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. Thanks for tuning in today and supporting our conversation. My name is Abigail Honor.

Brenda: Hello, this is Brenda Cowan.

Abby: So today we’re focusing on a woman who has done it all in our industry and finding out what some of her challenges were professionally and personally, as her career has gone from strength to strength. It is a pleasure to welcome Trent Oliver, the principal and managing director of Blue Telescope.

BT, as it’s fondly referred to, creates location-based, interactive experiences for museums, executive briefing centers, and brand experiences. Trent has a desire to blur the lines between reality and technology, in honor of the good, Well, Trent, a big welcome to the studio today.

Trent: Thank you. I’m glad to be here.

Brenda: Trent, I’m going to kick us off focusing on your incredible history of work in interactive experience design technology, entertainment, leadership. Abby and I would love to know what on earth attracted you to this industry in the first place, and as I was thinking about this question, I was thinking about how so many of us in this dynamic profession find ourselves here, having come from totally, seemingly unrelated backgrounds or just plain weird lines of work, right? Really weird. And the attraction in experience design to me anyway, is that everything seems to apply.

Trent: Yeah.

Brenda: And there seem to be no limits in either direction. So, I’m curious to know, is that your take also and what brought you here?

Trent: I was in theater. I was a stage manager. I moved up, I became an equity stage manager, and it occurred to me I could stage manage the best show ever, and it could still be terrible. I could be well run, yet terrible. And I found myself in commercials in LA. I found myself doing corporate theater here in New York, and I would interview here and there, I did videos, I did film, and I saw a little car go across the screen. And this is a very long time ago. This is pre-2000. And I was like, oh, how’d you do that. And I was like, that’s cool. I want to figure that out.

I got lucky. I started telling my clients back then when I was a producer, don’t call me unless you don’t know how to do it. If you don’t know how to do it, I’m interested. If you know how to do it, call somebody else. They can dance faster. I don’t want to dance faster. And I found myself owning a company, and we ended up doing interactive multimedia. And then wandered my way. I mean, I couldn’t have aimed for it.

Abby: You know what I was going to say? One of the things that really resonated with me is when Trent, you said that if you can’t do it, if a client can’t do it, you wanted them to call you. What do you think that is, that, not being scared to help people solve problems that you don’t have the answer to? What is it about that in you that motivates you?

Trent: I always found that when I wanted to learn something I’d go get a job doing it. Nothing makes you learn it faster than, oh dear God, I might get fired, you know, like, oh, if this doesn’t work, I’ve got a problem. But diving in and going to the best people you can find that do that and interviewing them, it’s phenomenal. They’re not worried about you. You’re not going to take their job and they’ll give you great advice. And I like learning. Learning’s great. If I weren’t learning, I would probably blow up my career and run away.

Abby: So just jumping back then into this idea that our industry is very multidisciplinary, not only for the people and where they’re coming from as they come into our industry, but sort of, the way that we need to have multiple people from lots of different disciplines sitting around the table to be able to do what we do really well. You need everybody there and I remember thinking as I was growing up, well, I’ve got a broad interest in lots of things. I like to do this, the painting, the video, the sound, the music. But thinking about my growth and how I ended up here, it helps to have mentors.

Trent: Yeah.

Abby: Did anyone ever mentor you along your road to success and how did it help you? At the time?

Trent: I would just go find people who were good at—like I didn’t know how to make a DVD. I called up a friend and said, let me take you to lunch and pick your brain. I joined, back when it existed, the Inc. Business Owners Council, because I was like, all right, I own a business. Do I know what I’m doing? I don’t know, and that was really interesting to learn that businesses all have the same problems, everybody has employees, overhead, health care. They’re all dealing with the same problems. And it’s useful to talk about those problems and hear from others that have found a way.

Brenda: Well, I want to pick up, and move along a little bit more of the conversation about mentorship, because I know that you yourself see mentorship and being a mentor as very important. And, you have been an advisor for an organization called Harriet’s Descendants, and the organization, folks, if you don’t know what it is, it mentors the next generation of themed entertainment leadership to embrace, engage in the work of equity, access and justice and mindfully expand representation, inclusion and diversity within guest experiences and creative works. And they’ve got this great tagline, which is, “think of us as a feminist, intersectional Dumbledore’s Army of themed entertainment.” I’m looking at you laugh, Trent, did you know that this was one of the taglines?

Trent: No.

Brenda: You must tell us how did you get involved with this organization, as a mentor, as an advisor.

Trent: Cynthia Sharpe is a principal at Thinkwell, and she’s a very creative, very opinionated, intelligent woman. And she and I were having a big discussion around 2016, and we had very strong feelings and this is what came out of that. One of the first years we went to IAPA and we had this interesting kind of round robin talk about like how, how can you go forward as a woman? Women haven’t been in the workforce that long. We don’t have, a lot of times, mothers that did it before. We don’t know how to go forward and how to make it not personal but breaking it down and making it kind of more of a math problem and not a personal problem.

But I will say that it’s something that all people should be involved in. If we are really looking at finances, adding half of the citizenry into the economics, adding people that we don’t see, that don’t look like us, that, you know, they’re not part of our everyday experience into what we’re doing. We’re going to expand our audience. That’s going to make everybody more money. So even if you are against it, it will make you money. And I think that financial case is a good thing to put forward when people don’t agree with just kind of the basic idea.

Abby: Why is it called Harriet’s Descendants?

Trent: It’s after the first female animator at Disney.

Abby: Oh, wow. I did not know that.

So, you started talking about women, so I’m going to keep going. I played, like, a lot of sport in school, and often we trained with guys, right, and I learned that you need to be agile and strategic if you’re really going to have success when you’re playing with the boys. And so, Trent, as the principal and managing director of Blue Telescope, tell us about being a woman in a leadership position in this largely male dominated industry, and do you have any stories to share or things that you had to overcome.

Trent: I never walk in thinking, oh, I’m a woman here. My mother told me I was smart. Whether I am or not, my mommy told me, therefore I believe it. And I’ll walk into anywhere thinking I should be here. It’s taken years to get that, and I often am clueless when I’m faced with either, you know, a male who isn’t enjoying a female having a conversation with him, or other women who kind of—there’s games in the playground that I never learned.

And then there have been times where it’s been overtly bad. We used to have a large client, the biggest pharmaceutical client in the world at that time, and I was at a conference and ended up with someone who could have put us out of business, got off the elevator behind me on my floor, and ended up having a full-on wrestling match. And I got lucky. I got my door open and got myself in and slammed the door and he wasn’t inside. And I was furious. I was furious for years. I could do nothing about it. There was nothing I could do. And that’s crazy.

That was the most over. You know, coming up in my life, there was lots of crap. I remember also after then a partner, a fabrication house that we partnered with, I had hired, a man from another company, and I brought him with me. We went to go talk to this fabrication partner. Suddenly, I didn’t exist. And, you know, they had a complete conversation, and I didn’t matter. And I was like, wow, this is very interesting. And also having the name Trent, quite often people will say, oh, Trent, he and I go way back, and I would just grab a guy and say, here, you talk to him and I’m out of here.

I keep thinking it changes and it kind of does, but it kind of really doesn’t.

Brenda: Yeah.

Abby: I totally agree. How do you, how do you see leadership? What are you aiming to be? Or at least, let’s say your colleagues think about you as a leader, what sort of things do you want them to say?

Trent: That I have their back. We’re selling a service, yes. Our service is out people, and our people need to feel that they matter. If you don’t feel like you’re important in your job, you slack off, you stop coming in. It’s not that important. And the people who feel that way shouldn’t work for us. But its helping people go to the next level. It’s picking the right people and putting them together to create. And I tell everybody, being a stage manager, taught me to enable creative people to do what they need to do.

Abby: How do you teach this, Brenda? So, when you’ve got a room full of all these amazing students, how do you teach leadership?

Brenda: I teach leadership by teaching how to listen, how to speak even when you don’t want to speak or you’re not sure what you’re about to say. I think that a lot of the leadership skills that I really break down with my students have to do with being able to have really challenging conversations and to listen and to be engaged and to be mindful.

As I’m listening to the two of you, Abby and Trent and we were talking about mentorships and important people in our lives, and I have to share a story of when I was 30 years old, and I just had my daughter and I had a friend, and she was 88, and Kathryn had been a fashion model in the 1930s. This woman had moxie. I think the word was invented for her. And spending time with her always involved smoking cigarettes, drinking beer and talking about men and talking about being a woman. And I’m getting a crazy flashback to that right now. And outside of, you know, her, endless words of wisdom, one quip of which involved her saying, “Brenda, let me tell you something. The legs, they’re the last thing to go.”

But more seriously, she would tell me, get out there and talk, and she would say, no one’s going to listen if you don’t talk, and so in a way, to your point, you know, when you asked a question about how I teach leadership, it really is about those conversational skills. And it might sound feeble but if you really look around you and if you really watch people and if you really watch the dynamics, it’s the people who, yes, can talk, but the people who have the skill of listening, they’re the people who go far.

I want to sort of extend this conversation about womanhood by bringing up the next absolutely obvious talking point, which is going to be about family, because this just seems inevitable in a way. You know, before I was a professor, I was in practice, for many years and raising a family and traveling constantly, working far too many hours. How’s this sounding, my friends?

Trent: Yeah.

Brenda: Yeah, sounding about right. So, I also ran a company which meant that I was always on the front line when things needed to get decided upon, when things needed to get done, and when I was interviewed for my current position, this professorship, one of the questions that I was asked was how I would feel about not traveling so much, about how would I feel about not being in the action and everything else. And they were really genuinely concerned about this. And I swear to God, I practically choked back tears. And like the idea was such a relief. And so, Trent, you’ve got a family of your own and your very busy, active position at Blue Telescope. How have you managed to balance your work and your life?

Trent: I don’t know that I do.

Brenda: Tell us more.

Trent: Becoming a parent was a lesson in futility. You can’t do anything completely, Just can’t. I can’t be there to be the perfect mother. There is no such thing. I can’t be at work and, you know, be a workaholic because I need to go home. You know, there’s so many things that when I was freelance and I was single, it was like, oh, I dove in, I did it completely, I walked away, I was done.

We’re 24 years old, the company is, and I haven’t finished anything completely in 24 years. But I read this amazing article from a woman who said, don’t give up. At the time, there’s so many women who would have kids and they’d leave the workforce and they felt that, you want to be there for your family, you want to participate. You had kids because you wanted them, not because you wanted to leave them behind, but that continuing down the work path and becoming really successful, she was like, I have been allowed to take my family on amazing trips. I have been able to do all these things for my kids. I’ve also been able to go to their recitals, and I think that that’s really important. I have not made everything my kids have done. I’ve made a lot of them. But my daughter will tell you I wasn’t there.

Abby: They’ll remember that one time.

Brenda: That one time, forever.

Trent: Yeah. But, at a certain point, it was either I was home, or my husband was home. And travel comes and you do it. And then you come home, and my kids have gone with me and set up a booth, you know, I took my daughter to Munich because I had to go there, and it was like, you’re coming with me. Now, that’s amazing.

Brenda: That really is.

Trent: That’s amazing.

Brenda: It’s important. Let’s take a little pivot. Let’s talk about Praxis. So, dear listeners, Praxis is a consultation group of industry practitioners, and they provide this comprehensive list of services in exhibition development and design, media, software, hardware, interpretive and master planning, and so much more. And as a part of your work, Trent, you’ve recently put together a survey of best practices on how new technologies can help us navigate the new challenges our profession is facing. What are some of the challenges that technology is addressing and how is it that technology addresses them best?

Trent: Everybody, you know, they’re like, oh, tell me your offering, what’s your latest technology? And it’s like, throw that out. That has nothing to do with anything. We have to figure out why. Why are you doing this? What is it, what is the kernel of what you want people to do, feel, think, you know, how do you get to them emotionally? What is that? And then once we know why, there are a million ways to figure out the how. And technology is a tool. It’s a hammer. It’s a nail. It’s you know, okay, a touch screen, not that anybody needs more screens in their lives, but how can we find ways to spark joy, to educate, to surprise, to have fun? You know, fun is a perfectly good why. Looking cool is not a good why, because that will fade very quickly.

And the technology, it’s just going to keep rolling. I don’t think we’re surprised where it’s going. Okay, Apple Vision Pro, all right. It hurts my head. Yeah. the HoloLens was quite good also, but the idea of AR, augmented reality, virtual reality. AI is remarkable. I think that it’s going to be the most fascinating thing in our lives. I think it’s going to be good and bad. And I think it’s really interesting and I’m happy to watch it.

All of these things will happen, but they aren’t the important part. How can we use technology to help all of us go forward? And how can we create things that are useful?

Brenda: Do you happen to have a personal favorite that you’ve done over the years that, Blue Telescope has produced?

Trent: We created an injection simulator for Ipsen Pharmaceuticals. I got to say, it’s really cool. That is really cool.

Brenda: Oh, wait, what is an injection simulator?

Trent: It’s actually, it’s a physical device. Here’s a bust of a human. And around the neck and shoulders is a silicone shawl, that you would use, you know, that’s like a medical dummy. And you pick up a real syringe that’s of course, attached, and you pull it back as if you’re filling it with medicine. But on the screen in front of you, it shows the medicine going in. And as you go to inject, it will tell you here’s the muscles you’re trying to hit. Did you hit them? Yes. How much medicine did you put in and how much went wild. And it’s very specific and it’s very accurate. And I think that’s really cool. That’s a nice invention.

Brenda: Yeah. And frankly, strangely compelling. Abby, would you want to give someone an injection?

Abby: I would love to do that. You used the word specific. I want to pick up on that, because a lot of the things that I’ve seen of your work have to be specific to be successful. I think it’s a challenge to try to bring that to a visitor who maybe doesn’t have the background. And, our job, in a way, is to try and frame the interactive or the exhibit moment, and I find that really sometimes a challenge, right? To put the context around this moment that you’re doing in this case, you know, injecting like, why am I doing it? How does it help? Why is this cool and all the other reasons.

whil

And so how do you go about your process? You’re obviously not focusing on the technology first, which I completely agree with. I think that’s wonderful. You’re listening to what the client needs are, but how are you planning out, can you just try to paint a picture of how you come up with an exhibit idea.

Trent: I don’t know. A long time ago, we used to do a lot of pharmaceutical trade shows, and we used to say, you need to be able to see it from far away and know there’s something interesting. So, a big, then a medium when you’re there, something that most people will do that engages and is interesting but allows those people who are really the nerds to dive in and really go to it. And I think the same is true for museums.

You have to be a little puzzling. What is that? Why is that? And go there and have it be interesting that even if I don’t know, it’s kind of fun. Let me check this out. Maybe I’ll learn something. You know, you learn stuff just by watching, you know, and there are people who aren’t going to interact. Are they still going to get stuff? Hopefully they will, but allow there to be enough content for the nerds to dive in because, you know, everybody should get to. But it does have to be something that’s accessible to everyone.

Abby: So, some of your work with exhibit experiences, really focuses on the visitor. How important for you is the visitor when you think about your strategy for design?

Trent: I think that’s the key. I mean, it doesn’t make any sense otherwise. Whatever you’re designing, if you’ve got the why, you got to know who is coming through and make sure that they feel they’re represented.

I have a pet peeve that sometimes museums kind of live in rarefied air and I’ve been in discussions in a big round table where everybody is extremely educated and really smart and coming up with really good points, but they’re missing the undereducated. And if you’re going to speak to people who maybe don’t have a master’s and a PhD, you have to have people in the room that also don’t have a master’s and a PhD so that you can speak to them. You know, if you want to speak to people as a community, you have to bring the community in.

We did a project recently and it was on black feminism. We were lucky enough that Tessellate brought us in for Women’s History Museum, and we got to create the interactives that they designed. We brought black feminists to the table to do the work because I can’t speak to anybody else’s experience but my own and I believe everybody should feel that.

Abby: Good for you. That’s fantastic that you did that.

So, let’s chat a bit about AI because you touched earlier. How do you see museums of the future? Do you think that they will be heavily designed with the use of AI? Do you think a lot of our industry will become obsolete?

Trent: Have you seen the meme that as long as clients don’t know what they want, our jobs are secure? I don’t know for sure. Yes, some jobs will become a little obsolete, but, like, AI takes all our meeting notes. How fantastic is that? If you need to create—all right, I need a picture, kind of like this, kind of like that. I personally can still see when it’s AI, and I’m like, eh, but sometimes it can give you an idea of where you’re trying to go. And maybe it can cut down some of your discussions of like, do you mean this, do you mean that, you know, and then go to the people to create it. Authentic human experiences, I think are going to be very important. I think we’ll know the difference. I’m fascinated to see where it goes. I could see where terrible things could happen, and I could also see where amazing things could happen.

Abby: Well, that sounds like the fate of human nature.

Trent: Yeah.

Abby: The good and the bad.

Brenda: Well, I want to know, Trent, what is it that you’re currently passionate about in this big world of yours? What is it that you’re just really excited to be showing up for every day?

Trent: Blue Telescope is the Rubik’s cube I get up and I work on every day. Now, I know I should have solved it by now, but it’s interesting. What’s the right blend of jobs? You know, we need to have stuff we care deeply about because that’s why we get up in the morning. But we also need to have stuff that’s fun, fast and profitable because without profit, you can’t do the stuff you care about. It’s kind of like, I’ve heard flying a helicopter, you’re constantly moving, you can’t stop your hands because you’re constantly doing it. And I feel like that.

Brenda: Well, I know what you’ve got to do next, okay, being that you are willing to keep learning and interested in constantly learning new things, and you clearly have the ability to be in endless motion, right, all the time. It is time for you, Trent Oliver, to learn how to fly a helicopter.

Trent: Oh no, no.

Abby: Yes, I second that notion.

Brenda: You heard it here first.

Abby: Yeah, yeah. Trent, up in the air.

Trent: When I was young, I was never afraid of heights. I was never afraid of rollercoasters, any of it. Now I’m like, oh no, no, no, I couldn’t. If I got four feet off the ground, I’d be scared.

Abby: I think it’s something, yes, it’s something to do with aging, and the fear starts to kick in.

Trent: Yeah. Something in your head. You get dizzy.

Abby: Another biological thing that happens as we age.

Brenda: Oh, here we go. And, well, that’s another whole podcast.

Abby: Well, Trent, I cannot thank you enough for coming on today and sharing some of your experiences.

Trent: What a fun thing.

Abby:  It’s been really—I feel like I’ve met a kindred spirit.

Trent: Oh, me too. This is great.

Abby: Yeah. This has been amazing. Thank you so much.

Brenda: Thank you so much, Trent.

Trent: Thank 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. We’ll see you next time.

Brenda: Thanks everyone!

Trent: Bye.

[Music]

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

Show Notes

Blue Telescope

Harriet B’s Descendants

Praxis Museum Projects Group

Injection Simulator – Ipsen Biopharmaceuticals

National Women’s History Museum and Blue Telescope Named 2023 Gold Winner

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

Brenda: And I’m Brenda Cowan.

Abby: Our guest today really can do it all. Balancing design and technology in his work to create captivating and moving experiences. He’s had an incredible journey which seems to only just be beginning as we hear about his latest project. And today, if he’s willing, we’ll hear about everything from his early acting career to coding to probably one of the most highly anticipated media moments of last year on the Sphere. It’s my pleasure to welcome Ed Purver to the show.

Ed: Hello. What a lovely intro that was.

Abby: Well, Ed, you’re a creative director and your work really does push the experiential field. You and I have been in contact for a number of years, and I have always been struck by the ephemeral beauty and fundamental concepts behind what you create. So, can you tell our listeners sort of where you first started in media? Because I know you were a young man, and I was a young lady and enjoyed your very early work on TV.

Ed: Oh my goodness. Yeah, way back in the early mid 1990s when I was at the beginning of my twenties and I really didn’t know what to do with my life, I fell into acting and yeah, I was your communal garden actor popping up on TV shows here and there and I popped up in lots of theaters, some really good theaters around England. I showed up in the West End and then decided to call it a day, really.

It was a really fun five years, but I was never that into it, I never really believed in it as a career. I always felt a bit embarrassed to tell people I was an actor. I felt a bit embarrassed by the whole process and I was much more comfortable hanging out around the kind of the music scene in London and the clubs in the 1990s, which I found much more engaging. And me and my good, good friend Neil Bennun, who had gone to the same acting classes as me and is now a brilliant author who lives on a small island off the coast of Denmark, we were so unconvinced by normal acting that we would find all these other ways to entertain ourselves and we would get onto the London Underground and we would perform acts of generosity.

And our whole thesis was that no one should ever know that it wasn’t real. As far as everyone else is concerned, in that carriage, you’re complete strangers. You just got on at different stops and you can’t possibly know each other. And so, then we would like, perform these little scenes. You know, I might be sitting there reading a newspaper and Neil would stand near me, and after a while, he just looked, he sort of sighed and he said, I’m really tired. And he would ask me, would you mind if I sat on your lap and I would like be reading my paper and I would, you know, not respond at first, and you can feel the Britishness, the British like uncomfortableness of everyone around, wait, these people are breaking the rule like strangers are speaking to each other.

And I’d look up at the, I’d look up and say, well, where are you getting off? And he’d say, he’d tell me the name of the station. I’d have a look at the map to see how far is that? It’s only a few stops over. Alright, go on then. And he sit on my, you know, he’d sit on my lap, and he’d read his book and I’d read my paper and we wouldn’t speak anymore until he got to his stop and he’d say, thank you very much, I’d say, you’re welcome. And he’d get off, you know, and I would continue on my way. And we did lots of different kind of scenes like that. It made us feel much more alive than going to rehearsals or showing up to do an episode of whatever TV show where the BBC was doing or something like that.

Abby: For me, my question is, what were the people doing around you and is it that you were, have always maybe been interested in affecting people’s emotions and the way they see the world, because it sounds like that’s as much for you, but I’m sure you were, you’re doing it for a ruse, you know, you’re doing it to change the way people act with each other or to just get somebody out of the humdrum-ness of their day, right? Like, what were some of the things you observed of the people around you when you were doing this?

Ed: People would burst into laughter. Sometimes people would do their utmost to pretend it wasn’t happening. You know what I mean? Just being incredibly English about it and just staring fixedly at the floor, six inches in front of their toes and waiting for their stop to come. We were very clear about why we were doing it. It was our whole desire was to just drop seeds of generosity into the city of London. And we thought, well, if somebody observes this and they believe it’s real, then there is a tiny bit more chance that they might be more generous to somebody else. And so, we thought, this is really exciting. There’s a possibility we’re actually changing reality, we’re actually changing the city.

Brenda: You’re making me think about my, probably my favorite author of all time, Annie Dillard, and she writes about when she was six or seven and she was living in Pittsburgh and she, as this young child, used to take pennies, which she saw as just incredible treasure. And she would do things like put a penny in a little sort of niche in a tree or in a crack in a sidewalk. And she would take a piece of chalk and draw a long arrow and she would write treasure this way, and she would just litter the city with these pennies and these messages. And basically, as I see it, she was creating exhibitions and very much so like what you’re talking about. And she would never even wait to see. You know, she believed very much so that life was so rich and fulfilling by giving treasures to other people.

So from this fabulous performative self that you were—and as an American, I can assure you, you would probably be met with the same kind of responses in New York, you would either get people in the New York City subway who are, right, totally ignoring you, or sort of nervously laughing or you would end up with several more people on your lap.

Abby: Yeah, exactly.

Brenda: So, you would definitely get the mix. But let’s talk about what brought you to the U.S. It’s a big shift for you, and what were you up to when you first arrived?

Ed: The catalyst was going to Burning Man in the late nineties. Back then, Burning Man was really, really unknown in England. It wasn’t the huge sort of globally visible event that it is now. And it was just because a friend of mine had like got caught up in some kind of dot com venture and she’d gone over to San Francisco and in between her meetings someone said, oh, this thing’s happening this weekend.

She drove out there with a friend. Her friend was so appalled by it, they immediately turned around and left. Her friend refused to stay at Burning Man, she said, I’m not staying here. We are not, not, not, not staying here. So, my friend Robin came back to London. She told us, oh, there’s this really interesting thing that happens in the desert. But I couldn’t stay because Jo wouldn’t let me. And we were having literally New Year’s dinner, and we made a pact. All right, this year we will go to this thing.

And so, we went off to Burning Man that summer, and it was so eye opening for me to see groups of friends getting together and just making magic happen that I was like, oh, oh, this is possible. You can do this.  And it was really radical and exciting to see the installations that people were putting up there. And I was like, well, I’m going to leave boring London and I’m going to go to this place and hang out with those people and see what happens next.

Abby: So you went to NYU, because I sort of want to hear more about how you got started to work in software development. So just talk to us about how you transitioned.

Brenda: Yeah, big change. Wasn’t it a really big shift for you?

Ed: It was a huge, huge shift for me moving from England to California in really exciting ways. Like I could see more blue sky than I’d ever seen before. Having grown up in a very cloudy country, and I’m not kidding, that has a massive effect on you.

Abby: Huge effect. Yeah, huge effect. Huge.

Ed: Like an emotional, physical effect. On the flip side, I felt more frightened and lost than I’d ever felt before. And anyway, while I was there in San Francisco, performance was really all I knew to do. But I hooked up with some very creative people who were much more inspired by Pina Bausch and much more kind of expressive, dance-oriented ways of performing.

And we decided that it would be interesting to play with live media within the context of this performance. And so, I said I would do that. And so, I started to teach myself just the basic video editing platforms of the day. And actually, more useful were VJ software setups that allowed me to put little cameras around the stage and project on lots of surfaces and capture the performance in real time and do real time effects with them.

But I kind of reached my ceiling of what I could do with those platforms, and I decided I need to figure out how to make my own. And that was why I went to NYU, Abby. So, I went there and yeah, I sort of—I went through a really, really important process where I understood that I can learn technical skills, but I’m not a technical person. That is not my value to the team. I am much more of a creative person but becoming a creative person who understood how to build software, who understood how to speak to a creative coder, became extremely valuable for me in doing all of, like the whole next chapter of professional work that came out of that.

Abby: And that’s interesting thinking about how it’s informed your process. You know, when you work with developers now, can you sketch out what happens on your projects? Because I know it’s often daunting for a lot of people who don’t have the coding experience to collaborate with a programmer.

Ed: Well, first of all, though, I should say very honestly that I am a rubbish coder, but the brilliant thing that I found out was that there’s other platforms that exist that allow you to create your own custom software without actually coding. And that’s what really helped me understand how to speak in terms of logic and variables and have these really fruitful conversations with people who were coding geniuses.

And once I kind of had more success and became a full-time creative lead at ESI Design, we were creating a lot of very large custom permanent installations of digital media into the built environment. So, you know, massive lobby installations, beautiful custom screens that integrated into the architecture of the building. And because these were permanent installations that were there every day, that had a repeat audience, I really didn’t want to deliver a library of movies. It’s like, okay, here you go, here’s 30 video files because that will get quite boring quite quickly. I thought it was much more rich to conceptualize living systems that could populate these screens.

So how I would work is I would work very much as like an interaction designer, diagraming out logic flows, like here are my inputs. These will affect the media, and these are the different outputs I want. So creating quite technical documents for the coder, at the same time creating very creative documents for the client so that I can tell the story about what people will see and what they will feel and why this relates to their building, why this relates to this area, and why it’s rich and relevant for the people who will see it. And then back with creative coder, I deliver these quite technical but simple documents and what they are is they’re instructions on how to build a tool. That’s what I’m asking. I’m not saying creative coder, make my work, make the final piece. I’m saying make me a tool, then you will bring that tool to my workplace and leave it with us, and we will set up a chunk of whatever custom display technology we’ve dreamed up and we will connect them and we will begin to play.

And that’s how I got the best results, because I could sit down instead of having to sort of painfully have long phone calls or in-person meetings saying, can you make it a bit slower? Could you make it a bit more colorful? Could you make it more fluid? What do you mean by fluid? Oh, well, hang on a minute. Let me try and find a reference of what fluid looks like. Just make me a tool with the sufficient parameters for me to sit down and I’ll noodle away for hours until I get the looks that I really want.

Brenda: This sounds so logical and so simple and so successful, and yet I can’t help but think about all of the clients who really need to understand or need to think about how, if you will, they’re getting a puppy that’s going to constantly change and grow and evolve and that they need to care for this puppy, and that longevity is an enormous factor. And I’m curious, have you ever had any situations where you’ve had to really work with a client to understand that, you know, they are going to need to think about updating or evolving their new tool, if you will, over time?

Ed: Well, I clearly didn’t sell it well enough to you, Brenda, because this is kind of the beauty of it, is that they don’t have to update it.

Brenda: Fabulous.

Ed: It evolves by itself. So let me give you a couple of examples so it’s not quite so abstract. While I was at ESI, ESI delivered this epic installation in the Wells Fargo Center, which is, I think the tallest building in Denver, it’s known as the Cash Register Building, designed by Philip Johnson back in the eighties, I believe. And they have this monumental lobby with this massive, massively high atrium and a huge, huge, huge blank stone wall upon which we installed five, nearly 30 meter tall strips of LED, and they changed into different states during the day.

Now, one of those states was just birds flying. That’s all it was. It was just a flock of hundreds of birds flying against a sky. But the wonderful thing is, this was not a video. This was real time. And therefore, the birds are constantly changing who’s the leader. They’re deciding how much they want to flock, whether there’s wind, whether there’s turbulence that changes their flight patterns. The sky is changing its color automatically with the real time of day.

Another state that it had, the same media canvas, was a waterfall, but the waterfall would change its volume of water and intensity based on time of day as well. And we tried to map that with the energy levels of people, like more energy at the start of the day, less energy at the end of the day, and we would take wind data from what’s the wind doing out there in Denver and that waterfall would change—the direction of the spray would be changing based on what’s the wind doing. You know, the difference is, Brenda, is you’re making a place instead of presenting a movie.

Abby: But it’s interesting though, Ed, because it’s very different to maybe some of the video or media pieces that we need to make. These are pieces that don’t have a, let’s call it a direct narrative, right? It is about creating a mood and an emotion and an environment and bringing a space to life.

Ed: That’s exactly right. Like, for—and we’re talking about a very specific context here. You know, we’re talking about sort of public spaces really, or semipublic spaces. And I always try to avoid something that’s trying to tell a linear story because there’s no way to be sure that you’re going to put your audience in front of your story when it begins. You know, people are arriving all the time, and so a linear story has less value because fewer people understand it.

So, I describe the birds and the waterfall because they’re so simple and easy to understand. But we delivered this other piece and the whole, the thesis of the piece or the concept of the piece was the city of Chicago is going to paint pictures of itself. It was a bit of a play on the tendency of these big lobbies to hang an abstract painting behind the security desk because abstract paintings like, nobody knows what they are, so there’s less chance someone’s going to say, I don’t like that, that’s wrong, da-da-da-da-da. It’s just there, it’s just there, right? So, like, okay, we’re going to play with that.

And we made this massive, massive canvas. That’s what it was called. It’s an LCD screen, but it had vinyl stretched across a few inches in front of it. So, we sent out a local team to record hours and hours of just city movement, just of that neighborhood. So, it’s just a hours of really boring video. This literally, literally hours of trains coming, look, there’s a train going past, and like, traffic. It’s literally you are watching traffic, the clouds moving by, the people running the marathon going past the building, boats on the river. So, we have this amazing like, really I saw it as data. It’s huge, like datasets of movement and then this genius creative coder and a wonderful artist by the name of Vincent Houze, he did me the honor of making the tool for me that I could then play with and make all the presets.

And so, what is the experience, the experiences is you might walk through this lobby at any moment, right? You see this monumental canvas up there, and so you might see a boat slowly plowing its way down the river. Is it the Chicago River? I think so. And then slowly, every little bit of movement starts to become a brushstroke. So, ripples start sort of extend themselves and that boat starts to dissolve into painterly sort of swirls of color. And the whole thing slowly morphs into what looks like an abstract painting now. And so, there’s thousands and thousands of potential compositions. And so, what we deliver to them, we can say, client, listen, I’m giving you thousands of hours of content here, like for really cheap.

Brenda: You know, let’s talk about the emotional element. It’s come up a couple of times as you’ve been sharing examples and talking about your work, and it’s very clear that you create very emotion rich pieces for people. Tell us more about what this means to you. Like, what does emotion look like for you in your work and how do you go about nurturing this emotional experience for the intended audience?

Ed: I think I’ll start my answer by telling you about the moment in my life that sort of triggered me on this path of playing with the built environment so much. Because earlier on you asked me Brenda, you said it must have been hard to move from England over to San Francisco all of a sudden. And it was. It was, it got so hard at one point that I just I found it very hard to stay asleep for more than a few hours.

I was getting very anxious, like it had triggered some kind of deep, slightly sort of panic response in me. It’s like, ah, you’re destroying your life. You don’t know what you’re doing. You’re a failure. That, you know, all of those silly stories that so many of us here in our heads at some point in our lives. And it reached a point that was quite intense.

And I had a very, very strong experience when I was in a movie theater by myself. I got halfway through the film, and I felt this almost like a physical feeling inside my stomach and into my chest, like something rising up. I didn’t know what it was, but it was absolutely terrifying. And like, in an instant, I said I have to get out here, I have to leave right now.

I got up as quickly as I could and I left the movie theater and going through the lobby towards the door, I knew, I had to prevent myself from seeing anything. And it was like, okay, If I could just get to my bicycle, If I can just get to my bicycle and get the key out and unlock the lock and get on my bicycle, I might be able to somehow get home and close the door and everything will be okay.

But in that moment of like unlocking my bike, out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of some buildings. And that was it. And I turned and I looked, and I just observed all of the buildings in flux, like nothing was solid anymore. And it wasn’t a hallucination, like I’m on mushrooms and this is very visual. It was kind of very, very deep, like an understanding of the fluidity of everything. And I was, okay, I’m done. You know, this is my, basic, this is my life over, I’m going out, like, this, this is the end for me.

Brenda: You actually sound like a theoretical physicist. I was going to say. They’re going to put you in a genius laboratory.

Ed: Well, it’s very interesting you say that, because my partner, who I lived with at the time, when I got home and I was like, all right, so this happened and she was like, oh yeah. She’s like, well, I don’t know, I think a lot of people would feel pretty grateful to have the experience that you just had, you know, And, and that was a really, really great response to be around because it sort of didn’t allow me to relish my own drama and, and melancholy.

But more like, okay, so that was an experience, but it really was strong, and it really resonated and sort of echoed within me forever. And this started showing up in my work. So that’s why, like, then I talk about this project in Chicago was talking about what am I doing? I’m kind of like dissolving the city of Chicago into this fluid river of dreaminess. It’s like, it’s still there. Like, they hire me at Sphere, and one of the first things I do is turn it into like this whole rippling blob of fluid, you know?

And so, my mission, I feel like, is to try to make people more present in wherever they are, because I am someone who’s way too—I’m way too stuck in my head, I think far too much. And whenever I experience something that’s surprising enough to wake me up and stop my constant noise and just be in that moment, I’m so grateful. And so, when you talk to me about why do I want to create emotional experiences, I think why is because it’s the experiences I would like to have myself and it’s what I would like to offer to the world is, is to present, I think I like playing with the built environment so much because I want to suggest possibility. Like we tend to accept the rules of our reality as whatever we saw they were when we were children, maybe, and I like to say, but actually, maybe, maybe wonderful things are possible.

Brenda: Yeah, no, it’s absolutely brilliant. And I’m thinking about the sphere. I’m thinking about your large-scale work, and I’m thinking about what you were just talking about in terms of mindfulness and being present and enabling people to really experience that. And when people experience great scale like the Grand Canyon, right, when they—and, this Sphere, right, this modern monument, they experience awe. Awe actually stimulates presence and mindfulness and well-being. Like there’s these brilliant studies that directly link human well-being and scale. And awe. So, you’ve totally achieved that.

Abby: There’s so many things I want to ask you, but I think just thinking about our listeners, because the Sphere was just all over social and as Brenda mentioned, it’s such an already landmark building. When we talked, some of the things creatively, the challenges you were facing are the challenges I face on other projects and people here, listening will face. And so the way that you, you know, dealt with it shows a fearlessness and a dedication to what you believe in. that I think—

Brenda: And grit.

Abby: —that I want our listeners to understand, to be able to help them in similar situations. So yeah. Can you tell us sort of how you got embroiled with Sphere and how that all came to be and how you reflect back now?

Ed: Yeah, it happened kind of by accident and what had happened is I had been head of creative at Cocolab, which is a brilliant studio in Mexico City. But when the pandemic shut down schools, because we have little kids, we got out of cities. So, we left the city, as many, many families did, and moved to the countryside where we live now in central Mexico. And we like it in the countryside. I didn’t want to go back, so I said to Cocolab, listen, I think I’m going to try freelancing, which I’d never really done before. So, I just thought to myself, Well, who should I write to? And I just sent like two emails to people I thought, well I remember you, I’d like to work with you.

And so that was the first step in the process. And so, it’s just an accident. You know, I didn’t go hunting for the Sphere, but once I got the offer, it was hard to turn down because I knew it would be a momentous project. And what more amazing canvas could you dream for? A seamless sphere, enormous, like floating right there in the middle of a city. I mean, it’s kind of a dream, right? So that was how I began.

My experience there was a really good example of what happens when you establish your creative concept and your creative strategy clearly, but then you let it go and so it was a great experience of observing that when it’s let go and it’s let go without anyone saying so out loud, it’s just sort of quietly let go, right? It quietly dies and everyone just sort of gently figures out, oh, we’re not kind of doing that anymore. And so that’s what happened. That’s like, you know, it’s happened in countless megaprojects over the years. A lot of work was put into a strategy that was then discarded, a moment of kind of, woah, so what shall we—let’s do everything. Let’s do everything. And then a sudden kind of directive to pivot at the last minute.

But we pivoted quickly, and we delivered stuff that was spectacular, and that’s what we needed to do. What we did was hugely successful in the end, what the team did was hugely successful. So, of course I was there in Vegas the night we turned it on. Actually, I was there a few nights before to do like a supposedly secret test at like four in the morning. Well, we just had to put something on to make sure that things were pointing in the way that we thought they were. So that was kind of cool to be there on the top of a parking garage at four in the morning being like, oh my God, thank you. Thank you. It works. It works. It works. Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. And then—

Abby: Been there, I know that feeling.

Ed: And, and then, you know, less than a week later, maybe, being in, in Vegas on July the fourth and watching traffic stop and everyone just getting out of the cars to look at this thing which actually caused us like we were like, oh, no, we’re got to cause a traffic accident. Like we, our, our reaction was like one of like sort of hysterical worry.

And I went down because we were looking at it from up high and I went down onto the street and the moon was playing. And that is amazing. Like, there’s been lots of shows and I’ve directed some of them on the Sphere that were, you know, had all sorts of effects and illusions. And that’s really fun. But something as simple as that, is when this structure transforms itself to be something you recognize like that, like the moon is floating in the middle of Las Vegas. It is incredible.

Like even the basketball that I delivered, which was put on a few days after the fireworks show, was also brilliant. It’s just so simple. It just looks like it’s, it looks like the impossible is happening. There’s a massive basketball rotating in the middle of Las Vegas, and it looks real. It looks real. So that was incredibly satisfying and incredibly wonderful to see the built environment get completely transformed. It’s pretty incredible.

Abby: Well, as you mentioned, as we’ve been chatting, that idea of making possibility out of possibilities, again, it seems to me like the sphere is, it’s just created another amazing possibility. I just want to thank you Ed, for coming on today and sharing just a little glimpse into the way that you create. I’ve just really enjoyed; I feel very inspired and so I just want to say thank you so much for sharing all of this with us today. And I really would love to have you back.

Brenda: Yeah, if we can have you back, there’s so many things that you mentioned that you’ve talked about and that Abby and I are curious about that have to do with what it’s like to work with Ed Purver, and what is it like being in a creative team and how does collaboration work? And so, if you’re game to come back and chat more, we are game too.

Ed: I would love to. Listen, I mean, thank you for inviting me. It’s, it’s really nice to, you know, to meet you both, and it’s always nice to be asked about what you do and to be asked about your life. So, thank you for listening to my long answers and thank you for being interested.

Abby: Yeah, thank you so much, Ed, and thanks to everyone who tuned in today. Please subscribe for more episodes of Matters of Experience and make sure to leave a rating and a review and share with a friend. We’ll 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.

Show Notes

Ed Purver

Wells Fargo Center – Ed Purver

Canvas – Ed Purver

Sphere – Ed Purver

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 to you 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: Well, I’m very excited because today we’re talking with Jan Seidler Ramirez, who is the founding chief curator and executive vice president of collections at the National September 11th Memorial and Museum in New York City, which is one of the most impressive and moving places in the world, at least I think, and at the end of 2018, had drawn over 43 million visitors.

Jan works directly with stakeholders from multiple communities and agencies directly affected by 9/11 and with artists, photographers and filmmakers who responded to these transformative events. Previously, she served as vice president and museum director at the New York Historical Society and held senior administrative positions at Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Hudson River Museum, and the Museum of the City of New York.

She’s also taught and lectured, I don’t know where she’s found time to do this, but extensively on American history and the phenomenon of crisis collecting and authored numerous publications and essays relating to American arts and cultural history. Jan earned her Ph.D. in American Studies at Boston University, which is my alma mater, and where my mom also earned her Ph.D. That’s just a shout out to my mom, who listens to every podcast.

Brenda: Shout out, Mom.

Abby: Jan, welcome to the show. 

Jan: Oh, thank you so much for having me.

Abby: So, the creation of the Memorial Museum was at times fraught, so trying to please all these constituencies and political issues and working across the disciplines involved in a new building and what is to some a very sacred site. So, it sounds like an impossible task. What was involved in making this all happen?

Jan: Oh, a lot of chardonnay.

Well, you know, certainly I was one of the cogs in the wheel, I was certainly not, you know, the main player, but by the time—as you probably know, the choice to do a museum about the event itself was a second choice, because the first choice was to do museum, you know, broadly speaking to international freedom, societies that have it, societies that don’t have it. A very smart, effective team of people had been at work on this project for about two years. And when it was, their plans were rolled out for the first time publicly to a group that can, you know, included first responders and family members of the victims, I think it was then that the recognition really registered with these stakeholders, sensitive stakeholders, that their loved ones would be somewhat reduced to a footnote in this inevitable march towards freedom that took place. And they protested that the site itself was being used for that purpose. It wasn’t the idea of the museum, which they felt was perfectly valid, but not on that sacred ground. 

And, you know, I’m not a religious person, but I became a much more religiously aware person, given the fraught nature of this unplanned cemetery, you know, a battleground, whatever you want to call it. And by 2006, which is when the green light went on for the repurposed 9/11 Memorial Museum, just for starters, the medical examiner of New York City had made a promise to the families that at such time the memorial precinct was built out, he would take the temporary repository of unidentified unclaimed remains from First Avenue near Bellevue Hospital and move it to the site itself. That has always been a confusion for visitors and for family members. You know, it is not part of the official 9/11 Memorial Museum. We have nothing to do with. It’s still operated by the office of chief medical examiner, but it does repose behind a main wall of the museum.

And so, you know, with that, we also inherited the tragic statistics at the time, which haven’t gotten that much better, but then about, you know, 50%, 55% of all the New York victims had never been physically identified, not a scrap of a remnant of them had been identified, and therefore, for their family members, you know, the restlessness of this event was just chronic. This was far from a neutral ground. It’s still not a neutral ground. And I will say that those statistics have shrunk a bit, but it’s still 40, now, it’s 40% of the victims who have never been identified.

So that’s the beginning of, you know, welcome to the, to this project. And then it was always the second guessing, the third guessing, the media frenzy around what we were doing, what we weren’t going to do, you know, what we were going to do poorly. Surely, we were helping a lot of New York City papers, sell a lot of papers, you know, just because we were a topic of speculation. I think all of that could only ever stop or at least be tamped down when we opened, and people could come judge for themselves.

Abby: It seems like a very dramatic example of a museum built for the community, because Brenda and I are often talking about museums and are they really, truly serving the community? And in this case, it sounds like the community demanded the memorial museum.

Brenda: And the museum is the community, quite literally—

Abby: Yeah.

Brenda: —you know, in terms of the objects that are collected. And what I also appreciate is that community is certainly about New York City, but it’s also very much so the international story, because so many people who were lost at the towers that day were from all around the world. And they too are now a permanent part of our New York City community. And the institution sees to it that that is the case.

Jan: You’re absolutely right. I mean, it’s the DNA in the World Trade Center, because, you know, there were people from 90 nations who were reflected in the victim population. There are people that, you know, had never been to New York. They were flying over New York on business. They had no intention of being in New York, who tragically died in New York and are going to be forever here.

What I think is really interesting about your comment is we were extremely mindful that there were sort of circles of bereavement and circles of connection, stakeholder connections to this story, and if we didn’t listen to them carefully and we didn’t produce something that didn’t ring true to them, it would be a terrible failure. However, we were never actually doing it for the community. We were doing it for the future. And so, everything we were trying to do was for the cause of public edification, whoever the public may be down the line.

And so really, the most, one of the most complicated and fascinating, rewarding parts of the process were the three or so years we were bringing in a stakeholder community, sort of advisory group of about 90 people representing many different slices of the pie of people that were directly affected, of course, the victims families members having a very special place in that, but lower Manhattan residents and first responders and companies, businesses that were dislocated from downtown, investigators and so forth. We would lay out our thinking on, you know, as we were going forward to invite their response. So, they felt, you know, they were part of it.

First and foremost, they knew that on our project we were mostly professional museum makers, you know, curators or exhibit developers, educators, architects, designers. In a way that was a huge blessing, if I could say, because we were not government appointees. So, we didn’t have that agenda, sort of, you know, scarred on our backs. But what we didn’t realize was how cocooned many of these stakeholder communities were from one another. You know, they were so caught up in their own, the intense grief and the intense dislocation and pain you know, and trying to get some form of balance again, that they had no idea any other group might have felt pain of, perhaps not of exactly the same kind of pain they had felt. And so, it was like listening to them listen to each other and fight with each other, but also come to common ground that was so important. We had to sit back and watch them do it themselves.

We put it through this test and we still, to this day, there’s a group that’s very unhappy with the design of the 9/11 memorial. They’re very unhappy that the repository is underground. They’re very unhappy that the public at large, not family members, have to pay to go in, pay to pray is sort of the critique. On the other hand, I would say some of our friends from particular type of press, when they want to rile things up, they’ll go to those, you know, 12 people for comment. They never go to the thousands of other people who seem to be pleased and resolved, who have been participants in the process who are so proud of what has happened there, you know, who bring their young family members there, because that doesn’t generate headlines, you know. But that’s, that’s the world.

Abby: That’s for a different podcast, we could totally talk about that, yeah.

So, I’ll steal a bit of Brenda’s thread of a love for objects and their meanings. So how do you see the role of the vast types and amounts of objects you’re working with at the Memorial Museum? And I’ll sort of also add, I haven’t been back for a few years, so I’m not aware how often you actually move things. Some of the huge pieces I know probably never move, but if you could sort of talk, imagine someone’s not been there, talk about some of the artifacts that are there and then what does move and change?

Jan: Well, part of the project from the beginning, because there was a window of opportunity to bring back some of the big gigantic relics of the site itself and the damaged rescue apparatus—we had to select those materials before we even knew the stories associated with them, you know, to bring and drop down into the site because the memorial was years ahead of the museum in terms of its planning. And that was our roof. And if we didn’t move quickly and live with imperfection, but, you know, also let emotions kind of speak a little more loudly than they might otherwise speak in a deliberative process, we wouldn’t have had the opportunity, for example, to bring back the last column, which was the 39 foot tall relic from the South Tower that had been there from the very beginning of the towers being built and it was the last vestige sort of standing the day the site closed, actually the day before when it was cut down and it was brought out as a proxy for all the people that were not found and functioned on site as the first memorial where the different rescue recovery groups and disaster volunteers and occasional family members had been able to come in and put their mark on it in different forms.

So, we had the big eyewitness objects and then we had the exquisitely intimate, you know, human scaled items that we do not yet have a lead on. And we knew that we were going to have to have a strategy before we went out to collect them. You know, it’s one thing to say we’d like to collect recovered personal effects from people that lost their lives or whose lives were ever changed, but we owed those potential donors the explanation, how are you going to use them? And that became another kind of complicated part of the journey, because first and foremost, we had to write a collection policy. Can’t build a collection without a collection policy. It’s kind of a, you know, kind of dull and dry part of the process, but you do have to do it, and I sat down to do it, but we had to have the talk with our prospective donors, which is not everything will be on view all the time. What you’re doing is you’re in part doing a symbolic act by giving something physical associated with your loved one’s life, possibly with the end of his or her life, and possibly with the prime of their life or their beginning of their life, and you are putting it symbolically at a place where their life ended. So, their memory will always live on here.

And that’s a hard, that’s a hard conversation for people who are not necessarily museum savvy audiences. Also that because in our case, with victims alone, we were dealing with a population of about 3000 people, that the space we had couldn’t possibly tell the stories of 3000 people through, you know, 3000 people’s stuff, we would have the faces of the victims and have the short biographies about them, and we would find ways to cycle through examples of personal effects and personal materials and mementos that the families had chosen. And so, in a way, they were given a chance to co-curate that collection with us. They set the terms of why it was a valued thing. We didn’t.

Abby: The stories though must be pretty key, right? Because like this bottle of water I’ve got could be all scrunched down, the story that goes with it could be moving and incredible or it could be just absolutely not interesting because it’s the connection with the person and the story that this object represents. Because, yeah, there must have been a selection process, right? People brought in tons and tons of stuff and then you would have to listen to the stories but then curate what you thought would resonate with people, right?

Jan: Yes, to a degree. And you are absolutely right. This is a museum where provenance or context is all, in most cases. And speaking of, you know, water bottles, for example, there was a young man who had lost his brother. His brother had been killed in the North Tower, and he came in and indeed presented a bottle of, you know, Perrier water or an empty bottle that was not actually empty. There was a little bit of dust in the bottom of it, completely humdrum looking object. And then he explained that on the first anniversary of the attacks, the first time he’d ever been allowed to go down the ramp to Ground Zero, he had scooped up some of the dust because his brother was one of the unfortunate people who had never been found and to him the dust was sacred.

So, we try to be very attentive and anything that comes into our collection comes in through a process. We have an acquisitions and loans committee and, you know, we have to not only think about can we care for it, can we conserve it, where are we going to store it, how we’re going to house it, you know, will it have options for display, but it is how are we going to tell the story, what we know about this, for the record, when the person telling us isn’t necessarily a historian, we have no way of particularly vetting what they’re saying, but they’re sharing their story. And we had to live with a certain level of historical discomfort.

Our oral historian, for example, you know, who’s been with us from the beginning, often says, you know, somebody will get 10 minutes into their story, and she knows she knows more actually, about the day or the place or the what probably could have happened and probably didn’t happen. But, but it’s the story, it’s what, you know, trauma does to your memory. That’s really what we’re collecting. It’s not the accuracy per say.

Abby: A lot of the work we do is contextualizing these artifacts and trying to bring them back to life. But also, in terms of the spaces people are in, because seeing them in, on a nice, neat plinth in a beautiful white room or however it’s perfectly designed, doesn’t really evoke the time and the place, and so we end up oftentimes designing really immersive experiences and places, settings for these objects.

When you come into your museum, it’s already baked in, the emotions, when you enter the site from above are like, you can’t help but be flooded. And so then going down into the belly of the beast, so to speak, and being in that place, it has that loaded environment, at least for me it had that. I used to have a—I was right there when the Twin Towers got hit actually. I had just gone under on the E train. It had stopped, the lights had gone out and I was the last train to make it up into Tribeca where our offices were. And so, I was actually on the street when the, when it all sort of started to shatter. And so, when I went to the space, it was an incredibly moving experience.

And I think that having it in that specific space, rather than having the museum uptown, let’s say, for example, adds a lot of that emotional engagement and resonance that I feel is sometimes missing or could be missing if it had been built in a different environment, if that makes sense.

Jan: It makes complete sense. And, you know, the first artifact I curate or conserve, care for—and when I say I, it of course means that, all the team I represent—is the archeological cavity itself, combined with the memory of the day, people’s personal stories, the blue sky, it was an election day in New York, I mean, the many different ways people start their 9/11 story.

The site itself is so powerful that we have to respect its power. We know that many visitors to the 9/11 Memorial Museum today will have never seen the World Trade Center in its prime, and we need to give them time to adjust to the reality of what they’re looking at. It’s a confusing space. I mean, you know, it’s seven stories below ground and it’s only when you’re sort of halfway down the ramp that we begin to give you a different cue in your journey. And that’s the beginning of the projections of the missing person fliers that started to be seen in the streets of New York that afternoon, in that evening.

Brenda: There is something that I think is really important to make sure that we ask you, and it’s about following up with the idea of how soon is too soon. I know when I bring my students to meet with you every year, which you are so generous about, my students are coming from all over the world, and a number of them every year are coming from places that are dealing with tragic circumstances in lifetime and oftentimes will ask me afterwards or we’ll have a group discussion afterwards about, you know, was it too soon to start the institution just a few years after the tragedy, or is it still too soon to be having these conversations? And it becomes a very rich dialog. And I’d love to hear your perspective on the whole idea of when is too soon, too soon?

Jan: We’ve certainly heard the too soon, too sad, too sacred, too, you know, the, all the reasons, legitimate reasons why our active collecting, curating, producing a museum probably was a curious, if not a strange, if not a threatening idea to some people. I know as a, you know, person who has been in the world of historical material culture, I know that we have lost the context for so much of the physical materials that are in museum collections because we didn’t move soon enough. And I think there’s the difference I would make—it’s a very generalized difference—is I don’t think it’s ever too soon to collect. It may be too soon to exhibit. And so, collecting and getting the context right, the provenance right, getting the storyteller, the donor right, figuring out if the person, for starters, even had the legal right to donate it. I think that that is something you have to do fleet of foot, if you can.

One thing we’ve done at the 9/11 Museum is we have made a great investment in our conservation staff and they are incredibly ingenious people who are basically being challenged every day to think about two things. One is how do you preserve trauma and damage? But I think I’m of the school that sometimes you need to move much more quickly than you wish you could, and that if you are doing it with people you respect, they don’t have to be curators, they don’t have to be conservators, but they’re people that are knowledgeable about the community or the event or the where they can go to rest for a period of time, your gut instincts, your collective gut instincts are often going to prove themselves pretty good.

Abby: Turning to the media, because that’s my area of specialty. Overall, the museum doesn’t feel censored. Was there an awareness of that? Because I imagine it could be leveled as a criticism. It’s too much. People shouldn’t see this, yada, yada, yada. I think it’s fantastic and exactly where it needs to be. And I think that I see other institutions sometimes pulling back and not showing the truth of what happened.

Jan: One thing I had to learn was I was not working at a museum. I was working at a memorial museum. And that is a huge qualifier. We have, you know, part of the ethic of our institution is an abiding reverence for human life. Human life tragically ended in horrible ways on the day itself, and we had many, many, many, many different debates about, you know, for example, the images of the falling people. But we felt that if we omitted it, it was such an indelible part of the day’s chemistry that if we omitted it, we would be raising questions for all kinds of people about what else we had omitted. So, instead, we decided to put it in an alcove and give people some sort of advance warning if you wish to.

And then there was even a discussion, you know, tragically, so many pictures and video tapes and newsreel footage of that incredible, unbelievable, terrible act, but we felt that we couldn’t put them up as mounted photos. They needed to be projected and just come and go, come and go, because we did not want them to become some kind of strange icons. And the one thing, though, you will not find in the 9/11 Museum, and that does not mean we do not have it in our collection. You will not see publicly, images of body parts on the street because again, we felt that that violated the respect for human life.

Brenda: I know from the research work that I did with your museum, memorial museum and the wonderful people who I was so fortunate to be able to interview and for whom your institution is so important, hope and healing is a paramount part of their experience and also, I think, is a big part of the intention of the Memorial museum. And I’m really curious how you interpret the idea of the 9/11 Memorial Museum as a place of hope and healing. How do you interpret that personally?

Jan: Well, every day I watch people from many different parts of the country and parts of the world coming together. They come in as strangers. They may not go out as friends, but something is happening to them. There is an energy change where they’re seeing each other sort of stripped to the bone of what we love in the world, and we value in the world. And it transcends nationalities and religions and backgrounds. And it is a very moving thing to watch happen.

We just, we happened to meet with our docents yesterday, who are remarkable people, they’re the people that are on the front line every day, and they were talking about friends who would say to them, you’re volunteering to be a docent in the 9— how could you deal with it? And they talked about just the remarkable emotional and spiritual in some cases uplift they have from working with people and the hugs that get, you know, freely shared.

The other thing I would say is, apart from the fact I’ve always considered it a museum about humanity, it’s not about terrorism. It is about the decency of people to one another. What we can do when we are pushed to the wall and in a terrible predicament. As we worried, we really haven’t delivered the ending, the uplift, the never again if, you know, the naivete of, although the power of never again, we just haven’t delivered it. How can you give people an ending when every day in the press still, this event is still unspooling? I mean, to this very day, criminal evidence is still being held for people that have not yet come to trial. I mean, there’s you know, people are dying of the health effects. I mean, there’s just, there’s a lot going on still.

But all that said, the remarkable thing is how people, you know, who, they’ve made the descent down into the museum, they’ve experienced the museum, and they’re literally coming up. And when they walk out onto the Memorial plaza, they’re going to see it, through fresh eyes, probably, the miracle of a rebuilt downtown skyline, and, you know, the memorial plaza with the trees that have matured, so if you’re there in the summer or the fall, there’s the show of the trees and the sound of the water, and it kind of smells good because of the nature. So, in a funny way, the place and the city provided something uplifting. And that is, you know, just the incredible power and grit of human beings to get up, dust themselves off and take that next step forward, and it’s just renewal.

Brenda: Gosh, there’s just so much that’s so tempting to ask about and even, you know, not as a question, but something, you know, for folks to consider as well, is that the 9/11 Memorial Museum also has to deal with and consider current events as well. It’s so much beyond just the day. And so, for an institution, you are constantly growing and evolving and shaping yourselves. So, I just want to commend you for what is a tremendously complex, truly complex job that you do with a great deal of love.

Abby: And grace. I’d also just like to thank you, Jan, for joining us and sharing your experience in such an open, candid way. And I’m hoping that our audience, our listeners will go. Go to the September 11th Memorial Museum experience it. It is a spiritual place. It is a complete journey for the soul when you go there. But I think you’re right, at the end of the day, the feeling is a positive one about humanity and the way that we come together in a crisis. So I just wanted to thank you so much today, Jan, for sharing with us.

Jan: Thank you.

Abby: And thanks to everyone who joined 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: 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.

Show Notes

911 Memorial

Episode 38: Demystifying AI w/ Chris Cooper 

Transcript 

[Music]

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

AI Brenda And I’m Brenda Cowan.

AI Abby: Today’s show, we are going to take a deep dive into artificial intelligence and experience design, looking at how we collaborate with AI during the process of creating a museum, the limitations right now and general potential worries about the future impact on our industry.

AI Brenda: But we couldn’t start a show about AI without using AI.

AI Abby: Brenda, I want to reveal that I am Abby and you heard AI Brenda earlier. So, I am going to hand the show over to the real Abby and Brenda, but I will be back for the show sign-off.

Brenda: Oh, my God. Did you miss us, everybody? We were here all along. I was here all along terrified, listening to Abby sound like this and just wondering, how on earth did that happen?

Abby: I do think, Brenda, that you did sound better than me.

Brenda: I sound better than I really do in real life.

Abby: AI has something against people from the North West of England.

So, love it or hate it, AI is taking over, causing some to worry about job loss, bias, or security while others enjoy the convenience, productivity, innovation, and personalization it affords. Today, we welcome my business partner at Lorem Ipsum, Chris Cooper, to the show. He’s been obsessed with AI for a while at this point and is knee deep in our R&D in AI and also spearheads its application in our experience design team. Chris, a big hello.

Chris: Hello.

Brenda: Hello Chris, this is Brenda. It’s very nice to meet you.

Chris: You actually sound worse than your actual AI.

Brenda: I’m sure I do. No, in all seriousness, it’s such a pleasure to meet you, and I am genuinely curious about all things AI. And also, I know we’re going to talk a lot about AI in terms of our processes and our protocols and our work in design and so forth, and I thought I would just share with you a very few areas in my workplace where we are working with AI, and it includes all areas of business, technology, mathematics, sciences, gaming, design of all types and English studies, English as -second language studies, and it is absolutely everywhere in the world of higher education, and with all of the considerations and concerns and even conflicts that come along with that.

Chris: I think academia, it’s interesting because I typically think of—this is probably a prejudice—but I typically think of academia as kind of being stuck in not the most advanced technologically, but for whatever reason, this is like, it’s like the front lines for a lot of AI discussions and what have you. So, it’s kind of an interesting perspective that you have.

Brenda: It’s really interesting when you’ve got students, and I’ll speak on behalf of my institution, you know, it is an incredibly global institution, both in terms of the student body, but also the faculty and staff—

Abby: I just want to plug that’s FIT for anybody who wasn’t aware.

Brenda: FIT in New York City. And it’s virtually impossible for us to be teaching a large number, especially in our schools of business and technology, our schools of art and design; we have to be teaching AI because our students are and we’re working directly with industry.

Chris: And they’re going to use it. So, you have to get out ahead of it so that you can participate in how they use it and make sure that you guide them in the right direction.

Brenda: Right, which to a person such as myself is, honestly, it’s not terrifying, but it’s definitely, you know, I’m feeling like I’ve got so much catchup work to do, which I’m determined to do, but I’m really looking forward to diving deeply into not just the kinds of AI that you’ve been using, but the reasons why, and how it’s really working, because I think I’m going to take a lot out of this conversation.

Chris: You know, one thing that I think we should establish right now is I am not an expert, right? Like, I’m just a guy who’s trying to figure out how this is going to work in what we actually do to make money, right. And the second thing is, everything’s happening so fast that even anything that we talk about right now, in a few weeks, months, is going to be completely dated, which is really frustrating when you’re in my position where you’re trying to figure out workflows, and they’re constantly changing.

But I think that everything’s developing so quickly that I’m not sure that we’re in a position right now where people are behind. In the sense that, like, everything that I’ve gained or expertise that I have right now may expire in three months, and if you start doing stuff right now, you may be caught up with where I am in three months because new tools will come out. And all the new tools that are coming out, they’re trying so hard to make them accessible for people right now. Right now, most of the stuff that we have is pretty janky, for lack of a better word, and you kind of have to hack things together to make them work. And I think that that’s, kind of feeds into a lot of people’s hesitance to adopt it and also a lot of people’s fear about what it might mean because it’s so foreign and it’s not accessible.

Abby: Well, I’ll start. We’re going to start at the very beginning because I know, Chris, we use a lot of language models. So, can you describe, so, at the beginning of a project, when we have a team, and we’re just even brainstorming, you know, how you collaborate with AI?

Chris: I mean, in general, language models are like the most prominent AI that we’re using, right? So ChatGPT obviously is kind of the leader in that area, but we also use Claude, which is another one. So, what we’ll do is we’ll use the language models to brainstorm the initial ideas. If we’re doing a concept and we usually get together and we kind of talk about the concept, what the client wants, what we’re starting to think about and just starting to wrap our heads around it. And what I do, and not everybody on our team does, but what I do is I feed all of that into the language model. I feed any documents that the client has given us. I feed any conversations that we’ve had, and I start having a conversation with the model about what we might be able to do for this concept.

And I think that’s like a key thing that I’ve seen internally, that it’s a stumbling block for a lot of people, is a lot of people are just like, go to the model and type in, give me ten ideas for this. And the model kind of just goes blah, and gives you like stereotypical, trite ideas, and then they leave it there, and they’re like, oh, see, AI’s stupid. And what you really need to do is have an iterative conversation with it, where you tell it all this stuff, you start telling it what you want and giving it some of your like nuanced ideas, see what it gives back to you. Then you correct it and say, no, I don’t like that. I want it more like this.

And you end up having a conversation. And the way I think about it is, you know, when you’re teaching somebody something you really like start to learn the material even better than the way you originally learned it, because it challenges you to fill in all the holes in your thinking. Well, these conversations that you have with a language model start to force you to think creatively about what you actually want to do with the concept because you’re having a conversation where you’re directing the model towards what you want it to end up with.

Then, once that has happened, I will have the AI play a different role with me where I have it critique the ideas. So I then say, okay, approach this like you’re an expert in the field of exhibit design or what have you, critique those ideas, and then I’ll take that critique, and I’ll feed it back into the brainstorming session I had and tell the AI that I’m brainstorming with, change the original ideas we came up with to address these critiques, and then it will generate whole new ideas based on this critique that it essentially has provided. And so, you enter this kind of iterative cycle where you begin to develop more and more interesting, unique ideas than you would if you just sat down by yourself.

Brenda: This is so much like cooking.

Chris: Yeah, I guess it is a little bit like cooking.

Brenda: I’m getting such a strong sensibility of how it is that things can just endlessly be reduced and refined. And my question for you is, when do you know that you’ve got the sweet spot? When is that sauce perfectly reduced?

Chris: Well, it’s just when you like it, when you’ve got ideas that you like and then you go back to your partners, and you talk to them and either they respond to them or they don’t. But it just, it’s a process that allows you to kind of get out of your head.

And then one thing that I left out that I’ll typically do is I’ll then also ask it to critique it not just from like how good an idea it is, but like what sort of red flags or issues might someone have with this. So those could be political concerns. Those could be like, I don’t know, blind spots that I may have culturally. And so at least that lets me think about that before I just blindly go in and present something and I haven’t thought about like, oh, these indigenous people from this sector may have an issue with this.

Brenda: Give me a story because we all know that part of the challenge with AI is bias, and we know that there are racial and cultural biases. That said, when you use your technology towards trying to better understand your own thinking and perhaps your own, like you said, blind spots, can you give us a story of that happening and, does anything come to mind?

Chris: I think a lot of what you’re talking about, and what a lot of people critique, is that it’s a very passive perspective when you bump into those prejudice. It’s like, give me this, and it gives you that, and you’re like, oh, well, that’s, that’s got a bias. Whereas what I’m talking about is it’s a conversation you’re having. And when you have a conversation with people, every single person you have a conversation with has a bias, and you just have a conversation, and you dismiss the bias, or you say, no, that’s a bad idea, that’s stupid, or no, we need to think about this or whatever, so you can get past those biases if you’re aware of them, right?

Another thing that I would say is AIs don’t just have, or we should talk about, language models; they don’t just have one perspective. Part of when you prompt them is you prompt them to have the perspective you want them to have. So, if I prompt it to brainstorm with me, I tell it it’s the greatest exhibit designer in the world, you’ve won all of the awards, and then that gets it to start thinking that I need to respond as this.

And if you think about how these models work is they’re predictive models, and they’re trying to predict the next word or token, right? Well, when you start just with the blank page, they’re doing that prediction based off of everything that it’s been trained on. It doesn’t care if it’s right or wrong. It is just going to say what is the most likely next thing to say. As soon as I say, you’re the greatest exhibit designer in the world, you’ve won, blah, blah, blah, all the sudden, it narrows that down so that what it’s predicting to say is only based on the data associated with the very best exhibit designer in the world.

Brenda: So, have you run into any kinds of challenges? I’ll just throw out one, you know, challenge that I encounter in my work, which is hallucinations. If I’m asking students to write a scholarly paper and the next thing you know, they’ve got all of these, you know, citations and these resources for, yes, actual authors, but with fake books.

Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Brenda: Right?

Chris: Absolutely.

Brenda: Do you run into this?

Chris: Yeah, so that’s why when you’re doing conceptual stuff, right, it’s really well-suited to that because when you’re doing conceptual stuff, you’re not asking it to give you like—

Brenda: Facts.

Chris: —facts. You’re just brainstorming, right?

Brenda: Yup.

Chris: The hallucination stuff is something you have to be careful of, but that’s going to become much more of a concern later in the process. As far as the brainstorming, obviously, you should be aware of that. But, you know, if you think about the tools we usually use for brainstorming, you’re going to be searching the Internet, you’re looking at Wikipedia. All of these sources are prone to mistakes—

Brenda: Yeah, it’s the wild west.

Chris: —that you’re always going to have to take into account. So, it’s the same type of thing as you’re probably having to teach your students all the time; don’t just accept what you find as fact. You always have to like—

Brenda: Of course.

Chris: —think about it and, review it and go back and critique it.

Abby: So, when you have an idea, and you move into the concepting, we use Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and DALL-E, can you tell us about that process and some of the benefits of AI at that stage?

Chris: Right. So, so far, we’ve talked pretty much about the language models, right? What Abby is talking about are like the text-to-image models. And so, what we’ll do is we will take the ideas that we came up with, even if they weren’t developed with AI, say someone just has an idea. We’ll still go to the text-to-image—

Abby: Which we still do, just to note to all the listeners, we’re not only using AI, we do have our ideas.

Chris: Of course. What we’ll do is will take whatever idea that it is, and we’ll put it into the text-to-image model. And it’s a great tool because when people have an idea, we can all say the same idea, but as soon as you see a picture of it, you all realize that none of y’all were thinking the same thing. You’re like, oh, that’s blue. And Abby will be like, no, it’s white. And you know, you’ll have the whole conversation like that.

Brenda: You know, I’m curious, as you know, the conversation unfolds, I’m really curious about your process at your company for generating exhibit ideas, exhibit concepts, exhibit images. You, I presume, before you were actively using these models, you had a process for brainstorming, generating, producing, and so forth. Has your process changed as a result of this, and in what way?

Chris: Well, so traditionally, we’d have sketches sometimes, sometimes we would be photoshopping things together, and then we would move past that. And we still do this. We still model, but the hurdle for modeling and creating renders is much higher than going into a text-to-image generator where you can just spit out stuff, right?

Traditionally, what we would do is we would sell in a concept, maybe have a few directional renders that we did. And then, once the concept has been approved, we would go through the design process, and the design process would be much more rigorous because we would be using actual 3D modeling software, we would be using the architectural models that came over from like the shell and core from whatever architect is working on the space, so everything’s accurate.

And then that can be intensive because then you’re like properly modeling things out, you’re properly texturing everything, you’re properly lighting everything, and you’re generating those renders and then presenting imagery based off of that, maybe even bringing it into a game engine so that people can walk around in the space and have real-time experiences with it and that is not going to go away because clients are going to still want at some point an accurate model of the space.

I think it will all change with these technologies, but you will move from like a conceptual text-to-image idea presentation up to a more and more accurate model that may incorporate AI into it, but it will still have like accurate measurements.

Brenda: So, in your brainstorming process, do you find yourself using words and language a little bit less and going right into visual, visual images and that sort of thing? Or are you still…

Chris: We’re still using language. You still have to tell the story behind it. But what’s happening is because the imagery is so easy to create now, we can even internally, when we’re brainstorming, we can be generating imagery to show each other even as we’re talking. So, the images are informing the brainstorm at a much earlier stage.

Abby: And it’s interesting, as Chris mentioned, it’s easy to make these images. What’s hard is to make the images that are right for the project, and that will never change. And there are some drawbacks as well. Like Chris and I feel that DALL-E’s visuals are a little plastic, right? And the texture isn’t really nice. They’re not lush. They look a bit plasticky.

Chris: Yeah. 

Abby: It’s still not there yet.

Chris: So, all of the models have positives and negatives to them. So, like Midjourney is like a beautiful, cinematic imagery, but it’s harder to prompt right now. You have all of these disparate things that, to your analogy, it’s a little bit like cooking. You’re like, oh, let’s, let’s bring all this together, and then you can mix them in different ways to come up with really interesting outputs.

Abby: Do you think, Chris, that collaborating with AI on concepts has resulted in sort of the end result being less valued than it were if a human was creating it?

Chris: I think that that’s a danger that we’re going to run into, and we’ve seen this in other areas. We saw a lot of this in video work where, you know, there was a time where in order to like cut a video, you had to have all this equipment that people didn’t have access to. Once people had access to iMovie, their value for what we would do when we were making a video went down because they’re like, my nephew can make a video, and you’re like, yeah, but your nephew can’t make this video. But somewhere in their head, they’re like, my nephew—

Same thing is going to happen here where, used to be in order to make beautiful renders it required like a level of investment between having the right people on your staff, the right equipment, the right amount of time, the expertise, all that sort of stuff. Now, you’re going to have a lot of people who can just crank out a lot of imagery, and not everyone’s going to be able to tell the difference between, or they may be able to tell the difference between a good image and a not-so-good image. But they’re not going to value the expertise that created that difference.

Brenda: So, this is like, you know, Sunday evening dinner conversation in my household because my husband’s a digital retoucher and, as of right now, and he does very high-end retouching for print, photoshop is not, the AI is not there yet to be able to do pristine, pristine level image creation for what he does. But, you know, I think these kinds of things, it’s really only a matter of time before Photoshop truly can just create magnificent, truly magnificent images that a trained artist can create. And/or is the standard going to be so low? I mean it. Is the standard going to be lowered, chipped away at bit by bit?

Chris: I wouldn’t have immediately thought what you’re thinking. But if you look at what happened with video when the Internet happened, the quality of video just went to pot, and everyone just got accustomed to bad video. And you’re right, something like that may start to happen, but there’s still going to be a difference.

And I think the best way I can describe it is our other partner, Yan, is a DP, so he’s great with lighting and setting up shots, right? And even when we create a render where we push it through our entire workflow with really talented 3D artists and they do a great job, right? And then they send over a render, and we’re like, no, because they framed it wrong, and they haven’t lit it the way it should be lit. And then Yan can sit down and be like, well, no, just lower the camera, change the lens, tilt this, like you need a backlight over here, and all of a sudden, it completely changes the image. The difference between those two images might not be readily apparent to a lot of people, but when you’re selling something, someone is going to have an emotional reaction to the one that Yan lit and framed, and they won’t to the other one.

Abby: I would like to say with Chris’s example of video as well, although there’s a proliferation of low quality, low budget media everywhere, there are still remained the feature films, the ultra-high budget, the way they’re shooting it, the technology—

Brenda: Oh yeah, the 70mm.

Abby: Yeah, exactly. So, I think the best always remains. So, I think your husband is fine, and he’ll always have a job, you can let him know. It’s going to be fine; we’ll still need his skill set.

Brenda: It’s not about him.

Abby: But I think that, you, society always values the best of the best. I just think there’s a proliferation of crap, maybe.

Brenda: From what I understand, it’s hard to really capture in words at this point; AI is not quite capturing a level of emotion that you know can be found right in the human hand, if you will.

Chris: Yeah, I think in general, and I think there’s a fair amount of debate in this about how far can AI advance if it is not experiencing the world, right? I mean, we all experience the world, and a part of the connection that we establish with one another when we make art or whatever it is is through that shared experience where, somehow, we’re tapping into what it is to have been alive and experience things. And if AI just is completely foreign to all of that, it may never be able to do that.

Brenda: Well, ultimately, right, AI is understanding the world through people’s interpretations of the world.

Chris: Well, except for now, that’s changing.

Brenda: Tell me.

Chris: Well, like a language model is trained by just feeding it like the Internet, right? As the models are becoming multimodal, which means they can see and they can hear, they’re going to start experiencing the world more like we do. And if—now, this is where I’m getting out of my depth, right, but this is how it seems to me—if they start experiencing the world more like we do, then what we’re talking about may start to go away.

Brenda: Yeah, it’s fascinating to still push for my part anyway, the idea that ultimately it is still perceiving other people’s generated data. So, the question will be at what point, right, is this truly autonomous and what that autonomy is going to mean in a, you know, and we could talk about agency as well, AI having its own agency.

Abby: Yeah, I mean, for me, it’s all about evolution is inevitable and it seems like AI is part of our evolution and may take us over as we evolve. We’re constantly moving, and we feel like we’ve always been here as we are today and have never changed. But we have. And you look back a million or so or even nearer, and we weren’t the way we are today.

So, I think the future is hopeful, and we’ll see what technology does and how it augments us as it is already doing. So, okay, I’m going to hand the outro over to AI. We’re going to feed this edited podcast into it and give it some of our previous outros, and see how it decides to wrap up our show today. So, take it away AI Abby and Brenda.

AI Abby: Well, that wraps up another intriguing conversation. We’ve delved deep into the world of AI, its applications, and its potential impacts.

AI Brenda: Absolutely. It’s been a pleasure exploring these nuanced perspectives. And as always, we appreciate you joining us on this journey.

AI Abby: Indeed. Thank you for tuning in today. If you enjoyed the show, subscribe to Matters of Experience wherever you get your podcasts. Don’t forget to leave a rating and review and share it with your friends.

AI Brenda: Until next time, stay curious and stay engaged. Thank you for being part of this exploration with us.

AI Abby: Thank you, everyone. See you on the next episode.

[Music]

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

Show Notes

ChatGPT

Claude AI

Midjourney

Stability AI

DALL·E 3

Transcript 

[Music]

Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience. This podcast is produced by Lorem Ipsum, an experience design company headquartered in New York City. Our show explores the creativity, innovation and psychology driving designed experiences. If you’re new, a big 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’s show, we’re going to look at designing and branding for art museums and specifically San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. We are very fortunate that our guest today is Bosco Hernández, the design director at SFMOMA, where he leads a team of designers and architects stewarding the brand, the collection, and the visitor experience, which sounds like no, no mean feat and I’m looking forward to hear more about it.

Bosco: So excited to be here.

Abby: We’re so happy to have you on the show. Now your work has garnered recognitions from many different design awards, including AIGA, our favorite – SEGD, Graphis, and the American Alliance of Museums, and you currently serve on the board of SEGD, where you chair the Racial Justice Committee.

Brenda: So, let’s get the ball rolling, Bosco. If you could describe for our listeners a little bit about the museum itself, how it’s laid out and if there are any challenges with the space that you’re working with at the moment.

Bosco: Yeah, if you’ve never been here, the museum went through an expansion in 2016, so it’s comprised of two buildings and one was designed by Mario Botta and then one that was, the expansion was designed by Snøhetta. There are seven floors of art, and there’s also two sets of elevators, which makes it super interesting and keeps us on our toes. Our permanent collection is sort of set out in a second floor of the building. There’s a street actually, that not a lot of people notice, but that goes underneath the building. And we have, the Fisher Collection is also presented here in the museum, which comprises of like three other sort of floors on the Snøhetta side. So, it’s quite interesting and very unique set up.

Abby: So, one of the – San Francisco, my sister used to live there, and I know the downtown has really seen a lot of industry leave. You know, the dynamics have completely changed and I’m sure people were coming in their droves. So, I guess has the visitor flow changed and sort of have your expectations changed from an institutional perspective?

Bosco: Yeah, it has changed. And I get this question so many times, what’s going on in San Francisco? What’s happening? I see the parks in certain areas of the city thriving, all the streets are filled with people. But downtown, where the museum is located has seen some major changes and vacancies, so that has definitely impacted the museum, and also our approach, you know.

We’re very close to the Moscone Center, which is our biggest convention center, and it used to be, you know, scheduled with many conferences happening all the time, very hard to walk on the sidewalks. And now it’s different. There’s not that many of those conferences happening, so definitely it has put more pressure on us in a way that we haven’t experienced. Just really have to be very thoughtful about the type of programing that we’re doing and how – just our approach to the audiences.

Brenda: Could you tell us just a little bit about what it is that’s different and how you’re approaching these changes?

Bosco: There are tourists that are coming, but not to the levels that we had seen before. Like I said, we have to think about the exhibitions that we’re programing, and we are doing a lot of tests in terms of like our galleries. can we have some of our galleries free to the public? Is that helping attract more audiences.

The permanent collection on our second floor, we extended and made that free, and I think we did see some visitors that were coming to see those shows, but not to the extent that we needed. And so, I think we’re still sort of experimenting and thinking about ways to attract new audiences.

Our focus has been thinking about the Bay Area. What are ways that we can sort of really highlight and serve as a platform to local artists? There’s so many exciting artists that are doing incredible work here. And are there ways that we can, you know, provide a platform for those artists?

Brenda: You know, we were talking a while ago and you talked about how it is that you’re moving towards a more approachable language for your design work. Can you share with us what it is that you mean?

Bosco: So, this, some of those questions, we were actively trying to solve. And one of the ways since the pandemic, what we’ve been doing, and it’s one of my favorite parts of my work is we host these JEDI meetings which are, stand for justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. They’re held every week and they’re facilitated by different people in our team.

And these meetings are used to tap into this kind of more abstract and meaningful parts of our work that are not just, not specifically tied to kind of logistics and the product that we’re doing, but more about are we serving or our design meeting, is meeting the needs of the people that we want to see in the museum.

And also, I think some of the bigger questions that I think have been great is sort of how are we doing the work itself is just as important as the work we’re doing and so there’s been lots of sessions about, you know, psychological safety. What does it mean to kind of speak up and say, you know, I don’t think this this direction that we’re doing is exciting enough, or how do we do it in a way that, that doesn’t sort of turn off and end the conversation, but actually becomes a way of opening a door into other possibilities.

And I think that has been something that is obviously hard at a design studio is sort of, it’s a very vulnerable process to kind of share your work. But also, if we want to do something new and different, we have to kind of be able to dive deep and be very, very honest with our feedback and be very critical.

Brenda: This is such an important model and it’s really refreshing to hear an art institution taking this on. And can you give us an example of a specific challenge or specific experience that you all tackled during one of your JEDI meetings?

Bosco: The bigger challenges are like – sustainability has been another big component. And so, one of the JEDIs that we did was kind of analyzing sort of the, some of the waste that was created and through like the vinyl, the scape, the paint, and we did some material research and some investigation about what can we do to reduce some of that waste and some of the workload.

And it was like a small little thing, but we started noticing little threads that were repeating. And whenever we use screws and nails, there’s no damage and things can still look really great and they’re super easy for the crew and our installation team to, to remove and install. So that sort of that’s one tiny example, but a level of kind of an awareness.

We are on a grind doing so many projects, but just having one hour a week has allowed us to kind of tap into to slow down a little bit and notice what is it that we’re doing, and can we do it better? How might we is something that we say that a lot in those meetings, how might we do it differently? Which I find it so exciting and sort of non-confrontational.

Abby: Moving now to talk sort of about connecting people with art, we were asked to curate an exhibition of 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th century Russian art a number of years ago. It was full of a bunch of beautiful masterpieces, but things that people were very familiar with looking at, and it was, needed to all be addressed through a new lens to revisit these paintings and put them into a different context.

So, we chose color. This was before this was all in vogue, by the way. I claim I started this, so we took the majority of the color or the most influential color in a painting, and so we would juxtapose a 17th century landscape with a 20th century cubist portrait, things like that in a room. And the rooms would be yellow and red and blue, but color became this amazing conduit for all these different stories and perspectives on the paintings themselves and painting and art in general.

I feel like the art world, or the art museums are still hanging things up, still having some text panels and not doing a lot to help us engage with those, let’s say, masterpieces or familiar pieces. I’m not really talking about contemporary paintings, so, you know, how do you at your museum look at ways of telling stories for people who are coming into the space?

Because I know a lot of people sometimes are like art, this is art, I can do it myself or I don’t understand it. Or they haven’t got art history background, so how are you bridging, how are you having those conversations with visitors who may be there for the first time and nervous and don’t understand? And what are some of the stories you’re able to tell? Or some of the challenges you have.

Bosco: I mean, it is a challenge. I think some of the key is this idea of, you know, this dialog that happens with the visitor, I think to me is a key component of processing information, like you’re saying, you can sort of feel it in a more emotional level like you were describing with the colors of the walls and how they interact with the paintings. Not everybody sort of can read a label and kind of enter into that artwork that way.

So that’s one of the questions that we’re asking is, are written labels the best way to tap into different audiences that we’ve never sort of approached before, like with different cognitive disabilities and so on. So, I mean, in my mind, I want to experiment with, you know, could we do, let’s say, some kind of, you know, official sort of, a simple graphical way of talking about an artwork.

And of course, it’s always sort of this fine line of like what is more important, you know, we don’t want to take away from the art experience. And so, I think it’s something that we are constantly navigating. Are there spaces for this where we can kind of push those boundaries and experiment with how people either are touching or experiencing with their hands the artworks themselves, they have a place to build, create or do something as a ways to kind of understand that work.

Abby: I think you’re right. I think maybe for me, an issue as you’re talking is that it’s pristine, it’s finished, and the artwork is sitting there and if you’ve been to artists’ studios, they’re, for the most part, they’re messy. You can see they’re playing. There’s creativity and evidence everywhere.

Brenda: They’re not precious.

Abby: They’re not precious, it’s iterative. And so that’s all gone. And when you go to an art museums, it’s like dah-dah-dah-dah, we’re not showing the nine paintings that led up to this or the 20,000 failures or the inspiration that arrived at this. It’s just evaluate this. And so that, what I’m deducing from what you’re saying is that it’s more about inclusive design. It’s letting people play, enjoy, touch, feel and connect more with these paintings and the art.

Bosco: Yeah, I mean, I like to think we would succeed if people are coming here and they feel like this is an invitation, it shouldn’t be intimidating. And I think you’re totally right. You know, museums often are showcasing works that are finished. They’re done. They’re, somehow the assumption is that they’re perfect. They couldn’t be any more perfect. They pass through the selection process that confirmed their perfection.

And so, there’s this kind of paradox there that makes it feel like either I could have done that, but I’m not here. And why not? Why am I not here? Or I could never do this, and this is impossible for me to do. And so, it is interesting and I think it does, obviously, there’s a reason that live museums have been doing it for a long time because to some degree there’s that contrast that kind of helps sort of enhance the works often.

But, you know, it doesn’t have to be always that way. And I think we can have some rooms at least where we can kind of let our guard down and embrace that kind of messiness that artist studios have.

Brenda: So, you were talking about flexibility and adaptability and being able to negotiate and that leads us to a very critical conversation point, which is working with curators. So, these are very complex relationships when we’re talking about being a partner as a designer and working with curators throughout the design process. And you have a lot of experience working successfully with many different curators.

And let’s just start with asking what kind of advice would you give to designers who are struggling to make a really sort of profitable, beneficial connection with curators?

Bosco: Yeah, it’s work that you never finish doing and you’re always evolving and learning and sharing sort of the learnings that you have. And we’ve actually talked about it in one of our JEDIs, is sort of how, you know, how do we talk about our work and what has been the most successful because it’s such a key component of design is sort of that storytelling and bringing people along with you.

These are all human relationships. I know it’s very different. I had a background as a designer in a small design firm, and I remember the relationship that I have with a client was very different. You kind of come and present it and you show the work, they pick one and you kind of move on. But at a museum, like you said, it’s such a – we’re creating a much more complex sort of it’s almost like basically like building a building to some degree or some large project that involves multiple people. And I find that the story is kind of a key element when presenting the work.

I guess I find curators have been most successful when the story all makes sense, where the, the threads work to enhance sort of that story that the curator is going to have to tell, like when they do a curatorial walk through of their show.

Abby: But how often does a curator – let’s say you’re talking about they’ve got the story there and it’s all great. Not all of them are visual people, right? They’re telling you the story, but they’re not giving you any ideas visually, right?

Bosco: Yeah, I mean that, yeah, it certainly happens. Unfortunately, there’s been occasions where like, you know, we had agreed on everything on paper. The words were all matching and then the walls were painted, and we were like, oh my God, this is too bright, or then what happened? Oh, no, what are we going to do? We need to kind of rethink.

And so, I think that’s one of the things that we’ve done just recently is sort of embracing this more iterative approach where we have a conversation first and there’s words that are being kind of thrown at us, and then we do kind of a response we call, I think it’s like an alignment meeting and, and we interpret their words.

Doing physical mockups are the best things in my mind. I find that even when you have ideas that I know the curators might be very uncomfortable with, and I know that it could enhance the exhibition, I always try to, you know, at least present one direction that is pushing the envelope into the, the direction that we’re trying to move towards.

Brenda: Bosco, you make maquettes, right? You make like little models?

Bosco: Yeah.

Brenda: And are these devices that you use to be able to sort of persuade or seduce a curator over to some really interesting design possibilities?

Abby: You can say the dark side, if we’re talking about JEDI meetings.

Brenda: I’ll let you say the dark side.

Bosco: Yes, we have a miniature version of the entire museum, and it’s in our lower level in our basement. And its super fun and it takes sort of that edge off. And I find that, you know, my team usually especially for the architects or the exhibition designers, you know, they have to operate this software like AutoCAD or SketchUp or Rhino. And oftentimes the curators are not familiar with those programs, so you have one person kind of navigating the spaces and sharing sort of what the visualizations are going to be.

But I find that with the maquettes, there’s wonderful sort of surprises and things that can happen. And also, it’s a very democratic process. I’ve seen curators spend hours and hours over the weekend or whenever they want. They can just move back and forth the works and freely, and some really kind of fun and innovative idea has happened that way.

Abby: So, moving to your work on the brand side, you did taboos about 10 to 15 years ago with things like gift shops and restaurants and when I visit SFMOMA’s website, you have the Kusama Dining Experience, which is referring to Yayoi Kusama, the artist who does the polka dots, and she’s all the rage. She’s sponsored by Louis Vuitton right now. And you have your Kusama Dining Experience, which has a special menu inspired by her work. And there’s the cocktail hour with cocktails inspired by work.

Brenda: Drink the Kusama cocktail and you will see polka dots.

Abby: Sounds fantastic.

Bosco: Exactly.

Abby: And so, this sort of branding, this bringing an artist into your dining experience, having a themed dining experience, why does there need to be this diversity of offerings in an art museum and in a museum in general now?

Bosco: I mean, that’s something that our new director has really felt strongly and I think you might be familiar with Kusama’s work, and that might be the reason that you come here and you might be here on the first Thursday, so you’re coming in for free. And I think that what we’re trying to do is think about are there ways to kind of have kind of diversify, sort of that, not only the way that we’re earning revenue, but also sort of the options for visitors so that you have a more holistic experience?

And so, one of the things he’s been talking about is the notion of this radical hospitality. What does it mean to be pushing the limits? And I think this is something that, you know, a lot of restaurants and the hospitality industry have been thinking about, but what would that look like for a museum? And so, it’s something that we’re experimenting.

Brenda: You know, something that maybe more on a personal note, you have spoken before about working and thinking with an abundance mindset and not a scarcity mindset, and that this is how you approach thinking about how you can reach visitors in different ways. And I would love to hear where does this very positive philosophy come from?

Bosco: You know, it’s interesting because since we last talked, I thought, oh, this is kind of something that maybe we should do a JEDI on. And we did. And since then, my mind has been like a little bit more nuanced because I did receive some feedback from my team and especially obviously with some of the layoffs and so on.

There are some, some real pressures as to like what is this sort of possibility or abundance mindset. And to me, I think I mean, some of it has to do with the way even, even the way that I was saying before, like I love the question of like, “how might we?” When you frame a question that way, you know, you realize that there’s, really it could be limitless ways of answering that question.

So, I think it’s super valuable to kind of shift that perspective and to notice, like at least be aware of like what are the things or the elements that are forcing me to kind of not think beyond what is possible. One of the critiques also were like, is it, is abundance mindset something that can be sustained all the time.

Is it endless? I think some, especially because we’re in San Francisco and we’re in this tech world where, you know, you see those phrases coming up a lot of like, don’t worry, just break it and see how it works. It’s about trying and doing and so there was this pushback a little bit. And I think, you know, for me, the – and especially because you look at where the world is leading us in terms of like sustainability and so on, it’s like, can we, is, is this sustainable?

And I, I think it was interesting and very valid points, but I still, I think obviously things are not black and white. To me, what I find more interesting is its sort of noticing and stopping and really thinking what if or how might we and letting go of some of this or at least noticing where these constraints are coming from.

Abby: So, if we focus now on technology, I know one of the challenges for institutions and local government when they think about investing is how do we use technology in the most effective way in our museums and art museums and institutions, because it can be very expensive, you know, how interactive does it need to be, how flexible? And they have to serve a large population and think about that longevity, sustainability, robustness of the technology chosen. And I don’t think there’s a perfect answer. I agree with you. I think there’s the practical side, there’s the theoretical side, there’s the ideological side. Tell us about your experience with technology.

Bosco: Yeah, we’ve had some wonderful breakthrough, sort of really refreshing uses of technology at the museum with just a couple of them. I think one of them was the 2016 app, when we reopened the building that was partnered with Detour, this app that would kind of locate where you were and give you like turn-by-turn directions and guide you as if you were, you know, the reviews were like, it feels like I have a personal curator that was walking me through the museum.

So, it was very sort of delightful and unexpected and it was wonderful What we’ve discovered, and obviously nowadays, I think, you know, with the challenges that we’re facing, investing in technology is a real challenge. And also, I find that, you know, at least in San Francisco, we’re competing with a lot of these other spaces that are kind of like the center of the tech world and so how do we do things in a kind of unexpected way?

It’s also something that we’re thinking about. I do find that some of the most analog versions have been, of the reasons, again, that I love them is because they can be iterative, adaptable, it’s much easier to adapt and change. It’s so hard to do that when you’re investing in some of this larger equipment, and the longevity, like you said, is a real threat. So that’s something that we’re constantly trying is, are there ways to do this in an analog way that can kind of be more surprising and even unexpected and achieve the same results?

Abby: Thank you, Bosco, for sharing a glimpse into SFMOMA and your design process with us today and being open about the challenges you face. Your work and your team’s work is absolutely beautiful and I encourage anybody in the area to go and visit SFMOMA, and I hope everyone listening takes away as designers that we really should try to continue to experiment with our work.

There’s no right way and always aim, as Bosco said, to take visitors’ breath away. I think that’s amazing. So yeah, thank you, Bosco, for inspiring us today and creating exhibitions that people haven’t seen before.

Brenda: Thank you, Bosco.

Bosco: Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure.

Abby: Thank you for listening today. If you enjoyed the show, 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: 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.

Show Notes

SFMOMA

MARIO BOTTA ARCHITETTI

Snøhetta

The Fisher Collection at SFMOMA

Kusama Dining Experience · SFMOMA

Introducing Detour Platform and our first partner, SFMOMA | by Andrew Mason

The SFMOMA’s New App Will Forever Change How You Enjoy Museums | WIRED

[Music]

Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience. This podcast is produced by Lorem Ipsum, an experience design company headquartered in New York City. Our show explores the creativity, innovation and psychology driving designed experiences. If you’re new, a big and a hearty 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: Today on our show, we’re going to look at humor and absurdity. No, it’s not me and you, Brenda. Well, our guest today is Neil Mendoza, one of the world’s biggest names in new media where experimental art meets technology and electronics. He blends sculpture, software and engineering to animate objects and spaces. Neil’s art often repurposes found objects, offering viewers a fresh perspective that challenges their preconceptions.

And Brenda, on previous podcasts, you know, we come back time and time again to the theme of reframing or offering a new, fresh perspective on familiar subjects or history to really challenge all biases that we all have and sometimes don’t even realize, and Neil’s work does this using humor, which I think is sometimes, sort of has the best effect on a visitor. And he’s showcased his work globally, taught art and technology at UCLA and Stanford, and co-founded the art collective, “Is This Good?” It’s a pleasure to welcome you, Neil, to the show.

Neil: I’m super happy to be here. I love your podcast, so really excited to have a chance to have a chat with both of you and see what comes out.

Abby: I want to sort of start by hearing about the sort of kid you were because, you know, you seem to have the right and left sides of the brain very much working. Paint me a picture of young Neil and how you sort of – the early seeds were already sown.

Neil: I think curiosity was a big, very big part of my childhood and something that unites both the left side and the right side of my brain. I was like, curious to learn about how the world worked and also curious to see about how I could shape the world. I remember when I was young, I used to really enjoy taking things apart and putting them back together again, much to the chagrin of my parents.

And I was also super into like, plasticine and Play-Doh and, you know, trying to make impressions of what the world might be like. So, I think there’s always been this kind of technical and creative side to my personality, in some ways, like fighting for supremacy, and in other ways, complementing each other.

I think I’ve always enjoyed, like being inspired by the absurd as well. I remember there were some illustrated books you can get as a kid which have Rube Goldberg-esque machines, and I think maybe one of the first projects that I could see a line between what I was doing as a kid and now is when I had a pet hamster and I made a device that would like attach to my hamster’s wheel and count how many times he ran around his wheel every night to try and work out how far he was actually running. And then, yeah, I don’t know, 20, 30 years later, I made a Hamster Powered Hamster Drawing Machine. So, yeah, there’s definitely a continuum there.

Brenda: That’s absolutely brilliant and an excellent use of a hamster. So, well done that.

Neil: I mean, I should have been generating some power.

Abby: Some power, yeah, electricity.

Brenda: It’s never too late, Neil.

Neil: It’s true.

Brenda: So, you know, I’m thinking about the kind of playful person that you’re describing, and I’m thinking about what a blessing and curse it can be in an educational setting. Because sometimes kids who are so curious and who tinker and who love to play or whatever can also have a challenging time sometimes in a structured classroom. And one of the things that Abby and I are really curious to hear about is your education, your early years. Like how is it that you managed to really fully develop this way of working, this way of thinking, and this way of exploring through your education and some of your early jobs?

Neil: It’s an interesting question, I guess, yeah, obviously, way back when I was in school at the beginning, I think it used to come out as like misbehavior and dissatisfaction with the educational system because, yeah, often it doesn’t cater to curious kids as much, so then they start to act up and misbehave. And I think that might have been, might have been me.

And then, I went on at university to study math and computer science. And again, the emphasis there was very much on the fundamental elements of both of those fields. There was nothing creative at all about it. I didn’t really know about creative applications of computers then. I mean, it seems so obvious now, like the world is full of like creative ways people are using technology.

But back then the most creative things people were doing were probably making computer games and graphics for movies, but it seemed very, very separate from the world of art and creativity to me. They didn’t really form a bridge in my brain until a little bit later when I was working at an advertising agency, and I saw people there using code and computers in a very explicitly creative way.

When I saw that, I got really excited, so I started to explore making my own installations with technology. And after, like, working more and more on projects like that in my spare time, some of them started to get exhibited at galleries and I decided I was going to go and do a master’s at UCLA in Design Media Arts, to really be in an environment where there would be people who I could, you know, who could nurture my artistic aspirations and yeah, push me in the correct direction.

So, I went and did that, and then since studying at UCLA, I’ve more or less been full-time artist. So, I’m still trying to work out the best way to stay as a full-time artist, but it’s definitely one of the most rewarding parts of my career up until now.

Abby: So, I’m sort of fascinated, just doing a bit of a segue, Neil, and addressing what you’re talking about in terms of being inspired outside your job because there’s something in your job that’s just, you know, the mundane or you’re like, I don’t picture myself at this ad agency forever. And you have this thing, this hankering or this inspiration or this drive that leads you on.

I’m talking about the idea of a lot of people who’ve been successful at things that are unconventional, have often had to do it after hours, you know, nights and weekends. I did that when I was editing full time, and at night – I wanted to be a filmmaker – and so at nighttime, I had to, and weekends, I had to work on my film Saints and Sinners on same-sex marriage in the Catholic Church.

And so, I’d go to work all day sitting down, editing with clients, and then in the evening, edit all night till about 2 a.m. and just do it constantly, for months. Nobody tells you to do it. There’s no guarantees of success at all. You know, can you talk a little bit about that sort of need to do that nights and weekends and how you feel like doing that and going above and beyond contributed to you being successful and being able to earn a living at what you do?

Neil: I think when I started doing it, I didn’t really think that I was on a path to be doing it full-time. I was doing it more because of a need to express myself. It was more like a, maybe a quest for meaning, like if you’re spending all day, every day using these skills you’ve attained to do something which you don’t find is rewarding, is improving the world in some way you find refreshing, then I think that then you suddenly get this drive to express yourself in other ways.

And then when you’ve done it enough, you suddenly start to realize, yes, maybe this is something that I could actually do full-time. And I think obviously a lot of kids are discouraged from chasing creative careers, and that makes perfect sense because creative careers are obviously going to be a lot more competitive, so parents obviously just want their kids to be doing something that’s safe and guaranteed. But creative careers obviously are a lot more rewarding as well because you get to guide your own destiny, so to speak.

Brenda: You know, I was talking with a colleague just recently about how in his company, he says, pretty much so, everybody has some kind of deep passionate interest or form of expression outside of work. And I think that, you know, when I listen to you talk about how it is that creativity and personal passions and personal exploration can really help you in the work that you do, you know, I’m thinking about my own work I do.

I’m a very passionate gardener, and I’m convinced that it translates into helping me be a better teacher because there’s so much patience and nurturing involved and a lot of belief that things are going to work out really well in the end. So, at any rate, let me ask you about your background in science and how has that informed and influenced your artistic work? Like, do you feel that your scientific approach, your analytical thinking is reflected in the artwork that you’re creating?

Neil: So, I’m a self-taught engineer, and I think it’s always a battle in my head between the left and the right brain. And it’s very tempting when you’re doing artwork that involves technical elements to over-engineer and overanalyze the technical side at the expense of the artistic side. Like the technical side and the engineering side almost has a beauty in itself that you can see when you’re doing it, but that’s probably lost on most people who just come to a museum and see the final piece.

They don’t appreciate, for instance, the beauty of the code that underlies it because they never get to see that. So, it’s an interesting push and pull trying to balance those things when you’re integrating science and technology into artwork and not let one suffer for the expense of the other.

Abby: Can you tell us then or try to explain your process, sort of the stages that you go through as you’re creating a piece or an exhibition and what part is the most difficult to you?

Neil: I mean, I think the most difficult is the very initial phase when you’re trying to work out exactly what you want to make or the first steps you want to take along the path because you have infinite possibility ahead of you. I think it’s even more challenging in artwork which involves technology like media art, than it would be in some more traditional forms of art, such as painting or ceramics, because, you know, just making the art, you’re also defining the media as you go along.

Like especially with my work, I really enjoy trying to make machines and technologies that haven’t been seen before, but obviously that means that the field of possibility is scarily large. So yeah, stage one will be kind of starting out, trying to decide where to plant the seed, where I want to start. And normally I have a vague kind of conceptual idea I want to chase and a vague kind of technological idea I want to chase, and I want to see how those two can intermingle.

So, I’ll start off by like making some simple prototypes, which maybe would represent half an idea, and then see where it takes me. I’m a very hands-on type of person. I think that the act of making, the act of getting outside of your head and actually engaging your hands, also facilitates the generation of new ideas a lot.

For instance, like, one of my pieces, like the Hamster Powered Hamster Drawing Machine, I guess that was a kind of tongue-in-cheek exploration of selfie culture, but also, I had a bit of interest in mechanical drawing machines and automata from the 19th century. So originally, I just started off playing around with drawing machines, and then I’d say it should be a drawing machine that would draw a hamster.

I didn’t know what kind of selfie machine it would be. And then, I integrated an extra video of a hamster, which would appear to drive the machine. So, everything came in little stages, which was kind of like, I would make a little prototype and then it would guide me to the next stage of the project.

Abby: Isn’t that amazing, though? How wonderfully iterative. How scary? Because I assume you have like an end date or like if it’s being commissioned, I guess that’s a question like how often are you commissioned and have the pressure to deliver? Because this is, it very much sounds like it’s based on exploration and learning and understanding stage by stage. So, how sort of scary is it for you?

Neil: It’s pretty scary if you don’t know where you’re going. It really depends on the type of context, you know, whether it’s a residency or a commercial commission. I think I one of the reasons I enjoyed grad school so much was it was like you had pressure to deliver, but it was – failure was kind of allowed. That doesn’t really exist in the real world. There’s just the pressure to deliver, and, you know, it has to be something that you’re proud of because it’s going to be out there in the world whether you like it or not.

Brenda: I couldn’t agree more. And I absolutely love the idea of appreciating failure in a certain regard when failure is safe, and it enables you to push forward. And I want to ask you about inspiration and what the things are or what the thing is that inspires you, that brings forth new ideas that really compels you to create. Are there specific places or sources or as you’re walking about in the course of your everyday life, do things sort of reach out to you? What does inspiration look like to you?

Neil: I think inspiration a lot of times comes from being outside in nature, like being in the real world away from my computer. A lot of my pieces involve environmental elements, and just the complexity of nature really inspires me. Obviously, going to art museums as well really inspires me, like trying to see what other people are doing. And I think, like, we mentioned deadlines before, I think when I do have a deadline that’s coming up and close by, it forces my brain to be contemplating that deadline subconsciously, and connections, which I might have missed when I’m out and about in the world will make themselves known to me.

I think when you’re a creative person working on a creative project, you’re essentially trying to make links between different unexpected elements of reality, and when you’re out in the world, and you have this, like, yeah, thing, gnawing at your subconscious, you’ve got a deadline, I think it can help you make these unconscious links and force them into your consciousness. So, yeah, nature and art galleries are a big source of inspiration for me.

Also, just being in the right context. I love doing residencies because of the cross-pollination of ideas you get from talking to other creatives about what you’re doing. I think that’s a really rich source of inspiration for me. Wandering around thrift stores is also really inspiring for me, trying to contemplate these objects that often we take for granted, like what they actually mean, like how I can take them out of context and, you know, give them a new life and a new meaning.

I also like using old tech. I find that pretty inspiring. I think when you are an artist working with tech, it’s very tempting to just want to use the newest, shiniest toys, but you can also use and abuse older stuff and I think people often have an element of nostalgia attached to it, so you have this kind of side door into their psyche with the attachments they already have to these objects. So, yeah, I think random objects are also a great source of inspiration to me.

Abby: So, we want to sort of focus on some of the more specific work. So, tell us about your umbrellas and how you turned that into a piece of art and also your anti-vanity mirror. So, could you tell us those two stories, Neil?

Neil: The umbrella piece, I was wandering around the rubbish dump, and I saw, I guess it was probably about 200 umbrellas. It looks like someone had decided they were going to collect umbrellas and they had ended up here in the dump. So, I collected up all of these umbrellas and started experimenting with them, trying to work out what I could do with them, and I became quite an expert on umbrella mechanics in the end. And this one idea came to mind about trying to flip reality upside down and make it an umbrella that would rain on the inside. The idea was it was going to be a device that people will use in the future if they’re in a desert environment, and because of climate change, it stopped raining so much. So, they have this, now this climate modification device that they can carry around with them and make it rain. So that took a lot of experimentation to work out.

And the other piece you mentioned, the anti-vanity mirror – yeah, I found this beautiful ornate mirror and got me thinking about vanity mirrors and I thought, what about if I could make an anti-vanity mirror? So, it would be sort of a gift for any influencer in your life to try and train them to stop looking at themselves in the mirror. The idea would be they would go up to this mirror, and it would run away from them, and they would have to chase it around if they wanted to look at themselves. And yeah, seem to be quite successful, like when going up to it after one of the exhibitions in a gallery, I could see there was like nose marks and lip marks, so some people seem to really like this piece.

Brenda: You know, I have to ask you more about using found objects, you know, the experience of finding an object and having a connection with it, sort of this subjective connection with an object is actually linked to experiences of wellbeing in people. And studies talk about how the experience of finding an object can stimulate experiences of wonder and awe. And I’m really curious to know if you would agree with this idea, and you know, when you use found objects in your work, what kind of thoughts or sparks or emotions are conveyed?

Neil: Yeah, I think totally, when I find an object, especially when I find it for my specific purpose of, like, using it for what it was not originally intended for, it definitely kind of makes me happy. It’s like a little key to a puzzle. So, from my perspective, definitely I can relate to that.

And then, from viewers of my artworks that involve found objects, I think it’s a great way to connect to them in a way that you can’t connect to them just by, you know, making abstract pieces. I think one great thing about it is you form this immediate connection with them and then you can use it as a kind of medium with which to communicate other ideas through. It’s kind of like a back door into their psyche.

So, I think it’s particularly effective when you’re trying to talk about like serious issues, like if you’re making a piece, for instance, about environmental issues, if you just straight up, didactically talk at people about those kind of issues, it’s very easy for them to shut down because we have this, you know, wave of information about all that kind of stuff.

But then if you try and talk about those issues by, you know, using these familiar objects, I think you kind of can get around these blockades that people psyche’s put up to new information sometimes because that, you know, that concept is already in their brain. So, I definitely feel like it’s really powerful to be able to use these objects which, you know, already form part of people’s psyches and the way they relate to the world and as a way to communicate with them.

Abby: You mentioned earlier that a lot of the exhibits or pieces of art that you make are hands-on; you encourage people to touch them and interact and it’s very important that they do that. So in lieu of that, I’d love you to tell the listeners about your orchestra of knives, which does sound nuts. What is it and how did people respond?

Neil: So the orchestra of knives, I guess at the time I was pretty into using motors and actuators to explore different ways of making sound, and I was walking around a thrift store and I saw a lot of old knives and yeah, kind of like at that moment I was thinking about musical projects, so it grabbed me as something that would be fun to make a musical project out of. So, I created this kind of like very clean, nicely engineered looking sculptures that consisted of, like, transparent plastic and knives, and when activated, they would play “Staying Alive.”

So yeah, people were super into this, but when the whole orchestra switched off, people’s relationship to it was completely different to when it was switched on. When it was switched off, people would look at it and see all these knives and their inherent relationship to knives would be the one that came out. They would be like, that looks super scary, I don’t want to go anywhere near that.

But as soon as it started playing music, their relationship to the whole thing changed and people started to want to go up to it and stick their fingers inside it, which is definitely not what you want to be doing. That was really interesting how like the decontextualization of those objects was full. You know, like you would think that people’s brains would be like, no, this is a sharp object moving at high speed. I shouldn’t stick my finger in there, but…

Brenda: You’re fighting nature.

Neil: Yeah, it transformed itself from a dangerous object into an object of play.

Brenda: Neil, I wanted to mention that when I was visiting the Pittsburgh Children’s Museum not long ago, I was there with a museum colleague of mine, and we are footing around and found ourselves in the lab area where they have the residencies and I came across a series of interactive paintings that absolutely knocked my socks off and have taken videos of them and carry them around in my phone and when I’m having a blue moment, I will look at my phone and I will play a little video of my friend cranking a handle and making an arm with a pointy finger, point, point, point, point into a piece of artwork. But it is absolutely stunning. And could you give us a quick description of the Tough Art work that you did at the Pittsburgh Children’s Museum?

Neil: Yeah. So, like I mentioned before, residency is a really amazing opportunity to expand your creative horizons, and Tough Art is really great because you get to actually engage with the kids on the museum floor and test stuff out. So yeah, I had this idea where I wanted to connect kids more closely with famous paintings, and I think it’s probably already hard enough to get kids to engage with static artworks even before the age of the iPad.

And now, now kids are just used to poking everything and get sad when it doesn’t move or make noises back to them. I think also kids really enjoy just moving their bodies around, flailing around, like one of the pieces is a piece where you pump up apples on the screen and the kids just enjoy the very physical act of like moving their arms up and down.

It was virtually secondary to anything else that was happening in the space, whether on the screen or elsewhere. So, that was a revelation to me. And yeah, the Tough Art programs are really amazing. So, they give a few artists access to the museum’s very capable staff and the museum floor to try out some ideas, and the Pittsburgh Children’s Museum does a lot to support artists, so I think it’s an amazing place to be.

Brenda: It absolutely is an amazing place and children are amazing people. And when myself as an adult and my colleague playing with this particular piece and watching this poking finger actually move the painted figure inside, there was something so, you know, back to where we began, absurd and humorous about it, but there’s also something really powerful about it. It’s on people’s own terms.

People have power to cause certain effects to happen or to create reactions that they might expect or that are unexpected but that they were responsible for. And I think that that’s really important, how visitor centered you are in that way, or I should say how participant focused you are in your work.

Neil: Yeah, I mean, I think in today’s digital world where so much of our interaction with the technology is, you know, via one-person experiences like cooped up in our home, like trying to create experiences that are open-ended and multi-person that, you know, can connect people in ways that they want to kind of make up as they go along is really powerful.

And I think also, I think as an artist working with technology outside of the constraints that working for a company might give you, it’s really valuable to be able to suggest, you know, alternative futures that technology could be used for outside of like the ways that tech companies are trying to tell us they need to be used for. Like phones and laptops and all those kinds of things, that’s all well and good, but it’s kind of like a local minima in interaction, like the companies producing them know that we’ll carry on buying more of them. They’re trying to, you know, sell us more devices and get more of our attention, which maybe isn’t the best for us and the best for our human experiences.

So, I think it’s really valuable that artists can then use this same type of technology and explore how to make experiences that, you know, maybe are a bit more focused on our human experience and improving it rather than just trying to, you know, aim for very specific business ends. So, yeah, I think it’s a real privilege to be able to do that.

Abby: And just building on that thought, your art often explores the complex relationship, I think, between humans and technology. You know, it can highlight technology’s benefits while also revealing sort of its more unsettling aspects. Do you think like algorithms and AI may reduce spontaneity, unpredictability, and serendipity in human life.

Neil: I think purely as a tool, I’m excited about AI. On a day-to-day basis, it’s kind of like it’s a multiplier for human capability, specifically from an interactive art point of view. It’s really interesting because previously when you created an interactive installation, all of the interactions would need to have been pre-coded into the software that drove the installation.

Now with AI, you can make interactive installations that would do things that even the artists might not have expected them to do. Like any technology, I’m optimistic about where it can go and pessimistic about the fact that there are some bad uses, and we need to try and rein them in, and I think artists have, you know, a big role to play in trying to paint pictures of possible futures that we want to live in.

Brenda: Well, the act of creation in and of itself, I think is a hopeful enterprise, and, you definitely seem to be embodying that idea. You know, let’s find out what it is that you are passionate about right now with your work and in your life. What is it that excites you when you start your workday?

Neil: Right now, at this very moment, I am playing with, like we mentioned AI, I am playing with these kind of reinforcement learning systems, trying to learn how to get bits of artwork that can respond to me and change with how I am interacting with it over time. So that’s my very personal, like geeky thing, that’s exciting me at the moment.

I’ve just moved into a new space in New Mexico, so I’m also very excited about having a larger space to explore slightly larger scale pieces of work. Conceptually, I’m also interested and like excited at the moment to try and like put sensors out in nature and like integrate the natural world into this, like technological world a little bit more. So yeah, those are a few different-level things that are exciting to me at the moment.

Abby: Well, Neil, it all sounds incredibly cool, and I just wanted to thank you for sharing your process for creation and your perspective on the work you’ve made so far. It seems to me very much Monty Python-esque, don’t know if any of the other listeners caught that, and we’re really, really excited to see the next chapter and what comes out of your studio. So, thank you for joining us.

Neil: Thank you for the invite and it was really great to speak to all of you.

Brenda: It’s such a pleasure, Neil. Thank you.

Abby: So, thank you for listening today. If you enjoyed the show, 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.

[Music]

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

Show Notes

Hamster Powered Hamster Drawing Machine – Neil Mendoza

Climate Control – Neil Mendoza

Antivanity Mirror – Neil Mendoza

The Electric Knife Orchestra – Neil Mendoza

tough art – Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh

Mechanical Masterpieces – Neil Mendoza

Transcript

[Music]

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

Brenda: And I’m Brenda Cowan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abby: And what about AI?

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

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

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

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

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

Abby: Hundred percent, yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brenda: Take care, everyone.

[Music]

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

Show Notes

Gallagher Design

DTech Lab

Transcript

[Music]

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

Brenda: Hello, this is Brenda Cowan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brenda: Is the walking the moment of…

Abby: The moment…

Brenda: …drudgery and despair.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And folks were starting to get…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abby: People 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brenda: Buh-bye everybody.

[Music]

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

 

Show Notes

The Secrets of Emotion — Pablo P. L. Tinio

Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center – Lorem Ipsum Corp

Designer and Curator Ellen Lupton on How Storytelling Shapes Design

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

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle, Ph.D.

Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence (YCEI)