compromise. I mean, we’ve been through the entire three rounds of conceptual design iteration that are, you know, exhibits that are really thought through and detailed and we haven’t put a single piece of text on any drawing.

 

Abby: Fantastic.

 

Brenda: Wow.

 

Abby: Fantastic. I want to, I want to go, I want to see this, it sounds incredible.

 

Tom: I do, too. I mean, it looks like this could be a fun experience because by interacting with something, you’re getting the message.

 

Abby: Yes.

 

Tom: And then there’ll be some words on a screen or something that give you some context for it or tell you a factoid about it or something. But you’re going to get it. You’re going to get that it takes a lot of effort to generate electricity. You’re going to get that water is a precious resource. You’re going to get all these things intuitively. That’s pretty cool, right?

 

Abby: It’s really, really cool. And also, I do just want to add, seeing as you mentioned, and we’re very focused at Lorem Ipsum on media, you don’t have to necessarily have text in the media to help tell these stories.

 

Brenda: I love hearing this from the both of you. It’s called developmental interaction, which is a primary way that humans learn, which is by doing. Love you both.

 

Tom: And by mimicking also.

 

Abby: Mimicking.

 

Brenda: You bet.

 

Tom: And we don’t change people’s minds by explaining climate change to them.

Abby: No, no.

 

Tom: There was an educator I got to interview once named David Sobel, who wrote a book called Beyond Ecophobia, and he said that all their research shows that teaching kids about environmentalism isn’t the thing that causes them to become environmentalists when they grow up. The thing that hooks them and creates environmentalists is the amount of time the kids got to spend in an unstructured way in natural settings.

 

In other words, they had experiences that meant something to them, and because they valued those intuitive and experiential events, they treasured them, they wanted to preserve them. And that became a driving force in their adult lives. And, you know, I think back to my childhood, and that’s exactly what happened to me. So anyway, yeah, I’m as, I’m glad you’re excited by this because that’s the thing that makes me feel like I’m finally doing a sustainability exhibit that targets the general public in a way that’s going to, that might actually do a lot of good.

 

Abby: Yea.

 

Brenda: I’ll bet it will.

 

Abby: Have an impact and make changes.

 

Brenda: Absolutely amazing.

 

Abby: Tom, this is so enlightening in so many ways that I didn’t anticipate. I just want to thank you so much for joining us today and this challenging, thoughtful conversation.

 

Tom: Well, thanks to both of you. It’s really an honor to be part of this with you folks.

 

Brenda: I also have to say our sponsor, Paul Orselli Workshop, Paul just bought his first all-electric vehicle, and I feel like that is a necessary plug into this conversation.

 

Abby: It very much is. Congratulations, Paul. Thanks to everyone who tuned in today. If you love what you heard, subscribe for more episodes of Matters of Experience wherever you listen to podcasts. Make sure to leave a rating and a review and share with a friend. We’ll see you next time.

 

[Music]

 

Producer: Matters of Experience is produced by Lorem Ipsum Corp and recorded at Hangar Studios. Tune in next time for more fun discussions about experience design.

 

Show Notes

Books — Tom Bowman

Bowman Design Group

Sustainable Materials: With Both Eyes Open | The Use Less Group

Beyond Ecophobia — David Sobel

The Climate Crisis is Simple with Tom Bowman

The Climate Crisis is Simple with Tom Bowman

October 4, 2023