Podcast

Abigail Honor: Welcome to Matters of Experience, a podcast that explores the creativity, innovation, and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. If you are new to the show, a hardy welcome to our regular listeners. Thank you for tuning in and supporting our conversation. My name is Abigail Honor. Hello, this is Brenda Cowan.

Abigail Honor: Today we are talking with a very recognizable voice in our community, literally and figuratively. Jonathan Alger, Jonathan, many know you as the co-founder and managing partner of CNG Partners, where your clients run the gamut and include the nine 11 Museum, nasa, Cornell, the Smithsonian, US Department of State.

Abigail Honor: I, I can go on. You’ve been honored. Buy more initialisms than I can pronounce sequentially on this show. ’cause I tried. As well as being a two time winner of the A Am Muse Awards, he’s also served two terms of the president of SEGD and recently we’re all enjoying your podcast and newsletter, making the museum.

Abigail Honor: Jonathan, a huge welcome to the show.

Jonathan Alger: Very happy to be here. Thank you both for having me. I’m a big fan of your show.

Brenda Cowan: Thank you Jonathan. I happen to know that you’re a musician, you’re an avid reader, and I think of it as a collector of amazing true or sometimes not so true facts and anecdotes. You always seem to have an incredible story to share.

Brenda Cowan: That inevitably leaves me wondering. Is that for real? I also know that you appreciate it when others in your firm have and share what I’ll call out of work talents such as art making and music. So tell us how do your myriad personal and professional interests and talents synergize into the work that you do?

Jonathan Alger: I don’t know. Uh, I think that if I were giving advice to somebody today about pursuing a career or creating a company or both, I’m not sure I would advise them to do what we have done because I’m not sure that the environment is really conducive to that. You know, nowadays it’s all about specializing and, and what we do is sort of neither specializing nor generalizing, but, somewhere in between. And I think that’s a, that’s a difficult spot to be in, I think. But for us, it’s been great. We love the lifestyle of multi-specialty work, and so we’re in, in my firm, I, I do a lot of exhibition design and experience design. That’s what I write about. That’s what I podcast about. That’s what I’m sort of most known for, but coming up in the business, I did all the other things that you would think a traditional communication design person would do: branding and, uh, way finding and digital projects and print and all of that sort of stuff. So it was sort of a apprenticeship that felt a little bit more like learning how to run or learning how to do the decathlon rather than learning how to run the a hundred meter dash only.

Jonathan Alger: But you know, again, I’m not sure that that’s business advice I would give any, anyone today. Do not, do not set out to become a medium sized Swiss army knife.

Abigail Honor: I feel the exact same way. We don’t have an elevator pitch for what we do. Every time I meet a client, it’s really hard because when you are medium size, small to medium.

Abigail Honor: I think we’re probably a bit smaller than you guys and you’re trying to pitch what you do, but you have a depth or a multidisciplinary team that can actually do branding, do wayfinding, for example, experience design, um, you know, vr, ar, digital, whatever it is in your Swiss Army knife. It’s really hard to be able to pitch that to clients when they’re often just looking for one thing

Jonathan Alger: That’s right.

Abigail Honor: I’m always trying to say, what’s your problem and let us fix it. Don’t come to us for a set specific task. How are some of the challenges? As you mentioned, you have this rich team and they have a lot of things they can do. How do you see the next five years in terms of your business? Do you ever think, oh, we need to specialize.

Abigail Honor: It will be better to be one size fits all for people or like, what’s your perception on that?

Jonathan Alger: I have no idea. I’d like to be able to answer with a very fluid and cogent, uh, words to live by that people could whip their notebook out on and start scribbling away, but I don’t really, I don’t really have an answer for that.

Jonathan Alger: I think we’re maybe birds of a feather. Um, we’ve been around long enough that we’ve just got a pretty big portfolio in each one of those areas. So when a client comes to us with a particular specialty they want, we just show them that. Every once in a while we come across a client that needs, you know, pineapples, storm doors, and to be flown in an airplane and we can handle them as well.

Abigail Honor: So in terms of like CNG, you know, you’re very much known for a focus on cultural nonprofit work. What, why, why is it tell us like that special focus and why it’s important for you?

Jonathan Alger: Our firm, uh, CNG Partners is a descended firm and of another firm called, uh, Chermayeff & Geismar, and Chermayeff & Geismar is a, a sort of a original gangster, uh, formed in the fifties old school, New York graphic design firm. One of the firms that invented or popularized the term graphic design and was one of the very first firms ever to do exhibition design as a firm actually.

Jonathan Alger: And I just happened to luckily get an opportunity to work there and I, I started there as a junior designer and I left there as, as one of the principles of the firm, and then started this firm, which is a descendant. And that firm for whatever reason, and probably personal interest, et cetera, just didn’t do much commercial work, didn’t do much marketing, didn’t sell soap as we used to say.

Jonathan Alger: And so the firm that I now am the managing partner of and one of the owners of is following suit, and that started to refine itself even more when we created this firm 20 years ago. We started eventually, after five, 10 years in, we realized that 85, 90% of of our clients and our financial health was coming from the broadly defined cultural sector.

Jonathan Alger: And so we said, let’s just plant a flag. And not actively go after commercial projects as much.

Abigail Honor: Oh, that’s really interesting. Financially, was that a gamble?

Jonathan Alger: You know, like, I’m, I’m fond of saying like, nonprofit is a tax status, not a business goal. So, uh, well run nonprofits. We work with a lot of nonprofits, we work with a lot of government entities. We work with NGOs, et cetera. Let’s think about some nonprofits that we know well by name: Harvard, the Smithsonian, National Geographic. I don’t know, NASA, if you want to include government entities. These, I don’t think you’d think of any of those entities as being poorly funded. So I think something like 10% of the workforce in the United States works in the nonprofit sector writ large.

Jonathan Alger: And so it’s, it’s a good place to be. You can even be a niche within a niche, and that’s, that’s where we are doing arts and culture.

Brenda Cowan: So when I think about how it is that CNG brings voices, people, the human into your exhibition projects and how it is that, in my interpretation, it makes for very inclusive environments, it makes for, again, very human environments.

Brenda Cowan: And I’m curious to hear a little bit about how it is that you think or you approach projects with a human element in mind. Or is it the kind of thing that just sort of develops heuristically?

Jonathan Alger: There’s always been an issue with museums taking a stand and having a very firm opinion about something. In some cases, it’s sort of incontrovertible.

Jonathan Alger: We are the Museum of Forks. Forks have tines and on the other end is a part where you hold them. Right? You can say that if you’re the museum of for, you’re the curator of the Museum of Forks. You can say things like that. But otherwise, we work with a lot of museums and museum-like entities that are a little bit uncomfortable with sort of taking a stand.

Jonathan Alger: So one of the, I don’t know, tricks or hacks or rules of thumb that, that we’ve stumbled on and and gone with is this idea of the personal testimony trick. The idea that, if we can get someone who’s maybe not a subject matter expert, they’re not an SME, they’re just somebody else who has lived experience or they’re adjacent to the subject, or they may not know everything about chemistry, but they work in a lab and we have them say what they feel about a subject, then that’s a great way for visitors to have a way in that’s a little bit more understandable to them.

Jonathan Alger: It’s also a great way for museums to avoid looking like there’s only one answer and that people are supposed to look to them for some kind of absolute truth. So that’s the sort of the personal testimony trick, and you can do that a number of ways. You can do that like we’re doing right now, recording something in audio.

Jonathan Alger: You can also do it in writing.

Brenda Cowan: I’m really curious as a leader, how it is that you effectively communicate or even educate clients about the work that you do. It’s a particular form of communication, um, I would suggest, and I’m really curious, how do you approach that?

Jonathan Alger: Yeah, I’d say I, some people refer to that as sort of, uh, consulting or educational consultative relationship with your clients. Other people refer to it as being long-winded and pedantic. I guess it, it depends on the, the situation, but I don’t mind at all trying to help clients understand every aspect of something that they might want to understand. Uh, and some people are like that, you know, on the show that I do, I just had a guest who is a specialist in museum display cases, and you can tell that she loves to explain that stuff to people, and that is stuff that really needs to be explained to people. And nine times out of 10, the clients that we’re working with are people who have never done this before. They may very well never do it again. They may decide never to do it again. Every once in a while they decide to do it again.

Jonathan Alger: But when you go in and you want to have your knee operated on, and there’s some people that are just like, hey, fix my knee, okay, knock me out, take care of it. But there are other people that said, whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait a minute. What are my options? What’s entailed? I think you just have to do that.

Abigail Honor: Given what you’ve just said in terms of the education, if you have money and you need to build a museum, they automatically, the clients think, I need an architect. I keep finding us in situations where whenever we are brought in, the client has already made some decisions, like even buying hardware too early.

Jonathan Alger: Oh yeah. We get that all the time.

Abigail Honor: And it’s,

Jonathan Alger: Yeah, the, the AV salespeople got to them.

Jonathan Alger: They got to them.

Abigail Honor: Exactly. How do we,

Jonathan Alger: That’s a really big LED wall. It’s curving.

Abigail Honor: It’s exactly like that. Yeah. So how do we build a better understanding of our industry and how to work through these projects and our process with clients or build that awareness so they’re doing it in the right order at least?

Jonathan Alger: That’s a really, that’s a super question I’ve never really thought exactly about that, you know, we are, everyone around this table is sort of around the same table, right? We don’t have a client sitting in the fourth chair over there. So if I take your question correctly, it is, how can we make sure that before we show up, the clients know what it is that we’re gonna do and they’re starting to make the right decisions, et cetera.

Jonathan Alger: So, I don’t know, maybe, uh, you know, uh, SEGD, the Society for Experiential Graph Design has just started this new group, a professional, uh, practice group, uh, that is for people to do exhibition and experience design. Maybe we should focus one of the committees of that group on creating some kind of website or page at SEGD.org or literature or something that could somehow be distributed. You could use the, the sort of the power and the force of a larger organization, uh, and kind of do a got milk campaign. Like if we’re all dairy farmers, you could do a bit of a got milk campaign, not to, not to create demand for our bovine liquid, but to make the client sort of understand, you know, what, what the basic steps are.

Abigail Honor: Yeah. And who they need sitting around the table at the beginning.

Jonathan Alger: That’s a great idea. I’m gonna go do that right now. I’m gonna leave,

Brenda Cowan: I would suggest that you’re already underway with doing this, or at least into, into begin our segue actually into talking about making the museum, part of what I see happening is you making a very substantial contribution to providing everyone and certainly, you know, prospective clients or existing clients with a vocabulary, with an understanding of the tools, the techniques, and understanding the functions and the possibilities of, you know, what I think of as a very kaleidoscopic profession. And I’m curious, was that your intention or do you see yourself doing that? Because from the outside, it seems that that is a huge part of your outcomes.

Jonathan Alger: So making the museum, shameless plug. You can look at makingthemuseum.com, dear Listener, is both a podcast, which is attempting to be as good as the podcast that I’m on right now, but is falling very short.

Brenda Cowan: Au contraire.

Jonathan Alger: But is also a newsletter. It started out as a newsletter. I was writing five very short one minute read, uh, newsletters per week and now it’s three times a week by popular demand or popular un-demand. And that started, uh, two ways. One was sort of a selfish way. I’d, I’d had a lifelong dream to attempt to get over my absolutely fundamental terror of writing, uh, in public, uh, doing something where it wasn’t just business emails, but something where I was purely writing and I was asking people to look at my writing.

Jonathan Alger: I, I, I went through school, uh, with a whole bunch of friends who are, you know, writers for a, for a business, and I always thought that that was great, and I thought that I, I couldn’t do it. I tried and it was terrible, and I wanted to tackle that monster. And so I did that and I took courses and yada yada.

Jonathan Alger: And the other thing was this thing that people do is a small community. Even if you were to say, okay, all the people that do museum exhibition and let’s add all the people that do theme park work, let’s add them in and let’s add people who do themed retail and let’s add cruise ships and uh, visitor centers and alumni centers and zoos, you know, all of that.

Jonathan Alger: Even if we brought all of those people together, it’d still be a fairly small number. So, back to architects, last time I checked, there was like 80,000. There’s probably 120,000 members of the AIA right now. But SEGD itself has what, 2000. So it’s a relatively small group, and that means that there isn’t a critical mass adequate to generate a, uh, criticism, uh, textual communication. There isn’t writing in the field per se, except here and there. And the other gap is professional development, that there isn’t a way that you can get up in the morning and have a cup of coffee and get your one word a day calendar about your profession. Or, you know, every month you take a little continuing education unit or something and it’s like, ooh, storm drain flashing great.

Jonathan Alger: You know? And I just felt that, uh, I could combine those two things. I can combine that interest in writing, the fact that I’ve been doing it for a number of years, and I can share what I’ve learned.

Abigail Honor: One of the things I just wanna pick on what you said, Jonathan, is you had a need to write. You didn’t feel comfortable writing, and you forced yourself through that discomfort to achieve the goal that was pushing you forwards.

Abigail Honor: But only from doing that and facing those fears and facing those obstacles and overcoming do you ever accomplish anything? So unfortunately, in order to accomplish anything, you have to go through the, through the quagmire and put yourself in an uncomfortable situation to get the other side.

Jonathan Alger: Uh, Abby, you’re uh, totally right.

Jonathan Alger: I think that there’s this big realm of discomfort that you have to aim for. I’ve done projects with clients, some of my client work has been insanely uncomfortable for me. Things we’re, we’re working with a client group that I don’t think I have anything in common with, I don’t agree with in some ways. I agree with the project they’re doing, but there’s something else about, uh, who they are that may be on a personal basis I wouldn’t agree with.

Jonathan Alger: And the thing that I find all the time is once you get through this sort of weird more Mordor on the other side, you’re like: What? That wasn’t Mordor at all. Who has so worried about that zone of discomfort turns out in retrospect, looking back at it to be wonderful. I’ve had clients that I thought were gonna be just, I, I don’t, I don’t know how we’re gonna get through this.

Jonathan Alger: And you kind of figure it out. And after the first meeting, everybody is like, you know, going out to lunch together individually, you are like, what?

Abigail Honor: Yeah, I completely agree. Completely agree. And also dealing in the moment that it’s not comfortable with the job where you’ve overreached somewhere or you feel you may be overreaching or you’re not all on the same page, whatever the challenge is, learning to deal with the stress of that is something that I’m constantly challenged with.

Brenda Cowan: Well, this is something, uh, we had, uh, on a recent podcast, Sarana Pringle from Yale who does studies and research in creativity and emotional intelligence. And this was a piece of what she was talking about and what she studies, which is for the creative person, and I would say for a creative leader as well, being able to enter into discomfort and being able to manage not knowing. How this is going to turn out or where this is going to go is an enormous skill and it’s something that you have as a significant tool in your toolbox.

Jonathan Alger: Yeah, I think that’s often the case when you’re, when you’re an entrepreneur, you’re a business leader, or you’re a partner in a firm, or you’re trying to, uh, negotiate any kind of new possibility. It’s highly likely that some aspect of what you’re being asked to do is something that you currently are not a master of, and it simply doesn’t work that you would attempt to become a master of the thing in advance and then seek out somebody because all of the engagements are unique. They’re all one-offs, right? They’re all very individual. We just finished a project for. It’s an interactive university project at a lab of Ornithology where the, the median visitor is a 62-year-old, uh, white female with expensive binoculars. If I had attempted to become the master of that before we began that, I don’t know, I’d have a very long gray beard and then they would’ve chosen somebody else. So you have to be willing to knit the parachute on the way down a little bit. You, you have to be confident that you can do it. You have to have a, a record of having done that many times. Before to be confident, like, sure, I can jump out the plane.

Abigail Honor: Mm-hmm. What about fear of failure? Do you think some of the motivation is because you’re like, I’m not gonna fail. I cannot fail. Or how do you deal with failure? Because we all fail. Right? You fail forward. That’s how you learn. That’s how you grow. I’m a big believer in failure, so how do you deal with it?

Jonathan Alger: I like it. I’m gonna, I’m gonna make a mug. I’m a big believer in failure. I like that. Yeah. You have to acknowledge that you will have a failure, but. You have to make the right bets, right? Everything is thinking in bets, so there are situations where you’re guaranteed to fail. Take on situations like that deliberately and for a specific reason. Otherwise, try to find situations where you could possibly not fail and just do everything you can to not fail.

Abigail Honor: It’s a delicate balance though, right? Because as you are boldly going where you haven’t gone before, trying something new or part new, there is still probably, if we were betting people, a percentage of failure always.

Jonathan Alger: Right, and you do fail. You do fail. That’s, that’s for sure. You get more points for, you know, most improved player is sort of more impressive than player who yet again, one player of the year.

Brenda Cowan: Well, you’re never starting from zero after you have gone for something you’ve attempted, something, you fail, and when you go again, you’re not starting from zero. And I think that that is a reality, and it’s also a mindset that can really, you know, it’s like an abundance mindset. It really enables you, I would suggest, to be able to build the skill and to perhaps end up mastering. Whatever the case might be.

Abigail Honor: Yesterday, we did a pitch for a big commercial campaign and we made the images in ai. We brought them to life in ai and these were science images and technology images, and so we basically made a video in four hours. We got the job simply because we just outworked everyone in this four hours and made what looked like you. The client could see the spots, right? We gave them that wet their appetite. And so I’m sort of shocked at how quickly it’s going and I just wondered how you felt about it because we are already seeing clients using it.

Abigail Honor: So if we are not doing it, they’ll come to the table and show us what, well, last night we did this and so we have to keep up with our clients now. Because you get a client who happens to be, have a creative director who’s very techie and suddenly we can’t be outworked by them. So I just wondered what your, we’re in a frenetic race to keep up with AI and to see how we can use it effectively, and I just wondered what your thinking was on it all.

Jonathan Alger: Yeah, I, I think that, uh, you know, the advances in AI are not evenly distributed. Mm-hmm. It’s not a, it’s not a yeah’s kind of a linear way that’s moving up the beech tsunami that’s coming towards our island or whatever. It’s, I don’t know. It’s, it’s an army where some of the phalanx are further ahead than the other ones or something.

Jonathan Alger: But in, in what we do when we’re trying to work on a physical space, it’s a complex, unique, three-dimensional puzzle. In, um, a situation like that, there is no way that AI can solve the problem for you. Uh, once you’ve solved it, AI could, you know, render up something similar. Uh, in the early days of Dall-E and Midjourney.

Jonathan Alger: I said, you know, Dall-E, hey, I’m gonna experiment with you. I’d like to you to make me, uh, an uh, photographic realistic image of a young woman in a sundress in a museum looking at a sword that’s in a vitrine. And the results were absolutely laughable. So the more specific in the early days right now for ai, the more specific that you want to get, the less joy you’re gonna have and things that are already well chewed and masticated by the computers of the internet where there’s already ample material to learn on. You’ll be able to do something like that. So if I were to say, Hey, AI, give me a picture of a multicultural group of preppy kids drinking sodas. Boy, I could get some great stuff for that. But if I were to say like, give me an image of a really cool concept for an exhibit that’s about, uh, shepherding in Iceland. It’s gonna, it’s gonna balk.

Abigail Honor: Yep. Last question. Advice to young exhibit designers?

Jonathan Alger: I would say in, it depends. If you would like to make yourself indispensable and get a well-rounded, a little bit of everything, kind of an experience to go work at a firm that is looking for that. You should go sign up for Brenda’s program. If you would like to work for a firm like mine and there aren’t many or like yours, Abby, there, there’s maybe 20, 25 firms like ours in the entire country. If you wanna work for a firm like that, it’s a little bit more of a mercenary outlook. And for people like that, I would recommend, uh, that you should, first, you should become a T-shaped person. You should get a very broad understanding, but there should be one thing that you’re very deep in. And, um, that, that might be architecture. We have our, um, our head, our most senior staff member in 3D design has two degrees in architecture.

Jonathan Alger: So, uh, and you know, likewise with graphic design, uh, likewise with media, et cetera. So, um, when people are hiring us and they, they need to get the job done well, and they need to get it done quickly, et cetera, that’s, that’s the kind of, um, talent pool that we’re, that we’re looking for.

Abigail Honor: Well, Jonathan, thank you so much for joining us. This was really, really interesting and entertaining. And yeah, everybody check out MTM. It’s a fantastic podcast.

Brenda Cowan: It really is.

Abigail Honor: Podcast. Absolutely. Essential. Essential, I think.

Jonathan Alger: Aw, I like that word. Yeah.

Abigail Honor: So, um, yeah, thank you and thanks to everyone who tuned in today. If you like what you heard, subscribe for more episodes of Matters of Experience and make sure to leave a rating and a review and share with a friend.

Abigail Honor: We’ll see you next time.

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

Murilo Melo

HERSHE

Grad in Black

New York Festivals Advertising Awards

[Music]

Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience, a podcast that explores the creativity, innovation and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. If you’re new, a hearty welcome, and to our regular listeners, thank you for tuning in and supporting our conversation. My name is Abigail Honor.

Brenda: Hello, everyone. This is Brenda Cowan.

Abby: So today we’re chatting with Murilo Melo, who is the global head of design at Gut. He has over 20 years of experience working at agencies like Leo Burnett, Publicis Brazil, and Havas. He’s worked on iconic projects for clients like Coca-Cola, Netflix, Google and Hershey: I’m not a huge fan of the taste of that chocolate, but what I do like was the HERSHE campaign for International Women’s Day, where you showcased female artists of all types on the packaging and across digital.

It was absolutely beautiful and told our story really, really effectively. And you’ve also won awards like such a long list of awards, top national, international festivals like Cannes Lions, D&AD, Effie, One Show, Clio, the list goes on. And now your career is most definitely climaxing as you join my design jury at New York Festival Advertising Awards this year, as we have the opportunity to review and award the top talent in design experience design for the past year, which we’re going to talk about later. Murilo, welcome to the show.

Murilo: Thank you so much, Abigail. Thank you, Brenda. And after this introduction, I might call you for every meeting I do with my team.

Abby: We’re available. We’re available. I’ve never been to Brazil. I’m right there.

Brenda: Oh my gosh. And I’m right there with you. And what is so delightful is that you make it very easy for us to be very enthusiastic about your work and what you do and where you’ve been. I’d love to dive in and get us kickstarted with thinking about what it’s like to design for iconic brands, iconic brands that are household names around the world, and even through your design work, how it is that you’re at once thinking on a massive scale, right, globally, but also about everyday people, everyday lives. Can you tell us about how you craft messages, how you craft experiences that work for the whole world, so to speak, and yet resonate with just individual people? The human scale.

Murilo: Yeah, this, this Brenda, is a challenge because these brands, most of these brands we are talking about, they are loved brands and people love brands, people connect with the brands, they talk about it, they’re reacting to their social media. So, when you’re working with these kind of major brands around the world, it is a responsibility to know what to do. But also the payoff is amazing because of course you have great minds at the brand side, from the marketing team, from the, even the design team inside the companies, and I feel this is important. I’m super respectful for what the relationship between brands and people, and the goal is always to be impactful in a good way, because people, people get it, you know, when you’re pushing too hard or when it’s not related and you’re just doing something to call the attention. So, what I try to do, and I think it really works, is to be true to the brand and to the consumers.

Abby: That’s really interesting.

Brenda: What does it look like to be true to the consumer? Like, is there a way of thinking about the person so that we can resonate with, you know, the brand with them? Is there a particular like headspace that you get into, or is there a method?

Murilo: I don’t think there’s an established method, but I think it’s something related to, deliver to the people what the brand has to give, because sometimes we see some, some brands, or some communication pushing so hard into a direction that the brand does not represent. They don’t have that commitment inside of their marketing team. And then it sounds fake, you know. So, I think it’s, it’s a kind of a respectful thing. And I think brands are more—they are more aware of this nowadays. We lived at a time, a recent period that anything was worth it to say if it looked good for the brands. And people are not buying that anymore and brands are taking more care. I think it’s something that the market is more mature about, which is great.

Abby: But how do you like, in, like taking Hershey or Coca-Cola, I know a lot of people enjoy Hershey, lots of people enjoy Coca-Cola. How are you putting yourself in the mind’s eye of the consumer? Do you look on social? Are you seeing the way they talk about the brand, what they like about the brand? How is it that you know how to successfully address that consumer? Words to use, visuals to choose, or concept to make the campaign about? Do you know what I mean? Because you’re over there, you’re in Brazil, you may or may not like the brand you’re working for. So how do you bridge that gap?

Murilo: Yeah, for example, the Hershey’s campaign, HERSHE, it all started with the finding that on the name and in the packaging, you have “her,” and you have “she,” which is nice, a nice finding, and we are all excited about that. But we’re like, what are we doing with this? Like, are we just saying, hey, there’s “her” and “she,” here, congratulate woman. Well, I don’t think that’s enough. But that’s kind of what I was saying before, like why, why are you saying that?

Then we took a step further and say, hey, we should elevate women, her, artists, she writes, her poems, her paintings, and then bring the community in. And like I was saying, inside the company at the time we worked on this project, there was, a department that was, the leadership was filled, I mean, majority of the leadership was women. So, it was all true to the brand, but it came to the consumers to be part of that. And the initiative really worked because it has a large scale of showing the artists and making a gallery and exporting the idea to many countries. And the community got excited because we can, you can do these kind of things, and the community refuses, and that’s okay, it’s part of the job. But it was interesting for everyone. So, I think when we got into that place, we said, well, we are actually doing something relevant, influential, and not only communication or advertising, you know.

Brenda: Yeah, it was a dialogue.

Murilo: Yes.

Abby: When you think about design, it can mean a lot of things. It’s a huge umbrella, right? There’s visual and communication design, digital and user experience design, UX, product industrial design, environmental experiential design, marketing, advertising design, fashion design, spatial design. So, talk to us about what your focus is or what types of design you’re drawn to in your sort of everyday life, so not necessarily what you put out, but what influences you.

Murilo: Yeah, sure, and design is everywhere, is in everything. And that is hard for us that are obsessed about design because it’s like, where do I look? So, I mean, I live in a constant, like, overwhelming about everything that is being done, especially now that we have access to everything throughout social media. And it’s too much, actually, because it’s too much good stuff that you see, interesting stuff and it’s hard to follow everything.

But what really caught my attention and what I like, I love the most when I talk about design and talking about the day by day, is when I see design connected to creativity. And it could sound redundant because it is a creative expression. But when design is connected to a creative purpose or something behind it, I think it’s, it elevates the creativity and the creativity, it’s really beneficiated by design.

I’ve been seeing a lot of luxury brands on social media, and they’re working so well with design, and animation, and kind of unusual things visually. And this is, is more interesting for me at least, than what we saw in the past that was kind of a blasé thing, something more distant. So, I mean, it’s a random example, but I think creativity elevates design, and since my day-by-day work is—I have a design studio inside of an advertising agency, right? So, my sweet spot in curiosity in my heart is between this connection: design and creativity coming to impact and to amuse people.

Brenda: We had a wonderful conversation a while ago with Zorana Pringle, who is an expert in creativity. She does research at Yale, and I really appreciate listening to you talk about creativity right now and its relationship with design and also thinking about how it is that creativity is kind of like a muscle that we exercise, and it sounds like, you know, when you talk about imagination, when you talk about inspiration, when you talk about creativity, you very much so are bringing a lot of that, you know, that muscle to the table, if you will, which certainly must make a big difference, or at least it seems to result in some pretty remarkable projects.

So, thinking about some remarkable projects, one of the things that I was really curious about was about pitching to clients. And I’m curious when you know that you truly have something special to share, what’s it like when you know that you’ve really created this amazing idea, and is there a trick to getting everybody else on board?

Murilo: That’s a good question, and I wish I had the trick answer, but I think it’s deeper than that because it’s a construction. In the past, I think designers from, especially from this environment, advertising, creativity, branding, they were often seen as finishers of an idea, right, like executing, developed the concept, so let’s put the design team now that things are coming right. And this perception is shifting. For me, it already shifted completely. So, designers are no longer just problem solvers, they are problem definers. So, they help shape conversation before a single visual idea is created, and this is where I think is the heart of the, the thing when you want to, let’s call it sell a design piece. You got to show the relevance before because it’s a business decision because it’s important for the brand to create value. And then I show you the idea of how doing that. And it’s not just like, being a showman, a showwoman in presenting, but about making the client realize how important the design is for its brand or its projects.

Abby: I have a quick, quick sort of build on to that because we’ve had some experiences where we’ve pitched something, a concept, and the client initially has loved it, and then over successive meetings, or it even could be the next one, something internally shifted and the feedbacks almost gets 180ed. Has that ever happened to you, when client feedback has started off really onboard to an idea and sort of got watered down, maybe somehow.

Brenda: Something got lost in the process.

Murilo: Yeah, yeah, this is really frequent because the clients, they have more complex structures nowadays, like I think before it was one-on-one, just a team of decision makers and now the big clients, they have a whole marketing team, a lot of layers, and we work with something that is kind of subjective. We sell like ideas and there is risk on that.

That’s why I think the most important thing is to push courage from the clients. It is brave to approve something that has not been done, or that’s kind of not what the brand has always worked on. And we at Gut, we have a methodology which is amazing, which is the bravery scale. We bring clients in and we say, hey, let’s look at the bravery scale, from 1 to 10, and we talk about what is being 10, brave, like living like there’s no tomorrow. And 1 is like, hey, I don’t know if I should. And there are a lot of steps on this bravery scale. And maybe the thing on some projects is to go from 2 to 3, which is amazing. It’s incredible. It’s not being like; I’m going to throw the papers and put my job in risk. No, it’s something, it’s one thing that’s going to maybe be rewarded and then you’re going to jump more. It’s going to make you feel secure and more brave. So, it’s this kind of thing we talk about this with the clients and it sometimes works.

Brenda: That’s such a beautiful answer.

Abby: Yeah, what a great idea as well to get people on board with where they’re coming from, because a lot of our guests talk about boards, if we’re creating exhibitions for museums and lots of different stakeholders, as you mentioned, often 50 up to 100 different stakeholders, all with different appetites for risk, all perceiving the job to be done with different risks involved and wanting to, as you just mentioned, move the needle. So, it’s a really great method that you’ve just described for making sure that at least from your perspective, as the agency, you understand where the client’s risk adversity lies or bravery lies. I think that’s fantastic.

Brenda: It is good. And also, I would imagine that your, your awareness of the consumer and, some of those sort of emotional connections that people have with the products, with the brands makes a big difference.

Murilo: It’s super does, and we live in a world that it’s possible to test and learn faster. You can try with a small group, you can try it on social media and see how, how is the appetite of people, if the client is a low score on the brave scale, it is a way to start, like, let’s push the tone a little bit and try this with this group. Well, it’s a good reaction. Let’s amplify. Can we scale that? And when we scale that the bravery will be rewarded. And if it is rewarded, it is something that it’s inspiring. Colleagues, the juniors of the team will say, hey, you look what he did, he, it was risky, and it was worth it. I mean, I’m talking like a dreamer because I believe in this. I think this really works.

Abby: Do you think that being a dreamer, like you’re obviously great, very personable, I would imagine fantastic with clients, very articulate. You just mentioned juniors. Can you teach what you have?

Murilo: Well, I think it’s about trust, intimacy. It’s like everything in life when we are, like, you have to make an impression, you are not yourself, and when you’re not yourself, things sound kind of fake. If you don’t connect, you don’t convince anyone of anything, you know, and that’s not quite easy, because sometimes from the client side or even from inside our team, people are not that open. And how to open their, their hearts and their conversation, and to make this, it’s this kind of soft skill, let’s call it, like that, that I think the world, the world is given so much credit for. Because technically, with all we are seeing the AI things and everything, we are reaching a high level of technical capabilities. But the emotional one, I think that’s the key for these kind of things, you know.

Brenda: The pace at which new design tools are being created have sped up projects, and I’m really curious about whether in your experiences, whether or not expectations have shifted in terms of how like rapidly teams are developing and implementing design work. How do you stay so thoughtful? How do you stay so true to the richness of what it is that you’re creating in an industry that seems to be moving increasingly faster?

Murilo: It is a paradox because it saves us time, but for us to use it and save us time, we have to invest time to learn. But I think we have to find room to, to breathe, to absorb and to use it and to move it to the next round because it’s a cause of a lot of anxiety. I’m really anxious because when we are working and doing great work and I see something coming out and say, hey, should I have worked less on this project to dedicate time for me and my team to learn that? Because this is the future and if you go into that direction, I mean, I don’t know if we can survive. It’s too much. So, I would, I would take a breath and focus on the work. Stay curious, of course, it’s like, it’s essential for our, has always been for our profession, but at least for me, I don’t see myself always working and producing and learning and testing new. I mean, we have to have space for stuff, you know, that’s at least my point of view.

Abby: Well, I think also with, with AI, when you’re making imagery, it’s a whole different way of being creative. So originally, we had pen to paper and it was one way of drawing something, and then you have your tablet and you have your pen, and now we have writing words to create images, which is a whole different mode of processing. And I’m sure if we had a scientist here, when it comes to the brain, like I’m, I’m much more a hold and do, a physical—and so now I’m typing words to articulate an image that I’m trying to get to. But it takes time, and it takes practice. We’re finding it still takes huge amounts of time to get exactly what you want. It takes no time to get something, it’s how well you can start working with it and collaborating with it.

Murilo: Yeah, there’s something kind of personal about this. I realized I have always loved notebooks and Moleskines and taking notes, and I realized, it was something that just came to me, that I was not using anymore. I had forgotten my notebooks, and I was searching already, I was thinking on the computer, so I went to Pinterest, to Google, maybe to ChatGPT, anything and was trying to—and then it came to me in December say, no, no, I have to get back to my notebook. And I bought a notebook, and it was game changer. I dedicate ten minutes, I don’t know, some time, thinking, writing, and then I use the machine and I’m trying to do this with the team, hey, hey, let’s, let’s be like AI-free, computer-free for a moment, and then we go—this step is magic, and it already made a lot of difference in my year.

Brenda: Oh, good for you.

Abby: I have a question for you, Brenda, about your students.

Brenda: Sure.

Abby: So, in a way, Murilo’s getting his team to slow down, and in answer to your observation that everything’s going faster, how do your students do that? Like how do we fight against the world we live in because everybody’s tempted to just go in and do the prompt, which is a—just get on with it, you know. When you’re talking with your students and guiding them through the world they’re about to go into, what is some advice you give them on how to slow down?

Brenda: What I’m able to do with my students is shape an understanding that we’re not fighting, necessarily, the world. The world is, you know, it is changing. It’s developing. It’s growing. The tools are there. They are faster. Ultimately, though, I have a bit of a privilege and I think the students have a bit of a luxury being in the classroom where I can say, we’re going to take a pause right now, and where the majority of the work that I do with them is paper and pencil and it’s, you know, kind of crazy and kind of messy and a little chaotic and very, very creative. And I think that learning that taking that pause, again, like, you know, we’re hearing right now, it’s just simply another tool. A pause is a tool, just like AI is a tool, just like paper and pencil are tools.

Murilo: Perfect, yes.

Brenda: So, what are like maybe 1 or 2 of the projects that you’re the most proud of?

Murilo: We did a project that was really meaningful for so many people. There’s this thing, this, this pain around the world. That is when people are going to graduate, the graduation caps, they are hard to fit into Black people hair. And then our team, which has Black people creating, executing the idea, which of course is their place to think about it, they came up with a solution, said, hey, why shouldn’t we find a designer and make some special graduation caps for all kinds of hairs? And then we said, well, this is amazing. This is a really human thing, and it’s an important moment. It’s about self-esteem, everything. And then we went to talk with a designer, a fashion designer, and he was amazed by the idea. He draw 4 or 5 caps for different kinds of curly hair. And then it was like, it was liquid, people and especially Black people that had passed these into their graduations that work here, they were so excited about the idea. And of course, we were excited too. And then we put it out in the world, and it was amazing. It was amazing. It was really emotional. And now we are actually having the caps into the graduation ceremonies and people are actually wearing them. So, I’m super proud of this, you know.

Brenda: Oh my God, this is amazing. This is, like literally, this is a problem in my own program and with my students when they graduate.

Murilo: It is Grad In Black, it’s called, the project. And we have an open source for these designs. So, the designers did, we have an open source, a PDF where you can just do it anywhere you want. It tells you how to, and it’s there.

Brenda: Amazing.

Abby: That’s incredible. Well, so that’s an example of design solving a big problem. Right? That is super rewarding. So, let’s talk about our design jury at New York Festival Advertising Awards. So, you’ll be joining a number of incredible jury members like Jonathan Alger from C&G and Monica Herman from Giant Spoon. So I’m excited to collaborate with Scott Rose, the president, to add sections in the design category that reflect our profession like experiential activations, branded environments, and exhibition design, as well as all the more traditional design entries, because one of the reasons Murilo, that, at least I and I believe Brenda, want to do our podcast is to really build awareness about what we do. And a lot of that is exhibition design, experience design. And so having those categories now under the design umbrella and be recognized for awards is incredibly important to all of the people making amazing work. So, what is it about these awards that are exciting for you?

Murilo: The jury will see much more work, creative work because the market is wider. The market is asking for more work. So, we are producing more design work, more relevant design work and it will be amazing to see. I’m actually really curious because I think this past year was game changer for design. So, I think it’s our opportunity to learn, the jury and anyone who applies the work. It is something good because people keep consuming, because people see what have beaten them or what they have beaten. So, it’s a time to study. In advertising and design, we don’t dedicate as much time to study as in medicine, for example. And I think the award shows, they have these, these possibility. Okay, let’s see the golds for New York Festival this year, what the jury said the golds are, where are the industry heading. So, it’s something about the future too, because a lot of these great minds coming together to this conclusion, it is something pointing to the future.

Brenda: That is so exciting. Murilo, I’m really hoping you can talk to us about something that you are very, currently, very passionate about. What is—and it could be anything, this is a big, wide open question, but what are you just really, really excited about working with right now?

Murilo: I’m trying to go deeper into the entertainment industry. We are doing a project for a rapper/singer in Brazil, and he has such an amazing concept for his album, and we are navigating through that, how to make content for a musician, and the first part was doing a graphic design, and it’s already amazing because you have to study the platforms, how it will look like in Spotify or Apple Music. But beyond that, how is the music industry communicating? Is it a long format? It is a video clip, it is not a video clip anymore, is something on TikTok. So, it’s like a reinvention and there are no answers for these questions, as every time is a new thing. Like Beyoncé comes with an album that talks about, I mean, all the legacy from the country music, and it’s something that is a decision. But Rosalía doing something in TikTok, that is making a performance of her whole live album, which is something that shook the industry. So, I’m really curious about that at this moment.

And I would expand the music thing to entertainment, like we are working for a project for Netflix and it’s a new series, it’s a title treatment, and then you have to deep dive on how the art direction and the design comes to life inside the series. How can we apply the logo or the, the attitude or the photography inside of the content? So, these are things that are on my radar right now, and I’m really trying to study and to learn about them.

Brenda: I don’t know, you know, I listen, I’m listening to you, and I just keep imagining that you think in a very kaleidoscopic way, like how it is that you are able to integrate so many different aspects of design, be curious about so many different kinds of things, and yet altogether you’re able to form a single message, a single image, perhaps a single idea.

Abby

This was really enjoyable. I love the way you described us as problem designers. I just love that. And that method of sort of when you’re pitching, showing the relevance to the client, whatever it is you’re pitching and creating that value and then showing the idea is just is it’s a great way to really ease in ideas that are out of the box. Murilo, thank you so much.

Brenda: What a pleasure talking to you.

Abby: Yeah, this was fantastic.

Murilo: It was really a special moment. Thank you.

Abby: And thanks to everyone who tuned in today. If you liked 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.

Brenda: Thank you for joining us, 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.

Monica Herman

Giant Spoon

29ROOMS — Monica Herman

SAMSUNG YOUNIVERSE — Monica Herman

ADIDAS FORUM CITY TAKEOVER — Monica Herman

UNBOTHERED WASH DAY — Monica Herman

HOUSE OF DRAGONS — Monica Herman

[Music]

Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience. My name is Abigail Honor.

Brenda: Hello, this is Brenda Cowan.

Abby: This podcast is produced by Lorem Ipsum, a multimedia experience design company headquartered in New York City, and our podcast explores the creativity, innovation and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. Hello to anybody listening for the first time, and welcome back to our regular listeners.

So today we’d like to welcome Monica Herman to the show, who currently works at Giant Spoon as their VP Executive Creative Director. Now, besides being responsible for the now pretty iconic House of Dragons second season promotion—which was awesome, and from my apartment I can see the Empire State Building, and there was suddenly this huge dragon creeping around the top and I was stoked, and like, “who is the genius behind this?”—and part of a fantastic integrated campaign across the city and around the world, Monica has also led experiential creative globally across Vice Media Group. And you were responsible for 29Rooms, which was another viral sensation, and you’ve got what, interestingly, both an architectural and agency background, which seems like really that sweet spot in so many ways right now. So, Monica, I’m excited to talk with you. Welcome to the show.

Monica: Thank you so much, Abigail and Brenda. I really appreciate you having me. I’ve known Brenda for years now, and I’ve been, it’s been such a pleasure visiting her class at FIT and just hearing all the great things she’s working on, and I’m so excited to talk to you both.

Brenda: We are really excited to have you, in part because you have such a breadth of areas of experience, exploration and expertise, and you’ve worn many different hats throughout your career thus far. And when I think about your work, I think about how it is that you always create with an eye for storytelling and creating epic experiences in different kinds of ways. So, we’re going to begin by just asking you about where your journey began. How did your creative world begin?

Monica: You know, it’s funny because I had parents, you know, who loved the arts, who encouraged me to do whatever. And I think, you know, I came to that very naturally. But I’d say the origin story starts with Sex and the City, which came out, I think, when I was like in sixth grade or eighth grade or somewhere around there. And I remember, like my rich friend had HBO, right, and like I would go over to their house and like when their parents weren’t watching, we would like, turn on Sex and the City, and like, my mind exploded, you know, I was like, this is New York City?! And like, the clothes and like the fantasy and it’s, it’s funny, you know, you watch it now and, you know, there’s 6000 ways it’s problematic, but for, you know, a 13-year-old in Michigan, I was like, must get there. Must do those things.

Brenda: I was just going to say, so were you like in like an urban setting or—

Monica: No.

Brenda: More of a suburb?

Monica: Small town.

Brenda: So, this was new in a whole variety of ways for you?

Monica: Yeah, it was, it was. And, you know, my mother’s family is from Chicago, so, you know, been going to the city, it wasn’t like I was on the farm, like seeing, you know, television for the first time. But just this idea that cities were just full of possibility and again, being a very aesthetically driven person, just really being blown away by this idea.

And of course, not just that, but any other cultural reference at the time where you just saw like the, like I said, the fashion and the architecture, and so I was very single minded sort of in that approach and I, I remember I think it was in like my, like a school play program in my, you know, senior year where I said, like, I wanted to be like Charlotte York. I wanted to go in art and business. Like, that sounded right to me. You know, I was like, yeah, that I get that.

Abby: So, yeah, what happened next?

Monica: Well, what happened next is I did get that art history degree at University of Michigan, and I came to the city actually planning, in all seriousness, to go into art business. And I had wanted to—I always knew I wanted a master’s degree, but I moved to the city, I graduated from undergrad, came to the city in 2008, which is when the economy crashed and I had gotten a job through some connections at a textile and rug gallery in Soho, which was like amazing.

So, working in Soho, you know, I was a gallerista, you know, I was at the front, and I was doing all those things. And, you know, I was watching the economy, like, collapse around me. Right? And quite literally, cause you’re in Soho, you’re just like seeing the streets empty out, you know, and people would come in and inquire about this and that, but no one’s buying, you know, $25,000 rugs in 2008. So, watching that experience and watching my boss, who had just recently started that business, sort of grapple with that, I got a little scared, you know, like, and it was okay, and I said, wow, like, I want a, I want a hard skill. Right? And I felt, you know, the luxury market, which is what art really is, you know, for if we’re getting into it didn’t seem like the right thing to go into at the time, especially because, you know, I didn’t necessarily have the connections to like, make it in that market.

So, I said, okay, hard skill, hard skill, how do I get one of those? And I remember—I swear, I don’t watch that much television, but maybe this is just younger, in my younger days—Project Runway was very popular. So now I’m Sex and City, Project Runway. I’m definitely gonna regret this podcast later. So, I said, like, maybe there’s something with fashion design. So, I looked up Parsons and I was super interested. But you know, they didn’t have a master. You had to get an undergrad, and I didn’t want to do that at the time, I knew I’d be doing this on my own with student loans, so there’s just a lot of factors there. And I came across a master’s program for architectural lighting, and I saw that, and I said, that, like, I want to do that. I don’t know what that is. It sounded great. I must do that. I ended up going to the dean because I had no portfolio. And I said, like, let me in, let me in. Please. So, he said, okay, go to summer school for architecture, which I did. And then I started my master’s in architectural lighting design, and then I ended up working in that field for two and a half years after grad school.

Abby: Wow. That’s amazing.

Brenda: No, it’s, you are exactly what I hope all of my graduate students would be like. You know, and actually, I think that they really are because so many of them, right, likewise, they come into the program, they’re just like, gimme, gimme, gimme. I want to get into this industry. I want to get into this business. I don’t even know exactly, entirely precisely what it is, but I know that I want it, and that’s such an important way to think. And I can actually see back to the original idea of, you know, the origin story. It makes sense that you have ended up or at this point in your career, doing things that are really innovative and really different and unexpected and really spectacular in a lot of ways.

Abby: How did you decide to sort of move over or include all of the experience design you’re now doing? So, what was that transition like and why did it happen?

Monica: So, I was really lucky. I ended up in an incredible architectural lighting agency, I would say the best in the world, the Office for Visual Interaction. And my main client was Zaha Hadid and I was working on—

Abby: Wait, your main client off the bat?

Monica: Yes, off the bat.

Abby: Wow.

Monica: Off the bat, that’s right. And so, you know, working on the Zaha work and traveling to Rabat and traveling to London and being under the tutelage of such incredible designers and the founders, Jean and Enrique, absolutely amazing. It was like going to boot camp.

Abby: How were you chosen? Why, why you?

Monica: You know, you’ll have to call Jean and Enrique and ask. But I do remember, I was lucky, I remember they came to see my thesis presentation. Maybe what they, they saw in my work, which, coming from liberal arts, I was so obsessed with sort of psychology and the human experience, and I remember, so there’s, there’s a tendency, I think, in some of those, theses that I’ve seen now over the years, because I go back to school, for people to, to really focus on sort of like tactical problem solving, and a lot of the themes come up again and again and they’re not bad. They’re ripe for, for discussion, whether it’s like, circadian rhythms or, you know, hospital lighting or all these things.

But I really came at it from what I saw as like a very sort of emotional, romantic, and I was, my thesis was about, you know, how lighting profoundly can influence people’s relationships in space, right, so if I’m having this conversation with you at this table and we’re under this fluorescent lighting, that sets the tone, if nothing else was changed except suddenly it’s just me, you and a candle between us, like, everything’s different. Just, just by changing that. And I, you know, I found that subject so fascinating, and I think it was, it was different, and they respected that.

So, back to your question, which was okay, but then how did I go from that to, to leaving that. And I think it speaks to okay, I was with the best in the industry. I was, I was working on the best architect in the world. I was working on the most exciting projects, and I wasn’t fundamentally happy. And I don’t know, happiness, if you want to say it that way, but there was something that, I think, about the field was potentially at odds with my personality or the kind of things that drive me, which has to do with probably my worst trait, which is like impatience.

And I think to be a successful architect, and you could, I’m sure other people would argue differently, you know, you—patience is really a key virtue. And when I spoke to the really passionate architects, you know, on Zaha’s side, the way they spoke about their work and the idea of legacy and leaving something behind and their dedication to seeing something through with decades, you know, I’m sitting across the table and being like, that’s so cool. I don’t feel that at all. Like I just, I didn’t feel that way.

And so, I was sort of fixated on this idea, like, what is this? How could I possibly be bored in this field that’s fundamentally unboring? But to me, who just, like, wants to keep moving on and trying new things like, I don’t know that I have it in me to really sort of dive in for that decades long, which is what the projects deserve, and which is incredible. I wish I was that person.

Abby: Is it the legacy part that you weren’t—like if they’re doing these ten-year projects so that they can leave a legacy and the building will stand, is the projects you do now, one, bam, they’re done. You are leaving a legacy of the work that you’ve, I mean incredible work, your portfolio, but a different sort of legacy I guess, not one that people can go and physically enjoy. So, do you think about your legacy in your work right now?

Monica: No, I think about my legacy in my personal relationships, and I actually think, so that’s one of the things that gives me the freedom to enjoy my job is that I take my work very seriously, and I am so dedicated to and I have so much gratitude. But it’s a cliche to say, like, we’re not, you know, curing cancer, but it’s a cliche for a reason. You have to approach work that way where it’s, you know, your, you kind of say like, this is fundamentally, it’s a non-necessary thing, that it’s just a joy to create. So yeah. So, I’ve never felt that. I feel very motivated by my career. I love to work. I feel lucky to work. I’m ambitious, but I’ve never felt like I must leave my mark on the world. I’d love to. I mean, I love reading, so I get so jealous of novelists, you know, and I wish that was me, but since it’s not and when I look at that, I’ve never felt like, oh, that’s the thing I need to leave behind.

Brenda: You strike me as a very highly present person, and a person who’s really all in, in the moment and being creative and really thinking through what it is that you’re doing and being creative. And it just seems to me that working like that, you know, whether it leaves a legacy or not, who cares? We’re in the moment, we’re making something cool as shit, right?

Abby: But she’s making—you are, Monica, communicating with people because you’re making memories and moments for others which leave an indelible mark, and they’ll remember forever and ever. Like when you think about Sex and the City and that little relevance that it played to you in moving to New York City, when you see some of or encounter some of the projects that you’ve worked on, I mean, they really connect with people, and I think that they’ve built those people’s memories and people hopefully will be inspired in whatever it is they do after being immersed in some of the amazing things that you’ve created, that I know we’re going to go on to talk about. So, I think that you’re, the way you are and who you are is very much reflected in the type of work you do.

Brenda: I think that there’s a big difference between doing creative work because it’s what you want to do, and it’s where you are, and it’s the headspace that you’re in. There’s a difference between just doing the work and/or protecting your brand, so to speak. And I think that that makes for really different kinds of projects, if I were to guess.

Abby: And then moving to your projects, so you work physically, digitally, conceptually, and all of your work really connects people together in very powerful, playful and even I would say introspective ways. So, I’m thinking about the Samsung YOUniverse (y-o-universe to those listening) Experience, the Adidas City Takeover that you did, and Unbothered Wash Day. So, you’ve done a ton of different projects for brands and messaged in ways that really reach out to participants in meaningful and personal ways. So, tell us about some of your projects where you think the story really was evergreen or archetypal and connected with people in fundamental ways?

Monica: Well, let’s talk about Unbothered Wash Day. So, this was a virtual event—that cursed phrase, virtual event. But this happened in January, I believe, of 2021, right, so right in the thick of the pandemic. I was working at Vice at the time, and Unbothered was a Refinery29 subbrand focused on our Black female audience. And there had been success editorially with a column called Wash Day that focused on ritual and haircare, and the idea of that sort of time of week where our Black female audience was doing, sort of, wash day, doing hair. And there was so much talk around that, and there was so much online community forming. How can we celebrate that community and kind of make it bigger than people’s personal routines, but find a way to really celebrate that culture with the audience?

So actually, kind of inviting everyone to a shared wash day in which we had creators come in to talk about self-care and talk about what self-care meant for our, the community of readers in that time in the pandemic, I mean everything from sort of products to mental health to, all of that coming together. So, I think doing that at the time and just creating that space and sort of more literalizing the idea of a community coming together for a virtual event versus sort of just everyone sharing stories. You actually got to be live and talk face to face and sort of share your experience or meet some of the creators you were interested in. So that was great. And I remember we won an award for that. It felt like a gift. Right? You’re not, you weren’t sitting there saying like, oh, we want you to do this, or we have a message to you. It just felt like we were actually giving something to, to the audience who at that time, it was something to do when no one could do anything and just, a way of sharing experience during a really complicated time.

Brenda: I’ve got like so many thousands of thoughts and responses now and what I love about listening to you talk about Unbothered Wash Day, right, is that you talk about it, from the perspective and for the perspective of the audience, right, it’s all about the audience. It’s all about the person who’s going to engage, who’s going to get something out of it.

It’s not about your personal brand, right, and it’s probably why you’re able to work with so much speed is if you take that, if you’re taking that approach, are you taking that approach like with every project, like do you, you know, start with, okay, the end user and where are they coming from? Who are they? What do they want? What are their expectations? What are they desiring, you know, and then how do we craft towards that?

Abby: I’m going to build on that just for a second and say, yeah, like how do the projects come to you? Are they, help we need, this is our problem as a brand, you know, this is our community, like how is the process of the way the jobs come in and then how’s the process of the way that you’re ideating and who for, the client or the customer?

Monica: Well, first of all, it’s always for both, right? So, it’s not binary. And that’s a great, but it’s a great task to say that is it for the client or the, or the customer. You do start with the business problem, right, and that’s, that’s what we’re in, right, like we’re not there just to do cool things because it’s cool.

We’re there because we’re addressing something, whether that’s awareness, no one’s ever heard of this brand or perception, it’s maybe a big box brand that wants to look cool and culturally relevant. You’re really thinking about kind of, what is it this business needs to sort of accomplish, you know, it’s viewership, it’s sales, it’s whatever, and you, you start there and we’ve got strategists who come in and they, and they come up with that approach and you sort of figure out what it is that you’re trying to say. And then this is really, really important. And we can talk about this when we get into House of the Dragon or something else, you then craft the medium coming out of that, right, so you never if you’re, you know, you don’t approach it being like, okay, we’re going to do a screening, we’re going to do a pop-up. You can, but that’s not the work I’m interested in doing now.

So, it’s like, and I’m talking about this in the ideal state, right. So it’s identifying that and it’s identifying for me a hook, right, and I think like one of the things that is, can be a pitfall both for creatives and for brands is this desire to accomplish or say, every single thing you’ve ever felt about sort of your brand, you know, through the lens of like an experience or something like that. And I get that impulse, like I really, I sympathize with, I empathize with it, you know, so my job is to sort of guide people away from that because I’m like, you know, let’s take, for example, a television show, right? You know, you’re like, I don’t need to recreate the story that your show does that, my job is to not take that and then replicate it out in the world. My job is to just get people excited and wanting to learn more, wanting to do that next step.

Brenda: Well, this is, I mean, it’s the perfect timing to just have you talk about House of Dragon. You know, I’m excited and just want to sort of introduce the question by talking about the physicality of House of Dragon, that campaign, which I, I think it was mind boggling in just the best possible way, and not just because of all of the various media elements, but because, you know, there were so many physical, you know, monumental physical attributes to it.

And, you know, maybe it’s just like a personal thing for me or whatever, but there’s something about taking over the Manhattan Bridge, the Empire State Building, the Brooklyn Bridge, right, and seeing that and driving past that every single day or walking down the block from it. And it would be wonderful for you just to share with our listeners, how did you come to those, and if you would just describe a little bit about what the physicality was, in particular?

Monica: We had done House of Dragon Promotion season one, and in that, you know, HBO had come to us and they’re so smart, like, our clients at HBO are great marketers. So, they knew sort of for season one that they wanted to reach the sort of all existing fan base first, people who love Game of Thrones, bring people into the world of the show.

So, when we did that, we created an immersive experience at Comic-Con. It was a standalone recreation of the Red Keep, in which we invited fans to actually line up and experience hatching a dragon for themselves, right, so it was very theatrical. There were literally actors there, you know, you are recreating sets in some ways and bringing this to life and tapping into that, like true fantasy element for people who already were sort of invested in that, or we knew we could kind of reignite that.

Now, season two, right? They’ve got a foothold and now they want to go big. So right, I said season one, we bring people into the world of the show, season two, we brought the world of the show into our world, and we’re doing that in service of what they had asked us to do, which was kind of tease the narrative structure of season two, which is that basically there’s two warring factions, right? You have two, kind of, competing queens, you have a green council and a black council, and the whole sort of, all of season two is built around the idea that all must choose, right, and like there are two sides, everyone must choose them. Like everyone’s going down, but they’re going to go down fighting and there’s sort of no middle ground.

So, in doing that, you know, we’re like, okay, but how you do that, I’m not going to get there and I’m not going to make a billboard experience that’s like, so Queen Rhaenyra did this and Queen Alicent did this, and this is why she—no one gives a shit, right? I’m going to lose people right away. But if I can tap into, if we can tap into people’s sort of existing affinities that you’re already familiar with: Mets versus Yankees, this bagel shop versus that bagel shop, your competing housewives, you know, whatever it is that you already—everyone loves competition and rivalry, you know, whatever that is. If we can find a way to bridge those affiliations suddenly without doing anything at all, we’ve got you, right, and this was a multifaceted campaign.

So, you mentioned The Dragon. That was a big stunt. And then we made it really, really simple, right? You know, it is just kind of like green, black, green, black, all must choose, and these inciting messages. So, it was this combination of meeting people where they are and doing it in a very simple and visually ownable way, right, so just saying like green and black banners like, that’s it. And that’s one of the things you’ve got to really think about is, you know, what is the ownable sort of visual symbol for the show.

Brenda: Why do you consider season two House the Dragon, one of your best, your very best projects?

Monica: Yes. I love it in its simplicity, and I love that it defies categorization in some point. So, I’m very careful, like people say it’s an experiential campaign, I’m like, no it was not. It was a 360 integrated campaign. It’s not a, you know, whatever you want to say about it, it wasn’t, it was totally unique in that respect. So, they didn’t come to us and say, okay, we want necessarily a massive stunt. They just said, what is the best way to get people to raise their banners? World’s your oyster, any canvas you can think of. So that was competing trailers on YouTube. That was the sports partnerships, like I said, we did do the bar nights of sort of competing cocktail bars that, you know, different places in Manhattan, you know, competing pizza spots to the stunt to that—

So, it’s like when you. when you really look at the breadth of all the ways we brought that message to life and showing that that simple concept of just sort of assigning allegiances, right, is infinitely scalable. We just, we went wild and that was very fun. So that’s, that’s what’s interesting to me. I’m always looking to build, to break medium.

You know, we could talk about this idea of like, what experiences, you know, are or can be, and I think the idea of pushing medium and it’s not always like a pop-up, there’s not always, you know, 6 to 100 pallets of plywood, you know, in a built thing going into this, it really can be everything from a social experience to the sort of shared awe that comes when, you know, all these millions of people in the city walk out and they’re on their commute and they see a dragon on the Empire State Building, and I’m getting texts from people I haven’t heard from years, like, oh, I work on 27th Street, and we looked out and we could see it. So that was really sort of incredible. And I think the one other point you brought up was that mix, and you said this of what was real.

And Brenda, you asked about, you said physicality, what was real and what was not real, you know, what was CGI. And that was very important to us too. And we knew, like, okay, we wanted to do some things or show up in places we know we’d never get the permits for, even though if anyone can get permits, it’s Giant Spoon, but we knew if we went like pure CGI, like it wouldn’t land, right? So, what we needed to do is actually mess with people, right? And not in a, like a manipulative way, again, like you’re, you’re trying to trick people, but to just say like, whoa, like this is incredible.

Brenda: It’s playful, in a playful way.

Monica: It’s playful, you know? So, when you look at that, like those banners on Grand Central, Rockefeller Plaza, the New York Stock Exchange, like all of those were real, right? The dragon was real. So, you see that, and then you’re like, but the bridges, they’re not, you know, and everything, it was just like a total, so people were actually, they didn’t feel tricked. They were having fun. They were having fun, kind of understanding, like what they were seeing.

Brenda: If you could have anything that you wanted where, in terms of experiential, where do you hope things go five years from now?

Monica: I hope they’re sustainable. Right? That’s going to be a really interesting challenge and one I don’t have the answer for. Everyone’s been trying for years and years. But it’s you know I think substituting you know sustainably sourced MDF versus not is not the answer, right, like it’s going to take like pretty wild innovation to think about what that means. Right? Like it’s not just recycled materials. So, I think it’s a sustainable industry in which we can find ways to bring these stories to life that are low impact, and doing that through technology, through sort of social invitations versus maybe built environments as much. I love built environments, so it’s a tricky—makes me nervous to even say that because I love a built environment, you know? But I’m thinking, well, how could I do that sort of absent of materiality in some ways and just kind of invite people to experience things different?

So, I would say in five years I want to define that, and I want to find a way to always keep doubling down on relationships of people in real life. You know, that’s what inspires me is to see kind of what people are, what they’re doing in the world. There’s a reason I’m in experimental and that, you know, I just love that. So, I don’t know, I think it’s that and it’s, it’s making sure that the technology, while that will advance and we’ll find different ways of kind of creating environments, that they’re all in service, of just making things feel more human than they were ever before.

Brenda: You just have such an insightful way of thinking about, really, the whole world of experiential and the nature of people, and which gets back to your, right, origin with your interest in psychology.

Abby: And community building. A lot of your work brings communities together virtually or in person. So, you’re building communities, which essentially is what we all try to do, whether it’s exhibit design or in all the advertising that you do. Yeah, you bring together these people, so they keep this human connection, and the delight and all that you bring, we don’t have enough of that in the world.

So, thank you for all the work you do. I think it’s absolutely incredible and really excited to see what you can do next in New York City, what’s around the corner.

Brenda: I don’t know, I see you hitting rural areas next.

Monica: I would love that.

Brenda: I see that in your future.

Monica: I can’t stop dreaming about crop circles. I hope that’s not a hint.

Abby: Oh, you heard it here first, crop circles.

Brenda: No, I’m seeing you do major earthworks. Okay.

Abby: Thank you so much, Monica, for joining us today.

Monica: Thank you so much for having me.

Abby: And thanks to everyone who tuned in. 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 review and share with a friend. See you next time!

Brenda: Thank you 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.

McCann Systems

SUMMIT One Vanderbilt

Refik Anadol

[Music]

Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience. My name is Abigail Honor.

Brenda: Hello, this is Brenda Cowan.

Abby: This podcast is produced by Lorem Ipsum in New York City and explores the creativity, innovation and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. Hello to anybody listening for the first time, and welcome back to our regular listeners. So, today our guest is my friend Brandon Harp, Director of Digital Experiences, leads McCann Systems’ Experiential Technology Practice. He works at the crossroads of media, architecture, technology and storytelling, which I think is a real sweet spot right now, and for the past 15 years has focused his interest in how humans interact with digital displays, how technology enhances and activates brands, and how media speaks to and influences audience. Brandon, welcome to the show.

Brandon: Thank you so much, Abby. Thanks for having me, and Brenda, I really appreciate it.

Brenda: Oh, we are so delighted to have you and to kick start off, I know that you have an early sort of origin story to the work that you’re currently doing, and I thought I would share an early memory of mine, which is making an exhibit in my bedroom when I was probably about six years old, and it was because I had found a small toy that I was convinced was the Loch Ness Monster. And I was so overjoyed by this that I decided that the very best thing to do, to share this wealth of information and to celebrate the toy, was to construct an exhibition in my bedroom. So, the rest actually is history for me. What about you, Brandon?

Brandon: Well, I don’t know that my story is as good as yours, Brenda. I mean, who doesn’t like the Loch Ness Monster?

Brenda: Who doesn’t? Indeed.

Brandon: But, for me, it actually started—I had, as a young kid, I had always wanted to be and had ambitions of being an architect. And so I remember I was at the store with my mother, and I convinced her to buy me a book of floor plans and I used to take those floor plans and mark them up with various different colors and highlighters and things, and kind of expand on the floor plans as if I was putting in an addition on a house and things like that. So, I’ve always had kind of this dream, I guess, of being an architect. And so now my work is taking me in the direction of audiovisual, and how does media fit within spaces and spatial planning, and, you know, how does the, essentially the technology work with the architecture to tell stories and so forth. So, it’s kind of come full circle for me, which is kind of exciting.

Abby: One of the things I wanted to chat about is: we talked earlier with the architect Alex Bitus about the importance of bathrooms. And now and again it crops up on our podcast, this theme, because it’s a personal favorite of mine. I really think it’s an underrated space. And so, when we were chatting earlier, you have sort of a very nice epiphany moment, which I can really appreciate, linked to being in a bathroom and it’s not going to be—

Brenda: The listeners are definitely interested now.

Abby: It’s not going to go to a bad place. So, you know, tell me about your epiphany story.

Brandon: Actually, I have two good bathroom stories, believe it or not, so we’ll get real spicy here. My first one was when I first encountered digital signage, which is really where I started my career. It was in a bathroom, believe it or not, and I was using the urinal and staring at the screen that was changing and it was showing advertisements of, you know, that bar that I was at, I believe, and maybe, you know, something else and then it would change and rotate and it, you know, really got me thinking that, you know, this is the wave of the future, right?

I guess my other bathroom story while we’re on this topic, which is kind of funny, is, you know, if you haven’t been to SUMMIT One Vanderbilt, they actually have some of the most amazing bathrooms and it’s because as part of the observation deck experience, you get to actually look out over the city from very high up in the air for these, full glass windows. It’s an amazing view and an amazing bathroom, literally, just because of the way that it was designed and the experience that’s involved in that. So I guess moral of the story is you can have an experience in the bathroom.

Brenda: You absolutely can.

Abby: See, see, it’s catching on. But just because you’ve just mentioned it, do you want to talk just now before we keep going about that project, seeing as you mentioned it, because I know you guys worked on it.

Brandon: Sure. Well, without giving it away, because I would encourage everyone to go see it and experience it for yourself. I think, you know, it’s easy in our world of audiovisual to get sucked into, you know, just focusing on the video element of things. And the vision that Kenzo Digital had, who was the immersive artist, was truly exceptional. It came to him in a dream, he presented it to Marc Holliday, the CEO of SL Green, and you have video mixed with audio and interactives and sight and sound and smell and art and all these things just kind of come together and really just blend so well. You get this, just this multi-sensory sort of experience that just changes your perception and your view. And you can be a New Yorker and go there and love every minute of that. You could be from another country around the world and go there and love every minute of it. And it’s never the same thing twice, which is really what’s interesting about it.

And, you know, a project like that that was under a grueling timeline, constantly changing of design, and so forth, really just trying to stay, you know, ahead of it, ahead of the design and being agile and limber enough to do so as a company. You know, we stayed on schedule during Covid and there were so many just things I think that could have adversely gone wrong that for us just didn’t. I don’t know if it was a stroke of luck, but maybe there was a little bit of that in there. But it was also, I think, just the sheer ambition of what it was that we were creating and, you know, knowing that the outcome was just going to be that incredible, so we were just constantly pushing to get to that finish line and now it’s, it is truly something. It still gives me goosebumps when I think about it. It’s, to me it’s something that certainly lights up my life, makes me happy every time I think about it, and I’ve loved and still enjoy sharing it with anybody who’s either hasn’t been there or maybe has been, but wants a, just a different experience and so…

Brenda: It sounds so amazing, and I also appreciate how you use New Yorkers as, even a New Yorker would go and find that. I have to ask you, you know, you’re describing such an ideal situation in terms of the client being in alignment with you and with all of the different companies and individuals involved in the process. And what a wonderful rarity. And I have to ask, you know, you work on huge projects in major cities. You weave technology into our every day, give us a hit of a challenging project. How do you creatively solve issues when things aren’t necessarily going so well?

Brandon: You know, oftentimes the challenges are just getting past, you know, what is the technology to create the experience? Because in our world and the approach that I take and McCann Systems takes is that there’s more to it than just the video wall. Right? And it’s easy for clients and designers and architects and so forth to say, well, hey, I need to understand what it’s going to take from a budgetary perspective to be able to put something like this in, right? Everybody wants the Sphere nowadays, that’s great, but your budget doesn’t necessarily support that in a lot of cases. So, it’s something that, you know, we try to advise our clients on at a very early stage that there’s more to it than just the technology. The technology, we will get it to do what you want it to do. But let’s peel the onion back a little bit. Let’s take a step back. Let’s take the technology off the table and let’s engage with the right partners. Right? Let’s talk about the content. Let’s talk about the storytelling. Let’s talk about the experience. You know, the human interaction as I always say, because what is it at the end of the day that you want people to feel?

And I think that’s, you know, going about things that way has been very, very successful for me and in my career. But also, you know, for the companies that I work for, because they understand that and it helps the client really dig deeper, right? Because if you’re just looking at the surface, which to me is the black LED screen, it’s a square or a box on a wall in a lot of cases, you need to be able to understand, you know, and have a strategy, you know, content strategy and what is the experience and how does the journey flow through the space, and if you think about those things, you know, you’re able to overcome a lot of design challenges. You’re able to overcome a lot of the guesswork that comes with trying to establish budgets and things like that, but it also gives the client, I think, a real peace of mind that they know you are an expert at this, and they’re hiring the right person for the right, all the right reasons.

Abby: So switching, you were recently on a panel at DOOH conference, and the discussion was about privacy, and I wanted to talk a little bit more about that and share with our listeners that phenomenon that we’re all very happy to share everything with our phone, our name, our phone number, our Social Security, date of birth, you name it, we’ll share it. But when it comes to larger screens, people, the public seem to get really creeped out by the suggestion that a large screen could sort of see them and respond to them, when I’m thinking about the great strides in technology we’ve made, where we can actually build these screens to dim if there aren’t a lot of people there to save energy or dim at night time when there’s nobody there. And so, we can actually make them sensitive to humans. And when we’re there and not there, and even just from a sustainability perspective, that’s good. But we don’t want any of that. Right? Human nature is seeming, and we were chatting a lot about that at the conference. So, you know, what’s your spin on that and perspective on that? Do you think that we’ll get over ourselves and we’ll be getting tracked by all these screens or, you know, I’d love for you to share your thoughts, Brandon.

Brandon: It’s always an interesting topic because, you know, how many times have you just been sitting there at night with your husband or wife or partner and you’re talking or whatever, and you mention something, and then all of a sudden you look at your phone and it’s like, oh, Google is listening to me, because now there’s an ad for, you know, whatever it was that you’re talking about. So, you know, I think, yes, there’s a lot of that on, on your personal device. And there can be a lot of it out in, in the wild or in public spaces and so forth. I think what you’re seeing is places where tracking of individuals moving through spaces, understanding their, you know, whether they’re a male or a female, their height, you know, how happy they are, are they smiling or are they not smiling, tracking those kinds of things: I think a lot of that nowadays is anonymous, which is good because really it’s just all about taking that data and then being able to repurpose it or reuse it in a way that it can influence something else.

And as somebody who, you know, really loves all things digital signage, call me a nerd or whatever, but I do like the data aspect of it, right, and taking data and utilizing that to influence decision making, but also in the art world, I think a good example of that would be, you know, Refik Anadol. Everyone knows Refik, right, for his work with the machine learning and the data visualizations. I mean, he’s taking data and turning that into art, and I think there’s something very powerful about that. And a lot of different clients that we have are asking about those kinds of things. How can we take financial data or metrics from something and be able to present it in a way that it creates a really unique kind of inviting ambiance, maybe in a lobby or something of that nature and then, you know, present it back to those people, right, and it, but it’s totally anonymous, right? It doesn’t infringe on you as a person. It doesn’t know who you are. It’s just gathering of data and repurposing it in ways that’s pretty exciting.

Abby: If I was running a museum and I spent a bunch of money on my brand new build, I would probably want to get anonymous data of what’s working, where people are hanging out, what they’re responding to, or even you might want to put it in to be able, Brandon, to explain to your client, look what’s working really well, what we did here works or it doesn’t work. I’m assuming that everybody would like data, so that they can learn and improve.

Brenda: You know, I’m thinking of a billion different things, and I’m really sad that I wasn’t at the DOOH conference, because I do have so many mixed feelings about this as well, and far too many, dinner table conversations with my husband about all of this, because, yes, we also, call us nerdy, talk about this quite a bit. But in terms of, even Abby, what you were just asking about in terms of, you know, museums or any kind of place wanting to be able to share data and also collect data about people’s responses to spaces and stuff like that, I think about a topic that came up at the SEGD Xlab conference, that we were all just at, and the question about a return on emotion and the, sort of, there was a mini conversation, if you all caught it, about, you know, some folks thinking that you can’t even really get that kind of data from people. And for me, that’s the data that I would be most interested in really understanding. And, Brandon, I’m wondering if you have specific thoughts about the idea of return on emotion. Do you see that as data that is able to be collected? And, you know, because emotion is a part of what it is that you try to work with and be sensitive to and understand and utilize within your own work.

Brandon: Everything that we do in terms of designing systems and installing them and servicing them, is to provoke emotions at the end of the day, and if it’s a part of an attraction or even if it’s just something, you know, in a lobby where people are passing by, it’s intended to create an emotion.

We recently did a project that we did, was for Mercer Labs here in New York City. It’s an immersive environment that’s got kind of the feel of an art gallery and an experience, just experiential spaces that really also captivate all of the senses. We had a partner who is testing out these wristbands that you can wear, and ultimately what it does is it picks up on brainwaves rather than heartbeats and things like that, and utilizing an app with this wristband, once you make your way through this, all the spaces, which took about an hour, we were provided with this data as to your level of immersion and your level of immersion is, you know, tied directly to emotion, right, and how you’re feeling about that space. So it’s interesting to see the data on that, and I found it interesting because prior to going into those spaces with the wristband, I kind of had it in my head, the ones where I would feel that emotion, really, the highest or the greatest, I guess, and in some cases it wasn’t always the case, so it was interesting.

I think it’s still kind of in its infancy stage, but I think it does, that anonymous data does lead towards something, right? And we know that it does help understand our emotions and our level of immersion as we are in these spaces, which is great. And if we can use that as part of actionable design and come up with new ways of, you know, helping people create spaces that are truly immersive like that, that every space can really get your senses up and generates this amazing feeling, then, you know, maybe we’re onto something.

Brenda: I think it’s, it’s so rich and potent and I think that as a tool for designers and as a tool for developers and planners, it would be so valuable to be able to have as best an understanding as possible about immersion and, you know, the level of engagement and the types of engagement, but also the intensity of emotion that we could, you know, reasonably anticipate, you know, from my perspective, you know, so that we could be particularly sensitive to how it is that we’re telling our stories and how we can be the most effective with a really deep awareness of being able to, frankly, help people and support people as much as get our message across in a way that’s really going to be comprehensive.

Abby: So, we’re going to move to airports So we’ve done some large projects in airports, large media projects, and I wanted to talk about airports because I know you, Brandon, have done some large projects. It’s like a new canvas. You know, you have people, unlike I think in a museum when they go into a museum to absorb content, you have them going to an airport to travel somewhere else. And so actually absorbing content or being ready to be told a story is very much secondary, even, if not thirdly or fourthly, on their agenda of why they’re at the airport. And so, it’s a really interesting playground and place to be able to tell these episodic stories. Can you tell us about one of your airport projects and where you see this sort of canvas going in the future?

Brandon: Yeah, the airports, you know, really seem to be a place that, you know, we can utilize this technology that we deal with on a day-to-day basis to help set the mode and set the tone for the experience that you’re about to have. And I’ve been talking about this theory of a connected journey, as I like to call it, and for me, it begins as soon as you get out of your Uber or someone drops you off on the sidewalk, then you start to make your way, you know, through TSA to get to your gate, onto your plane, off your plane, go pick up your bag and then get back into an Uber, a taxi, or even taking it a step further all the way to your final destination.

But you know, for me, I think in an airport, what really is important is giving people real time information at the right place so that they don’t have to search for, you know, the schedule on the app for that specific airline or for that specific, you know, terminal or anything like that. So, to me, it’s about giving people kind of the right information at the right time, because in general, airports can be overwhelming. They can be a feeling of negativity. Right? You’re maybe upset because your plane is a little delayed. So how do you, how do you change that? And I think that’s what we as people who design and build and service these systems we strive for, is to put, you know, as corny as it sounds, a smile on people’s faces.

And if you do that, in turn, you’re creating new revenue channels, right? Because they are a little more happy now. They’re feeling a little more euphoric. They’re feeling more comfortable in their surrounding environment, and therefore they’re going to get something to eat and they’re going to spend more money, or they’re going to go into one of the stores there, the retail stores, and buy a new outfit or a new, you know, piece of luggage or something, right, to just, because they’re feeling that way.

So I think it’s, it’s the connectedness of that passenger journey, and, you know, there are ways of, of still really interacting with people in fun, playful ways. Maybe it’s a video wall that has some sort of depth sensing camera that just kind of walks with you and kind of leads you down a path or leads you in the direction that you need to go towards the baggage claim. And maybe it waves at you or blows you a kiss, or does something that, you know, just kind of interacts with you to kind of put a smile on your face and keep you moving through the space, but multifunctional too even, you know, wayfinding is always a big element of an airport, and to me, that’s one of the first things I notice is if I find the wayfinding to be cumbersome or challenging or just, you know, not legible, in some cases, you know, how can you utilize a screen like that that could be interactive but also lead you to a certain destination right, and how does it get you from point A to point B?

So I think those are all things that are kind of a part of that connected journey and a lot of just kind of the, the recent things that we’re seeing in trends and ways of engaging people with digital displays throughout airports.

Brenda: I have to ask when—so, we’re talking about artistry, and we’re talking about being able to envision environments that are, you know, highly, highly aesthetic, emotion-rich and sculptural. Who on your team—please tell me there’s somebody on your team who brings pencil to paper in these early stages to really envision these kinds of applications and environments. I’m so curious.

Brandon: Yeah, there sure is. You know, we’ve got some, some really bright people that work for us. Ken Newbury is our CTO. We’ve got Ryan Palley, who just joined the company, who’s, I’ve been working with for years. And I’ll give those guys a shout out just because I work with them quite a bit on these, this little experiential island, as we call it, that we live on.

They understand this technology, they know it very well, and they’re very good at doing exactly like you said, Brenda, these little napkin sketches are helping a client, you know, think through, okay, what is, you know, what is this use case? What’s the application? How can we do something here that’s unique and really offers a, you know, an inviting solution, something that we can all be proud of. So, I think from an engineering standpoint, they’re the brains. They know this kind of stuff really well.

Brenda; We love people like them.

Brandon: You have to have them. But they’re also, they also have that creative gene, too, which is important. And not everybody has that, I think. But it is important to have the, you know, kind of marry the two, right, and creativity with engineering often don’t go together that well. So, finding people that do have that sort of, you know, blend of both skill sets, I think is really what makes us effective as a company.

Abby: Well, and kudos to you, Brandon, because you know, the way you approach what you do is: it’s a lot of custom work, it’s a lot of things that maybe haven’t been done before, and so you and your company are very willing to work with designers and make, as you did, dreams come true, literally. And, you know, that takes a lot of courage and courage from the company you work for. So where do you get the chutzpah from to do that?

Brandon: I think it’s always been in our DNA. I mean, when I joined McCann about six months ago, you know, something that really struck me was, that the company has always had the, the feeling and, and kind of wherewithal to not say no to things because they’re challenging. Right? In fact, it’s quite the opposite for us. We like that challenge. We like to take on the projects that others just simply don’t think can be done or refused to do because they see it as, you know, too risky or we just don’t have the right kind of personnel to give it a try. So, for us, I think, you know, that to me was a breath of fresh air. Right? And that’s kind of what we’ve always been known for and how we’ve always gone about our business as a company. So yeah, there’s not much that scares us, if anything, I guess, but, you know, if there’s a will, there’s a way, and I think, you know, McCann is always good at looking at that to find the, find the solution for the client.

Abby: Thank you so much, Brandon, for bringing us onto, onto your experiential island today. It’s been really fun.

Brandon: Thanks for having me. It was so much fun. And I hope the listenership get something out of it. It’s so inspiring to be a part of this community that we have. You know, there’s so many brilliantly smart people out there who, if you can, just take a little bit from every person and sort of apply that in different ways. I think it’s a great way of doing things. So always keep learning, always keep being creative and imagining. And it’s, it’s all possible.

Brenda: Here, here.

Abby: Thanks to everyone who tuned in today. If you liked 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 please share with a friend. We’ll see you next time.

Brenda: Thank you so much 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.

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle, Ph.d.

Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence (YCEI)

The Creativity Choice by Dr. Zorana Ivcevic Pringle | Hachette Book Group

AR-Powered Interactive Artifacts

[Music] 

Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience. My name is Abigail Honor.

Brenda: And I’m Brenda Cowan.

Abby: This podcast is produced by Lorem Ipsum here in New York City and explores the creativity, innovation, and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. Hello to anybody listening for the first time, and a big welcome back to our regular listeners.

So today our podcast guest is Zorana Pringle, who is a senior research scientist at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, where she primarily studies the role of emotional intelligence and self-regulation in creativity and well-being. She received the Award for Excellence in Research from the Mensa Education and Research Foundation, and the Berlin Award for Outstanding Early Career Achievement from the Society for the Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts. Zorana is also the author of an upcoming book called The Creativity Choice, where she explains how to make ideas into realities and dispels the myth that creativity is a trait that you’re born with. So, I think we can have some fun today with this, Zorana. Big welcome to the show.

Zorana: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Brenda: We are so delighted to have you here and to talk about what I think is at the root of so much that makes us human: the relationship between creativity and emotions. Let’s begin with some broad strokes, though. You work at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. How do you define emotional intelligence, and why is this an important area of research?

Zorana: So, scientists define emotional intelligence as set of four related abilities: they are abilities to accurately perceive emotions in oneself and others, ability to use emotions to help thinking and problem solving, the ability to understand emotions, and the ability to regulate or manage emotions both in oneself and in others. And if you think of general intelligence that we have all heard about, it is about solving problems. Emotional intelligence is also about solving problems, but those problems are emotional in nature.

Abby: Obviously, we all feel we are all trapped in these, our own bodies and and our brains and we feel. But you’re not putting that aside when we’re thinking about how we perceive other people feeling. Because for me, I would say, don’t most people, I guess unless they’ve had some sort of trauma, feel their own emotions and thoughts. You can’t sort of escape those.

I’ve met a lot of people who can be very emotional, but completely, like, tick the first four things personally, but when it comes to thinking about somebody else, they’re tone deaf and totally emotionally do not understand other people and hit any of those four things, but you seem to pop them together.

Zorana: Yeah, it seems that they largely go together. It is possible to think of individuals who are able to solve problems and figure out what they are feeling themselves and understand what’s going on with themselves, but then not translate that to others. But that’s more of an exception than the rule. When we are trying to understand, perceive what’s going on emotionally, we are solving a problem.

It doesn’t seem like we are solving a problem because nobody kind of posed it formally, but essentially, we are solving a problem because we are collecting different pieces of information and making a judgment of what is the solution to those pieces. So, think of, okay, if somebody asks you this moment, how are you? What are you feeling? You are not in that moment thinking what you were feeling. You were just going about your business. And so, for a second you have to say, okay, let me figure that out. Let me solve that problem. Let me answer it. And then you are trying to gather information, and we gather information about emotions. And then we can use emotion as information for other things we do in life.

So, if you are trying to say, when you are asked that question, what are you feeling right now, you have to get together the clues. Okay. What am I doing? Are there some physical symptoms I have? Jitteriness, palms sweating, and when you start putting those things together, you can start piecing it and putting labels to it. Okay, if you are feeling very activated in your body and you are feeling unpleasant, well, maybe you are anxious or maybe you are angry. Which one fits the situation better? So, you are solving that problem.

But you are using similar kinds of information when you’re making judgments about what somebody else might be feeling. You are not going to have first person information about the internal experience of activation, but you can observe it in behavior to a certain extent, and you can perceive those behavioral signs of what might be going on with somebody else, from facial expressions, from body language, from tone of voice and things like that. So you are, in both cases, you are collecting information and putting information together.

Abby: When are you talking about emotional intelligence in the example you gave, like a physical thing, all picking up on audio cues, what about knowing a history of somebody? Are you talking about emotional intelligence of meeting a stranger, or emotional intelligence when you could know why they would be feeling a way they are?

Zorana: Sort of both. If we are meeting a stranger, we have fewer cues to make an informed judgment. Think of it as, how much certainty we can have in what somebody is experiencing. We are going to have more margin of error if you are meeting somebody from the first time, because you are going to be relying on more superficial things.

If you know already somebody and have a relationship and know how strongly they respond to things, for instance, you can calibrate for that and take it into account. I happen to have a friend who is very emotionally reserved from his cultural background, he is of Scandinavian origin. It is not very expressive for somebody who grew up in the Mediterranean like myself.

So, I have to take that into account when making a judgment. The fact that he doesn’t raise his voice very much, whereas people I grew up around do, does not mean that he’s not excited, it’s just you have to take that into account. And if I met him for the first time, there would be more chance of me misjudging it.

Brenda: You know, it’s making me think about one of the studies that I did with a museum in Stockholm, and it was an exhibition project that they were co-creating with folks from the Syrian community, both immigrants and also refugees. And I was fortunate to be able to work with like 35 different families across the country, Syrian families, and to talk with them about what their partnership was like with the institution.

And I heard over and over and over again about how very, very different emotion and expression was between the two cultures, and it seemed to be one of the biggest difficulties, actually, was, you know, miscommunication and folks just not really syncing with each other until the museum created an exhibition that enabled the Syrian community to tell their individual stories.

And all of the sudden there became this sort of this middle ground that the Syrian folks would refer to as their new home, where they could express themselves and actually feel like they were being understood and heard. And in the, you know, in the form of the museum. It was really remarkable.

Abby: Let’s talk about creativity. Let’s start with a tough question. What is creativity from your perspective?

Zorana: Creativity is something that is in the same time original and in some way meaningful, appropriate, useful or effective, depending on different contexts and depending on what area of work we are talking about. And I don’t want to get into a trap of saying anything specific that is going to limit how creativity can be expressed, because it can be expressed in any medium, in any area of life, from it being in an idea to being in a design to being in a piece of art. And so I want to leave that part open. The key is original and, in some way, meaningful, useful, or effective.

Abby: Okay, I’m going to pick up on the original because my background is painting, as our listeners who listen in know, and then filmmaking. And when I researched and studied the history of art, you see that everything evolves, right? You learn from the past, previous artists, you build, technology evolves. And so this idea of originality, from my perspective, seldom happens. When you say original, can you help me understand better what you mean? If I think that everything is a derivative of something, it could be a new version of or a different spin on, but from at least in my experience, there’s nothing that’s truly original.

Zorana: And I do not disagree with you. If we take the definition of original as something that is in no way related to what has been done before, but if we go into that territory, I think we are almost getting in territory of religion and starting from nothing. And in creativity studies we don’t do that. We see that there are different ways of being original and different levels of being original.

So, it can be an original version of something that is in some ways different from what has been done before. It can be original that is a different kind of reaction to what has been done before. As I think of history of art, I am not an artist myself, but I love art and art history, and I think of it as a series of reactions.

So, there is a movement in art and then another movement emerges, oftentimes in reaction to it. It still makes it original, and it’s meaningful because it is interacting with the existing world and getting an effect from its audiences. Another thing that you have mentioned that reminded me as you were talking about there is no true originality, well, what’s the meaning of true originality, made me think, well, maybe that true originality comes in only in this, what creativity scholars call big C form. And big C is creativity of people and creativity of products that are changing our culture. None of us here are physicists, but if you think of what physicists you can name, those are the big C physicists.

You can name Einstein, you can name Bohr, for instance, or Tesla. Those are the big C creators. They have completely changed how we view something, how we understand something, and even our culture. I think that the reason why I don’t like to talk about originality in that way is it can be discouraging. If you know, and I, for example know that I am not, you know, a Picasso, it could be discouraging, because if you cannot be that and if that is the only originality there is, what can you contribute?

Brenda; Part of what keeps going through my head, listening to this is one of the nuggets of inspiration I received when I was kickstarting a lot of my own research work. You know, I had a lot of self-doubt and self-judgment, and I thought, well, but, you know, am I really contributing anything? And is this new? And the advice was learn how to see the familiar in unfamiliar ways.

And that was really invigorating. You know, I actually also started as a painter, and it just, despite getting a degree in it and so on and so forth, it never really gelled. And I never thought of myself as a creative person until I started teaching. You know, there’s ambition, there’s intention, obstacles, you have to pivot all the time and needing to keep things going when they’re not working.

And you’ve got to try to make connections and then breakthroughs. And, you know, ultimately, one of the keys I find for myself is empathy comes into play quite a lot. The need to connect, to see others, to be open to, to see into relationships. Zorana, I know that you see a relationship between creativity and our capacity to engage with empathy. What does that look like for you?

Zorana: As psychologists have studied the creative process, they have identified one of the key aspects, if not the key aspect as something we call problem finding. And what problem finding is, is identifying and then constructing and developing, reframing and redeveloping what we are working on. In that process, empathy is a great starting point. You might start with a given problem, that, so you are not identifying the problem directly.

A client is, for instance, approaching you with a certain issue they need to address and to give us direction and imbue meaning in that process of narrowing and honing in to how to approach a certain task is the lens of empathy, is thinking of the end users of our products or of our designs? Thinking of what are their needs?

What are the obstacles they might be experiencing? Talk to them. Learn from them, truly listen, and be open to changing the ideas that you start with based on that feedback.

Abby: So, you said my big C-word, Zorana, clients. So, when we think about, when we think about emotional intelligence, we have to manage up when we’re designing spaces and we have to manage them and where they’re coming from and the pressures that they’re under. But I don’t really ever feel that they’re managing us at all, when we’re under stress and strain clients and maybe roles that people have, cause people to need to have higher emotional intelligence or not care or not need to have the same amount of emotional intelligence. So how is it when it comes to hierarchy, maybe on a project, and when I’m thinking about clients?

Zorana: Emotional intelligence skills help in all interactions, and you have to approach different interactions in different ways. So, you have interactions with colleagues on a project, interactions potentially with people who are leaders in places where you work and to whom you are responsible. In some ways, you have interactions with people outside of your organization who are coming up with problems for you to solve, and they are having relationships with people who they are responsible to.

How successful a project will be, and the nature of the design will be is dependent on the success of communication with all of those different relationships. That makes it much more complicated, obviously. There was research that shows that when clients are represented by middle managers, they approach this interaction with a designer in a very particular way. They approach it with almost a checklist of I want this, this, this, and this in an end design, when those pieces of the checklist may not be the ideal choices for the design to be truly successful, because what they are doing is they are not fully present in the interaction, not fully hearing the designers with their input. They are only reflecting the fears and concerns from those they are responsible to. When we are truly present in the interaction, we can then be hearing both sides and opening up a conversation. For that to happen, there needs to be certain prerequisites. There needs to be a level of trust on different sides of the relationship.

Brenda: I’m listening and I’m thinking, you know, again, back to creative process, how it can bring out a lot of frustration, a lot of fear. You talked about the need for trust, and especially in situations where there are vulnerabilities, trust is a really big ask. And I see with my students, for example, they have to embrace the unknown. All of us who are in, you know, the creative design world have to, to a certain extent, embrace the unknown in the work that you do.

Right? Good design means not knowing exactly where things are going to end up. You have to have faith that your skills and abilities to work with others will result in unexpected or rich outcomes that really work for visitors. And I’m curious Zorana, how do we overcome this, what I think anyway, is natural anxiety that comes with being creative, and that could be, like we’re talking about, in the form of interactions with others, or even just amongst ourselves?

Zorana: I think that’s a beautiful question. And the real answer is we are not going to overcome the anxiety. And once people know that the creative process, not just for you, there is nothing unique about you experiencing this anxiety, experiencing this uncertainty, experiencing doubts. Everybody who is involved in creative work, in the creative process is going to experience these things.

They are integral to the process. I think that is freeing because then you realize that there’s nothing unique about you that is wrong. Sometimes when we feel something unpleasant, we feel something is wrong with us. No, nothing is wrong with you. This is completely natural part of the process. That does not mean that you cannot do anything about it, but you also, you have to start with the realization that this will happen.

I have recently come across, a quote from Georgia O’Keeffe. And let’s face it, we all love Georgia O’Keeffe. And she said that she was never comfortable with anything she did in her life, that she was terrified of all the decisions she made and all the things she tried, but that never stopped her in doing it.

Some of us are more prone to feeling vulnerable and feeling anxious. Well, I happen to be one of those people, but that doesn’t mean that you cannot do things. You can do things even if you don’t feel comfortable. It’s okay. You can still do it. You manage those feelings. You learn to live with them and manage them but accepting that they are going to be part of the process will liberate you in knowing that, well, you know, you are not special in the way of being specially broken. That is just part of it.

Abby: Well, I was going to jump in as well and just piggyback on that, because I think having fear is very much akin to excitement and adrenaline, at least for me. So, whenever we’re, you know, doing something that is making me have doubts, fears, it’s now synonymous with thrills and excitement because I’ve had practice, doing things that are not comfortable. And the more practice you have, I totally agree Zorana, it never goes away. I think it shouldn’t go away. It’s like an intrinsic human condition to be scared. It’s not bad. It just is. I mean, it protects us, right, from bad things happening. So having fear is something you live with. But for me, being happy in that moment of fear and knowing that it’s going to pass and using it and harnessing it. So, I sort of embrace fear. I like it.

Brenda: You’re a junkie.

Abby: I’m a junkie. You have to if you want to be creative, because like we talked about earlier, if you want to push any boundaries, then that usually involves doing something original, new, different, that is not going to be comfortable because there are no guarantees there. So, I feel like fear and creativity, it’s sort of synonymous.

Zorana: I very much agree. And in the emotion science, what we talk about is reframing. So, the same experience can be framed in different ways. You can say, I am experiencing this jitteriness right now because I am anxious. I am anxious because I am unsure whether I can do this, or you can reframe it and say, I am experiencing this because I deeply care about how I’m going to do on this task, and this reflects my level of commitment and the excitement for it, but also realization of how important it is.

Brenda: Okay, how about exhibitions? So not everybody is going to be moved by an artwork or let’s say sometimes exhibitions with fine art in them fail to engage folks who maybe don’t feel welcomed or who don’t feel knowledgeable enough in the first place. What can we who are in the design profession, what can we do to make art more accessible and open up more possibilities for people to experience deep emotional interaction with art?

Zorana: Currently, we are working on a big project where we are studying what makes art meaningful and the theoretical framework, we are using what is called the mirror model of art based in psychology of art and empirical aesthetics. And what it states is that the process of art appreciation is a mirror reverse image of a process of art creation.

So what happens in creating art, in that process, is that artists start with ideas, concepts, insights, or feelings they want to convey in their work and then finally they put those finishing touches on their piece and audiences start with those finishing touches” what is in the piece physically, what is jumping at them, and then if they continue engaging with it, they start making personal connections, and then they start wondering about what artist’s intentions and ideas might have been. So as museum designers and exhibition curators, our task would be to facilitate this process, facilitate engagement so that it doesn’t stop. It continues so that people can make this progression and truly engage in it.

Now, you have raised something very important in that there are barriers for people in engaging with art, some relatively physical and some that are more social and psychological, where people, many people feel either unwelcome in the art spaces or cannot see themselves in their own experiences represented.

And to truly reach that deep experiences of art, we have to see it. We have to, in some way be able to, to connect with it. And our challenge is to curate with that in mind.

Abby: Zorana during Covid, we were part of multiple different companies who worked with Cooper Hewitt, the Smithsonian online collection of 3 million, over 3 million exhibits, and they wanted to activate it beyond the walls of the museum and to visitors who didn’t feel like they belonged within the museum walls. We chose a group of objects, and it was all from the La Belle Époque in the 1912s.

It was all from a music room. So, we chose them to be from this specific space. And then on the phone, you use the QR code, download an app and you step through a portal and into this room and all the way that the conversation was, the text panels were not text panels, they were little pop ups that spoke in very conversational tone and reference. For example, like the Neapolitan ice cream was the favorite ice cream of this time period. What’s your favorite ice cream? So, it was really about democratizing, in a way, these institutions and making them more approachable and reaching and bringing in new audiences who could resonate with all these stories, these untold stories that these artifacts have. So, it’s interesting you bring all this up because it was exactly what we were trying to do with that project.

Zorana: Sounds like a wonderful idea where you are doing two important steps. One is bringing people in who might not be interacting with artworks to begin with, but then you are doing an extra step in helping them make that personal connection from which they can engage more deeply.

Abby: So, Zorana, thank you so much. This was thought provoking, insightful. I just absolutely loved it. And next time I’m, you know, boldly going where I’ve not gone before and got sweaty palms, I’ll think about you and getting through to the other side. So, thank you so much.

Brenda: Thank you, Zorana.

Zorana: Thank you very much.

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

Brenda: Thank you 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.

love good color

Adobe’s Founders Tower Provides a Glimpse Into the Future of Work

Project Color Corps

ec reems academy

[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, warm welcome. And to our regular listeners, thank you for tuning in and supporting our conversation. My name is Abigail Honor.

Brenda: And this is Brenda Cowan.

Abby: So today, Brenda, we’re discussing all things color, from bright and attention seeking to muted and quiet. We’re going to be looking at how color affects us and how we can design with it for specific outcomes. Today’s guest is synonymous for me with the word color. It’s my pleasure to give a big, bright sunshine orange welcome to Laura Guido-Clark. Laura, welcome to the show.

Laura: Thank you so much. I’m so honored to be here and to share your color enthusiasm.

Abby: So, Laura, you launched a groundbreaking color methodology back in 2017, it’s called LOVE GOOD COLOR, that uses science and the senses to help designers factor in emotive responses when using color, and through your work, you empower organizations to strategically shift their approach to designing through color for deep impact. You’ve applied this methodology to your work with companies like Herman Miller, HP, Samsung, and Toyota, and we’re really excited today to learn how color can be a change agent and how to design with it successfully.

Brenda: Before we dive deeply into the world of design, Abby and I always love with all of our guests to get a sense of your journey, the origin story, if you will. How does one wind their way into the world of color?

Laura: When I was ten, I saw The Wizard of Oz, and I always say that when Dorothy stepped into the Technicolor world, I went with Dorothy. I never came back from Oz, and it was so striking to me, the world she left, the sepia color world, to Oz, and Oz just represented hope and opportunity. And it was really the first time that I ever noticed that color was powerful like that, and I somehow felt it was going to play a role in my world. I just didn’t know how.

Brenda: Oh my gosh. Wow.

Laura: Yeah.

Abby: So, what was your background? So, you’ve obviously always had a passion for color, but can you talk to us about your background and sort of how you balanced design with your other interests?

Laura: Yeah. Well, honestly, I was really torn between being a doctor or a designer. So, I was in pre-med and in interior design, and I was getting ready to apply to medical school. And I had a couple more classes in organic chemistry and I remember having this epiphany that I didn’t want to be a doctor and that I really needed to do design, and I got up and I turned in all my lab equipment, and my lab partners were going crazy, like, you’re, this is just a moment. You, don’t, you’re going to regret this. I said, I’ve never been clearer in my whole life. And I turned in my lab equipment, and I’ve never, ever regretted the decision.

Brenda: Wow. Well, I’m going to not ask what your folks perhaps might have thought about this moment. Or anybody else.

Laura: It took me three months to tell them.

Brenda: Oh. But I think it’s really fascinating. And I’m going to wager a guess here that there’s a definite link between your background in the sciences and the fundamentals of color. Can you tell us a little bit about what is it that people are responding to when they respond to color? How does this work?

Laura: Well, I think one of the things that’s most fascinating about color is not only the science of it, but the association it has with language. I believe it is another language, that actually color can tell stories that sometimes words can’t possibly tell. And if you notice, if you walk into a room, no one has to give you a cue about how you’re feeling.

Color many times is signaling all of those things. And it could be a memory, a color memory. It could be just the way that it perhaps evokes nature. But color is speaking to us all the time. And I think that that’s what really drew me to it, because it was a way of communicating that sometimes I found we weren’t able to say those things with words.

And the way that color works, I mean, it’s a wavelength. Not only do you see it, you feel it. And that is a really powerful thing. And they have done studies where sighted as well as blind students can have a like effect, because color is a wavelength. And I think that that’s another part of color that, that makes me feel that it’s a tool that’s often underutilized or perhaps sometimes thought of as only on the surface. And yet it is really the heart, the heart of the matter. Right?

Brenda: Wow. Absolutely. Now, we would be remiss not to give a nod to folks with color blindness.

Abby; Yeah, that’s, that’s completely true. So, my mom is actually colorblind, and my daughter is colorblind, too. So, I live with that awareness in all its shapes and forms. But it really does, it’s a big part of their experience with the world. So, do you work in any way with an awareness that different people experience color in different ways? And my second question, which is a toughie, do you think that in general, we’re, we’re all born to appreciate color.

Laura: I always take into consideration color blindness. We run our colors through the app, so we understand what people who are colorblind are seeing. I’ve met the person who worked on the EnChroma glasses, which can correct color blindness and seeing how powerful that really is. And my father was colorblind, which I didn’t really realize. I just thought that he was super organized and that my mom just like, wrote the colors of his socks and organized his drawers.

I thought, wow, this is something, wow, like she’s super organized. But then I realized he couldn’t see in color. And the other part of color is that we are all still seeing color a little bit differently, and all the way we see it on our screens, our screens are calibrated differently. And also, the way we respond to color is different culturally.

And we also, I think, have a way of thinking about color through color memories. Color memories don’t go away. So, when you’re working with a client, you really have to take into consideration if they’ve had not a good experience with a certain color and from what I heard, I think Zuckerberg is colorblind, and that’s, he picked the color of Facebook because it was a color he could see.

Brenda: So, my husband is a digital retoucher, and so everything that he does is about color and is about understanding color and how color builds shape and volume and dynamic and everything else. And so, in the work that he does now, mostly for ad agencies, he’s constantly sculpting with color, and it’s amazing to me how his clients, how hard it is for them to really kind of understand the complexity of working with color. He does a lot of skin, skin tones, and I hear him all the time talking with his clients, just saying, you’ve got to trust me if this is not perfect, if this is not done incredibly well, they will see that it’s fake.

Abby: Well, just jumping on the skin, Laura, you know, we were chatting about how we can read subtle fluctuations in our skin, right? There’s a whole science.

Laura: Yeah, well, that’s one of the things that Changizi discovered, he was a neurobiologist, and he found that the reason why we seeing color is to read human emotion, and that we as humans can read the subtle fluctuation of hemoglobin on our skin and primates who have less hair on their face, the rods and cones in their eyes are shaped more like ours, so they can read those too. And to your point earlier, I believe that we are very pure and recognize color, colorblindness or not, that there’s a way that color still moves us in the world and that we all know more than we give ourselves credit for. But I believe what happens, like with children’s art, judgment comes in the way, and we fear we’re going to do it wrong. And so, we play less and less with color and become safer when we really need to be using it as a powerful tool to support the intentions of space or product or whatever it is we’re doing.

Abby: As ever, just another side note, as we grow up, we seem to just sanitize ourselves and our creativity and our play. I have no idea why and we fight constantly against that. I know Brenda and I both try to channel our inner—

Brenda: Child.

Abby: —child, and when we are designing. But you’re on a journey to change the world with color. What is it about the power of color that really captures your imagination and makes you think that you can make a change to the lives of people you design for?

Laura; I think that color represents a story. I think it represents our personal story, our personal longings, and I believe that it also represents our inner beauty projected on the exterior. So, I know that when I’m working in my nonprofit with children and they start to see these things that they’re creating come alive, it creates a greater sense of belonging because it is of them. It is done with them, and I believe it is part of their culture that they’re representing, part of their dreams and their journeys. I think it is, well, we call it optical optimism, but it’s a game changer.

Brenda: Wow, I absolutely love that. I love optical optimism. Laura, is there like a particular way that you find yourself bringing your clients into the world of color and help them kind of see all of the possibilities that are there?

Laura: One of the reasons why I developed the system was so that I could engage our clients in a way that is very respectful, and it asks questions of them that they know how to answer. So, when we sit down in sessions, we don’t ever start with color. We start with words and language. And so that becomes this process where they feel heard and they feel seen, just like the kids in the community.

And then we start to do this process of discovery, and then we can show them ways that color can be associated to their needs and their intentions. And then all of a sudden it becomes much more fun, and it doesn’t become something that’s, you know, this is what it is, and I know and you don’t know. It’s never those conversations.

It’s more like, oh, I see. So, you don’t like blues, well, let’s shift to the same feeling in something you do like, like a red. And I think that this is where the conversation becomes super rich and where alignment can come with the client and with your team.

Abby: What’s the process then, you mentioned you start with words. Can you talk us through like an example of a typical process with a new client?

Laura: Yeah. So, we, we need to understand who they are as a brand. And it might seem seemingly simple to boil down to, you know, 3 to 5 words who you are as a brand, but it could take hours or days to do that type of work. And then if we’re working on a building, it’s really understanding what each space is doing. What is it supporting? What do you want people to feel in that space? What are they doing in that space? And we use those as language-based cues.

And I think a good example of this is the way that we worked with Adobe and Gensler on the Adobe Founders Tower. We programmed every single space with LOVE GOOD COLOR. So, every single space we understood deeply the intention of the space and color was selected based on those needs. And all of a sudden it became so much easier. It was a puzzle that came together very seamlessly because we understood what it was, we were trying to say, communicate, and support.

And so that’s really how we work with our clients. And it could be a product. We work with the children in the schools that way. How do you want to feel when you come to school? You know, nobody asks them.

Abby: No. No. Environment, hugely underdeveloped and under spoken about in classrooms. My mom started as a classroom teacher and the first thing she had her kids do in September was transform the classroom into an environment, and whether it was a huge tree in the middle, whatever they wanted to, so that they felt ownership on their space and not like they were sitting in a cube with things on the wall.

Laura: I love your mother.

Brenda: Oh my gosh. Abby’s mother is incredible. Absolutely incredible. So why did you found Project Color Corps? This is your nonprofit organization that believes that color is a change agent and infuses a sense of well-being, joy, and interestingly, you talk about equity as it’s related to color and how it is brought into our surroundings. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the work that you have done?

Laura: I believe we’re on our, I think, 22nd project, and we’re now in four cities across the country, which is very exciting for us. But I think it’s very hard for a child to muster a sense of hope in hopeless settings. And what I find is that they’re often surprised that we would actually come and work on their spaces, which is very heartbreaking to me. Like, why would you want to do this for us?

So, what happens is that they begin to think that that is their value, which couldn’t be further from the truth. And what I realized about color is its humanistic qualities. And again, it’s a way for us to connect with one another. And so, using it, I saw how powerful it was for my clients. And I started wondering, like, how about all the people who don’t get that? And how could we go into these spaces and work with them so that they see themselves in their environments? And that’s the, really the whole point of it, is they see their inner strength and beauty every single day.

Brenda: Having hope in a place that is a significant part of your life, and that is such a significant part of your world, is so critical to the fundamental sense of well-being that a person needs, and it’s so important and so wonderful that you’re able to do this. Can you give us like, an example of one project that you can tell us about where you saw, maybe a real transformation or that really had, was there like a magic moment that you were able to witness or experience?

Laura: Yeah, I think that every project, I walk away feeling like I got the gift. I feel like I get way more than I give and let me just share with you our very first project, because it was the hardest one to get. You would think that people would want to sign up and say, oh, I want this to happen. And I kept thinking, do they think I want them to paint my house? Like nobody was volunteering. I’m like, I don’t understand this, but I don’t think people even understood that this was an option or an opportunity.

But the very first school we went into was called the E.C. Reemes Academy. It was—it was located in what was called the Killers’ Corridor of Oakland because the kids were in lockdown a few times a week from drive-by shootings. And when I went to the school to engage, our engagement is usually about a year long, they asked me why their neighborhood never got color and why they never got nature. And when I talked to them about their feelings and what they were hopeful for in their school, they said, do you think you could, you know, create a space that would make us feel respected? Could you create a space where people might want to come and visit us, because no one wants to visit us now?

And so, it was this really deep understanding of how they will not only hold themselves, but the environment around them. And it made me realize that as we went through this process that, you know, we’ve been told that disruptive behavior is actually reduced in our engagement. It’s giving a voice to the children and the community and letting them all along see that they are so powerful. And so, I think for me, it just reinforces that we don’t really give voice enough to children and communities, and we don’t, and we really underestimate neuroaesthetics and what a facility can do for learning, for growing, for many, many other things.

Abby: What’s really interesting about your story, though, Laura, is when you have a vision… I just want to talk about people in business or in nonprofit who have a vision for something that you know the community needs, and the difficulty you had to persuade the first person to adopt it. It’s hard, right? And it’s amazing because, you know, there’s a need and you have to sort of beat that door down or try to find that connection, that magnet that’ll set you off, because I’m sure after that first one, once you’ve got that first case study, the penny seems to drop for people. And they’re like, yes, we need you. Laura, come over here.

Laura: Yeah.

Abby: Why are human beings like that in the first place? Why was it so hard, you think, to find that first group?

Laura: I think because we don’t know what we don’t know. So, it was never, ever part of a conversation when we’re talking about education. It’s always thought of as something superfluous. It’s, isn’t that nice. And if you think about it, it’s not really taken into many school districts, nor is it really, you know, maybe in affluent communities, you see, there are beautiful schools, but typically it’s thought of as institutional. And it is like the antithesis. It’s like beating the life out of creativity. I mean, we talk about why is that happening to us. Look at where we put the kids.

Brenda; Even in, in my workplace, in our college campus, when I first started working there, I got an office space, and I was told that it was going to be painted, and I was excited. I said, well, you know what? You know, where’s the fan deck, and so that I can pick the color and they’re like, no, no, no, no, no, it’s going to be white. And this is standard, and this is how it’s going to be. And there was this moment when they realized that that was not going to be acceptable to me, because in my office, it’s where I would have, you know, first of all, where I would be working all the time. But I meet with students in there, I work with my colleagues in that space. I have to be able to decompress in that space. And so, you know, I was certainly quite polite about it or whatever. but I went out, I picked the color, I bought the color, I brought the color. And I, you know, was going to paint it myself. And finally, they were okay, okay, okay. And they painted with my color.

Abby: Which was what color, Brenda? Tell us.

Brenda: Well, two colors. Okay. And one is a very soft, very beautiful kind of milky sagey green. It’s a very happy color. And then it’s complemented with a very, kind of a periwinkle purple, soft, again, another very milky color. And at any rate, it just always, always feels good.

Laura: No, but it’s great you advocated for that. We just recently did a school where we had done these big murals, and we created fencing for the kindergartners because they were exposed to the streets. And we painted these murals. And then the school learned that they were up to be painted, to be repainted, and they would not let them paint it beige. They said, you have to work with Project Color Corps. 

Brenda: Excellent.

Laura: And so that school is like a beacon in the community.

Brenda: Fabulous.

Laura: Because the entire thing was painted, multicolored buildings, we were really able to advocate on a much bigger level and to refuse what was normally standard, which is beige.

Abby: So, in terms of thinking about your methodology and designers, what are some guidelines or some advice you could give. They’ve listened to you today, they’re very enthusiastic, they want to go out there and try to use color more effectively. Could you just tell us some stepping stones to help them as they’re thinking about this?

Laura; I think the first thing that I would say is to be intentional, to have a very deep understanding of your goals in this space, not only with space planning, but with color, to really understand how color can play a supporting role, sometimes a major role, because it’s the biggest dosage you’re going to get of any one thing. So, I would say be intentional.

The second thing would be to engage in conversation with your client, to make sure that you are understanding the needs and to bring them into it so that they become part of a process and not an end result.

And then the third thing would be to play and play and play, because it is amazing the things you can uncover and create when you take the pressure off and just be playful and mix colors in different ways, and it’s really about discovery.

So, I would think that those things are some of the more fundamental things you could do when you’re working on any kind of space.

Abby: I like the way that you’re saying what’s your intention for the space. Maybe it’s a place to relax and reflect, and then what are the colors that the designer feels are relaxing or, you know, a place that you can really turn off and that’ll be different for different people, right? You’re not—I’m guessing it’s not like, oh, if you need it to be reflective, then you go for these greens and these blues. It, it’s literally as you mentioned earlier, it could be a red.

Laura: It’s a quality of color. And here’s the big part, and I think this is why I was really motivated to, to do this color system is that we learn color spectrally. It’s a drawdown of orange. We learn it as a family. It’s the orange family from light to dark. But the quality of that color you can imagine can be horizontal. So, the quality of a color, like you said, that’s calming. Orange can be calming too. It’s about the quality of color. So, saturation and brightness can have a greater effect than the hue. And so, we don’t often think that, we’re always thinking in the spectral world. Red is anger, red is love, red is, you know, it’s like wow, that’s a heavy lift. It’s like, but what red?

And the key is everyone will want their brand color somewhere. But the key is where is it the strongest, and the answer isn’t everywhere. You know, that’s not the answer. The answer is like sometimes the smallest dosage could be the most powerful and the most strategic, because the overall goal of any space is to make the people inhabiting it feel welcome and a sense of belonging, a sense of community. Right? And you can’t feel that if something is imposed on you.

Brenda: Laura, we need to know. What does your home look like? Is it bold and colorful, tell us. Give us just a little hint of what it feels like in your own living space.

Laura: The colors in my home are very reflective, I would say, of nature. They’re calming. There’s a lot of greens or paler colors and I use color as an accent. I’m always thinking of what I want to highlight and what my eye wants to be drawn to. So that’s the way that I use color. And in my space, I can’t use color because I’m always analyzing color. So, it can affect, you know what I’m looking at? It’s like being in the light box, right? There has to be a sense of purity to the space, because my whole world is about looking at color and creating palettes. And so, it’s, it’s quite neutral.

I’m not by nature a big, like a bold color person. You know, I have tried to wear a red dress for probably 20 years, and I still can’t wear it because I believe every time I put one on, I’m shouting. I’m like, hello. You know, I can’t do it. So, I feel like my space is more kind of reflective of my, my personality in a way, you know, where it’s a little bit more… I mean, I love to laugh, but I’m just saying I don’t have, like, fun colors everywhere. It would be hard for me to live in a space like that.

Abby: Have we got anything Laura that you’re about to work on, like, what more is that to do for you? That’s why I’m like, you’ve already done so much, like do you feel that there’s still a challenge to get the word out wider?

Laura: I think that for me, the thing I’m focusing on the most is how I can be of service to others. I am working on some senior living and health care where people are more vulnerable. And so I want to make sure that they’re in environments that really help them to heal. I’m starting to work on projects in public schools, so that the interiors of the spaces that the children are in are supportive and just bring them to a whole new level of discovery.

And then I want to grow Project Color Corps to many different cities. I always thought of it as the Peace Corps, but with color. So, we’re using color to spread the word of what it can really, really do. So, it’s mostly a focus on being of service and to take what I’ve learned. And I always say that, you know, I know this one thing and I know it kind of deep, you know, but that I want to use it in a way that, that really helps humanity.

Abby: Which turns right back to being a doctor, because that’s what they’re supposed to do as well. You haven’t strayed too far from the original, original mission. Your mom and dad should be very proud.

Brenda: Yes, indeed.

Abby: Laura, thank you so much. Well, first of all, for bringing us optical optimism, which I’ll be using that. It’s an incredible concept. And here’s to never leaving Oz.

Laura: Oh, that’s so kind. I adored being with both of you. And thank you for your time and your energy. This has been so wonderful. Thank you so much.

Brenda: It’s been a delight having you.

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, and make sure to leave a rating and a review and share with a friend. See you next time!

Brenda: Bye 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.

Dori Tunstall

Decolonizing Design

PRL x Naiomi Glasses

[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. And to our regular listeners, thank you for tuning in and supporting our conversation. My name, if you don’t know it, is Abigail Honor.

Brenda: Hello, this is Brenda Cowan.

Abby: Today we’re speaking with Dori Tunstall, distinguish design anthropologist, celebrated author, visionary organizational design leader—can’t wait to hear about that—consultant, and coach. She is a pathbreaker of progressive approaches that challenge conventional design paradigms that exclude and harm indigenous cultures.

With a global career encompassing an Associate Professor of Design Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Swinburne University in Australia, respectively, Dori made history as the first Black and Black female Dean of basically anywhere in the world at OCAD University in Toronto, Canada. Go Canada!

Her accomplishments have been recognized with numerous prestigious awards, which I am not about to list because we’ll be here the entire show, but most recently, the 2022 Sir Misha Black Award for Distinguished Service to Design Education. Dori, a huge welcome.

Dori: I am so excited to be in conversation with you, Abigail and Brenda.

Brenda: Oh, Dori, we’re so happy that you’re here. So, before we focus in on your incredible work with design, advocacy, and leadership, tell us what attracted you to cultural justice work in the first place?

Dori: I was born into it. I grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana. I am multi-generational African American, so, you know, like 7 to 10 generations that we can trace our family heritage in the United States and thus being culturally African American, which is a kind of hybrid mix of African, European and indigenous cultures, there’s an innate sense of attunement to cultural justice in which cultures get to be expressed, which cultures are repressed, which cultures you’re forced to assimilate to in order to survive. And it also brings, again, these opportunities for wonderful, you know, global celebration of culture and just my innate desire to understand how people think, how people move in the world has, you know, just deepened my, both my scholarship and my practice, right, around trying to understand culture and what it is and what it can mean to people.

Abby: Were your mom and dad involved in that sort of work? Tell me a little bit more about the influences that drew you into this sort of line of work.

Dori: I mean, I was born, I mean, you know, in 1972, in the 70s, so this is when you had the first introduction of like, Black History Month. So, my family was definitely involved with that.

There were always, you know, like there was always art around us. You know, I had cousins and uncles and stuff who were artists, so that was always encouraged. I talk about like how I became a designer is like, I have this book and volume number 11 is Make and Do. So, at the age of 10, I went through every single exercise in that book, which is like, you know, how to make stamps out of potatoes and build houses out of cardboard, so creative expression and an understanding of black culture was something that my family deeply, deeply advocated for and wanted to make sure that we were closely connected to.

Brenda: So, thinking about that and thinking about this incredible, you know, resume that you have today, I’m curious, was your journey, was it, like, fluid or were there a lot of unexpected turns and changes along the way that were unanticipated?

Dori: Yes. I always say that I’m like the queen of the zag. And I’ll give just like, really quick examples, so there’s a story that was told: at the age of 6, I said I was going to go to Harvard, and it was a thing that first my family’s response was like, you go, girl. Right? Like so there was something there that they actually felt that they could encourage me to do that.

So, I applied to Harvard University, but I encountered Bryn Mawr College, which is an all-women’s college, and it’s one of the Seven Sisters. And for me, the claim to fame is like, that’s where Katharine Hepburn graduated. So, I got into Harvard, but I zagged in the sense of going to Bryn Mawr College.

That was like one of my first zags, and I’ve never worked harder in my life intellectually than I did as an undergraduate at Bryn Mawr College, right, and making decisions to go from biochemistry to anthropology, like, I wouldn’t have done that. I wouldn’t have the environment to feel I could choose that pathway if I had gone to Harvard because there’s always a preconceived notion of like the pathway you’re choosing if you’ve chosen to go to Harvard, right?

Abby: So, is that what happened when you left university then? You graduated with your fancy science degree and then you zigged.

Dori: No, I didn’t get it. So, the other zag is that my junior year, I was supposed to decide whether I was going to be a biochemistry double major or go into anthropology. I took anthropology classes because physical anthropology is the first course that you take. And so, I was like, oh, I’m interested in anatomy and etc., etc. and I took a medical anthropology class because I was like, I’m a global person, and so I really want to understand how medicine works across the world. And I fell in love with the subject matter.

And so, I just kept taking more anthropology classes, and I decided that anthropology got me closer to why I wanted to do neurosurgery, which is I wanted to understand how people think. And in anthropology, you learn how people think, but you learn how people think in the way that they think. And I get to understand how people think in the way that they want you to understand how they think. Right? And so that was the other big zag, was then.

So, I ended up with a degree in anthropology. My family freaked out because they thought they were going to have to, like, carry me financially for the rest of their lives. They were like, what do you do with that? And then I went to Stanford and got my Ph.D. there. But then the other zag, right, is that I went into high tech consulting at Sapient/E-Lab, and that was on a totally different trajectory. But then when they saw my salary, they were fine.

Brenda: I’m a parent of a young person who just got an undergrad in fine arts, you know, and I’m just like, baby, you just got to do what you got to do. You got to follow your heart. And she’s now going into art therapy.

Dori: I mean, you know, the, you know, my family is very much like working class, right? And so, like those questions of like, the sacrifices, let’s say, that are made to set you on a pathway where you’re like, okay, she’s going to Harvard in ten years or whatever, right? I understand deeply the anxiety because the intent is, again, if you’re working class, you want your children to be upwardly mobile, right? And so, this idea of, okay, how many zeros is it, is also a marker for them of like, okay, we’ve done a good job. Right? We’ve set them up for independence. We’ve set them up for potentially intergenerational wealth. And we created you know like a possibility model for everyone else in the family.

Abby: Yeah, the family and the community. The community modeling that happens when somebody gets so far, like, I think it inspires other people and other people’s kids

So, moving from the early, very impressive years to your most recent accomplishment, so we’re going to talk about this extraordinary book titled Decolonizing Design: A Cultural Justice Guidebook, where you have a powerful take on the role and responsibility of designers and cultural leaders to really take action towards amending social and societal injustices through design. Tell us what decolonizing means to you and why this is your current passion.

Dori: Decolonization is about reestablishing indigenous sovereignty as the land, meaning, like, there’s practice we do, like a land acknowledgment, right? So, I’m on the land of Tongva, Chumash, Tataviam peoples here in, you know, Los Angeles. So there’s that recognition of and the rematriation of the land back to those communities

And then it’s dismantling all of these structures that have been put in place to maintain this hierarchy that has put Europeans and their descendants at the top, African Americans or African peoples at the bottom, and then everyone else trying to figure out how they fit in between. So, decolonization is that process, right, of reckoning, it’s acknowledging the harms that have been done and then making the true actions of amends to redress those harms.

Abby: Do you think we can ever right the wrongs of the past completely?

Dori: Yes. Luckily, being in, like, California, you begin to see that happen, right? Like you have 100,000 acres have been rematriated to the Shasta Indigenous Nations. And again, whatever people’s fears are about that, like, nothing happens. The Indigenous communities continue to remain generous, right, in their approach to reconciliation.

Brenda:  You know, in talking about decolonization efforts, I’m curious, Dori, if you could talk to us a little bit about how it is that in your experience, organizations, institutions have been falling short over the years, and I recognize this is probably a massive, I know it’s a massive question, but I’m curious if there are any specific missteps or lack of steps that you’ve encountered.

Dori: Well, in the book, I try to talk about it in two very personal ways. The first chapter is Putting Indigenous First, and it’s really about the story of my own humility that I had to cultivate in terms of working with Indigenous communities and Indigenous faculty and the sense of recognizing that, whatever struggle, civil rights struggle that I may have, right, as African American, there’s a different struggle that in some ways holds first precedence, right, over redressing for that. And it expresses itself in, really, ways, so again, like asking to be in partnership, I do a lot of work around cultural appropriation and misappropriation, and the heart of that, the grievances around that that, why didn’t you just ask to be in community with us, to be sharing with us? Right, like we would have done it in collaboration.

And again, amends are being done. Like Ralph Lauren and the Polo brand just started their third collection with Naiomi Glasses, whose, Diné designers have, they’ve done three collections to go, this is the last one. Equal credit. Right? Give back to the community, not just the individual. Again, her name is plastered all over, everywhere. I’m assuming paid very, very well and continuous. Right? Like it just wasn’t a one off. And again, like, if you talk 20, 30 years ago, Ralph Lauren was like cultural appropriator number one. 2020, had a reckoning, changed the way their business worked, to success, right, because I’m upset because it came out yesterday and it’s like it’s almost all sold out.

Brenda: You know, you’re reminding me, just, it’s like a personal side note, but the whole idea of humility, and especially when working with, with Indigenous folks and I was working on a project with the Smithsonian, the Museum of the American Indian, and I was learning about and working with Haudenosaunee and folks from the Iroquois Confederacy. And I kept slipping up, using the right language to talk about, you know, is it the Iroquois Confederacy? Is it the Haudenosaunee, and how do I get this just right in the exhibition work that I was doing? And I kept getting corrected by one of the Haudenosaunee women who was working with us. And I just kept saying thank you because she didn’t make me feel stupid. She didn’t make me feel ashamed. And at any rate, I just remember feeling gratitude. A really warm combination of humility and gratitude.

Dori: The two things that I always mess up in my relationships with Indigenous people, but other community, cultural communities as well, is, one: is being present. There’s a lot of trauma, right, that is very close in Indigenous communities, which is very triggering because African Americans have experienced like, again, same types of trauma, different timelines, like I say, like the, if you think of the residential school, you’re talking about people’s parents and grandparents, right, in terms of like, how close the harm is. Whereas even if we’re talking about like Jim Crow and a lot of those things, it’s something that I think of in terms of like my great grandparents. And so, to even have like that generation of difference means the trauma affects you in a different way, right? So, the thing I talk about is like having to be present in their joy and in their grief and in their anger because that’s, that demonstrates I care, right, it demonstrates that I understand them as peoples and I’m present for whatever they’re feeling.

The other thing and I still fail with this one and it’s, it’s hard, it’s not hardwired, it just takes a lot more practice, is that like, I am the queen of productivity, I am the queen of the Gantt chart. And it’s how I think, like when I think of an idea, I already have, like what the strategy needs to be and you know, what are the operations. So, it’s like, the moment the idea comes, I’m like, okay, these are the next steps, which is great. It means like, this is why I get to lead a lot of stuff, right? But it also means that if people are not operating under that same sense of time and task, which many of my Indigenous colleagues and more importantly, Indigenous processes of decision making does not fit within a Gantt chart, then I end up actually causing harm to a lot of my indigenous relationships, because I’m so trapped in this idea that there’s a time frame in which this needs to happen.

And again, I appreciate what you’re saying, because I would say it took me a moment to realize that the act of calling out is an act of love. It is saying, I want to be in good relations with you. So, I’m going to tell you what’s going on.

Brenda: You know, I have a question; we’ve been hearing about making amends, right, we’ve talked about that a little bit. And I’m really curious, you know, in your work, you talk about how it is that we need to make amends far beyond DEAI. Can you tell us what you mean by that?

Dori: So, the way in which DEAI is normally framed is around hiring. And in the book, I talk about the fact that, like, the way in which hiring is generally done is that they’re looking for a super token, which is, again, an individual, you know, who has an extraordinary resume, again, from structurally marginalized identities, whose talents are so desired by institutions that they’re willing to kind of put aside any aversions they have to those identities in order to access those talents. And, you know, I’ve consulted with enough academic institutions and they’re all like, who’s the super token? Right? Like, who’s the Indigenous Ph.D. from MIT that we can recruit to come to our, you know, I don’t know, backwater institution in order to make us feel like we’re decolonizing. Again, important and necessary. But it has to be done in a context that leads to success.

So, first of all, the person is in isolation, which, you’re structurally setting them up to be manipulated by the institution and actually not bring about change, right? So, you need to hire for critical mass, bring in five people a year so that they can begin to build a pocket of culture from which they can draw the strength to challenge every institutional thing that you have in terms of how it’s not working for the identities that they embody.

And that means then you’re talking about like, you know, everything from like, yes, the hiring process, but you’re also talking about, okay, what are the ways in which courses might be assigned, the workload might be assigned? What are the ways in which recruiting is done? What counts as work? Does all this community engagement count as work. So, you’re changing all of these sort of structures that exist within the institution so that they will feel free to contribute all of who they are to the institution and connect the institution to those communities that you’re wanting to embrace. Right?

Abby: Did you realize all this, like on your journey? Have you lived all of these situations?

Dori: Yeah.

Abby: Right, that’s what it feels like.

Dori: Well, and the notion of the super token came because people kept asking me, what does it feel like to be the first Black and Black female, and I said, well, it’s bittersweet because on the one hand, there is sweetness because you’ve broken through a particular type of barrier. Right? And people are inspired by that. Like there are young people who start crying just from meeting you because you’ve opened up possibilities for them. Right?

But it’s also bitter because you think of like, who are all the people that were rejected? By the system. So that it takes you in 2016 to be the first. So, my answer to that is like well it’s complicated because I’m a super token. Again, in terms of the meritocracy game, I’m exceeding expectations. That is a barrier, right? Because then people say, oh, we would hire more X, Y and Z if they were like Dori. Well, Dori’s not even like Dori. So, the responsibility of a person who’s a super token is actually to dismantle all of those structures that put them in that position of being a super token.

Brenda: That is a really tall order.

Dori: It is. I mean, this, you know, again, why my second book is The Super Tokens: The First, and the Only is as I went on tour for the last, you know, year and a half or so, people come up to me and were sharing their stories of being a super token. And first of all, they were thanking me for the term because they had a way to explain the tensions between what they were feeling in their career of, on the one hand, exceptional performance, but on the other hand, constantly failing disrespected. Right? And/or rejected by their institution. So, the idea in some ways of the second book is really to be able to embrace their stories and to draw from them what individuals and institutions need to learn, so that those experiences of those super tokens are not so painful.

And it’s a reminder for super tokens themselves of like what their role was supposed to be, because one of the things, the hard conversations that I’m having right now, let’s say, with the Black community, is that, you know, our trajectory in terms of how we’ve been structured is for us to want to join the institution. Right? We are super excited because Kamala Harris is about ready to join this super institution, right? Like President of the United States. And that’s what you’re taught. Your purpose is to infiltrate these institutions. But that is not enough, right? And that’s the part where it’s like, it is more than DEI, because it is not enough. You actually have to be engaged with dismantling empire, dismantling oppression.

And when you’re a super token, sometimes, again, your everyday struggle to exist in the institution in ways that you’re so focused on survival in the institution that you’re not focused on liberation. So, there’s also the reminder that if you are in an institution as a super token, you’re not there just to join. You’re there to create structures of liberation by dismantling and reassembling the institutions and in a way that is more just, more fair, more equitable.

Brenda: You know, we’ve talked, and the word liberation has come up a number of times. And I’m so taken with your message about humility and being informed when working with others, with being a partner and ally. And you talk about how we can experience liberation in not being afraid, right, to say no to something that could harm you. When we’re able to manage the vulnerability and the humility required to do this, we can foster connection and joy. I’ve heard you speak about this in other forums, and you term this liberatory joy. Tell us, how can we all exercise liberatory joy in our work?

Dori: There’s a workshop that I give, and I’ve given it twice, quite successfully, which is Designing a Pathway for Liberatory Joy. And in it, I ask people to first know thyself. So, I ask people to identify their positionality vis-à-vis structures of oppression. Then, decide on something they want to say no to, but feel they can’t. Once they’ve kind of sketched out like a pathway of like what, what would it mean to say yes to that thing? Imagine what like a positive outcome would be of saying yes to that thing you want to say no to. And then what are the systems that you have to, like, engage with in order to be able to get to that yes.

All it is, is just setting up a methodology to begin to say, like, no to the things that I want and need to say no to, so that I can say yes to the things that are going to bring me closer together to myself, closer to communities that I love and find nurturance with, closer to whatever higher purpose, right, that sparks my imagination and my commitment. And to say, you know, when I say liberation is saying no to that which might harm you, it becomes really clear, as we’re hyper aware of the things that might harm us. So, all of a sudden, and then people begin to think is like, can I say no to that? Can I say no to that job? Can I say no to that housing situation? Can I say no to that policeman? Right, all of a sudden you begin to accumulate all the things that are actually oppressing you, and then you figure it out: what’s your pathway to liberation?

And you can’t do it as an individual. You feel so overwhelmed if you’re trying to achieve liberation as an individual. So, it is only by trying to connect with others to others, right, that we, we create the conditions in which everyone can say yes to that which affirms them and nurtures them. And connection to me is joy, like, why we love music is because it connects us. You can have a bunch of people all moving in sync because the rhythm gives them a point of connection to one another, right?

Brenda: Well, I say yes to you, Dori, and I say yes to this moment that the three of us have.

Abby: Yes, I say yes too, this was incredible. Thank you, Dori, so much for sharing your zigzagging pathway with us today and sort of opening my mind and hopefully the listeners minds, liberating us all en masse.

Dori: Thank you so much again. It’s such a pleasure and you are such wonderful interlocutors, so let me know anytime you want to do it again.

Brenda: Oh my gosh, well this, this does beg for a sequel, I must say, because I feel we’ve only just scratched the surface. So—

Abby: So maybe, maybe after your next book tour.

Dori: Yes.

Abby: We’ll see you at the end of that. Thanks to everyone who tuned in today. If you like what you heard, please subscribe for more episodes of Matters of Experience where you listen to podcasts. Make sure to leave a rating and a review and share with a friend. We’ll see you next time.

Brenda: Thank you so much 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.

Marshall Steam Museum

Milton Historical Society

Science After Hours | The Franklin Institute

An open letter to the American Alliance of Museums

Small Museum Association

Introducing SEGD Professional Practice Groups

[Music]

Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience. My name is Abigail Honor.

Brenda: And I’m Brenda Cowan.

Abby: This podcast is produced by Lorem Ipsum, here in New York City, and explores the creativity, innovation, and psychology driving design experiences and encounters. Hello to anybody listening for the first time and welcome back to our regular listeners.

Today our guest is Alli Schell, who, after wearing many hats in the world of museums early on in her career, now works as the Director of Public Programs at the Marshall Steam Museum in Yorklyn, Delaware, where she champions small museums, which is one of the subjects of today’s podcast. She has been around museums almost her entire life, thanks to her father who took her to cultural sites on her summers off. Alli, a big welcome to the show.

Brenda: Welcome, Alli.

Alli: Thank you so much. I am a big fan of your podcast and just appreciate all that you do for the museum community. So, thank you for having me.

Brenda: Well, we’re so excited to have you, and let’s just get kick started by having you tell us a little bit about your early exposure to museums and historic sites, and what is it about your upbringing that influenced the path that your professional life has taken?

Alli: So big thanks to my father, who is a now retired history teacher. He taught eighth grade history, which it’s its own special kind of challenge. He loved teaching middle school students. And I think one of my first museum memories is at four years old, going to Colonial Williamsburg with him.

But on his summers off, that’s what we would do. We would go and visit different cultural sites all on the East Coast, and I just was so influenced by him. So then decided when I turned 16, I got my driver’s license, the thing that I decided to do on my weekends was, you know, not drive to the mall or other places, was to go volunteer at my local museums. And this first museum that I volunteered at, I remember approaching sort of the supervisor there and trying to think of ways to draw more people into the museum. And this was at 17 years old, and the museum was located kind of in this town where there was a central hub, almost like a wagon wheel. And the central hub is where everybody kind of gathered.

They had farmer’s markets on the weekends and different things going on. And I remember on the weekends I would drive past and see all these people kind of gather in the middle, but then they wouldn’t trickle down into where our museum was just a block or two off of this central spot, and I approached her and I was like, we should go up and, you know, I’m already in costume, I’ll be happy to hand out pamphlets and brochures and talk people up. They even put a sign out. I was like brainstorming all these different things and very genuinely they were like, yeah, go and do that. That sounds like a great idea.

Brenda: You’re a natural.

Alli: Even then I was already thinking more about how to propel small museums forward.

Abby: Where do you think people like you get that drive to go the extra mile? And is it only in this area of your life or is it in other subjects at school? Like, do you think it’s just central to who you are? Or is it specifically about this subject matter?

Alli: I think it just goes back to, for me, being really drawn to museums and their missions and what they’re about and just trying to help them to survive. It’s almost like a small museum philosophy of just letting people know that these places exist, they’re here in the community, and you should come and check us out. And I think it also goes back to my father in terms of just like teaching style and being sort of engaging or sort of interpretation.

You know, he taught history so he could have just done the usual thing, we just kind of go through the book. But he would go the extra mile, and on these summers off, he would go and use his own money, it’s very common for teachers, and purchase extra things, and he would do these like weeklong, sort of interactive experiences based around Civil War history and then also the American Revolution. And he made so many kids become teachers because of that, because he had this sort of interactive style of teaching and that has just stuck with me, and that is kind of my approach because I do public programs and education.

So, I know, I know I’m giving my dad a big shout out, but he so deserves it because he just really influenced me, and that’s, sometimes what it takes is just like one person to kind of be sort of your vision and kind of sets you on your path.

Brenda: Well, I’ll tell you something: what I think is going to be revealed pretty quickly in this, is that you yourself have quite a vision. Let’s talk about your first job-job, which was a director position. Who starts out as a director? That’s incredible. A very small museum, but they took a chance on you, which is really admirable. What was that first role like for you? How did you make your mark?

Abby: I want the terrifying, I want the terrifying—

Brenda: Abby wants to know if you were terrified.

Abby: You were terrified!

Alli: I don’t think I was terrified. I think I was terrified of my first board meeting. I don’t think I was daunted by the actual act of taking on a small museum. I think I was just very excited, and also very humbled that they just appreciated sort of youthful or emerging professional ideas and energy. And I know you’re going to make me emotional just because I always just consider myself this kind of small fish in a really big pond and just kind of make my mark behind the scenes, and that’s kind of what I like to do.

Now, the interesting thing about landing this position was—I don’t think you could really do this anymore, but I was so desperate, I guess, to get a position out of graduate school that I looked up a list of museums in all the places that I was willing to move to, and just went down the list and emailed them and was sharing my resume and looking on their websites and this was the place that I ended up at, was one of the places. And they got back to me right away and they were like, actually, we’re looking for a director, you know, send over your resume, cover letter, and we’d love to consider you. And I remember thinking, there’s no way. I’m an emerging professional. There is no way they’re going to hire me. So, I actually, I ignored the email.

Abby: Oh, no, Alli!

Brenda: Oh no.

Alli: And like a couple days later, and they were like, hey, we still haven’t gotten your cover letter and resume. You know, we’d still love to consider you. And I was like, oh, okay, well, I’ll send it in. Immediately get back to me, set up an interview and the rest is history. Yeah, they, they chose me.

Abby: That’s awesome.

Brenda: Oh, wonderful.

Abby: And which museum was this Alli?

Alli: It’s called the Milton Historical Society. It was in an old church. So, it was this quirky little, small museum located right downtown in Milton, Delaware, which is maybe about 30 minutes north of a lot of the Delaware beaches.

Abby: I want to hear about the t-shirt story, because I find that absolutely fascinating, and sort of that overall latitude you had in your role.

Alli: So, the Milton Historical Society, not only was it sort of the local history of the town, but Milton was also part of the shipbuilding industry in the southern part of the state. And, I don’t know, I just have all these different parts of me, I also have a very creative side, and so it manifested itself in me wanting to make a t-shirt for the gift shop. And I also love a good pun. So, because the town also has a little, has that quirky side to it, I was like, well, let me see if I can get away with this. And so, the shirt said, “Oh Ship” on the front, and it had a little tagline about, you know, “Shipbuilding Happens” in, you know, Milton, Delaware. I can’t remember exactly what the back said. And I was like, oh, this is right on the line.

Abby: Did they sell?

Alli: Mhm.

Abby: I knew it.

Alli: Oh, my goodness. And even years later, people remember this shirt. They asked me about it. So yeah, I think I made my mark in, in some way, even if it was just this terrible pun t-shirt.

Abby: But I think one of the fun advantages of working in a small museum and running it, like you really do wear multiple hats, you really can work in, you know, the grassroots marketing or in the merchandizing and be aware of, like who is your visitor? How is it cyclical, how is it seasonal? And you can really affect change.

Brenda: But what were some of the challenges, Alli?

Alli: Oh boy.

Brenda: Some.

Alli: Well, I think always with small museums right. I think just coming in, being the only full-time staff, I had two part time staff workers. So, it was just like everything—I was on all the time. When you’re in a small museum, you can see directly the influence you have, whether it’s through an “Oh Ship” t-shirt or a new exhibit you’re doing, or just working with the community and talking to them when they come and visit the museum. So, you get really addicted to seeing the influence that you have in a positive way. And that means that you end up taking on more and more and more. And I think I just got to a point, after two years that I realized I was burnt out and that, you know, being a director was very interesting and a really great learning experience.

But I realized there were areas I liked and areas that I didn’t like. So, to transition out of that is an interesting thing because people are like, well, you hit the top, you know, where do you go from there? And a lot of people say, oh, you’re kind of downgrading. But for me, because I don’t have an ego about those kinds of things, it was just more important that I set up my career pathway and my story. And I realized that out of this, the things I really liked were programing and education. You know that you really don’t like the administrative side.

And also, some of the other challenges, such as like with HR. When you’re a small museum, a lot of times you don’t have an HR department, and when something actually happens—I won’t get into the details—when something actually happens to you, and pretty much the only HR department that you have potentially at a small museum is your board, that gets really tough. And so, there were a couple situations I had to navigate where I was like, I can’t really rely on my board just because of the nature of the thing. So, how do you do it?

And one of them, I had to actually involve a stakeholder in the community because I had to think really creatively. I was like, how do I, how do I bring someone else in with influence that can help with this situation? But I can’t rely on the organization to kind of help, help figure this out.

Brenda: You certainly were very nimble, though, in terms of how you, I mean, the idea of bringing in an outside stakeholder and figuring out how to do that in a way that was safe. I’m just really personally very inspired by your thinking and how you were able to pivot and sort of you know, address just how to address things like this where there’s no, like, answer.

Abby: And I think that’s good advice for anybody in a situation, right? When there’s one against many and you feel either you’re not getting heard or your point across or something’s unfair, bringing in, you know, a third party, a mediator, somebody who can offer a fresh perspective often helps to solve the issue in some way, shape or form. But it seems to me that wherever you go, whatever organization you join, you really are trying to elevate them and make them successful. And so, you’ve brought to the community a number of different things. Can you talk about some of your programs?

Alli: Well, yeah, partnerships I think are one of my favorite things. You’re centered somewhere in a community, and I don’t ever feel like I’m in competition with another organization. I feel like we’re both kind of fighting the same fight. And I guess one of the best examples of that was I was working at another small museum that had historic houses, and one historic house was kind of located a little further away from kind of the main campus of where things were. And I really wanted to highlight that building. It was very cool, was an 18th century tavern, and I always go to different museum programs and kind of get inspired.

So, I will give a shout out to The Franklin Institute’s Science After Hours. I had gone and the whole museum was open, and people could kind of explore around, and they had different themes each night that you went. And there were different stations, and it was really interactive and fun. And I was like, well, what if I superimpose that kind of idea on to this historic tavern? And one of the big features that I kind of picked up on and that people were always drawn to, was just exploring the house. Let them at their own pace, explore the house, and then each room has something interactive.

So, whether it’s someone from the community doing a presentation or they’re writing with a, you know, a quill pen, for example, or they’re making 18th century insults with different words, and I would just come up with some of these activities, it really activated the space and made it come alive. And this event would be like sold out, I think I did this for about two and a half years.

But then the other, other side to it was the volunteer side. And so, we ended up getting this core group of volunteers that loved to help out. And I would also give them some ownership, so I send them kind of, here’s your area that you’re going to help with and here’s some information on it, but you know, you’re your own person, like take it and go with it. And so, they loved that so much that I just had this core group that would come volunteer every month. And it was just, that was probably one of my favorite things I ever kind of created.

Abby: Okay, so recently you shot into everyone’s LinkedIn channel when you posted your open letter to the American Alliance of Museums and their treatment of small museums. So, a little background to your story for our listeners.

You attended the conference this year after about a ten-year hiatus, because back then you were told a small museum meant a staff of 30 or more, which certainly wasn’t you. So now you’re back. Hopeful, optimistic, proud to represent real small museums in a panel presentation on small museums. Perfect for you. And the rooms overcrowded, so they have to set up extra seats and like super, super well attended. And the topic is important to this massive group of people because I think it’s about 85% of people in our profession work at small museums.

And now, Ali, tell us what happened.

Alli: So, I had ten years ago attended AAM as an emerging professional, I knew I had landed that director position and then yes, they had, the person at the panel had mentioned their staff size of it had to at least have been like 20 or 30 individuals. I was like that, that is not a small museum. And so there I was just kind of like, I was a little defeated in some ways because AAM—and I don’t want this, I’m just going to preface this: I don’t want this to be a bashing of AAM at all. And so, you know, you will see that for my letter, I just, it’s a call for just being proactive in general. But, you know, you kind of look to them as the thought leaders and sort of the overall kind of support system for museums in the US.

And so just to have that experience was just like really disappointing, and then going back ten years later, getting on this panel, for me, it was like correcting an error in the past of now I actually get to do that session that I was really hoping for ten years ago, but then I was just noticing and even just talking with colleagues, so the letter is kind of a, also, representation of some other just conversations, and I was like, I’m happy to be the, kind of, I’ll have the target on my back—conversations I had had with other employees, and there’s just some things that really turned us off, and to see that things just really hadn’t changed in some ways, or maybe reverted back in some ways.

And so just really wanted to call AAM and others out as to, you know, hey, we got to fix this and fix some other things, or, you know, how can we all come together? We’re a creative field, so we’re all connected to different resources. So, if it isn’t AAM, who else can do it?

Brenda: It is important to note that AAM is really the big player, certainly in the United States, you know, and we can talk about ICOM, you know, of course, as well and on an international level, by mission. But AAM is not insignificant. How is it that AAM is a mismatch currently for small museums?

Alli: So first and foremost, just small museum representation. So, if you’ve never worked at a small museum, you don’t really understand the challenges. And also, the really great things that a small museum can bring. And so, you know, just noticing that just about all of leadership and probably for a long time, I haven’t gone back and really done a full deep dive of that, have been, you know, people that come from larger museum backgrounds or even sort of, you know, higher executive positions.

So that was just kind of disappointing that there isn’t sort of a spread within the leadership there, executive leadership. And then articles as well. I know that there was someone at one point that was kind of really championing, on their staff, quite a few years ago with small museums, so they had helped create the small museum accreditation pathway, because there are just some things, like accreditation that really weren’t accessible to small museums in certain grants. Even though they’ll say it’s for anybody, there are just things set up that already are limiting.

So, some grants, some larger grants looking for like, what staff member is going to do this and this and this? And I had, even me, because I was ambitious when I was a director and I was like, I’m going to apply for an NEH grant before they had created the small museum grant and just even filling it out, I was like, I don’t think I have a chance.

I want to do it; I want to go for it. But, you know, they were like, well, what staff members getting assigned to this role and this role, I’m like, it’s just me. And then, yeah, they would have, so this person that was sort of championing small museums also I think was kind of instrumental, it’s just my take, in getting a lot of these small museum articles, because they always have the articles that they post out, which is really great resources in general.

But sometimes, a lot of times I read through them and I’m like, okay, that’s a great case study, but it doesn’t really apply to my site and that’s always what I’m looking for as a small museum person is, how can I take this information and how can I like objectively apply that to my site? And so not to simplify things, but I know that we’re like, we just got to get things done, so help us make that happen.

Abby: And what were some of those solutions then? Because I know, you know, in the open letter you lay out some of the solutions to benefit the museum community that you offered up to AAM.

Alli: Yes. So, I didn’t want to write a letter that was just, you know, being angry and upset, and I just want to preface that I did get to meet with some representatives recently at AAM, so they have started the conversation. But basically, some things that I put up, of course, very simply, just like create space for small museums to be in leadership positions and I think also there are some parts of AAM that have like paywalls or higher admission rates to attend certain things. And like even the annual conference is just, can be like inaccessible just in terms of costs, even for like emerging professionals. And of course, there’s some ways you can always kind of get around that. If you kind of volunteer or get a scholarship, not to say that they don’t give pathways to affordability, but still, just as a base level, it’s pretty expensive. And I get it. It’s a larger conference. So, places like Small Museum Association have like a way more affordable conference for me that I just have gone to every year and I get what I need out of it. But, you know, thinking just maybe they can think more creatively about some ways that things are structured.

Even for posting jobs. They have a job board and there is a fee associated with that. And so, I do career coaching stuff as well for museum professionals and for me when I see something like that, it just means that only certain jobs are going to get posted because they’re not going to post, let’s say, an entry level position or an internship necessarily. I think they did make a change from this, internship’s being posted on there, but you know, you’re not going to spend 250 bucks to post a smaller, lower-level position versus, you know, they’re going to put that money into executive directors, for example

So just some equity in there in terms of like opening it up so that, you know, there isn’t really one space for museum people to find a job, period. There isn’t one resource out there. So that really needs to change. Even just advocacy in general for funding. I think, in terms of grants and like, I just am thinking of things that are kind of like just help move the needle for museums in general, is there was a time during the pandemic where grants actually were funding operational costs and staff members and things like that versus the project aspect.

And I thought, oh, this is really great, seeing a lot of these grant makers kind of shift that during the pandemic. And then they shifted right back. So, I’m like, AAM already does these advocacy days who can kind of help talk to these grant makers and be like, this is actually what we need, and that would solve so many problems. So, for museums, if we could just have some funding for the people that work at these organizations who then could do these projects.

Abby: So, let’s do that: shout out to the, to people in the grant business. Please, please, please, please make a grant that helps support small museum staff and their operations.

Alli: Museum staff in general for any museum, you know. I think, some of these things benefit museums of all sizes.

Brenda: I had a conversation a couple of years ago with, with a very notable person in the museum world, and we were talking about the idea of small museums. And this individual very fervently said that it’s a frustration of theirs, that funding would ever go to a small museum, and that it’s the big museums that can be the change makers.

And I disagreed, disagreed at the time, and continued to disagree with that notion, and instead feel that the real change makers are going to be these smaller, nimble, we’ll go back to ships, it’s the tiny ship, and not the cruise ship that’s able to more nimbly pivot and be responsive to the times and be responsive to individuals and individual causes even. Would you agree with that?

Alli: Absolutely. I mean an example I can give, coming back to ships, right, so even just during the pandemic, I had an idea like day one when everything got shut down to do sort of an online program. And my boss was like, yeah, go for it, do it. So, I was able to get that program up and running in like a day. So just being able to pivot on a dime like that when you have this, the smaller sloops versus the larger ships really makes a difference.

And, you know, being able to just see what you need to do for that community or what you need to do in general. I think being community resources is super important, so you’ve seen a lot more museums become like voter registration sites, just even community gathering spots for lots of just different events that may or may not relate to the museum, but it’s a place that’s, you know, where people just go to gather, supporting the people in the community, not just the visitors, but the people that are working and volunteering there and supporting them, as much as you’re supporting the visitor and recognizing that the people that are probably working and volunteering there might have some ideas too and commitment to the community that you’re serving.

Brenda: Well, being that AAM stopped it’s work with small professional groups as a part of its organizational structure, in response to that, the Society for Experiential Graphic Design, SEGD, they have just started a brand-new professional practices group, that I must say has received a rousing amount of interest from the community. They have created their own professional practice group specific to museums.

They anticipate creating several, I believe, of these professional practices groups, but they have started with museums. And Alli, I don’t know if you are on board, but please do take a peek and get the small museum representation in the mix there. And I am very willing to believe that they would be very receptive to your voice and the voices of small museums being a part of that practice group.

Alli: Yeah, excellent. I think that’s just what needs to happen. And knowing that there is space for these smaller museums to have a voice is really helpful. And that’s kind of also what, in my conversation with AAM, that they’re like, you know, hey, we already did some outreach to some of these different committees and things that we have here, and they’re aware and are open to, you know, people applying. So, I think it’s, part of it is knowing that there is a space.

Abby: Yeah, well, they have new leadership, and this is exactly what they need to hear. And obviously they’re working with you, which I think is a great result. They’re listening, which is so important. So, you know, forging forward and making change is so important. So, thank you Alli so much for joining us today and shining light on small museums and their importance to local communities that they serve, and for honestly and candidly discussing the challenges of working in a small museum that staff face as you strive to thrive.

Alli: We try. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like it but—

Abby: Keep going, Alli. Keep going. Take a deep breath.

Brenda: Absolutely. You have a lot of people who are grateful for you and certainly including Abby and myself.

Abby: 100%.

Alli: Oh my gosh, I’m so humbled. Thank you so much.

Abby: And thanks to everyone who tuned in today. If you like what you heard, subscribe to more episodes of Matters of Experience, more episodes of Abby and Brenda, and 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.

Brenda: Take good care of yourselves, 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.

Beth Redmond-Jones

Monterey Bay Aquarium

Welcoming Museum Visitors with Unapparent Disabilities

Into the Deep | Exhibition | Monterey Bay Aquarium

Heureka Goes Crazy

[Music]

Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience. My name is Abigail Honor.

Brenda: Hello. Welcome. This is Brenda Cowan.

Abby: Our podcast is produced by Lorem Ipsum here in New York City and explores the creativity, innovation and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. Hello to anybody listening for the first time, and welcome back to our regular listeners. So, today our guest is Beth Redmond-Jones, who is the VP of Exhibitions at Monterey Bay Aquarium and author of Welcoming Museum Visitors with Unapparent Disabilities.

Her career spans over 30 years, in which Beth has worked at some incredible institutions, including the San Diego Natural History Museum, Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute. Her work focuses on engaging visitors in the natural world and inspiring them to take that step and advocate to protect our earth and ocean as they continue their journey beyond the walls of the experience.And also, Beth has been actively exploring how museums and institutions can more effectively serve people with unapparent disabilities, which I’m really interested to talk about today, Beth. So, listeners, this is going to be a real trip. Welcome, Beth, and thank you for joining the show.

Beth: Thank you for having me. I’m so excited to talk to the two of you.

Brenda: It’s such a pleasure to have you here. So, Beth, before we focus on your incredible work in design, visitor advocacy and leadership, let us know what attracted you to the industry in the first place. How does your story begin?

Beth: Well, I grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, and if I wasn’t outside in the woods with my dog looking for snakes and frogs and building forts, I would request that my mom or my dad would take me to either the Cincinnati Zoo or the Natural History Museum. And the Natural History Museum, in particular, was really amazing in that they had—this was the old Natural History Museum, not the one in Union Terminal right now—but they had this amazing spelunking experience where you literally opened the cave door, walked in across these rocks with water flowing around it, a waterfall, and there were stalagmites and stalactites and I still don’t know which is which, but I would go through that again and again and again, and I would exit through this cave door that opened out, and my mom would be sitting there on the bench doing her knitting, and she’d look at me and she goes, “You’re going to go again.” And I’m like, “Yes, I am.” And it was just transformative because I’d never been spelunking, so that was the closest I’d ever gotten to it. But I was just so fascinated about the whole idea of transporting someone to someplace else and like, feeling this amazing connection with place.

Brenda: What was that magic moment when you were able to take your early experiences in caves and with the natural world and in the woods and chasing frogs and snakes, when were you able to then discover that you could continue that passion and that excitement in a cultural institution?

Beth: Working in a museum in my mind was that you had to have a degree in art history, which is what I ended up pursuing, but I also had a minor in biology and studio art, and then you had to work in an art museum. So, I did an internship at the Tucson Museum of Art right after college and worked on an exhibition there, well several, actually, which was really fun, but it wasn’t filling my soul. And so I, you know, went to Washington, D.C. to work at the Smithsonian because that’s what everyone does, realizing I couldn’t get a job at the Smithsonian because I didn’t have experience or credentials or anything else. And so I ended up going to grad school, and that’s where I met Kathy McLean. She is an amazing woman here in the West Coast, one of my mentors, and she really pushed forward the idea of content driving design and coming at it from a visitor experience side.

Abby: I love that. I love that. So, in terms of your work, then Beth, so the listeners can better understand what it was you were doing, you mentioned sort of more of the design or the approach strategically thinking about yourself as the visitor and what you want them to learn and understand. What were you doing? Were you curating? Were you designing for much of your early life?

Beth: My early life really started with project management and helping wrangle all the details of an exhibition project, and then looking at the content. So, what do visitors know about a subject? How do we meet them where they are and scaffold up from there? And then designing experiences based on what you want to communicate to visitors. So, really looking at what is the content and then what is the experience design that you want to create to formulate this three-dimensional space that visitors are going to walk through or wheel through or run through.

Abby: From a project management perspective then, what were some of the challenges when you approach it that way, from the visitor’s perspective?

Beth: I think the opportunity for me with, and one of the things I really learned through the project management was I was managing the evaluation and the front-end evaluation and seeing what visitors like, listening to what they’re saying, doing interviews, collating the data for the expert to then, you know, formulate the final report. And so really understanding where visitors were, that was a huge advantage for me.

Part of my brain is really, really good at details if I can be really focused. So, it was a lot of, you know, correlating like what are all the pieces that we need for this experience from the text and the translation and the objects and that kind of thing, and are they all represented in the design documents? So, it was more of a logistical place except the evaluation and being able to manage that really allowed me to understand visitors better and their different learning styles and what excited them, and what didn’t.

Brenda: Beth, one of the things that Abby and I are really curious about has to do with how it is that you think about inspiring visitors to take action. So, what are some of the ways that through your work, you are able to really activate the visitor.

Beth: Okay. Imagine an upside-down triangle. Okay. And you’re going to put two lines through it to make three equal parts, with the top part being the largest, because it’s upside down, the middle section, and then the tiny little point at the bottom. So that upper section is the experience that your visitor has at the museum. So, at the aquarium that’s 2 million visitors a year fall into that top section and they get to experience the aquarium in whatever capacity that they, they do and however they learn.

Then you draw an arrow from that top section to the middle section. That middle section I like to call connect. Somehow there is something in that experience that made them connect with the ocean. Maybe it was the otter that they saw on exhibit and then they’re standing out on the back deck, and they saw an otter playing around or, you know, in the kelp or something like that. Somehow there was some kind of connection that happened.

 Then if you take an arrow from that middle section to that bottom section, that’s the action. So, a smaller portion of that 2 million are going to connect with something in the aquarium. But even a smaller percentage of people are going to take action. And it’s building that empathy that happens between the experience and connecting with it. And until you have that empathy in that connection, you’re not apt to do something about it. And that’s really based in all the conservation psychology that’s out there.

I always use the example of recycling. When recycling started in the US, middle schoolers at that time were the ones who were coming home saying, “Mom, Dad, we’ve got to start recycling because it’s my future that you’re screwing up.” And it was these group of teens that could make a connection to their future, where the adults had, like their future was now. So, it was a way of then activating that family to then take action by recycling. Does that make sense?

Brenda: It makes a tremendous amount of sense. And I also appreciate how you think about this in in a framework of empathy and relevancy and how it is that humans ultimately, if we can understand that the tiniest thing that we do in the course of a day can actually make a difference.

Abby: So, Beth, your work really has a strong root, clearly, in visitor advocacy and reaching out through the experiential, hands-on design. I know you used multimedia, but you know, in terms of that middle tier of the triangle and really connecting with people, we’ve found that as soon as people can touch and interact rather than just stand and passively, maybe just read, they really start to emotionally resonate with the content. So, can you talk to us a bit about the way that you sort of really emotionally touched the visitors?

Beth: Well, I think there—that aligns with why I am drawn more to natural history and live animals, because there are things that have existed on this planet for millions of years and may still be here or may not.

One of the things that we talk about here at the aquarium is that the animals are ambassadors, and we create the design of our exhibits to really highlight and focus on the animals. Everything is seamless from what we call back of house, so the animal habitat, to the front of house. And our text is very minimal, and the experiences outside are very minimal, unless they completely add to what you’re seeing in front of you

So, I was just recently talking with one of my designers about like, if you were talking about a, a femur bone from some animal, you want that bone in front of you and you want that label right there, so there’s a direct connection between that label and that femur bone, and not having that femur bone across the gallery.

Brenda: So, we’ve been talking about the wonderful things that you do with the aquarium to engage visitors and to spur action and to develop relevancy, and to make for a very successful visit on visitors’ terms. What I’d love to do would be to fold this into your most recent accomplishment, which is an extraordinary book that adds great depth and breadth to our profession’s work with DEAI.

I enjoyed this book immensely, and it brings into focus the needs of museum visitors with unapparent disabilities. So, let’s enter into this part of our conversation, if you would, with a definition. Is there like a medical definition of unapparent disabilities? And what do they mean within the museum profession?

Beth: When I started working on this book, actually the title that I pitched was Hidden Disabilities. And I started talking to individuals with lived experience and a couple colleagues of mine who work in the accessibility field, and then I looked at the dictionary, imagine that, and found that, you know, the term hidden is being out of sight or not readily apparent. It’s being concealed, which means someone on purpose is trying to hide what they may or may not have.

So, then I looked at invisible and invisible implies not being seen. And we all want to be seen. So, I started thinking about, well, you know, ADA uses physical and then it was like, well, I could talk about mental health, but then it’s also neurodiversity and its dementia and grief and things that don’t have a clear definition within the DSM or within the ICD that the World Health Organization puts out.

And so, I started thinking about the word apparent, and then unapparent just came to me. A lot of people have asked me why I didn’t use the term nonapparent, and non comes across as such a negative term for me, more so than unapparent does. So, I ended up going with unapparent, and when I spoke with others with lived experience, that resonated with them.  So, it’s not readily seen or directly apparent, but it is still there. It’s not being hidden. It’s not invisible. Does that make sense?

Brenda: That makes a tremendous amount of sense, and I really appreciate the thoughtfulness that went into this. And I think that choosing the right language and you bringing that forth into the broader dialog within the profession is really important.

Abby: I also just wanted to add that I completely agree with Brenda, in terms of the thoughtfulness in the way that you consulted people with, let’s wonderfully adopt the unapparent disabilities that I think is perfect, and made sure that that community were comfortable with that term.

Beth: Well, I’m going to interrupt you for one second because I’m part of that community. I have depression that I’ve lived with ever since I was a teen, and my family didn’t want to talk about it, because if you don’t talk about it, it’s not there. But I struggled with it, and both of my kids have it, and my husband, my ex-husband is on the spectrum.

Abby: It’s very personal for you.

Beth: It’s very, it’s very personal. But one of the things that I will do at conferences is I will ask people to raise their hands and keep them up if they know of anyone that has anxiety, depression, ADHD, dementia, bipolar. Within 5 to 6 terms every hand in the room is up.

Abby: Oh, I’m sure.

Beth: And one of the things I say is that this is our present and this is our future. Everyone is touched by this, yet no one will talk about it. And the stigma piece makes me crazy and that’s part of the reason I wrote this book, because we need to start talking about it, and museums are such safe places to be able, for those with these challenges, to just be, get out of their own heads, find a moment of quiet or a moment of connection. Moment of mindfulness.

Abby: I love that you brought up museums as a place for that, a place for our society to be able to come and talk freely and openly about things like mental health conditions or any concerns. To be honest, I think that as museum institutions evolve and become places for our communities, that this is one of the wonderful roles I think they can play.

Beth: Most definitely. I think the United States, though, is way behind. The National Health Service in the UK is so much further ahead. And how social prescribing is becoming very commonplace within the NHS, as well as in Canada. And I think the United States needs to get with it and start really thinking about this.

Abby: I just have a quick design question about that. So, can you tell me or explain to me a few sort of examples about things that change when you’re designing for this group? Just some really good examples, so designers who are listening can, sort of have some food for thought when they’re designing their next project.

Beth: So unapparent disabilities impacts everybody in some way or another, either personally or someone that they may be with. So, I don’t think there is a thing about creating different types of labels or anything like that, but maybe really thinking intentionally about the space that you use and how to use it.

Do you have very high active zones for someone who may be a sensory seeker in the autism spectrum? But also, do you have quiet areas where someone who is a sensory avoider might be able to decompress, or someone who gets very anxious in crowds, that they can separate themselves away and have a moment to take a few deep breaths, regroup, and then move forward.

My oldest daughter used to have a service dog. She has autism and other mental health challenges, and she was a huge inspiration for this book, and just knowing some of the exhibits I go into, they’re not designed to accommodate an individual with a service dog. So how do you do that? Most museums don’t even allow service dogs, but they have to by ADA. So, I think there’s a lot of things you can intentionally think about in just creating a welcoming space for all. And that quiet space that someone who has anxiety may want to sit and decompress, it may be a perfect space for a nursing mother just to sit down and nurse her baby for a few minutes so then they can keep going and enjoy the experience. So, it really gets then to universal design. And what is good for one is really, can be beneficial for all.

Brenda: This sounds so achievable. And yet, as you pointed out, the US is struggling in some ways to really work with this audience and make necessary change that would make things accessible for all. And I’m curious, what do you think museums and cultural institutions have been missing? How is it that they’ve been falling short? What is it? Is it funding? Is it an unawareness? Is it an unwillingness? What is it that is not happening in our institutions that you think we can really impact?

Beth: I think it’s a lot of, actually, I think it’s at a societal level. It gets into the stigma piece of us not recognizing that individuals with unapparent disabilities are around us everywhere, and not being willing to take a stand to support this audience. I’m very fortunate my staff have faith in me and trust me, and those with unapparent disabilities will come to me, yet maybe not necessarily go to HR if they’re having a rough day or need a different type of headphones so they can function in a cubicle environment or something like that. I think it’s at all levels of, not just visitors that are coming to the museums, but the staff that are working there, and how do we really make everyone feel welcome and comfortable in whatever capacity that they’re engaging.

As to why, you know, other than stigma, I think a lot of places are afraid and they may lose funding, maybe, or be seen differently. I mean, I’ve actually had a couple people reach out to me since I wrote this book saying, well, you may not be hired in a museum ever again for being so vocal.

Brenda: Seriously?

Beth: Seriously.

Brenda: Oh my Gosh.

Beth: And, I was like, wow, okay, there is stigma, full and present, and these are people who have been in the field for years.

And, you know, one of the things that I was asked, I had several readers for different sections of this book, and one of them came back to me and said, in your very first chapter you state that you have depression. I’m like, yep. And like, aren’t you afraid of like putting that out there? I’m like, if me, as the editor of this and, you know, coauthor of this book cannot state that, why am I even doing this book?

So, I think there’s a huge societal piece to this that really needs to be addressed. And hopefully, as other museums and other individuals are willing to start speaking out, that we can maybe start making change.

Abby: And let me ask you a quick question then, a bit based on where you currently work, it’s obviously a very welcoming place and a place that gives you the support you need, for the book and for where you’ve worked and what is it, do you think about the aquarium and the staff because, you know, you mentioned the docents, but the environment you work in that you think makes it special and so accepting? And what are some of the nice moments in the aquarium where you feel that there’s fantastic, inclusive design and you’re proud of your achievements?

Beth: Okay. Well, first of all, accessibility is a journey. There’s not a start and an ending. It is a continuous journey. There’s one thing I always have to remind myself and the people that I’m working with, I think we could be better. You know, this is an amazing place, but the quiet spaces are very far and few. It’s a concrete building with a slate tile floor. We have to really be intentional in the way that we design future spaces. I’ve only been here for five years, and I only have one exhibition up currently, and we’re working on a second one right now where we’re really putting accessibility at the forefront of our design. So, it’s just how can we create spaces and do that?

And we’re right now on a journey. We have just started developing an accessibility roadmap here. We worked with all of our staff in putting together a shared Google Sheet, for lack of a better term, where people could put in opportunities, things that are working, not working for both staff, as well as for our volunteers, as well as our visitors. And we are slowly working through how do we parse out and make changes over the years to come, and where are the opportunities and the precedents that we can set.

In regards to designing the Into the Deep exhibition, which is my first exhibition here, when that project started, they designed a entry gallery that was filled with monitors and bioluminescent, deep sea animals. So, it was very sparkly and blinky and, not like strobe lights, but, you know, lights going on and off of the bioluminescence of these gelatinous animals in the deep sea. And I had us redesign the gallery so we could move that off the main path, because someone with sensory processing disorder or challenges could get to the beginning of that and turn around and walk away and never see all the amazing animals that are actually in the deep sea because of this one experience that was a multimedia experience.

Abby: This is incredible, right, Brenda? Like this is phenomenal.

Brenda: It’s absolutely perfect.

Beth, I wanted to ask you about when you were putting together the book. You have an impressive lineup of authors who contributed to it and brought many different perspectives, many different facets to the stone. How did you come to identify and select the authors that you did? Like, did the content specifically drive the selection of authors, or were there particular folks out there doing work that you knew was really essential and important to bring to the fore? How did you come to direct the chapters?

Beth: Well, I didn’t want this to be all about autism, but I felt that I needed to bring up autism, because that’s something that the museum field has really made strides in. But I also wanted to look for opportunities for where programs have pushed beyond just the sensory mornings or evenings, and how they’ve really integrated those of that community and how to move that forward. I really wanted to look at mental health, and that was a little bit more challenging. I knew of the mental health exhibition that Heureka had put together, so I reached out to them, and they were really willing to write about it.

But for me, I really get tired of us all patting ourselves on the back for all the great work that we’re doing, and that’s part of the reason I wanted to have lived experience voices in it. Because first and foremost, if we’re doing these programs, we need to be engaging those audiences and asking them how we can better serve them and not just make assumptions for how we can serve them and support them. So that was not difficult to find people who I knew with lived experience. So, it was really a pleasure that they were really excited to participate in. And be a part of that as well.

Brenda: Well, the range and the depth, the breadth of authors in there, it brings so much dimensionality to this subject, and one of the things that really is important to me is the range in particular, like your decision to bring in mental health. I was very surprised, honestly, at how encompassing you have been with this particular book, and I think that it is so important that you have brought this to the profession.

Beth: Well thank you.

Abby:  I think we should just tell the listeners to go out there and buy the book. Damn it, get that book! It’s a must read, but I want to move now, as we’re running out of time, and I’ve got a really critical question. Technology, Beth. Blessing or curse? Blessing or curse? What do you think?

Beth: I think it depends on the situation. I think if you can tell the story with a real object or the real thing, then you should. I think it’s really determining what is the problem you’re trying to solve with technology that you can’t do without it.

I don’t know, I get very frustrated by technology sometimes because I feel like it’s just like, oh, well, let’s just throw it on a on a computer screen. I don’t know, I’m about authenticity and the real things. I mean, if you’ve ever been to the Holocaust Museum and you stand in front of an SS uniform or inside that train car, technology is never going to replace that. And whether it’s, you know, a totally faux spelunking experience, for me, that was the real thing when I was seven years old. But it was that immersive element that I wouldn’t have those same feelings or that, I don’t think that passion for nature without being in it and loving having my parents let me run around in the woods for hours with my dog and play and collect snakes.

Abby: So, Beth, this has been incredible. Thank you so much for sharing, like, sharing your fearlessness in walking the walk and talking the talk and being a real leader.

Berenda: Here, here.

Abby: Like, I wish there were more people like you who are willing to put their head up above the parapet and tell it like it is, and not worry about losing their job and what negative things going to happen to them. So, thank you for being you and having that courage.

Beth: My pleasure. I think all the formal learning organizations can help in making people feel more welcomed, regardless of abilities and disabilities, and that is to train the frontline staff and those that engage. That is where, in the book I bring up a couple examples of the way I was treated with my oldest daughter, and it was really unpleasant and, you know, oh, people with autism kill people and, you know, do you have a problem, do you need to leave?

I mean, there was some really, really some awful things, said, and I just checked it off as them not knowing and not knowing better. So, I think if we do anything else, is training our frontline staff to come with empathy and open hearts and compassion to whoever it may be and just be, how can I help? Anything that you need that we can help make your visit better today.

And I think if we can all take that one step, we’ll be much better as a society, and hopefully will open the door for the rest of the museum to then start thinking about how we can do that for our own staff and others as well.

Brenda: Wise words.

Abby: Beth, again, thank you so much and thank you 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, and make sure to leave a rating and a review and share with a friend. We’ll see you next time.

Brenda: Take good care everyone. Thank you, Beth.

Beth: Bye. Thank you.

[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.

ATELIER BRÜCKNER

Ecsite

Wellcome Collection

Ars Electronica Center

ZOOM CHILDREN’S MUSEUM – Wien

Artistic Residencies | Arts · at · CERN

Fungi Cosmology: a new kingdom and its relevance for the future – Swissnex in Brazil

Futurium

ART+COM Studios | Neo-Natur

Hyundai Motorstudio | ATELIER BRÜCKNER

[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 our regular listeners, thanks for tuning in and supporting our conversation. My name is Abigail Honor.

Brenda: Hello everyone. This is Brenda Cowan.

Abby: So, Brenda, today we’re speaking with Elisabeth Ramm, who is an associate partner at ATELIER BRÜCKNER and a lecturer at various art schools in Europe, as well as the co-founder of Swiss-based ARTHINKING association. Elisabeth designs and crafts theatrical and scenographic spatial concepts for museums and brands worldwide. Leveraging a broad spectrum of strategies and techniques drawn from theater, film, exhibition, and art to translate complex narratives holistically, immersively, and artistically into physical space. Elisabeth, it sounds like we really have a lot in common.

Brenda: Yes, some kindred spirits.

Abby: So very, yes, very excited to welcome you to the show.

Elisabeth: Thank you so, so very much for having me tonight. It’s an honor. I’m in Europe. It’s 10 o’clock in the evening. Yeah.

Abby: Thank you. Thanks for staying up. But I know for you this must be normal as you work around the globe. When do you ever sleep?

Elisabeth: Actually, I try, I have to try. Well, I have to get some sleep, obviously, you know, so, I’m a mother as well, so you know how that works. So, you try to, you know, combine various different aspects in life, you know. But yeah.

Brenda: That’s actually a perfect segue into where we wanted to really begin thinking about all of the different techniques that you use, as Abby mentioned, drawn from various disciplines like theater and film. What was your experience with all of these different kinds of art forms before joining ATELIER BRÜCKNER?

Elisabeth: Actually, it was, I would say, basically through my biography. My father is a classical musician and I’d been born in the former eastern Germany part, and he was introducing me, actually, to classical music. So, I learned the violin, and then I was studying classical violin. And then, as I saw or eventually realized that I have other, well, maybe, interests, I kind of terminated this.

And then I went to Zurich. This was really a time when a digital revolution really actually happened. So I did my bachelor’s in media art and then since I always wanted to kind of stage and really well see what spatial impact also ideas and storytelling could have, I then back in the time when scenography was not really so evolved, I decided to, well, to go into theater directing.

And so, I did my masters in this one, and so I had kind of a really a broad overview. And then of course, I thought, okay, what now what to do with all of these kind of, you know, aspects? And then I discovered actually that there is something like scenography and exhibition design. And then I really found, I have to say, I found my home in this approach because it’s so interdisciplinary, there are so many things that are coming together that intersect storytelling. I mean, you know it yourself. Yeah. Content and then spatial imagery and experiences that are being laid out, are being designed. So, I think this really kind of fits me and suits me.

Abby: What was it when you were directing theater that wasn’t enough for you personally, Elisabeth? What sort of drove you into museums and exhibition design?

Elisabeth: Actually, I think it’s a different media that I could take advantage of; the different experiences that I could create. And I think most of all, that visitors in an exhibition actually choose their own way. They choose their own path. So, it’s not that you put visitors in front of a narration, and then something happens, and they have to listen to this. So, they actually, they freely explore what is coming. So there is a level of suspense, yeah, and as I said too, you can work with graphic design, you know, all kinds of, you know, media that you can take advantage of in so many different ways, only in one exhibition, and I think this kind of variety of experience creation, that was, for me, quite interesting.

Abby: We talk about storytelling—you use the word a lot on the show, Brenda, right? For me, it’s about a drama, protagonist, antagonist, what’s sort of the struggle and hopefully the positive or nuanced outcome. And how do we tell the key chapters in the story in this authentic, engaging, immersive way? And we always start, at Lorem Ipsum, we start with a story structure before designing, you know, and diving into the design aspect of it. And we like to get our guests perspective on what storytelling is for them in their work. Can you talk to us a little bit about your process? And when you say storytelling, what you mean?

Elisabeth: Yeah, that’s interesting because it means, you know, for different people, different things. And so, we kind of try to apply the idea of the dramaturgy in space also to our work. So, you know, like where is the peak point, where are the high points, so how are we kind of guiding visitors around?

But I would say storytelling is for us strongly, also comes from content. So, we would analyze what is there, yeah, so what is really the body of content or what are the messages that we want to convey, and how can we derive motives out of these kind of content clusters or however, and then from there kind of create, of course, always from the other end coming, thinking of experiences. So, you know, what is our target audience, for example, and what would they expect or also what we would like to, you know, dive into.

And of course, a storyline can be a chronology. It can be a thematic order, you know, it can follow different kind of principles, I would say. It can also be interrupted, so you can have breakouts, for example. So, let’s say before maybe things were more didactic and then suddenly you have something where you break out into something totally emotional. But we of course also then think from the end of the space. Yeah. So, what really actually tells the architecture, what is the space and the shell that we are doing this in?

Brenda: You’re describing such an incredible landscape to us right now, really giving us an idea of just how rich and full of drama and possibility your spaces are. And one of the things that Abby and I are hoping to be able to focus on with you today is your work in science, and we’re really curious to hear how do you apply these different elements of storytelling and create an exciting, designed environment that conveys science concepts?

Elisabeth: That is a very interesting question because that is, I would say, reflects a challenge that we are currently facing because we are at the moment are assigned to, well, eventually create a science center. But the target audience for this one is elementary school kids, until I would say teens or, you know, like late teens. And one thing that for us was important is to think of, okay, I mean, science is—or science museums are really kind of fostering, I would say problem solving, critical thinking, you know, engineering, you know, all these kind of natural, scientific kind of ideas.

But at the same time we were wondering, okay, we are, I think, in very special times right now. So, we are facing numerous challenges, as we all know, climate change, you know, migration, food security, energy and so on and so forth, and what kind of skill set do we want youngsters to have, to possess? What can we foster through our exhibition and what do we have?

And for us, one key aspect in this entire kind of setting was the idea of creativity. So, the ability eventually to make youngsters—acquaint them—with creative thinking, with, you know, like methods that they can, not learn but, you know, kind of experience. So, to really be able to think out of the box and to come up with ideas that eventually, hopefully, kind of shape the world or however.

Abby: That’s a big responsibility, that’s fascinating, like to actually be able to change the way that the visitor thinks in order to be able to learn about who they are and the way that they work—actually, to change their process of learning.

Brenda: And at a really particular age, too, if we’re thinking developmentally, you’ve really got such an ideal sort of age range within the course of human development to be able to really reach young people at a time when they’re formulating ideas and just starting to really understand—

Elisabeth: Exactly.

Brenda: —right, the world beyond their door.

Abby: But does that mean then, are you thinking about how, how often does one person, one of these kids come because to really affect change probably once isn’t enough. So, is there going to be—and this is early, because you haven’t concepted, I get it, but is there any thinking towards before the student comes in and then after the students left?

Elisabeth: Absolutely. I think what is really key in general is that an institution, however, wherever, is really grown and rooted within not only a community but also its location and that it grows with its visitors and with its audience. So, you know, that when you come, you know, as eventually a teen, you remember how it was when you were a kid and then, you know, eventually you would even come, you know, as an adult and remember that.

And then also, you know, mirror the experience eventually, even in a digital realm, so that you always have a connecting point and that, I mean, of course, you know, pre communication, post communication, all of this is very important. But I think really to create an institution that lasts, so, that does not only give you a one-time experience, but where you can always come and see something new or something different.

Abby: So, you just returned from the Ecsite Conference where exhibition educators, makers, designers came together to discuss all things experience, exhibitions, science, and storytelling. I know that there was an element to the conference that really struck you as important as it related to the question of whether natural phenomena need storytelling or scenography at all. This is a sort of a controversial discussion about whether, for example, natural phenomena speak for themselves or speak for itself, or if setting up a narrative interpretation is essential. So where do you fall in this discussion, Elisabeth?

Elisabeth: That was, that was very, very interesting, very interesting lecture, I have to say. There were many, many workshops in this Ecsite Conference, and this one was really, that was outstanding, because the, already kind of the announcement of the session was interesting.

So, the announcement goes like this: so, some science centers use effects like colors, signage, materials to give visual similarities for a space. But some science centers have decided to go further and implement extensive scenography in an effort to tell stories and create immersive experiences for the visitors. But does this actually have the intended effect, or is it just an expensive distraction for our visitors, which also delays our projects?

So, this is how actually they were framing it. And I thought, okay, this should be interesting. And it was really a vivid discussion about whether or not this makes sense. And they had to kind of install this or in the scenery of really a trial. And there were, I would say, people from Phaeno and from other science centers in Switzerland that would say no, they really, they stick to this, this makes sense, and this is absolutely the right approach.

And then, of course, you know, there was me like a scenographer standing up and saying, you know, my son just asked me the other day, mama, why are we actually not falling off the earth? And I thought about this question because this is such a deep and, you know, multi-layered question that really, in my opinion, requires storytelling. And in an extent, it also requires scenography to be contextualized, to be understood, because what in the end is science? Science is nature, and nature is science. But to really understand the complexity and the simplicity at the same time, yeah, of natural phenomena, I think in this case really strongly needs embedding. and there, scenography of course strongly can help. So, I was super, super, super pro-scenography of course.

Brenda: I am completely on the side of scenography and embedding phenomena within a story to gain access, and I think especially because it can enable a person to go deeper and then a little bit deeper and then a little bit deeper, you can feed people as they’re exploring in their own way. But when you have a very rich context that is built out, you know, not just visually or sensory, but also through layers of content, through emotional experience, you can really reach so many more people, I think. So, I’m with you, Elisabeth. Elisabeth, let’s talk about the history and some of the differences between STEM and STEAM, and what do they mean to you as it relates to experience design?

Elisabeth: Yeah. So, STEM, basically I believe was introduced in the 2000, early 2000 years, and STEM is science, technology, engineering and math. So, ten years later, you know, like another kind of shift of mindset appears, like a little bit of an evolution, and suddenly we find between the E and the M an A that stands for art. So, we have STEAM now and the idea is behind that—and this, of course, is a leap forward—that art, of course, has a profound impact of how we see things. So that is really a shift of perspective, and I think this shift of perspective, that leads then to this eureka moment where you think like, oh, wow, it’s not, you know, like a binary thinking, where you think, okay, it’s black or white or it’s right or wrong or it’s this or that, you know, so it’s either or and nothing third.

So, you know, to exclude eventually implicit knowledge, to exclude intuition. And I think this is exactly where this A, the art, actually comes in. And of course, you know, there are many institutions that were created, then and under the label of STEAM: the Wellcome Collection in London, and then the Ars Electronica Center in Linz, you know, there’s a fantastic children’s museum in Vienna as well, called ZOOM, that is relying totally and solely only on programing. They have a temporary exhibition. But this actually, this art approach that is brought into institutions in many different ways, yeah, some have art collections suddenly, or they invite artists to do their artistic research. They have residency programs such as the CERN in Switzerland. They have really an artist in residence program. So, it’s really kind of a cooperation. And also, the scientists take great advantage of what the artists actually are doing. So this is really an interesting approach.

And for me, one example of how this can be mind-blowing and where it actually makes a difference is of a fungus. So, there’s an art institution in Switzerland where a friend of mine was actually the co-director, and they also had an artist in residence program. And as it happens, in the Swiss National Park, there was a gigantic fungus being found in the year 2004. And it was one of the largest living organisms, and it was also very old. So, it was a thousand years old. And this very fungus, of course, leads now to, you know, a vast amount of topics and themes, you know, so this is really as a starting point to think about eventually, interconnectedness and symbiosis of, you know, like hidden networks and communication, adaptation and resilience.

So also to take this one kind of thing, you know, and, and really explore different realities to really shift perspective around this kind of idea. This, I think, for me is really a great example of how to bring in or how, what STEAM actually can do with, with thinking and with scientific, well, binary thinking between right and wrong. So really kind of bringing in a multidimensional reality.

Abby: So excited. I want to go. And it also just gets, as you talking about it, it makes me excited to want to learn and go see and understand, and the more you understand about the fungus, the more you understand about humanity, because we’re all interrelated and interconnected, and it’s just exactly where science museums should be.

Brenda: You know, I’d love to add a layer of complexity to the dialogue right now, and get back to how it is that we are addressing, through our design, through our experiences, through our science centers, the big challenges that are facing the world right now. And I’m thinking about, you know, specifically climate change as being an area of science that so many science centers are approaching.

How is it, Elisabeth, that you can bring an audience into the complexity of what our planet is facing today? Like, what kind of thinking do we need and how do we move forward? How do you instill a sense of hope, opportunity, possibility through your designed environments?

Elisabeth: Well, first of all, exactly what you said, a sense of hope and possibility? I think, you know, from a conceptual kind of a level, this is exactly where we try to, to pick young minds up, because it’s not about that they solve our problems or, you know, become, you know, have the burden of to become a game changer. So, it’s exactly this: to ignite the idea of, you know, there is something that we have to face, but as well, you know, there is an opportunity of invention. It’s a challenge, and we should tackle this challenge.

So, I can answer with a different example I just saw in the Futurium, in the Future Museum in Berlin, there was a really interesting installation, very, very large. So, you would walk into a space and there were these gigantic Neo-Natur sculptures, yeah, so they would be out of wood and they at the moment would serve as exhibition canvas or, you know, how do you say, so with objects and graphic and everything. So, they were functional, but at the same time they were very artistic and they were very space filling and very, very prominent and super immersive.

And the idea of neo-nature is something where technology, humanity or human, so the human approach, this human design approach as well as an idea of nature, so, the Anthropocene, the age of man, where we anyways, you know, shape our environment, but to kind of find new possibilities to do so. So, to create environments and shapes and shells. Parametric architecture, for example, would be another example of this. So, to really actually, within them, or intersection of technology and art and design and the human approach really create shapes and forms that are, that are different, that are very ecstatic, but also kind of, you know, blend in nature in a different way and therefore become sustainable. So, in this one to really kind of, you know, have an option and have a possible and really a creative and interesting potential to, well, to design and to create. And I think this is something that is very, that can, you can embrace this, yeah, and it makes—it’s fun and yeah.

Abby: So for some of our listeners thinking about designing spaces like you, you use light, you use sound, you use color, really to create this expansive atmospheres where landscapes of imagination can flourish and grow. What practical advice can you give some of our listeners to sort of solve problems, design these exhibits with all of these tools that you need to use? Have you got any advice, because sometimes it can be overwhelming?

Elisabeth: I honestly think coming from theater, you know, let’s say suspense or an atmosphere, an experience can be created everywhere, anywhere with, I think little means. For me, it’s always light and sound, for example. So sound is really, it’s really important. It’s quite often underestimated. And then certainly I would say also narration, a story you can create, I would say a spatial landscape only through a story. A well-told story, a good narration, a, really an audio play, you know, that is, that is eventually heard in the, in the space or whatever can already set a certain spatial atmosphere as we know, and then it becomes theatrical or it becomes immersive, because eventually you dive into the story, you see the images within your mind, you know, you fill out the space with your own imagination. So, I’m not sure if it always takes this, you know, kind of big, super, scenography kind of imagery. So, I think the story or yeah, atmospheric means or displays are very easily being achieved.

Brenda: Elisabeth, I’m an educator in exhibition and experience design, and in my work I’m highly invested in supporting emerging exhibition and experience designers, developers, leaders. How do you leverage your own talents and your own work to bolster the next generation?

Elisabeth: For me, what is interesting is to see them coming up with their ideas, with their, you know, different approaches. And then, because I see myself not really as a teacher, I see myself more as an amplifier, more as a muse. So, I try to listen, you know, very carefully of what they actually come up with. And then I try to inspire them with links with, you know, references with, yeah, and inspirational kind of ideas. And then of course, I would never, you know, hold back to revealing that there’s also a methodology. So, there is the process, yes? When I was studying theater, I remember that there,  everything was a mystery, yeah? So, how do you design a storyline? How everything kind of then comes together until the very, you know, premiere and the opening night.

And of course, there is a methodology that can be learned. How far you then actually break the rules that is then the question of, you know, creativity and, you know, like, really, yeah, so first, you know, to learn the frame and then kind of to throw it away, but so I would say it’s like, it’s both, it’s always kind of letting them go and then kind of, you know, getting them back through, telling them how I actually do things, but also, you know, enjoy listening. I really enjoy listening.

Abby: So, you mentioned breaking rules. Can you give us a good example in your work when you broke the rules, which is risky and nerve wracking and I’m sure you lost some sleep about it, but you were right to break the rules, and you are happy you broke the rules? Just so our designers can understand that sometimes taking risks is a good thing.

Elisabeth: Yeah, I think what is always a critical point is when there is no reference yet. We are surrounded, as we all know, yeah, by a lot of images. Pinterest is the perfect example of this. So, the question is if we, you know, not kind of only procreate or, you know, is if there’s a constant evolution of, you know, an idea that evolves into a like slightly different idea, and then there are 20 images of the same idea, you know, and then it’s to say, okay, let’s take that idea.

So, I think whenever and this happens in every project, for everyone, I think, when the part of innovation is coming. And so, when you have an idea, but there is not a mood image that reflects this idea, so you really have to be profound and, you know, like really specific and say I, you know, and you have to explain it, you have to draw it.

So, for example, I remember, I mean, I was just partly onboard in that project, but there was a kinetic sculpture, yeah, that actually BRÜCKNER developed for the Hyundai Motorstudio. And this kinetic sculpture, which consisted of different poles that were kind of coming out of the, you know, kind of a ground installation and that were shaping different forms of different cars. And nobody really had an idea how this could work, and if it looked cool and if it was good or whatever. And then I think we just, we were very kind of consistent. So, you have to be in this kind of case or in this example, really kind of, really pulled through and to be very strong. And then of course, you need strong people that say, this is a good idea, and we believe in this.

And then finally, of course, getting through with mockup and then really doing it and really kind of, you know, yeah, and really getting us through. So, I would say the moment of when you try to do something that really has not done before, then a trust relationship with the client and with the entire team is really needed.

Abby: Yeah, and that’s when it gets really fun, right?

Brenda: Yeah. And trust is something that has come up often in our conversations. How do you approach building trust?

Elisabeth: That is a very deep and essential question, honestly. You have to be, again, listening, be very perceptive, be very open, be very adaptable. Also be resilient, you know, and show, I would say, the client because I believe in, not colleagueship, I think when you’re really approached on a project, you have to become accomplices. You know, you have to become slightly more than this. You have to understand that you really are sitting in this one boat together, and you cannot achieve something because somebody thinks they want to, you know, make the money. Yes, as well. But at the same time, I mean, I don’t go home at, you know, five in the evening or six or whenever, you know, like my profession is what I chose to be, actually my life. So I spent my life or part or times of my life, you know, like doing, concerning myself with, let’s say, you know, other people’s ideas and, you know, requirements, and so on, and to kind of let them know I’m doing this voluntarily because I want something here, I think for, for me, you know, to to get this idea across, then ultimately, in my perception, build this kind of trust. But of course, the other party, then, accordingly, of course, has to mutually commit to this idea and then also kind of, you know, float along this kind of process.

Abby: I think that’s fantastic way of describing it, when you say it’s a life, it’s not a job. And that’s exactly how I feel, Elizabeth, that it just—it’s so enjoyable, but it’s so all encompassing. You go to sleep thinking about it, you wake up thinking about it. You see things when you’re walking through an airport, you see things in the mall.

Brenda: You make a podcast about it.

Abby: Yeah, you make a podcast about it, like you’re literally consumed, and so there has to be that passion and that excitement.

Elisabeth: Absolutely.

Abby: So, thank you, Elisabeth, for chatting with us today and for representing immersive experience design around the globe and creating some truly wonderful environments at ATELIER BRÜCKNER for us all to learn and enjoy. I’m very excited to see your science center grow, so keep us updated and open its doors to those teenagers and shape those young minds.

Elisabeth: Thank you so much for having me. It was really fun. Thanks.

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 review and share with a friend. We’ll see you next time.

Brenda: Take care everybody.

[Music]

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

Emilie Baltz

Dream Machine – Emilie Baltz

Gensler

[Music]

Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience. My name is Abigail Honor.

Brenda: Hello, this is Brenda Cowan.

Abby: This is produced by Lorem Ipsum, an experience design company headquartered in New York City. And our podcast explores the creativity, innovation and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. Hello to anybody listening for the first time, and welcome back to our regular listeners.

So today we’d like to welcome Emilie Baltz, an immersive experience director whose work adds a sensory dimension to design, which is one of the many reasons she’s unique. But also, she’s the inventor of the word “eatstallation,” which I absolutely love. Emilie, a big welcome to the show.

Emilie: Thank you.

Brenda: Emilie, we’re going to kick things off by talking about the multi-sensory work that you create that truly fosters curiosity and wonder. And you like to say that your work fosters curiosity and wonder one lick, suck, bite and sniff at a time.

Emilie: That’s right.

Brenda:  And as I’m thinking about the lick, suck, bite and sniff at a time, I get so many flickers of memories. So, I think about eating ice cream on the beach in the summertime. I’m thinking about my lilac bush in the spring. Is this the kind of response that you hope for, Emilie, in others when you create the work that you do and sort of trigger memory and affiliations? Or am I, have I just gone off the deep end here?

Emilie: I would say yes. So, I’m really interested in how our bodies experience the world and how they’re also portals for experience. And so, everything that you just described to me are examples of embodied experience. We have these nostalgic, you know, moments in our childhood of licking ice cream or being at the beach, you know, swimming in waves. And we remember all of that because of all the sensory stimulation as well as the physical engagement.

You know, I think of multi-sensory experience design also choreographically. So, nothing exists on its own. We never just see. Right? It’s always a choreography of all of our senses that comes into our body as sensation. And then through our cultural experiences, our language, we start to make meaning out of them. And emotion then introduces, you know, emotion is the meaning making state of feeling. So that’s kind of the choreographic principle, I would say, thinking about all of those senses and their relationship to each other because they’re constantly in motion, you know.

Abby: That’s incredible. So, your work is a combination of the senses, art and technology, if I was going to try and bucket it in some, some verticals, but can you let us know about your journey, sort of to what we see today? Tell us about your path.

Emilie: Sure. It is a non-linear path. I originally studied screenwriting and contemporary dance, and then I went on five years later, and I have a master’s degree in industrial design, with actually a focus on food as a material for design, because I was interested in industrial design and its relationship to human behavior. Industrial design is so heavily influenced by human psychology, you know, behavioral habits, and it really is, I think, one of the earlier foundations that lead us now into what we would call experience design as a discipline.

Brenda: I love that you’re talking about food. I love the idea that food can foster community, communication and sharing in our everyday lives. I know that’s a big part of how you approach thinking about food in your work. What does this look like in design? Like what are some of the behaviors that you see your design with food cultivating?

Emilie: I think for me, food is both medium and metaphor for experience design. I can use food as an ingredient, as a material in creating a dish, for example, or a consumer packaged good, right, so you can very easily go into product, ingredient, nutrition, all of kind of the functional benefits that we expect with our materiality of food. But you also can lean into its multi-sensory properties because food is our only multi-sensory material on earth, because when we eat, we don’t just taste. Flavor is a construct of all of our senses, and if you’ve ever plugged your nose while eating and then you release it, you realize just how dependent our sense of taste is on our sense of flavor.

And then my work also looks at all of the different kinds of rituals and behaviors that go around the experience of eating, that foster things like community, the development of mythology. Family dinners are usually the forums for sharing our history, talking about our days, inventing the future as well as, you know, even celebratory experiences, you know, state dinners, for example, are actually mediums for diplomacy, for power. Food is this universal medium that allows for all kinds of different intersections and relationships of the human experience and that feels, you know, timeless, as I said, universal. I can’t think of another material that does this.

Brenda: How do you manage the mess? That’s what I keep, I keep thinking about it—no, but seriously, how do you manage the mess of food? What comes to mind?

Emilie: You know, I worked in fine dining between undergraduate. The reason I got into industrial—

Abby: I was going to say, how did you get into the food part?

Emilie: Yeah, I worked in bars and restaurants, and I had the great luck of falling into the wave of molecular gastronomy in the early 2000s in New York City, which was led by chefs like Wylie Dufresne, Will Goldfarb, you know, these were my heroes and my mentors. And so, what I discovered within that world was the attention to detail, the kind of service design that goes into fine dining. And so, when we talk about mess, like in those places, there were no mess because we designed for no mess. We designed for the best guest experience possible.

So that kind of ballet of people in space, and also the kind of storytelling that was happening within that time, because suddenly with the introduction of chemistry into food, right—chemistry into gastronomy is what molecular gastronomy was known for—you could transform a carrot into a cloud, right? You could dive into a day at the beach at Saint Barts that my mentor Will Goldfarb famously made, right. So suddenly you had multi-sensory stories that you weren’t just looking at, someone wasn’t telling it to you, but you were feeling them. And for me, that’s a precursor also to this kind of experiential and immersive present that we have, because we don’t just tell stories anymore. We live stories now.

Abby: Yeah. What were some of the challenges? Because you’re sort of an outlier doing this. There’s other people that try to do similar stuff to you, but you for me, you’re very much singularly doing what you do at this level and with this success. So how did you get to that?

Emilie: I was, I believe in a couple of things. Number one is that I always said yes. I said yes to everything. And I also say, what if a lot. So, I like the experience of risk. I like the emotional experience of risk. I also hate it, because I’m human. But during graduate school, I had this time and place that offered, you know, a semblance of stability where I could take risks. And so, I called, I literally would call the kitchens of the chefs that I admired. And strangely, they got on the phone, and it was such a landscape of generosity. You know, I owe my career and creativity to many of these people because they were so open and they were so genuinely excited about the newness that was in the field at that time, and also so genuinely connected to human beings. Food is an empathetic and generous activity—feeding someone, right? And that inspired me.

And by saying yes, again, it opened the door into a whole network of people who had, not even a shared industry, but I would say a shared spirit. Everyone was in pursuit of invention. Everyone was in pursuit of care, you know, and wonder and imagination. And so, finding that, more even then like a discipline, finding emotional qualities that are shared for me has always been one of the great ways forward. And, you know, that continued in that spirit.

Abby: And it’s in all your work. I mean it completely shows everything you create.

Brenda: Well, I’m thinking about the sound machine at Liberty Science Center, which is honestly, it’s one of my favorite installations that I’ve encountered, truly. And, you know, I bring my graduate students to it every year as a part of our curriculum, actually. And folks, if you don’t know it, it incorporates sound, smell, memory. It is accessible and it’s social, but it’s also individual. It’s funny, it’s poignant, and it is very playful and fun. And we consider its power to engage and stimulate trans sensory relationships in so many different ways. Emilie, can I ask you to share with the listeners a little bit about this particular piece?

Emilie: Sure. The Dream Machine was originally actually created for the Panorama Music Festival, which used to happen on Randall’s Island in New York, and it was commissioned by a wonderful curator and thinker, Justin Bolognino, who ran the media agency at the time, who was really interested in bringing interactive media to festival formats, specifically how we could create experiences that would allow visitors to play music together.

And as I was thinking through it, you know, I was also reading Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World at the time. And that book, if you’re not familiar with it, looks at the future, right, it’s a piece of speculative fiction, and Huxley uniquely looks at America. And he says, oh, in America you will not be controlled by like, dictatorship, not an overt sense of power. You will be controlled by pleasure. And so, in the Brave New World, everyone is on the Soma drug, which makes them not feel anything. And so, he invents these machines for re-feeling. And one of them is the smell organ. And it plays arpeggios of thyme, lavender and pig dung. You know, insomuch as like scent is directly linked to our limbic system, which is our center of memory and emotion.

So, I brought those two ideas and came up with this notion of what would a dream of humanity be? What if we could play all of our feelings in concert, in harmony together? This organ, quote unquote, is a wheel of feeling, basic human feelings from happiness to disgust. It’s ten different stations, and you play it by pumping bicycle pumps that are connected to this like strange collage of a trombone and a French horn. And by pumping the bicycle pump, you actually pump a scent that is designed to elicit that specific emotion. So, there’s a scent of respect, for example, which is kind of like a woody scent. And it also simultaneously triggers a sound that was also algorithmically designed to elicit that emotion. And a color of light. So, it’s a multi-sensory organ.

And insomuch as that creates also natural accessibility because it’s multimodal. So, lots of different people can engage with it in lots of different kinds of learning styles. And there’s a little secret in it that I don’t know if you ever got, but if everybody actually plays all of the stations in unison, like in harmony, the sound is harmonious. But also you release an Easter egg in the middle, so this giant puff of fog comes up from the middle.

Brenda: Oh my goodness.

Abby: You heard it here.

Emilie: It’s a celebration of human—

Abby: Get to the Liberty Science Center, get that puff created. Let’s go people.

Brenda: I love it. I have not seen the puff.

Emilie: The puff can come. Hopefully if the puff is still intact, we got to go check.

Abby: Of course it is, of course it is.

Brenda: Well this exhibit is, to put it in a way that all of you listeners I know understand, it is loved. I have seen like this particular exhibit element withstand so much enthusiastic use—

Emilie: It’s enthusiastic. This is true.

Brenda: —not just from kids but from adults as well.

Abby: So, I have a question about how you come up with your ideas. Is it usually an RFP that gets sent to you? Is it something that you’ve just willed out of thin air and you’re like, oh my gosh, who’s going to pay for this? Where can I go to sell it? I’d love to sort of understand more of what this looks like, sort of how you brainstorm, how you get work.

Emilie: It’s both, you know, over the course of the last 25 years, I’ve been able to come up with my own ideas, often very late at night.

Abby: So, you don’t get up early in the morning then, you’re a night owl.

Emilie: Well, I have a six-year-old, I get up at all times.

Brenda: You are ever present, ever ready.

Emilie: I’m ever present, ever ready. But he is a great source of inspiration for these things too, you know. Yeah. There are times where just like, I think, any artist, there’s an itch that you just have to scratch and an idea, you know, flows. And then due to the fact that I have a unique specialty and that I also really love human beings—I want to also say that in general, as a practitioner to other practitioners is like, the human relationship side of it for me is the real joy of making work.

And so, I get a lot of RFPs. You know, I also, presently I work as the Creative Director for Digital Experience at Gensler. So, I have just an influx of all sorts of different kinds of parts of the industry, of parts of the world that are fascinating, you know, so there’s some strategy that I will say that I’m interested in, like I’m interested in certain sectors, and I actively will go and, you know, meet people there as well. But a lot of it is also because of my own natural belief in this kind of experience design. I think that that becomes something that feels for me, it’s authentic, you know.

Abby: Yeah.

Emilie: And I think for anybody who has landed on that, you usually start to attract also other people who are interested in that.

Abby: Yeah. It feels very like you are your work.

Brenda: Well and generosity, to use the word that you’ve brought up a couple of times now, I think is really, really key. What’s really exciting to hear is that you’re generous as a person and generous as a thinker, and the work that you create is likewise very generous. Your ability to craft experiences where other people get to share with others, it’s inspiring, and it just makes a tremendous amount of sense, because, and quite literally, when you’re engaging with the senses, you are in so many ways automatically able, I think, to connect with other people. Right? Our senses can transcend language.

Emilie: Yeah, exactly. So, you know, I grew up in a bi cultural household, so we spoke two languages.

Abby: Oh, which ones?

Emilie: French and English. My mom is French. My father was American. That’s a primary experience for me is that the times also that we were together were language less. And often those were actually around meals as we would go, you know, we’d go to France and see my family there or they would sometimes mix. And nobody spoke each other’s language except for my brother and I.

But—and my mother, too. But those kinds of universal experiences that are fundamentally human, they’re primary rituals and experiences, it starts to stitch the fabric of our world together. I am a reductionist. I need to go to the simplest thing possible too, and I also, in my own way, am constantly looking to make meaning as one of the activities of my life.

I also am really firmly grounded in the absurd. Like many days, I don’t think that the world makes very much sense. So, so it is up to us, especially as creative people, to give meaning to it. Because through that act of meaning making, we start to give purpose to life, you know? And as maybe another general truism, I think that our human relationships, for me, I know they’ve always given me huge amounts of value and meaning and usually spaces that are most meaningful are moments of dancing with someone that you love, or breaking bread with a stranger and getting to know them. You know, maybe that sounds a little cliched and utopian in 2024, but—

Brenda: No.

Abby: No, it sounds like going back to basics, to be honest, which is, I think what we all maybe need to just sort of take a break and remember what makes us human and what makes us connect with each other.

Brenda: Abby and I, we were just discussing the fact that I just came back from a mini vacation, which was so good, and so, so overdue. And you’re making me remember probably the singular most meaningful experience that I had, which was in Paris, where one of my best friends in the whole world has just relocated, and I had dinner with two very dear friends of hers whose English is not so great.

So, there wasn’t a whole lot of verbal communication, and one person was an artist, and his wife is a botanist. And the four of us, my friend and I, we sat together, and we had a meal together, and it was pasta and bread and red wine and very little dialogue, and one of the most special moments I’ve had in, I don’t know how long. I feel like I know these people inside and out, and so very little of it was about verbal communication, and so much of it was about literally the sharing of the food, and the cooking together.

Emilie: Yeah, yeah.

Brenda: How—it’s simplicity.

Emilie: It’s incredibly simple, you know, and I think that, who is it, Mary Oliver would call that the soft animal. And we need those moments, you know, our entire life—we are no longer primitive beings, but there is a balance in our experiences going through our daily life, going through highly mechanized industrial civilizations now, you know, where we have to go back to that, we have to make time for it. And I even think about what are the learnings from that cooking together, being together that could show up in spaces like museums. Also, when we think about the transformation of these kinds of cultural spaces, there’s a real hunger, you know, pun intended there, for that kind of language less engagement with each other.

Abby: One hundred percent.

Emilie: And that buzzword of like it has to be human, quote unquote, you know, everyone is talking about that right now. It has to be immersive. I like to look a little bit more deeply at that and more practically of, well, what does that mean. To go back to that statement before, you know, there’s nothing more immersive, actually, than dancing with someone that you love. Immersion does not need to be a spectacle. It can be about present tense. It can be about connection; it can be about intimacy. But I think it’s a, it’s an active experience. It’s an embodied experience. It’s engagement. We’re doing something with our bodies, with each other in time and space.

Abby: But I think an interesting thing to think about is a lot of the experiences that we’re designing for in museums have a narrative story. There’s a lot of limitations that are put on you when you have to tell some sort of a story that people need to learn and engage with, and then it becomes a little bit more challenging to do something that could be an immersive group activity, because people have to be, I won’t say reading, but they have to be, let’s at least say learning some facts. Right? And so that I think is the challenge for what we’re doing is trying to do that balance and make sure that people are physically engaged in doing things and part of the story, whilst learning about what the story is they’re part of and moving—because we don’t have much time, we have so much to get from you.

Brenda: My goodness.

Abby: I just want to talk about technology.

Emilie: Yeah.

Abby: Technology—

Brenda: AI.

Abby: Yes. AI, so talk a little bit so that people can get and paint a picture of your work in terms of how you work with technology and how you’re thinking about working with AI, if you are, if you’re not.

Emilie: I think of technology as another ingredient, and I would use the word ingredient rather than tool because it’s an integrated part of what I do. What I find extraordinary about technology is its extra sensory property, you know. In its best use, it is magic. It reveals different possibilities, different ways of engaging with the world. I have been known to put sensors in ice cream cones and cotton candy machines to make both of them sing when you either lick or spin them. But that’s what I think of it, you know, I think of it as an ingredient. It never should be for me, the most, the dominant narrative necessarily. And I think artificial intelligence, you know, I’m, I’m curious about it. I use it, you know, I use it as image generation software. I’m most interested in its ability to show us more about ourselves.

And I think the fact that now we have an observational tool on humanity that is based on pattern recognition. That, to me, is the most interesting way that it may change our behaviors, for better and for worse, you know, and incredible cautionary tales that I also see emerging in terms of the kind of biases that are still being brought up, the lack of criticality that we have around that.

You know, there’s a host of ethics questioning privacy, etc., etc., etc. like we could spend the next two hours talking about that. But where I do find hope is more of the artistic uses presently that are really using it kind of as a black mirror and also maybe even as a rainbow mirror, you know, to show us all the different facets of ourselves and that kind of dialogue feels like a dialogic opportunity to be in dialogue with ourselves, see ourselves differently, maybe try to rewrite ourselves in new ways.

Brenda: We need to absolutely find out, what is it that you are currently passionate about? What’s coming next from your world, Emilie?

Emilie: I am so presently passionate about community building and placemaking. Those are two real needs that I personally feel, and that I also see in the world. And so how our experiences can create opportunities for more in-person experiences, for a shared sense of belonging, a feeling of togetherness and also hope.

Abby: Now I’m going to go to a dark place, because—