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Taste, Touch, and Tech with Emilie Baltz
Whether you’re a designer, a creative professional, or simply curious about the world of sensory design, this episode offers a wealth of insights and inspiration. Join us for an engaging conversation that celebrates the power of multi-sensory experiences and the importance of human connection in design.
As an award-winning artist, designer, author and public speaker her appearances include TEDx, DLD, PSFK Conference, Ignite Conference, Creative Mornings, TODAY Show, NBC, Wall Street Journal, D-CRIT and more. Emilie holds a Bachelors Degree in Film Studies from Vassar College and a Masters Degree in Industrial Design from Pratt Institute.
[Music]
Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: Hello, this is Brenda Cowan.
Abby: This is produced by Lorem Ipsum, an experience design company headquartered in New York City. And our podcast explores the creativity, innovation and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. Hello to anybody listening for the first time, and welcome back to our regular listeners.
So today we’d like to welcome Emilie Baltz, an immersive experience director whose work adds a sensory dimension to design, which is one of the many reasons she’s unique. But also, she’s the inventor of the word “eatstallation,” which I absolutely love. Emilie, a big welcome to the show.
Emilie: Thank you.
Brenda: Emilie, we’re going to kick things off by talking about the multi-sensory work that you create that truly fosters curiosity and wonder. And you like to say that your work fosters curiosity and wonder one lick, suck, bite and sniff at a time.
Emilie: That’s right.
Brenda: And as I’m thinking about the lick, suck, bite and sniff at a time, I get so many flickers of memories. So, I think about eating ice cream on the beach in the summertime. I’m thinking about my lilac bush in the spring. Is this the kind of response that you hope for, Emilie, in others when you create the work that you do and sort of trigger memory and affiliations? Or am I, have I just gone off the deep end here?
Emilie: I would say yes. So, I’m really interested in how our bodies experience the world and how they’re also portals for experience. And so, everything that you just described to me are examples of embodied experience. We have these nostalgic, you know, moments in our childhood of licking ice cream or being at the beach, you know, swimming in waves. And we remember all of that because of all the sensory stimulation as well as the physical engagement.
You know, I think of multi-sensory experience design also choreographically. So, nothing exists on its own. We never just see. Right? It’s always a choreography of all of our senses that comes into our body as sensation. And then through our cultural experiences, our language, we start to make meaning out of them. And emotion then introduces, you know, emotion is the meaning making state of feeling. So that’s kind of the choreographic principle, I would say, thinking about all of those senses and their relationship to each other because they’re constantly in motion, you know.
Abby: That’s incredible. So, your work is a combination of the senses, art and technology, if I was going to try and bucket it in some, some verticals, but can you let us know about your journey, sort of to what we see today? Tell us about your path.
Emilie: Sure. It is a non-linear path. I originally studied screenwriting and contemporary dance, and then I went on five years later, and I have a master’s degree in industrial design, with actually a focus on food as a material for design, because I was interested in industrial design and its relationship to human behavior. Industrial design is so heavily influenced by human psychology, you know, behavioral habits, and it really is, I think, one of the earlier foundations that lead us now into what we would call experience design as a discipline.
Brenda: I love that you’re talking about food. I love the idea that food can foster community, communication and sharing in our everyday lives. I know that’s a big part of how you approach thinking about food in your work. What does this look like in design? Like what are some of the behaviors that you see your design with food cultivating?
Emilie: I think for me, food is both medium and metaphor for experience design. I can use food as an ingredient, as a material in creating a dish, for example, or a consumer packaged good, right, so you can very easily go into product, ingredient, nutrition, all of kind of the functional benefits that we expect with our materiality of food. But you also can lean into its multi-sensory properties because food is our only multi-sensory material on earth, because when we eat, we don’t just taste. Flavor is a construct of all of our senses, and if you’ve ever plugged your nose while eating and then you release it, you realize just how dependent our sense of taste is on our sense of flavor.
And then my work also looks at all of the different kinds of rituals and behaviors that go around the experience of eating, that foster things like community, the development of mythology. Family dinners are usually the forums for sharing our history, talking about our days, inventing the future as well as, you know, even celebratory experiences, you know, state dinners, for example, are actually mediums for diplomacy, for power. Food is this universal medium that allows for all kinds of different intersections and relationships of the human experience and that feels, you know, timeless, as I said, universal. I can’t think of another material that does this.
Brenda: How do you manage the mess? That’s what I keep, I keep thinking about it—no, but seriously, how do you manage the mess of food? What comes to mind?
Emilie: You know, I worked in fine dining between undergraduate. The reason I got into industrial—
Abby: I was going to say, how did you get into the food part?
Emilie: Yeah, I worked in bars and restaurants, and I had the great luck of falling into the wave of molecular gastronomy in the early 2000s in New York City, which was led by chefs like Wylie Dufresne, Will Goldfarb, you know, these were my heroes and my mentors. And so, what I discovered within that world was the attention to detail, the kind of service design that goes into fine dining. And so, when we talk about mess, like in those places, there were no mess because we designed for no mess. We designed for the best guest experience possible.
So that kind of ballet of people in space, and also the kind of storytelling that was happening within that time, because suddenly with the introduction of chemistry into food, right—chemistry into gastronomy is what molecular gastronomy was known for—you could transform a carrot into a cloud, right? You could dive into a day at the beach at Saint Barts that my mentor Will Goldfarb famously made, right. So suddenly you had multi-sensory stories that you weren’t just looking at, someone wasn’t telling it to you, but you were feeling them. And for me, that’s a precursor also to this kind of experiential and immersive present that we have, because we don’t just tell stories anymore. We live stories now.
Abby: Yeah. What were some of the challenges? Because you’re sort of an outlier doing this. There’s other people that try to do similar stuff to you, but you for me, you’re very much singularly doing what you do at this level and with this success. So how did you get to that?
Emilie: I was, I believe in a couple of things. Number one is that I always said yes. I said yes to everything. And I also say, what if a lot. So, I like the experience of risk. I like the emotional experience of risk. I also hate it, because I’m human. But during graduate school, I had this time and place that offered, you know, a semblance of stability where I could take risks. And so, I called, I literally would call the kitchens of the chefs that I admired. And strangely, they got on the phone, and it was such a landscape of generosity. You know, I owe my career and creativity to many of these people because they were so open and they were so genuinely excited about the newness that was in the field at that time, and also so genuinely connected to human beings. Food is an empathetic and generous activity—feeding someone, right? And that inspired me.
And by saying yes, again, it opened the door into a whole network of people who had, not even a shared industry, but I would say a shared spirit. Everyone was in pursuit of invention. Everyone was in pursuit of care, you know, and wonder and imagination. And so, finding that, more even then like a discipline, finding emotional qualities that are shared for me has always been one of the great ways forward. And, you know, that continued in that spirit.
Abby: And it’s in all your work. I mean it completely shows everything you create.
Brenda: Well, I’m thinking about the sound machine at Liberty Science Center, which is honestly, it’s one of my favorite installations that I’ve encountered, truly. And, you know, I bring my graduate students to it every year as a part of our curriculum, actually. And folks, if you don’t know it, it incorporates sound, smell, memory. It is accessible and it’s social, but it’s also individual. It’s funny, it’s poignant, and it is very playful and fun. And we consider its power to engage and stimulate trans sensory relationships in so many different ways. Emilie, can I ask you to share with the listeners a little bit about this particular piece?
Emilie: Sure. The Dream Machine was originally actually created for the Panorama Music Festival, which used to happen on Randall’s Island in New York, and it was commissioned by a wonderful curator and thinker, Justin Bolognino, who ran the media agency at the time, who was really interested in bringing interactive media to festival formats, specifically how we could create experiences that would allow visitors to play music together.
And as I was thinking through it, you know, I was also reading Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World at the time. And that book, if you’re not familiar with it, looks at the future, right, it’s a piece of speculative fiction, and Huxley uniquely looks at America. And he says, oh, in America you will not be controlled by like, dictatorship, not an overt sense of power. You will be controlled by pleasure. And so, in the Brave New World, everyone is on the Soma drug, which makes them not feel anything. And so, he invents these machines for re-feeling. And one of them is the smell organ. And it plays arpeggios of thyme, lavender and pig dung. You know, insomuch as like scent is directly linked to our limbic system, which is our center of memory and emotion.
So, I brought those two ideas and came up with this notion of what would a dream of humanity be? What if we could play all of our feelings in concert, in harmony together? This organ, quote unquote, is a wheel of feeling, basic human feelings from happiness to disgust. It’s ten different stations, and you play it by pumping bicycle pumps that are connected to this like strange collage of a trombone and a French horn. And by pumping the bicycle pump, you actually pump a scent that is designed to elicit that specific emotion. So, there’s a scent of respect, for example, which is kind of like a woody scent. And it also simultaneously triggers a sound that was also algorithmically designed to elicit that emotion. And a color of light. So, it’s a multi-sensory organ.
And insomuch as that creates also natural accessibility because it’s multimodal. So, lots of different people can engage with it in lots of different kinds of learning styles. And there’s a little secret in it that I don’t know if you ever got, but if everybody actually plays all of the stations in unison, like in harmony, the sound is harmonious. But also you release an Easter egg in the middle, so this giant puff of fog comes up from the middle.
Brenda: Oh my goodness.
Abby: You heard it here.
Emilie: It’s a celebration of human—
Abby: Get to the Liberty Science Center, get that puff created. Let’s go people.
Brenda: I love it. I have not seen the puff.
Emilie: The puff can come. Hopefully if the puff is still intact, we got to go check.
Abby: Of course it is, of course it is.
Brenda: Well this exhibit is, to put it in a way that all of you listeners I know understand, it is loved. I have seen like this particular exhibit element withstand so much enthusiastic use—
Emilie: It’s enthusiastic. This is true.
Brenda: —not just from kids but from adults as well.
Abby: So, I have a question about how you come up with your ideas. Is it usually an RFP that gets sent to you? Is it something that you’ve just willed out of thin air and you’re like, oh my gosh, who’s going to pay for this? Where can I go to sell it? I’d love to sort of understand more of what this looks like, sort of how you brainstorm, how you get work.
Emilie: It’s both, you know, over the course of the last 25 years, I’ve been able to come up with my own ideas, often very late at night.
Abby: So, you don’t get up early in the morning then, you’re a night owl.
Emilie: Well, I have a six-year-old, I get up at all times.
Brenda: You are ever present, ever ready.
Emilie: I’m ever present, ever ready. But he is a great source of inspiration for these things too, you know. Yeah. There are times where just like, I think, any artist, there’s an itch that you just have to scratch and an idea, you know, flows. And then due to the fact that I have a unique specialty and that I also really love human beings—I want to also say that in general, as a practitioner to other practitioners is like, the human relationship side of it for me is the real joy of making work.
And so, I get a lot of RFPs. You know, I also, presently I work as the Creative Director for Digital Experience at Gensler. So, I have just an influx of all sorts of different kinds of parts of the industry, of parts of the world that are fascinating, you know, so there’s some strategy that I will say that I’m interested in, like I’m interested in certain sectors, and I actively will go and, you know, meet people there as well. But a lot of it is also because of my own natural belief in this kind of experience design. I think that that becomes something that feels for me, it’s authentic, you know.
Abby: Yeah.
Emilie: And I think for anybody who has landed on that, you usually start to attract also other people who are interested in that.
Abby: Yeah. It feels very like you are your work.
Brenda: Well and generosity, to use the word that you’ve brought up a couple of times now, I think is really, really key. What’s really exciting to hear is that you’re generous as a person and generous as a thinker, and the work that you create is likewise very generous. Your ability to craft experiences where other people get to share with others, it’s inspiring, and it just makes a tremendous amount of sense, because, and quite literally, when you’re engaging with the senses, you are in so many ways automatically able, I think, to connect with other people. Right? Our senses can transcend language.
Emilie: Yeah, exactly. So, you know, I grew up in a bi cultural household, so we spoke two languages.
Abby: Oh, which ones?
Emilie: French and English. My mom is French. My father was American. That’s a primary experience for me is that the times also that we were together were language less. And often those were actually around meals as we would go, you know, we’d go to France and see my family there or they would sometimes mix. And nobody spoke each other’s language except for my brother and I.
But—and my mother, too. But those kinds of universal experiences that are fundamentally human, they’re primary rituals and experiences, it starts to stitch the fabric of our world together. I am a reductionist. I need to go to the simplest thing possible too, and I also, in my own way, am constantly looking to make meaning as one of the activities of my life.
I also am really firmly grounded in the absurd. Like many days, I don’t think that the world makes very much sense. So, so it is up to us, especially as creative people, to give meaning to it. Because through that act of meaning making, we start to give purpose to life, you know? And as maybe another general truism, I think that our human relationships, for me, I know they’ve always given me huge amounts of value and meaning and usually spaces that are most meaningful are moments of dancing with someone that you love, or breaking bread with a stranger and getting to know them. You know, maybe that sounds a little cliched and utopian in 2024, but—
Brenda: No.
Abby: No, it sounds like going back to basics, to be honest, which is, I think what we all maybe need to just sort of take a break and remember what makes us human and what makes us connect with each other.
Brenda: Abby and I, we were just discussing the fact that I just came back from a mini vacation, which was so good, and so, so overdue. And you’re making me remember probably the singular most meaningful experience that I had, which was in Paris, where one of my best friends in the whole world has just relocated, and I had dinner with two very dear friends of hers whose English is not so great.
So, there wasn’t a whole lot of verbal communication, and one person was an artist, and his wife is a botanist. And the four of us, my friend and I, we sat together, and we had a meal together, and it was pasta and bread and red wine and very little dialogue, and one of the most special moments I’ve had in, I don’t know how long. I feel like I know these people inside and out, and so very little of it was about verbal communication, and so much of it was about literally the sharing of the food, and the cooking together.
Emilie: Yeah, yeah.
Brenda: How—it’s simplicity.
Emilie: It’s incredibly simple, you know, and I think that, who is it, Mary Oliver would call that the soft animal. And we need those moments, you know, our entire life—we are no longer primitive beings, but there is a balance in our experiences going through our daily life, going through highly mechanized industrial civilizations now, you know, where we have to go back to that, we have to make time for it. And I even think about what are the learnings from that cooking together, being together that could show up in spaces like museums. Also, when we think about the transformation of these kinds of cultural spaces, there’s a real hunger, you know, pun intended there, for that kind of language less engagement with each other.
Abby: One hundred percent.
Emilie: And that buzzword of like it has to be human, quote unquote, you know, everyone is talking about that right now. It has to be immersive. I like to look a little bit more deeply at that and more practically of, well, what does that mean. To go back to that statement before, you know, there’s nothing more immersive, actually, than dancing with someone that you love. Immersion does not need to be a spectacle. It can be about present tense. It can be about connection; it can be about intimacy. But I think it’s a, it’s an active experience. It’s an embodied experience. It’s engagement. We’re doing something with our bodies, with each other in time and space.
Abby: But I think an interesting thing to think about is a lot of the experiences that we’re designing for in museums have a narrative story. There’s a lot of limitations that are put on you when you have to tell some sort of a story that people need to learn and engage with, and then it becomes a little bit more challenging to do something that could be an immersive group activity, because people have to be, I won’t say reading, but they have to be, let’s at least say learning some facts. Right? And so that I think is the challenge for what we’re doing is trying to do that balance and make sure that people are physically engaged in doing things and part of the story, whilst learning about what the story is they’re part of and moving—because we don’t have much time, we have so much to get from you.
Brenda: My goodness.
Abby: I just want to talk about technology.
Emilie: Yeah.
Abby: Technology—
Brenda: AI.
Abby: Yes. AI, so talk a little bit so that people can get and paint a picture of your work in terms of how you work with technology and how you’re thinking about working with AI, if you are, if you’re not.
Emilie: I think of technology as another ingredient, and I would use the word ingredient rather than tool because it’s an integrated part of what I do. What I find extraordinary about technology is its extra sensory property, you know. In its best use, it is magic. It reveals different possibilities, different ways of engaging with the world. I have been known to put sensors in ice cream cones and cotton candy machines to make both of them sing when you either lick or spin them. But that’s what I think of it, you know, I think of it as an ingredient. It never should be for me, the most, the dominant narrative necessarily. And I think artificial intelligence, you know, I’m, I’m curious about it. I use it, you know, I use it as image generation software. I’m most interested in its ability to show us more about ourselves.
And I think the fact that now we have an observational tool on humanity that is based on pattern recognition. That, to me, is the most interesting way that it may change our behaviors, for better and for worse, you know, and incredible cautionary tales that I also see emerging in terms of the kind of biases that are still being brought up, the lack of criticality that we have around that.
You know, there’s a host of ethics questioning privacy, etc., etc., etc. like we could spend the next two hours talking about that. But where I do find hope is more of the artistic uses presently that are really using it kind of as a black mirror and also maybe even as a rainbow mirror, you know, to show us all the different facets of ourselves and that kind of dialogue feels like a dialogic opportunity to be in dialogue with ourselves, see ourselves differently, maybe try to rewrite ourselves in new ways.
Brenda: We need to absolutely find out, what is it that you are currently passionate about? What’s coming next from your world, Emilie?
Emilie: I am so presently passionate about community building and placemaking. Those are two real needs that I personally feel, and that I also see in the world. And so how our experiences can create opportunities for more in-person experiences, for a shared sense of belonging, a feeling of togetherness and also hope.
Abby: Now I’m going to go to a dark place, because—
Emilie: The Anthropocene is nigh!
Abby: I heard you say, and I quote, “joy has little currency in the art market.” And then I just fell in love with you after that statement. So, I was like, my background is painting and art, so, why do you think that is? And what does joy bring to someone in this context or in an installation or exhibition?
Emilie: There is a certain accessibility to joy, to real joy that is about shared experience, that is about delight in everyday life, I think. And that’s just a celebration of humanity. And if there is one critical gaze that I have onto the art world is its at times incredible opacity and the gatekeeping of those feelings and of those celebrations.
And so, when I say joy is not something that is highly valued in the art world, I think it’s more of a point of entry into the kind of engagement and celebration that I think real art creates, because I’ve had totally joyful, transcendent experiences in front of some of the greatest works of art. But that’s not an explicit communication. And I think for a lot of people who come up in the art world, or even in any kind of creative industry, the idea that one can express joy, create joy, sell joy is something that often gets devalued.
Abby: I completely agree, yeah.
Emilie: And instead, it becomes a rather competitive landscape of who’s better than who, who’s cooler than who, you know? And these are statements of like 14-year-old me in high school, probably too. But, but those are, those are conversations that I think are interesting to have because it also is slightly uncomfortable.
Brenda: I keep thinking about the episode that Abby and I just recorded before you showed up, which was our 50th episode anniversary, but where we really focused on inspiration and what is inspiration and the muse. And I just keep thinking about the relationship between joy and inspiration and how they can even perhaps be swapped out and about.
Emilie: Yeah, recently had this conversation with a good friend of mine, David Schwarz, who runs HUSH Studios here in Brooklyn and I was saying, you know, I believe in joy. And he said, oh, I would call that inspiration.
Brenda: Fantastic. Yeah. So, I really, I think that they are interchangeable in many ways. And we do need inspiration. I might also even add the word delight into that and the experience of delight. I teach a studio at the School of Visual Arts called Design Delight in the Products of Design Master’s program there, and the goal of that studio—
Abby: Hold on, wait a minute. When do you have—we have these guests on, I’m like, when do you sleep? Besides being a mother, let’s just put that aside. You work at Gensler, you’re teaching, you’re making all your own—what the, what’s the secret, Emilie, to that?
Emilie: Someone once told me—they’re like, some people have 100% energy in their tank. You have 600% energy.
Abby: There you go, I believe it. I believe it.
Emilie: I have a lot of energy. It’s a gift to be alive. And I’ve always felt that quality. I’ve always really, deeply felt that it’s an honor to be here. It’s short, you know, and when you see people around you not be here anymore, you realize even how shorter it is. And when you see life in front of you like it’s a gift to have my son as a reminder of that.
So, I want to be here. I want to to play with this thing called life, and I want to enjoy it. And I want more than anything for more people to enjoy it, because it is difficult to be alive. And it’s getting more difficult, you know, as we walk around and we start to see the context that we live in, the conditions, we need experiences of life to balance it, you know?
And that’s where I think experiences of joy or delight, delight for me is the gift of paying attention. It’s to be present in this moment more than it is happy bunnies or the color pink, or anything else that we might aesthetically connect with that. For me, this is now becoming a very personal narrative, but for me that is how I try to affect the experience of my life.
How do you cope with this thing that we have to live every day in these bodies, you know, and what privilege to be here, sitting with you in New York City. You know, I don’t take that for granted. So can our work dive a little bit more deeply into that and those themes of care, those themes of generosity, you know, those are important to me, you know, and I hope that I, I try to do as best as I can in my daily life to remind myself of that.
And I’m also incredibly human and fail daily at living that, you know. So, I might sound amazing saying all this out loud, but, you know, I’m also like a person who’s grumpy and tired and, you know, sometimes doesn’t do great and all that stuff, but I feel lucky to be able to do it. And, and that’s something I want to share with the world.
Abby: Yeah. That’s called being a human.
Brenda: Well, you dive headlong right on into it.
Abby: Yeah. And this has been absolutely inspiring. You are our new muse.
Brenda: Yes, absolutely.
Abby: This is wonderful. Thank you for going deep and being really personal. I connected with the way that you’re feeling about why you do what you do. That’s, I think, exactly the same reason why I do it. We just walk this way once and you better make it a good one. So ring the life out of it, as much as you can.
Brenda: Well, it’s a big dance, isn’t it?
Emilie: It sure is.
Brenda: So, get up out of your chair.
Abby: And have a party.
Emilie: Oh my gosh, I still I still have this desire to make the church of party to just celebrate and party.
Abby: Oh, you heard it first here, we’ll invite you when it’s opening.
Emilie: You’re going to run it, okay?
Abby: I’m there. Yeah. Just don’t have me sing. Dancing’s fine, singing, no. Thank you, Emilie, so much. This has been incredible, like, you’re so courageous, and go out and invent and create things, everybody. Thanks for listening, for everybody who tuned in today. And 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: Be well 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.
As an award-winning artist, designer, author and public speaker her appearances include TEDx, DLD, PSFK Conference, Ignite Conference, Creative Mornings, TODAY Show, NBC, Wall Street Journal, D-CRIT and more. Emilie holds a Bachelors Degree in Film Studies from Vassar College and a Masters Degree in Industrial Design from Pratt Institute.
[Music]
Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: Hello, this is Brenda Cowan.
Abby: This is produced by Lorem Ipsum, an experience design company headquartered in New York City. And our podcast explores the creativity, innovation and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. Hello to anybody listening for the first time, and welcome back to our regular listeners.
So today we’d like to welcome Emilie Baltz, an immersive experience director whose work adds a sensory dimension to design, which is one of the many reasons she’s unique. But also, she’s the inventor of the word “eatstallation,” which I absolutely love. Emilie, a big welcome to the show.
Emilie: Thank you.
Brenda: Emilie, we’re going to kick things off by talking about the multi-sensory work that you create that truly fosters curiosity and wonder. And you like to say that your work fosters curiosity and wonder one lick, suck, bite and sniff at a time.
Emilie: That’s right.
Brenda: And as I’m thinking about the lick, suck, bite and sniff at a time, I get so many flickers of memories. So, I think about eating ice cream on the beach in the summertime. I’m thinking about my lilac bush in the spring. Is this the kind of response that you hope for, Emilie, in others when you create the work that you do and sort of trigger memory and affiliations? Or am I, have I just gone off the deep end here?
Emilie: I would say yes. So, I’m really interested in how our bodies experience the world and how they’re also portals for experience. And so, everything that you just described to me are examples of embodied experience. We have these nostalgic, you know, moments in our childhood of licking ice cream or being at the beach, you know, swimming in waves. And we remember all of that because of all the sensory stimulation as well as the physical engagement.
You know, I think of multi-sensory experience design also choreographically. So, nothing exists on its own. We never just see. Right? It’s always a choreography of all of our senses that comes into our body as sensation. And then through our cultural experiences, our language, we start to make meaning out of them. And emotion then introduces, you know, emotion is the meaning making state of feeling. So that’s kind of the choreographic principle, I would say, thinking about all of those senses and their relationship to each other because they’re constantly in motion, you know.
Abby: That’s incredible. So, your work is a combination of the senses, art and technology, if I was going to try and bucket it in some, some verticals, but can you let us know about your journey, sort of to what we see today? Tell us about your path.
Emilie: Sure. It is a non-linear path. I originally studied screenwriting and contemporary dance, and then I went on five years later, and I have a master’s degree in industrial design, with actually a focus on food as a material for design, because I was interested in industrial design and its relationship to human behavior. Industrial design is so heavily influenced by human psychology, you know, behavioral habits, and it really is, I think, one of the earlier foundations that lead us now into what we would call experience design as a discipline.
Brenda: I love that you’re talking about food. I love the idea that food can foster community, communication and sharing in our everyday lives. I know that’s a big part of how you approach thinking about food in your work. What does this look like in design? Like what are some of the behaviors that you see your design with food cultivating?
Emilie: I think for me, food is both medium and metaphor for experience design. I can use food as an ingredient, as a material in creating a dish, for example, or a consumer packaged good, right, so you can very easily go into product, ingredient, nutrition, all of kind of the functional benefits that we expect with our materiality of food. But you also can lean into its multi-sensory properties because food is our only multi-sensory material on earth, because when we eat, we don’t just taste. Flavor is a construct of all of our senses, and if you’ve ever plugged your nose while eating and then you release it, you realize just how dependent our sense of taste is on our sense of flavor.
And then my work also looks at all of the different kinds of rituals and behaviors that go around the experience of eating, that foster things like community, the development of mythology. Family dinners are usually the forums for sharing our history, talking about our days, inventing the future as well as, you know, even celebratory experiences, you know, state dinners, for example, are actually mediums for diplomacy, for power. Food is this universal medium that allows for all kinds of different intersections and relationships of the human experience and that feels, you know, timeless, as I said, universal. I can’t think of another material that does this.
Brenda: How do you manage the mess? That’s what I keep, I keep thinking about it—no, but seriously, how do you manage the mess of food? What comes to mind?
Emilie: You know, I worked in fine dining between undergraduate. The reason I got into industrial—
Abby: I was going to say, how did you get into the food part?
Emilie: Yeah, I worked in bars and restaurants, and I had the great luck of falling into the wave of molecular gastronomy in the early 2000s in New York City, which was led by chefs like Wylie Dufresne, Will Goldfarb, you know, these were my heroes and my mentors. And so, what I discovered within that world was the attention to detail, the kind of service design that goes into fine dining. And so, when we talk about mess, like in those places, there were no mess because we designed for no mess. We designed for the best guest experience possible.
So that kind of ballet of people in space, and also the kind of storytelling that was happening within that time, because suddenly with the introduction of chemistry into food, right—chemistry into gastronomy is what molecular gastronomy was known for—you could transform a carrot into a cloud, right? You could dive into a day at the beach at Saint Barts that my mentor Will Goldfarb famously made, right. So suddenly you had multi-sensory stories that you weren’t just looking at, someone wasn’t telling it to you, but you were feeling them. And for me, that’s a precursor also to this kind of experiential and immersive present that we have, because we don’t just tell stories anymore. We live stories now.
Abby: Yeah. What were some of the challenges? Because you’re sort of an outlier doing this. There’s other people that try to do similar stuff to you, but you for me, you’re very much singularly doing what you do at this level and with this success. So how did you get to that?
Emilie: I was, I believe in a couple of things. Number one is that I always said yes. I said yes to everything. And I also say, what if a lot. So, I like the experience of risk. I like the emotional experience of risk. I also hate it, because I’m human. But during graduate school, I had this time and place that offered, you know, a semblance of stability where I could take risks. And so, I called, I literally would call the kitchens of the chefs that I admired. And strangely, they got on the phone, and it was such a landscape of generosity. You know, I owe my career and creativity to many of these people because they were so open and they were so genuinely excited about the newness that was in the field at that time, and also so genuinely connected to human beings. Food is an empathetic and generous activity—feeding someone, right? And that inspired me.
And by saying yes, again, it opened the door into a whole network of people who had, not even a shared industry, but I would say a shared spirit. Everyone was in pursuit of invention. Everyone was in pursuit of care, you know, and wonder and imagination. And so, finding that, more even then like a discipline, finding emotional qualities that are shared for me has always been one of the great ways forward. And, you know, that continued in that spirit.
Abby: And it’s in all your work. I mean it completely shows everything you create.
Brenda: Well, I’m thinking about the sound machine at Liberty Science Center, which is honestly, it’s one of my favorite installations that I’ve encountered, truly. And, you know, I bring my graduate students to it every year as a part of our curriculum, actually. And folks, if you don’t know it, it incorporates sound, smell, memory. It is accessible and it’s social, but it’s also individual. It’s funny, it’s poignant, and it is very playful and fun. And we consider its power to engage and stimulate trans sensory relationships in so many different ways. Emilie, can I ask you to share with the listeners a little bit about this particular piece?
Emilie: Sure. The Dream Machine was originally actually created for the Panorama Music Festival, which used to happen on Randall’s Island in New York, and it was commissioned by a wonderful curator and thinker, Justin Bolognino, who ran the media agency at the time, who was really interested in bringing interactive media to festival formats, specifically how we could create experiences that would allow visitors to play music together.
And as I was thinking through it, you know, I was also reading Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World at the time. And that book, if you’re not familiar with it, looks at the future, right, it’s a piece of speculative fiction, and Huxley uniquely looks at America. And he says, oh, in America you will not be controlled by like, dictatorship, not an overt sense of power. You will be controlled by pleasure. And so, in the Brave New World, everyone is on the Soma drug, which makes them not feel anything. And so, he invents these machines for re-feeling. And one of them is the smell organ. And it plays arpeggios of thyme, lavender and pig dung. You know, insomuch as like scent is directly linked to our limbic system, which is our center of memory and emotion.
So, I brought those two ideas and came up with this notion of what would a dream of humanity be? What if we could play all of our feelings in concert, in harmony together? This organ, quote unquote, is a wheel of feeling, basic human feelings from happiness to disgust. It’s ten different stations, and you play it by pumping bicycle pumps that are connected to this like strange collage of a trombone and a French horn. And by pumping the bicycle pump, you actually pump a scent that is designed to elicit that specific emotion. So, there’s a scent of respect, for example, which is kind of like a woody scent. And it also simultaneously triggers a sound that was also algorithmically designed to elicit that emotion. And a color of light. So, it’s a multi-sensory organ.
And insomuch as that creates also natural accessibility because it’s multimodal. So, lots of different people can engage with it in lots of different kinds of learning styles. And there’s a little secret in it that I don’t know if you ever got, but if everybody actually plays all of the stations in unison, like in harmony, the sound is harmonious. But also you release an Easter egg in the middle, so this giant puff of fog comes up from the middle.
Brenda: Oh my goodness.
Abby: You heard it here.
Emilie: It’s a celebration of human—
Abby: Get to the Liberty Science Center, get that puff created. Let’s go people.
Brenda: I love it. I have not seen the puff.
Emilie: The puff can come. Hopefully if the puff is still intact, we got to go check.
Abby: Of course it is, of course it is.
Brenda: Well this exhibit is, to put it in a way that all of you listeners I know understand, it is loved. I have seen like this particular exhibit element withstand so much enthusiastic use—
Emilie: It’s enthusiastic. This is true.
Brenda: —not just from kids but from adults as well.
Abby: So, I have a question about how you come up with your ideas. Is it usually an RFP that gets sent to you? Is it something that you’ve just willed out of thin air and you’re like, oh my gosh, who’s going to pay for this? Where can I go to sell it? I’d love to sort of understand more of what this looks like, sort of how you brainstorm, how you get work.
Emilie: It’s both, you know, over the course of the last 25 years, I’ve been able to come up with my own ideas, often very late at night.
Abby: So, you don’t get up early in the morning then, you’re a night owl.
Emilie: Well, I have a six-year-old, I get up at all times.
Brenda: You are ever present, ever ready.
Emilie: I’m ever present, ever ready. But he is a great source of inspiration for these things too, you know. Yeah. There are times where just like, I think, any artist, there’s an itch that you just have to scratch and an idea, you know, flows. And then due to the fact that I have a unique specialty and that I also really love human beings—I want to also say that in general, as a practitioner to other practitioners is like, the human relationship side of it for me is the real joy of making work.
And so, I get a lot of RFPs. You know, I also, presently I work as the Creative Director for Digital Experience at Gensler. So, I have just an influx of all sorts of different kinds of parts of the industry, of parts of the world that are fascinating, you know, so there’s some strategy that I will say that I’m interested in, like I’m interested in certain sectors, and I actively will go and, you know, meet people there as well. But a lot of it is also because of my own natural belief in this kind of experience design. I think that that becomes something that feels for me, it’s authentic, you know.
Abby: Yeah.
Emilie: And I think for anybody who has landed on that, you usually start to attract also other people who are interested in that.
Abby: Yeah. It feels very like you are your work.
Brenda: Well and generosity, to use the word that you’ve brought up a couple of times now, I think is really, really key. What’s really exciting to hear is that you’re generous as a person and generous as a thinker, and the work that you create is likewise very generous. Your ability to craft experiences where other people get to share with others, it’s inspiring, and it just makes a tremendous amount of sense, because, and quite literally, when you’re engaging with the senses, you are in so many ways automatically able, I think, to connect with other people. Right? Our senses can transcend language.
Emilie: Yeah, exactly. So, you know, I grew up in a bi cultural household, so we spoke two languages.
Abby: Oh, which ones?
Emilie: French and English. My mom is French. My father was American. That’s a primary experience for me is that the times also that we were together were language less. And often those were actually around meals as we would go, you know, we’d go to France and see my family there or they would sometimes mix. And nobody spoke each other’s language except for my brother and I.
But—and my mother, too. But those kinds of universal experiences that are fundamentally human, they’re primary rituals and experiences, it starts to stitch the fabric of our world together. I am a reductionist. I need to go to the simplest thing possible too, and I also, in my own way, am constantly looking to make meaning as one of the activities of my life.
I also am really firmly grounded in the absurd. Like many days, I don’t think that the world makes very much sense. So, so it is up to us, especially as creative people, to give meaning to it. Because through that act of meaning making, we start to give purpose to life, you know? And as maybe another general truism, I think that our human relationships, for me, I know they’ve always given me huge amounts of value and meaning and usually spaces that are most meaningful are moments of dancing with someone that you love, or breaking bread with a stranger and getting to know them. You know, maybe that sounds a little cliched and utopian in 2024, but—
Brenda: No.
Abby: No, it sounds like going back to basics, to be honest, which is, I think what we all maybe need to just sort of take a break and remember what makes us human and what makes us connect with each other.
Brenda: Abby and I, we were just discussing the fact that I just came back from a mini vacation, which was so good, and so, so overdue. And you’re making me remember probably the singular most meaningful experience that I had, which was in Paris, where one of my best friends in the whole world has just relocated, and I had dinner with two very dear friends of hers whose English is not so great.
So, there wasn’t a whole lot of verbal communication, and one person was an artist, and his wife is a botanist. And the four of us, my friend and I, we sat together, and we had a meal together, and it was pasta and bread and red wine and very little dialogue, and one of the most special moments I’ve had in, I don’t know how long. I feel like I know these people inside and out, and so very little of it was about verbal communication, and so much of it was about literally the sharing of the food, and the cooking together.
Emilie: Yeah, yeah.
Brenda: How—it’s simplicity.
Emilie: It’s incredibly simple, you know, and I think that, who is it, Mary Oliver would call that the soft animal. And we need those moments, you know, our entire life—we are no longer primitive beings, but there is a balance in our experiences going through our daily life, going through highly mechanized industrial civilizations now, you know, where we have to go back to that, we have to make time for it. And I even think about what are the learnings from that cooking together, being together that could show up in spaces like museums. Also, when we think about the transformation of these kinds of cultural spaces, there’s a real hunger, you know, pun intended there, for that kind of language less engagement with each other.
Abby: One hundred percent.
Emilie: And that buzzword of like it has to be human, quote unquote, you know, everyone is talking about that right now. It has to be immersive. I like to look a little bit more deeply at that and more practically of, well, what does that mean. To go back to that statement before, you know, there’s nothing more immersive, actually, than dancing with someone that you love. Immersion does not need to be a spectacle. It can be about present tense. It can be about connection; it can be about intimacy. But I think it’s a, it’s an active experience. It’s an embodied experience. It’s engagement. We’re doing something with our bodies, with each other in time and space.
Abby: But I think an interesting thing to think about is a lot of the experiences that we’re designing for in museums have a narrative story. There’s a lot of limitations that are put on you when you have to tell some sort of a story that people need to learn and engage with, and then it becomes a little bit more challenging to do something that could be an immersive group activity, because people have to be, I won’t say reading, but they have to be, let’s at least say learning some facts. Right? And so that I think is the challenge for what we’re doing is trying to do that balance and make sure that people are physically engaged in doing things and part of the story, whilst learning about what the story is they’re part of and moving—because we don’t have much time, we have so much to get from you.
Brenda: My goodness.
Abby: I just want to talk about technology.
Emilie: Yeah.
Abby: Technology—
Brenda: AI.
Abby: Yes. AI, so talk a little bit so that people can get and paint a picture of your work in terms of how you work with technology and how you’re thinking about working with AI, if you are, if you’re not.
Emilie: I think of technology as another ingredient, and I would use the word ingredient rather than tool because it’s an integrated part of what I do. What I find extraordinary about technology is its extra sensory property, you know. In its best use, it is magic. It reveals different possibilities, different ways of engaging with the world. I have been known to put sensors in ice cream cones and cotton candy machines to make both of them sing when you either lick or spin them. But that’s what I think of it, you know, I think of it as an ingredient. It never should be for me, the most, the dominant narrative necessarily. And I think artificial intelligence, you know, I’m, I’m curious about it. I use it, you know, I use it as image generation software. I’m most interested in its ability to show us more about ourselves.
And I think the fact that now we have an observational tool on humanity that is based on pattern recognition. That, to me, is the most interesting way that it may change our behaviors, for better and for worse, you know, and incredible cautionary tales that I also see emerging in terms of the kind of biases that are still being brought up, the lack of criticality that we have around that.
You know, there’s a host of ethics questioning privacy, etc., etc., etc. like we could spend the next two hours talking about that. But where I do find hope is more of the artistic uses presently that are really using it kind of as a black mirror and also maybe even as a rainbow mirror, you know, to show us all the different facets of ourselves and that kind of dialogue feels like a dialogic opportunity to be in dialogue with ourselves, see ourselves differently, maybe try to rewrite ourselves in new ways.
Brenda: We need to absolutely find out, what is it that you are currently passionate about? What’s coming next from your world, Emilie?
Emilie: I am so presently passionate about community building and placemaking. Those are two real needs that I personally feel, and that I also see in the world. And so how our experiences can create opportunities for more in-person experiences, for a shared sense of belonging, a feeling of togetherness and also hope.
Abby: Now I’m going to go to a dark place, because—
Emilie: The Anthropocene is nigh!
Abby: I heard you say, and I quote, “joy has little currency in the art market.” And then I just fell in love with you after that statement. So, I was like, my background is painting and art, so, why do you think that is? And what does joy bring to someone in this context or in an installation or exhibition?
Emilie: There is a certain accessibility to joy, to real joy that is about shared experience, that is about delight in everyday life, I think. And that’s just a celebration of humanity. And if there is one critical gaze that I have onto the art world is its at times incredible opacity and the gatekeeping of those feelings and of those celebrations.
And so, when I say joy is not something that is highly valued in the art world, I think it’s more of a point of entry into the kind of engagement and celebration that I think real art creates, because I’ve had totally joyful, transcendent experiences in front of some of the greatest works of art. But that’s not an explicit communication. And I think for a lot of people who come up in the art world, or even in any kind of creative industry, the idea that one can express joy, create joy, sell joy is something that often gets devalued.
Abby: I completely agree, yeah.
Emilie: And instead, it becomes a rather competitive landscape of who’s better than who, who’s cooler than who, you know? And these are statements of like 14-year-old me in high school, probably too. But, but those are, those are conversations that I think are interesting to have because it also is slightly uncomfortable.
Brenda: I keep thinking about the episode that Abby and I just recorded before you showed up, which was our 50th episode anniversary, but where we really focused on inspiration and what is inspiration and the muse. And I just keep thinking about the relationship between joy and inspiration and how they can even perhaps be swapped out and about.
Emilie: Yeah, recently had this conversation with a good friend of mine, David Schwarz, who runs HUSH Studios here in Brooklyn and I was saying, you know, I believe in joy. And he said, oh, I would call that inspiration.
Brenda: Fantastic. Yeah. So, I really, I think that they are interchangeable in many ways. And we do need inspiration. I might also even add the word delight into that and the experience of delight. I teach a studio at the School of Visual Arts called Design Delight in the Products of Design Master’s program there, and the goal of that studio—
Abby: Hold on, wait a minute. When do you have—we have these guests on, I’m like, when do you sleep? Besides being a mother, let’s just put that aside. You work at Gensler, you’re teaching, you’re making all your own—what the, what’s the secret, Emilie, to that?
Emilie: Someone once told me—they’re like, some people have 100% energy in their tank. You have 600% energy.
Abby: There you go, I believe it. I believe it.
Emilie: I have a lot of energy. It’s a gift to be alive. And I’ve always felt that quality. I’ve always really, deeply felt that it’s an honor to be here. It’s short, you know, and when you see people around you not be here anymore, you realize even how shorter it is. And when you see life in front of you like it’s a gift to have my son as a reminder of that.
So, I want to be here. I want to to play with this thing called life, and I want to enjoy it. And I want more than anything for more people to enjoy it, because it is difficult to be alive. And it’s getting more difficult, you know, as we walk around and we start to see the context that we live in, the conditions, we need experiences of life to balance it, you know?
And that’s where I think experiences of joy or delight, delight for me is the gift of paying attention. It’s to be present in this moment more than it is happy bunnies or the color pink, or anything else that we might aesthetically connect with that. For me, this is now becoming a very personal narrative, but for me that is how I try to affect the experience of my life.
How do you cope with this thing that we have to live every day in these bodies, you know, and what privilege to be here, sitting with you in New York City. You know, I don’t take that for granted. So can our work dive a little bit more deeply into that and those themes of care, those themes of generosity, you know, those are important to me, you know, and I hope that I, I try to do as best as I can in my daily life to remind myself of that.
And I’m also incredibly human and fail daily at living that, you know. So, I might sound amazing saying all this out loud, but, you know, I’m also like a person who’s grumpy and tired and, you know, sometimes doesn’t do great and all that stuff, but I feel lucky to be able to do it. And, and that’s something I want to share with the world.
Abby: Yeah. That’s called being a human.
Brenda: Well, you dive headlong right on into it.
Abby: Yeah. And this has been absolutely inspiring. You are our new muse.
Brenda: Yes, absolutely.
Abby: This is wonderful. Thank you for going deep and being really personal. I connected with the way that you’re feeling about why you do what you do. That’s, I think, exactly the same reason why I do it. We just walk this way once and you better make it a good one. So ring the life out of it, as much as you can.
Brenda: Well, it’s a big dance, isn’t it?
Emilie: It sure is.
Brenda: So, get up out of your chair.
Abby: And have a party.
Emilie: Oh my gosh, I still I still have this desire to make the church of party to just celebrate and party.
Abby: Oh, you heard it first here, we’ll invite you when it’s opening.
Emilie: You’re going to run it, okay?
Abby: I’m there. Yeah. Just don’t have me sing. Dancing’s fine, singing, no. Thank you, Emilie, so much. This has been incredible, like, you’re so courageous, and go out and invent and create things, everybody. Thanks for listening, for everybody who tuned in today. And 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: Be well 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.
Taste, Touch, and Tech with Emilie Baltz
The Muse in Museum
Join us for a special milestone as we celebrate 50 episodes of Matters of Experience! Abby and Brenda dive into the heart of what makes our profession so unique – and celebrate the incredible guests and topics we’ve explored.
In this episode, “The Muse in Museum,” we reflect on the muses that shape our show. From the creative minds at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to innovative voices at the Museum of the Future, we uncover the magic behind designed experiences.
A heartfelt thank you to all our guests and supportive listeners. Your insights and stories have made this journey extraordinary. Don’t miss this special episode – listen now and celebrate with us!
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum – Lorem Ipsum Corp
The Senses: Design Beyond Vision
Objects of Love, Hope and Fear
Listen to some of the episodes discussed:
[Music]
Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: Hello, I’m Brenda Cowan.
Abby: This podcast is produced by Lorem Ipsum, an Experience Design company, headquartered in New York, and our podcast explores the creativity, innovation and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. Hello to anybody listening for the first time, and a welcome back to our regular listeners. So, Brenda, today is a very special episode for us both.
Brenda: It is. A very special episode.
Abby: It is, right? It’s our 50th episode. And when I look back at the array of guests from Bosco, who works at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, or Sundar, from the Museum of the Future, and Victor from Intel, who talked to us about the business of connecting people to stories, and that’s just to name a few. We’ve covered multiple aspects of experiential design, from initial concept, data gathering, inclusive design, multimedia, fabrication, and AI and I feel like we’re just getting started.
Brenda: It really does, doesn’t it, feel like we’re really just starting to sort of dig into this, which is so wild, and—so what’s 50? Silver? Gold? What are we, paper? What gift am I giving?
Abby: Yeah, what gift are we getting.
Brenda: You know, listening to the sort of the range of topics and some of the folks who, who we’ve been able to speak with, I’m also thinking of some of the amazing guests that we spoke with about subjects in design, such as empathy, emotion, satisfaction, community, and storytelling. You know, so much of what we’ve talked about over these episodes is the element of the person and the personal in designed experiences, and how important it is to stay true to the people with whom we work with and for, to always seek to enable individuals to have experiences on their own terms. That’s something that I just find myself coming back to time and time again. Good design fosters and encourages this dynamic. That’s my takeaway from so many of the folks and so many of the conversations that we’ve had.
Abby: So, Brenda, you had this brilliant idea for this 50th show, our little anniversary, which is gold, by the way. I googled it very quickly.
Brenda: Oh, it’s gold, okay.
Abby: I should have known that, not that that big day isn’t coming up for me in a few years.
Brenda: Put that ring on my finger, Abby.
Abby: But we’re going to focus on the subject of inspiration, what muses do and how they form the basis of a museum. So, settle in everyone, and we’re hoping, hoping to really inspire you with the conversation today.
Brenda: Well, inspiration Abby, it’s something that I’ve been thinking about quite a lot these days, in no small part due to the fact that I just got a mini break, a vacation. I just got back from back-to-back trips to Baltimore, Santa Fe, and Paris and in each place, no matter how humble the place was or how epic, I found myself caught up in these moments that inspired me to think, act, contemplate, and just sink into moments of quietude. And sometimes it was experiences where, let’s say I saw someone or something that surprised me and that made me want to engage. Or perhaps I was touching and smelling something in nature that was sending me flying back into early memories. I was in a designed light, sound and architecture extravaganza that blew my mind—side note, stay tuned for a future episode on that one. And all along throughout these experiences, I would catch myself having this like inner dialogue, questioning what I was responding to and wanting to know more, wondering about my own reactions and in what ways I was finding things so meaningful.
Abby: I just want to jump in right now. That’s so interesting, the idea of when you have the thoughts and feelings that you don’t know necessarily why or where they’ve come from, and it can be a bit sort of befuddling and exciting as well, as you start to learn more about yourself from these experiences and then try to draw conclusions from them about who you are, where you’re going, why you had them, where you’ve been. And I totally agree, I had a similar—I was at Cannes Film Festival walking down the street and I smelled something. It must have been some succulents or passing some flowers or something, and it immediately shot me back to my village days in, in England with horses in a field, which is so bizarre from being in sort of like a cement small town to get moved there, and then all of those emotions from being about that age came flooding back.
Brenda: As I was having my moments, I started to think about muses of inspirations that prompt us to wonder and question and learn and grow. You know, the nine goddesses of Zeus.
Abby: He had nine? Wait a minute, he had nine goddesses? Oh my goodness me, lucky man.
Brenda: But I was thinking of the nine goddesses of Zeus who preside over the arts and sciences and of the museum. So, Abby, when we’re talking about the museum, we’re talking about the seat of the muses. So if you’re following me, inspiration is key to all of this. And I think that being open to it and cognizant of it is crucial for creatives and leaders and, well, everyone that’s been on the show has been speaking to inspiration in one way or another. And in a way, our show is like a museum. Our show is a seat for the muses. So taking this moment to reflect on that and to see our guests as the muses that they are to us is important to do, and an awful lot of fun for our 50th. I’ll give you all a little heads up that we’re going to give you a little exercise in just a little bit, so stick with us and prepare to play a little bit with your own inspirations.
Abby: That sounds very exciting. So, when you talk about switching off, you just mentioned switching off, and I was thinking about daydreaming and, you know, looking for inspiration by switching off, and I know that I read a lot of studies about how it actually, this idea of daydreaming will reduce stress and anxiety. So it really can help there and bring back clarity and even efficiency and problem solving. You know, it can help you through big decisions or deadlines that you know you may not have the answers to all be able to do until you sort of like, switch off. I know it sounds like an oxymoron, like, how do you get something done when you actually disengage from it? But that’s at least for me as well, the way that it works.
And the same with creativity. I’m looking forward to going on a vacation because I’m looking forward to being able to switch off. But at the same time, I’m always absorbing content, information. But when you’re in the sort of more relaxed mode, you have time to contemplate and play in your head. And I think that playing, that creativity really is, for me at least, where my inspiration comes from.
And another thing that I think about all of our peers is they all seem to be multi-talented or interested in lots of different things. They’re not one trick ponies. So you could have somebody who’s an engineer who works in AR, who’s also a musician, and you could have someone else who’s got an amazing sense of fashion or likes to paint and design.
Brenda: Well, we just had Eli Kuslansky on, who is a brilliant multimedia technical designer and also a writer, an artist and a chef.
Abby: Yup, exactly. So, I really believe that you can find inspiration in very, very different places.
Brenda: It’s interesting that it’s the advice that I give my students when they get a mini break of their own, and so many of them will come and ask me, okay, what should I work on during my break and what should I and should I be doing this? And should I be doing that? And I can, you know, bone up on these particular skills and I can be reading this and la la la la la. And the advice that I give time and time again is do nothing, do something that brings you a lot of joy, that brings you pleasure, whatever it might be, and just sink yourself into that and it will reap rewards.
Abby: I also wanted to tie the subject of this podcast, which is muses and inspiration, with how I had the inspiration to do this. Brenda, it was your work actually at FIT, from coming in and having the privilege to speak to the students, and then seeing my peers coming in, also talking from the different facets of what we do. And I felt that we were missing a podcast about everything we do. And I realized that the group you were bringing in were all from very different walks of life, and the idea of this Matters of Experience sort of popped in my head, and you as the natural partner, so I just hoped you’d say yes.
Brenda: Of course I said yes.
Abby: And you jumped straight in.
Brenda: Seriously? How could I say no? And you and I definitely have a shared mission in terms of thinking about the profession and the need for this work that we all listening are engaged in, in our own individual and joint ways. The need for this profession to be viewed and understood more and more as a profession, as a thing unto itself. And the more that we can speak, the more that we can publish, the more that we can promote what exhibition and experience design is, the more it’s going to gain, I think, in terms of awareness.
Abby: No, it’s awareness and actually role in the creation of an experience. So that our clients can understand when they need us and why they need us. And it’s a shout out to SEGD and Cybelle Jones and that incredible organization and how they support us and get the word out to the community about what we do.
Brenda: I know that the times that we’ve spoken about the need for exhibition and experience design to really have more weight as a profession unto itself comes when we talk about architecture and the role of architecture and architects, and how architecture is viewed and how very differently so—
Abby: Yes, yes it is.
Brenda: —than where we’re coming from.
Abby: Yeah, and when—it’s really interesting, one of the episodes that resonated with me was early on with the architect, Alex Bitus. He brought us sort of three key drivers for his work, which were environment, materials, and the site history, which really makes perfect sense when you think about the exterior, and I guess sort of from his perspective, interior of a new building, but how it will fit or complement the world around it and be inspired by the local landscape through the materials, you know, he’s designed, he’s built it with.
But what’s interesting from our experience design perspective is that we create these environments that often juxtapose, to be honest, against the building design from maybe a form and a function perspective, and I think it’s okay that it does that. We design and service the story. What are we trying to say? What’s the right environment for that story? So we think about guiding the visitor through the journey and often design being inspired by the setting of the story, I guess more like scenic design or film set design.
Brenda: Well, when you’re talking about immersion in the moment and in the story, let’s also include emotional involvement, engagement with other people, engagement with objects as well. And these are things that we learned a lot about from so many of the folks that we’ve spoken with: community and connection and belonging. I’m remembering one of our early episodes with the wonderful Joy Bailey-Bryant, and I’m also thinking about Annie Polland from the Tenement Museum.
These individuals brought to light such important elements of the nature of being a creative and also storytelling and the nature of experiences being about people belonging, being welcomed, being a part of the story and feeling like and knowing that they are a part of the institution in myriad ways. And I’m also thinking about emotion and empathy-rich experiences, and our conversation with Jasminko Halilovic and Elif Gokcigdem, and Terry Snowball.
These are individuals who, for me, were so inspiring because they were really sharing with us how it is that emotions and evocative objects and difficult subjects and challenging subjects are a very rich part of the fabric of what we do and our ability to be able to share these stories in very sensory-rich ways is absolutely critical, and that emotion is a key part of this immersed experience that we keep hearing about and talking about throughout all of our episodes.
Abby: Well, it’s empathetic design, and I think it’s something that, I mean, you tell me, Brenda, it seems like something that’s really coming to the forefront, like right now, over the last few years, something that we all need to bear in mind. What caused this? Where did it come from? Has it been around and I’ve just been not looking in the right places, because I feel that in all of those examples, all of those museums, they really are powerful.
Brenda: I think that thinking in empathy has to do with and we, when we talked with Elif Gokcigdem, she spoke a lot about designing for empathy, which is really the focus of her life’s work, really. And she was talking about how understanding that empathy is a way of understanding that there is a oneness in the world and of which we are all a part, and that we can use this understanding and this awareness as a tool of thinking about a lot of what I was just talking about, the idea that there is connectivity, that we can foster, that we can enable, that we can reinforce through designed experiences where people can realize, oh, I’m actually a part of this story.It’s important to me because it’s relevant to me, even if it’s about people I don’t know or places I’m not familiar with.
Empathy as a tool can be seen as being a matter of showcasing different perspectives, hearing narratives from many different people and many different places, perspectives from many different periods in time, and to be able to not present necessarily just a singular idea or a singular perspective, but indeed to be able to explore subjects in a myriad of ways and through myriad even of interpretations.
Abby: Yup, now what comes to mind is our recent conversation with Jamie Lawyer from the Rubin Museum, when she explained that her first encounter at a museum, this young girl goes in, she’s standing there absolutely thrilled by what she’s looking at, and the docent comes over and her first thought is, oh my gosh, have I done something wrong? And he was like, no, I’d like to tell you more about this piece.And she felt that oneness, I think. I think she felt that emotional connection with what she was looking at, and it was so profound that now that’s what her life’s work is, to bring that feeling of oneness to all of the visitors who come into her museum. So, you know, from this one moment and this one kind gesture from the docent, but also the amazing curatorial work of the museum staff, connected with Jamie and her story.
Brenda: So when we were talking with Kiersten F. Latham, she was sharing with us how critical it was to think about the front of house staff and how important it is to really elevate an awareness of their role and that so much jibed with what we were talking about when we were having our conversation with Monica Montgomery and we were talking about how it is that people need to feel like they are welcomed in and not, you know, in some kind of a rarefied moment or a rarefied place such that it has nothing to do with them.
Abby: And what’s actually really interesting is when we did our project with the Smithsonian, one of the problems is their actual physical building, and that what it represents really excludes a huge proportion of the community. And so how do you break down those physical barriers and the mental barriers to make sure that you’re welcoming through your doors, as well as digitally, online and all the other ways we can do it, but in person into your establishment, and that they will feel that they have been heard and are a valued part of that community.
Brenda: Well, this loops even back around a little bit to talking about how it is that people need to be a part of the creation, that people are not the afterthought. This is something that when we were talking with Joy Bailey-Bryant from Lord Cultural, and she was sharing with us the idea of belonging and that we need to engage communities, individuals, as well as our experts, as well as our own staff in the creation of our institutions, in the creation of our exhibitions, of our programs, and that belonging very much so begins there.
Abby: And also our teams, our internal teams need to be diverse. Everybody’s sick of hearing it, but if they don’t represent the community at least as far as you can, then it’s just like a one trick pony. You have to have the different voices at the table, at the creative table.
Brenda: Abby, when I’m thinking about what you’re talking about, I’m thinking about Ellen Lupton and The Senses.
Abby: Oh, yes. Ellen was absolutely fantastic. Yeah. It was so interesting how Ellen came up with this wonderful show, The Senses like, which was at Cooper Hewitt a while ago, and it really relied heavily on scent and touch to tell the story. And what was inspiring about her story was how she came up with the idea for the show. Talking about musing, she was musing and thinking about her previous show, about beauty and questioning it, and what she kept coming back to is the sensory experience that had worked so well in that show.
And I think it’s fascinating that she allowed her mind and thoughts to wander and dream about what that could look like as an exhibition. She didn’t have an RFP. She had nothing. She just sort of went on this journey of interest for her. And so, through these musings, a large, more conceptual topic about the senses was born. And I really was thinking that asking what if, as a designer, is key at certain stages and giving yourself this air.
Brenda: Well you’re talking about something actually very sophisticated. You’re talking about operating in the subjunctive mood, which is specifically when you begin a sentence, let’s say, with imagine if or what if? And it automatically puts you in a hypothetical mindset. And in a space of questioning that absolutely does open up possibilities. And what’s really cool is not only is it useful, a useful way to think as a creative person or even as a business leader or whomever it is that you are, it’s a very important way to frame out an exhibition. Imagine if…
Abby: Yeah, we like that a lot, a lot of the successful exhibitions that we’ve made, or we’ve reviewed of our peers have the visitor answer those questions and really get drawn in and really try to think and play and engage with the content in that manner.
Brenda: You know, thinking about trying things and doing things and investing yourself in possibilities makes me think of Tom Bowman. Tom, right, our sustainability expert, who was so unbelievably inspiring to me, and interestingly, when talking about one of the biggest crises of our lifetimes, Tom left me with this feeling of hope and this belief that even the smallest of things can indeed be consequential and can make a difference, and that even if there are situations where you’re doing something and it might have a, you know, ill impact on the environment, it can nevertheless be better than the alternative which could be insurmountable, in terms of, you know, the damage that can be done.
And I think that what was really inspiring thinking about Tom was that he gave you a means of just grounding yourself in the midst of something that is just so huge, and that folks in the exhibit industry who are taking initiatives towards green design, towards thinking in terms of sustainable materials, sustainable practices, that it actually really, really does make a difference.
Abby: Yeah.
Brenda: Let’s talk about Andrea Hadley-Johnson.
Abby: Oh, perfect segue. Oh, Andrea, fellow Brit, she’s absolutely incredible. And she really made me stop and think about the way we curate for the local community and also collaborate with them. Like her story is amazing, when she told us about the exhibition at Derby Museum and the Objects of Love, Hope and Fear gallery, where she took artifacts in the museum out into the community who helped her understand what they were, and the story of going into the barbers with the comb. And they were telling her where they thought it came from, and then sharing their combs. So that idea of looking back at history and then looking back at the present and how we’ve evolved and just really working in that way with artifacts in the community, it sort of completely blew my mind.
Brenda: Again, connection, belonging and it’s just another nice reinforcing example of how our guests are talking about connectivity, how they’re talking about people belonging, and how we’re talking about multiple perspectives.
Abby: Yes, very key, multiple perspectives, and that also reminds me, at the National Justice Museum in Nottingham, Andrea had locals choose an object. She would sort a group of objects and they were doing a photographic exhibition, and the locals would come in and have to choose an object they wanted to pose with. One of the objects in the collection was a pistol, a little bit of an older pistol. So not something in the last decade or so, a bit older.
The lady had chosen the pistol and posed with this pistol, and a colleague of Andrea’s said, you know, we can’t show the pistol because gun crime is on the rise in the UK. And, you know, there’s also been a lot of knife crime. It’s really a serious issue for the government, and we’re a national justice museum, and it isn’t something that we should be messing around with. It was a very serious conversation about what she was trying to do. And for Andrea, it was censorship, and she discussed how it really matters to have these kinds of conversations.
So, I just found this absolutely fantastic. And it’s so interesting how an artifact can sit there in front of us all, very quietly and go unnoticed. And when it’s selected out and put into a different environment, let’s say, in terms of the lady holding the pistol for a photograph, it takes on a whole new meaning.
Brenda: Well, I’m thinking as well about going back to Jasminko Halilovic and talking about the War Childhood Museum, where we are seeing objects that have bullet holes in them and that show the violent end, right, of guns. And what that means, like in terms of this conversation about what we choose to show in our institutions and what the meaning of these things is and how it is that Andrea had to really fight and advocate for allowing people to respond to objects in a way that was natural to them, and to have it be like you were saying, a conversation.
Abby: I think she embodied, as a curator, she has courage. It’s these difficult questions that bring us together. It’s these difficult questions that we have to be having in our museums. And there’s not always an answer. It’s not, again, it’s not about right or wrong.
Brenda: Abby, I think that a lot of our muses in their beautiful, flowing togas are kind of badass.
Abby: I do too. They are.
Brenda: I think what I’d like to do is get us chewing on something and give something for all of you listeners to play around with just a little bit. Give yourself a treat and take a couple of minutes out of your day and meditate on the meaning of something that is inspiring to you. And you know this is more than a treat. Okay, this is a meal. Give yourself a good hearty inspiration meal.
Think of something or someone that has inspired you, and it doesn’t matter how small the moment might have seemed or how inconsequential. Give yourself a tremendous amount of freedom to just remember and reflect upon something that you found inspiring. And then what you’re going to do is you’re going to imagine that you are conducting an interview with that person or thing, and you’re going to ask it or them about how they see themselves as important. Ask that person or that object what impact they make on people or on the world, and then ask them what their own hopes are, and then think about why it is that you are inspired by this person or thing, what connections you are making as a result of this inspiration, and then think about what feelings and hopes of your own are ignited. In doing this exercise, and thinking through those steps and imagining, back to the imagine if and what if brilliant way of questioning, you yourself are now a museum. Your mind is a museum, and you have the basis for designing an experience about your own inspiration. You are becoming your own muse.
Abby: Wow.
Brenda: I guarantee you, even if you mutter to yourself in the process of doing this.
Abby: Am I allowed to ask you who you thought, who inspired you.
Brenda: Oh my gosh, where to begin? I get inspired.
Abby: It’s me, isn’t it.
Brenda: It is you.
Abby: What do you mean Brenda, where to begin? I’m sitting right opposite you!
Brenda: Oh my God, I just, I didn’t want to make you blush, Abby. Okay, there you have it.
Abby: I’m blushing right now. Well, thank you, Brenda, for this incredible journey we’re on.
Brenda: Thank you, Abby.
Abby: Thank you for being my partner. I feel incredibly fortunate to be able to share the stories of our peers, to be honest with the wider audience and continue hopefully to support our community and in our small way, with one podcast at a time. So, it’s been a heck of a journey so far.
Brenda: So far, so good. Abby. Have a wonderful gold anniversary.
Abby: You too. And thanks to everyone who tuned in today and has tuned in before. If you like what you heard, it’s not always quite like this, but subscribe for more episodes of Matters of Experience wherever you listen to podcasts, please leave a rating and a review and share with a friend. We’ll see you next time.
Brenda: Take care everybody.
[Music]
Producer: Matters of Experience is produced by Lorem Ipsum Corp and recorded at Hangar Studios. Tune in next time for more fun discussions about experience design.
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum – Lorem Ipsum Corp
The Senses: Design Beyond Vision
Objects of Love, Hope and Fear
Listen to some of the episodes discussed:
[Music]
Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: Hello, I’m Brenda Cowan.
Abby: This podcast is produced by Lorem Ipsum, an Experience Design company, headquartered in New York, and our podcast explores the creativity, innovation and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. Hello to anybody listening for the first time, and a welcome back to our regular listeners. So, Brenda, today is a very special episode for us both.
Brenda: It is. A very special episode.
Abby: It is, right? It’s our 50th episode. And when I look back at the array of guests from Bosco, who works at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, or Sundar, from the Museum of the Future, and Victor from Intel, who talked to us about the business of connecting people to stories, and that’s just to name a few. We’ve covered multiple aspects of experiential design, from initial concept, data gathering, inclusive design, multimedia, fabrication, and AI and I feel like we’re just getting started.
Brenda: It really does, doesn’t it, feel like we’re really just starting to sort of dig into this, which is so wild, and—so what’s 50? Silver? Gold? What are we, paper? What gift am I giving?
Abby: Yeah, what gift are we getting.
Brenda: You know, listening to the sort of the range of topics and some of the folks who, who we’ve been able to speak with, I’m also thinking of some of the amazing guests that we spoke with about subjects in design, such as empathy, emotion, satisfaction, community, and storytelling. You know, so much of what we’ve talked about over these episodes is the element of the person and the personal in designed experiences, and how important it is to stay true to the people with whom we work with and for, to always seek to enable individuals to have experiences on their own terms. That’s something that I just find myself coming back to time and time again. Good design fosters and encourages this dynamic. That’s my takeaway from so many of the folks and so many of the conversations that we’ve had.
Abby: So, Brenda, you had this brilliant idea for this 50th show, our little anniversary, which is gold, by the way. I googled it very quickly.
Brenda: Oh, it’s gold, okay.
Abby: I should have known that, not that that big day isn’t coming up for me in a few years.
Brenda: Put that ring on my finger, Abby.
Abby: But we’re going to focus on the subject of inspiration, what muses do and how they form the basis of a museum. So, settle in everyone, and we’re hoping, hoping to really inspire you with the conversation today.
Brenda: Well, inspiration Abby, it’s something that I’ve been thinking about quite a lot these days, in no small part due to the fact that I just got a mini break, a vacation. I just got back from back-to-back trips to Baltimore, Santa Fe, and Paris and in each place, no matter how humble the place was or how epic, I found myself caught up in these moments that inspired me to think, act, contemplate, and just sink into moments of quietude. And sometimes it was experiences where, let’s say I saw someone or something that surprised me and that made me want to engage. Or perhaps I was touching and smelling something in nature that was sending me flying back into early memories. I was in a designed light, sound and architecture extravaganza that blew my mind—side note, stay tuned for a future episode on that one. And all along throughout these experiences, I would catch myself having this like inner dialogue, questioning what I was responding to and wanting to know more, wondering about my own reactions and in what ways I was finding things so meaningful.
Abby: I just want to jump in right now. That’s so interesting, the idea of when you have the thoughts and feelings that you don’t know necessarily why or where they’ve come from, and it can be a bit sort of befuddling and exciting as well, as you start to learn more about yourself from these experiences and then try to draw conclusions from them about who you are, where you’re going, why you had them, where you’ve been. And I totally agree, I had a similar—I was at Cannes Film Festival walking down the street and I smelled something. It must have been some succulents or passing some flowers or something, and it immediately shot me back to my village days in, in England with horses in a field, which is so bizarre from being in sort of like a cement small town to get moved there, and then all of those emotions from being about that age came flooding back.
Brenda: As I was having my moments, I started to think about muses of inspirations that prompt us to wonder and question and learn and grow. You know, the nine goddesses of Zeus.
Abby: He had nine? Wait a minute, he had nine goddesses? Oh my goodness me, lucky man.
Brenda: But I was thinking of the nine goddesses of Zeus who preside over the arts and sciences and of the museum. So, Abby, when we’re talking about the museum, we’re talking about the seat of the muses. So if you’re following me, inspiration is key to all of this. And I think that being open to it and cognizant of it is crucial for creatives and leaders and, well, everyone that’s been on the show has been speaking to inspiration in one way or another. And in a way, our show is like a museum. Our show is a seat for the muses. So taking this moment to reflect on that and to see our guests as the muses that they are to us is important to do, and an awful lot of fun for our 50th. I’ll give you all a little heads up that we’re going to give you a little exercise in just a little bit, so stick with us and prepare to play a little bit with your own inspirations.
Abby: That sounds very exciting. So, when you talk about switching off, you just mentioned switching off, and I was thinking about daydreaming and, you know, looking for inspiration by switching off, and I know that I read a lot of studies about how it actually, this idea of daydreaming will reduce stress and anxiety. So it really can help there and bring back clarity and even efficiency and problem solving. You know, it can help you through big decisions or deadlines that you know you may not have the answers to all be able to do until you sort of like, switch off. I know it sounds like an oxymoron, like, how do you get something done when you actually disengage from it? But that’s at least for me as well, the way that it works.
And the same with creativity. I’m looking forward to going on a vacation because I’m looking forward to being able to switch off. But at the same time, I’m always absorbing content, information. But when you’re in the sort of more relaxed mode, you have time to contemplate and play in your head. And I think that playing, that creativity really is, for me at least, where my inspiration comes from.
And another thing that I think about all of our peers is they all seem to be multi-talented or interested in lots of different things. They’re not one trick ponies. So you could have somebody who’s an engineer who works in AR, who’s also a musician, and you could have someone else who’s got an amazing sense of fashion or likes to paint and design.
Brenda: Well, we just had Eli Kuslansky on, who is a brilliant multimedia technical designer and also a writer, an artist and a chef.
Abby: Yup, exactly. So, I really believe that you can find inspiration in very, very different places.
Brenda: It’s interesting that it’s the advice that I give my students when they get a mini break of their own, and so many of them will come and ask me, okay, what should I work on during my break and what should I and should I be doing this? And should I be doing that? And I can, you know, bone up on these particular skills and I can be reading this and la la la la la. And the advice that I give time and time again is do nothing, do something that brings you a lot of joy, that brings you pleasure, whatever it might be, and just sink yourself into that and it will reap rewards.
Abby: I also wanted to tie the subject of this podcast, which is muses and inspiration, with how I had the inspiration to do this. Brenda, it was your work actually at FIT, from coming in and having the privilege to speak to the students, and then seeing my peers coming in, also talking from the different facets of what we do. And I felt that we were missing a podcast about everything we do. And I realized that the group you were bringing in were all from very different walks of life, and the idea of this Matters of Experience sort of popped in my head, and you as the natural partner, so I just hoped you’d say yes.
Brenda: Of course I said yes.
Abby: And you jumped straight in.
Brenda: Seriously? How could I say no? And you and I definitely have a shared mission in terms of thinking about the profession and the need for this work that we all listening are engaged in, in our own individual and joint ways. The need for this profession to be viewed and understood more and more as a profession, as a thing unto itself. And the more that we can speak, the more that we can publish, the more that we can promote what exhibition and experience design is, the more it’s going to gain, I think, in terms of awareness.
Abby: No, it’s awareness and actually role in the creation of an experience. So that our clients can understand when they need us and why they need us. And it’s a shout out to SEGD and Cybelle Jones and that incredible organization and how they support us and get the word out to the community about what we do.
Brenda: I know that the times that we’ve spoken about the need for exhibition and experience design to really have more weight as a profession unto itself comes when we talk about architecture and the role of architecture and architects, and how architecture is viewed and how very differently so—
Abby: Yes, yes it is.
Brenda: —than where we’re coming from.
Abby: Yeah, and when—it’s really interesting, one of the episodes that resonated with me was early on with the architect, Alex Bitus. He brought us sort of three key drivers for his work, which were environment, materials, and the site history, which really makes perfect sense when you think about the exterior, and I guess sort of from his perspective, interior of a new building, but how it will fit or complement the world around it and be inspired by the local landscape through the materials, you know, he’s designed, he’s built it with.
But what’s interesting from our experience design perspective is that we create these environments that often juxtapose, to be honest, against the building design from maybe a form and a function perspective, and I think it’s okay that it does that. We design and service the story. What are we trying to say? What’s the right environment for that story? So we think about guiding the visitor through the journey and often design being inspired by the setting of the story, I guess more like scenic design or film set design.
Brenda: Well, when you’re talking about immersion in the moment and in the story, let’s also include emotional involvement, engagement with other people, engagement with objects as well. And these are things that we learned a lot about from so many of the folks that we’ve spoken with: community and connection and belonging. I’m remembering one of our early episodes with the wonderful Joy Bailey-Bryant, and I’m also thinking about Annie Polland from the Tenement Museum.
These individuals brought to light such important elements of the nature of being a creative and also storytelling and the nature of experiences being about people belonging, being welcomed, being a part of the story and feeling like and knowing that they are a part of the institution in myriad ways. And I’m also thinking about emotion and empathy-rich experiences, and our conversation with Jasminko Halilovic and Elif Gokcigdem, and Terry Snowball.
These are individuals who, for me, were so inspiring because they were really sharing with us how it is that emotions and evocative objects and difficult subjects and challenging subjects are a very rich part of the fabric of what we do and our ability to be able to share these stories in very sensory-rich ways is absolutely critical, and that emotion is a key part of this immersed experience that we keep hearing about and talking about throughout all of our episodes.
Abby: Well, it’s empathetic design, and I think it’s something that, I mean, you tell me, Brenda, it seems like something that’s really coming to the forefront, like right now, over the last few years, something that we all need to bear in mind. What caused this? Where did it come from? Has it been around and I’ve just been not looking in the right places, because I feel that in all of those examples, all of those museums, they really are powerful.
Brenda: I think that thinking in empathy has to do with and we, when we talked with Elif Gokcigdem, she spoke a lot about designing for empathy, which is really the focus of her life’s work, really. And she was talking about how understanding that empathy is a way of understanding that there is a oneness in the world and of which we are all a part, and that we can use this understanding and this awareness as a tool of thinking about a lot of what I was just talking about, the idea that there is connectivity, that we can foster, that we can enable, that we can reinforce through designed experiences where people can realize, oh, I’m actually a part of this story.It’s important to me because it’s relevant to me, even if it’s about people I don’t know or places I’m not familiar with.
Empathy as a tool can be seen as being a matter of showcasing different perspectives, hearing narratives from many different people and many different places, perspectives from many different periods in time, and to be able to not present necessarily just a singular idea or a singular perspective, but indeed to be able to explore subjects in a myriad of ways and through myriad even of interpretations.
Abby: Yup, now what comes to mind is our recent conversation with Jamie Lawyer from the Rubin Museum, when she explained that her first encounter at a museum, this young girl goes in, she’s standing there absolutely thrilled by what she’s looking at, and the docent comes over and her first thought is, oh my gosh, have I done something wrong? And he was like, no, I’d like to tell you more about this piece.And she felt that oneness, I think. I think she felt that emotional connection with what she was looking at, and it was so profound that now that’s what her life’s work is, to bring that feeling of oneness to all of the visitors who come into her museum. So, you know, from this one moment and this one kind gesture from the docent, but also the amazing curatorial work of the museum staff, connected with Jamie and her story.
Brenda: So when we were talking with Kiersten F. Latham, she was sharing with us how critical it was to think about the front of house staff and how important it is to really elevate an awareness of their role and that so much jibed with what we were talking about when we were having our conversation with Monica Montgomery and we were talking about how it is that people need to feel like they are welcomed in and not, you know, in some kind of a rarefied moment or a rarefied place such that it has nothing to do with them.
Abby: And what’s actually really interesting is when we did our project with the Smithsonian, one of the problems is their actual physical building, and that what it represents really excludes a huge proportion of the community. And so how do you break down those physical barriers and the mental barriers to make sure that you’re welcoming through your doors, as well as digitally, online and all the other ways we can do it, but in person into your establishment, and that they will feel that they have been heard and are a valued part of that community.
Brenda: Well, this loops even back around a little bit to talking about how it is that people need to be a part of the creation, that people are not the afterthought. This is something that when we were talking with Joy Bailey-Bryant from Lord Cultural, and she was sharing with us the idea of belonging and that we need to engage communities, individuals, as well as our experts, as well as our own staff in the creation of our institutions, in the creation of our exhibitions, of our programs, and that belonging very much so begins there.
Abby: And also our teams, our internal teams need to be diverse. Everybody’s sick of hearing it, but if they don’t represent the community at least as far as you can, then it’s just like a one trick pony. You have to have the different voices at the table, at the creative table.
Brenda: Abby, when I’m thinking about what you’re talking about, I’m thinking about Ellen Lupton and The Senses.
Abby: Oh, yes. Ellen was absolutely fantastic. Yeah. It was so interesting how Ellen came up with this wonderful show, The Senses like, which was at Cooper Hewitt a while ago, and it really relied heavily on scent and touch to tell the story. And what was inspiring about her story was how she came up with the idea for the show. Talking about musing, she was musing and thinking about her previous show, about beauty and questioning it, and what she kept coming back to is the sensory experience that had worked so well in that show.
And I think it’s fascinating that she allowed her mind and thoughts to wander and dream about what that could look like as an exhibition. She didn’t have an RFP. She had nothing. She just sort of went on this journey of interest for her. And so, through these musings, a large, more conceptual topic about the senses was born. And I really was thinking that asking what if, as a designer, is key at certain stages and giving yourself this air.
Brenda: Well you’re talking about something actually very sophisticated. You’re talking about operating in the subjunctive mood, which is specifically when you begin a sentence, let’s say, with imagine if or what if? And it automatically puts you in a hypothetical mindset. And in a space of questioning that absolutely does open up possibilities. And what’s really cool is not only is it useful, a useful way to think as a creative person or even as a business leader or whomever it is that you are, it’s a very important way to frame out an exhibition. Imagine if…
Abby: Yeah, we like that a lot, a lot of the successful exhibitions that we’ve made, or we’ve reviewed of our peers have the visitor answer those questions and really get drawn in and really try to think and play and engage with the content in that manner.
Brenda: You know, thinking about trying things and doing things and investing yourself in possibilities makes me think of Tom Bowman. Tom, right, our sustainability expert, who was so unbelievably inspiring to me, and interestingly, when talking about one of the biggest crises of our lifetimes, Tom left me with this feeling of hope and this belief that even the smallest of things can indeed be consequential and can make a difference, and that even if there are situations where you’re doing something and it might have a, you know, ill impact on the environment, it can nevertheless be better than the alternative which could be insurmountable, in terms of, you know, the damage that can be done.
And I think that what was really inspiring thinking about Tom was that he gave you a means of just grounding yourself in the midst of something that is just so huge, and that folks in the exhibit industry who are taking initiatives towards green design, towards thinking in terms of sustainable materials, sustainable practices, that it actually really, really does make a difference.
Abby: Yeah.
Brenda: Let’s talk about Andrea Hadley-Johnson.
Abby: Oh, perfect segue. Oh, Andrea, fellow Brit, she’s absolutely incredible. And she really made me stop and think about the way we curate for the local community and also collaborate with them. Like her story is amazing, when she told us about the exhibition at Derby Museum and the Objects of Love, Hope and Fear gallery, where she took artifacts in the museum out into the community who helped her understand what they were, and the story of going into the barbers with the comb. And they were telling her where they thought it came from, and then sharing their combs. So that idea of looking back at history and then looking back at the present and how we’ve evolved and just really working in that way with artifacts in the community, it sort of completely blew my mind.
Brenda: Again, connection, belonging and it’s just another nice reinforcing example of how our guests are talking about connectivity, how they’re talking about people belonging, and how we’re talking about multiple perspectives.
Abby: Yes, very key, multiple perspectives, and that also reminds me, at the National Justice Museum in Nottingham, Andrea had locals choose an object. She would sort a group of objects and they were doing a photographic exhibition, and the locals would come in and have to choose an object they wanted to pose with. One of the objects in the collection was a pistol, a little bit of an older pistol. So not something in the last decade or so, a bit older.
The lady had chosen the pistol and posed with this pistol, and a colleague of Andrea’s said, you know, we can’t show the pistol because gun crime is on the rise in the UK. And, you know, there’s also been a lot of knife crime. It’s really a serious issue for the government, and we’re a national justice museum, and it isn’t something that we should be messing around with. It was a very serious conversation about what she was trying to do. And for Andrea, it was censorship, and she discussed how it really matters to have these kinds of conversations.
So, I just found this absolutely fantastic. And it’s so interesting how an artifact can sit there in front of us all, very quietly and go unnoticed. And when it’s selected out and put into a different environment, let’s say, in terms of the lady holding the pistol for a photograph, it takes on a whole new meaning.
Brenda: Well, I’m thinking as well about going back to Jasminko Halilovic and talking about the War Childhood Museum, where we are seeing objects that have bullet holes in them and that show the violent end, right, of guns. And what that means, like in terms of this conversation about what we choose to show in our institutions and what the meaning of these things is and how it is that Andrea had to really fight and advocate for allowing people to respond to objects in a way that was natural to them, and to have it be like you were saying, a conversation.
Abby: I think she embodied, as a curator, she has courage. It’s these difficult questions that bring us together. It’s these difficult questions that we have to be having in our museums. And there’s not always an answer. It’s not, again, it’s not about right or wrong.
Brenda: Abby, I think that a lot of our muses in their beautiful, flowing togas are kind of badass.
Abby: I do too. They are.
Brenda: I think what I’d like to do is get us chewing on something and give something for all of you listeners to play around with just a little bit. Give yourself a treat and take a couple of minutes out of your day and meditate on the meaning of something that is inspiring to you. And you know this is more than a treat. Okay, this is a meal. Give yourself a good hearty inspiration meal.
Think of something or someone that has inspired you, and it doesn’t matter how small the moment might have seemed or how inconsequential. Give yourself a tremendous amount of freedom to just remember and reflect upon something that you found inspiring. And then what you’re going to do is you’re going to imagine that you are conducting an interview with that person or thing, and you’re going to ask it or them about how they see themselves as important. Ask that person or that object what impact they make on people or on the world, and then ask them what their own hopes are, and then think about why it is that you are inspired by this person or thing, what connections you are making as a result of this inspiration, and then think about what feelings and hopes of your own are ignited. In doing this exercise, and thinking through those steps and imagining, back to the imagine if and what if brilliant way of questioning, you yourself are now a museum. Your mind is a museum, and you have the basis for designing an experience about your own inspiration. You are becoming your own muse.
Abby: Wow.
Brenda: I guarantee you, even if you mutter to yourself in the process of doing this.
Abby: Am I allowed to ask you who you thought, who inspired you.
Brenda: Oh my gosh, where to begin? I get inspired.
Abby: It’s me, isn’t it.
Brenda: It is you.
Abby: What do you mean Brenda, where to begin? I’m sitting right opposite you!
Brenda: Oh my God, I just, I didn’t want to make you blush, Abby. Okay, there you have it.
Abby: I’m blushing right now. Well, thank you, Brenda, for this incredible journey we’re on.
Brenda: Thank you, Abby.
Abby: Thank you for being my partner. I feel incredibly fortunate to be able to share the stories of our peers, to be honest with the wider audience and continue hopefully to support our community and in our small way, with one podcast at a time. So, it’s been a heck of a journey so far.
Brenda: So far, so good. Abby. Have a wonderful gold anniversary.
Abby: You too. And thanks to everyone who tuned in today and has tuned in before. If you like what you heard, it’s not always quite like this, but subscribe for more episodes of Matters of Experience wherever you listen to podcasts, please leave a rating and a review and share with a friend. We’ll see you next time.
Brenda: Take care everybody.
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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.
The Muse in Museum
Breakdowns and Breakthroughs with Eli Kuslansky
Mr. Kuslansky installations include the Yale School of Management, Sony, The Smithsonian Institution, The New York Stock Exchange, Goldman Sachs, Intel, IBM, Times Mirror Corporation, The White House Visitor’s Center, and for Frank Gehry, Foster + Partners, and other architects, designers and Institutions around the world.
[Music]
Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: This is Brenda Cowan.
Abby: Our podcast is produced by Lorem Ipsum, an experience design company headquartered in New York, and our podcast explores the creativity, innovation and psychology driving design experiences and encounters. Hello to anybody listening for the first time, and a welcome back to our regular listeners. So, Brenda, today we’re talking with Eli Kuslansky. He is the partner and chief strategist at Unified Field, an innovation and media production firm, which he founded 35 years ago. And that’s really kind of amazing. I just wanted to give you a big shout out for weathering all the storms and steering your ship—
Brenda: A lot of storms in 35 years.
Abby: —through economic waters, and the pun is intentional because you started at the South Street Seaport and did nautical antique appraisals for Sotheby’s and Christie’s. Let’s start there. Tell us a little bit more about that and where you got your start in this business.
Eli: Yikes, okay. No, no, well South Street was interesting because, when I graduated from Cooper Union, I wasn’t quite sure what the work I was doing, I really liked that much, and I wasn’t sure what to do and found this beautiful photograph of a kind of, like, a really interesting cat who is, like, playing banjo in a mix of, a shop full of ship models, which has been a big interest of mine. So, there was a photograph in a newspaper, newsletter my brother read. I looked over his shoulder and saw it.
Brenda: And that was it, that, you were hooked.
Eli: That was it. That was my first foray into museums.
Brenda: Fantastic.
Eli: Which is, you know, I always believe in this thing called the power of serendipity.
Brenda: Mmhmm.
Abby: Was it an ad in the newspaper? Was it like—
Eli: No, no, it was an article.
Abby: Just an article about South Street Seaport.
Eli: South Street, Seaport newsletter. And that was it. From there we worked for several years. You know, we did exhibits. We also sold stuff in the store, we restored and built ship models, museum ship models, and, from there I went to Ralph Appelbaum Associates, well, actually, there’s an interim between that and Ralph Appelbaum, I was a finish carpentry foreman.
Brenda: So somehow or other, in the midst of all of this, you got really interested in technology, perhaps hooked for life in technology. Where did that start? Where did that begin?
Eli: Yeah. Well, what happened was, you know, I was in construction to make a living. And at that point, I was a finish carpentry foreman, and, you know, I tired of doing that, and I wanted something cleaner, that paid better. So, I started taking CAD lessons, AutoCAD lessons, and I zoomed right through it. And then I had to get a job though I had no experience.
So, I lied. I figured the first five jobs I’d get fired from, but then at that point I’d have like five jobs on my resume. And then it was great, and then I could work through the night, you know, did my artwork during the day and I had like machines, four machine running macros. So, they let me do it.
Abby: Wow. Because you must have adopted CAD pretty early on then. What year was that?
Eli: Oh, God. I’m not saying. No, but to give you an idea of when we started the company, because we were one of the pioneers of it, that was the point when DOS was shifting over to Window, right, so it was text based. And one of our first jobs we did was to do an interface, graphic interface for the Bank of New York for their, you know, their institutional banking.
Abby: That’s crazy.
Eli: We, actually in the Window’s ward, I got to meet Bill Gates.
Abby: That was cool.
Eli: So, we realized at that point that this was going to be big.
Brenda: Let’s flow from that. Let’s talk more about media and museums, and Unified Field has been an innovator in museum-based media and technologies for a long time and absolutely still to present day. And I believe that your work is really particularly known for being very evocative, very emotion rich, and very much so centered around powerful human stories, and I’m thinking about a relatively recent project that you did, the Museum of Tolerance in LA.
I’m wondering if you can tell us about the work that you did there, because I know the project in particular, from you and am just enamored of it. Share with our listeners that particular project.
Eli: Well, the Museum of Tolerance Social Lab was a way to, you know, look at some of the pertinent and important topics surrounding things like, you know, anti-Semitism and intolerance, you know, things like that. So, we, somebody else I won’t mention who did some previous work on that for the conceptual part of it. And then we came in and this is typical in our case where we can, where we’re allowed to, we try to push the envelope.
So, to give you one example. There was a thing about points of view. So, we did this cube that was 9 feet high, 14 feet on a side, four sided, back projected. It was called Point of View, and it had directional sound, and it was kind of like a Rashomon movie in a way.
So, for example, you had, you know, let’s say a young woman is coming out to her parents that she’s gay, right, and there’s four participants. So, one side would be her point of view. It’s the same film shot four times. The other one would be the mom, the other one, the father. Another would be, I don’t know, the gardener, I forgot who it was, you know, it was something like that. So that was kind of cool.
You know, it’s tricky because museums are, you know, when they’re curatorially driven, they want to try and get as much content as they can, and it sometimes blends into being didactic. But that’s not, you know, we’re in a participatory culture in a digital society. So, it was like it has to be experiential and somewhat poetic, somewhat theatrical, even though the content has a lot of gravitas to it. So anyway, I don’t know, there was also something that they took out which was a tolerance test when they came in.
Brenda: Woah, that sounds provocative.
Eli: It was very provocative, but they wanted to take it out because one of the donors came in and found out that they’re intolerant.
Abby: So, it works then, it was working.
Eli: Yeah, sure it works.
Brenda: One would assume. I mean, the thing that I love that we’re hearing from you so much about this particular work is empathy, which is something that Abby and I’ve been hearing a lot about, and I know that in the profession, it’s a trend. It’s a real growing trend and I think that in many ways, if one can be an early adopter of empathy in exhibits, then I think that, and in this particular example as well, being very decisive and very sort of programmatic about what empathy can actually look like, how it can feel, how it can be poetic in an exhibit environment. That’s something that I really think about quite a lot when I think about your work.
Eli: Yeah, that’s interesting, well thank you. That’s a high compliment indeed. Yeah. I mean you have to make it empathetic because it has to resonate, not only just one type of audience, multi type of audiences, and otherwise it’s just technology for technology’s sake. So, you can still do the best technology and coolest technology, but if it’s not connecting with people and visitors, it’s not effective.
Abby: We also at Lorem Ipsum do a lot of work like this, and we find it challenging sometimes when potentially a client or an institution feels like it’s trying to tell a specific message or being, as you said, more didactic. And we try to often focus them more on the experience and the fact that people are coming in with different experiences themselves when they are standing in front and absorbing the messages and the emotions that are getting conveyed.
So, I’d love to hear your perspective on how you work with clients to allow them to have the courage to push the visitors into places that are uncomfortable. I mean, you mentioned the tolerance test, for example, and I think that’s exactly where we all need to be, by the way, I think if we’re just putting out things that people want and accept and have already chewed on, then, you’re not ever getting through. You need to put people in a subtly or uncomfortable sort of a place, otherwise you’re not challenging their preconceived notions of who they are and how they perceive others. So, I’d love to talk about the sort of like delicacy that’s needed when working with a client to really make something that’s worthwhile.
Eli: Well, the first part is you have to listen to them. You really have to actively listen to them and to let them know that you got what they’re saying. So, you’re not just pushing something on them. The other part of it, I think, is that you also have to present it in the format that they would get it, right, and then part of that is also making it their idea, so they own it.
You know, we also have this expression to look for the gold in the conversation because oftentimes, you know, you don’t like what they’re saying and they’re saying crazy stuff and like, you know, what are you talking about? You’re an amateur. But invariably there’s something in it that’s really valuable and that, that they’re trying to tell you and either frustrated about or they’re inspired by, and that’s the stuff you have to look for.
The other thing, too, is that it’s important to do focus groups. Because that will burst their assumptions about things, sometimes.
Brenda: It’s such a valuable thing and so rarely done, things like front end evaluation with the focus groups, interviews, town halls and sessions such as that and even formative, you know, at midpoint when you’re having to sort of really muscle through or negotiate things where the client is convinced it’s not working, you know it’s going to work. And at any rate, that’s a really critical takeaway for every client out there. Please, please consider evaluation, focus groups, testing in every possible way.
Eli: Yeah, it’s great. And we’ve done that in this, and I won’t tell you who the museums are, but there’s a story, right, so one science center, Midwest science center, wanted to do this thing, it was a totally questionable idea is the best way to describe it. But basically, what it is, is you have a screen, you listen to a bunch of scientists in a lab coat, which already boring. And then you vote on what they say. And we tell them, like, that’s not going to work. So, they said, okay, but we want to do it anyways, and they spent over $500,000 on it.
Brenda: Wow. Yeah.
Eli: Fast forward five years later, we have another museum in the east wanted to the same exact thing and we tell them, look, this XYZ science center built it. It didn’t work then, it’s not going to work now, but we want it. It’s like, okay, we’re going to do it for you, just with the caveat that don’t come back to us and say it doesn’t work and sure enough, it didn’t work.
Abby: But that’s interesting. We run into this a lot. We have the museum and the content people, and then I feel our job is to listen and understand what they’re trying to communicate and then we come up with the ways to effectively communicate it. I think part of our job is to understand how to engage the visitor in a fun and meaningful way, and that is not easy. I do not think that’s easy at all.
Brenda: No, it’s definitely not easy. And just like it’s not easy working with these clients who are, you know, might be hellbent on a particular idea that they feel strongly about. I’ll also add in one of the things that is really difficult about our whole industry, and that I also really kind of love is the level of vulnerability that people I think have to be able to embrace to do this kind of work, because when it’s done well, when it’s done with good partners, you have to take a lot of risks and you have to just simply not know.
You have to not know what it’s going to look like. And also you need to be able to really trust that things are going to connect with the visitor and that the, if it’s a collection, if it’s an idea, if it’s a story, whatever it is that the, you know, institutions about, that is so important and so valuable to you that people will be able to fall in love with it in little ways.
Abby: What’s your process? So, the listeners can understand, do you come up with how are you going to use an interactive, you know, are you looking at the story first and the best ways to tell that story? Can you just shed a little bit of light on how you guys think and how you come up with an end product.
Eli: Let’s talk about museums because brands are different. But I think in the case of museums, you really want to get a good snapshot of everybody’s P.O.V., if you will, and not just in formal meetings, you know, I know many years ago, when we first started the bank project, the senior product manager of the software project at the bank would go to their clients, and you’re talking about dealing with people at GM, at the highest level, you know, CFO, stuff like that. And in that, that’s a good case study, because we’d sit around these conference rooms and we ask them questions, blah, blah, blah. And it’s all like, you know, the guy who runs the software is interested in features, and the guy who’s the senior guy is in value, right?
So, it’s, it’s not like we speak to a client’s one language. You’re talking to 2 or 3 different languages. So, you have to be aware of that, across the body and stuff like that, you know. But what’s interesting is that most of the meeting was B.S., like you say an hour meeting, like, you know, the first 50 minutes, 45 minutes, totally useless. Right? It was at the end, the last five minutes that you would get the guy who is like the, who really knew the stuff inside and out would buttonhole you and say, look, it would really be great if we did this.
Brenda: You got the gold.
Eli: That’s the gold. So, once you have that, then you’re, you know, of course you usually work with exhibit designers and architects, stuff like that. And then you know, you got to get in alignment, the conceptual alignment. And the best time for us to come in is, especially in architectural based projects, is after they’ve done the block studies and other stuff, like in the overall arching themes and stuff, is to come in as an, early on in the conceptual phase. That’s the best benefit people get out of it because unlike the museum or the architects, oftentimes we’ll work across multiple industries or multiple cultures. So, we can bring that weight of knowledge and experience to this particular, you know, project.
Abby: People talk about listening all the time. And so when someone says, yeah, you got to listen, I think nobody’s listening to the fact what listening really means, because for me, it’s about going into a room and not having any preconceived ideas of what stories they want to tell and how you think they’re best to tell. And literally going in tabula rasa and sitting there and being completely open and hearing the client.
I’ve seen people think they’re listening, but they’ve sort of almost already know what’s going to happen or what they think it should be. And then they’re in the meeting and they leave, and it’s like they haven’t heard anything.
Brenda: Being highly present is really complicated, and part of me wonders when thinking about the client dynamic with the, I’ll call, I’ll lump us all into the creative, right, and the dynamic of creatives, I think that, man, when we are able to get into flow state, what a tremendous pleasure that is. And it really is right. It’s a state of optimal creativity, optimal experience, and it’s highly, highly present.
And it’s like ultimate uber present. You are just really in the moment, you’re creating and, right, all this great stuff is happening, and I wonder how much a client actually gets to experience that. And I think that maybe more confidence also comes from having been able to have those kinds of experiences and kind of come out on the other side, you know, you can trust yourself a little bit.
And so, I’m just sort of playing the empathy game here, really thinking about these different perspectives, because I think about most clients and you know, man, they’re constantly dealing with past and with future, and I wonder how much they get to really zone in the moment.
Eli: But I think, I think there’s an aspect to it that you really have to create a space of safety. A safe environment to be able to be vulnerable on your side and their side. So, in some ways it’s not just conversation, it’s a state of being.
Brenda: Eli, this is something that you and I have spoken about. I’ve known you for just about 18 years now, and I always love talking with you. I just love hearing where it is that you’re coming from. And I’m thinking of some recent conversations that we had actually through Covid and thereafter, and here’s the deal: you’re an artist; you’re a podcaster of Art Movez, which, listeners, I highly recommend you tune into; you’re also, as I see it, a philosopher and you—
Eli: Kind of like a street philosopher.
Brenda: Okay. But I think of you very much so as a Renaissance man, who has a lot of ideas about how it is that we’re currently operating at a time of profound growth, sort of societally, culturally, but also scientifically and a time of great discovery. And we would love to hear what’s your vision of art, culture and science in the world right now?
Eli: Yeah, that’s a great question. Well, I think the way the universe kind of works, according to my POV, is that it there is breakdowns and breakthroughs. And then you have to have a breakdown before you get a breakthrough, otherwise you have a perfect system. And the other thing that’s interesting about it; the breakthrough is at the same commensurate scale as the breakdown in terms of depth and breadth and stuff. So, the bigger the breakdown, the bigger the breakthrough, right.
So, you’re looking at now, we have an assault on democracy around the world and people’s rights. And you know, other things too. So, and it’s not quite accurate, but I, and the reason I don’t think it’s accurate, because I had this conversation with Chrissie Iles, who is the curator of the Whitney. And, you know, I said, you know, I think that we’re in a new Renaissance because of the old, you know, the plague sort of helped start the other Renaissance.
And she said, which one? You know, because it’s like there’s more than one. And you’re starting to see that, you’re starting to see it in medicine, science, you know, and the arts. You know, you look at a lot of fine art today, there’s really amazing stuff of it going around. Brilliant work. But for the most part, you know, 90% of it or more could have been done in the 1930s.
So, then the question is, what is art of our time, not art made in our time, which is how most museum, art museum describes, or, but how most museums describe it is like what is 21st century as art made in our time? But that’s not accurate. So now we’re starting to see a lot of artists experiment with it in a lot of ways and experiment with technology and, you know, whatever fabrication and other stuff like that.
Again, also, I think the best stuff still is the stuff that combines the old with the new, which is what Renaissance means. It’s a rebirth.
Abby: So, we’re quickly adopting and adapting AI all around the world in all the different industries, but we’re specifically thinking about AI tools in our work. I know as a creator you use AI in your art and exhibition concepts. And in a recent social media post you wrote, and I quote you, dealing with AI is like having an idiot savant muse who feels nothing, knows nothing, and understands nothing, like talking to the wind.
Now, I kind of do agree with this perspective, but an unfeeling idiot savant can be very useful. It’s infinitely patient, will work with me ceaselessly. It doesn’t have an ego, so it takes criticism and creative feedback really well. And since it’s been trained on a massive amounts of data, it can answer most questions and brings a wealth of context to many subjects. So, if you want it to be human, I think you’re going to be disappointed, at least right now, but if you accept it for what it is, I think it can be a really creative companion, unlike any human and, potentially soon, better. Why do you love AI and how are you using it?
Eli: Well, yeah, a lot of ways. I want to back it up a little bit about a couple of things. So ChatGPT is like talking to like a very fussy aunt sometimes like, oh no dear, you shouldn’t be saying this. So, but it’s, it’s great when you’re writing to just be able to get verbiage, right, and you can’t use what it comes out with because like generic crap, you know, so and it’s obvious, like what it does, just like image, a lot of stuff when you do text to image, it comes out this weird science fiction thing. But if you know how to use it, it’s an amazing tool.
The other thing too is that I think some of the most interesting things you can do with AI, especially in Midjourney, is not the text to image. There’s actually a command there, forward slash blend command that allows you to blend up to like five of your own images. And that’s when it gets really interesting.
Abby: And I’m really excited as well because I think it’s soon, it’s becoming with ChatGPT 4.0, multimodal. So, as we can start talking to it and things like that, instead of typing stuff, I think it’s going to start to be a guide. It’ll be a teacher. I don’t want to freak too many people out.
Brenda: Like me.
Abby: It’ll talk to you, and you can ask it questions and it’ll explain things. So, I feel like the future is getting to us quicker. I feel like this is all, AI has sped up so many things.
Eli: Look, AI is a double-edged sword. You know, there’s definitely going to be a shift in the economy in terms of, you know, I mean, you think about it; what happens when AI gets to the point where you can drive trucks around the country, that’s like tens of thousands or millions of people who do that for a living.
But the other thing it’s going to do is it’s really going to lower the cost of production, let’s say, for feature films, right? I think his name is Tyler Perry, very interesting story, and what happened with him is that he was going to spend eight hundred million dollar building 16 stages for film. And then OpenAI came out with Sora and Sora is text to video.
Now, like a lot of things AI, it’s not quite there yet. But he saw that and he canceled all the plans for the eight hundred million development because he figured, what do you need that for? You can just do it. Now, if that’s the case, if you don’t need, like, these super expensive soundstages to build these environments and stuff, you just do it text to, text to video, can you imagine what the cost of like making feature films would be, it’d drop significantly.
Abby: It’s so interesting you mention that actually, because I was just at Cannes Film Festival and I was in the Microsoft Café and they were presenting Copilot, where it can take, text and turn it into storyboards. It was having a little bit of difficulty doing it because it’s still in its infancy, but it is completely just around the corner. It’s incredible how much it’s going to help and streamline filmmaking.
Eli: I don’t think it’s there, by the way. And I’ll just give a quick example. I went many years ago into IBM, had the, you know, Watson thing or something like that. And one of the things they had was they had their AI, they made recipes from things that AI created. Now, I’m a self-trained chef and I know what things are supposed to look like and taste. And I was looking at this and said, yeah, you could combine those ingredients, but why? You know what I mean?
Brenda: I keep thinking and thank you for the segue, because you are a chef and I just think about quality and that’s it. You know, in terms of my analogy regarding AI, it’s like, I think the microwave is a really important tool and it is helpful. It does speed things up. It achieves things that would be pretty rough to do, I think, with other conventional tools. And I don’t think you could ever supplant the chef with the conventional tools. And that’s what I think about AI.
Eli: Well, speaking about AI and the arts, that’s interesting. So many years ago, at South Street, I got this Chinese junk. It was laying, beautiful junk, you know, made in the ‘30s, laying around in pieces. And finally, Covid came and the beginning of Covid I said, alright, I have a perfect opportunity to restore this thing because it takes a lot. So, it ended up being six months, 4 to 6 months.
And during this time, I say, oh crap, I should be doing artwork. Why am I doing this? Then I said, all right, well, I’ll figure out a way to connect this to the stainless-steel complex, you know, tensile structures I was doing. And then when I got finishing it, I look at this thing and said there’s no freaking way you can do this.
Like, until we had to start using Midjourney, and then I used the blend command, and I blended the photograph of this Chinese junk with the stainless-steel things, and it came out these ship designs that are totally crazy. I mean, you know, I have a background in ships and their restoration, and I showed that to my friends and they said, what, are you kidding me?
But then I said, oh, this is interesting. So, I’m turning this into an exhibit of this fictitious character who was an insane, you know, English designer, Naval designer, and he came up with these models. So, it’s interesting in a sense, because it’s a retro futurism exhibit that looks at the archetype of mad genius and the malleability of history, you know, because of the impact of AI. So, that’s one of the things I’m working on.
Brenda: And at the end of the day, it’s a beautiful story that you’ve created and accompanied by, again, really poetic, beautiful images of ships that may or may not ever actually sail—
Eli: No, would never sail.
Brenda: —but they don’t need to. Don’t need to at all. I love how we’ve come full circle—
Abby: Look at that.
Brenda: —to where we began.
Abby: Thank you so much, Eli, for joining us today and sharing all these thoughts. It’s been incredible. I think one of the biggest things for me is vulnerability and failing forward and having the courage to make mistakes in order to grow. So, thank you for sharing your wise words.
Brenda: Thank you, Eli.
Abby: And thanks to everyone who tuned in today. If you enjoyed it, subscribe for more episodes of Matters of Experience on Spotify or Apple. Please leave a rating and a review and share with a friend. See you next time.
Brenda: Thank you everybody, take care.
[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.
Mr. Kuslansky installations include the Yale School of Management, Sony, The Smithsonian Institution, The New York Stock Exchange, Goldman Sachs, Intel, IBM, Times Mirror Corporation, The White House Visitor’s Center, and for Frank Gehry, Foster + Partners, and other architects, designers and Institutions around the world.
[Music]
Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: This is Brenda Cowan.
Abby: Our podcast is produced by Lorem Ipsum, an experience design company headquartered in New York, and our podcast explores the creativity, innovation and psychology driving design experiences and encounters. Hello to anybody listening for the first time, and a welcome back to our regular listeners. So, Brenda, today we’re talking with Eli Kuslansky. He is the partner and chief strategist at Unified Field, an innovation and media production firm, which he founded 35 years ago. And that’s really kind of amazing. I just wanted to give you a big shout out for weathering all the storms and steering your ship—
Brenda: A lot of storms in 35 years.
Abby: —through economic waters, and the pun is intentional because you started at the South Street Seaport and did nautical antique appraisals for Sotheby’s and Christie’s. Let’s start there. Tell us a little bit more about that and where you got your start in this business.
Eli: Yikes, okay. No, no, well South Street was interesting because, when I graduated from Cooper Union, I wasn’t quite sure what the work I was doing, I really liked that much, and I wasn’t sure what to do and found this beautiful photograph of a kind of, like, a really interesting cat who is, like, playing banjo in a mix of, a shop full of ship models, which has been a big interest of mine. So, there was a photograph in a newspaper, newsletter my brother read. I looked over his shoulder and saw it.
Brenda: And that was it, that, you were hooked.
Eli: That was it. That was my first foray into museums.
Brenda: Fantastic.
Eli: Which is, you know, I always believe in this thing called the power of serendipity.
Brenda: Mmhmm.
Abby: Was it an ad in the newspaper? Was it like—
Eli: No, no, it was an article.
Abby: Just an article about South Street Seaport.
Eli: South Street, Seaport newsletter. And that was it. From there we worked for several years. You know, we did exhibits. We also sold stuff in the store, we restored and built ship models, museum ship models, and, from there I went to Ralph Appelbaum Associates, well, actually, there’s an interim between that and Ralph Appelbaum, I was a finish carpentry foreman.
Brenda: So somehow or other, in the midst of all of this, you got really interested in technology, perhaps hooked for life in technology. Where did that start? Where did that begin?
Eli: Yeah. Well, what happened was, you know, I was in construction to make a living. And at that point, I was a finish carpentry foreman, and, you know, I tired of doing that, and I wanted something cleaner, that paid better. So, I started taking CAD lessons, AutoCAD lessons, and I zoomed right through it. And then I had to get a job though I had no experience.
So, I lied. I figured the first five jobs I’d get fired from, but then at that point I’d have like five jobs on my resume. And then it was great, and then I could work through the night, you know, did my artwork during the day and I had like machines, four machine running macros. So, they let me do it.
Abby: Wow. Because you must have adopted CAD pretty early on then. What year was that?
Eli: Oh, God. I’m not saying. No, but to give you an idea of when we started the company, because we were one of the pioneers of it, that was the point when DOS was shifting over to Window, right, so it was text based. And one of our first jobs we did was to do an interface, graphic interface for the Bank of New York for their, you know, their institutional banking.
Abby: That’s crazy.
Eli: We, actually in the Window’s ward, I got to meet Bill Gates.
Abby: That was cool.
Eli: So, we realized at that point that this was going to be big.
Brenda: Let’s flow from that. Let’s talk more about media and museums, and Unified Field has been an innovator in museum-based media and technologies for a long time and absolutely still to present day. And I believe that your work is really particularly known for being very evocative, very emotion rich, and very much so centered around powerful human stories, and I’m thinking about a relatively recent project that you did, the Museum of Tolerance in LA.
I’m wondering if you can tell us about the work that you did there, because I know the project in particular, from you and am just enamored of it. Share with our listeners that particular project.
Eli: Well, the Museum of Tolerance Social Lab was a way to, you know, look at some of the pertinent and important topics surrounding things like, you know, anti-Semitism and intolerance, you know, things like that. So, we, somebody else I won’t mention who did some previous work on that for the conceptual part of it. And then we came in and this is typical in our case where we can, where we’re allowed to, we try to push the envelope.
So, to give you one example. There was a thing about points of view. So, we did this cube that was 9 feet high, 14 feet on a side, four sided, back projected. It was called Point of View, and it had directional sound, and it was kind of like a Rashomon movie in a way.
So, for example, you had, you know, let’s say a young woman is coming out to her parents that she’s gay, right, and there’s four participants. So, one side would be her point of view. It’s the same film shot four times. The other one would be the mom, the other one, the father. Another would be, I don’t know, the gardener, I forgot who it was, you know, it was something like that. So that was kind of cool.
You know, it’s tricky because museums are, you know, when they’re curatorially driven, they want to try and get as much content as they can, and it sometimes blends into being didactic. But that’s not, you know, we’re in a participatory culture in a digital society. So, it was like it has to be experiential and somewhat poetic, somewhat theatrical, even though the content has a lot of gravitas to it. So anyway, I don’t know, there was also something that they took out which was a tolerance test when they came in.
Brenda: Woah, that sounds provocative.
Eli: It was very provocative, but they wanted to take it out because one of the donors came in and found out that they’re intolerant.
Abby: So, it works then, it was working.
Eli: Yeah, sure it works.
Brenda: One would assume. I mean, the thing that I love that we’re hearing from you so much about this particular work is empathy, which is something that Abby and I’ve been hearing a lot about, and I know that in the profession, it’s a trend. It’s a real growing trend and I think that in many ways, if one can be an early adopter of empathy in exhibits, then I think that, and in this particular example as well, being very decisive and very sort of programmatic about what empathy can actually look like, how it can feel, how it can be poetic in an exhibit environment. That’s something that I really think about quite a lot when I think about your work.
Eli: Yeah, that’s interesting, well thank you. That’s a high compliment indeed. Yeah. I mean you have to make it empathetic because it has to resonate, not only just one type of audience, multi type of audiences, and otherwise it’s just technology for technology’s sake. So, you can still do the best technology and coolest technology, but if it’s not connecting with people and visitors, it’s not effective.
Abby: We also at Lorem Ipsum do a lot of work like this, and we find it challenging sometimes when potentially a client or an institution feels like it’s trying to tell a specific message or being, as you said, more didactic. And we try to often focus them more on the experience and the fact that people are coming in with different experiences themselves when they are standing in front and absorbing the messages and the emotions that are getting conveyed.
So, I’d love to hear your perspective on how you work with clients to allow them to have the courage to push the visitors into places that are uncomfortable. I mean, you mentioned the tolerance test, for example, and I think that’s exactly where we all need to be, by the way, I think if we’re just putting out things that people want and accept and have already chewed on, then, you’re not ever getting through. You need to put people in a subtly or uncomfortable sort of a place, otherwise you’re not challenging their preconceived notions of who they are and how they perceive others. So, I’d love to talk about the sort of like delicacy that’s needed when working with a client to really make something that’s worthwhile.
Eli: Well, the first part is you have to listen to them. You really have to actively listen to them and to let them know that you got what they’re saying. So, you’re not just pushing something on them. The other part of it, I think, is that you also have to present it in the format that they would get it, right, and then part of that is also making it their idea, so they own it.
You know, we also have this expression to look for the gold in the conversation because oftentimes, you know, you don’t like what they’re saying and they’re saying crazy stuff and like, you know, what are you talking about? You’re an amateur. But invariably there’s something in it that’s really valuable and that, that they’re trying to tell you and either frustrated about or they’re inspired by, and that’s the stuff you have to look for.
The other thing, too, is that it’s important to do focus groups. Because that will burst their assumptions about things, sometimes.
Brenda: It’s such a valuable thing and so rarely done, things like front end evaluation with the focus groups, interviews, town halls and sessions such as that and even formative, you know, at midpoint when you’re having to sort of really muscle through or negotiate things where the client is convinced it’s not working, you know it’s going to work. And at any rate, that’s a really critical takeaway for every client out there. Please, please consider evaluation, focus groups, testing in every possible way.
Eli: Yeah, it’s great. And we’ve done that in this, and I won’t tell you who the museums are, but there’s a story, right, so one science center, Midwest science center, wanted to do this thing, it was a totally questionable idea is the best way to describe it. But basically, what it is, is you have a screen, you listen to a bunch of scientists in a lab coat, which already boring. And then you vote on what they say. And we tell them, like, that’s not going to work. So, they said, okay, but we want to do it anyways, and they spent over $500,000 on it.
Brenda: Wow. Yeah.
Eli: Fast forward five years later, we have another museum in the east wanted to the same exact thing and we tell them, look, this XYZ science center built it. It didn’t work then, it’s not going to work now, but we want it. It’s like, okay, we’re going to do it for you, just with the caveat that don’t come back to us and say it doesn’t work and sure enough, it didn’t work.
Abby: But that’s interesting. We run into this a lot. We have the museum and the content people, and then I feel our job is to listen and understand what they’re trying to communicate and then we come up with the ways to effectively communicate it. I think part of our job is to understand how to engage the visitor in a fun and meaningful way, and that is not easy. I do not think that’s easy at all.
Brenda: No, it’s definitely not easy. And just like it’s not easy working with these clients who are, you know, might be hellbent on a particular idea that they feel strongly about. I’ll also add in one of the things that is really difficult about our whole industry, and that I also really kind of love is the level of vulnerability that people I think have to be able to embrace to do this kind of work, because when it’s done well, when it’s done with good partners, you have to take a lot of risks and you have to just simply not know.
You have to not know what it’s going to look like. And also you need to be able to really trust that things are going to connect with the visitor and that the, if it’s a collection, if it’s an idea, if it’s a story, whatever it is that the, you know, institutions about, that is so important and so valuable to you that people will be able to fall in love with it in little ways.
Abby: What’s your process? So, the listeners can understand, do you come up with how are you going to use an interactive, you know, are you looking at the story first and the best ways to tell that story? Can you just shed a little bit of light on how you guys think and how you come up with an end product.
Eli: Let’s talk about museums because brands are different. But I think in the case of museums, you really want to get a good snapshot of everybody’s P.O.V., if you will, and not just in formal meetings, you know, I know many years ago, when we first started the bank project, the senior product manager of the software project at the bank would go to their clients, and you’re talking about dealing with people at GM, at the highest level, you know, CFO, stuff like that. And in that, that’s a good case study, because we’d sit around these conference rooms and we ask them questions, blah, blah, blah. And it’s all like, you know, the guy who runs the software is interested in features, and the guy who’s the senior guy is in value, right?
So, it’s, it’s not like we speak to a client’s one language. You’re talking to 2 or 3 different languages. So, you have to be aware of that, across the body and stuff like that, you know. But what’s interesting is that most of the meeting was B.S., like you say an hour meeting, like, you know, the first 50 minutes, 45 minutes, totally useless. Right? It was at the end, the last five minutes that you would get the guy who is like the, who really knew the stuff inside and out would buttonhole you and say, look, it would really be great if we did this.
Brenda: You got the gold.
Eli: That’s the gold. So, once you have that, then you’re, you know, of course you usually work with exhibit designers and architects, stuff like that. And then you know, you got to get in alignment, the conceptual alignment. And the best time for us to come in is, especially in architectural based projects, is after they’ve done the block studies and other stuff, like in the overall arching themes and stuff, is to come in as an, early on in the conceptual phase. That’s the best benefit people get out of it because unlike the museum or the architects, oftentimes we’ll work across multiple industries or multiple cultures. So, we can bring that weight of knowledge and experience to this particular, you know, project.
Abby: People talk about listening all the time. And so when someone says, yeah, you got to listen, I think nobody’s listening to the fact what listening really means, because for me, it’s about going into a room and not having any preconceived ideas of what stories they want to tell and how you think they’re best to tell. And literally going in tabula rasa and sitting there and being completely open and hearing the client.
I’ve seen people think they’re listening, but they’ve sort of almost already know what’s going to happen or what they think it should be. And then they’re in the meeting and they leave, and it’s like they haven’t heard anything.
Brenda: Being highly present is really complicated, and part of me wonders when thinking about the client dynamic with the, I’ll call, I’ll lump us all into the creative, right, and the dynamic of creatives, I think that, man, when we are able to get into flow state, what a tremendous pleasure that is. And it really is right. It’s a state of optimal creativity, optimal experience, and it’s highly, highly present.
And it’s like ultimate uber present. You are just really in the moment, you’re creating and, right, all this great stuff is happening, and I wonder how much a client actually gets to experience that. And I think that maybe more confidence also comes from having been able to have those kinds of experiences and kind of come out on the other side, you know, you can trust yourself a little bit.
And so, I’m just sort of playing the empathy game here, really thinking about these different perspectives, because I think about most clients and you know, man, they’re constantly dealing with past and with future, and I wonder how much they get to really zone in the moment.
Eli: But I think, I think there’s an aspect to it that you really have to create a space of safety. A safe environment to be able to be vulnerable on your side and their side. So, in some ways it’s not just conversation, it’s a state of being.
Brenda: Eli, this is something that you and I have spoken about. I’ve known you for just about 18 years now, and I always love talking with you. I just love hearing where it is that you’re coming from. And I’m thinking of some recent conversations that we had actually through Covid and thereafter, and here’s the deal: you’re an artist; you’re a podcaster of Art Movez, which, listeners, I highly recommend you tune into; you’re also, as I see it, a philosopher and you—
Eli: Kind of like a street philosopher.
Brenda: Okay. But I think of you very much so as a Renaissance man, who has a lot of ideas about how it is that we’re currently operating at a time of profound growth, sort of societally, culturally, but also scientifically and a time of great discovery. And we would love to hear what’s your vision of art, culture and science in the world right now?
Eli: Yeah, that’s a great question. Well, I think the way the universe kind of works, according to my POV, is that it there is breakdowns and breakthroughs. And then you have to have a breakdown before you get a breakthrough, otherwise you have a perfect system. And the other thing that’s interesting about it; the breakthrough is at the same commensurate scale as the breakdown in terms of depth and breadth and stuff. So, the bigger the breakdown, the bigger the breakthrough, right.
So, you’re looking at now, we have an assault on democracy around the world and people’s rights. And you know, other things too. So, and it’s not quite accurate, but I, and the reason I don’t think it’s accurate, because I had this conversation with Chrissie Iles, who is the curator of the Whitney. And, you know, I said, you know, I think that we’re in a new Renaissance because of the old, you know, the plague sort of helped start the other Renaissance.
And she said, which one? You know, because it’s like there’s more than one. And you’re starting to see that, you’re starting to see it in medicine, science, you know, and the arts. You know, you look at a lot of fine art today, there’s really amazing stuff of it going around. Brilliant work. But for the most part, you know, 90% of it or more could have been done in the 1930s.
So, then the question is, what is art of our time, not art made in our time, which is how most museum, art museum describes, or, but how most museums describe it is like what is 21st century as art made in our time? But that’s not accurate. So now we’re starting to see a lot of artists experiment with it in a lot of ways and experiment with technology and, you know, whatever fabrication and other stuff like that.
Again, also, I think the best stuff still is the stuff that combines the old with the new, which is what Renaissance means. It’s a rebirth.
Abby: So, we’re quickly adopting and adapting AI all around the world in all the different industries, but we’re specifically thinking about AI tools in our work. I know as a creator you use AI in your art and exhibition concepts. And in a recent social media post you wrote, and I quote you, dealing with AI is like having an idiot savant muse who feels nothing, knows nothing, and understands nothing, like talking to the wind.
Now, I kind of do agree with this perspective, but an unfeeling idiot savant can be very useful. It’s infinitely patient, will work with me ceaselessly. It doesn’t have an ego, so it takes criticism and creative feedback really well. And since it’s been trained on a massive amounts of data, it can answer most questions and brings a wealth of context to many subjects. So, if you want it to be human, I think you’re going to be disappointed, at least right now, but if you accept it for what it is, I think it can be a really creative companion, unlike any human and, potentially soon, better. Why do you love AI and how are you using it?
Eli: Well, yeah, a lot of ways. I want to back it up a little bit about a couple of things. So ChatGPT is like talking to like a very fussy aunt sometimes like, oh no dear, you shouldn’t be saying this. So, but it’s, it’s great when you’re writing to just be able to get verbiage, right, and you can’t use what it comes out with because like generic crap, you know, so and it’s obvious, like what it does, just like image, a lot of stuff when you do text to image, it comes out this weird science fiction thing. But if you know how to use it, it’s an amazing tool.
The other thing too is that I think some of the most interesting things you can do with AI, especially in Midjourney, is not the text to image. There’s actually a command there, forward slash blend command that allows you to blend up to like five of your own images. And that’s when it gets really interesting.
Abby: And I’m really excited as well because I think it’s soon, it’s becoming with ChatGPT 4.0, multimodal. So, as we can start talking to it and things like that, instead of typing stuff, I think it’s going to start to be a guide. It’ll be a teacher. I don’t want to freak too many people out.
Brenda: Like me.
Abby: It’ll talk to you, and you can ask it questions and it’ll explain things. So, I feel like the future is getting to us quicker. I feel like this is all, AI has sped up so many things.
Eli: Look, AI is a double-edged sword. You know, there’s definitely going to be a shift in the economy in terms of, you know, I mean, you think about it; what happens when AI gets to the point where you can drive trucks around the country, that’s like tens of thousands or millions of people who do that for a living.
But the other thing it’s going to do is it’s really going to lower the cost of production, let’s say, for feature films, right? I think his name is Tyler Perry, very interesting story, and what happened with him is that he was going to spend eight hundred million dollar building 16 stages for film. And then OpenAI came out with Sora and Sora is text to video.
Now, like a lot of things AI, it’s not quite there yet. But he saw that and he canceled all the plans for the eight hundred million development because he figured, what do you need that for? You can just do it. Now, if that’s the case, if you don’t need, like, these super expensive soundstages to build these environments and stuff, you just do it text to, text to video, can you imagine what the cost of like making feature films would be, it’d drop significantly.
Abby: It’s so interesting you mention that actually, because I was just at Cannes Film Festival and I was in the Microsoft Café and they were presenting Copilot, where it can take, text and turn it into storyboards. It was having a little bit of difficulty doing it because it’s still in its infancy, but it is completely just around the corner. It’s incredible how much it’s going to help and streamline filmmaking.
Eli: I don’t think it’s there, by the way. And I’ll just give a quick example. I went many years ago into IBM, had the, you know, Watson thing or something like that. And one of the things they had was they had their AI, they made recipes from things that AI created. Now, I’m a self-trained chef and I know what things are supposed to look like and taste. And I was looking at this and said, yeah, you could combine those ingredients, but why? You know what I mean?
Brenda: I keep thinking and thank you for the segue, because you are a chef and I just think about quality and that’s it. You know, in terms of my analogy regarding AI, it’s like, I think the microwave is a really important tool and it is helpful. It does speed things up. It achieves things that would be pretty rough to do, I think, with other conventional tools. And I don’t think you could ever supplant the chef with the conventional tools. And that’s what I think about AI.
Eli: Well, speaking about AI and the arts, that’s interesting. So many years ago, at South Street, I got this Chinese junk. It was laying, beautiful junk, you know, made in the ‘30s, laying around in pieces. And finally, Covid came and the beginning of Covid I said, alright, I have a perfect opportunity to restore this thing because it takes a lot. So, it ended up being six months, 4 to 6 months.
And during this time, I say, oh crap, I should be doing artwork. Why am I doing this? Then I said, all right, well, I’ll figure out a way to connect this to the stainless-steel complex, you know, tensile structures I was doing. And then when I got finishing it, I look at this thing and said there’s no freaking way you can do this.
Like, until we had to start using Midjourney, and then I used the blend command, and I blended the photograph of this Chinese junk with the stainless-steel things, and it came out these ship designs that are totally crazy. I mean, you know, I have a background in ships and their restoration, and I showed that to my friends and they said, what, are you kidding me?
But then I said, oh, this is interesting. So, I’m turning this into an exhibit of this fictitious character who was an insane, you know, English designer, Naval designer, and he came up with these models. So, it’s interesting in a sense, because it’s a retro futurism exhibit that looks at the archetype of mad genius and the malleability of history, you know, because of the impact of AI. So, that’s one of the things I’m working on.
Brenda: And at the end of the day, it’s a beautiful story that you’ve created and accompanied by, again, really poetic, beautiful images of ships that may or may not ever actually sail—
Eli: No, would never sail.
Brenda: —but they don’t need to. Don’t need to at all. I love how we’ve come full circle—
Abby: Look at that.
Brenda: —to where we began.
Abby: Thank you so much, Eli, for joining us today and sharing all these thoughts. It’s been incredible. I think one of the biggest things for me is vulnerability and failing forward and having the courage to make mistakes in order to grow. So, thank you for sharing your wise words.
Brenda: Thank you, Eli.
Abby: And thanks to everyone who tuned in today. If you enjoyed it, subscribe for more episodes of Matters of Experience on Spotify or Apple. Please leave a rating and a review and share with a friend. See you next time.
Brenda: Thank you everybody, take care.
[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.
Breakdowns and Breakthroughs with Eli Kuslansky
Creating with Nature with Melissa McGill
[Music]
Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience, a podcast that explores the creativity, innovation and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. If you’re new, a big welcome and to our regular listeners, thank you for tuning in. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: Hello, everyone. This is Brenda Cowan.
Abby: So today we’re talking with Melissa McGill, who’s an artist, activist, and water storyteller. She’s known for collaborative, ambitious, site-specific public art projects that really explore nuanced conversations between land, water, sustainable traditions, and the interconnectedness of humankind. Spanning a variety of media including performance, photography, painting, sculpture, sound, light, video and immersive installation, Melissa has presented both independent public art projects and solo exhibitions nationally and internationally.
Abby: Melissa, welcome to the show.
Melissa: Thank you so much. I’m so happy to be here with you.
Brenda: Melissa, your work is so amazing. Abby and I are thrilled to be talking with you today.
Melissa: Thank you.
Brenda: Yeah, absolutely. But Abby and I are really curious to know why you feel creative experiences are important to communities. Can you give us an example of a particular creative experience that you think has really made a huge, a huge difference?
Melissa: I think that things that draw us into awe and wonder and a sense of really, you know, the planet we live on, our interconnectedness, those are the things that really move me. And I think there’s incredible potential to creative collaboration.
So, one work that immediately comes to mind, a work that is such an inspiration to me personally, is a work by an artist named Maria Lai. She’s a Sardinian artist. She’s passed now, but she did a project called “Legarsi alla montagna,” where she activated her entire village to be connected through a blue ribbon, basically a blue cloth ribbon that was woven through the town. And everybody got involved. And then this ribbon was brought up the mountains, so they were literally tied to themselves, to the mountain, you know, and since what’s happened in that village and how the people came together around that project was really inspiring to me.
Brenda: And why are these important? Why are these kinds of creative experiences important in the first place?
Melissa: Well, I think we live in a time that’s very deeply, deeply challenging, and we are out of balance and disconnected from each other and the environment, and this robs us of our collective agency. So, if we remember that nature is really our wisest ancestral guide, and that how deeply interconnected we all are, we can come together and celebrate the interconnectedness and find balance and a harmonious path forward. I think there’s incredible potential for that in public space.
Abby: Would you say, Melissa, when I look at your work in general, does it sort of focus on nature and bringing community together through nature, like what’s sort of your focus as you’re creating a piece?
Melissa: It’s all water and stars. Very simple. That’s why I sometimes call myself a water storyteller. I’m really, I’m a water person, and that element is just so engaging to me. We have to care about our waterways, and so exploring nuanced conversations with land, water and sustainable traditions and the interconnectedness of all beings, not just human, but all beings, is at the heart of what I am interested in doing.
But I actually would say that constellation is really a form that all of my works take. Like with a constellation, it’s one star and then a collection of stars that are telling a story or that have, that become something else. And that is what’s happening in my work all the time. We are individuals, but then coming together collectively, we can create something different.
I mean, we can all have an idea that we start with. But when you engage in real conversation with, let’s say it’s a site-specific work with other people from that place, with people who, you know, let’s say if we talk about the Venetian Lagoon, where I’ve, I’ve done a major project called Red Regatta, you know, finding others that were deeply connected to that waterway and drawing on my experience, my own long personal experience with that waterway, brought us to new places.
Abby: So, talk to us, you mentioned Red Regatta first, so I’m going to piggyback on that because it’s a phenomenal project. Can you sort of describe to our listeners the end result of what Regatta could be expressed visually? And then sort of the pathways and the different collaborations with the different groups who helped bring Red Regatta to the water.
Melissa: So Red Regatta was an unprecedented independent public intervention. It took the form of four large scale regattas that activated different areas of the Venetian Lagoon in Italy. The vela al terzo sailboats are a traditional wooden type of boat and we sailed together. Each boat had its own set of hand-painted red sails, so every sailboat was hoisted with hand-painted red sails.
This project took place in 2019. It was presented in collaboration with the Associazione Vela al Terzo Venezia, which is the sailing club of this type of boat that is in Venice, and a team of over 250 Venetian and international collaborating individuals and partners, many who have never worked together before.
And so, why red? Why these red sails that were hand-painted for each boat? Well, my idea was that red is a color that has tremendous emotional range. It represents life force, passion, energy, but also alarm and warning. So just imagine 52 Venetian traditional vela al terzo sailboats sailing through the green blue waters of the Venetian lagoon in unison against the backdrop of the city to draw attention to so many of the issues that this waterway and that Venetians are facing, whether it’s climate change, rising seas, ever increasing motorboat traffic, the problem with the cruise ships, the ever shrinking Venetian population.
One other thing that I want to mention about these boats is these vela al terzo boats, they are so beautifully adapted to the city of Venice. You can raise your sales and sail through the Venetian Lagoon, or you can lower the sails, take the mast down, and then row your way under the bridges through the city. So, what an amazing, adapted perfect tradition that needs to be celebrated and moved, and brought forward. Those are the examples that we need, right, to navigate into the future.
Brenda: How on earth, Melissa, do you coordinate and lead a project on that scale? You mentioned that there were so many different groups and individuals. What did that look like?
Melissa: Well, first of all, I had an amazing team which I’d like to give, thanks and call out to. So, I collaborated, like I said, with the Associazione Vela al Terzo Venezia under the helm of Giorgio Righetti, who was the president of the association at the time. He’s since passed on.
And we had deep partnerships with the Comune di Venezia, all kinds of organizations in Venice, Oceana, the United Nations, Sailors for the Sea. I mean, it went on and on nationally and internationally, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. We did Ocean Space. I mean, I could list so many, they’re all on the website, but I really celebrate the community.
And, I think that, you know, the, yes, I mean, there are many people when you start a project like this that will tell you that it can’t happen. I got a lot of that, like, no, this is impossible. It’s never going to work. But when you also have people who look at the project and say, wow, this would be amazing if we could do this, let’s, let’s try and then you just keep putting one foot in front of the other in dedication. You have to be incredibly resilient.
There’s an ancient Arab proverb that I always use, which is throw your heart out in front of you and run ahead to catch it. And that is basically what happened. So, there were many stages. There were many moments of like tearing your hair out like, oh my gosh, are we actually going to be able to do this? Actually, it was my project manager, Marcella Ferrari, when we were painting the sails.
She said, you’re going to look back on this and you’re going to just be astounded. And I was like so in it, I was like, okay, yeah, but we have to mix this color to go with it. Like, I was right, I was back in the details, you know? And now I look at it and even talking about it, you can probably hear in my voice like I actually, I’m kind of in awe of the fact that we did it.
I also think that all projects have divine timing. and the project timing of this project was really specific because I raised all the money for this project myself, like I do for a lot of my projects, my big projects, like Constellation and this one, I have had to fundraise and raise the money for these projects independently because I haven’t found another way to do them. And so, that is a huge responsibility. Fundraising is not my favorite part, but it’s part of what goes with, you know, something like this. And, you know, somebody said, oh, you know, we, we don’t have enough money yet, like, we really should, because the sails were expensive, and I gave them all to the sailors. They all kept, I gave them to them to keep.
So, somebody said, oh, you know, we don’t have enough money yet and we should postpone it. And I said, we absolutely cannot postpone it. I was convinced. I was like, no, it has to be now. And it was just like bigger than me, like it was just, has to be now. And then what happened right after was a series of catastrophic events.
A cruise ship, like a month or, a month or so after we sailed the last regatta in September 2019, a cruise ship crashed into the Fondamenta in Venice, something we were talking about. It’s like cruise ships in Venice. And then they had the worst flooding since the 60s, you probably remember the dramatic flooding of Venice that year. Like, you know, it was horrendous. It was like the whole city was destroyed. And then Covid. So, if it hadn’t happened then, we probably wouldn’t have done it.
Brenda: You are definitely in sync with, I’m sure, a lot of different forces, because what an uplifting, positive time of beauty you created in the city. And, you know, thinking about your connectivity with things. Let’s talk a little bit more about how your work incorporates and resonates with nature. So, you’ve mentioned deep listening. It’s, something that you encourage, deep, deep listening to nature as you create.
And this is really, it’s related to a lot of movements that we’re hearing about now, such as, you know, being very mindful, highly present, fostering deep connectivity through mindfulness and active listening. Tell us what deep listening means to you. What can we learn from it?
Melissa: I think that the deep listening is not just to, well, it’s to nature, but it’s also to each other. So how can we come together to address these urgent local and global issues creatively and collaboratively? This is the question that I think about. Like, you know, and I would say that seeking out authentic listening collaboration is so important because there’s a lot of people that talk about collaboration, but, you know, when you’re having a conversation, how much are you listening and how much are you talking? You know, also with the non-human, so that’s, you know, the other, I never know what to call that, it’s like other beings, other forces, because I always think of these projects as being collaborations with other people and communities, but also with the elements.
Abby: Yeah.
Melissa: And with the natural forces. I mean, you can’t sail a regatta without the wind and the water. But I think meaningful shared experiences that are designed to have lasting positive impact, it’s like if we shift the perspective and think about how to have these conversations in ways that are going to bring people together in joy and wonder with lasting positive impact, which I really build the projects around, all of them, then, you know, there’s a lot we can do with that.
Abby: So, some of your, you work in what I’d describe as unconventional places. For our listeners, what do you think, Melissa, some of the pros and cons are, when considering creating these larger public works?
Melissa: I think it’s really important that you really have an authentic relationship to the place. Like I make work where I live or where I have lived, or where I know people. Sometimes I go into new communities, but only with a tremendous amount of time with immersing myself in that, like, I am not going to be the artist who drops into a place and, you know, says, okay, let’s just make this, because it’s not going to have the same relationship to the place.
You know, I need that time to connect. Heart connect. It’s about heart connection. So, you know, a project in the Hudson River. I live on the shores of the Hudson River, a project in Venice, I lived in Venice. I have a deep community there. There’s a lot of places I haven’t been that I’d love to do projects, but it would take time to have a, build a relationship, you know.
One site that I take with me and I probably could do, you know, would be engaged to do a project anywhere there is this condition is, I am a person who is incredibly drawn to estuaries. Estuaries are places where, you know, as we know, there is saltwater and freshwater mixing. There are often marshes. There’s incredible biodiversity in those places. And they’re places that are between places that are very important in the world. And so, I do think I could go to any estuary and find my footing pretty quickly.
But that’s just like I have a very natural draw to that. But I think that if someone is, you know, planning to work site-specifically, I just hope they would do the work to really find out what is that place.
Abby: I do just want to build on a wonderful estuary where I grew up. I grew up on the Wirral, which is north of Wales and south of Liverpool. It’s a little peninsula there, so there’s an estuary which is now getting silted up. About 100 years ago boats would go up and down. So, from Parkgate is the name of the, of the town there, you can see over this beautiful estuary at all the biodiversity, over the River Dee there to Wales, and it would be an amazing place for you to do something.
Brenda: Put it on your list.
Melissa, let’s talk about time. A lot of your work connects the past, the present and the future. Why is this theme so central to your work, and do you ever think about permanence?
Melissa: I don’t think there’s any such thing as permanence. I also think we have to really get into the concept that time is not linear. It is more of a spiral, and we can really learn from the past. We can learn what shouldn’t be repeated, we can learn what is really sustainable and in right relationship to the planet we live on.
Many indigenous communities have the wisdom of that, and we need to remember what our interconnected relationship is there. So, I think that my connection of past, present and future is really like, what can we bring forward, like in the case of Red Regatta, bringing forward this tradition that is in harmony with the environment that it’s based in, is a good idea.
So, you know, we’ll think about that in connecting past, present and future. And also, you know, really, I love involve being the youth in the projects. I love involving, like I do family workshops and I involve people of all ages in the projects because we are all in this together and the youth are the future. And so, we really have to be including them in what’s happening and give agency again, inspire agency.
And that goes back to that theme of like climate fatigue and like, how can we come up with creative ways to navigate forward that are going to be in the interest of everyone eventually, hopefully.
Abby: Do you think we, we as humans ever learn? Because it seems to me that if we could all just look at the past, then we wouldn’t even be making some of the mistakes we’re currently making, let alone all the ones are going to be making in the future. Do you ever feel a little like this is just part of being human, and we’re constantly going to repeat the same mistakes?
Melissa: It goes a little bit to this idea of disconnection. I think that our culture and capitalism relies heavily on distraction, distraction from core values and the connection to the environment. And so, to remember that in any way we can is going to be a positive thing.
Brenda: Melissa, a lot of artists are talking about sustainability. When we say sustainability, what do you translate that to mean in your work?
Melissa: I think that sustainability is finding ways to be and to like, it brings up a lot of verbs for me, like, actually, like action, like how can we be sustainable not just for the humans, but for all of the beings that live on the planet. So, for example, you know, if we make decisions based on what’s best for everyone, that’s sustainability.
I mean, that’s the way I think about it. So, if something is in, as I was saying before, right, relationship to, you know, nature, to all the beings that are human and, and more than human, there’s all different ways of saying it. I mean, we’re never, but we can’t make any gross generalizations about what’s right for everyone. But I think that’s the thing that has to really be part of the conversation. and that’s one of the reasons I really care about beauty. Beauty in the projects is because beauty brings heart connection, and you don’t need language.
Abby: So, if you’re using beauty to move people, to make them rethink nature, why is nature on its own not enough for people? Why does it not connect naturally to us, do you think? Why are we happy living in our cement jungle?
Melissa: I think again, it goes back to distraction and the phones and the smartphones and the whole culture being in that, people aren’t, you know, are really in that. I know it’s been a useful tool. I’m not someone who is against technology, but I think we really need to think about the impacts that it’s had on people and how they’re connecting to the world that they are in.
Like, for example, when I was doing this project called Constellation. Constellation was a large-scale project around the ruins of Bannerman’s Castle on Pollepel Island in the Hudson River. Every evening as the sun went down, these starry lights emerged one by one with the stars in the night sky, and they created a new constellation connecting past and present, light and dark, heaven and earth. And it references a Lenape belief about Opi Temakan which is the “White Road” or the “Milky Way” connecting this world with the next.
So, what this was, was I mounted on this island 40 to 80ft poles, and at the top of each pole was a solar powered LED., so you would see this kind of vertical rhythm of these poles during the day. And then as the sun went down, the light would fade and the poles would disappear and these starry lights would come on one by one in the night sky and mix with the stars, actual stars and the moon and connect you back to this larger sense of this landscape. And out of the, just the narrative of this folly, of this Bannerman’s Castle, which was a, built by an Army surplus dealer, a Scottish immigrant, in the turn of the century who kind of turned it into an advertisement.
It’s like a folly. So started, and a lot of it has fallen down, which is why it’s kind of a ruin. And so, it’s part of the New York State Parks Department, Hudson Highlands State Park. So, going back into that site and bringing that connection to the larger landscape, we did boat tours all the time. I collaborated with the Bannerman Castle Trust to do these boat tours, which would bring people out on to the river in the evening, which hardly anybody does, and go to see the stars come on.
And so, one experience that I had that was so moving and I would, I will never forget it, was every time I did an artist led tour, which was often I would experience the same thing, which was we would have this, the public on the boat. And every evening as the sun went down and these points started to light one by one, over the 15 minutes or so that they lit, people would see one come on, somebody would say, there’s the first one or whatever, and then everybody would get out their phones and start to try to take pictures.
But it was night time on the river, and these were solar powered points of light like stars, so you couldn’t capture it very well with the phone, so you had no choice but to put your phone down, put it back in your pocket or your bag and just be there with each other and the smell of the river and the wind on your face, breeze or whatever it was. Sometimes, you know, and different phases of the moon and everyone would stop talking. Or if they talked, they would just whisper. It was like being in a cathedral or something. It was like being really there and present and connected, and it was incredible. So that was a gift.
Abby: So be in the moment. Put the phone down, be present.
Brenda: And listen.
Abby: Well. Thank you, Melissa, for joining us today. Yeah, thanks for sharing your work, the tenacity needed to create these projects and, the importance of nature for all of us and how at our core, we’re very much still part of the world we live in, dependent on it and need to take care of it. So, thank you so much for sharing today.
Melissa: Thank you.
Abby: And thanks to everyone who tuned in today. If you enjoyed it, subscribe for more episodes of Matters of Experience on Spotify or Apple. Please leave a rating and a review and share with a friend. See you next time!
Brenda: Thank you Melissa. 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.
[Music]
Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience, a podcast that explores the creativity, innovation and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. If you’re new, a big welcome and to our regular listeners, thank you for tuning in. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: Hello, everyone. This is Brenda Cowan.
Abby: So today we’re talking with Melissa McGill, who’s an artist, activist, and water storyteller. She’s known for collaborative, ambitious, site-specific public art projects that really explore nuanced conversations between land, water, sustainable traditions, and the interconnectedness of humankind. Spanning a variety of media including performance, photography, painting, sculpture, sound, light, video and immersive installation, Melissa has presented both independent public art projects and solo exhibitions nationally and internationally.
Abby: Melissa, welcome to the show.
Melissa: Thank you so much. I’m so happy to be here with you.
Brenda: Melissa, your work is so amazing. Abby and I are thrilled to be talking with you today.
Melissa: Thank you.
Brenda: Yeah, absolutely. But Abby and I are really curious to know why you feel creative experiences are important to communities. Can you give us an example of a particular creative experience that you think has really made a huge, a huge difference?
Melissa: I think that things that draw us into awe and wonder and a sense of really, you know, the planet we live on, our interconnectedness, those are the things that really move me. And I think there’s incredible potential to creative collaboration.
So, one work that immediately comes to mind, a work that is such an inspiration to me personally, is a work by an artist named Maria Lai. She’s a Sardinian artist. She’s passed now, but she did a project called “Legarsi alla montagna,” where she activated her entire village to be connected through a blue ribbon, basically a blue cloth ribbon that was woven through the town. And everybody got involved. And then this ribbon was brought up the mountains, so they were literally tied to themselves, to the mountain, you know, and since what’s happened in that village and how the people came together around that project was really inspiring to me.
Brenda: And why are these important? Why are these kinds of creative experiences important in the first place?
Melissa: Well, I think we live in a time that’s very deeply, deeply challenging, and we are out of balance and disconnected from each other and the environment, and this robs us of our collective agency. So, if we remember that nature is really our wisest ancestral guide, and that how deeply interconnected we all are, we can come together and celebrate the interconnectedness and find balance and a harmonious path forward. I think there’s incredible potential for that in public space.
Abby: Would you say, Melissa, when I look at your work in general, does it sort of focus on nature and bringing community together through nature, like what’s sort of your focus as you’re creating a piece?
Melissa: It’s all water and stars. Very simple. That’s why I sometimes call myself a water storyteller. I’m really, I’m a water person, and that element is just so engaging to me. We have to care about our waterways, and so exploring nuanced conversations with land, water and sustainable traditions and the interconnectedness of all beings, not just human, but all beings, is at the heart of what I am interested in doing.
But I actually would say that constellation is really a form that all of my works take. Like with a constellation, it’s one star and then a collection of stars that are telling a story or that have, that become something else. And that is what’s happening in my work all the time. We are individuals, but then coming together collectively, we can create something different.
I mean, we can all have an idea that we start with. But when you engage in real conversation with, let’s say it’s a site-specific work with other people from that place, with people who, you know, let’s say if we talk about the Venetian Lagoon, where I’ve, I’ve done a major project called Red Regatta, you know, finding others that were deeply connected to that waterway and drawing on my experience, my own long personal experience with that waterway, brought us to new places.
Abby: So, talk to us, you mentioned Red Regatta first, so I’m going to piggyback on that because it’s a phenomenal project. Can you sort of describe to our listeners the end result of what Regatta could be expressed visually? And then sort of the pathways and the different collaborations with the different groups who helped bring Red Regatta to the water.
Melissa: So Red Regatta was an unprecedented independent public intervention. It took the form of four large scale regattas that activated different areas of the Venetian Lagoon in Italy. The vela al terzo sailboats are a traditional wooden type of boat and we sailed together. Each boat had its own set of hand-painted red sails, so every sailboat was hoisted with hand-painted red sails.
This project took place in 2019. It was presented in collaboration with the Associazione Vela al Terzo Venezia, which is the sailing club of this type of boat that is in Venice, and a team of over 250 Venetian and international collaborating individuals and partners, many who have never worked together before.
And so, why red? Why these red sails that were hand-painted for each boat? Well, my idea was that red is a color that has tremendous emotional range. It represents life force, passion, energy, but also alarm and warning. So just imagine 52 Venetian traditional vela al terzo sailboats sailing through the green blue waters of the Venetian lagoon in unison against the backdrop of the city to draw attention to so many of the issues that this waterway and that Venetians are facing, whether it’s climate change, rising seas, ever increasing motorboat traffic, the problem with the cruise ships, the ever shrinking Venetian population.
One other thing that I want to mention about these boats is these vela al terzo boats, they are so beautifully adapted to the city of Venice. You can raise your sales and sail through the Venetian Lagoon, or you can lower the sails, take the mast down, and then row your way under the bridges through the city. So, what an amazing, adapted perfect tradition that needs to be celebrated and moved, and brought forward. Those are the examples that we need, right, to navigate into the future.
Brenda: How on earth, Melissa, do you coordinate and lead a project on that scale? You mentioned that there were so many different groups and individuals. What did that look like?
Melissa: Well, first of all, I had an amazing team which I’d like to give, thanks and call out to. So, I collaborated, like I said, with the Associazione Vela al Terzo Venezia under the helm of Giorgio Righetti, who was the president of the association at the time. He’s since passed on.
And we had deep partnerships with the Comune di Venezia, all kinds of organizations in Venice, Oceana, the United Nations, Sailors for the Sea. I mean, it went on and on nationally and internationally, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. We did Ocean Space. I mean, I could list so many, they’re all on the website, but I really celebrate the community.
And, I think that, you know, the, yes, I mean, there are many people when you start a project like this that will tell you that it can’t happen. I got a lot of that, like, no, this is impossible. It’s never going to work. But when you also have people who look at the project and say, wow, this would be amazing if we could do this, let’s, let’s try and then you just keep putting one foot in front of the other in dedication. You have to be incredibly resilient.
There’s an ancient Arab proverb that I always use, which is throw your heart out in front of you and run ahead to catch it. And that is basically what happened. So, there were many stages. There were many moments of like tearing your hair out like, oh my gosh, are we actually going to be able to do this? Actually, it was my project manager, Marcella Ferrari, when we were painting the sails.
She said, you’re going to look back on this and you’re going to just be astounded. And I was like so in it, I was like, okay, yeah, but we have to mix this color to go with it. Like, I was right, I was back in the details, you know? And now I look at it and even talking about it, you can probably hear in my voice like I actually, I’m kind of in awe of the fact that we did it.
I also think that all projects have divine timing. and the project timing of this project was really specific because I raised all the money for this project myself, like I do for a lot of my projects, my big projects, like Constellation and this one, I have had to fundraise and raise the money for these projects independently because I haven’t found another way to do them. And so, that is a huge responsibility. Fundraising is not my favorite part, but it’s part of what goes with, you know, something like this. And, you know, somebody said, oh, you know, we, we don’t have enough money yet, like, we really should, because the sails were expensive, and I gave them all to the sailors. They all kept, I gave them to them to keep.
So, somebody said, oh, you know, we don’t have enough money yet and we should postpone it. And I said, we absolutely cannot postpone it. I was convinced. I was like, no, it has to be now. And it was just like bigger than me, like it was just, has to be now. And then what happened right after was a series of catastrophic events.
A cruise ship, like a month or, a month or so after we sailed the last regatta in September 2019, a cruise ship crashed into the Fondamenta in Venice, something we were talking about. It’s like cruise ships in Venice. And then they had the worst flooding since the 60s, you probably remember the dramatic flooding of Venice that year. Like, you know, it was horrendous. It was like the whole city was destroyed. And then Covid. So, if it hadn’t happened then, we probably wouldn’t have done it.
Brenda: You are definitely in sync with, I’m sure, a lot of different forces, because what an uplifting, positive time of beauty you created in the city. And, you know, thinking about your connectivity with things. Let’s talk a little bit more about how your work incorporates and resonates with nature. So, you’ve mentioned deep listening. It’s, something that you encourage, deep, deep listening to nature as you create.
And this is really, it’s related to a lot of movements that we’re hearing about now, such as, you know, being very mindful, highly present, fostering deep connectivity through mindfulness and active listening. Tell us what deep listening means to you. What can we learn from it?
Melissa: I think that the deep listening is not just to, well, it’s to nature, but it’s also to each other. So how can we come together to address these urgent local and global issues creatively and collaboratively? This is the question that I think about. Like, you know, and I would say that seeking out authentic listening collaboration is so important because there’s a lot of people that talk about collaboration, but, you know, when you’re having a conversation, how much are you listening and how much are you talking? You know, also with the non-human, so that’s, you know, the other, I never know what to call that, it’s like other beings, other forces, because I always think of these projects as being collaborations with other people and communities, but also with the elements.
Abby: Yeah.
Melissa: And with the natural forces. I mean, you can’t sail a regatta without the wind and the water. But I think meaningful shared experiences that are designed to have lasting positive impact, it’s like if we shift the perspective and think about how to have these conversations in ways that are going to bring people together in joy and wonder with lasting positive impact, which I really build the projects around, all of them, then, you know, there’s a lot we can do with that.
Abby: So, some of your, you work in what I’d describe as unconventional places. For our listeners, what do you think, Melissa, some of the pros and cons are, when considering creating these larger public works?
Melissa: I think it’s really important that you really have an authentic relationship to the place. Like I make work where I live or where I have lived, or where I know people. Sometimes I go into new communities, but only with a tremendous amount of time with immersing myself in that, like, I am not going to be the artist who drops into a place and, you know, says, okay, let’s just make this, because it’s not going to have the same relationship to the place.
You know, I need that time to connect. Heart connect. It’s about heart connection. So, you know, a project in the Hudson River. I live on the shores of the Hudson River, a project in Venice, I lived in Venice. I have a deep community there. There’s a lot of places I haven’t been that I’d love to do projects, but it would take time to have a, build a relationship, you know.
One site that I take with me and I probably could do, you know, would be engaged to do a project anywhere there is this condition is, I am a person who is incredibly drawn to estuaries. Estuaries are places where, you know, as we know, there is saltwater and freshwater mixing. There are often marshes. There’s incredible biodiversity in those places. And they’re places that are between places that are very important in the world. And so, I do think I could go to any estuary and find my footing pretty quickly.
But that’s just like I have a very natural draw to that. But I think that if someone is, you know, planning to work site-specifically, I just hope they would do the work to really find out what is that place.
Abby: I do just want to build on a wonderful estuary where I grew up. I grew up on the Wirral, which is north of Wales and south of Liverpool. It’s a little peninsula there, so there’s an estuary which is now getting silted up. About 100 years ago boats would go up and down. So, from Parkgate is the name of the, of the town there, you can see over this beautiful estuary at all the biodiversity, over the River Dee there to Wales, and it would be an amazing place for you to do something.
Brenda: Put it on your list.
Melissa, let’s talk about time. A lot of your work connects the past, the present and the future. Why is this theme so central to your work, and do you ever think about permanence?
Melissa: I don’t think there’s any such thing as permanence. I also think we have to really get into the concept that time is not linear. It is more of a spiral, and we can really learn from the past. We can learn what shouldn’t be repeated, we can learn what is really sustainable and in right relationship to the planet we live on.
Many indigenous communities have the wisdom of that, and we need to remember what our interconnected relationship is there. So, I think that my connection of past, present and future is really like, what can we bring forward, like in the case of Red Regatta, bringing forward this tradition that is in harmony with the environment that it’s based in, is a good idea.
So, you know, we’ll think about that in connecting past, present and future. And also, you know, really, I love involve being the youth in the projects. I love involving, like I do family workshops and I involve people of all ages in the projects because we are all in this together and the youth are the future. And so, we really have to be including them in what’s happening and give agency again, inspire agency.
And that goes back to that theme of like climate fatigue and like, how can we come up with creative ways to navigate forward that are going to be in the interest of everyone eventually, hopefully.
Abby: Do you think we, we as humans ever learn? Because it seems to me that if we could all just look at the past, then we wouldn’t even be making some of the mistakes we’re currently making, let alone all the ones are going to be making in the future. Do you ever feel a little like this is just part of being human, and we’re constantly going to repeat the same mistakes?
Melissa: It goes a little bit to this idea of disconnection. I think that our culture and capitalism relies heavily on distraction, distraction from core values and the connection to the environment. And so, to remember that in any way we can is going to be a positive thing.
Brenda: Melissa, a lot of artists are talking about sustainability. When we say sustainability, what do you translate that to mean in your work?
Melissa: I think that sustainability is finding ways to be and to like, it brings up a lot of verbs for me, like, actually, like action, like how can we be sustainable not just for the humans, but for all of the beings that live on the planet. So, for example, you know, if we make decisions based on what’s best for everyone, that’s sustainability.
I mean, that’s the way I think about it. So, if something is in, as I was saying before, right, relationship to, you know, nature, to all the beings that are human and, and more than human, there’s all different ways of saying it. I mean, we’re never, but we can’t make any gross generalizations about what’s right for everyone. But I think that’s the thing that has to really be part of the conversation. and that’s one of the reasons I really care about beauty. Beauty in the projects is because beauty brings heart connection, and you don’t need language.
Abby: So, if you’re using beauty to move people, to make them rethink nature, why is nature on its own not enough for people? Why does it not connect naturally to us, do you think? Why are we happy living in our cement jungle?
Melissa: I think again, it goes back to distraction and the phones and the smartphones and the whole culture being in that, people aren’t, you know, are really in that. I know it’s been a useful tool. I’m not someone who is against technology, but I think we really need to think about the impacts that it’s had on people and how they’re connecting to the world that they are in.
Like, for example, when I was doing this project called Constellation. Constellation was a large-scale project around the ruins of Bannerman’s Castle on Pollepel Island in the Hudson River. Every evening as the sun went down, these starry lights emerged one by one with the stars in the night sky, and they created a new constellation connecting past and present, light and dark, heaven and earth. And it references a Lenape belief about Opi Temakan which is the “White Road” or the “Milky Way” connecting this world with the next.
So, what this was, was I mounted on this island 40 to 80ft poles, and at the top of each pole was a solar powered LED., so you would see this kind of vertical rhythm of these poles during the day. And then as the sun went down, the light would fade and the poles would disappear and these starry lights would come on one by one in the night sky and mix with the stars, actual stars and the moon and connect you back to this larger sense of this landscape. And out of the, just the narrative of this folly, of this Bannerman’s Castle, which was a, built by an Army surplus dealer, a Scottish immigrant, in the turn of the century who kind of turned it into an advertisement.
It’s like a folly. So started, and a lot of it has fallen down, which is why it’s kind of a ruin. And so, it’s part of the New York State Parks Department, Hudson Highlands State Park. So, going back into that site and bringing that connection to the larger landscape, we did boat tours all the time. I collaborated with the Bannerman Castle Trust to do these boat tours, which would bring people out on to the river in the evening, which hardly anybody does, and go to see the stars come on.
And so, one experience that I had that was so moving and I would, I will never forget it, was every time I did an artist led tour, which was often I would experience the same thing, which was we would have this, the public on the boat. And every evening as the sun went down and these points started to light one by one, over the 15 minutes or so that they lit, people would see one come on, somebody would say, there’s the first one or whatever, and then everybody would get out their phones and start to try to take pictures.
But it was night time on the river, and these were solar powered points of light like stars, so you couldn’t capture it very well with the phone, so you had no choice but to put your phone down, put it back in your pocket or your bag and just be there with each other and the smell of the river and the wind on your face, breeze or whatever it was. Sometimes, you know, and different phases of the moon and everyone would stop talking. Or if they talked, they would just whisper. It was like being in a cathedral or something. It was like being really there and present and connected, and it was incredible. So that was a gift.
Abby: So be in the moment. Put the phone down, be present.
Brenda: And listen.
Abby: Well. Thank you, Melissa, for joining us today. Yeah, thanks for sharing your work, the tenacity needed to create these projects and, the importance of nature for all of us and how at our core, we’re very much still part of the world we live in, dependent on it and need to take care of it. So, thank you so much for sharing today.
Melissa: Thank you.
Abby: And thanks to everyone who tuned in today. If you enjoyed it, subscribe for more episodes of Matters of Experience on Spotify or Apple. Please leave a rating and a review and share with a friend. See you next time!
Brenda: Thank you Melissa. 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.
Creating with Nature with Melissa McGill
What is an Experience? with Tim McNeil
His recent publication “The Exhibition and Experience Design Handbook” pulls from his extensive experience as an educator, designer, and contributor to building three major museums: the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center and Getty Villa, and the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art.
He has been recognized for design excellence by the Society for Experiential Graphic Design, the University and College Designers Association, the American Alliance of Museums, and the International Museum Design and Communication Association. Tim is a frequent speaker and writer on museum and design issues. His award-winning design work is archived at the Getty Research Institute and has been featured in multiple publications.
Tim McNeil | University of California Davis | blooloop 50 2023
The Exhibition and Experience Design Handbook – 9781538157985
The Transformational Impact of Exhibition and Experience Design – SEGD
[Music]
Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: Hello, this is Brenda Cowan.
Abby: This is produced by Lorem Ipsum, an experience design company headquartered in New York, and our podcast explores the creativity, innovation and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. Hello to anybody listening for the first time, and welcome back to our regular listeners. So, Brenda, today we’re talking with a guest Blooloop named among the top 50 Museum Influencers for 2023, who recently published the Exhibition and Experience Design Handbook, which really is a must read and reference book for all designers. I cannot encourage you enough to go online and buy it. It’s an amazing guide for our practice. And if you haven’t guessed yet, we’d like to welcome to today’s show, Tim McNeil. Tim, welcome.
Tim: Thanks for that great introduction, Abby. Hi, Brenda. It’s so, so great to be here. So, admire what you’re doing and how your show has contributed to the field. So, thanks for having me.
Brenda: Well, Tim, I love your book. And, you know, it’s funny, I remember hanging out with you weeks before Covid changed the world, and you were sharing with me your journey of writing this book, and I was so excited in those early days for what was to come and, Tim, you so delivered.
Tim: Thank you.
Brenda: So, like me, you’re an educator. You are a professor of design. You are the director of the Design Museum at the University of California, Davis. And before that, you spent 30 years as a practicing exhibition designer working for major museums like the J. Paul Getty. Tim, what are the most vital elements from your years of practice that you make sure to pass on to your students in the classroom?
Tim: Yeah, no, I think, I mean, the key one is collaboration. In the classroom, I always encourage students to work together, because, you know, that’s how, you know, exhibition teams work, right? We don’t do anything in isolation. A level of, I suppose, installing in my in students that ambiguity is okay, because often when we’re working on any project, right, we don’t know where things are going to go sometimes.
We’re going to pitch ideas. We’re going to try and, you know, conceive of things to get buy-in from various people. And sometimes that works and sometimes that doesn’t. Sometimes we come up with an amazing design for something and it gets critiqued, it gets changed, it has to move on. And I think for, in the classroom space, that’s sometimes quite difficult for students to grapple with, that they could spend a long time on something and then it may not actually get, you know, realized in the same way that they envisioned it.
And the other is just creativity. I’m a huge believer in creativity, that that is the one key thing that makes designers, designers, right, that we can have all the amazing tools we want in the world, but if we don’t have a creative response or something unique to present that information or those ideas, and we can’t think of things in a highly creative way, then that doesn’t do much.
So, to me, the designer brings this level of creativity to any project and thinks about things in a way that maybe has never been thought of before.
Brenda: So, this is something that is, it’s actually it’s been a little bit of a debate. Now, I’m a firm believer that you can teach creativity, or I should say that you can foster its growth and foster its presence within an individual. What do you think—
Abby: Oh, hang on, this is going to be interesting.
Brenda: Tim, can you teach creativity?
Tim: I think you can teach tools to be more creative, whether those will all get to the end result you want, not for everybody. I mean I make a point in the classes I teach, we do warm-up exercises that are about just thinking freely and about making what I call, by associations. So, taking one thing and taking another and trying to put them together and seeing what you get.
So, there are tools you can use, you know, and there are lots of, you know, resources for this about how to be creative. But I think it’s practicing that so that you have a set of tools to rely on that help you. And also, part of that creative process is multiplicity of ideas, right? Not settling on one but exploring the full gamut of options. So yeah, I think you can offer the tools and ways of becoming more creative.
Brenda: Build the muscle.
Abby: Yeah, I totally agree with that, and just touching on one other thing that you mentioned, which is really important to me, is this idea of the multiplicity of ideas and that generating new versions and different versions, because settling on the first idea, I think, doesn’t mean that that idea has had that robust testing that needs to happen in the ideation process.
That’s the point of evolving ideas and exploring everything. And I think a lot of designers pause, potentially, when they feel like they’ve found it immediately, instead of really continuing to iterate, Tim, so it’s nice to hear that you’re teaching your students that that’s really invaluable, because I think collaboration and iteration are the two things that designers really need to get used to and understand that their idea is to be contributed to a pool of other collaborators, to grow and build something that’s made collectively.
Tim: Completely agree, and I suppose another part of it is originality. And I don’t believe—it’s hard to find anything that’s truly original. So, I wouldn’t go out and say that you can always come with original ideas, but I do think you’re always striving to think about how can you at least improve what’s already there?
Brenda: Innovate.
Abby: Move it forward. Yeah. So, changing our focus for a second, experiences, whatever they are, so from entertainment to cultural events sort of reflect our society which is ever changing. What do you think have been some of the most significant social changes, let’s say in the last decade, and how is our industry addressing them?
Tim: Well, we always talk about technology. Okay. It’s been a big part of this which has really impacted our culture, or at least the way we do things within exhibitions. Also, a big change, right, is, is a focus on, much more on audience, and understanding everyone’s needs. And we’re not there yet with that, but we’re certainly a lot further along than we were.
And I certainly, when I’m teaching and, in my work, always put audience at the forefront, audience and story, actually narrative at the forefront. So, I think that’s the key thing. And also, just an awareness of a complex world that we’re living in and that awareness, and I see it, you know, certainly in my students, in terms of how there’s so much more sort of understanding of the complexity of the world in terms of, you know, the climate crisis, in terms of inclusion and equity, in terms of understanding what everyone around them needs. And then, so I think that’s a, definitely a huge, sort of shift or advancement as well in that area.
Brenda: One of the great things about having students is, is that they are always bringing society to you.
Tim: I always say that I’m learning more from them than I can ever really teach. You know, right? I mean you’re there as a facilitator to get the conversation going and the dialog going, but really they’re learning from each other more than they’re necessary learning from the instructor, and I think that’s key. But I, yeah, I absolutely agree with that.
Brenda: Well, it’s the mark of a really great educator. So, let’s talk about the book again. Just like my graduate program it’s titled Exhibition and Experience Design. What’s the difference between the two in your take, like why is there an and?
Tim: One of the main goals of the book for me was to combine somewhat equally, the sort of history of exhibition and experience making, the theoretical sort of underpinnings of the discipline, and then the more practice based of how do we do it? You know, the, the words we use to describe the field, the way we do things have evolved.
Certainly, the word exhibition is one that, you know, has evolved over time to include so many more things. To me, exhibition, or exhibition as a medium because exhibitions are everywhere and anywhere, right? You can find an exhibition, you know, in, in a street, in a museum, in your home, if you choose to create one. I think whenever we’re staging any kind of environment, we’re creating an exhibition. Experience, of course, is one that’s being used now very loosely within multiple sort of sectors to describe experience making, whether that’s not just within exhibitions but also within, you know, digital media or UI/UX, sort of human centered design, all those other areas too. So, the books attempting to try and, you know, clarify some of that or link these two together, that experiences can happen in many, many places. But the, it’s the, you know, exhibition making is certainly one of the main drivers to how you get there.
Brenda: I’m listening to you, and I’m really appreciating the way, the sort of, the broad way in which you’re really describing experience and the scope that you’re including and in addition to the physical space as well, listening to you, it’s so clear that also when we’re talking about experience, we’re talking about the heart space, we’re talking about emotional experience, we’re talking about intellectual experience in addition to that physical experience, which, right, has been the convention for so long. But now we’re really, really giving, I think, you know, sizable, necessary merit to the, the, the emotional and the intellectual.
Tim: Yeah, very much so. And the book touches on that and goes into sort of the more sort of philosophical sense of what an experience is, as much as you’re saying about the emotional and the more psychological, right, of, of how we, how we have an experience, what does an experience mean. You know, it also touches a lot, right, on memory. Right? What are, what are those moments that we’re creating that we remember? Are those, what’s the, what’s the value in memory to an experience too is of real interest to me because I think when we walk away from experiencing, what do we walk away with? What do we hold on to and what do we let go?
And so, as I think about designing an exhibition, I’m always thinking about this pacing through a space and how these moments, these experiences can be revealed. So, you know, I like to think of it in terms of, you offer an attract to somebody, which then you reveal something, and then you offer a reward. And I think about that a lot in terms of creating experiences. Upfront, you’re pulling people in. You’re then maybe revealing something they’ve not known before or are seeing something for the first time and then rewarding them something at the end.
So, there’s this experience to dissecting it, what are the components of an experience and how do they map onto designing an exhibition?
Abby: That’s really interesting because we think about it in a very similar way in terms of attracting someone, gaining their interest, revealing something new about something they thought they already knew, or a new topic they haven’t seen, and then connecting with them on an emotional and an educational level and an entertaining level, and then providing, I guess, it’s interesting you call it a reward, we always think about it as, and maybe this is because we do a lot of history museums and a lot of heavy subject matter. So, it’s always that space for repose, a place for quiet thought and a place to think. One of the chapters is Once Upon a Timeline. I have mixed relationship with timelines because they are so wonderful in their organization of things for people, but at the same time can be extremely limiting. So can you sort of chat through from a design perspective—
Brenda: Sell Abby on the timeline.
Tim: Okay. And I think that, you know, as you picked up there, the chapters in the book, I try to come up with kind of enticing, should we say more provocative chapters to kind of pull you in, just like you just did then, Abby, with the timeline. Because in some ways, I then refute that the timeline is only one way, of course, of telling a story.
And even the timeline as a concept, right, means different things to different people in different parts of the world. You know, some timelines are linear, many are cyclical, others don’t exist at all. Like the idea that we have a beginning and an end. So, I think that it’s there a bit as a provocation, but also to kind of say it’s a trope, okay, that we’ve used to tell stories for millennia, one that we rely on heavily because it’s kind of easy to do it that way.
You’ve got a beginning, a middle, and an end, or at least you’ve got a linear path to follow. So, the chapter does kind of take that on and looks at well, what does that mean to tell a story? Like if we think about it as being, as linear, how do we think about an experience playing out in different ways as well?
Certainly, I’m interested in, and the chapter picks up on it, in how we move people through a space, and that the movement through the space becomes a storytelling device. It’s not necessarily constructed on time, but more on movement or the journey. So yes, timelines are great, but they offer limitations. And, you know, the sort of chrono thematic approach to an exhibition, right, where you have a timeline as the main construct that ties it all together, but there are these deviations to different themes from it, can be a very powerful way of doing it, so that the thematic approach becomes equally prevalent. And certainly, a thematic division of an exhibition or telling a story allows for a more inclusive story to be told, frankly, you know, the timeline locks you into something that, you know, that is easier, difficult to move or, or to introduce other things to it.
Brenda: Well, the great thing about that kind of approach is that it, I think, enables the visitor to sort of be in, if you will, or consider a particular moment in time, and then draw it in relationship to their present day. Anyway, I’m very pleased with the Once Upon a Timeline chapter. I’m with you, Tim.
Abby: There was, well I do also—
Tim: We’ll convince you. Abby.
Abby: Yeah, yeah. I do agree that, that the challenge maybe with the timeline is, is how do you make it relevant to the audience at the time? And Tim, you talk a lot about it. I think it’s through the stories you tell, because at the end of the day, we’re all humans, and these stories often have relatable themes within them, whether it’s relating to a monster or relating to somebody who’s wonderfully triumphant. I think it’s important to make sure that the way that we then tell those stories resonate with the audience.
Tim: I think the timeline is a good starting point often, but then it’s good to challenge that, and then it gets you to then think about things in a different way. But it’s somewhere that, it’s an easy place to maybe begin.
Abby: Yeah, I completely agree. So, you know, there is a call to action in the book. What do you mean by that?
Tim: The process of designing an experience or an exhibition is very much rooted in a design process that borrows from architecture to some degree, right? We go through a phased approach of concept development, detailing, implementation, and it’s very fixed. So, the call to action is, hey, do we have to always design an exhibition this way? Could we come at it from a different approach?
Could we think about an exhibition more from, I suppose it is the more emotional but more, again, the creative side of it. But also, can this methodology be mapped onto other disciplines in other areas? Because I feel that within the digital realm, within developing UI/UX, types of experiences, it’s the same thing we’re doing. We’re creating a digital space rather than the physical one, but we’re still thinking about some of the same criteria, such as staging, such as creating wow moments such as thinking about, you know, our audience is key to that too.
So, I was really wanting to use exhibition design and that process as a way of tackling other things. And the other part of the call to action is that I feel that exhibition design is the most transdisciplinary of the design fields, more so than architecture, more so than theater design or other areas, because it simply brings together so many different design areas and people from other disciplines to create these kind of experiences.
So, the call to action is, hey, we need to acknowledge this field. The profile of the field needs elevating. I feel it, it’s playing a role within society and within culture that it often doesn’t get credit for and has been doing for a long, long time. And that’s why I was very focused on the history in the book of when did we begin to sort of professionally design exhibitions, experiences and look what we’ve managed to do and look where we’ve got to. So, the call to action really is also about, hey, look, this field means business. Pay attention and look at the great work that exhibition makers are doing and the influence they’re having within the field.
Abby: Well, no, I think it’s super important. And that’s why Brenda and I started this podcast. We felt exactly the same way, that we need people to start acknowledging this field and stop calling architects to do our work or thinking that they’re the ones that they should be hiring to design exhibitions. I can’t tell you, Tim, how many times I’m handed an exhibition design done by the architect of the building. And it’s, you know, it’s frustrating.
Brenda: Thinking much more expansively about the role of the curator, or perhaps less expansively about the role of the curator. You know, I just keep thinking, as I’m listening to you about things such as film and the process of filmmaking, the, you know, hordes of people and disciplines that are involved in crafting a film, and also the fact that what a delight when you are able to work with filmmakers within the exhibition team, when you’re able to work with journalists in the exhibition team, authors in the exhibition team, in addition to all of the, you know, the myriad of design disciplines.
Let’s expand upon this a little bit and let’s talk about other members of the creative team. And I’m thinking about engaging audiences, and I’m thinking about engaging local communities. What do you think about how it is that engaging with local people, local communities can make a difference in exhibition creation?
Tim: There’s a class that I teach called Narrative Environments, and it’s completely focused on working with local community. So, we spend ten weeks working with the local organization, you know, within the region where I’m based, and I let it evolve through the project. I don’t have a, necessarily a idea of what it’s going to end up being in the end.
And I tell the students upfront about this, too, that we’re going to do this collaborative project with the community and we’re going to see where it goes and what happens and learn as we go. And I love this class because it’s something that I wish I could have done more in professional practice, where we don’t get so hung up on what the end result should be, but that we work more open-endedly with community to let everyone be part of the process, right.
And it’s also coming on from a research project that I’m involved in at the moment. I’m working with a colleague in London, Tricia Austin, on this, and the two of us are currently hosting forums. We’ve done seven of them so far with designers all over the world to better understand if the exhibition design medium can be an agent of change, can truly be transformative.
But what’s come through from those conversations time and time again? The projects that many of the designers we’ve, you know, had participate have been ones on a very local level that have addressed, projects that are, you know, very much connected to cultural aspects or geographic local region that they’re working in. And these all involve community, about bringing people into the conversation and working with them very, very closely.
And it’s been interesting that many of the participants in these forums, they’re the projects they want to talk about, too, because they feel those are the most, been the most successful, when they have been able to engage community partners in a meaningful way. So, it says a lot about, well, okay, that’s, there’s the satisfaction level there, too, of feeling like the project really worked, and they’re very proud of the result when they were able to have this more reciprocal relationship with the audience.
Abby: Just to chime in, I was lucky, fortunate enough to be part of one of those forums, and I think that was a great opportunity for us. I find that it’s very difficult to come together with peers and discuss our projects and workshop together and move forward as an industry. There’s a couple of great places to do that, but I really felt it was very intimate.
We were sharing specific projects. We all had a set amount of time and then the feedback was just fantastic. It was candid, it was informed, like it was just a really wonderful moment.
Brenda: What I love about what you’re doing with your forums is working towards the idea of transformation, and I think creating illustrative examples of what transformation actually looks like. And I think that, you know, a lot of scholars are familiar with the idea of transformation and its connections with, for example, wellbeing and some of the recent work that I was engaged with really looking at the role of transformation in the flourishing museum and in the flourishing exhibition experience.
And, but there’s, there’s a but which is there isn’t, I think anyway, enough example out there of what it really, really looks like. And doing that on a global level, Tim, is, it’s brilliant and it’s important. So, so thank you for doing that.
Tim: Thanks. Yeah, I mean just to sort of give a little bit of context to these, the title of the forums is really called The Transformational Impact of Exhibition Design. And that’s the reason for having these forums and inviting designers to come and talk about projects they’ve worked on that address, you know, for instance, climate crisis, social justice, looking at social polarization, and issues around technology and ethics are some of the key ones that we’re sort of interested in.
And also, just how many of the, you know, the designers from different parts of the world have things to contribute in all of those areas, but are also very specific to where they are, geographically, you know, and what they’re facing sort of, you know, on a more local level. And that’s been interesting to see too. But the passion and enthusiasm for talking about this is, it’s contagious. It’s been, it’s been really great.
Abby: So, I have a question for Brenda and you, Tim, in terms of, it’s all leading towards, again, our profession and highlighting our profession. Why has it taking us so long, like what are we doing wrong?
Brenda: Why is it that folks call the architect first and then much later on in the process, the exhibition team is brought in to sort of fill in the box? What’s up with that? That convention should be long gone by now.
Tim: Absolutely. I agree, and I’ve also, Brenda, thank you for your contribution, for your books as well because part of this is, right, is building up a body of theory or writing to help substantiate the field, right? That’s a big part of it too. And in my surveys of looking at what’s out there in terms of publications about our field, there’s so few.
But if you look at architecture, you could fill entire library with it. So that says a lot too, about the maybe, there hasn’t been the opportunity to be as critical about our field. And I mean that through, you know, dissecting it and looking at it and writing about it than we could have been. And some of that is because it goes back to, right, the, the, a more curatorial approach to exhibition making. That certainly has a place and is well understood, but again, the role of the designer and working with the curator or with the exhibition team is less understood or less valued. Hence, again, what we’re doing here, right, is to make a mark on that.
Abby: That’s a call to action, then, in a way, Tim. Call to action to our listeners.
Brenda: You know, as I see it, it’s, I mean, it’s like a love affair. It really is. And in every possible way, you know, I think that embracing the idea of sharing your expertise or maybe even more importantly, sharing your questions, through whatever the medium is, if it is, if it is a podcast or if it is a book, or if it is a research project and, you know, any kind of publication whatsoever, I think that sort of building towards this, you know, critical mass, I think, as you’re thinking, Tim, everybody who can contribute the questions that they have about our field and to explore those questions and to enable themselves as best as possible to fall in love with something, no matter how small or quotidian or large and philosophical. I think that the more we are enabled to allow ourselves and give ourselves permission to fall in love with just one aspect, if not many, about what it is that we’re doing, and then to produce something that illustrates that passion and the wonder about it, then I think we’re going to see more and more and more of these kinds of contributions.
Tim: Absolutely.
Abby: Well, thank you so much, Tim. I really hope our listeners enjoyed all the facets of our conversation as much as I did. This was inspiring, thought provoking, provocative. So, a huge thanks, Tim, for joining us today and sharing your experiences.
Tim: Oh, you’re absolutely welcome. It’s been really fun. Thanks for having me on the show.
Abby: And thanks to everyone who tuned in today. If you enjoyed it, subscribe for more episodes of Matters of Experience on Spotify or Apple. Please leave a rating and a review and share with a friend. 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.
His recent publication “The Exhibition and Experience Design Handbook” pulls from his extensive experience as an educator, designer, and contributor to building three major museums: the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center and Getty Villa, and the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art.
He has been recognized for design excellence by the Society for Experiential Graphic Design, the University and College Designers Association, the American Alliance of Museums, and the International Museum Design and Communication Association. Tim is a frequent speaker and writer on museum and design issues. His award-winning design work is archived at the Getty Research Institute and has been featured in multiple publications.
Tim McNeil | University of California Davis | blooloop 50 2023
The Exhibition and Experience Design Handbook – 9781538157985
The Transformational Impact of Exhibition and Experience Design – SEGD
[Music]
Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: Hello, this is Brenda Cowan.
Abby: This is produced by Lorem Ipsum, an experience design company headquartered in New York, and our podcast explores the creativity, innovation and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. Hello to anybody listening for the first time, and welcome back to our regular listeners. So, Brenda, today we’re talking with a guest Blooloop named among the top 50 Museum Influencers for 2023, who recently published the Exhibition and Experience Design Handbook, which really is a must read and reference book for all designers. I cannot encourage you enough to go online and buy it. It’s an amazing guide for our practice. And if you haven’t guessed yet, we’d like to welcome to today’s show, Tim McNeil. Tim, welcome.
Tim: Thanks for that great introduction, Abby. Hi, Brenda. It’s so, so great to be here. So, admire what you’re doing and how your show has contributed to the field. So, thanks for having me.
Brenda: Well, Tim, I love your book. And, you know, it’s funny, I remember hanging out with you weeks before Covid changed the world, and you were sharing with me your journey of writing this book, and I was so excited in those early days for what was to come and, Tim, you so delivered.
Tim: Thank you.
Brenda: So, like me, you’re an educator. You are a professor of design. You are the director of the Design Museum at the University of California, Davis. And before that, you spent 30 years as a practicing exhibition designer working for major museums like the J. Paul Getty. Tim, what are the most vital elements from your years of practice that you make sure to pass on to your students in the classroom?
Tim: Yeah, no, I think, I mean, the key one is collaboration. In the classroom, I always encourage students to work together, because, you know, that’s how, you know, exhibition teams work, right? We don’t do anything in isolation. A level of, I suppose, installing in my in students that ambiguity is okay, because often when we’re working on any project, right, we don’t know where things are going to go sometimes.
We’re going to pitch ideas. We’re going to try and, you know, conceive of things to get buy-in from various people. And sometimes that works and sometimes that doesn’t. Sometimes we come up with an amazing design for something and it gets critiqued, it gets changed, it has to move on. And I think for, in the classroom space, that’s sometimes quite difficult for students to grapple with, that they could spend a long time on something and then it may not actually get, you know, realized in the same way that they envisioned it.
And the other is just creativity. I’m a huge believer in creativity, that that is the one key thing that makes designers, designers, right, that we can have all the amazing tools we want in the world, but if we don’t have a creative response or something unique to present that information or those ideas, and we can’t think of things in a highly creative way, then that doesn’t do much.
So, to me, the designer brings this level of creativity to any project and thinks about things in a way that maybe has never been thought of before.
Brenda: So, this is something that is, it’s actually it’s been a little bit of a debate. Now, I’m a firm believer that you can teach creativity, or I should say that you can foster its growth and foster its presence within an individual. What do you think—
Abby: Oh, hang on, this is going to be interesting.
Brenda: Tim, can you teach creativity?
Tim: I think you can teach tools to be more creative, whether those will all get to the end result you want, not for everybody. I mean I make a point in the classes I teach, we do warm-up exercises that are about just thinking freely and about making what I call, by associations. So, taking one thing and taking another and trying to put them together and seeing what you get.
So, there are tools you can use, you know, and there are lots of, you know, resources for this about how to be creative. But I think it’s practicing that so that you have a set of tools to rely on that help you. And also, part of that creative process is multiplicity of ideas, right? Not settling on one but exploring the full gamut of options. So yeah, I think you can offer the tools and ways of becoming more creative.
Brenda: Build the muscle.
Abby: Yeah, I totally agree with that, and just touching on one other thing that you mentioned, which is really important to me, is this idea of the multiplicity of ideas and that generating new versions and different versions, because settling on the first idea, I think, doesn’t mean that that idea has had that robust testing that needs to happen in the ideation process.
That’s the point of evolving ideas and exploring everything. And I think a lot of designers pause, potentially, when they feel like they’ve found it immediately, instead of really continuing to iterate, Tim, so it’s nice to hear that you’re teaching your students that that’s really invaluable, because I think collaboration and iteration are the two things that designers really need to get used to and understand that their idea is to be contributed to a pool of other collaborators, to grow and build something that’s made collectively.
Tim: Completely agree, and I suppose another part of it is originality. And I don’t believe—it’s hard to find anything that’s truly original. So, I wouldn’t go out and say that you can always come with original ideas, but I do think you’re always striving to think about how can you at least improve what’s already there?
Brenda: Innovate.
Abby: Move it forward. Yeah. So, changing our focus for a second, experiences, whatever they are, so from entertainment to cultural events sort of reflect our society which is ever changing. What do you think have been some of the most significant social changes, let’s say in the last decade, and how is our industry addressing them?
Tim: Well, we always talk about technology. Okay. It’s been a big part of this which has really impacted our culture, or at least the way we do things within exhibitions. Also, a big change, right, is, is a focus on, much more on audience, and understanding everyone’s needs. And we’re not there yet with that, but we’re certainly a lot further along than we were.
And I certainly, when I’m teaching and, in my work, always put audience at the forefront, audience and story, actually narrative at the forefront. So, I think that’s the key thing. And also, just an awareness of a complex world that we’re living in and that awareness, and I see it, you know, certainly in my students, in terms of how there’s so much more sort of understanding of the complexity of the world in terms of, you know, the climate crisis, in terms of inclusion and equity, in terms of understanding what everyone around them needs. And then, so I think that’s a, definitely a huge, sort of shift or advancement as well in that area.
Brenda: One of the great things about having students is, is that they are always bringing society to you.
Tim: I always say that I’m learning more from them than I can ever really teach. You know, right? I mean you’re there as a facilitator to get the conversation going and the dialog going, but really they’re learning from each other more than they’re necessary learning from the instructor, and I think that’s key. But I, yeah, I absolutely agree with that.
Brenda: Well, it’s the mark of a really great educator. So, let’s talk about the book again. Just like my graduate program it’s titled Exhibition and Experience Design. What’s the difference between the two in your take, like why is there an and?
Tim: One of the main goals of the book for me was to combine somewhat equally, the sort of history of exhibition and experience making, the theoretical sort of underpinnings of the discipline, and then the more practice based of how do we do it? You know, the, the words we use to describe the field, the way we do things have evolved.
Certainly, the word exhibition is one that, you know, has evolved over time to include so many more things. To me, exhibition, or exhibition as a medium because exhibitions are everywhere and anywhere, right? You can find an exhibition, you know, in, in a street, in a museum, in your home, if you choose to create one. I think whenever we’re staging any kind of environment, we’re creating an exhibition. Experience, of course, is one that’s being used now very loosely within multiple sort of sectors to describe experience making, whether that’s not just within exhibitions but also within, you know, digital media or UI/UX, sort of human centered design, all those other areas too. So, the books attempting to try and, you know, clarify some of that or link these two together, that experiences can happen in many, many places. But the, it’s the, you know, exhibition making is certainly one of the main drivers to how you get there.
Brenda: I’m listening to you, and I’m really appreciating the way, the sort of, the broad way in which you’re really describing experience and the scope that you’re including and in addition to the physical space as well, listening to you, it’s so clear that also when we’re talking about experience, we’re talking about the heart space, we’re talking about emotional experience, we’re talking about intellectual experience in addition to that physical experience, which, right, has been the convention for so long. But now we’re really, really giving, I think, you know, sizable, necessary merit to the, the, the emotional and the intellectual.
Tim: Yeah, very much so. And the book touches on that and goes into sort of the more sort of philosophical sense of what an experience is, as much as you’re saying about the emotional and the more psychological, right, of, of how we, how we have an experience, what does an experience mean. You know, it also touches a lot, right, on memory. Right? What are, what are those moments that we’re creating that we remember? Are those, what’s the, what’s the value in memory to an experience too is of real interest to me because I think when we walk away from experiencing, what do we walk away with? What do we hold on to and what do we let go?
And so, as I think about designing an exhibition, I’m always thinking about this pacing through a space and how these moments, these experiences can be revealed. So, you know, I like to think of it in terms of, you offer an attract to somebody, which then you reveal something, and then you offer a reward. And I think about that a lot in terms of creating experiences. Upfront, you’re pulling people in. You’re then maybe revealing something they’ve not known before or are seeing something for the first time and then rewarding them something at the end.
So, there’s this experience to dissecting it, what are the components of an experience and how do they map onto designing an exhibition?
Abby: That’s really interesting because we think about it in a very similar way in terms of attracting someone, gaining their interest, revealing something new about something they thought they already knew, or a new topic they haven’t seen, and then connecting with them on an emotional and an educational level and an entertaining level, and then providing, I guess, it’s interesting you call it a reward, we always think about it as, and maybe this is because we do a lot of history museums and a lot of heavy subject matter. So, it’s always that space for repose, a place for quiet thought and a place to think. One of the chapters is Once Upon a Timeline. I have mixed relationship with timelines because they are so wonderful in their organization of things for people, but at the same time can be extremely limiting. So can you sort of chat through from a design perspective—
Brenda: Sell Abby on the timeline.
Tim: Okay. And I think that, you know, as you picked up there, the chapters in the book, I try to come up with kind of enticing, should we say more provocative chapters to kind of pull you in, just like you just did then, Abby, with the timeline. Because in some ways, I then refute that the timeline is only one way, of course, of telling a story.
And even the timeline as a concept, right, means different things to different people in different parts of the world. You know, some timelines are linear, many are cyclical, others don’t exist at all. Like the idea that we have a beginning and an end. So, I think that it’s there a bit as a provocation, but also to kind of say it’s a trope, okay, that we’ve used to tell stories for millennia, one that we rely on heavily because it’s kind of easy to do it that way.
You’ve got a beginning, a middle, and an end, or at least you’ve got a linear path to follow. So, the chapter does kind of take that on and looks at well, what does that mean to tell a story? Like if we think about it as being, as linear, how do we think about an experience playing out in different ways as well?
Certainly, I’m interested in, and the chapter picks up on it, in how we move people through a space, and that the movement through the space becomes a storytelling device. It’s not necessarily constructed on time, but more on movement or the journey. So yes, timelines are great, but they offer limitations. And, you know, the sort of chrono thematic approach to an exhibition, right, where you have a timeline as the main construct that ties it all together, but there are these deviations to different themes from it, can be a very powerful way of doing it, so that the thematic approach becomes equally prevalent. And certainly, a thematic division of an exhibition or telling a story allows for a more inclusive story to be told, frankly, you know, the timeline locks you into something that, you know, that is easier, difficult to move or, or to introduce other things to it.
Brenda: Well, the great thing about that kind of approach is that it, I think, enables the visitor to sort of be in, if you will, or consider a particular moment in time, and then draw it in relationship to their present day. Anyway, I’m very pleased with the Once Upon a Timeline chapter. I’m with you, Tim.
Abby: There was, well I do also—
Tim: We’ll convince you. Abby.
Abby: Yeah, yeah. I do agree that, that the challenge maybe with the timeline is, is how do you make it relevant to the audience at the time? And Tim, you talk a lot about it. I think it’s through the stories you tell, because at the end of the day, we’re all humans, and these stories often have relatable themes within them, whether it’s relating to a monster or relating to somebody who’s wonderfully triumphant. I think it’s important to make sure that the way that we then tell those stories resonate with the audience.
Tim: I think the timeline is a good starting point often, but then it’s good to challenge that, and then it gets you to then think about things in a different way. But it’s somewhere that, it’s an easy place to maybe begin.
Abby: Yeah, I completely agree. So, you know, there is a call to action in the book. What do you mean by that?
Tim: The process of designing an experience or an exhibition is very much rooted in a design process that borrows from architecture to some degree, right? We go through a phased approach of concept development, detailing, implementation, and it’s very fixed. So, the call to action is, hey, do we have to always design an exhibition this way? Could we come at it from a different approach?
Could we think about an exhibition more from, I suppose it is the more emotional but more, again, the creative side of it. But also, can this methodology be mapped onto other disciplines in other areas? Because I feel that within the digital realm, within developing UI/UX, types of experiences, it’s the same thing we’re doing. We’re creating a digital space rather than the physical one, but we’re still thinking about some of the same criteria, such as staging, such as creating wow moments such as thinking about, you know, our audience is key to that too.
So, I was really wanting to use exhibition design and that process as a way of tackling other things. And the other part of the call to action is that I feel that exhibition design is the most transdisciplinary of the design fields, more so than architecture, more so than theater design or other areas, because it simply brings together so many different design areas and people from other disciplines to create these kind of experiences.
So, the call to action is, hey, we need to acknowledge this field. The profile of the field needs elevating. I feel it, it’s playing a role within society and within culture that it often doesn’t get credit for and has been doing for a long, long time. And that’s why I was very focused on the history in the book of when did we begin to sort of professionally design exhibitions, experiences and look what we’ve managed to do and look where we’ve got to. So, the call to action really is also about, hey, look, this field means business. Pay attention and look at the great work that exhibition makers are doing and the influence they’re having within the field.
Abby: Well, no, I think it’s super important. And that’s why Brenda and I started this podcast. We felt exactly the same way, that we need people to start acknowledging this field and stop calling architects to do our work or thinking that they’re the ones that they should be hiring to design exhibitions. I can’t tell you, Tim, how many times I’m handed an exhibition design done by the architect of the building. And it’s, you know, it’s frustrating.
Brenda: Thinking much more expansively about the role of the curator, or perhaps less expansively about the role of the curator. You know, I just keep thinking, as I’m listening to you about things such as film and the process of filmmaking, the, you know, hordes of people and disciplines that are involved in crafting a film, and also the fact that what a delight when you are able to work with filmmakers within the exhibition team, when you’re able to work with journalists in the exhibition team, authors in the exhibition team, in addition to all of the, you know, the myriad of design disciplines.
Let’s expand upon this a little bit and let’s talk about other members of the creative team. And I’m thinking about engaging audiences, and I’m thinking about engaging local communities. What do you think about how it is that engaging with local people, local communities can make a difference in exhibition creation?
Tim: There’s a class that I teach called Narrative Environments, and it’s completely focused on working with local community. So, we spend ten weeks working with the local organization, you know, within the region where I’m based, and I let it evolve through the project. I don’t have a, necessarily a idea of what it’s going to end up being in the end.
And I tell the students upfront about this, too, that we’re going to do this collaborative project with the community and we’re going to see where it goes and what happens and learn as we go. And I love this class because it’s something that I wish I could have done more in professional practice, where we don’t get so hung up on what the end result should be, but that we work more open-endedly with community to let everyone be part of the process, right.
And it’s also coming on from a research project that I’m involved in at the moment. I’m working with a colleague in London, Tricia Austin, on this, and the two of us are currently hosting forums. We’ve done seven of them so far with designers all over the world to better understand if the exhibition design medium can be an agent of change, can truly be transformative.
But what’s come through from those conversations time and time again? The projects that many of the designers we’ve, you know, had participate have been ones on a very local level that have addressed, projects that are, you know, very much connected to cultural aspects or geographic local region that they’re working in. And these all involve community, about bringing people into the conversation and working with them very, very closely.
And it’s been interesting that many of the participants in these forums, they’re the projects they want to talk about, too, because they feel those are the most, been the most successful, when they have been able to engage community partners in a meaningful way. So, it says a lot about, well, okay, that’s, there’s the satisfaction level there, too, of feeling like the project really worked, and they’re very proud of the result when they were able to have this more reciprocal relationship with the audience.
Abby: Just to chime in, I was lucky, fortunate enough to be part of one of those forums, and I think that was a great opportunity for us. I find that it’s very difficult to come together with peers and discuss our projects and workshop together and move forward as an industry. There’s a couple of great places to do that, but I really felt it was very intimate.
We were sharing specific projects. We all had a set amount of time and then the feedback was just fantastic. It was candid, it was informed, like it was just a really wonderful moment.
Brenda: What I love about what you’re doing with your forums is working towards the idea of transformation, and I think creating illustrative examples of what transformation actually looks like. And I think that, you know, a lot of scholars are familiar with the idea of transformation and its connections with, for example, wellbeing and some of the recent work that I was engaged with really looking at the role of transformation in the flourishing museum and in the flourishing exhibition experience.
And, but there’s, there’s a but which is there isn’t, I think anyway, enough example out there of what it really, really looks like. And doing that on a global level, Tim, is, it’s brilliant and it’s important. So, so thank you for doing that.
Tim: Thanks. Yeah, I mean just to sort of give a little bit of context to these, the title of the forums is really called The Transformational Impact of Exhibition Design. And that’s the reason for having these forums and inviting designers to come and talk about projects they’ve worked on that address, you know, for instance, climate crisis, social justice, looking at social polarization, and issues around technology and ethics are some of the key ones that we’re sort of interested in.
And also, just how many of the, you know, the designers from different parts of the world have things to contribute in all of those areas, but are also very specific to where they are, geographically, you know, and what they’re facing sort of, you know, on a more local level. And that’s been interesting to see too. But the passion and enthusiasm for talking about this is, it’s contagious. It’s been, it’s been really great.
Abby: So, I have a question for Brenda and you, Tim, in terms of, it’s all leading towards, again, our profession and highlighting our profession. Why has it taking us so long, like what are we doing wrong?
Brenda: Why is it that folks call the architect first and then much later on in the process, the exhibition team is brought in to sort of fill in the box? What’s up with that? That convention should be long gone by now.
Tim: Absolutely. I agree, and I’ve also, Brenda, thank you for your contribution, for your books as well because part of this is, right, is building up a body of theory or writing to help substantiate the field, right? That’s a big part of it too. And in my surveys of looking at what’s out there in terms of publications about our field, there’s so few.
But if you look at architecture, you could fill entire library with it. So that says a lot too, about the maybe, there hasn’t been the opportunity to be as critical about our field. And I mean that through, you know, dissecting it and looking at it and writing about it than we could have been. And some of that is because it goes back to, right, the, the, a more curatorial approach to exhibition making. That certainly has a place and is well understood, but again, the role of the designer and working with the curator or with the exhibition team is less understood or less valued. Hence, again, what we’re doing here, right, is to make a mark on that.
Abby: That’s a call to action, then, in a way, Tim. Call to action to our listeners.
Brenda: You know, as I see it, it’s, I mean, it’s like a love affair. It really is. And in every possible way, you know, I think that embracing the idea of sharing your expertise or maybe even more importantly, sharing your questions, through whatever the medium is, if it is, if it is a podcast or if it is a book, or if it is a research project and, you know, any kind of publication whatsoever, I think that sort of building towards this, you know, critical mass, I think, as you’re thinking, Tim, everybody who can contribute the questions that they have about our field and to explore those questions and to enable themselves as best as possible to fall in love with something, no matter how small or quotidian or large and philosophical. I think that the more we are enabled to allow ourselves and give ourselves permission to fall in love with just one aspect, if not many, about what it is that we’re doing, and then to produce something that illustrates that passion and the wonder about it, then I think we’re going to see more and more and more of these kinds of contributions.
Tim: Absolutely.
Abby: Well, thank you so much, Tim. I really hope our listeners enjoyed all the facets of our conversation as much as I did. This was inspiring, thought provoking, provocative. So, a huge thanks, Tim, for joining us today and sharing your experiences.
Tim: Oh, you’re absolutely welcome. It’s been really fun. Thanks for having me on the show.
Abby: And thanks to everyone who tuned in today. If you enjoyed it, subscribe for more episodes of Matters of Experience on Spotify or Apple. Please leave a rating and a review and share with a friend. 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.
What is an Experience? with Tim McNeil
Creating an Audience-Centered Experience with Jamie Lawyer
ICOM approves a new museum definition
Mandala Lab, Milan | BAM | 2024 – Rubin Museum of Art
[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. 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 this is Brenda Cowan.
Abby: So today I am very overly excited to welcome Jamie Lawyer to the show. Jamie is the chief—and the world goes crazy—Jamie is the chief experience officer at the Rubin, where she drives the creation of strategic, creative and empowered experiences at the intersection of visitors, art and museum staff. So, Jamie, we’re neighbors. The Rubin was on the same street as our old office for over a decade, and I’ve been fortunate enough to have enjoyed many, many days with my children, colleagues, either visiting the unbelievable collection or one of the temporary exhibitions, or enjoying the best lunch, I would say, in the neighborhood, or buying a gift at the store.
Brenda: Or the DJ Friday nights, don’t forget that.
Abby: DJ Friday night. It has a special place in my New York experience, and I’m really excited to talk about your many hats, from audience-centered work to your commitment to educating museum professionals and your black belt in taekwondo. Jamie, thank you for joining us today.
Jamie: Thank you so much. I’m excited to be here.
Brenda: Let’s just begin with your origin story. What attracted you to the work that you’re doing now?
Jamie: I was 19 years old the first time I stepped foot inside a museum. I grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania, and as someone who was gay in a very small area, the feeling of belonging was something I was very attuned to. And I also did not have a lot of access to arts and culture where I grew up. And I remember the first time I went to a museum down in Washington, D.C., and stepped foot through the door, and I’m in this gallery, and I look around and I see families. I see two, you know, college age students signing, you know, to one another from Gallaudet University.
And I walk closer to a Jackson Pollock painting and security guard comes up to me and I’m worried. Oh, no, I did something wrong. Not again. And instead of correcting me, he invited me to look closer. And at that moment, I realized the power of that invitation, of what it feels like to belong in a space that can feel so intimidating and you’re so scared and, you’re just trying to figure out how to, how this, how does all this relate to me?
So, for me, that moment of invitation, I felt the power of that, and that’s the feeling that I wanted to pursue and say, hey, you know, people like me belong in museums. And if I don’t feel like I belong, I’m sure there’s plenty of other people that also feel that way too.
Brenda: What a really amazing foundational experience for you to have. That feeling that you described, is that something that is still present with you today, and the work that you do when you pop into the museum for your job and it’s, you know, yet another day. Do you still have this feeling of, is this a place where people can belong?
Jamie: That is the number one thing I am fighting for in every room that I’m in, and every time I talk to a team member, when I think about why do we do this work right? It’s to make people feel like this is a place for them, to make people feel like art and culture can matter, and that you have a right to access it. And to me, what happens when we build that muscle for our audiences, they begin to get curious about culture. They begin to fall in love with cultural experiences, and that’s something we need more of. We need museum fans. We need people to be excited, and we need to make sure that we’re creating spaces where we are caring for our audiences in such a deep way that they walk away with saying, you know what? I had a great experience today. I feel confident the next time I go into the next cultural institution that I access.
Abby: As a chief experience officer, what are you doing on a daily basis? Give me a day in the life of Jamie.
Jamie: My role as Chief Experience Officer at the Rubin, I’m really thinking about the 360-degree view of audience experience. Right? So, for me, that means at the point of entry, I’m making sure that our frontline staff feel supported, that they can welcome people with ease, that they have the knowledge that it takes to form those connections. I’m also intersecting with a lot of the activities that are unfolding in our galleries for interpretation. So again, another bridge between our art, our curators and our audiences. Right? So, in my areas, this is also our docent programs.
So now I’ve, I’ve walked you through, we’re coming through the front door. We’ve moved into our gallery spaces. But it’s also all the words that we’re using. So, for us that’s the language, that’s editorial, that’s the things that we’re publishing, all the ways that we’re speaking with people to make sure that we’re creating something that’s consistent throughout and an area that’s expanded for us and will continue to grow.
That’s also digital content, right? So really being able to push out into different ways to reach audiences. So, for me, a day in my life is really thinking about, those are all the major interaction points just within my team structure. But of course, I’m collaborating with colleagues across the museum to really make sure that they’re keeping visitors at the center of all of their work, because that’s what every department is really designed to do.
We’re supporting audiences, we’re supporting staff who support audience, and we’re trying to find ways to work together and making sure that we’re creating a dynamic experience for them, regardless of what area of the museum we serve.
Brenda: You do some of the most sophisticated audience studies I think I’ve ever seen, looking at audiences, looking at people, thinking about experience, thinking about learning, thinking about play, thinking about what is engagement. And tell us a little bit, give our listeners a little quick hit of the predominant types of audiences that you have identified at the Rubin, because they’re fascinating. And if I recall correctly, right, you’ve got like two predominant types of visitors. Right? And then it gets more complex.
Jamie: So, the audiences that come to the Rubin based on research that we have done in the past, we really are focusing on two major elements, and we really embrace psychographic research, right, what’s motivating people to really come in through the doors? And I would say they break down into simple, but powerful ways. People that want to engage with their head, I want to learn, I want to engage with my intellect and people that engage with their heart, right, I want an emotional experience. I want to feel connected to something bigger than myself. So those are our two audiences that are sharing spaces with one another. They have completely different needs, but they both can really learn from each other and in quite valuable ways.
And when we’re able to really build that foundation for those people who love to experience with their heart, they appreciate when their head gets involved. And there’s people that, you know, I want to learn. I crave something new. They’re even open to learning more about their emotions and ways of feeling connected to someone else. So, while they might seem separate on paper, there’s a beautiful space that they do overlap. And some of our projects are really thinking about where is that overlap, how can we satisfy both of those audiences and making sure that they have a meaningful experience with us and can really learn from each other as part of it?
Brenda: So, you do so much in your role as chief experience officer. What don’t you do that you think you should be? What’s missing?
Jamie: So, the thing that I, I wish for and I spend quite a bit of my, my days doing is really thinking about our employee experience, right? Museums are made of people, and the great work that we do comes from them, and when we invest in them, we will have greater and stronger audience experiences on the outset. When we make it so that their work is easier to do when they can find joy in what they do, when they feel empowered, when they know how to show up in their space and feel celebrated for that, we will have better cultural institutions.
So, for me, that big thing that I spend a lot of time doing that is really thinking about how can I really improve what’s happening on the inside of our cultural institutions within our teams that make people reach out, say, hey, let’s work together on this, hey, you have a valuable perspective to offer. I haven’t heard you speak up today. I know you’re thinking something, so really making sure that all the key voices are heard and represented as part of the conversation, and not only it being something that I’m just deeply passionate about, then making sure it gets baked into our culture and the way of working so that it will stay, and suddenly people will wake up and say, this is how we’ve always been.
Abby: What makes a great colleague? How can you tell somebody is not going to fit culturally, and who’s going to be a good fit?
Jamie: When I think about someone coming into a cultural institution, my approach is I look for potential, right? I look for people who are excited, who are curious, who have passion for what they’re doing, and that’s what matters to me. And of course, we can go into expertise and qualifications and, you know, things like that. But to me, as someone who is curious to learn, who is resilient, who has the ability to pivot, and I’m not just speaking for the, the Rubin Museum, this is for cultural institutions today, because to me, it’s, you can have all of those incredible, necessary hard skills, but so many of those soft skills that we talk about, like that’s to me, when things get tough, those are the things that we’re leaning on. Right? When people value that as part of who they are, that helps them propel forward.
So, someone who’s curious and willing to learn more, and that’s what our art really shows us. We’re dealing with Himalayan art. Our art requires that we stay curious and keep our minds open. And I know on the show you’ve talked a lot about like growth mindsets, right? So being able to have a growth mindset is so essential in the museum field. From my perspective, when I’m thinking about people I want to work with, that’s our way forward. People who are willing to see other ways of doing things, willing to sort of roll our sleeves up and have great conversations and, you know, have the uncomfortable conversations as well. To me, that’s how we move the field forward and also how we find joy in our work.
Abby: You know what’s really interesting, so my mom was the principal of a school. She’d been a teacher for a large part of her life, and we would often talk about what makes a good teacher. It was about sort of what you’re describing Jamie, and how you can get others excited, and how you can reach others and help them be curious.
And as you’re talking about your colleagues at the Rubin, and finding a good fit, it seems to me that whatever they’re doing, it’s not also about just them and their curiosity. It’s about how much they want to communicate and share that with the visitors. And it feels like as soon as you got that combo, then you’re golden because it’s about that welcoming and your sort of story, your origin story is just quintessentially that perfect mix of the visitor who’s nervous but open to want to know more and curious, and then the docent or the person who represents the institution holding their hand and shepherding them forwards.
Brenda: Well, being cared for in terms of being listened to and like you’ve been saying, being seen, but also being cared for in terms of compensation and hours of work and is my environment, you know, welcoming to me in a lot of practical ways. These are so imperative and in certain cultural institutions lead to so much stress, burnout, anxiety. We are all familiar with this kind of dynamic.
So, Jamie, your attention to creating a very caring environment, it’s absolutely essential to having a good workplace, a good work environment, and also to build resilience and to have the ability for somebody to feel so cared for and so comfortable that they might take that vulnerable step of saying something that might not like you said, feel very comfortable, perhaps, or they might feel like they can share even if they don’t know the answer, but they want to find out, or they want to reach out to other people with whom they don’t get to interact on a regular basis. All of those things can only happen if you’re in a very caring environment.
Abby: In your day to day or week to week or month by month. What are some of the challenges that happen in your job?
Jamie: So, for me, when I think about any challenges that I might face in the workplace, empathy is a guiding value for me. Being able to see and understand someone else’s point of view, whether it’s the curators, you know, curators that I work with, any members of staff, right, content experts, external partners, everyone has different perspectives, right? We understand this. But also, what happens is everyone has different ideas of who their audiences are. We’re all thinking about audience. But our challenge and my challenge is to make sure that we have a shared language with one another.
One of the things I love to do is collaborate, right? And a lot of the sort of things that come up when you hear collaborate is, oh there’s too many cooks in the kitchen. I understand where people are coming from, but to me, I’ve seen kitchens at work and there’s a lot of people in those kitchens, and it’s about every single person really understanding their role, why they’re here and having someone really guiding them expertly towards a common goal. We’re all so passionate about this work, and I think sometimes we can really misunderstand one another’s passions.
But if we’re willing to really pause and reflect and ask, why is this in the room, let’s take a step back. This is not about ego. This is about our audiences. And the more that we are cultivating and practicing that empathy, that vulnerability, all the things that we want our audiences to bring to us, we need to show that to our staff, to our colleagues, to our partners, to people who say, I don’t quite get it, right, but what does it look like to think about it a little differently, to see their humanity, to see their passion and say, while we don’t agree today, I’m willing to sit down, let’s listen, let’s find a way forward.
Abby: So, let’s focus on martial arts. So, this crops up a lot on our podcast. sports and how it helps with discipline, facing failure and sort of achieving success in the workplace. I was worried when my two girls, I’m very sporty. I’m really into sport, very competitive. And my kids were not that into sports, so I tracked them around to everything. But I was relieved when my eldest finally fell into jujitsu, which is a phenomenal sport, and my youngest now does volleyball, so they are not complete couch potatoes, and they may be successful in the workplace. So, Jamie, tell us about your sport and how you feel it relates to your work and the themes of interpretive experiences that you oversee.
Jamie: So, a fun fact about me, I’ll offer two fun facts; one, the way that my brain processes information, I don’t see any mental images. So, when I think about memories, a lot of people, if you think about a red barn or you can see a red barn and people have different ways that they see that red barn. For me there’s no mental image that comes up, right?
I can feel what that looks like. I can understand what it looks like. As a byproduct of that, right, it means that being embodied, really being in the present moment is the way that I really navigate the world. So, to go back to taekwondo, which I grew up doing, I was a second degree black belt, competed nationally across the country. And one of the things I really learned about from that from a very young age was the importance of embodied experience, right? When you can really feel something in your body, it helps you be present in a different way. It helps with patience; it helps with understanding.
And also, one of the things through a sport that’s very individual in nature, right, it’s you versus yourself, most often. There’s other ways, but a lot of times it’s you versus yourself. You begin to see the power of incremental change, right, so when we think about change happens, you know, when you’re training year after year, it’s not, you know, one thing, suddenly you’re at the next, next level. You wake up a year later and you’re completely different than, than what you were that year before.
So, to me, the subtlety of movement, the change in the way that you are holding your posture, right, you can feel that in your body. And I think for me, the last key takeaway for me from taekwondo, I started teaching when I was ten years old, which I cannot imagine that here in New York City, like you all show up to your workout class and there’s a ten-year-old telling you to drop and give them 20. But you know, for me, I had the opportunity to see that everyone was a beginner, right? Whether you’re a four-year-old or you’re a sixty-year-old, we all have things to learn. We all learn in different ways, and we all deserve respect and we’re all just trying to reach a common goal together and the power of being able to listen to one another.
So, a ten-year-old being able to offer correction based on expertise that they had and receive that in respect, it’s the same thing that should happen in our workplaces, right, leadership should be listening to an entry level person who’s just come in. So, to me, like I see that sort of reciprocity, that mutual respect of letting our titles out of the room and really just seeing like, what’s the expertise that we have here? Let’s listen to all the voices. We’re all beginners in some way. Let’s stay curious and let’s say open, open to learning.
Abby: It looks like you’ve reflected back a lot on your childhood and who you are. And it’s all sort of the pieces of the puzzle that fit together as to who you are now, you can see where you were at ten, how you’ve changed. Do you feel like there’s anything left to learn about yourself?
Jamie: Every day.
Abby: Really?
Jamie: Every day there’s other things to learn, right? Like knowledge locks in in new ways. And what locks in for me today, six months from now, there might be something new. That’s to me, we’re all in this path of ongoing learning. There’s always a beginner’s mind, right, that we need to embrace the world with.
So, for me, it’s like one of the things I really think about and whether I’m talking about taekwondo or the first time I, you know, felt comfortable in a museum. These are my values. These are the ways that I show up in my workplace, my history, my identity. Being a queer individual, that informs who I am, being empathetic, that informs who I am, being collaborative, all these things are values or identities, and I think that’s something that we, we talk a lot about. But so often within our teams, and when we show up to this work, what are our personal values?
Because those are the things that we will say yes to. Those are the things we will say no to, that influences how we fight in the room, how we let things go, where we will compromise, where we will, like, really push in. And it comes down to values and being willing to investigate yourself, become aware of where your weaknesses are, where the things that you don’t know, and you need to bring other people into the conversation.
And being able to learn from the things that you value, the way that you see the world, and understanding how that can drive you, but also where you need collaborators to sort of balance you out as well, and making sure that other people are also attuned to the things that they value. So that’s something to me that’s so important for the way that I think about, you know, biography and how we show up in the workplace.
We’re showing up as whole people. Right? And it’s important in our experiences. We are designing as whole people. We’re designing for the things we love, the things that we privilege. And it’s why it’s so important to have that empathy for others and other perspectives and other points of view. Because if we are only leading from our own sensations, the things that we care about, we are leaving so many people out of the conversation.
Brenda: Let’s talk about the Rubin Museum of Art. It’s about to launch itself into a whole new form. It’s envisioning itself as a global museum, and that means traveling museum, a digital experience, a loaning institution. And I think that what the institution is embarking upon is incredibly courageous. And I think about other institutions that have taken similar forms, such as the Museum of Homelessness, the Museum of Empathy, and how it is that these institutions operated without walls for many years, and they reached so many people through installation, through programs, and through being a part of other museum and heritage sites.
So, I’m excited about the new form that the Rubin is taking, and appreciate how bold it is for challenging conventions and challenging, you know, even the new definition of museum that ICOM has put forth. Jamie, what feedback have you been receiving from others? Are there naysayers?
Jamie: You know, for us, it’s really important to be able to meet audiences where they are, and there has been a lot of excitement towards this. We’ve received a lot of positive feedback of, yes, like, you’re going to come near me now. You’ll be able to do more work within the regions that you serve. You will still be there to serve us. You’ll be able to create more understanding, awareness of Himalayan art. Fabulous. So, there has been a lot of support for evolution.
There has also been, you know, people who feel a sense of attachment to who we are and want us to continue to be who we are. And it’s been really interesting, you know, to see grief in action. Right? The really, the response from the museum community, from the visitors, the only way I can describe it is just to compare it with grief. There’s people who are experiencing loss, profound memories that they’ve had in the space, who come to it during moments of I want to sort of make sense of what’s happening in my life, in the world. They come to the Rubin. People who want to feel a connection to their own culture, come to the Rubin. So, I recognize that our transition to our new form does come with that loss that people really know us, know us as, and love us as.
And also, we’re still going to be here, right? We’re still serving our audiences. It’s just going to look different than what people really know us as right now. And one of the things that’s so exciting, we just opened the Mandala Lab in Italy, which is currently in our current physical building. We’re still able to bring Rubin experiences to people all over the States and all over the world. So, there’s still so many ways to interact with us.
We’re looking to support other cultural institutions who want to tell the story of Himalayan art, right? To be able to share our collection more broadly, something that the museum field we need to do, we need to share our assets. We need to share expertise and lift one another up. We will be able to do that work hand in hand with other cultural partners, and we will also be able to serve and support other artists and researchers through grant projects and opportunities.
So, while we are losing a very centralized way to experience us, we are actually going to be supplementing and supporting Himalayan art and this very important field of study in completely different ways, and to still be of service to the art, to the collection and to our audiences.
Abby: What motivated this?
Jamie: One of the big motivating factors was really following where can we most impact audiences? So, seeing a lot of the success of our traveling projects, of seeing attendance and support, support being there in both financial and audience excitement around it, those were really powerful proof points for us. And also, museums in their physical spaces, they’re expensive as well, right? So, for us, while financially the Rubin’s at a good point, this transition allows us to continue to serve our audiences for even longer. The museum field has to change.
I think when we look at our textbooks five years down the line, we’re going to see this moment that we’re currently living through right now. And I think what’s happening for us at the Rubin, I like to think about it as museum studies in action, right? You know, so this is to me, it’s a bold step that we are doing, but it’s one that’s in our heart of hearts, trying to serve audiences in our collection in the best way possible.
Brenda: So, you’ve been working in Bulgaria for the past few years on this really exciting initiative called Muse Academy. To me, it seems like there’s a surge of activity happening in Bulgaria, or at least I seem to keep hearing about how amazing Bulgaria is from a heritage institution and, cultural museum perspective. And I’m even thinking of, like, the new children’s museum, that’s there, Muzeiko, which is so beautiful and so profound and I hope to get there in person someday.
But let’s talk about you. What is the work that you’ve been doing in Bulgaria and what is it like bringing museum studies, audience studies, experience? What is it like bringing that to a very different place in a very different culture?
Jamie: So, the work I’ve been doing in Bulgaria, the, the past year and a half now has been so rewarding and so powerful. And it’s alongside great collaborators Paul Orselli and Christina Ferwerda and, we’ve been invited to create a professional development program where we’re inviting cultural professionals from all over Bulgaria, from entry level positions to museum directors, outgoing directors who are getting ready to pass the baton, also partnering with NGOs who partner with museums and tourism, hospitality and helping them think about how can I create an audience centered experience.
So, we’re bringing together a curriculum that is helping them change the way that they’re thinking about audience, to think about how can I tell dynamic stories in my cultural institutions? How can I create interactive exhibitions and really keep audience satisfaction at the center, and to not only give them tools that they can bring back, but also give them a mindset that they can push forward and one of the guiding phrases for the program is Mozhelo, which means it is possible.
So, this program is not only giving them real things, but real things that they can, they can do today, small and big changes. But it’s also giving them an energy inside them that says, you know what? We can do this right, I can do this, that this change is possible. So, to me, that’s that, you know, that’s something I believe so powerfully in our field, is that each one of us can make a difference in our, in our small ways.
We can push boulders up hills. We can do it together. If other people don’t want to join us, it’s okay. There’s still things that we can do and try, and it’s important that we, we stay focused. We stay focused on what’s ahead of us and that audience that we are fighting for to bring into our cultural institutions. So, when we’re there and doing that work, we’re helping remind people of the power of audience, of what it means to visit a cultural institution, of why it matters, and to give people professional development opportunities to network and find their collaborators, and to say, hey, like this, this is possible. We can, we can do something here.
Abby: Jamie, this was incredible. I feel like we could definitely go on for another hour. I would love to have you back after we see the transition, the Rubin to without walls. It would be really interesting to talk through all the pros and cons and what you’re experiencing and learning and growing. Very excited to see your next chapter. Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your experiences.
Jamie: Thank you so much.
Abby: And thanks to everyone who tuned in today. If you like what you heard, 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: 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.
ICOM approves a new museum definition
Mandala Lab, Milan | BAM | 2024 – Rubin Museum of Art
[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. 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 this is Brenda Cowan.
Abby: So today I am very overly excited to welcome Jamie Lawyer to the show. Jamie is the chief—and the world goes crazy—Jamie is the chief experience officer at the Rubin, where she drives the creation of strategic, creative and empowered experiences at the intersection of visitors, art and museum staff. So, Jamie, we’re neighbors. The Rubin was on the same street as our old office for over a decade, and I’ve been fortunate enough to have enjoyed many, many days with my children, colleagues, either visiting the unbelievable collection or one of the temporary exhibitions, or enjoying the best lunch, I would say, in the neighborhood, or buying a gift at the store.
Brenda: Or the DJ Friday nights, don’t forget that.
Abby: DJ Friday night. It has a special place in my New York experience, and I’m really excited to talk about your many hats, from audience-centered work to your commitment to educating museum professionals and your black belt in taekwondo. Jamie, thank you for joining us today.
Jamie: Thank you so much. I’m excited to be here.
Brenda: Let’s just begin with your origin story. What attracted you to the work that you’re doing now?
Jamie: I was 19 years old the first time I stepped foot inside a museum. I grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania, and as someone who was gay in a very small area, the feeling of belonging was something I was very attuned to. And I also did not have a lot of access to arts and culture where I grew up. And I remember the first time I went to a museum down in Washington, D.C., and stepped foot through the door, and I’m in this gallery, and I look around and I see families. I see two, you know, college age students signing, you know, to one another from Gallaudet University.
And I walk closer to a Jackson Pollock painting and security guard comes up to me and I’m worried. Oh, no, I did something wrong. Not again. And instead of correcting me, he invited me to look closer. And at that moment, I realized the power of that invitation, of what it feels like to belong in a space that can feel so intimidating and you’re so scared and, you’re just trying to figure out how to, how this, how does all this relate to me?
So, for me, that moment of invitation, I felt the power of that, and that’s the feeling that I wanted to pursue and say, hey, you know, people like me belong in museums. And if I don’t feel like I belong, I’m sure there’s plenty of other people that also feel that way too.
Brenda: What a really amazing foundational experience for you to have. That feeling that you described, is that something that is still present with you today, and the work that you do when you pop into the museum for your job and it’s, you know, yet another day. Do you still have this feeling of, is this a place where people can belong?
Jamie: That is the number one thing I am fighting for in every room that I’m in, and every time I talk to a team member, when I think about why do we do this work right? It’s to make people feel like this is a place for them, to make people feel like art and culture can matter, and that you have a right to access it. And to me, what happens when we build that muscle for our audiences, they begin to get curious about culture. They begin to fall in love with cultural experiences, and that’s something we need more of. We need museum fans. We need people to be excited, and we need to make sure that we’re creating spaces where we are caring for our audiences in such a deep way that they walk away with saying, you know what? I had a great experience today. I feel confident the next time I go into the next cultural institution that I access.
Abby: As a chief experience officer, what are you doing on a daily basis? Give me a day in the life of Jamie.
Jamie: My role as Chief Experience Officer at the Rubin, I’m really thinking about the 360-degree view of audience experience. Right? So, for me, that means at the point of entry, I’m making sure that our frontline staff feel supported, that they can welcome people with ease, that they have the knowledge that it takes to form those connections. I’m also intersecting with a lot of the activities that are unfolding in our galleries for interpretation. So again, another bridge between our art, our curators and our audiences. Right? So, in my areas, this is also our docent programs.
So now I’ve, I’ve walked you through, we’re coming through the front door. We’ve moved into our gallery spaces. But it’s also all the words that we’re using. So, for us that’s the language, that’s editorial, that’s the things that we’re publishing, all the ways that we’re speaking with people to make sure that we’re creating something that’s consistent throughout and an area that’s expanded for us and will continue to grow.
That’s also digital content, right? So really being able to push out into different ways to reach audiences. So, for me, a day in my life is really thinking about, those are all the major interaction points just within my team structure. But of course, I’m collaborating with colleagues across the museum to really make sure that they’re keeping visitors at the center of all of their work, because that’s what every department is really designed to do.
We’re supporting audiences, we’re supporting staff who support audience, and we’re trying to find ways to work together and making sure that we’re creating a dynamic experience for them, regardless of what area of the museum we serve.
Brenda: You do some of the most sophisticated audience studies I think I’ve ever seen, looking at audiences, looking at people, thinking about experience, thinking about learning, thinking about play, thinking about what is engagement. And tell us a little bit, give our listeners a little quick hit of the predominant types of audiences that you have identified at the Rubin, because they’re fascinating. And if I recall correctly, right, you’ve got like two predominant types of visitors. Right? And then it gets more complex.
Jamie: So, the audiences that come to the Rubin based on research that we have done in the past, we really are focusing on two major elements, and we really embrace psychographic research, right, what’s motivating people to really come in through the doors? And I would say they break down into simple, but powerful ways. People that want to engage with their head, I want to learn, I want to engage with my intellect and people that engage with their heart, right, I want an emotional experience. I want to feel connected to something bigger than myself. So those are our two audiences that are sharing spaces with one another. They have completely different needs, but they both can really learn from each other and in quite valuable ways.
And when we’re able to really build that foundation for those people who love to experience with their heart, they appreciate when their head gets involved. And there’s people that, you know, I want to learn. I crave something new. They’re even open to learning more about their emotions and ways of feeling connected to someone else. So, while they might seem separate on paper, there’s a beautiful space that they do overlap. And some of our projects are really thinking about where is that overlap, how can we satisfy both of those audiences and making sure that they have a meaningful experience with us and can really learn from each other as part of it?
Brenda: So, you do so much in your role as chief experience officer. What don’t you do that you think you should be? What’s missing?
Jamie: So, the thing that I, I wish for and I spend quite a bit of my, my days doing is really thinking about our employee experience, right? Museums are made of people, and the great work that we do comes from them, and when we invest in them, we will have greater and stronger audience experiences on the outset. When we make it so that their work is easier to do when they can find joy in what they do, when they feel empowered, when they know how to show up in their space and feel celebrated for that, we will have better cultural institutions.
So, for me, that big thing that I spend a lot of time doing that is really thinking about how can I really improve what’s happening on the inside of our cultural institutions within our teams that make people reach out, say, hey, let’s work together on this, hey, you have a valuable perspective to offer. I haven’t heard you speak up today. I know you’re thinking something, so really making sure that all the key voices are heard and represented as part of the conversation, and not only it being something that I’m just deeply passionate about, then making sure it gets baked into our culture and the way of working so that it will stay, and suddenly people will wake up and say, this is how we’ve always been.
Abby: What makes a great colleague? How can you tell somebody is not going to fit culturally, and who’s going to be a good fit?
Jamie: When I think about someone coming into a cultural institution, my approach is I look for potential, right? I look for people who are excited, who are curious, who have passion for what they’re doing, and that’s what matters to me. And of course, we can go into expertise and qualifications and, you know, things like that. But to me, as someone who is curious to learn, who is resilient, who has the ability to pivot, and I’m not just speaking for the, the Rubin Museum, this is for cultural institutions today, because to me, it’s, you can have all of those incredible, necessary hard skills, but so many of those soft skills that we talk about, like that’s to me, when things get tough, those are the things that we’re leaning on. Right? When people value that as part of who they are, that helps them propel forward.
So, someone who’s curious and willing to learn more, and that’s what our art really shows us. We’re dealing with Himalayan art. Our art requires that we stay curious and keep our minds open. And I know on the show you’ve talked a lot about like growth mindsets, right? So being able to have a growth mindset is so essential in the museum field. From my perspective, when I’m thinking about people I want to work with, that’s our way forward. People who are willing to see other ways of doing things, willing to sort of roll our sleeves up and have great conversations and, you know, have the uncomfortable conversations as well. To me, that’s how we move the field forward and also how we find joy in our work.
Abby: You know what’s really interesting, so my mom was the principal of a school. She’d been a teacher for a large part of her life, and we would often talk about what makes a good teacher. It was about sort of what you’re describing Jamie, and how you can get others excited, and how you can reach others and help them be curious.
And as you’re talking about your colleagues at the Rubin, and finding a good fit, it seems to me that whatever they’re doing, it’s not also about just them and their curiosity. It’s about how much they want to communicate and share that with the visitors. And it feels like as soon as you got that combo, then you’re golden because it’s about that welcoming and your sort of story, your origin story is just quintessentially that perfect mix of the visitor who’s nervous but open to want to know more and curious, and then the docent or the person who represents the institution holding their hand and shepherding them forwards.
Brenda: Well, being cared for in terms of being listened to and like you’ve been saying, being seen, but also being cared for in terms of compensation and hours of work and is my environment, you know, welcoming to me in a lot of practical ways. These are so imperative and in certain cultural institutions lead to so much stress, burnout, anxiety. We are all familiar with this kind of dynamic.
So, Jamie, your attention to creating a very caring environment, it’s absolutely essential to having a good workplace, a good work environment, and also to build resilience and to have the ability for somebody to feel so cared for and so comfortable that they might take that vulnerable step of saying something that might not like you said, feel very comfortable, perhaps, or they might feel like they can share even if they don’t know the answer, but they want to find out, or they want to reach out to other people with whom they don’t get to interact on a regular basis. All of those things can only happen if you’re in a very caring environment.
Abby: In your day to day or week to week or month by month. What are some of the challenges that happen in your job?
Jamie: So, for me, when I think about any challenges that I might face in the workplace, empathy is a guiding value for me. Being able to see and understand someone else’s point of view, whether it’s the curators, you know, curators that I work with, any members of staff, right, content experts, external partners, everyone has different perspectives, right? We understand this. But also, what happens is everyone has different ideas of who their audiences are. We’re all thinking about audience. But our challenge and my challenge is to make sure that we have a shared language with one another.
One of the things I love to do is collaborate, right? And a lot of the sort of things that come up when you hear collaborate is, oh there’s too many cooks in the kitchen. I understand where people are coming from, but to me, I’ve seen kitchens at work and there’s a lot of people in those kitchens, and it’s about every single person really understanding their role, why they’re here and having someone really guiding them expertly towards a common goal. We’re all so passionate about this work, and I think sometimes we can really misunderstand one another’s passions.
But if we’re willing to really pause and reflect and ask, why is this in the room, let’s take a step back. This is not about ego. This is about our audiences. And the more that we are cultivating and practicing that empathy, that vulnerability, all the things that we want our audiences to bring to us, we need to show that to our staff, to our colleagues, to our partners, to people who say, I don’t quite get it, right, but what does it look like to think about it a little differently, to see their humanity, to see their passion and say, while we don’t agree today, I’m willing to sit down, let’s listen, let’s find a way forward.
Abby: So, let’s focus on martial arts. So, this crops up a lot on our podcast. sports and how it helps with discipline, facing failure and sort of achieving success in the workplace. I was worried when my two girls, I’m very sporty. I’m really into sport, very competitive. And my kids were not that into sports, so I tracked them around to everything. But I was relieved when my eldest finally fell into jujitsu, which is a phenomenal sport, and my youngest now does volleyball, so they are not complete couch potatoes, and they may be successful in the workplace. So, Jamie, tell us about your sport and how you feel it relates to your work and the themes of interpretive experiences that you oversee.
Jamie: So, a fun fact about me, I’ll offer two fun facts; one, the way that my brain processes information, I don’t see any mental images. So, when I think about memories, a lot of people, if you think about a red barn or you can see a red barn and people have different ways that they see that red barn. For me there’s no mental image that comes up, right?
I can feel what that looks like. I can understand what it looks like. As a byproduct of that, right, it means that being embodied, really being in the present moment is the way that I really navigate the world. So, to go back to taekwondo, which I grew up doing, I was a second degree black belt, competed nationally across the country. And one of the things I really learned about from that from a very young age was the importance of embodied experience, right? When you can really feel something in your body, it helps you be present in a different way. It helps with patience; it helps with understanding.
And also, one of the things through a sport that’s very individual in nature, right, it’s you versus yourself, most often. There’s other ways, but a lot of times it’s you versus yourself. You begin to see the power of incremental change, right, so when we think about change happens, you know, when you’re training year after year, it’s not, you know, one thing, suddenly you’re at the next, next level. You wake up a year later and you’re completely different than, than what you were that year before.
So, to me, the subtlety of movement, the change in the way that you are holding your posture, right, you can feel that in your body. And I think for me, the last key takeaway for me from taekwondo, I started teaching when I was ten years old, which I cannot imagine that here in New York City, like you all show up to your workout class and there’s a ten-year-old telling you to drop and give them 20. But you know, for me, I had the opportunity to see that everyone was a beginner, right? Whether you’re a four-year-old or you’re a sixty-year-old, we all have things to learn. We all learn in different ways, and we all deserve respect and we’re all just trying to reach a common goal together and the power of being able to listen to one another.
So, a ten-year-old being able to offer correction based on expertise that they had and receive that in respect, it’s the same thing that should happen in our workplaces, right, leadership should be listening to an entry level person who’s just come in. So, to me, like I see that sort of reciprocity, that mutual respect of letting our titles out of the room and really just seeing like, what’s the expertise that we have here? Let’s listen to all the voices. We’re all beginners in some way. Let’s stay curious and let’s say open, open to learning.
Abby: It looks like you’ve reflected back a lot on your childhood and who you are. And it’s all sort of the pieces of the puzzle that fit together as to who you are now, you can see where you were at ten, how you’ve changed. Do you feel like there’s anything left to learn about yourself?
Jamie: Every day.
Abby: Really?
Jamie: Every day there’s other things to learn, right? Like knowledge locks in in new ways. And what locks in for me today, six months from now, there might be something new. That’s to me, we’re all in this path of ongoing learning. There’s always a beginner’s mind, right, that we need to embrace the world with.
So, for me, it’s like one of the things I really think about and whether I’m talking about taekwondo or the first time I, you know, felt comfortable in a museum. These are my values. These are the ways that I show up in my workplace, my history, my identity. Being a queer individual, that informs who I am, being empathetic, that informs who I am, being collaborative, all these things are values or identities, and I think that’s something that we, we talk a lot about. But so often within our teams, and when we show up to this work, what are our personal values?
Because those are the things that we will say yes to. Those are the things we will say no to, that influences how we fight in the room, how we let things go, where we will compromise, where we will, like, really push in. And it comes down to values and being willing to investigate yourself, become aware of where your weaknesses are, where the things that you don’t know, and you need to bring other people into the conversation.
And being able to learn from the things that you value, the way that you see the world, and understanding how that can drive you, but also where you need collaborators to sort of balance you out as well, and making sure that other people are also attuned to the things that they value. So that’s something to me that’s so important for the way that I think about, you know, biography and how we show up in the workplace.
We’re showing up as whole people. Right? And it’s important in our experiences. We are designing as whole people. We’re designing for the things we love, the things that we privilege. And it’s why it’s so important to have that empathy for others and other perspectives and other points of view. Because if we are only leading from our own sensations, the things that we care about, we are leaving so many people out of the conversation.
Brenda: Let’s talk about the Rubin Museum of Art. It’s about to launch itself into a whole new form. It’s envisioning itself as a global museum, and that means traveling museum, a digital experience, a loaning institution. And I think that what the institution is embarking upon is incredibly courageous. And I think about other institutions that have taken similar forms, such as the Museum of Homelessness, the Museum of Empathy, and how it is that these institutions operated without walls for many years, and they reached so many people through installation, through programs, and through being a part of other museum and heritage sites.
So, I’m excited about the new form that the Rubin is taking, and appreciate how bold it is for challenging conventions and challenging, you know, even the new definition of museum that ICOM has put forth. Jamie, what feedback have you been receiving from others? Are there naysayers?
Jamie: You know, for us, it’s really important to be able to meet audiences where they are, and there has been a lot of excitement towards this. We’ve received a lot of positive feedback of, yes, like, you’re going to come near me now. You’ll be able to do more work within the regions that you serve. You will still be there to serve us. You’ll be able to create more understanding, awareness of Himalayan art. Fabulous. So, there has been a lot of support for evolution.
There has also been, you know, people who feel a sense of attachment to who we are and want us to continue to be who we are. And it’s been really interesting, you know, to see grief in action. Right? The really, the response from the museum community, from the visitors, the only way I can describe it is just to compare it with grief. There’s people who are experiencing loss, profound memories that they’ve had in the space, who come to it during moments of I want to sort of make sense of what’s happening in my life, in the world. They come to the Rubin. People who want to feel a connection to their own culture, come to the Rubin. So, I recognize that our transition to our new form does come with that loss that people really know us, know us as, and love us as.
And also, we’re still going to be here, right? We’re still serving our audiences. It’s just going to look different than what people really know us as right now. And one of the things that’s so exciting, we just opened the Mandala Lab in Italy, which is currently in our current physical building. We’re still able to bring Rubin experiences to people all over the States and all over the world. So, there’s still so many ways to interact with us.
We’re looking to support other cultural institutions who want to tell the story of Himalayan art, right? To be able to share our collection more broadly, something that the museum field we need to do, we need to share our assets. We need to share expertise and lift one another up. We will be able to do that work hand in hand with other cultural partners, and we will also be able to serve and support other artists and researchers through grant projects and opportunities.
So, while we are losing a very centralized way to experience us, we are actually going to be supplementing and supporting Himalayan art and this very important field of study in completely different ways, and to still be of service to the art, to the collection and to our audiences.
Abby: What motivated this?
Jamie: One of the big motivating factors was really following where can we most impact audiences? So, seeing a lot of the success of our traveling projects, of seeing attendance and support, support being there in both financial and audience excitement around it, those were really powerful proof points for us. And also, museums in their physical spaces, they’re expensive as well, right? So, for us, while financially the Rubin’s at a good point, this transition allows us to continue to serve our audiences for even longer. The museum field has to change.
I think when we look at our textbooks five years down the line, we’re going to see this moment that we’re currently living through right now. And I think what’s happening for us at the Rubin, I like to think about it as museum studies in action, right? You know, so this is to me, it’s a bold step that we are doing, but it’s one that’s in our heart of hearts, trying to serve audiences in our collection in the best way possible.
Brenda: So, you’ve been working in Bulgaria for the past few years on this really exciting initiative called Muse Academy. To me, it seems like there’s a surge of activity happening in Bulgaria, or at least I seem to keep hearing about how amazing Bulgaria is from a heritage institution and, cultural museum perspective. And I’m even thinking of, like, the new children’s museum, that’s there, Muzeiko, which is so beautiful and so profound and I hope to get there in person someday.
But let’s talk about you. What is the work that you’ve been doing in Bulgaria and what is it like bringing museum studies, audience studies, experience? What is it like bringing that to a very different place in a very different culture?
Jamie: So, the work I’ve been doing in Bulgaria, the, the past year and a half now has been so rewarding and so powerful. And it’s alongside great collaborators Paul Orselli and Christina Ferwerda and, we’ve been invited to create a professional development program where we’re inviting cultural professionals from all over Bulgaria, from entry level positions to museum directors, outgoing directors who are getting ready to pass the baton, also partnering with NGOs who partner with museums and tourism, hospitality and helping them think about how can I create an audience centered experience.
So, we’re bringing together a curriculum that is helping them change the way that they’re thinking about audience, to think about how can I tell dynamic stories in my cultural institutions? How can I create interactive exhibitions and really keep audience satisfaction at the center, and to not only give them tools that they can bring back, but also give them a mindset that they can push forward and one of the guiding phrases for the program is Mozhelo, which means it is possible.
So, this program is not only giving them real things, but real things that they can, they can do today, small and big changes. But it’s also giving them an energy inside them that says, you know what? We can do this right, I can do this, that this change is possible. So, to me, that’s that, you know, that’s something I believe so powerfully in our field, is that each one of us can make a difference in our, in our small ways.
We can push boulders up hills. We can do it together. If other people don’t want to join us, it’s okay. There’s still things that we can do and try, and it’s important that we, we stay focused. We stay focused on what’s ahead of us and that audience that we are fighting for to bring into our cultural institutions. So, when we’re there and doing that work, we’re helping remind people of the power of audience, of what it means to visit a cultural institution, of why it matters, and to give people professional development opportunities to network and find their collaborators, and to say, hey, like this, this is possible. We can, we can do something here.
Abby: Jamie, this was incredible. I feel like we could definitely go on for another hour. I would love to have you back after we see the transition, the Rubin to without walls. It would be really interesting to talk through all the pros and cons and what you’re experiencing and learning and growing. Very excited to see your next chapter. Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your experiences.
Jamie: Thank you so much.
Abby: And thanks to everyone who tuned in today. If you like what you heard, 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: Thank you everyone!
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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.
Creating an Audience-Centered Experience with Jamie Lawyer
Textiles and Technology with Nicole Yi Messier
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Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience, produced by Lorem Ipsum, an experience design company headquartered in New York City. Our podcast explores the creativity, innovation and psychology driving immersive experiences. If you’re new, hello and welcome and to our regular listeners, thank you for tuning in and supporting our conversation. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: Hello, everyone. This is Brenda Cowan.
Abby: So today we’re chatting with someone who works at the intersection of technology, craft and textiles to create experiences that truly push the envelope in terms of the way we interact with them and the way they respond to us. And someone who, as you learn more from, opens up a whole world of possibility in your brain you never knew existed, speaking from experience after visiting her studio, which is why I am so happy to welcome Nicole Yi Messier to our show. Nicole. Hello.
Nicole: Hi! I’m so excited to be here.
Abby: Nicole, you’re an interdisciplinary artist and creative technologist with a focus on storytelling and community. You co-founded Craftwork Collective, teach at Parsons and exhibit your work globally. So, we really have a lot to cover on this show. I’d like to first focus on how you got into this combo of technology and art. Technology and textiles is not an obvious pairing. So, how did you come to this particular intersection?
Nicole: Yeah, so my background and my first degree was actually in aerospace mechanical engineering and then I went on and worked at a consulting firm, and I really did not like it. While I was working in the consulting firm, I was taking art classes at night and decided to go back to school, get my MFA in design and technology. And that’s where I took a class called Computational Craft, where we’re really exploring conductive fabrics, thermochromic inks and things of that nature, and just got excited about kind of the magic that these materials bring to engineering and interactive things.
Brenda: What is it, I have to ask, what is it about aerospace engineering that sort of hooked you in the first place? What was it that, you know, sparked you to try it out?
Nicole: I was good at math and science in high school, and so I feel like everyone was like, you should do engineering. But I also really like to make, so I think that was the biggest thing actually, for me in engineering school that was lacking was like the making, the hands-on part. A lot of it was theory.
Brenda: Well, speaking of making, you once described the loom as being the first computer. We would love to hear more about what you mean by that, and how you see the history of technology and making and craft.
Nicole: We think of textiles as kind of an ancient technology. It’s a very mechanical system. They’re like the first computer, the first, like, drafting patterns and things of that nature, and so when we think about technology at craft work, we’re really trying to marry the two. It’s not just about what is modern technology, but let’s go to the past, use craft, and bring it into the digital technologies that we’re using today.
Abby: So how does all this fit with storytelling? You know, I understand both textiles and technology have been used to tell stories, textile art is one of the oldest forms of art and been used to tell stories through like human and animal figures, landscapes or, for example, the Bayeux Tapestry in England, which were all taught about, you know, from the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. It’s this huge thing that wraps all the way around, around the room. It’s amazing.
Textiles have been used to express cultural narratives, political affiliation. I’m thinking about banners, or there’s the AIDS quilts, and there’s also been multiple textile reactions to 911. I’m not even going into all of the ideas of blindfolds, gags, masks, corsets, foot bindings which tell a more violent story. But for you, Nicole, how does bringing the textiles and technology together sort of enhance, widen, deepen, I guess, the storytelling possibilities?
Nicole: Part of our work at Craftwork is we’re always thinking about how to kind of reimagine how textiles have always told stories across time and space. And so, we’re making oftentimes modern precedents of things that have already been made.
So, for example, we have a project called Ancient Futures where you could walk up to this textile that is woven with fiber optics, and you could tell it a secret or a story, and it would reflect back in light. And the, like, inspiration for this is how textiles have always held secrets, for example, people used to, knit secrets or messages into mittens during World War II.
For us, textiles is really kind of like a soft medium. So much of technology or interactive things today happen on a screen, and textiles help us bring something that’s a bit warmer and softer into these spaces.
Brenda: Is it possible for you to even separate the two? So, specifically, is there something about technology and just technology in and of itself that really excites you right now and then is there something about textiles and only textiles that’s exciting you right now?
Nicole: For me, I’m very unexcited about modern technologies right now. I think we’re seeing a lot of things on repeat, a lot of the same ideas, and it seems quite cyclical. And then whenever I’m doing something that’s textile based, I’m excited about it because it’s hands on, it’s usually something new that I’m learning. And then marrying the two is super exciting because we’re often creating novel materials, so like blending materials that aren’t found within the same space and really having to think about how these two different worlds can live together.
Abby: Do you think it’s because, you mentioned hard or plastic or digital or technology and how sort of that feels very rough or hard and then when you think about textiles, they feel softer. Do you think as people, as human beings, we like a bit of softness in our life.
Because I know when I was in your studio, I wanted to touch things. You had a beautiful merino wool hanging that may end up as a rug, and it was just the type of thing that you, it was soft and padded and squishy, and it was so, so nice. I wanted to walk on it. And so, textiles provide this emotional connection that isn’t in technology. I don’t feel the same—I get excited about technology—but I don’t want to touch it and squish it and being, surrounded by it. So, is there something about human nature that you think craves softness?
Nicole: I think people love texture and they love to touch things. And so, I think also when we think about textiles, it reminds us of home sometimes. There’s like less of a barrier to get through, so just thinking like instead of having a touch screen, what if that screen was soft or had some type of texture to it, I think it would be easier for people to engage with it.
Brenda: This is reminding me of, there’s an artist in the UK named Ellen Sampson, and she’s done a lot of research with touch and with clothing, and she talks a lot about how in her thinking, the desire to touch and to feel items of clothing specifically, has to do with the idea that our DNA is threaded within it, and the memories of people held within clothing is much like the DNA that we impart within clothing. It’s really, it’s, it’s fascinating stuff.
What do you think about that? Do you think about people wearing textiles as you’re making them? Do you think about that kind of human interrelationship and the idea that somebody’s body is really mingling with the work that you create?
Nicole: Yeah, sometimes with e-textiles, a lot of times you think about wearables and what it means to have something that’s interactive and soft on your body. I think for me and for us at Craftwork, we’re more excited about thinking about textiles as like an actual building block. And I think for a lot of people, the first thing when you think about textiles, you think about clothes, but actually, like you look around the room right now, how much textiles are around us? There’s textile on this mic, there’s textiles on the wall, and then just like making textile at an industrial scale to really be immersive in environments and in spaces.
Abby: One of the things, actually, you mentioned Ancient Futures, and I was in there and I saw a prototype. One of the things that I loved about it is this idea of being able to share a story and have the digital side create a color that represents that emotion of the story. So, if it was a happy story, it would be one color, neutral story, another, and then something maybe negative, not that I’d ever tell a negative story.
Brenda: Never.
Abby: That would be a be a third color. Can you talk a little bit about the genesis of this idea and what you’re hoping to achieve?
Nicole: Yeah. Craft has been such a space for community historically. And so, for us, we constantly think about that with our interactive pieces. And so, where there’s an ambient feeling to the textile, where there’s a light that’s changing, and the idea is that that light will be constantly changing and evolving with all the messages that are shared with it and in particular space, and the idea is that we could capture the overall feeling and the mood of a community. And then as this piece travels from location to location, we could capture many different communities through their stories and reflect that through something that’s not exactly just text or audio, but through something that’s more about creating a feeling within a location.
Brenda: Amazing,and a feeling that is a shared feeling. A feeling that is sort of like of many instead of just one. That’s lovely.
Abby: Yeah. Isn’t that absolutely incredible?
Brenda: Yeah.
Nicole: I think also like sometimes it can feel like in big cities you might be disconnected, but that as you see the stories that are collected, there tends to be like moods throughout the day and that there’s actually a connection between people, even within spaces.
Brenda: Nicole, I’m wondering, are there other projects in addition to Ancient Futures that sort of combines spoken word with technology, with textile and emotions? And are there other works that you can sort of share with us right now?
Nicole: Less about the spoken word, but we, we have another project in the studio that we’re very excited about where we’re exploring RFID systems as a mode of interaction. RFID systems are pervasive. We use them every day to like, swipe into buildings, but the magic of them is actually they both have antennas on them, and one powers the other, and you don’t actually have to touch them. You can make them hover against each other, and there’s actually like electricity moving through them. And so, we’ve thought about how do we put this system on our body and have people interact either with spaces or with each other through like simple hovering gestures? It’ll be like a little bit playful, a little bit awkward, but exploring like different modes of intimate interactions. So we’re really excited about that, and we’re excited about it because it’s also using like a low fi tech that’s very accessible, very easy to come by.
Brenda: Amazing. Where do these ideas come from?
Abby: Are you solving a problem first? And you’re like, I’m sick of RFIDs, and the way they’re so like this. Or are you just like musing in the shower or like, like, oh, maybe and so, yeah, where’s your inspiration coming from?
Nicole: I think a lot of the inspiration is through making. So, for the RFID tag thing, I had to one time make an RFID experience. The ones that we’ve all seen at museums and my RFID tags were on backorder. And so I was just like Google how I make an RFID tag and there’s just like this whole world of people making fun, quirky things with RFID tags. You can take copper tape, make an antenna, put a light bulb on it, and you don’t even need a battery to power it, you Just hover that over an RFID reader and it lights something up. And it’s those moments that feel, they feel magical.
Abby: I was going to say, do you know what makes it hard, though, when you think about pitching what you do to a client, must be difficult. What are some of the issues or some of the hurdles when you’re trying to explain to clients what you do and the different materiality, like, how are you solving this issue and what are some of the misconceptions people might have?
Nicole: I think some of the misconceptions are, technology and textiles, you do wearables. And we do do wearables. We can do wearables, but we do so much more than that. And then in terms of pitching, it’s really hard to capture textiles via photo, and then it’s really hard to capture textiles that are doing things computationally.
So, the best thing that we have found is to bring people to our space and then sometimes—we have a big materials library that we’ve organized, and we use that as a big tool when we’re talking to people. And if we go to someone oftentimes, we’ll bring like 1 or 2 of those cases that are full of swatches just to show the materiality, allow people to touch things and experience what a computational textile could be.
Brenda: Let’s talk about process. First, though, I want to ask you a question regarding as you are shaping a work and going through the process and you’re thinking about the story, do you like incorporate the audience or the end user at any point throughout the process, or is it something where you know you’ll work up to a certain point and then you’ll bring in that end user or the visitor or whatever the case might be. What does that process look like?
Nicole: Much of our making process is prototyping. A lot of the pieces we have out in the world, we call them prototypes. And so, we are constantly having an iterative process where we’re allowing the space, the pieces to live within a space and people to interact with it. And then going back to the drawing board and seeing how what we can change to make it a better experience. Better experience, meaning a lot of things. Maybe it’s sometimes messaging, sometimes it’s the interaction, sometimes it’s the design of it, like how it looks and feels.
Abby: Oh, that’s so interesting.
Brenda: We would love to know what your thoughts are regarding AI and what kind of technologies you might be using.
Nicole: We have been exploring AI. We’ve had a few projects where we’re thinking about AI as a collaborator. And also, have just explored how AI makes textiles, and it can’t. It’s so bad. You ask it to make a knitted structure and it cannot. And we’ve also tried to use it, like the great thing about it is it could be a rendering tool, right, for RFIPs and pitches—it is a bad rendering tool for textiles. It’s so bad we went all the way the other way and we’re having a storyboard artist help us make pencil renderings.
Brenda: There we go. This is where I get to interject some kind of romantic comment about the human hand.
What are you really passionate about right now, if you could pick one thing?
Nicole: I feel like Craftwork is, our studio is, my passion project right now. There’s not a lot of people really doing experiential design where they’re putting material research at the core of the things they do, and I think that in order to make more interesting, interactive pieces, we really need to have material research, material exploration, be a part of the design process, and for us, that is what excites us.
Abby: So, what’s the best way to work with you? Because you must be brought on sometimes at the very beginning, but sometimes probably towards the middle or even the fabrication stage, where they’re like, oh, how are we going to make this. Can you sort of talk to us about your process and then how you work in the larger project process?
Nicole: Much of our process follows, a similar path to a larger project in that we have an idea or concept and then we do design development. But I would say our design development is less based in like rendering and mockup worlds and actually prototyping and making it. I feel like a lot of the studios in experiential design were doing so much prototyping and then the like older I’ve gotten, the studios have moved away from it, and I think in order to make interesting work and really explore the possibilities of certain interactions and materials, you have to make things to figure it out. So, that’s a big part of our process. And then in terms of communicating that to a client, it’s like trying to find ways to document that constantly and capture that, and making that our 2D deliverable.
Abby: Yeah. That must be your biggest challenge in a way.
Brenda: Do you try to push to be a part of the earlier stages of the process?
Nicole: Yeah, ideally we’re part of concepting, so we can really flesh out the ideas together and build, build a creative trust because that’s, that’s a big hurdle. And we talked about this a bit. I think a lot of people are very excited about the new ideas, but then they want an example of it. It’s kind of like, well, we’re doing a new thing, so we don’t have an example and you kind of have to trust and it’s hard to build that trust. Yeah.
Brenda: It’s one of the things that we work with our students to try to really sort of teach them and enable them to be prepared for the, you know, inevitable question from a client, which is, day one, you’ve just met everybody: what’s it going to look like? And to fight against that, in, you know, a kind way, but to basically, for as long as humanly possible, not know what it is going to be, and it’s a tough, it’s a tough trick to teach a designer actually to, you know, not get visual for as long as possible and instead to really think about the story and the human factors and, you know, in the audience and so on and so forth, and it’s frustrating for, I know for a lot of the designers that I work with, it’s really frustrating to not know what it is.
What’s that process like for you? Do you get frustrated? You seem like you’re having too much fun to be a frustrated person.
Nicole: Do I get frustrated working with materials that don’t live within the same spaces? It’s so frustrating. But, as someone who’s done coding and hardware engineering, I feel like the biggest thing, and doing creative technology, so doing things that people don’t, haven’t done before is I have like a high amount of patience when things are broken. and I have this like, I can’t let it stay broken. So, I just keep going at it.
Brenda: It sounds like broken to you is an opportunity.
Nicole: Yes.
Abby: So, I would like, I’d like to ask you a question. What would you tell ten-year-old Nicole, if you could talk to her now, and here she is, ten-year-old Nicole, what would you say?
Nicole: I don’t know, I say this to my husband a lot, I say we’re living the dream, because New York can be hard and being a creative in New York can be hard. And I’m like you always have to remind yourself that, you know, in—to ten-year-old Nicole, in 25 years you’ll be living a dream.
Brenda: What’s coming up next? Can you talk about what, what we can expect from you in the near future?
Nicole: Yes. Craftwork is part of NEW INC. NEW INC is the design incubator at the New Museum. They work with artists, they work with studios, they work with a wide range of creative practitioners in helping them make their work more sustainably. So they’ll have a big festival called Demo Festival in June, and there will be a big, group exhibition, talks, presentations, and that is a big, kind of thing we’re looking forward to where we will have a large scale version of Ancient Futures that is up, down in Financial District.
Abby: Oh, fantastic.
Nicole: Yeah.
Brenda: That’s excellent.
Abby: Doesn’t that sound amazing, outside, see how it weathers the, because that was my other question was like textiles. I think we chatted textiles, water, like, are you dealing with waterproofing? Have you worked in water before, when you’re thinking about different elements?
Nicole: Yeah, we’ve dealt with waterproofing. And I think also when people think about textile, they think about it as a fragile thing, and actually there are industrial scale textiles. So thinking about whether it goes inside or outside, there really, there’s lots of possibilities there, and there’s lots of ways to treat textiles so that that might be stiffer in some parts, looser in others, so it has that flexibility, but that there’s, there’s different scales of what a textile can be.
I think the biggest thing is just, thinking about textiles as a building block is is a big thing for us. And I think it would be great if designers and everyone thought about that more. We would have such a richer, richer architecture, richer spatial design if we folded textiles in in a way that we fold technology or hard materials into things.
Abby: And for me, it kind of feels like one of those, why aren’t we doing it already? You know, like, yeah, of course, it should be part of our training, the training of students.
Brenda: Is it expensive? If I were looking to create some fabric architecture for space and stuff, does that like, are the budgeting conversations on a really crazy level or how accessible financially is this kind of technology?
Nicole: I think there are different scales, right? We were just talking about, this was for an exhibition, they’re going to put up drywall. We were like, we could put up fabric scrims instead, and the difference is, not crazy different.
Brenda: Right, negligible.
Nicole: Yeah.
Brenda: That’s really good to know and that, because that’s like the first question that I know always comes in. And it sounds like, you know, it might be really expensive, but it’s really nice to know that it’s scalable.
Abby: And long lasting, right? There’s a misconception that material will just wither away and disappear. But it lasts just as long in some cases, right?
Nicole: Yeah. And also, if you think about the amount of, like, money that goes into technology, if we could just think of textiles as technology, the amount of money to build something that’s textile and interactive would not be more expensive than something that’s hardened technology.
Abby: Just the plastics industry will be weeping.
Nicole: Yeah.
Abby: Which wouldn’t be a bad thing right. Exactly. Nicole thank you so much for opening up this window on textiles and technology and sharing your vision and experiences with us today. I hope everybody enjoyed listening. It was absolutely incredible.
Brenda: Amazing.
Abby: And thanks to everyone who tuned in. If you like what you heard, subscribe for more episodes of Matters of Experience, wherever you listen to podcasts. Make sure to leave a rating and a review and share with a friend. See you next time!
Brenda: Thank you everyone. Thank you, Nicole.
Nicole: Thank you.
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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.
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Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience, produced by Lorem Ipsum, an experience design company headquartered in New York City. Our podcast explores the creativity, innovation and psychology driving immersive experiences. If you’re new, hello and welcome and to our regular listeners, thank you for tuning in and supporting our conversation. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: Hello, everyone. This is Brenda Cowan.
Abby: So today we’re chatting with someone who works at the intersection of technology, craft and textiles to create experiences that truly push the envelope in terms of the way we interact with them and the way they respond to us. And someone who, as you learn more from, opens up a whole world of possibility in your brain you never knew existed, speaking from experience after visiting her studio, which is why I am so happy to welcome Nicole Yi Messier to our show. Nicole. Hello.
Nicole: Hi! I’m so excited to be here.
Abby: Nicole, you’re an interdisciplinary artist and creative technologist with a focus on storytelling and community. You co-founded Craftwork Collective, teach at Parsons and exhibit your work globally. So, we really have a lot to cover on this show. I’d like to first focus on how you got into this combo of technology and art. Technology and textiles is not an obvious pairing. So, how did you come to this particular intersection?
Nicole: Yeah, so my background and my first degree was actually in aerospace mechanical engineering and then I went on and worked at a consulting firm, and I really did not like it. While I was working in the consulting firm, I was taking art classes at night and decided to go back to school, get my MFA in design and technology. And that’s where I took a class called Computational Craft, where we’re really exploring conductive fabrics, thermochromic inks and things of that nature, and just got excited about kind of the magic that these materials bring to engineering and interactive things.
Brenda: What is it, I have to ask, what is it about aerospace engineering that sort of hooked you in the first place? What was it that, you know, sparked you to try it out?
Nicole: I was good at math and science in high school, and so I feel like everyone was like, you should do engineering. But I also really like to make, so I think that was the biggest thing actually, for me in engineering school that was lacking was like the making, the hands-on part. A lot of it was theory.
Brenda: Well, speaking of making, you once described the loom as being the first computer. We would love to hear more about what you mean by that, and how you see the history of technology and making and craft.
Nicole: We think of textiles as kind of an ancient technology. It’s a very mechanical system. They’re like the first computer, the first, like, drafting patterns and things of that nature, and so when we think about technology at craft work, we’re really trying to marry the two. It’s not just about what is modern technology, but let’s go to the past, use craft, and bring it into the digital technologies that we’re using today.
Abby: So how does all this fit with storytelling? You know, I understand both textiles and technology have been used to tell stories, textile art is one of the oldest forms of art and been used to tell stories through like human and animal figures, landscapes or, for example, the Bayeux Tapestry in England, which were all taught about, you know, from the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. It’s this huge thing that wraps all the way around, around the room. It’s amazing.
Textiles have been used to express cultural narratives, political affiliation. I’m thinking about banners, or there’s the AIDS quilts, and there’s also been multiple textile reactions to 911. I’m not even going into all of the ideas of blindfolds, gags, masks, corsets, foot bindings which tell a more violent story. But for you, Nicole, how does bringing the textiles and technology together sort of enhance, widen, deepen, I guess, the storytelling possibilities?
Nicole: Part of our work at Craftwork is we’re always thinking about how to kind of reimagine how textiles have always told stories across time and space. And so, we’re making oftentimes modern precedents of things that have already been made.
So, for example, we have a project called Ancient Futures where you could walk up to this textile that is woven with fiber optics, and you could tell it a secret or a story, and it would reflect back in light. And the, like, inspiration for this is how textiles have always held secrets, for example, people used to, knit secrets or messages into mittens during World War II.
For us, textiles is really kind of like a soft medium. So much of technology or interactive things today happen on a screen, and textiles help us bring something that’s a bit warmer and softer into these spaces.
Brenda: Is it possible for you to even separate the two? So, specifically, is there something about technology and just technology in and of itself that really excites you right now and then is there something about textiles and only textiles that’s exciting you right now?
Nicole: For me, I’m very unexcited about modern technologies right now. I think we’re seeing a lot of things on repeat, a lot of the same ideas, and it seems quite cyclical. And then whenever I’m doing something that’s textile based, I’m excited about it because it’s hands on, it’s usually something new that I’m learning. And then marrying the two is super exciting because we’re often creating novel materials, so like blending materials that aren’t found within the same space and really having to think about how these two different worlds can live together.
Abby: Do you think it’s because, you mentioned hard or plastic or digital or technology and how sort of that feels very rough or hard and then when you think about textiles, they feel softer. Do you think as people, as human beings, we like a bit of softness in our life.
Because I know when I was in your studio, I wanted to touch things. You had a beautiful merino wool hanging that may end up as a rug, and it was just the type of thing that you, it was soft and padded and squishy, and it was so, so nice. I wanted to walk on it. And so, textiles provide this emotional connection that isn’t in technology. I don’t feel the same—I get excited about technology—but I don’t want to touch it and squish it and being, surrounded by it. So, is there something about human nature that you think craves softness?
Nicole: I think people love texture and they love to touch things. And so, I think also when we think about textiles, it reminds us of home sometimes. There’s like less of a barrier to get through, so just thinking like instead of having a touch screen, what if that screen was soft or had some type of texture to it, I think it would be easier for people to engage with it.
Brenda: This is reminding me of, there’s an artist in the UK named Ellen Sampson, and she’s done a lot of research with touch and with clothing, and she talks a lot about how in her thinking, the desire to touch and to feel items of clothing specifically, has to do with the idea that our DNA is threaded within it, and the memories of people held within clothing is much like the DNA that we impart within clothing. It’s really, it’s, it’s fascinating stuff.
What do you think about that? Do you think about people wearing textiles as you’re making them? Do you think about that kind of human interrelationship and the idea that somebody’s body is really mingling with the work that you create?
Nicole: Yeah, sometimes with e-textiles, a lot of times you think about wearables and what it means to have something that’s interactive and soft on your body. I think for me and for us at Craftwork, we’re more excited about thinking about textiles as like an actual building block. And I think for a lot of people, the first thing when you think about textiles, you think about clothes, but actually, like you look around the room right now, how much textiles are around us? There’s textile on this mic, there’s textiles on the wall, and then just like making textile at an industrial scale to really be immersive in environments and in spaces.
Abby: One of the things, actually, you mentioned Ancient Futures, and I was in there and I saw a prototype. One of the things that I loved about it is this idea of being able to share a story and have the digital side create a color that represents that emotion of the story. So, if it was a happy story, it would be one color, neutral story, another, and then something maybe negative, not that I’d ever tell a negative story.
Brenda: Never.
Abby: That would be a be a third color. Can you talk a little bit about the genesis of this idea and what you’re hoping to achieve?
Nicole: Yeah. Craft has been such a space for community historically. And so, for us, we constantly think about that with our interactive pieces. And so, where there’s an ambient feeling to the textile, where there’s a light that’s changing, and the idea is that that light will be constantly changing and evolving with all the messages that are shared with it and in particular space, and the idea is that we could capture the overall feeling and the mood of a community. And then as this piece travels from location to location, we could capture many different communities through their stories and reflect that through something that’s not exactly just text or audio, but through something that’s more about creating a feeling within a location.
Brenda: Amazing,and a feeling that is a shared feeling. A feeling that is sort of like of many instead of just one. That’s lovely.
Abby: Yeah. Isn’t that absolutely incredible?
Brenda: Yeah.
Nicole: I think also like sometimes it can feel like in big cities you might be disconnected, but that as you see the stories that are collected, there tends to be like moods throughout the day and that there’s actually a connection between people, even within spaces.
Brenda: Nicole, I’m wondering, are there other projects in addition to Ancient Futures that sort of combines spoken word with technology, with textile and emotions? And are there other works that you can sort of share with us right now?
Nicole: Less about the spoken word, but we, we have another project in the studio that we’re very excited about where we’re exploring RFID systems as a mode of interaction. RFID systems are pervasive. We use them every day to like, swipe into buildings, but the magic of them is actually they both have antennas on them, and one powers the other, and you don’t actually have to touch them. You can make them hover against each other, and there’s actually like electricity moving through them. And so, we’ve thought about how do we put this system on our body and have people interact either with spaces or with each other through like simple hovering gestures? It’ll be like a little bit playful, a little bit awkward, but exploring like different modes of intimate interactions. So we’re really excited about that, and we’re excited about it because it’s also using like a low fi tech that’s very accessible, very easy to come by.
Brenda: Amazing. Where do these ideas come from?
Abby: Are you solving a problem first? And you’re like, I’m sick of RFIDs, and the way they’re so like this. Or are you just like musing in the shower or like, like, oh, maybe and so, yeah, where’s your inspiration coming from?
Nicole: I think a lot of the inspiration is through making. So, for the RFID tag thing, I had to one time make an RFID experience. The ones that we’ve all seen at museums and my RFID tags were on backorder. And so I was just like Google how I make an RFID tag and there’s just like this whole world of people making fun, quirky things with RFID tags. You can take copper tape, make an antenna, put a light bulb on it, and you don’t even need a battery to power it, you Just hover that over an RFID reader and it lights something up. And it’s those moments that feel, they feel magical.
Abby: I was going to say, do you know what makes it hard, though, when you think about pitching what you do to a client, must be difficult. What are some of the issues or some of the hurdles when you’re trying to explain to clients what you do and the different materiality, like, how are you solving this issue and what are some of the misconceptions people might have?
Nicole: I think some of the misconceptions are, technology and textiles, you do wearables. And we do do wearables. We can do wearables, but we do so much more than that. And then in terms of pitching, it’s really hard to capture textiles via photo, and then it’s really hard to capture textiles that are doing things computationally.
So, the best thing that we have found is to bring people to our space and then sometimes—we have a big materials library that we’ve organized, and we use that as a big tool when we’re talking to people. And if we go to someone oftentimes, we’ll bring like 1 or 2 of those cases that are full of swatches just to show the materiality, allow people to touch things and experience what a computational textile could be.
Brenda: Let’s talk about process. First, though, I want to ask you a question regarding as you are shaping a work and going through the process and you’re thinking about the story, do you like incorporate the audience or the end user at any point throughout the process, or is it something where you know you’ll work up to a certain point and then you’ll bring in that end user or the visitor or whatever the case might be. What does that process look like?
Nicole: Much of our making process is prototyping. A lot of the pieces we have out in the world, we call them prototypes. And so, we are constantly having an iterative process where we’re allowing the space, the pieces to live within a space and people to interact with it. And then going back to the drawing board and seeing how what we can change to make it a better experience. Better experience, meaning a lot of things. Maybe it’s sometimes messaging, sometimes it’s the interaction, sometimes it’s the design of it, like how it looks and feels.
Abby: Oh, that’s so interesting.
Brenda: We would love to know what your thoughts are regarding AI and what kind of technologies you might be using.
Nicole: We have been exploring AI. We’ve had a few projects where we’re thinking about AI as a collaborator. And also, have just explored how AI makes textiles, and it can’t. It’s so bad. You ask it to make a knitted structure and it cannot. And we’ve also tried to use it, like the great thing about it is it could be a rendering tool, right, for RFIPs and pitches—it is a bad rendering tool for textiles. It’s so bad we went all the way the other way and we’re having a storyboard artist help us make pencil renderings.
Brenda: There we go. This is where I get to interject some kind of romantic comment about the human hand.
What are you really passionate about right now, if you could pick one thing?
Nicole: I feel like Craftwork is, our studio is, my passion project right now. There’s not a lot of people really doing experiential design where they’re putting material research at the core of the things they do, and I think that in order to make more interesting, interactive pieces, we really need to have material research, material exploration, be a part of the design process, and for us, that is what excites us.
Abby: So, what’s the best way to work with you? Because you must be brought on sometimes at the very beginning, but sometimes probably towards the middle or even the fabrication stage, where they’re like, oh, how are we going to make this. Can you sort of talk to us about your process and then how you work in the larger project process?
Nicole: Much of our process follows, a similar path to a larger project in that we have an idea or concept and then we do design development. But I would say our design development is less based in like rendering and mockup worlds and actually prototyping and making it. I feel like a lot of the studios in experiential design were doing so much prototyping and then the like older I’ve gotten, the studios have moved away from it, and I think in order to make interesting work and really explore the possibilities of certain interactions and materials, you have to make things to figure it out. So, that’s a big part of our process. And then in terms of communicating that to a client, it’s like trying to find ways to document that constantly and capture that, and making that our 2D deliverable.
Abby: Yeah. That must be your biggest challenge in a way.
Brenda: Do you try to push to be a part of the earlier stages of the process?
Nicole: Yeah, ideally we’re part of concepting, so we can really flesh out the ideas together and build, build a creative trust because that’s, that’s a big hurdle. And we talked about this a bit. I think a lot of people are very excited about the new ideas, but then they want an example of it. It’s kind of like, well, we’re doing a new thing, so we don’t have an example and you kind of have to trust and it’s hard to build that trust. Yeah.
Brenda: It’s one of the things that we work with our students to try to really sort of teach them and enable them to be prepared for the, you know, inevitable question from a client, which is, day one, you’ve just met everybody: what’s it going to look like? And to fight against that, in, you know, a kind way, but to basically, for as long as humanly possible, not know what it is going to be, and it’s a tough, it’s a tough trick to teach a designer actually to, you know, not get visual for as long as possible and instead to really think about the story and the human factors and, you know, in the audience and so on and so forth, and it’s frustrating for, I know for a lot of the designers that I work with, it’s really frustrating to not know what it is.
What’s that process like for you? Do you get frustrated? You seem like you’re having too much fun to be a frustrated person.
Nicole: Do I get frustrated working with materials that don’t live within the same spaces? It’s so frustrating. But, as someone who’s done coding and hardware engineering, I feel like the biggest thing, and doing creative technology, so doing things that people don’t, haven’t done before is I have like a high amount of patience when things are broken. and I have this like, I can’t let it stay broken. So, I just keep going at it.
Brenda: It sounds like broken to you is an opportunity.
Nicole: Yes.
Abby: So, I would like, I’d like to ask you a question. What would you tell ten-year-old Nicole, if you could talk to her now, and here she is, ten-year-old Nicole, what would you say?
Nicole: I don’t know, I say this to my husband a lot, I say we’re living the dream, because New York can be hard and being a creative in New York can be hard. And I’m like you always have to remind yourself that, you know, in—to ten-year-old Nicole, in 25 years you’ll be living a dream.
Brenda: What’s coming up next? Can you talk about what, what we can expect from you in the near future?
Nicole: Yes. Craftwork is part of NEW INC. NEW INC is the design incubator at the New Museum. They work with artists, they work with studios, they work with a wide range of creative practitioners in helping them make their work more sustainably. So they’ll have a big festival called Demo Festival in June, and there will be a big, group exhibition, talks, presentations, and that is a big, kind of thing we’re looking forward to where we will have a large scale version of Ancient Futures that is up, down in Financial District.
Abby: Oh, fantastic.
Nicole: Yeah.
Brenda: That’s excellent.
Abby: Doesn’t that sound amazing, outside, see how it weathers the, because that was my other question was like textiles. I think we chatted textiles, water, like, are you dealing with waterproofing? Have you worked in water before, when you’re thinking about different elements?
Nicole: Yeah, we’ve dealt with waterproofing. And I think also when people think about textile, they think about it as a fragile thing, and actually there are industrial scale textiles. So thinking about whether it goes inside or outside, there really, there’s lots of possibilities there, and there’s lots of ways to treat textiles so that that might be stiffer in some parts, looser in others, so it has that flexibility, but that there’s, there’s different scales of what a textile can be.
I think the biggest thing is just, thinking about textiles as a building block is is a big thing for us. And I think it would be great if designers and everyone thought about that more. We would have such a richer, richer architecture, richer spatial design if we folded textiles in in a way that we fold technology or hard materials into things.
Abby: And for me, it kind of feels like one of those, why aren’t we doing it already? You know, like, yeah, of course, it should be part of our training, the training of students.
Brenda: Is it expensive? If I were looking to create some fabric architecture for space and stuff, does that like, are the budgeting conversations on a really crazy level or how accessible financially is this kind of technology?
Nicole: I think there are different scales, right? We were just talking about, this was for an exhibition, they’re going to put up drywall. We were like, we could put up fabric scrims instead, and the difference is, not crazy different.
Brenda: Right, negligible.
Nicole: Yeah.
Brenda: That’s really good to know and that, because that’s like the first question that I know always comes in. And it sounds like, you know, it might be really expensive, but it’s really nice to know that it’s scalable.
Abby: And long lasting, right? There’s a misconception that material will just wither away and disappear. But it lasts just as long in some cases, right?
Nicole: Yeah. And also, if you think about the amount of, like, money that goes into technology, if we could just think of textiles as technology, the amount of money to build something that’s textile and interactive would not be more expensive than something that’s hardened technology.
Abby: Just the plastics industry will be weeping.
Nicole: Yeah.
Abby: Which wouldn’t be a bad thing right. Exactly. Nicole thank you so much for opening up this window on textiles and technology and sharing your vision and experiences with us today. I hope everybody enjoyed listening. It was absolutely incredible.
Brenda: Amazing.
Abby: And thanks to everyone who tuned in. If you like what you heard, subscribe for more episodes of Matters of Experience, wherever you listen to podcasts. Make sure to leave a rating and a review and share with a friend. See you next time!
Brenda: Thank you everyone. Thank you, Nicole.
Nicole: Thank you.
[Music]
Producer: Matters of Experience is produced by Lorem Ipsum Corp and recorded at Hangar Studios. Tune in next time for more fun discussions about experience design.
Textiles and Technology with Nicole Yi Messier
Being Successful While Balancing it All with Trent Oliver
Injection Simulator – Ipsen Biopharmaceuticals
National Women’s History Museum and Blue Telescope Named 2023 Gold Winner
[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. 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.
Injection Simulator – Ipsen Biopharmaceuticals
National Women’s History Museum and Blue Telescope Named 2023 Gold Winner
[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. 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.
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[Music]
Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience, produced by Lorem Ipsum, an experience design company headquartered in New York City. Our podcast explores the creativity, innovation and psychology driving immersive experiences. If you’re new, hello and 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: Today we’re chatting with Anne Fullenkamp, who is the Senior Director of Creative Experiences at the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh. She oversees the museum’s permanent exhibitions and collections and design consulting and business development programs, as well as leading their complex design teams and design philosophies about hands on learning through play to create informal learning environments, which I’m really looking forward to discussing today. And she also leads the museum’s Inclusive Design Initiative, working with cultural organizations in Pittsburgh to make the city a hub for accessibility in the arts. Anne, welcome to the show.
Anne: Thank you very much. I’m looking forward to our conversation today.
Brenda: We’re so excited to have you Anne, and I’ve got to say, I feel so privileged, mostly because I come out of children’s museums, and part of what I wanted to initiate our conversation about was about the very nature of children’s museums, and also how the path to working in a children’s museum can be varied and circuitous. You know, I started my career back in the early 1990s at Brooklyn Children’s Museum and thinking I was going to be an art teacher, and then realizing, and as I’ve told others, having this total epiphany that, oh my gosh, children’s museums, who knew? Everything seemed possible.
And since those years, those many years ago, every single decision that I’ve made in my career, no lie, has been influenced in one way or another from that initial origin in my career at Brooklyn Children’s Museum. The Pittsburgh Children’s Museum is at least as miraculous and amazing. It is a giant complex of spaces and I absolutely love visiting there.
Anne, what is it that led you to children’s museums? And I’m curious if you fell in love with them through any special ways or special means.
Anne: My origin story started in very traditional architectural design. I went to art school fully intending to be a practicing architect, and I went to graduate school. I was a practicing architect for several years. I was living and working in Baltimore, my hometown, and then I found my way to Pittsburgh. And one day I was, like we all do at the early stages of our career, I was searching job boards to see what interesting things were out there, and a job posting for an exhibit designer popped up and I literally didn’t know what that was, so I clicked on it to see, huh, I wonder what that is. And I almost took it as a design exercise to see, okay, what if I applied for this and updated my portfolio thinking about an exhibit designer job?
So, I did that, and I got a call in to come to the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh. This was literally the first time I had ever been in a children’s museum, and it literally was a life changing moment. I ended up accepting a temporary grant funded position to design one traveling exhibit, which for me was perfect. And then, frankly, 17 years later, I’m still here.
But to your point, Brenda, I fell in love with this. I found an opportunity as a designer that was so unique because there was no other place where you’re designing and working in real time with the end user. And for me, that was a life changing moment because so often as designers, we put things out into the world and then we move on. At the Children’s Museum, I found myself on both sides. I was designing it and then I was also the end user. So, good or bad, I had to live with it. And that totally changed my thinking as a designer. And it’s just continued on and on.
Abby: What was it about the skills that you had as an architect that worked so well as you transitioned, and how was it very, very different from being an architect when you were designing for the museum?
Anne: So, the skills as an architect that I brought that fit in very well is the project management and the planning and understanding of materiality, budgets, schedules, a lot of the practical things, but even the whole design process is very useful. This idea of iterative design, where you’re going to start with a concept and then build and build and build that until you get a final design that’s fully articulated around a big idea.
And I think for me, my training as an architect, it was that big exploration, that big dreaming, where you’re pulling in influences from nature, from art, from culture or whatever. It actually didn’t matter that I didn’t have any experience in children’s museums, and in some ways that was better because I can look at each project more objectively and kind of draw from whatever this specific program or this specific space or project needs.
Another big piece is for anyone who’s been through art school or architecture school, you understand the process of critiques, where you put your heart and soul into something and you’ve stayed up all night and you’re literally bleeding. Your fingers might be bleeding from cuts, and this is, I went to architecture school 25 years ago, 30 years ago, when we were still making models.
So, yeah, you put so much into it, and then you put it up there and then somebody is going to say, I don’t like that, or why didn’t you think about this? And you need to be able to defend your ideas, but also accept the criticism and then maybe learn from somebody else. Another piece of this I always talk about is the people, often architects and designers, we’re designing with the materials and space and thinking about all these wonderful inanimate or abstract elements.
And then, yes, the user, there’s the end user, the stakeholder, whatever we’re calling them, and we interview them and their wants, wish lists are included. But at the end of the day, we talk about space, we talk about light, we talk about the materials and the aesthetics and details and create these moments that might feel great when you’re in there. It might photograph beautifully, but what happens when someone’s using it every day and they start to wear out? You might have to live with the design for ten years before you get a chance to redo it, or a gallery or something. So having to understand how to keep something fresh and new and interesting for children every day, it just amped up the responsibility of what we’re actually doing and putting a whole nother layer of personal connection with the end user, because I see it every day.
Brenda: You know, talking about the end user and talking about the people for whom we’re designing, in a children’s museum, it’s so special because everything that you are designing towards, in some ways has to do with every stage of human development. It’s so multidimensional, because we’ve got, you know, our little, teeny tiny ones right on through folks who are in their senior adult years and thinking about the whole person in designing in a really holistic fashion is something that, you know, certainly in the years that I was working with children’s museums, it was really at the heart of the matter. And that was, for me, something that was really particularly special and really one of my favorite aspects of the work. And I would love to hear what some of your absolute favorite aspects are of the work that you get to do.
Anne: First and foremost, I work with amazing people, and that does translate into the work on the floor and the things we produce because we really care. I’m lucky in that the people who choose to work at a children’s museum, frankly, I’m sure at any children’s museum—we’re nonprofits. Nobody is really in this for the money, but it’s really for a passion for some aspect of the work we do.
I have to say, I love that aspect of it, but I really do get great satisfaction in seeing a family, like you were mentioning the different ages, to see adults enjoying their time with their kids in a really unique way is very special. And to your point, yes, we’re going to see the early childhood and the kind of, the different stages of childhood development, and then you have older kids, but what about the parent, the new parent, or even the new grandparent or a caretaker?
You know, any adult who’s interacting with this child, who’s experiencing things in a new and joyful way, to see that kind of childhood joy of playing translate to an adult and get them kind of in a different headspace, they’re moments that are really special here when we see the parents just relaxing.
Abby: Can you tell us some specific examples? Because in your almost 18 years, can you? Yeah, share a few so we can understand what you’ve enjoyed.
Anne: Well, something just a couple of weeks ago I was walking through the museum, and I stopped to take a picture because we have an exhibit activity called Build It, and it’s a collection of drilled panels that you take nuts and bolts and that, you assemble them together to build different structures. And as I was walking by, I saw this amazing fort and structure, and I didn’t see any children.
I saw three adult men, and they were building and playing and having a lot of fun. And it took me a little while to find where the kids were. The kids were inside the fort, but for me, that was like, check the box because the dads were actively engaged in this creative Children’s Museum exhibit experience. Other moments, too, that are kind of these more special, quieter moments that you might not expect to find at a children’s museum, is we do have a focus on social emotional learning and our approach to that is through communication.
And we have these stations where you can write down, we call them strategies cards. That’s where parents can really communicate with one another. And every week, you know, we spend time going through and reading some of those notes. It’s really kind of gratifying to see that people take advantage of that and share their struggles. I mean, that’s another big part of, of what we believe at our museum is childhood, and raising children is not all sunshine and laughter. It’s a lot of pain and crying and anxiety and all of the stuff. And, you know, being a safe place where parents and caregivers can stage those frustrations and those feelings is another aspect that I find very gratifying.
Abby: We talk a lot on our show about beginning with audiences when you’re crafting the stories and content and exhibitions. Do you work directly with children when creating your experiences or other kinds of experts? And who’s at the table when the museum is sort of beginning or starting up a new experience?
Anne: Yeah. So, we do assemble an advisory panel, and that helps us kind of focus in on some of the bigger ideas. But one of the things we do very quickly in the process is we jump right into prototyping. We find it more useful as designers and to get everyone to loosen up in their creative process, to just make something and not necessarily so obviously connected to a topic, but just roll up your sleeves and start making something that is engaging is interesting to you and you think would be interesting to kids.
And then once we kind of have these quick prototypes, we put it out on the floor directly so our visitors can kind of respond to it. So, from that frame of mind, we kind of think about prototyping and this constant critiquing process. Let’s get it out and let’s see what they think really early, and that really helps our all of us see what’s going on, and if we’re on the right track, and then we find that sometimes we’ll figure out what the exhibit is about, actually, after we start building it.
Brenda: It sounds so dynamic. And so fun and I can imagine how stimulating it’s got to be to be a designer at your children’s museum. And we cannot have a conversation today about Pittsburgh without mentioning Fred Rogers.
Anne: Yes.
Brenda: And I can tell you, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, it was a huge influence in my childhood, as with so many people. I know that his work in media and with children, with families, his ethics and values of, in particular, certainly of kindness, have made a big impact on the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh. Can you tell us about the ways in which Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood has influenced the work that the Children’s Museum does?
Anne: Absolutely. So, Fred Rogers was a big part of the founding and the opening of the Children’s Museum in 1983, and then he continued to work with the museum until his passing and was a mentor and friend of our executive director. One thing that we’re really lucky is that we as an institution got to know Fred Rogers as a man, as a person, and one of the main things, our takeaway, because Fred Rogers is with us every day at the Children’s Museum, frankly, and it is his respect for children.
That’s what we talk about. And he really never talked down to kids. And that’s something we really model now, especially when we decide and to do topics that are more like tough to talk about, like our love—we have an exhibit about love and forgiveness and about kindness and all of our emotional, social, emotional work—that you need to talk about the hard things too. And Fred Rogers has been such a great model and how you can talk about these things and really respect children as human beings.
Abby: So, talking about some of the hard stuff, though, I really want to get into the specifics. Are there any limits? Let’s start with that. Any limits at your museum or boundaries to the content that you share? I guess that’s one of our first questions and sort of what is that balance? And if you could do some specific examples of maybe some things in the past just to help the audience understand.
Anne: We do not want to prescribe or judge or tell kids or families what they should think or feel. We want to provide spaces for kids to communicate wherever they are and contextualize some things in their own way. It’s almost taking a lot of steps back, and it’s really letting the experience lead. Whatever this next step context is. And I think the best, most specific example I mentioned are love and forgiveness, XOXO: An Exhibit About Love & Forgiveness. We learned so much in the development of that, that now influences a lot of our permanent exhibits and almost our approach to exhibits in general. Because when we were first developing this exhibit, when you think about love and forgiveness very quickly in the conversation, from an adult designer point of view, you end up going down a line of personal beliefs, religion, judgments.
You know, it gets very personal very quickly. And then it can, also gets very divisive. And when I was talking about before that, we start with the experience, we kind of like took a deep breath and like, okay, what are we going to do? Because nobody wants to come to an exhibit where they feel scolded or judged or lectured to.
So that’s where we went back and started with the fun stuff or things that they were doing. And then from there we realized, this whole process that we’ve been going through, what were we doing, really doing here? We have these amazing conversations that you can have as adults that kind of ended up being, might be controversial or even like heated when were communicating.
And we as a group, we were lucky in that we trusted one another, that we could have these frank conversations. So that’s where we kind of focused in on how people communicate. And then we provided from a content point of view, we did curate and provide prompts, quotes from people we valued. We have quotes from Mahatma Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, these kind of universal understood, accepted role models. But basically, we let the visitors kind of finish the story.
Brenda: And what does that look like? Because people might argue that you know, kids may not actually really deeply understand or personally connect with some abstract, if you will, concepts such as forgiveness and you go there, but you do it through play. What does that actually look like from a design perspective? How does somebody play towards gratitude or forgiveness?
Anne: Oh, it’s funny, in some ways you create these scenarios that then would spark a conversation. So, in a literal way, when we were doing XOXO, one of the things we talked about, love and forgiveness, well, there’s balance, right, there—love is on one end or forgiveness is on the other if that’s your balance scale. So how do kids balance things?
And we created a seesaw. And in the middle, there is a ball. And the ball was half black and half white, a yin and a yang, and kids work together to create that balance. And it created behaviors where kids start to learn how to work together and have conversations and what are we doing, and if you provide the tools in the toolbox, but also like understand that the kids need to move and have different energy levels and you kind of literally put the playground in front of them, but also give them these opportunities to rest and reflect, all in the same space, all together, that’s what’s been working for us when we talk about the social emotional learning aspects.
Abby: I want to ask, just pick up on something you mentioned Anne, you talked about frank conversations with your team. It seems that, you know, sometimes we find ourselves in situations where you can’t be as frank as you like. How have you managed to curate this team around you, where you can have that quality of conversation and all leave friends in a way or have that understanding that you all understand the world differently.
Anne: Well, I think at the foundation of who we are as a children’s museum, we’re actually an art museum. We are a collecting art museum. And I think those discussions are able to be pretty open and frank, but collegial, because we all kind of approach this as artists and creators. And I think just culturally, if you kind of come into the world from an artist point of view, there’s that expectation of even being outrageous and having kind of different ideas and different perspectives.
There’s a lot of humility among all of us, because if we, we kind of take this artistic, creative approach in it and just even start conversations, it’s like, well, this is just my opinion. Art is meant for controversy and to be subjective. And I like this, and you don’t, but it’s still art and art is still worthwhile. And that kind of goes back to even the practical standpoint.
We let the prototyping process kind of be that judgy, the judgmental factor. I’m not necessarily, and again, assuming it’s not outrageously out of scope, but if you have an idea and you think this is the way to go, let’s prototype it. Let’s see what the kids say. Let’s see what the visitors say. And I think that’s where that just respect and understanding, if we’re all creatives, we’re all going to come at this from a different perspective.
Brenda: You know, Anne, the conversation that we’ve had unfold today, talking about so much respect for your audience and for kids and for families, and now you talking about the very respectful ways in which you work with your staff and work internally, it’s making me think about the recent chapter that you just wrote for the volume that I just co-edited, Flourishing in Museums, and you’ve also published, in addition to writing about flourishing in your institution, you’ve also published on the theme of empathy.
And I think that more and more, these ideas and themes are progressing as our profession moves forward. And I’d love your perspectives on flourishing, both within your institution and also through the exhibitions that you create and how you reach and work with your audiences. I’d love your perspectives on what flourishing, and empathy looks like, what strikes you as possible in terms of the profession writ large?
Anne: Well, when you, when you’re describing this in context of flourishing and empathy and what we get to do at a children’s museum, I think this is where hopefully, and I see this, where all museums are moving into this approach of not necessarily being the experts, but really being spaces where people can explore ideas. We say at our museum, and it’s a quote that I, it’s been repeated that you can’t fail museum. And just having that ability to like, see something new, have an experience with it, whether it’s a, you know, a child and you’re a parent for the first time or just personally see something that you’ve never seen before, that is kind of exciting. And just to reignite that kind of personal passion, I think is really, really important.
And I think that’s where museums, especially in this day and age, where there’s so much information that’s available. I mean, this is kind of that classic, museums used to be places that provided information, but now that that kind of the same factual information is available at our fingertips, that I think that’s where the museums can be places for experiences.
And I know we’ve been, you know, our museum, we’re looking at all these like the photo ops and are those valuable kind of experiences. But if people are finding joy in what they do, it’s a social experience. But I think that’s where they, if they can be these places of really exploring new ideas and, trying things they’ve never done before.
Again, as a children’s museum, and we’re an art museum, so we have an art studio, we have a makerspace, we have artworks, we’re working commission art and installation art all the time. It’s kind of just places. I think that’s kind of the exciting thing when I think about museums in the future as they evolve, it’s really taking a step back and leaving more blank spaces and seeing how individuals can personalize and bring themselves.
I know that’s another phrase we see a lot now, but bringing themselves to the museum experience and adding to it, and the museum doesn’t have to provide all the context. We’re not the, the source of all the culture, all the context. We might even if it is a specific theme or an idea, this is a starting point. And then really looking at our visitors as contributors. And luckily, I mean, that’s the kind of where I see us going as a children’s museum, because the point of empathy when we were talking about that, too, it’s it allows you for lots of perspectives and to see how people, other people respond to things like that.
Abby: Briefly Anne, this is out last question, so, what would you tell ten year old Anne? What advice would you give her that you know now?
Anne; Well, it’s funny because that’s a question we always ask when you come to a new meeting at the Children’s Museum. You’re asked what you like to do as a child. And inevitably we find connections to what you do now. And, you know, in that context, growing up in Baltimore, I was an only child in the 80s. You know, I had young parents.
And now that very young parents, but I spent a lot of time at our art museum. But it’s that, that open exploration and just being places and having that kind of freedom, that confidence building that I now look back and got that kind of latchkey free, the free form child rearing. I’d like to say I wouldn’t change a lot, but it’s just interesting how where I ended up, I just see that looking back at my childhood as that connection to what I do now.
So yeah, I know I’m not actually—that advice to your, to yourself, it’s, it’s like everything, it’s to have, stress less. Don’t worry about it. Trust your instincts. Because that’s one thing that I have done, been able to do is, is to to trust my gut. And that’s where by making this leap in 2006, taking this chance and trying something out and knowing that it’s, you know, it’ll be okay. And I think that’s something I got from childhood and frankly, visiting museums, and I didn’t even appreciate that at the time, but I see that now working in museums, that that’s what these spaces can be.
Abby: Thank you, Anne, for sharing your story with us, and passion for design. I think there’s probably a lot of people who were like, I’d like to go and work on Anne’s team because it sounds fantastic.
Brenda: Oh my gosh.
Abby: I want to do what Anne does.
Brenda: You’re going to get so many emails now, Anne.
Abby: It sounds like an amazing place to work. And, and thank you, yeah, so much for sharing these individual stories. I’m coming to visit, if that’s all right, Anne.
Anne: Oh, anytime. We’re open—that’s the other wonderful thing about a museum. We’re open every day.
Brenda: There you go. Oh, it’s such, it’s such a worthy visit. Absolutely.
Anne: Well, thank you both. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation.
Brenda: Thank you so much, Anne.
Abby: And thanks to everyone who tuned in today. If you like what you heard, subscribe for more episodes of Matters of Experience, wherever you listen to podcasts, make sure to leave a rating and a review and share with a friend. We’ll see you next time.
Brenda: Goodbye, everyone.
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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.
Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh
build it – Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh Design & Consulting
learning resources – Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh
XOXO: An Exhibit About Love & Forgiveness – Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh
Flourishing in Museums: Towards a Positive Museology – 1st Edition
[Music]
Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience, produced by Lorem Ipsum, an experience design company headquartered in New York City. Our podcast explores the creativity, innovation and psychology driving immersive experiences. If you’re new, hello and 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: Today we’re chatting with Anne Fullenkamp, who is the Senior Director of Creative Experiences at the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh. She oversees the museum’s permanent exhibitions and collections and design consulting and business development programs, as well as leading their complex design teams and design philosophies about hands on learning through play to create informal learning environments, which I’m really looking forward to discussing today. And she also leads the museum’s Inclusive Design Initiative, working with cultural organizations in Pittsburgh to make the city a hub for accessibility in the arts. Anne, welcome to the show.
Anne: Thank you very much. I’m looking forward to our conversation today.
Brenda: We’re so excited to have you Anne, and I’ve got to say, I feel so privileged, mostly because I come out of children’s museums, and part of what I wanted to initiate our conversation about was about the very nature of children’s museums, and also how the path to working in a children’s museum can be varied and circuitous. You know, I started my career back in the early 1990s at Brooklyn Children’s Museum and thinking I was going to be an art teacher, and then realizing, and as I’ve told others, having this total epiphany that, oh my gosh, children’s museums, who knew? Everything seemed possible.
And since those years, those many years ago, every single decision that I’ve made in my career, no lie, has been influenced in one way or another from that initial origin in my career at Brooklyn Children’s Museum. The Pittsburgh Children’s Museum is at least as miraculous and amazing. It is a giant complex of spaces and I absolutely love visiting there.
Anne, what is it that led you to children’s museums? And I’m curious if you fell in love with them through any special ways or special means.
Anne: My origin story started in very traditional architectural design. I went to art school fully intending to be a practicing architect, and I went to graduate school. I was a practicing architect for several years. I was living and working in Baltimore, my hometown, and then I found my way to Pittsburgh. And one day I was, like we all do at the early stages of our career, I was searching job boards to see what interesting things were out there, and a job posting for an exhibit designer popped up and I literally didn’t know what that was, so I clicked on it to see, huh, I wonder what that is. And I almost took it as a design exercise to see, okay, what if I applied for this and updated my portfolio thinking about an exhibit designer job?
So, I did that, and I got a call in to come to the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh. This was literally the first time I had ever been in a children’s museum, and it literally was a life changing moment. I ended up accepting a temporary grant funded position to design one traveling exhibit, which for me was perfect. And then, frankly, 17 years later, I’m still here.
But to your point, Brenda, I fell in love with this. I found an opportunity as a designer that was so unique because there was no other place where you’re designing and working in real time with the end user. And for me, that was a life changing moment because so often as designers, we put things out into the world and then we move on. At the Children’s Museum, I found myself on both sides. I was designing it and then I was also the end user. So, good or bad, I had to live with it. And that totally changed my thinking as a designer. And it’s just continued on and on.
Abby: What was it about the skills that you had as an architect that worked so well as you transitioned, and how was it very, very different from being an architect when you were designing for the museum?
Anne: So, the skills as an architect that I brought that fit in very well is the project management and the planning and understanding of materiality, budgets, schedules, a lot of the practical things, but even the whole design process is very useful. This idea of iterative design, where you’re going to start with a concept and then build and build and build that until you get a final design that’s fully articulated around a big idea.
And I think for me, my training as an architect, it was that big exploration, that big dreaming, where you’re pulling in influences from nature, from art, from culture or whatever. It actually didn’t matter that I didn’t have any experience in children’s museums, and in some ways that was better because I can look at each project more objectively and kind of draw from whatever this specific program or this specific space or project needs.
Another big piece is for anyone who’s been through art school or architecture school, you understand the process of critiques, where you put your heart and soul into something and you’ve stayed up all night and you’re literally bleeding. Your fingers might be bleeding from cuts, and this is, I went to architecture school 25 years ago, 30 years ago, when we were still making models.
So, yeah, you put so much into it, and then you put it up there and then somebody is going to say, I don’t like that, or why didn’t you think about this? And you need to be able to defend your ideas, but also accept the criticism and then maybe learn from somebody else. Another piece of this I always talk about is the people, often architects and designers, we’re designing with the materials and space and thinking about all these wonderful inanimate or abstract elements.
And then, yes, the user, there’s the end user, the stakeholder, whatever we’re calling them, and we interview them and their wants, wish lists are included. But at the end of the day, we talk about space, we talk about light, we talk about the materials and the aesthetics and details and create these moments that might feel great when you’re in there. It might photograph beautifully, but what happens when someone’s using it every day and they start to wear out? You might have to live with the design for ten years before you get a chance to redo it, or a gallery or something. So having to understand how to keep something fresh and new and interesting for children every day, it just amped up the responsibility of what we’re actually doing and putting a whole nother layer of personal connection with the end user, because I see it every day.
Brenda: You know, talking about the end user and talking about the people for whom we’re designing, in a children’s museum, it’s so special because everything that you are designing towards, in some ways has to do with every stage of human development. It’s so multidimensional, because we’ve got, you know, our little, teeny tiny ones right on through folks who are in their senior adult years and thinking about the whole person in designing in a really holistic fashion is something that, you know, certainly in the years that I was working with children’s museums, it was really at the heart of the matter. And that was, for me, something that was really particularly special and really one of my favorite aspects of the work. And I would love to hear what some of your absolute favorite aspects are of the work that you get to do.
Anne: First and foremost, I work with amazing people, and that does translate into the work on the floor and the things we produce because we really care. I’m lucky in that the people who choose to work at a children’s museum, frankly, I’m sure at any children’s museum—we’re nonprofits. Nobody is really in this for the money, but it’s really for a passion for some aspect of the work we do.
I have to say, I love that aspect of it, but I really do get great satisfaction in seeing a family, like you were mentioning the different ages, to see adults enjoying their time with their kids in a really unique way is very special. And to your point, yes, we’re going to see the early childhood and the kind of, the different stages of childhood development, and then you have older kids, but what about the parent, the new parent, or even the new grandparent or a caretaker?
You know, any adult who’s interacting with this child, who’s experiencing things in a new and joyful way, to see that kind of childhood joy of playing translate to an adult and get them kind of in a different headspace, they’re moments that are really special here when we see the parents just relaxing.
Abby: Can you tell us some specific examples? Because in your almost 18 years, can you? Yeah, share a few so we can understand what you’ve enjoyed.
Anne: Well, something just a couple of weeks ago I was walking through the museum, and I stopped to take a picture because we have an exhibit activity called Build It, and it’s a collection of drilled panels that you take nuts and bolts and that, you assemble them together to build different structures. And as I was walking by, I saw this amazing fort and structure, and I didn’t see any children.
I saw three adult men, and they were building and playing and having a lot of fun. And it took me a little while to find where the kids were. The kids were inside the fort, but for me, that was like, check the box because the dads were actively engaged in this creative Children’s Museum exhibit experience. Other moments, too, that are kind of these more special, quieter moments that you might not expect to find at a children’s museum, is we do have a focus on social emotional learning and our approach to that is through communication.
And we have these stations where you can write down, we call them strategies cards. That’s where parents can really communicate with one another. And every week, you know, we spend time going through and reading some of those notes. It’s really kind of gratifying to see that people take advantage of that and share their struggles. I mean, that’s another big part of, of what we believe at our museum is childhood, and raising children is not all sunshine and laughter. It’s a lot of pain and crying and anxiety and all of the stuff. And, you know, being a safe place where parents and caregivers can stage those frustrations and those feelings is another aspect that I find very gratifying.
Abby: We talk a lot on our show about beginning with audiences when you’re crafting the stories and content and exhibitions. Do you work directly with children when creating your experiences or other kinds of experts? And who’s at the table when the museum is sort of beginning or starting up a new experience?
Anne: Yeah. So, we do assemble an advisory panel, and that helps us kind of focus in on some of the bigger ideas. But one of the things we do very quickly in the process is we jump right into prototyping. We find it more useful as designers and to get everyone to loosen up in their creative process, to just make something and not necessarily so obviously connected to a topic, but just roll up your sleeves and start making something that is engaging is interesting to you and you think would be interesting to kids.
And then once we kind of have these quick prototypes, we put it out on the floor directly so our visitors can kind of respond to it. So, from that frame of mind, we kind of think about prototyping and this constant critiquing process. Let’s get it out and let’s see what they think really early, and that really helps our all of us see what’s going on, and if we’re on the right track, and then we find that sometimes we’ll figure out what the exhibit is about, actually, after we start building it.
Brenda: It sounds so dynamic. And so fun and I can imagine how stimulating it’s got to be to be a designer at your children’s museum. And we cannot have a conversation today about Pittsburgh without mentioning Fred Rogers.
Anne: Yes.
Brenda: And I can tell you, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, it was a huge influence in my childhood, as with so many people. I know that his work in media and with children, with families, his ethics and values of, in particular, certainly of kindness, have made a big impact on the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh. Can you tell us about the ways in which Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood has influenced the work that the Children’s Museum does?
Anne: Absolutely. So, Fred Rogers was a big part of the founding and the opening of the Children’s Museum in 1983, and then he continued to work with the museum until his passing and was a mentor and friend of our executive director. One thing that we’re really lucky is that we as an institution got to know Fred Rogers as a man, as a person, and one of the main things, our takeaway, because Fred Rogers is with us every day at the Children’s Museum, frankly, and it is his respect for children.
That’s what we talk about. And he really never talked down to kids. And that’s something we really model now, especially when we decide and to do topics that are more like tough to talk about, like our love—we have an exhibit about love and forgiveness and about kindness and all of our emotional, social, emotional work—that you need to talk about the hard things too. And Fred Rogers has been such a great model and how you can talk about these things and really respect children as human beings.
Abby: So, talking about some of the hard stuff, though, I really want to get into the specifics. Are there any limits? Let’s start with that. Any limits at your museum or boundaries to the content that you share? I guess that’s one of our first questions and sort of what is that balance? And if you could do some specific examples of maybe some things in the past just to help the audience understand.
Anne: We do not want to prescribe or judge or tell kids or families what they should think or feel. We want to provide spaces for kids to communicate wherever they are and contextualize some things in their own way. It’s almost taking a lot of steps back, and it’s really letting the experience lead. Whatever this next step context is. And I think the best, most specific example I mentioned are love and forgiveness, XOXO: An Exhibit About Love & Forgiveness. We learned so much in the development of that, that now influences a lot of our permanent exhibits and almost our approach to exhibits in general. Because when we were first developing this exhibit, when you think about love and forgiveness very quickly in the conversation, from an adult designer point of view, you end up going down a line of personal beliefs, religion, judgments.
You know, it gets very personal very quickly. And then it can, also gets very divisive. And when I was talking about before that, we start with the experience, we kind of like took a deep breath and like, okay, what are we going to do? Because nobody wants to come to an exhibit where they feel scolded or judged or lectured to.
So that’s where we went back and started with the fun stuff or things that they were doing. And then from there we realized, this whole process that we’ve been going through, what were we doing, really doing here? We have these amazing conversations that you can have as adults that kind of ended up being, might be controversial or even like heated when were communicating.
And we as a group, we were lucky in that we trusted one another, that we could have these frank conversations. So that’s where we kind of focused in on how people communicate. And then we provided from a content point of view, we did curate and provide prompts, quotes from people we valued. We have quotes from Mahatma Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, these kind of universal understood, accepted role models. But basically, we let the visitors kind of finish the story.
Brenda: And what does that look like? Because people might argue that you know, kids may not actually really deeply understand or personally connect with some abstract, if you will, concepts such as forgiveness and you go there, but you do it through play. What does that actually look like from a design perspective? How does somebody play towards gratitude or forgiveness?
Anne: Oh, it’s funny, in some ways you create these scenarios that then would spark a conversation. So, in a literal way, when we were doing XOXO, one of the things we talked about, love and forgiveness, well, there’s balance, right, there—love is on one end or forgiveness is on the other if that’s your balance scale. So how do kids balance things?
And we created a seesaw. And in the middle, there is a ball. And the ball was half black and half white, a yin and a yang, and kids work together to create that balance. And it created behaviors where kids start to learn how to work together and have conversations and what are we doing, and if you provide the tools in the toolbox, but also like understand that the kids need to move and have different energy levels and you kind of literally put the playground in front of them, but also give them these opportunities to rest and reflect, all in the same space, all together, that’s what’s been working for us when we talk about the social emotional learning aspects.
Abby: I want to ask, just pick up on something you mentioned Anne, you talked about frank conversations with your team. It seems that, you know, sometimes we find ourselves in situations where you can’t be as frank as you like. How have you managed to curate this team around you, where you can have that quality of conversation and all leave friends in a way or have that understanding that you all understand the world differently.
Anne: Well, I think at the foundation of who we are as a children’s museum, we’re actually an art museum. We are a collecting art museum. And I think those discussions are able to be pretty open and frank, but collegial, because we all kind of approach this as artists and creators. And I think just culturally, if you kind of come into the world from an artist point of view, there’s that expectation of even being outrageous and having kind of different ideas and different perspectives.
There’s a lot of humility among all of us, because if we, we kind of take this artistic, creative approach in it and just even start conversations, it’s like, well, this is just my opinion. Art is meant for controversy and to be subjective. And I like this, and you don’t, but it’s still art and art is still worthwhile. And that kind of goes back to even the practical standpoint.
We let the prototyping process kind of be that judgy, the judgmental factor. I’m not necessarily, and again, assuming it’s not outrageously out of scope, but if you have an idea and you think this is the way to go, let’s prototype it. Let’s see what the kids say. Let’s see what the visitors say. And I think that’s where that just respect and understanding, if we’re all creatives, we’re all going to come at this from a different perspective.
Brenda: You know, Anne, the conversation that we’ve had unfold today, talking about so much respect for your audience and for kids and for families, and now you talking about the very respectful ways in which you work with your staff and work internally, it’s making me think about the recent chapter that you just wrote for the volume that I just co-edited, Flourishing in Museums, and you’ve also published, in addition to writing about flourishing in your institution, you’ve also published on the theme of empathy.
And I think that more and more, these ideas and themes are progressing as our profession moves forward. And I’d love your perspectives on flourishing, both within your institution and also through the exhibitions that you create and how you reach and work with your audiences. I’d love your perspectives on what flourishing, and empathy looks like, what strikes you as possible in terms of the profession writ large?
Anne: Well, when you, when you’re describing this in context of flourishing and empathy and what we get to do at a children’s museum, I think this is where hopefully, and I see this, where all museums are moving into this approach of not necessarily being the experts, but really being spaces where people can explore ideas. We say at our museum, and it’s a quote that I, it’s been repeated that you can’t fail museum. And just having that ability to like, see something new, have an experience with it, whether it’s a, you know, a child and you’re a parent for the first time or just personally see something that you’ve never seen before, that is kind of exciting. And just to reignite that kind of personal passion, I think is really, really important.
And I think that’s where museums, especially in this day and age, where there’s so much information that’s available. I mean, this is kind of that classic, museums used to be places that provided information, but now that that kind of the same factual information is available at our fingertips, that I think that’s where the museums can be places for experiences.
And I know we’ve been, you know, our museum, we’re looking at all these like the photo ops and are those valuable kind of experiences. But if people are finding joy in what they do, it’s a social experience. But I think that’s where they, if they can be these places of really exploring new ideas and, trying things they’ve never done before.
Again, as a children’s museum, and we’re an art museum, so we have an art studio, we have a makerspace, we have artworks, we’re working commission art and installation art all the time. It’s kind of just places. I think that’s kind of the exciting thing when I think about museums in the future as they evolve, it’s really taking a step back and leaving more blank spaces and seeing how individuals can personalize and bring themselves.
I know that’s another phrase we see a lot now, but bringing themselves to the museum experience and adding to it, and the museum doesn’t have to provide all the context. We’re not the, the source of all the culture, all the context. We might even if it is a specific theme or an idea, this is a starting point. And then really looking at our visitors as contributors. And luckily, I mean, that’s the kind of where I see us going as a children’s museum, because the point of empathy when we were talking about that, too, it’s it allows you for lots of perspectives and to see how people, other people respond to things like that.
Abby: Briefly Anne, this is out last question, so, what would you tell ten year old Anne? What advice would you give her that you know now?
Anne; Well, it’s funny because that’s a question we always ask when you come to a new meeting at the Children’s Museum. You’re asked what you like to do as a child. And inevitably we find connections to what you do now. And, you know, in that context, growing up in Baltimore, I was an only child in the 80s. You know, I had young parents.
And now that very young parents, but I spent a lot of time at our art museum. But it’s that, that open exploration and just being places and having that kind of freedom, that confidence building that I now look back and got that kind of latchkey free, the free form child rearing. I’d like to say I wouldn’t change a lot, but it’s just interesting how where I ended up, I just see that looking back at my childhood as that connection to what I do now.
So yeah, I know I’m not actually—that advice to your, to yourself, it’s, it’s like everything, it’s to have, stress less. Don’t worry about it. Trust your instincts. Because that’s one thing that I have done, been able to do is, is to to trust my gut. And that’s where by making this leap in 2006, taking this chance and trying something out and knowing that it’s, you know, it’ll be okay. And I think that’s something I got from childhood and frankly, visiting museums, and I didn’t even appreciate that at the time, but I see that now working in museums, that that’s what these spaces can be.
Abby: Thank you, Anne, for sharing your story with us, and passion for design. I think there’s probably a lot of people who were like, I’d like to go and work on Anne’s team because it sounds fantastic.
Brenda: Oh my gosh.
Abby: I want to do what Anne does.
Brenda: You’re going to get so many emails now, Anne.
Abby: It sounds like an amazing place to work. And, and thank you, yeah, so much for sharing these individual stories. I’m coming to visit, if that’s all right, Anne.
Anne: Oh, anytime. We’re open—that’s the other wonderful thing about a museum. We’re open every day.
Brenda: There you go. Oh, it’s such, it’s such a worthy visit. Absolutely.
Anne: Well, thank you both. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation.
Brenda: Thank you so much, Anne.
Abby: And thanks to everyone who tuned in today. If you like what you heard, subscribe for more episodes of Matters of Experience, wherever you listen to podcasts, make sure to leave a rating and a review and share with a friend. We’ll see you next time.
Brenda: Goodbye, 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.
The Transformative Power of Play with Anne Fullenkamp
Flourishing through Museums in a Changing World with Dr. Kiersten F. Latham
Flourishing in Museums: Towards a Positive Museology – 1st Edition
Man’s Search for Meaning: Frankl, Viktor E., Winslade, William J., Kushner, Harold S.
[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, this is Brenda Cowan.
Abby: So today, Brenda, I feel it’s going to be a really interesting conversation because we’re discussing your new book, Flourishing in Museums: Towards a Positive Museology that you wrote with today’s guest, Dr. Kiersten F. Latham, who is the president and CEO of Sauder Village. And for our listeners who may not be familiar with Sauder Village, it’s a living history museum complex in Ohio. If you’re ever in the area, I really, really encourage you to go, stay there. It’s absolutely fantastic.
Prior to the Village, Kiersten had led Museums Studies programs at Michigan State University and Kent State University, founded the experimental space, MuseLab, and taught all aspects of Museum Studies from administration to collections management to user experience. Kiersten has conducted research on the meaning of museum objects, Brenda, your area of interest too, user perceptions of ‘the real thing’ and positive museology. Kiersten, welcome to the show.
Kiersten: Thank you. I’m so glad to be here.
Brenda: Kiersten, we are so happy to have you. Let’s sink right into the heart of what the book is about. The museum field is poised for change and growth right now as it has never been before. Societal unrest and reckonings, climate change, challenges to museum conventions, these have brought us to a moment in time when positive and empathetic movements in the workplace and community are opportune and they’re necessary.
So, let’s begin with flourishing. In the midst of all of these challenges that museums are facing and all of the actions and activities that museums are making, what does it actually mean to flourish and who should be flourishing?
Kiersten: You know, I have an image that comes to my mind whenever I think about the word flourishing. You know the timelapses of flowers where you see the seed in the ground and it goes very fast and takes you through the whole growth cycle and then suddenly it’s in this bloom, and it’s this most incredible, beautiful thing with all this color.
That’s the image I have when I think about flourish. In this context, in the book and beyond the book, really, I think it boils down to when you empower people to flourish, it means that people have what they need to be their best selves. That means that they’re able to thrive, that there’s vitality, that they blossom, that they grow.
And in the museum organization or related cultural organizations, we’re referring to not only our visitors, but the people who work in the museums. And my own take on flourishing comes from a whole person approach, which means you’re really considering each person in their entirety, not just their work selves, but their whole selves, their whole past experience, their learning styles, their emotions, their life at home.
I think that’s really what flourishing means to me. It does come from Martin Seligman and many people have probably heard about Martin Seligman. He’s kind of the father of positive psychology, but he basically says that flourishing is a state that we create. And I think that’s really important here, too.
Abby: First of all, wow, the imagery of the flower and then the lead on to the flourishing is like really positive, and I think positivity seems to underscore so much of the idea of flourishing. But what does positivity mean here? I understand there are many sort of different disciplines that engage with the idea of positivity, you know, can you give us a little bit more of a break down?
Kiersten: For me, positivity is ultimately a practice. It’s taking a positive or optimistic attitude. It’s a skill, it’s a tool and it is the kind of thing that, if you choose, can change your reality. There’s a meme that’s going around in positive circles, positive disciplinary circles in particular about the heliotropic effect. The heliotropic effect is if you imagine a field full of sunflowers, and the sunflower throughout the day points itself toward the sun, right? It’s looking for that positive thing. It’s looking for that sunshine, that thing that, that keeps it going.
There’s a great quote that I just really love that I think summarizes a lot of this, and it’s from Viktor Frankl. He was, among many things, a Holocaust survivor. And he said, we have the freedom to choose our own attitude. It’s a choice that you can make. It’s a choice that you can make now, positivity, and it’s a choice that you can grow all the time.
But the other thing that’s important to remember here also is that we’re not talking about toxic positivity. You know, a lot of people, they hear the word positivity, and I can see them bristle a little bit. And I know that this is, this is one of those things that we need to, that Brenda and I in particular, you know, with this book, with the word positive in front of it and saying, hey, everybody be positive that we are not saying to paste on smiley faces, this is absolutely not what we’re saying and this is not what the entire set of positive disciplines are saying.
You know, to give you an idea of what positivity is, Barbara Fredrickson, who wrote the book Positivity, did a lot of research on it. She’s one of many who have been really digging into this for the last couple of decades. She says there are many forms of positivity, but she names a few, and I feel like this will give you an example. She’s broken them down to joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe, and my favorite, love.
Abby: Wow.
Kiersten: Yeah.
Brenda: In thinking about positivity and in thinking about all of this work in terms of principles or as we frame them out as intentions, we specifically work within a framework of specific emotions and behaviors, including gratitude, care, delight, courage, hope, and kindness. Can you talk with us a little bit about how it is, Kiersten, that museums work with these in practical ways?
Kiersten: Well, I want to start by saying it’s bird by bird. One bite at a time. But I think it starts with leadership because that sets the tone. As a leader, in order to create a culture that understands flourishing and enacts it, one needs to say it out loud.
Brenda: Kiersten, let me ask you, when you say “say it out loud,” are you speaking literally or figuratively?
Kiersten: Both.
Brenda: So as a leader of an institution, what would that have you saying out loud that might be deemed even controversial in some examples?
Kiersten: Yeah. So, I also wrote a chapter in the book on using love leadership in my organization. And, you know, that can get some funny looks. So, you have to define that. So, this is first of all, this is not, you know, like going out on dates, kind of love, not that sort of love, it’s agape love, which is kind of more of a practical sort of love, a care for people and a consistency.
But love leadership involves a lot of forgiveness, a lot of listening, a lot of communication, guidance. And for me, it meant saying to everyone from the start that I believe in leading with love. And then I started to realize, oh this is a pretty big organization. So, there’s about 350 people total with part time and full time mixed across this organization, and that’s new to me. That’s been something that’s been kind of a struggle because I want to communicate with everyone, and I want it one-on-one with everyone because I want to tell them all that I love them.
But what I did was I posted love letters, I call them love letters, at all the break rooms, and I tried to do it—I’m not very good with regularity, but I tried to do it monthly, where I put at these break room spots, just a monthly thing that just talked something about what was happening around the realm of leading with love. And it was just a short little thing. I always made it a little bit fun. I kind of used a lot of Canva templates that looked like Valentine’s Day.
That’s what it looked like in terms of saying it out loud. But I also did it in ways that weren’t using the love word necessarily, but made it very clear to, for instance, my core team. I have a core leadership team of eight people to talk about it in our pretty much every other week meetings. It means a lot of vulnerability, and so it was not only being vulnerable myself, but helping them understand the importance of them also being vulnerable. And so, it was just, it was in, I don’t want to call them small things, but it was in these kind of more subtle things that had to do with things like, you know, talking about emotions as leaders.
Abby: And in terms of flourishing for colleagues, let’s say, not for leadership, like is it, how do you talk about the docents and the people in the museum? Like what does this flourishing museum look like from a, from an employee perspective?
Kiersten: So, yes, the idea is that the leader creates conditions that allow for all of these people in their different kinds of jobs to flourish in positive ways. But I can give you some examples of that. It’s about, you know, having respect for each other, treating each other a certain way. We are a living history museum, but we have a whole suite of other, I don’t know, we can call them businesses, like a hotel and a restaurant and that sort of thing.
And, you know, they’ve in the past worked very much in silos. They’re physically apart. They kind of have had their own sort of budgets, their own staff. And I immediately wanted to break that down, break those silos down. And it’s taken a good year and a half to get to a point where, you know, I can say it over and over, but you really need to understand it from within and between themselves.
Me telling people isn’t going to do anything. People have to believe it and enact it. And so, for New Year’s as we, I believe everybody across this entire country, if not beyond that, have had staffing shortage issues. It’s, it’s just a, it’s just kind of a way of life right now. And we have particularly the inn, the hotel has had quite a difficult time with getting housekeepers.
So, what happened was, this is so beautiful, the hotel manager asked for help because they were short staffed. They had to do a quick turnaround on all the rooms because they were very busy. So, we reached out to the whole entire complex asking anybody and everybody from the bakery to the restaurant to the banquets, to the living history, to the farm.
I mean, everybody was asked, and I cannot believe how many people pitched in. It was absolutely, it just was a moment where I was like, oh, my gosh, this is, this is happening. People are caring for each other across the whole complex. They get it, that it’s not silos. They get it that we’re all in this together. So, I was one of those people, I did help, and that’s why I know how hard it is to change out a room. Oh, my gosh, I hurt really bad that night. I’ll just tell you that right now.
Abby: Well, another thing is leading by example, Kiersten, like you have to, you’ve got to walk the walk. You really do. And that takes time, that’s the only way. I was going to ask you how you manage to convince people to your way. And you know, the best way that I’ve seen is you can sit and tell people, but you just got to show them and do it. That really is the only way.
Kiersten: I think that’s the only way. But I actually see that, I don’t see that necessarily as leading by example, but learning for me. I mean, I have a much, much better sense now and I can be more empathetic to everybody who has these jobs. So, it was actually good for me.
Brenda: I want to play with some of this good feeling that we’re having here right now, because, Kiersten, when we were talking with the publisher of Flourishing in Museums, there was a little bit of pushback on the subject. Flourishing was misunderstood by many people, and it still is, I’m sure. There is this perception, and we were mentioning this a little bit earlier, that it’s about being happy all the time and feeling upbeat and not taking on difficult situations or subjects.
And as we know and as we’ve really, really worked very hard to point out in the book, the opposite is true. You can feel some very bad feelings and yet work towards flourishing with a positive strategy. You can take on rough subjects and challenges and do so in a positive manner. Kiersten, what do you say to folks who think that positivity is the same thing as feeling happy?
Kiersten: Well, I tell them it’s not the same thing, that’s for sure. One can be positive without being happy. And in fact, when you really start to dig into what an optimist is, I’m going to call them a practical optimist, one of the features of a practical optimist is that there, is that they can be cheerful but not be happy.
And that sounds like parsing things pretty finely, but if you start to think about it, positive can feel good, but not all positive things are good and not all negative things result in the bad. There’s a reason that we have negative reinforcement. The negative, why we have negative data that comes to us, because it is teaching us something. It’s telling us something. Don’t hold your hand in the fire. That’s bad.
Abby: Well, negativity is also critical thinking, right, Kiersten? Like, I’ll be in a meeting and we’re talking, and they’ll be like, why are you focusing on the negative? And I’m like, no, no, no, I’m problem solving. I want to see all those problems because that makes me feel comfortable. And then I can work on how we can positively address those issues.
Like these words positive and negative are bandied around. But you’re completely right. Sometimes we need the balance. You need to be able to see the, the good and the bad of the situation, and positivity is, I feel like you and Brenda are explaining it, is it’s about understanding that and looking forward and overcoming challenges with a positive way as opposed to just being, you know, happy as the ship’s going down. Yay, we’re all drowning!
Kiersten: Yeah, and I mean, remember what I said at the beginning? It’s about making a choice on perspective and you can take any situation, I mean, we’ve got situations in the book and we’ve got children in war, sexual assault, mental, emotional, spiritual health, repatriation, refugeeism are all topics that are discussed in this book, and the idea is to put on that, that lens, to understand it through that, to choose to see the future.
For example, there’s a fixed versus growth mindset. For example, a fixed mindset says, you know, that’s it, oh, bad thing happens, the end, we’re done, we’re all doomed. Let’s just all, you know, give it in. But a growth mindset, which is very much a part of positivity and flourishing, says, okay, this is this moment, this is this moment.
And it’s not always going to be like this. And we’re going to get past this and what are we going to do to get past it or how are we going to deal with it? And how are we going to, you know, not, it doesn’t always have to be like this, but how are we going to make an opportunity out of a problem? You know, sometimes a problem is a problem. You got to deal with it and you have to treat it as a problem. But quite often when you reframe, you can see the opportunities in problems.
Abby: Yeah, and Brenda, can you tell us something about a chapter in the book or, you know, as Kiersten just mentioned, some adversity, some of the stories about the museums or the subjects or the exhibitions that pop in your head?
Brenda: I think one of my oh, I don’t know if I could really pick a favorite exactly, but I’m so very fond of the chapter on the War Childhood Museum and the work of Jasminko Halilovic and how absolutely remarkable that institution was because they literally, everything about this subject was, if you will, negative. You know, the subject of the museum is about children in war.
There’s no sugarcoating this subject. And you could wonder how on earth could this have any relevancy to the idea of flourishing or positivity or, you know, positive anything? And the reality is, is that Jasminko did a brilliant job, not just in creating his institution, but in really sort of fortifying his staff, his visitors, and the people who participate with him in collecting and donating objects and looking at how it is that the very action of creating a museum and the very action of giving an object, and the very action of telling a story, and the very action of listening to a story enables you to flourish, it enables you to thrive, it enables you to grow, and it enables you to, in his work, work through the trauma, work through the tragedy, and come perhaps to a new place, a different place, transformation.
Abby: I do want to say one thing, which means the way that you just described the War Childhood Museum makes it, as an institution, give back so much to humanity because anybody who comes there or has to do with and involved with, but beyond the people involved, just the visitors, will take away something that will nurture them for the rest of their lives.
And so, it makes our museums, it makes me feel like our museums and institutions are still very vital places, places that can help people heal, understand where they’ve come from, understand each other. And I feel like they’re as relevant and important today as they ever have been.
Brenda: I would completely agree. And I think that, again, like Kiersten mentioned, so many of the subjects in the book and the author contributions deal with a lot of the very hard work that museums are doing right now, fortunately, and how difficult it is, if we are talking about repatriation of objects or and well, so on. I think that one of the things that is an important take away is, yes, museums can contribute to human beings becoming better human beings and flourishing is absolutely a part of that.
I like to think about flourishing and the museum world, though, as being very practical. And again, Kiersten, back to what when you were kickstarting this conversation and talking about how having an abundance mindset and thinking in terms of the positive, it really is practical mechanics in a certain regard and so any museum, even museums that aren’t dealing with very challenging topics, if you will, still need to work with an abundance mindset, still need to, and I’m using the word need here because I believe very fervently in this practice.
I’m thinking about another contributing author Anne Fullenkamp at the Pittsburgh Children’s Museum who wrote about kindness and who wrote about creating exhibitions on the subject of kindness for children. And what does that actually look like and how does that actually work? When she’s talking about the exhibitions work and the programing work that they’re doing at the Pittsburgh Children’s Museum, it’s very strategic and it’s very pragmatic, but it’s entirely dealing with feelings, emotions and interactions that can be a little bit amorphous. And again, kindness really is the subject of what she’s working with.
Abby: It sounds like, why do we need the book? The book sounds perfect, but it sounds like all the contributors’ museums have got it down. Have museums got it down? Who needs this book? Kiersten, starting with you.
Kiersten: No, but that is a really interesting question because when this journey started, it was an absolute no. But, and so that was probably, you know, the origin in my brain for all of this really started in 2017. So, I’m putting this in time so that you can understand this journey that went through COVID. In 2017 to 2019, no, this, let’s just say it was rejected outright—
Abby: Wow.
Kiersten: —in my first proposal of the book. But something and I think we all know, something happened during COVID, and we know that during the pandemic, people started to understand a lot more about the importance of emotions, importance of social contact, the importance of empathy. And now it’s okay. And I, and I feel like what’s really interesting is Brenda and I basically worked on this book over the span of that very strange time.
Brenda: Yeah, it was our COVID baby.
Kiersten: Yeah, it was. It was our COVID baby, but it was also, you know, the world wasn’t quite ready for it when we started. And now, look, the world feels like, I’m seeing publications and people talking about these things now, and they were not really talking about it in this way. So, it feels like we’ve like landed in this moment, in this trajectory of time where people really are going to get it now. And I think that’s exciting.
Brenda: I think that you’re right in that, you know, first of all, I think that anybody who works in museums is duty bound to do well and to be well and to think in these terms, because otherwise we’re not going to make it. Burnout is a reality in the museum world. Stress, anxiety, definitely realities in the museum world. And I think that if I were to, if I were to wager, because museums since COVID in particular, as you’re pointing out, have been taking on big issues and are working very, very hard, I think really across the board, are working very hard and very notably is maybe a better word, working very notably to be able to make change both in terms of how they staff, how they administer, how they function, how they operate, as well as what are we going to be exhibiting, what are we going to be interpreting, who are we inviting in, how are we welcoming people? Do people belong here?
These are all things that have been a problem with museums for a very long time that are now being addressed and the hard work of doing this, it’s a lot to ask of people who are working in museums and already working very, very hard to now work towards solving, in some cases, world problems. Right? Or looking to shift entire paradigms in ways of being, operating, and thinking. And I think that the timeliness of this work is because people need handholds so that they can do this rough work. They need a framework for being able to think in a way that is going to be rejuvenating, healthy, helpful and hopeful. And that’s what this book does.
Abby: Wow. It’s fantastic. I actually think this book should be read by more than people outside, people outside the museum industry, to be honest, I think it’s people who lead in any way, shape or form or who dream of leading, it sounds like there’s a lot of things in here that it will help guide, you know, be that playbook for people as they move forward and we all work together. I feel like it really has legs outside just the museum industry.
Kiersten: Yeah, you use the word playbook and I, I want to make sure that it’s understood, too, that really this isn’t, again, we talked about fix and growth. This is all about growth. This isn’t something that’s done. It’s not one and done. This is the start. I want everyone to build on, it doesn’t have to be me. It doesn’t have to be Brenda. You know, just how can you take this and run with it?
Abby: Well, Kiersten, it was such a pleasure to have you on the show today and discuss flourishing and that positivity can change your reality. Congratulations, Brenda and Kiersten with the book and I look forward to the next book.
Kiersten: Thank you.
Brenda: No pressure Kiersten, come on!
Kiersten: Yeah, that might be a little while.
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: Thanks 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.
Flourishing in Museums: Towards a Positive Museology – 1st Edition
Man’s Search for Meaning: Frankl, Viktor E., Winslade, William J., Kushner, Harold S.
[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, this is Brenda Cowan.
Abby: So today, Brenda, I feel it’s going to be a really interesting conversation because we’re discussing your new book, Flourishing in Museums: Towards a Positive Museology that you wrote with today’s guest, Dr. Kiersten F. Latham, who is the president and CEO of Sauder Village. And for our listeners who may not be familiar with Sauder Village, it’s a living history museum complex in Ohio. If you’re ever in the area, I really, really encourage you to go, stay there. It’s absolutely fantastic.
Prior to the Village, Kiersten had led Museums Studies programs at Michigan State University and Kent State University, founded the experimental space, MuseLab, and taught all aspects of Museum Studies from administration to collections management to user experience. Kiersten has conducted research on the meaning of museum objects, Brenda, your area of interest too, user perceptions of ‘the real thing’ and positive museology. Kiersten, welcome to the show.
Kiersten: Thank you. I’m so glad to be here.
Brenda: Kiersten, we are so happy to have you. Let’s sink right into the heart of what the book is about. The museum field is poised for change and growth right now as it has never been before. Societal unrest and reckonings, climate change, challenges to museum conventions, these have brought us to a moment in time when positive and empathetic movements in the workplace and community are opportune and they’re necessary.
So, let’s begin with flourishing. In the midst of all of these challenges that museums are facing and all of the actions and activities that museums are making, what does it actually mean to flourish and who should be flourishing?
Kiersten: You know, I have an image that comes to my mind whenever I think about the word flourishing. You know the timelapses of flowers where you see the seed in the ground and it goes very fast and takes you through the whole growth cycle and then suddenly it’s in this bloom, and it’s this most incredible, beautiful thing with all this color.
That’s the image I have when I think about flourish. In this context, in the book and beyond the book, really, I think it boils down to when you empower people to flourish, it means that people have what they need to be their best selves. That means that they’re able to thrive, that there’s vitality, that they blossom, that they grow.
And in the museum organization or related cultural organizations, we’re referring to not only our visitors, but the people who work in the museums. And my own take on flourishing comes from a whole person approach, which means you’re really considering each person in their entirety, not just their work selves, but their whole selves, their whole past experience, their learning styles, their emotions, their life at home.
I think that’s really what flourishing means to me. It does come from Martin Seligman and many people have probably heard about Martin Seligman. He’s kind of the father of positive psychology, but he basically says that flourishing is a state that we create. And I think that’s really important here, too.
Abby: First of all, wow, the imagery of the flower and then the lead on to the flourishing is like really positive, and I think positivity seems to underscore so much of the idea of flourishing. But what does positivity mean here? I understand there are many sort of different disciplines that engage with the idea of positivity, you know, can you give us a little bit more of a break down?
Kiersten: For me, positivity is ultimately a practice. It’s taking a positive or optimistic attitude. It’s a skill, it’s a tool and it is the kind of thing that, if you choose, can change your reality. There’s a meme that’s going around in positive circles, positive disciplinary circles in particular about the heliotropic effect. The heliotropic effect is if you imagine a field full of sunflowers, and the sunflower throughout the day points itself toward the sun, right? It’s looking for that positive thing. It’s looking for that sunshine, that thing that, that keeps it going.
There’s a great quote that I just really love that I think summarizes a lot of this, and it’s from Viktor Frankl. He was, among many things, a Holocaust survivor. And he said, we have the freedom to choose our own attitude. It’s a choice that you can make. It’s a choice that you can make now, positivity, and it’s a choice that you can grow all the time.
But the other thing that’s important to remember here also is that we’re not talking about toxic positivity. You know, a lot of people, they hear the word positivity, and I can see them bristle a little bit. And I know that this is, this is one of those things that we need to, that Brenda and I in particular, you know, with this book, with the word positive in front of it and saying, hey, everybody be positive that we are not saying to paste on smiley faces, this is absolutely not what we’re saying and this is not what the entire set of positive disciplines are saying.
You know, to give you an idea of what positivity is, Barbara Fredrickson, who wrote the book Positivity, did a lot of research on it. She’s one of many who have been really digging into this for the last couple of decades. She says there are many forms of positivity, but she names a few, and I feel like this will give you an example. She’s broken them down to joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe, and my favorite, love.
Abby: Wow.
Kiersten: Yeah.
Brenda: In thinking about positivity and in thinking about all of this work in terms of principles or as we frame them out as intentions, we specifically work within a framework of specific emotions and behaviors, including gratitude, care, delight, courage, hope, and kindness. Can you talk with us a little bit about how it is, Kiersten, that museums work with these in practical ways?
Kiersten: Well, I want to start by saying it’s bird by bird. One bite at a time. But I think it starts with leadership because that sets the tone. As a leader, in order to create a culture that understands flourishing and enacts it, one needs to say it out loud.
Brenda: Kiersten, let me ask you, when you say “say it out loud,” are you speaking literally or figuratively?
Kiersten: Both.
Brenda: So as a leader of an institution, what would that have you saying out loud that might be deemed even controversial in some examples?
Kiersten: Yeah. So, I also wrote a chapter in the book on using love leadership in my organization. And, you know, that can get some funny looks. So, you have to define that. So, this is first of all, this is not, you know, like going out on dates, kind of love, not that sort of love, it’s agape love, which is kind of more of a practical sort of love, a care for people and a consistency.
But love leadership involves a lot of forgiveness, a lot of listening, a lot of communication, guidance. And for me, it meant saying to everyone from the start that I believe in leading with love. And then I started to realize, oh this is a pretty big organization. So, there’s about 350 people total with part time and full time mixed across this organization, and that’s new to me. That’s been something that’s been kind of a struggle because I want to communicate with everyone, and I want it one-on-one with everyone because I want to tell them all that I love them.
But what I did was I posted love letters, I call them love letters, at all the break rooms, and I tried to do it—I’m not very good with regularity, but I tried to do it monthly, where I put at these break room spots, just a monthly thing that just talked something about what was happening around the realm of leading with love. And it was just a short little thing. I always made it a little bit fun. I kind of used a lot of Canva templates that looked like Valentine’s Day.
That’s what it looked like in terms of saying it out loud. But I also did it in ways that weren’t using the love word necessarily, but made it very clear to, for instance, my core team. I have a core leadership team of eight people to talk about it in our pretty much every other week meetings. It means a lot of vulnerability, and so it was not only being vulnerable myself, but helping them understand the importance of them also being vulnerable. And so, it was just, it was in, I don’t want to call them small things, but it was in these kind of more subtle things that had to do with things like, you know, talking about emotions as leaders.
Abby: And in terms of flourishing for colleagues, let’s say, not for leadership, like is it, how do you talk about the docents and the people in the museum? Like what does this flourishing museum look like from a, from an employee perspective?
Kiersten: So, yes, the idea is that the leader creates conditions that allow for all of these people in their different kinds of jobs to flourish in positive ways. But I can give you some examples of that. It’s about, you know, having respect for each other, treating each other a certain way. We are a living history museum, but we have a whole suite of other, I don’t know, we can call them businesses, like a hotel and a restaurant and that sort of thing.
And, you know, they’ve in the past worked very much in silos. They’re physically apart. They kind of have had their own sort of budgets, their own staff. And I immediately wanted to break that down, break those silos down. And it’s taken a good year and a half to get to a point where, you know, I can say it over and over, but you really need to understand it from within and between themselves.
Me telling people isn’t going to do anything. People have to believe it and enact it. And so, for New Year’s as we, I believe everybody across this entire country, if not beyond that, have had staffing shortage issues. It’s, it’s just a, it’s just kind of a way of life right now. And we have particularly the inn, the hotel has had quite a difficult time with getting housekeepers.
So, what happened was, this is so beautiful, the hotel manager asked for help because they were short staffed. They had to do a quick turnaround on all the rooms because they were very busy. So, we reached out to the whole entire complex asking anybody and everybody from the bakery to the restaurant to the banquets, to the living history, to the farm.
I mean, everybody was asked, and I cannot believe how many people pitched in. It was absolutely, it just was a moment where I was like, oh, my gosh, this is, this is happening. People are caring for each other across the whole complex. They get it, that it’s not silos. They get it that we’re all in this together. So, I was one of those people, I did help, and that’s why I know how hard it is to change out a room. Oh, my gosh, I hurt really bad that night. I’ll just tell you that right now.
Abby: Well, another thing is leading by example, Kiersten, like you have to, you’ve got to walk the walk. You really do. And that takes time, that’s the only way. I was going to ask you how you manage to convince people to your way. And you know, the best way that I’ve seen is you can sit and tell people, but you just got to show them and do it. That really is the only way.
Kiersten: I think that’s the only way. But I actually see that, I don’t see that necessarily as leading by example, but learning for me. I mean, I have a much, much better sense now and I can be more empathetic to everybody who has these jobs. So, it was actually good for me.
Brenda: I want to play with some of this good feeling that we’re having here right now, because, Kiersten, when we were talking with the publisher of Flourishing in Museums, there was a little bit of pushback on the subject. Flourishing was misunderstood by many people, and it still is, I’m sure. There is this perception, and we were mentioning this a little bit earlier, that it’s about being happy all the time and feeling upbeat and not taking on difficult situations or subjects.
And as we know and as we’ve really, really worked very hard to point out in the book, the opposite is true. You can feel some very bad feelings and yet work towards flourishing with a positive strategy. You can take on rough subjects and challenges and do so in a positive manner. Kiersten, what do you say to folks who think that positivity is the same thing as feeling happy?
Kiersten: Well, I tell them it’s not the same thing, that’s for sure. One can be positive without being happy. And in fact, when you really start to dig into what an optimist is, I’m going to call them a practical optimist, one of the features of a practical optimist is that there, is that they can be cheerful but not be happy.
And that sounds like parsing things pretty finely, but if you start to think about it, positive can feel good, but not all positive things are good and not all negative things result in the bad. There’s a reason that we have negative reinforcement. The negative, why we have negative data that comes to us, because it is teaching us something. It’s telling us something. Don’t hold your hand in the fire. That’s bad.
Abby: Well, negativity is also critical thinking, right, Kiersten? Like, I’ll be in a meeting and we’re talking, and they’ll be like, why are you focusing on the negative? And I’m like, no, no, no, I’m problem solving. I want to see all those problems because that makes me feel comfortable. And then I can work on how we can positively address those issues.
Like these words positive and negative are bandied around. But you’re completely right. Sometimes we need the balance. You need to be able to see the, the good and the bad of the situation, and positivity is, I feel like you and Brenda are explaining it, is it’s about understanding that and looking forward and overcoming challenges with a positive way as opposed to just being, you know, happy as the ship’s going down. Yay, we’re all drowning!
Kiersten: Yeah, and I mean, remember what I said at the beginning? It’s about making a choice on perspective and you can take any situation, I mean, we’ve got situations in the book and we’ve got children in war, sexual assault, mental, emotional, spiritual health, repatriation, refugeeism are all topics that are discussed in this book, and the idea is to put on that, that lens, to understand it through that, to choose to see the future.
For example, there’s a fixed versus growth mindset. For example, a fixed mindset says, you know, that’s it, oh, bad thing happens, the end, we’re done, we’re all doomed. Let’s just all, you know, give it in. But a growth mindset, which is very much a part of positivity and flourishing, says, okay, this is this moment, this is this moment.
And it’s not always going to be like this. And we’re going to get past this and what are we going to do to get past it or how are we going to deal with it? And how are we going to, you know, not, it doesn’t always have to be like this, but how are we going to make an opportunity out of a problem? You know, sometimes a problem is a problem. You got to deal with it and you have to treat it as a problem. But quite often when you reframe, you can see the opportunities in problems.
Abby: Yeah, and Brenda, can you tell us something about a chapter in the book or, you know, as Kiersten just mentioned, some adversity, some of the stories about the museums or the subjects or the exhibitions that pop in your head?
Brenda: I think one of my oh, I don’t know if I could really pick a favorite exactly, but I’m so very fond of the chapter on the War Childhood Museum and the work of Jasminko Halilovic and how absolutely remarkable that institution was because they literally, everything about this subject was, if you will, negative. You know, the subject of the museum is about children in war.
There’s no sugarcoating this subject. And you could wonder how on earth could this have any relevancy to the idea of flourishing or positivity or, you know, positive anything? And the reality is, is that Jasminko did a brilliant job, not just in creating his institution, but in really sort of fortifying his staff, his visitors, and the people who participate with him in collecting and donating objects and looking at how it is that the very action of creating a museum and the very action of giving an object, and the very action of telling a story, and the very action of listening to a story enables you to flourish, it enables you to thrive, it enables you to grow, and it enables you to, in his work, work through the trauma, work through the tragedy, and come perhaps to a new place, a different place, transformation.
Abby: I do want to say one thing, which means the way that you just described the War Childhood Museum makes it, as an institution, give back so much to humanity because anybody who comes there or has to do with and involved with, but beyond the people involved, just the visitors, will take away something that will nurture them for the rest of their lives.
And so, it makes our museums, it makes me feel like our museums and institutions are still very vital places, places that can help people heal, understand where they’ve come from, understand each other. And I feel like they’re as relevant and important today as they ever have been.
Brenda: I would completely agree. And I think that, again, like Kiersten mentioned, so many of the subjects in the book and the author contributions deal with a lot of the very hard work that museums are doing right now, fortunately, and how difficult it is, if we are talking about repatriation of objects or and well, so on. I think that one of the things that is an important take away is, yes, museums can contribute to human beings becoming better human beings and flourishing is absolutely a part of that.
I like to think about flourishing and the museum world, though, as being very practical. And again, Kiersten, back to what when you were kickstarting this conversation and talking about how having an abundance mindset and thinking in terms of the positive, it really is practical mechanics in a certain regard and so any museum, even museums that aren’t dealing with very challenging topics, if you will, still need to work with an abundance mindset, still need to, and I’m using the word need here because I believe very fervently in this practice.
I’m thinking about another contributing author Anne Fullenkamp at the Pittsburgh Children’s Museum who wrote about kindness and who wrote about creating exhibitions on the subject of kindness for children. And what does that actually look like and how does that actually work? When she’s talking about the exhibitions work and the programing work that they’re doing at the Pittsburgh Children’s Museum, it’s very strategic and it’s very pragmatic, but it’s entirely dealing with feelings, emotions and interactions that can be a little bit amorphous. And again, kindness really is the subject of what she’s working with.
Abby: It sounds like, why do we need the book? The book sounds perfect, but it sounds like all the contributors’ museums have got it down. Have museums got it down? Who needs this book? Kiersten, starting with you.
Kiersten: No, but that is a really interesting question because when this journey started, it was an absolute no. But, and so that was probably, you know, the origin in my brain for all of this really started in 2017. So, I’m putting this in time so that you can understand this journey that went through COVID. In 2017 to 2019, no, this, let’s just say it was rejected outright—
Abby: Wow.
Kiersten: —in my first proposal of the book. But something and I think we all know, something happened during COVID, and we know that during the pandemic, people started to understand a lot more about the importance of emotions, importance of social contact, the importance of empathy. And now it’s okay. And I, and I feel like what’s really interesting is Brenda and I basically worked on this book over the span of that very strange time.
Brenda: Yeah, it was our COVID baby.
Kiersten: Yeah, it was. It was our COVID baby, but it was also, you know, the world wasn’t quite ready for it when we started. And now, look, the world feels like, I’m seeing publications and people talking about these things now, and they were not really talking about it in this way. So, it feels like we’ve like landed in this moment, in this trajectory of time where people really are going to get it now. And I think that’s exciting.
Brenda: I think that you’re right in that, you know, first of all, I think that anybody who works in museums is duty bound to do well and to be well and to think in these terms, because otherwise we’re not going to make it. Burnout is a reality in the museum world. Stress, anxiety, definitely realities in the museum world. And I think that if I were to, if I were to wager, because museums since COVID in particular, as you’re pointing out, have been taking on big issues and are working very, very hard, I think really across the board, are working very hard and very notably is maybe a better word, working very notably to be able to make change both in terms of how they staff, how they administer, how they function, how they operate, as well as what are we going to be exhibiting, what are we going to be interpreting, who are we inviting in, how are we welcoming people? Do people belong here?
These are all things that have been a problem with museums for a very long time that are now being addressed and the hard work of doing this, it’s a lot to ask of people who are working in museums and already working very, very hard to now work towards solving, in some cases, world problems. Right? Or looking to shift entire paradigms in ways of being, operating, and thinking. And I think that the timeliness of this work is because people need handholds so that they can do this rough work. They need a framework for being able to think in a way that is going to be rejuvenating, healthy, helpful and hopeful. And that’s what this book does.
Abby: Wow. It’s fantastic. I actually think this book should be read by more than people outside, people outside the museum industry, to be honest, I think it’s people who lead in any way, shape or form or who dream of leading, it sounds like there’s a lot of things in here that it will help guide, you know, be that playbook for people as they move forward and we all work together. I feel like it really has legs outside just the museum industry.
Kiersten: Yeah, you use the word playbook and I, I want to make sure that it’s understood, too, that really this isn’t, again, we talked about fix and growth. This is all about growth. This isn’t something that’s done. It’s not one and done. This is the start. I want everyone to build on, it doesn’t have to be me. It doesn’t have to be Brenda. You know, just how can you take this and run with it?
Abby: Well, Kiersten, it was such a pleasure to have you on the show today and discuss flourishing and that positivity can change your reality. Congratulations, Brenda and Kiersten with the book and I look forward to the next book.
Kiersten: Thank you.
Brenda: No pressure Kiersten, come on!
Kiersten: Yeah, that might be a little while.
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: Thanks everyone.
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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.
Flourishing through Museums in a Changing World with Dr. Kiersten F. Latham
Museums of the Future with Sundar Raman
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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: Hello, this is Brenda Cowan.
Abby: So today we’re talking with Sundar Raman, the director of technology at the Museum of the Future. And for those who maybe missed all the hullabaloo, it’s the landmark museum in Dubai that’s devoted to innovation and futuristic ideology. And for visual learners like me, it’s the gorgeous, squashed, donut shaped metal building with the beautiful calligraphy all over it, designed by Killa Design. This won like a gazillion awards and been on the covers of publications since it opened. Now, I know the museum claims it’s the most beautiful building in the world. I think that’s a bit of a lofty claim there, Sundar.
Sundar: Well, I think I agree that it is the most beautiful building in the world. But what I will say is that it’s the most inspiring building in the world, and it pushes people to kind of think from a very different level. It really pushes us beyond the confines of where we are.
Brenda: It certainly defies convention. And when I look at it, call me a romantic, I think of it as like an embrace. It looks like it’s embracing, which is something that I think is, subjectively speaking, quite beautiful.
Abby: So, one of the issues we sometimes face is we are doing the inside of the building. we’re doing all the experiential design and the architect’s doing the outside and it’s like, never the twain shall meet. The architect does their, wow, this is amazing, we paid millions and millions of dollars for this beautiful, beautiful landmark building, but it’s useless for the design team when we go in because it’s not been thought about in terms of the spaces that we need so that we can do our job. It looks like it would have been a really challenging space to be able to build out. Do you know anything about some of the challenges that the, the donut, the eye, the hug meant for the team that were creating inside?
Sundar: I think this is always the case. The purpose of the architect of a building is very much different from the exhibition designer in a space. And the reason I say that—and of course I’ve dealt with this conundrum or this challenge on multiple buildings in my career, we often have to take over, let’s say, a historic or a classical building that you can only touch in certain ways in order to be able to tell the story even of the place. You know, oftentimes museums or cultural experiences are in places that you’re trying to evoke the stories that were in the place. And then they come in and they say, oh, you’re not allowed to put Wi-Fi, you’re not allowed to put wiring, but we want like amazing projections, and we want like amazing screens everywhere. And you’re like, there’s no power, man. Like, what do I do?
Where we don’t have that specific problem here, but the shape of the building certainly introduces challenges. And I would say this is true for a lot of places. And in our work as experienced designers, the challenge is not in trying to go, okay, oh there’s this thing, and then how do I wedge my idea into the place. Oftentimes it is that the place has its own story, and you have to tell your story kind of in alignment with the place, you know, to, like, allow it to kind of breathe into the story and your story to breathe into it. And for us, like some of the challenges of building into a non rectilinear space were overcome by saying, hey, actually, people can move in completely different ways. The challenges of like, how do you move a certain number of people across the floors? How do you, how do you put people into places that feel like they’re going to all get wedged into a corner? You know?
A driving idea in my mind during the whole project was the kid that walks into the place or the adult that walks into the place must feel like this was the first time they stepped into the future. From there on, when they look back, they go, that is where the future started for me. I mean, this was just for me to go, okay, like how can we make this thing happen in the kind of time constraint, resource constraint that we had in order to pull off the exhibitions.
I mean, I’m sure that Shaun Killa and Buro Happold and the team around like making the thing happen, had significant other challenges, but they provided a place that basically attracted people, even if we failed miserably, you know, so they sort of set it up really well for us or like terribly because we had to like, step up to the plate of this thing that they had created. But it also gave us this way of thinking of like, okay, when somebody comes in, they’re primed and then the next step is to get them to this other thing, and their experience has to be this other thing. And when they exit, they have to leave with, with this feeling in them.
Brenda: One of the things that I loved that you said as well, initially, was putting yourself in a position to think about the nature of how people move throughout a space and maybe thinking a little bit differently about some of the ways in which audiences, visitors, move throughout a space and beginning there because how often does design not even begin with thinking about, well thinking about the visitor at all, God forbid, but thinking about how do human beings move by nature and how do we move individually? How do we move as groups? So anyway, I appreciated you making mention of that.
I do want to pivot to talking about you and your journey, your own journey, giving our listeners a sense of your very diverse background. You love technology, you love data. You’re also a creative, and you see building technology as being creative, and we’d love to hear a little bit about what your path was to where you are today, and we would love to hear where you envision yourself in the future.
Sundar: Well, I am in the future already, so you know.
Brenda: There we go. That was inevitable.
Sundar: So cliche. Yeah, I know. Actually, it’s a good question, and, you know, because on some level it is very surprising even to me where I am. And there’s a certain amount of, I guess, serendipity and accident that goes into everything that we do. So, I have always wanted to be at this intersection of art and technology, but circumstances in life push people in one direction or another. My father is an amazing artist, but he never got to like practice art as a firsthand thing. He became an engineer, but he did art on the side. But I would say for me personally, I was just always excited in so many different things.
So, I went to school at a very strange place in Iowa, and then I ended up going and working at a company that made solar panels out in New Mexico, and the job was to set up solar panels in farms, ostrich farms and iguana farms out in the New Mexico desert. The process for me was always just, hey, what is an interesting thing to do? And what would be exciting about the next step? And it’s not always like, oh, I did this thing and therefore I knew where I was going. It seemed very much like these accidents were there, and somehow I find myself incredibly fortunate to have all of these paths coincide because the job that I do now, I don’t think I could do it had I not done all of those other things because I needed the variety of skills from engineering to understanding space systems and understanding people to like, you know, understanding how spirituality works for people, you know.
But I do think that pretty much everyone I know who is a creative experience designer or like a creative technologist or, you know, a creative engineer, they went down the path of doing a lot of different stuff. Like one of the best engineers I know was a historian, you know, another incredible programmer that I know was a flamenco guitarist. So like, they came down the path of creating experiences from other domains that gave them a way to think differently.
Abby: Do you think that that’s a lot to do with your parents, and some parents would rather you got a vocation, and you were going to be set for life and a clear path, and maybe it’s a narrow path, but it’s a surer path. And other parents or influences on kids or teenagers or students is more about looking for life experiences and following the path that excites you the most because you’re going to enjoy that, put time into it, do well at it and the money will come, the jobs will come, the path, like you, will come, it’ll be meandering. Like, do you think that it’s maybe a generational thing or a parental thing as well, rather than a you-thing or a me-thing or—do you know what I mean?
Sundar: If I think back, I have so many regrets about how much anxiety I probably instilled in my parents my entire life. They were not, you know—they would have been much happier I think, had I followed a path that was much more defined. But they look now and they’re like, okay, you’re okay. Fine. Now we don’t have to worry that we have to support you.
But generally, I think like, it has worked out because I’m also like, excited about a lot of things. And I think curiosity in the world generally helps, you know? And the people that I know who are curious about the world around them are also able to kind of do different things, you know. So generally, the world will support you if you go out and have curiosity and are willing to engage.
Abby: I have a question for Brenda about your students. Is curiosity something you can teach?
Brenda: It is something that I teach. 100%. Absolutely.
Sundar Wow, how do you teach it?
Brenda: It’s day one. I teach curiosity as a skill. You know, It’s a part of our nature, right? Its inherent. It’s in all of us. Some of us sort of squash it down. We kind of have to grow up and become an adult and we learn how to sort of just like, look at things instead of deeply see things. And yet, if we can tap back into that inner four-year-old in all of us where life is largely lived in questions and wonder, then we are going to be ourselves more open to the world around us. We’re going to be more open to ourselves, more open to change, more able to command our own skills and our own disciplines when facing uncertainty and the unknown. And it all begins with understanding that ultimately, we’ve evolved, as, you know, an animal that lifts up the rock to see what’s underneath it and that that is one of the most powerful things about us.
Sundar: So, I have always gone down the path of going, I can teach you to code, but I can’t teach you to be passionate, you know? And when people come in, like, they’re like, oh, I don’t know how to do this language. I don’t know how to do this thing. I don’t know how. I’ve never done this thing before.
And I always think experience is incredibly important at a senior level, at a junior to mid-level, it’s the experience of having done stuff so you know how to change context. But what you were talking about is complicated because it’s like, how do you instill in somebody the capacity to go in a different path? You know, like I have a friend who only eats chicken teriyaki no matter where in the world he goes. And I’m like, dude, this is—
Brenda: It’s a big world out there.
Sundar: Whatever, whatever, whatever makes you happy. But you know, these flavors are amazing. But how do you get somebody to kind of change their context a little bit? Because they’re like, no, I don’t like it. I just don’t, I don’t want to go there. There’s a huge insecurity in that.
Brenda: There is a huge insecurity. I mean, first of all, I’ve got the benefit of being in a classroom environment. So, there is something and I state this very clearly, it is your responsibility to see yourself in an environment where you can fail and where ultimately we should all fail at something at some point and that, that this is the place to do it. It is probably one of the great luxuries of being in an educational environment in that you can, you know, within whatever is reasonable for yourself, be vulnerable.
Yeah, I mean, I will add to that for your students that the number of times that adults in the professional world fail on like a monumental basis that they lie about—
Brenda: Yes.
Sundar: —upsets me on a daily basis. And I wish students understood this, that normalizing that might actually be the best thing that they could possibly do. They have to come into the working world and then be told that they are allowed to fail, or they see other people fail and they’re like, oh, okay, the management is failing this way, let me also fail. You know, because it’s never a good thing. It’s a very different philosophy about it.
Brenda: Well, poetics plays a part, because there’s failure, but then there’s also things just not working.
Sundar: Oh yeah, yeah. No, I’m not counting that. In our world of engineering, that is, that’s given.
Brenda: That’s right.
Sundar: That’s like—no, there’s also the contrivances and basically sabotage of the universe, which—
Brenda: Mm hmm.
Sundar: There’s always, like, everything is set up to basically make everything break for you on the last day, the eleventh hour. You know.
Brenda: I think that the curiosity piece, though, is something—it can be taught about and nurtured by the individual, nurtured by me as a teacher. And it’s also something that I really do deeply believe that you can think of as a skill and you can do certain things every day to exercise that muscle to a point where you can capture again, and I really do mean quite specifically something about the four-year-old. You can learn how to think about the world around you, even when you’re taking your commute in the morning or whatever the case might be. You can think in questions, and it opens you up to seeing things deeply and to a point where you can find and experience a lot more joy and a lot more, oh my God. And it’s something that then, you know, frees you a little bit and makes you more expansive.
Abby: Sundar, I just want to jump in and talk about the technology because sort of in your job, failing happens a lot. Do you think that through, again you mention technology, and I also work with technology and it’s always a wing and a prayer and a lot of hard work and breaking new ground. And it’s, if you’re doing technology well, you should be failing a lot to finally make something that works in a brilliant way. Do you think that you enjoy living in that environment and what has it taught you as a leader or, you know, working with people and emotions like having all this failure around?
Brenda: We’re here for you, Sundar. Let it out, it’s okay.
Sundar: No, there aren’t enough therapists in the world for what we do. No, I actually think that what we do is completely irrational. This is, it’s like I’ve talked to multiple friends of mine that do this, and I’m like, you know, generally we don’t get paid as much as people who do other things to do a lot more work that is generally temporary, that just keeps us on a level of anxiety and everyone’s like, oh my God, you finished that project? That’s amazing. Are you going to rest now? And you go, no, opening day was the easy part. Like, don’t you understand? This thing has to run for a while, you know? And you go, the anxiety doesn’t stop until like two years later, you know? So, we’re approaching year number two, but sadly, we’ve decided to inject a bunch of other things into it. And you go, wait, why? Why would you not just stop when you’re ahead? You know?
But I think it’s also like the way that the world works. You know, you always have to keep fighting. And there’s an excitement to getting it to that next level. And you realize this. You have something more in you that can take it to that next experience, you know, and in a way, like actually not to sound too effusive about, you know, both the building and where I live, but Dubai is kind of in-your-face about that. You know, you have to have a stupid amount of talent and a stupid amount of luck and then a completely insane vision to do what they did here, what they continue to do.
I mean, the Museum of the Future, like this is, this is—like when I first saw it, I was like, this is a stupid project. This is not going to get made. And then like as I stood in front of it, honestly, like I was initially like this, I don’t think I want to come to this place that’s just about like throwing money at a project, but you stand in front of it and you go, this is audacious. You know, and then you look around and you go, this building obviously belongs here because everything is audacious. You know, I can’t just like go, oh, this building could, would work just as well in Paris. No, it doesn’t. It just cannot work anywhere else. And this really is what has to get us to other levels of what we can do.
And what I love about this kind of a building project and this kind of an experience project is there’s a certain amount of trust in the system that has to go, okay, a group of human beings can come together and make this thing. You need a certain amount of provenance, a certain amount of fortune to pull it all together, and all of the stars have to align. But really it is a ton of hard work that gets people there. And I think that, you know, it’s the most comforting thing because you also go, we as humans are capable of doing really remarkable things. Don’t ever minimize that.
One of the quotes on the building is attributed to Sheikh Mohammed, and it says the future belongs to those who can imagine, design, and create it. The future is not for us to await, but rather to create. You know, every idea exists for us to envision and then manifest. You just push the envelope on what you’re going to manifest, and then you can do amazing things.
Brenda: Sundar, you’ve said that you see the future as being a place where we will have figured out how to be kind to each other and that you seek to manifest kindness in the future through your work. And I so wholly appreciate your positive thinking, and I’m wondering if you could just speak a tiny bit on what you see as the role of museums and empathy. Like, is the Museum of the Future a place where we can experience how to be better humans?
Sundar: I think the answer to your question is yes. I think one of the intimidating things about museums around the world so, for example, I was—like my relatives, my cousins, my aunts and stuff like often are extremely reluctant to go to museums. I think for two reasons. One is that there may feel a little bit of intimidation about the place, but also feel like it’s just not that interesting for me.
It doesn’t trigger any excitement, you know, and I think people can have very different ways of interacting with the place. But if you go into a place and the first thing you’re told is, don’t touch it, stand aside and look at a very small piece of print that gives you some kind of oblique reference to this thing, and they don’t understand the context within which this sits, because curation is hard, it gets a little bit frustrating, you know. And I think the kindness there is if you walk into a place and you see a sculpture if you can’t hold a sculpture, it’s kind of like, what’s the point? The reality of the sculpture is not the point, right? The ability to kind of connect with it is incredibly important, which is not to say that you shouldn’t step back and take a look at how amazing David is because he’s 17 feet tall.
But then when you go outside, and you see like the thousand copies of David, and you touch them, you go, this is how marble feels, and somebody made this. You go, wow, this is incredible that somebody could make this, and I can feel this thing, and I almost feel the blood going through this thing, you know? And that’s the stuff that I feel like, the points of kindness in places like that.
Our job as curators and storytellers is to bring people in, not to make them feel separated, you know? And it’s a hard one because I also appreciate the very hard problem of keeping people from breaking stuff because people come and break stuff every day at the museum.
Abby: Yes.
Sundar: On a level that I’m just like, how is this possible?
Abby: Yup.
Sundar: You know, like our manufacturers are like, this is military grade metal, But, you know, I think this idea is this: when we create experiences that are stories, it’s always good to understand what the operational constraint of the thing is. Because this is the other thing, like staff in museums also are like they’re in the worst possible position because people want to take a photograph and the security guy has to go up and go, don’t take a photograph of that thing.
And you’re like, you invited me into this place. The one thing we do is take selfies. Can you please just like allow that, my LED light is not going to damage this photograph and then go, oh, no, there’s a rights issue. And you go, well, that’s your problem, not my problem, you know, and so this is the thing of like we keep creating obstacles for people to, like, ingest what they, what is only just connecting to places and the stories that are around them.
Brenda: And their curiosity.
Sundar: Exactly. And their curiosity. If you curb that curiosity, why do you think that it will continue in another place? Obviously, it won’t, you know. Then you go, okay, I have to fit within my box. I have to follow the rules. You go, well the world is going to become boring that way.
Abby: I’m really sad that we’re actually out of time.
Brenda: I know I’m bummed.
Abby: This has been unbelievable, like Sundar—
Brenda: It’s so great talking with you.
Abby: Phenomenal to talk to you and hear about your perspective and the journey and how you still sound so curious and passionate about what you do.
Sundar: Well, thank you so much. This was super fun. I loved this conversation.
Brenda: It was so mutual. Oh, my goodness. And, you know, we’ll have to continue it in the future.
Sundar: All righty.
Abby: Thanks to everyone who tuned in today. If you like what you heard, subscribe for more episodes of Matters of Experience wherever you listen to podcasts, make sure to leave a rating and a review and share with a friend. We’ll see you next time.
Brenda: Thanks, everyone. Thank you, Sundar.
Sundar: Thank you so much.
[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.
[Music]
Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience, a podcast that explores the creativity, innovation and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. If you’re new, a hearty welcome, and to our regular listeners, thanks for tuning in and supporting our conversation. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: Hello, this is Brenda Cowan.
Abby: So today we’re talking with Sundar Raman, the director of technology at the Museum of the Future. And for those who maybe missed all the hullabaloo, it’s the landmark museum in Dubai that’s devoted to innovation and futuristic ideology. And for visual learners like me, it’s the gorgeous, squashed, donut shaped metal building with the beautiful calligraphy all over it, designed by Killa Design. This won like a gazillion awards and been on the covers of publications since it opened. Now, I know the museum claims it’s the most beautiful building in the world. I think that’s a bit of a lofty claim there, Sundar.
Sundar: Well, I think I agree that it is the most beautiful building in the world. But what I will say is that it’s the most inspiring building in the world, and it pushes people to kind of think from a very different level. It really pushes us beyond the confines of where we are.
Brenda: It certainly defies convention. And when I look at it, call me a romantic, I think of it as like an embrace. It looks like it’s embracing, which is something that I think is, subjectively speaking, quite beautiful.
Abby: So, one of the issues we sometimes face is we are doing the inside of the building. we’re doing all the experiential design and the architect’s doing the outside and it’s like, never the twain shall meet. The architect does their, wow, this is amazing, we paid millions and millions of dollars for this beautiful, beautiful landmark building, but it’s useless for the design team when we go in because it’s not been thought about in terms of the spaces that we need so that we can do our job. It looks like it would have been a really challenging space to be able to build out. Do you know anything about some of the challenges that the, the donut, the eye, the hug meant for the team that were creating inside?
Sundar: I think this is always the case. The purpose of the architect of a building is very much different from the exhibition designer in a space. And the reason I say that—and of course I’ve dealt with this conundrum or this challenge on multiple buildings in my career, we often have to take over, let’s say, a historic or a classical building that you can only touch in certain ways in order to be able to tell the story even of the place. You know, oftentimes museums or cultural experiences are in places that you’re trying to evoke the stories that were in the place. And then they come in and they say, oh, you’re not allowed to put Wi-Fi, you’re not allowed to put wiring, but we want like amazing projections, and we want like amazing screens everywhere. And you’re like, there’s no power, man. Like, what do I do?
Where we don’t have that specific problem here, but the shape of the building certainly introduces challenges. And I would say this is true for a lot of places. And in our work as experienced designers, the challenge is not in trying to go, okay, oh there’s this thing, and then how do I wedge my idea into the place. Oftentimes it is that the place has its own story, and you have to tell your story kind of in alignment with the place, you know, to, like, allow it to kind of breathe into the story and your story to breathe into it. And for us, like some of the challenges of building into a non rectilinear space were overcome by saying, hey, actually, people can move in completely different ways. The challenges of like, how do you move a certain number of people across the floors? How do you, how do you put people into places that feel like they’re going to all get wedged into a corner? You know?
A driving idea in my mind during the whole project was the kid that walks into the place or the adult that walks into the place must feel like this was the first time they stepped into the future. From there on, when they look back, they go, that is where the future started for me. I mean, this was just for me to go, okay, like how can we make this thing happen in the kind of time constraint, resource constraint that we had in order to pull off the exhibitions.
I mean, I’m sure that Shaun Killa and Buro Happold and the team around like making the thing happen, had significant other challenges, but they provided a place that basically attracted people, even if we failed miserably, you know, so they sort of set it up really well for us or like terribly because we had to like, step up to the plate of this thing that they had created. But it also gave us this way of thinking of like, okay, when somebody comes in, they’re primed and then the next step is to get them to this other thing, and their experience has to be this other thing. And when they exit, they have to leave with, with this feeling in them.
Brenda: One of the things that I loved that you said as well, initially, was putting yourself in a position to think about the nature of how people move throughout a space and maybe thinking a little bit differently about some of the ways in which audiences, visitors, move throughout a space and beginning there because how often does design not even begin with thinking about, well thinking about the visitor at all, God forbid, but thinking about how do human beings move by nature and how do we move individually? How do we move as groups? So anyway, I appreciated you making mention of that.
I do want to pivot to talking about you and your journey, your own journey, giving our listeners a sense of your very diverse background. You love technology, you love data. You’re also a creative, and you see building technology as being creative, and we’d love to hear a little bit about what your path was to where you are today, and we would love to hear where you envision yourself in the future.
Sundar: Well, I am in the future already, so you know.
Brenda: There we go. That was inevitable.
Sundar: So cliche. Yeah, I know. Actually, it’s a good question, and, you know, because on some level it is very surprising even to me where I am. And there’s a certain amount of, I guess, serendipity and accident that goes into everything that we do. So, I have always wanted to be at this intersection of art and technology, but circumstances in life push people in one direction or another. My father is an amazing artist, but he never got to like practice art as a firsthand thing. He became an engineer, but he did art on the side. But I would say for me personally, I was just always excited in so many different things.
So, I went to school at a very strange place in Iowa, and then I ended up going and working at a company that made solar panels out in New Mexico, and the job was to set up solar panels in farms, ostrich farms and iguana farms out in the New Mexico desert. The process for me was always just, hey, what is an interesting thing to do? And what would be exciting about the next step? And it’s not always like, oh, I did this thing and therefore I knew where I was going. It seemed very much like these accidents were there, and somehow I find myself incredibly fortunate to have all of these paths coincide because the job that I do now, I don’t think I could do it had I not done all of those other things because I needed the variety of skills from engineering to understanding space systems and understanding people to like, you know, understanding how spirituality works for people, you know.
But I do think that pretty much everyone I know who is a creative experience designer or like a creative technologist or, you know, a creative engineer, they went down the path of doing a lot of different stuff. Like one of the best engineers I know was a historian, you know, another incredible programmer that I know was a flamenco guitarist. So like, they came down the path of creating experiences from other domains that gave them a way to think differently.
Abby: Do you think that that’s a lot to do with your parents, and some parents would rather you got a vocation, and you were going to be set for life and a clear path, and maybe it’s a narrow path, but it’s a surer path. And other parents or influences on kids or teenagers or students is more about looking for life experiences and following the path that excites you the most because you’re going to enjoy that, put time into it, do well at it and the money will come, the jobs will come, the path, like you, will come, it’ll be meandering. Like, do you think that it’s maybe a generational thing or a parental thing as well, rather than a you-thing or a me-thing or—do you know what I mean?
Sundar: If I think back, I have so many regrets about how much anxiety I probably instilled in my parents my entire life. They were not, you know—they would have been much happier I think, had I followed a path that was much more defined. But they look now and they’re like, okay, you’re okay. Fine. Now we don’t have to worry that we have to support you.
But generally, I think like, it has worked out because I’m also like, excited about a lot of things. And I think curiosity in the world generally helps, you know? And the people that I know who are curious about the world around them are also able to kind of do different things, you know. So generally, the world will support you if you go out and have curiosity and are willing to engage.
Abby: I have a question for Brenda about your students. Is curiosity something you can teach?
Brenda: It is something that I teach. 100%. Absolutely.
Sundar Wow, how do you teach it?
Brenda: It’s day one. I teach curiosity as a skill. You know, It’s a part of our nature, right? Its inherent. It’s in all of us. Some of us sort of squash it down. We kind of have to grow up and become an adult and we learn how to sort of just like, look at things instead of deeply see things. And yet, if we can tap back into that inner four-year-old in all of us where life is largely lived in questions and wonder, then we are going to be ourselves more open to the world around us. We’re going to be more open to ourselves, more open to change, more able to command our own skills and our own disciplines when facing uncertainty and the unknown. And it all begins with understanding that ultimately, we’ve evolved, as, you know, an animal that lifts up the rock to see what’s underneath it and that that is one of the most powerful things about us.
Sundar: So, I have always gone down the path of going, I can teach you to code, but I can’t teach you to be passionate, you know? And when people come in, like, they’re like, oh, I don’t know how to do this language. I don’t know how to do this thing. I don’t know how. I’ve never done this thing before.
And I always think experience is incredibly important at a senior level, at a junior to mid-level, it’s the experience of having done stuff so you know how to change context. But what you were talking about is complicated because it’s like, how do you instill in somebody the capacity to go in a different path? You know, like I have a friend who only eats chicken teriyaki no matter where in the world he goes. And I’m like, dude, this is—
Brenda: It’s a big world out there.
Sundar: Whatever, whatever, whatever makes you happy. But you know, these flavors are amazing. But how do you get somebody to kind of change their context a little bit? Because they’re like, no, I don’t like it. I just don’t, I don’t want to go there. There’s a huge insecurity in that.
Brenda: There is a huge insecurity. I mean, first of all, I’ve got the benefit of being in a classroom environment. So, there is something and I state this very clearly, it is your responsibility to see yourself in an environment where you can fail and where ultimately we should all fail at something at some point and that, that this is the place to do it. It is probably one of the great luxuries of being in an educational environment in that you can, you know, within whatever is reasonable for yourself, be vulnerable.
Yeah, I mean, I will add to that for your students that the number of times that adults in the professional world fail on like a monumental basis that they lie about—
Brenda: Yes.
Sundar: —upsets me on a daily basis. And I wish students understood this, that normalizing that might actually be the best thing that they could possibly do. They have to come into the working world and then be told that they are allowed to fail, or they see other people fail and they’re like, oh, okay, the management is failing this way, let me also fail. You know, because it’s never a good thing. It’s a very different philosophy about it.
Brenda: Well, poetics plays a part, because there’s failure, but then there’s also things just not working.
Sundar: Oh yeah, yeah. No, I’m not counting that. In our world of engineering, that is, that’s given.
Brenda: That’s right.
Sundar: That’s like—no, there’s also the contrivances and basically sabotage of the universe, which—
Brenda: Mm hmm.
Sundar: There’s always, like, everything is set up to basically make everything break for you on the last day, the eleventh hour. You know.
Brenda: I think that the curiosity piece, though, is something—it can be taught about and nurtured by the individual, nurtured by me as a teacher. And it’s also something that I really do deeply believe that you can think of as a skill and you can do certain things every day to exercise that muscle to a point where you can capture again, and I really do mean quite specifically something about the four-year-old. You can learn how to think about the world around you, even when you’re taking your commute in the morning or whatever the case might be. You can think in questions, and it opens you up to seeing things deeply and to a point where you can find and experience a lot more joy and a lot more, oh my God. And it’s something that then, you know, frees you a little bit and makes you more expansive.
Abby: Sundar, I just want to jump in and talk about the technology because sort of in your job, failing happens a lot. Do you think that through, again you mention technology, and I also work with technology and it’s always a wing and a prayer and a lot of hard work and breaking new ground. And it’s, if you’re doing technology well, you should be failing a lot to finally make something that works in a brilliant way. Do you think that you enjoy living in that environment and what has it taught you as a leader or, you know, working with people and emotions like having all this failure around?
Brenda: We’re here for you, Sundar. Let it out, it’s okay.
Sundar: No, there aren’t enough therapists in the world for what we do. No, I actually think that what we do is completely irrational. This is, it’s like I’ve talked to multiple friends of mine that do this, and I’m like, you know, generally we don’t get paid as much as people who do other things to do a lot more work that is generally temporary, that just keeps us on a level of anxiety and everyone’s like, oh my God, you finished that project? That’s amazing. Are you going to rest now? And you go, no, opening day was the easy part. Like, don’t you understand? This thing has to run for a while, you know? And you go, the anxiety doesn’t stop until like two years later, you know? So, we’re approaching year number two, but sadly, we’ve decided to inject a bunch of other things into it. And you go, wait, why? Why would you not just stop when you’re ahead? You know?
But I think it’s also like the way that the world works. You know, you always have to keep fighting. And there’s an excitement to getting it to that next level. And you realize this. You have something more in you that can take it to that next experience, you know, and in a way, like actually not to sound too effusive about, you know, both the building and where I live, but Dubai is kind of in-your-face about that. You know, you have to have a stupid amount of talent and a stupid amount of luck and then a completely insane vision to do what they did here, what they continue to do.
I mean, the Museum of the Future, like this is, this is—like when I first saw it, I was like, this is a stupid project. This is not going to get made. And then like as I stood in front of it, honestly, like I was initially like this, I don’t think I want to come to this place that’s just about like throwing money at a project, but you stand in front of it and you go, this is audacious. You know, and then you look around and you go, this building obviously belongs here because everything is audacious. You know, I can’t just like go, oh, this building could, would work just as well in Paris. No, it doesn’t. It just cannot work anywhere else. And this really is what has to get us to other levels of what we can do.
And what I love about this kind of a building project and this kind of an experience project is there’s a certain amount of trust in the system that has to go, okay, a group of human beings can come together and make this thing. You need a certain amount of provenance, a certain amount of fortune to pull it all together, and all of the stars have to align. But really it is a ton of hard work that gets people there. And I think that, you know, it’s the most comforting thing because you also go, we as humans are capable of doing really remarkable things. Don’t ever minimize that.
One of the quotes on the building is attributed to Sheikh Mohammed, and it says the future belongs to those who can imagine, design, and create it. The future is not for us to await, but rather to create. You know, every idea exists for us to envision and then manifest. You just push the envelope on what you’re going to manifest, and then you can do amazing things.
Brenda: Sundar, you’ve said that you see the future as being a place where we will have figured out how to be kind to each other and that you seek to manifest kindness in the future through your work. And I so wholly appreciate your positive thinking, and I’m wondering if you could just speak a tiny bit on what you see as the role of museums and empathy. Like, is the Museum of the Future a place where we can experience how to be better humans?
Sundar: I think the answer to your question is yes. I think one of the intimidating things about museums around the world so, for example, I was—like my relatives, my cousins, my aunts and stuff like often are extremely reluctant to go to museums. I think for two reasons. One is that there may feel a little bit of intimidation about the place, but also feel like it’s just not that interesting for me.
It doesn’t trigger any excitement, you know, and I think people can have very different ways of interacting with the place. But if you go into a place and the first thing you’re told is, don’t touch it, stand aside and look at a very small piece of print that gives you some kind of oblique reference to this thing, and they don’t understand the context within which this sits, because curation is hard, it gets a little bit frustrating, you know. And I think the kindness there is if you walk into a place and you see a sculpture if you can’t hold a sculpture, it’s kind of like, what’s the point? The reality of the sculpture is not the point, right? The ability to kind of connect with it is incredibly important, which is not to say that you shouldn’t step back and take a look at how amazing David is because he’s 17 feet tall.
But then when you go outside, and you see like the thousand copies of David, and you touch them, you go, this is how marble feels, and somebody made this. You go, wow, this is incredible that somebody could make this, and I can feel this thing, and I almost feel the blood going through this thing, you know? And that’s the stuff that I feel like, the points of kindness in places like that.
Our job as curators and storytellers is to bring people in, not to make them feel separated, you know? And it’s a hard one because I also appreciate the very hard problem of keeping people from breaking stuff because people come and break stuff every day at the museum.
Abby: Yes.
Sundar: On a level that I’m just like, how is this possible?
Abby: Yup.
Sundar: You know, like our manufacturers are like, this is military grade metal, But, you know, I think this idea is this: when we create experiences that are stories, it’s always good to understand what the operational constraint of the thing is. Because this is the other thing, like staff in museums also are like they’re in the worst possible position because people want to take a photograph and the security guy has to go up and go, don’t take a photograph of that thing.
And you’re like, you invited me into this place. The one thing we do is take selfies. Can you please just like allow that, my LED light is not going to damage this photograph and then go, oh, no, there’s a rights issue. And you go, well, that’s your problem, not my problem, you know, and so this is the thing of like we keep creating obstacles for people to, like, ingest what they, what is only just connecting to places and the stories that are around them.
Brenda: And their curiosity.
Sundar: Exactly. And their curiosity. If you curb that curiosity, why do you think that it will continue in another place? Obviously, it won’t, you know. Then you go, okay, I have to fit within my box. I have to follow the rules. You go, well the world is going to become boring that way.
Abby: I’m really sad that we’re actually out of time.
Brenda: I know I’m bummed.
Abby: This has been unbelievable, like Sundar—
Brenda: It’s so great talking with you.
Abby: Phenomenal to talk to you and hear about your perspective and the journey and how you still sound so curious and passionate about what you do.
Sundar: Well, thank you so much. This was super fun. I loved this conversation.
Brenda: It was so mutual. Oh, my goodness. And, you know, we’ll have to continue it in the future.
Sundar: All righty.
Abby: Thanks to everyone who tuned in today. If you like what you heard, subscribe for more episodes of Matters of Experience wherever you listen to podcasts, make sure to leave a rating and a review and share with a friend. We’ll see you next time.
Brenda: Thanks, everyone. Thank you, Sundar.
Sundar: Thank you so much.
[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.
Museums of the Future with Sundar Raman
Evoking Emotional Responses with Ed Purver
[Music]
Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience, a podcast that explores the creativity, innovation and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. If you’re new, a hearty welcome and to our regular listeners, 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Evoking Emotional Responses with Ed Purver
Hope and Healing with Jan Seidler Ramirez
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Hope and Healing with Jan Seidler Ramirez
Demystifying AI with Chris Cooper
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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.
[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.
Demystifying AI with Chris Cooper
How Might We Do It Better? with Bosco Hernandez
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 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.
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 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.
How Might We Do It Better? with Bosco Hernandez
Humor & Absurdity with Neil Mendoza
Hamster Powered Hamster Drawing Machine – Neil Mendoza
Climate Control – Neil Mendoza
Antivanity Mirror – Neil Mendoza
The Electric Knife Orchestra – Neil Mendoza
[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.
Hamster Powered Hamster Drawing Machine – Neil Mendoza
Climate Control – Neil Mendoza
Antivanity Mirror – Neil Mendoza
The Electric Knife Orchestra – Neil Mendoza
[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.
Humor & Absurdity with Neil Mendoza
Espionage and Engaging Exhibits with Kathryn Keane
[Music]
Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience, a podcast produced by Lorem Ipsum, an experience design company headquartered in New York City. Our show explores the creativity, innovation and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. If you’re new, welcome, and to our regular listeners, thank you for tuning in and supporting us. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: Hello everyone. This is Brenda Cowan.
Abby: So today we’re going to talk about one of my favorite subjects and focuses, the future of storytelling in our industry. Well, there’s nobody better to talk about this with than Kathryn Keane, who has over 25 years of experience in the museum field, overseeing the development and creation of dozens of exhibitions, multimedia experiences and public programs. She’s a VP of Exhibitions and Collections at the International Spy Museum in DC and is also responsible for the museum’s large onsite artifact collection. Before coming to the Spy Museum, she was the director of the National Geographic Museum and started her career in the art museum world. Kathryn, a big welcome to our show.
Kathryn: It’s great to be here, Abby.
Brenda: We are so happy to have you, Kathryn, and I’m going to kick start the conversation by just letting you know that Abby and I are both huge fans of the Spy Museum. Its interactivity, its use of objects, its immersive quality, and absolutely its content. So, tell us, Kathryn, why is the Spy Museum important today?
Kathryn: The Spy Museum really captured the imagination of this city and all of the 21 million visitors to this city in a way that I think a lot of skeptics thought that it might not. And I think its success is really driven by a couple of factors. One, the stories they tell are very relevant today. It is also a really fun museum, right? It’s a serious museum, it has an incredible artifact collection that tells the story of history through the lens of espionage, but there’s a level of interactivity and interaction and media here that really makes it fun and brings history to life in a way that I think very few museums do.
Abby: Who is the museum for and what are the challenges you’re facing as a history museum as we get more and more recent history? Because I guess that newness or that recent history happens and needs to be incorporated in some way. So, you know, how do you keep up with history as well?
Kathryn: Yeah, I think it’s the biggest challenge for history museum is to keep up with history, which is happening all around us. And, you know, museums are very deliberate about getting it right. We are the most trusted institutions in society today, I found out recently. It’s really quite, not surprising, but it really is quite a lot of pressure on museums to get it right. We talk about the Ukraine war downstairs. In a film that we just re-edited, we talk about the recent Hamas attack on Israel and we feel it’s important for visitors to know that we are keeping up with the issues and intelligence on a weekly, daily, hourly basis here at the Spy Museum. Our challenge is always to be able to put history in context and in perspective.
Brenda: So, is it ever too soon? I’m really curious how you balance the kind of sensitivity with the responsibility that you are taking on at your institution. What kind of conversations do you have?
Abby: And I just want to build on that as well, because also what the visitor is bringing in and the sensitivity to an issue that’s very recent history or currently going on can often get in the way of, obscure, accentuate perspectives of an exhibition as well.
Kathryn: Oh, definitely, and in a city like Washington, which gets so many international visitors, we are trying to program for people from around the world here, which makes that even more challenging. I would say the majority of contemporary issues that we cover, those really in many ways show up in our public programing more than they do in our exhibits, right?
I mean, you all know how long it takes to develop an exhibit, how many layers there are to that. You know, we have a podcast, we have virtual programing, we have live programing here at the museum in our theater. And we have the luxury of having 18 intelligence agencies just here in DC alone so we can assemble experts with differing perspectives on our stage and try to present these issues from different perspectives.
But before we put them into an exhibit, it really requires a little bit more distance, I think, to get it right and to make sure that the story is ready to be told. To your point, Brenda, you know that a lot of these stories just go on and on and on. Sometimes that’s the story, right? That the story doesn’t end, that the conflict continues, that the challenges continue.
It’s challenging. It’s fascinating. Much of it is got to be framed in the eyes of the visitor because, you know, up here, we’re all too close to it, up in the in the offices and in the collections. We’re just too close to it. So, we always try to have that visitor perspective in mind.
Abby: So, you mentioned your collection of artifacts. I know the International Spy Museum has the largest collection of espionage artifacts on public display in the world, which I think is kind of incredible. And you’re located on L’Enfant Plaza near the National Museum, which is just a really easy place, great location, easy to access, and you welcome over 650,000 visitors a year.
So, when you visit, it’s quite a commitment – you, you know, I think is an estimated about two hour experience, plus, if you want to go really deep which I would definitely encourage people to do. But how do you plan for visitors’ experiences to sort of ease the flow, the ability to digest the content without making it overwhelming for people, you know, what are some of the techniques you could share with our listeners that you employ to engage visitors in different ways throughout their stay and keep them engaged?
Kathryn: I think we are still working on it. I think when the museum opened, the very impressive thing about the staff was that they, you know, after an exhausting effort to open this museum, they could have sort of sat back and said, you know, let’s just rest and congratulate ourselves and celebrate this new museum, and that didn’t even happen, not even for a second. They were immediately focused on flow issues, making sure there weren’t lines at our interactive kiosks, making sure that people were getting through the space in a reasonable pace, making sure that the gameplay for our big interactive game, which is called Undercover Mission, which each visitor assumes an identity at the beginning of their visit here and there are eight interactive stations throughout the museum where you are basically executing on an on a top secret mission. So, we want to make sure that everybody enjoys that experience as well, because over 98% of our visitors like to play that game while they’re here.
So, it’s been a constant challenge. A lot of it is just identifying problems and investing in fixing them, and that’s what this museum has been doing for the last couple of years.
Brenda: You know, I’ve got to say, when I was visiting last, I was really noticing actually how many people were in the institution and finding myself so easily being able to navigate around and to pause and enjoy specific objects in particular that I was really drawn to without feeling like I was crowded out or anything like that, and people were really, genuinely, deeply engaged.
I also have to say on a side note that I played the game. I took on a persona of a spy, and in playing the game, I was responsible for another agent who was out in the field, and I think somehow, I led to their demise, and I am a terrible spy. I am even worse at taking care of my teammates. So, it was very helpful for me to know that I probably have the best day job for myself and to know my place.
You know, you recently joined the Spy Museum. as we discussed, and we know that one of the things that you’re currently working on is an initiative to bring in a temporary exhibition within the institution for the first time, and you’re going to be looking to traveling it across the U.S. We would love to know how are you seeking to attract visitors to it, and especially because it’ll involve an extra fee. How do you attract those audiences and even repeat audiences?
Kathryn: Yes, that is our plan. We have – 86% of our visitors are here for the first time, and we translate that into the fact that we think over 85% of our visitors are tourists. But this is a very large metropolitan area here in the Washington DC region. It’s important to us as a nonprofit to have a membership, have donor support from this community and to have impact in this community through schools and through educational initiatives.
So, we have a pretty good feeling that, you know, a lot of people that live in Washington and in Virginia and Maryland have been here, but we want to give them a reason to come back. And traveling exhibits is one way to do that, bringing in temporary exhibits or creating special exhibitions that allow us to do a deep dive on any given subject.
And so, yes, you’re right, they built a 6500 square foot gallery on the third floor of the museum. And the idea is we will host this exhibition, it’s called Bond in Motion. It’s an exhibition that all the vehicles from the famous James Bond movie franchise.
Abby: Ok, I’m sold, I’m there, I’m excited.
Kathryn: Wonderful show to start with, and I think it will do very well here. The show will be open for a year. We will charge an upcharge, so it’s a little bit of a test to see if there are any price sensitivities. And then if we’re successful, then yes, we will have more confidence in creating our own exhibits, and one of the financing – one of the financial strategies for that would be to create an exhibit, maybe with a group of museum partners and travel that exhibit throughout the US as a way to sort of extend the life of the project, but also to generate enough revenue and sponsorship to support the cost.
Abby: Yeah, I think it sounds fantastic, and you know, I’ve really enjoyed your work for National Geographic, you know, when you traveled so many of the exhibitions and were starting to do more and more of that. I just want to discuss IP and traveling exhibitions. You know, they kind of maybe even need to wow and utilize projector screens, expensive technology, you know, keeping the cost reasonable and traveling an exhibition around the world or just across the USA and selling tickets and merchandise. It’s all sort of like a new business model.
I feel like it’s in its infancy, Kathryn, and some companies are focusing on building out what I call theaters or spaces. Others are focusing on sort of square footage and what’s the minimum you need to make the maximum profit but not having too much overhead. So how much equipment and tech do you really need to get that wow. Other companies like Illuminarium – we had Brian Allen on here in Vegas and you know, they have their own space, and they commission content.
So, what do you think? You’ve had a lot of experience doing this. I saw your King Tut, it was – I was very impressed. But what do you think is the future of this business? You know, what did you learn worked and what do you think isn’t there yet?
Kathryn: I do think it’s the future. What I’d like to see is more of this projection technology and multimedia installations coming into more traditional museum settings, right, which is what we’re trying to do here at the Spy Museum is create these immersive environments as a way to bring history to life around our artifacts. But I don’t think it’s going to go away, but I don’t think anyone is making a lot of money off of it either, because I just think it’s the business model is too challenging at this point.
Brenda: I’m so delighted that you mentioned your artifacts and your idea of layering experience and, you know, not looking at just sort of like one approach or the other, but instead really seeking ways to design on many different levels all at the same time to create very dynamic, very multidimensional environments, which you already, in my opinion, do extremely well.
And part of that for me, anyway, is definitely because of the uniqueness of a number of your objects – and I have to confess as well, I really got super nerdy when I saw your Enigma machine. I think I’ve got like ten photos of it on my phone. So, things like that can be just as absorbing and engage folks in deep focus as much as other kinds of technologies in media.
And on that subject, you have 10,000 objects in your collection. You have them all stored at the museum itself. What is the vision or the plan that you have for further activating this large collection with your audience?
Kathryn: Yes, we do. We have the luxury of having our collection on site, and it was initially done out of necessity. When the pandemic happened in 2020, we brought the collection on site. While it was here, we realized how much fun it was for people to go into our collection space and to be shown behind the scenes artifacts that are not on view or new things that have come into the collection. It was like going into a vault, right? Going into a secret space and seeing really special things.
So, that is our plan. We are not – we’re going to keep the collection on site. We’re going to redesign the space to be somewhat of an open storage facility where scholars will be able to go and do research on our collection, but we can also take VIP tours and host small events just to provide people with that behind the scenes experience, and I think that’s really what people are looking for in a museum, particularly people who really love museums. They love to go behind the curtain.
Abby: So, when you think about all these wonderful things that are happening inside your museum and the way that you market that outwards, how you tell your story to tourists, to the locals through marketing and social media, can you sort of talk a little bit about – I’d be interested to hear how you go about that, what your strategy is, is it Tik Tok? Do you go with the latest and greatest? Are you more sort of reserved in your strategy? Like just talk about your marketing.
Kathryn: I think it’s multilayered because we have different audiences, right? So, we sort of tailor our marketing strategies to obviously the audiences that we’re trying to reach. But yes, we have a big social media presence and there are lots of stories to tell, just had the anniversary of the Berlin Wall coming down, so we have a lot of opportunity to kind of promote the museum through the lens of historical anniversaries. We talk a lot about individuals that we feature in our museum, and we try to tease out more interest in them through social media. And then we do obviously, the more traditional outreach to school groups, to tourists, to tour operators.
So, we have, I think, a very creative team. I wouldn’t say there’s one thing that we do that no one else is doing, but I just think the content and the subject matter is just so interesting to people. And, you know, it kind of sometimes feels to me when I’m down in the museum, like there are people in the museum that maybe wouldn’t go to the Smithsonian or an art museum, but they wanted to come to the spy museum because they were curious and it held a certain fascination for them. So, they’re here.
Brenda: Well, I think about it, too, spying and the idea of spy – it’s a universal and it’s something that kids can understand as well as people of any age, right? And it’s something that I think, you know, and even this idea of you know, the voyeuristic experience in a very general way is something that just translates across culture, across time. It doesn’t matter who you are or where you’re from. It’s a human behavior. And I think that part of that, you know, certainly must be a part of the attraction that leads people to your institution. It just, it’s tapping into, again, I think, really, you know, human archetypal experience.
Kathryn: Agreed.
Abby: I know that you came and a lot of it been finished. It opened in 2019. But, you know, how do you currently and moving forward with the new exhibition and exhibitions of the future, how do you bring inclusive design into your museum?
Kathryn: Well, we have a huge audience, right? So, we need to make sure that the stories that we are telling are accessible. And I think that’s been a priority of the Spy Museum from the beginning. And this museum, more than most, has invested in not only exhibit design efforts to make the exhibits more accessible, they have an actual audio tour for low vision visitors and blind visitors, for example. That is something that they’ve had for a little while, and they worked quite hard on. The Neurodiverse community is a very important community here, and they do public programing and even have a special evening and open the museum for people that are neurodiverse. They adjust the settings of the equipment appropriately and they have a special night for people to come in, every year. They do special memory driven programs for older adults, that is an award winning program that they do here.
So, a couple of things that are on the docket for the future are audio tours in multiple languages, obviously, because we have such an international city that we live in and there are so many international visitors to the city, but also trying to make sure and I mentioned this earlier, that our content reflects the audiences that are visiting us, so people are seeing themselves in the stories that we tell.
Brenda: Kathryn, Abby and I are looking at each other as we’re having this dialog with you, and we are just amazed at how much it sounds like you’ve just got it all going on right? Things just seem like they’re going so smoothly, and you make this seem a little bit effortless. We would love to know what are the big challenges that you have right now?
Kathryn: Thank you for saying that. There are a lot of really passionate people that work for this museum. They’re also super creative, very entrepreneurial, and hard working. And I don’t think that this museum would be as successful as it is without a really committed staff. That being said, it is pretty lean and, you know, despite the fact that I mentioned that we’re a nonprofit and we’ve had some success in the philanthropic space, you know, the institution started as a for profit and it’s pretty dependent on earned revenue, right, and a successful business model. But it has had, since it became a nonprofit, it has also adopted and embraced a lot of impact goals, a lot of educational goals, a lot of ways that we want to impact the world, right? So, we call it the double bottom line here. But in truth, it’s trying to succeed on both fronts.
It’s trying to be a very powerful, impactful nonprofit and also generate enough revenue to keep things going. Right? So, and it’s a pretty small staff to be doing both of those things well. So, I think it’s a challenge for the whole institution, not just for me, but I think they have just the right combination of talent, skill, and passion on this team to be able to do it.
That, and just keeping it fresh. Right? You know, it’s just such an exciting place. It’s hard for me to believe that it’s 20 years old because, you know, it’s still feels so popular and maintaining that popularity is hard work. But I am having a ball and I really love the team here. You have to find your tribe in this business, and you know, it feels really comfortable and familiar and I’m just happy to be on the team.
Brenda: It sounds like you’re just such a really good fit in so many ways for an institution that is very effective inside and out. And, you know, Abby and I want to start to wrap up the conversation, but need to ask, in addition to the Bond car exhibition, what else are you really passionate about?
Kathryn: So many things. So many things. I feel that the collection here is really special, but I would say it’s very heavy on a few important areas in our field, right? It’s, we got a lot of Cold War and we have a lot of World War Two and some World War One. But I am super passionate about expanding the net on our stories to include international collections. We also don’t have a lot of Civil War or Revolutionary War artifacts in this collection, so I’m not just interested in the breadth of the collection, but I’m also interested in going back in time a little bit further.
And I also feel that this institution is a legacy institution for people who have devoted their lives to this work, right? The people that serve in the intelligence community and many of these people do very important work and their stories will never be told. So, it’s just the nature of the mission. And so, I feel a responsibility to that community, and I feel that this institution, because of its highly popular public nature, has a responsibility to those communities as well to make sure that we’re telling stories of these heroes.
Abby: It’s very interesting. You started it off at the very beginning of the show and you’re sort of talking about it now – the idea that people come to the International Spy Museum to understand real facts, it’s that credibility that we seem to be lacking in on news and wherever we’re seeking information where we can get it from our museums. And I think that is a heavy load to carry. But I think under your leadership, the International Spy Museum will continue to be a bastion, a place where we can go and learn about these people and the reasons things happened and why they happened and how things came about with feeling that we’re understanding a situation from a holistic perspective and not from a perspective that has an agenda or in some ways corrupting the information or is based on just no facts at all.
Kathryn: Correct.
Abby: So, I just wanted to thank you so much, Kathryn, for sharing basically your excitement for the future of the Spy Museum, our industry – I’m really excited to come see Bond, I’ll be there – and also to sort of encourage everybody to go to the International Spy Museum, take your friends and family. It’s phenomenal. And I can’t wait to see what happens under your leadership.
Brenda: Absolutely. Absolutely. Kathryn, thank you so much.
Kathryn: Thanks for having me.
Abby: And thanks to everyone who tuned in today. If you like what you heard, please subscribe for more episodes of Matters of Experience wherever you listen to podcasts and make sure to leave a rating and a review and please share with a friend. See you next time.
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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.
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Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience, a podcast produced by Lorem Ipsum, an experience design company headquartered in New York City. Our show explores the creativity, innovation and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. If you’re new, welcome, and to our regular listeners, thank you for tuning in and supporting us. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: Hello everyone. This is Brenda Cowan.
Abby: So today we’re going to talk about one of my favorite subjects and focuses, the future of storytelling in our industry. Well, there’s nobody better to talk about this with than Kathryn Keane, who has over 25 years of experience in the museum field, overseeing the development and creation of dozens of exhibitions, multimedia experiences and public programs. She’s a VP of Exhibitions and Collections at the International Spy Museum in DC and is also responsible for the museum’s large onsite artifact collection. Before coming to the Spy Museum, she was the director of the National Geographic Museum and started her career in the art museum world. Kathryn, a big welcome to our show.
Kathryn: It’s great to be here, Abby.
Brenda: We are so happy to have you, Kathryn, and I’m going to kick start the conversation by just letting you know that Abby and I are both huge fans of the Spy Museum. Its interactivity, its use of objects, its immersive quality, and absolutely its content. So, tell us, Kathryn, why is the Spy Museum important today?
Kathryn: The Spy Museum really captured the imagination of this city and all of the 21 million visitors to this city in a way that I think a lot of skeptics thought that it might not. And I think its success is really driven by a couple of factors. One, the stories they tell are very relevant today. It is also a really fun museum, right? It’s a serious museum, it has an incredible artifact collection that tells the story of history through the lens of espionage, but there’s a level of interactivity and interaction and media here that really makes it fun and brings history to life in a way that I think very few museums do.
Abby: Who is the museum for and what are the challenges you’re facing as a history museum as we get more and more recent history? Because I guess that newness or that recent history happens and needs to be incorporated in some way. So, you know, how do you keep up with history as well?
Kathryn: Yeah, I think it’s the biggest challenge for history museum is to keep up with history, which is happening all around us. And, you know, museums are very deliberate about getting it right. We are the most trusted institutions in society today, I found out recently. It’s really quite, not surprising, but it really is quite a lot of pressure on museums to get it right. We talk about the Ukraine war downstairs. In a film that we just re-edited, we talk about the recent Hamas attack on Israel and we feel it’s important for visitors to know that we are keeping up with the issues and intelligence on a weekly, daily, hourly basis here at the Spy Museum. Our challenge is always to be able to put history in context and in perspective.
Brenda: So, is it ever too soon? I’m really curious how you balance the kind of sensitivity with the responsibility that you are taking on at your institution. What kind of conversations do you have?
Abby: And I just want to build on that as well, because also what the visitor is bringing in and the sensitivity to an issue that’s very recent history or currently going on can often get in the way of, obscure, accentuate perspectives of an exhibition as well.
Kathryn: Oh, definitely, and in a city like Washington, which gets so many international visitors, we are trying to program for people from around the world here, which makes that even more challenging. I would say the majority of contemporary issues that we cover, those really in many ways show up in our public programing more than they do in our exhibits, right?
I mean, you all know how long it takes to develop an exhibit, how many layers there are to that. You know, we have a podcast, we have virtual programing, we have live programing here at the museum in our theater. And we have the luxury of having 18 intelligence agencies just here in DC alone so we can assemble experts with differing perspectives on our stage and try to present these issues from different perspectives.
But before we put them into an exhibit, it really requires a little bit more distance, I think, to get it right and to make sure that the story is ready to be told. To your point, Brenda, you know that a lot of these stories just go on and on and on. Sometimes that’s the story, right? That the story doesn’t end, that the conflict continues, that the challenges continue.
It’s challenging. It’s fascinating. Much of it is got to be framed in the eyes of the visitor because, you know, up here, we’re all too close to it, up in the in the offices and in the collections. We’re just too close to it. So, we always try to have that visitor perspective in mind.
Abby: So, you mentioned your collection of artifacts. I know the International Spy Museum has the largest collection of espionage artifacts on public display in the world, which I think is kind of incredible. And you’re located on L’Enfant Plaza near the National Museum, which is just a really easy place, great location, easy to access, and you welcome over 650,000 visitors a year.
So, when you visit, it’s quite a commitment – you, you know, I think is an estimated about two hour experience, plus, if you want to go really deep which I would definitely encourage people to do. But how do you plan for visitors’ experiences to sort of ease the flow, the ability to digest the content without making it overwhelming for people, you know, what are some of the techniques you could share with our listeners that you employ to engage visitors in different ways throughout their stay and keep them engaged?
Kathryn: I think we are still working on it. I think when the museum opened, the very impressive thing about the staff was that they, you know, after an exhausting effort to open this museum, they could have sort of sat back and said, you know, let’s just rest and congratulate ourselves and celebrate this new museum, and that didn’t even happen, not even for a second. They were immediately focused on flow issues, making sure there weren’t lines at our interactive kiosks, making sure that people were getting through the space in a reasonable pace, making sure that the gameplay for our big interactive game, which is called Undercover Mission, which each visitor assumes an identity at the beginning of their visit here and there are eight interactive stations throughout the museum where you are basically executing on an on a top secret mission. So, we want to make sure that everybody enjoys that experience as well, because over 98% of our visitors like to play that game while they’re here.
So, it’s been a constant challenge. A lot of it is just identifying problems and investing in fixing them, and that’s what this museum has been doing for the last couple of years.
Brenda: You know, I’ve got to say, when I was visiting last, I was really noticing actually how many people were in the institution and finding myself so easily being able to navigate around and to pause and enjoy specific objects in particular that I was really drawn to without feeling like I was crowded out or anything like that, and people were really, genuinely, deeply engaged.
I also have to say on a side note that I played the game. I took on a persona of a spy, and in playing the game, I was responsible for another agent who was out in the field, and I think somehow, I led to their demise, and I am a terrible spy. I am even worse at taking care of my teammates. So, it was very helpful for me to know that I probably have the best day job for myself and to know my place.
You know, you recently joined the Spy Museum. as we discussed, and we know that one of the things that you’re currently working on is an initiative to bring in a temporary exhibition within the institution for the first time, and you’re going to be looking to traveling it across the U.S. We would love to know how are you seeking to attract visitors to it, and especially because it’ll involve an extra fee. How do you attract those audiences and even repeat audiences?
Kathryn: Yes, that is our plan. We have – 86% of our visitors are here for the first time, and we translate that into the fact that we think over 85% of our visitors are tourists. But this is a very large metropolitan area here in the Washington DC region. It’s important to us as a nonprofit to have a membership, have donor support from this community and to have impact in this community through schools and through educational initiatives.
So, we have a pretty good feeling that, you know, a lot of people that live in Washington and in Virginia and Maryland have been here, but we want to give them a reason to come back. And traveling exhibits is one way to do that, bringing in temporary exhibits or creating special exhibitions that allow us to do a deep dive on any given subject.
And so, yes, you’re right, they built a 6500 square foot gallery on the third floor of the museum. And the idea is we will host this exhibition, it’s called Bond in Motion. It’s an exhibition that all the vehicles from the famous James Bond movie franchise.
Abby: Ok, I’m sold, I’m there, I’m excited.
Kathryn: Wonderful show to start with, and I think it will do very well here. The show will be open for a year. We will charge an upcharge, so it’s a little bit of a test to see if there are any price sensitivities. And then if we’re successful, then yes, we will have more confidence in creating our own exhibits, and one of the financing – one of the financial strategies for that would be to create an exhibit, maybe with a group of museum partners and travel that exhibit throughout the US as a way to sort of extend the life of the project, but also to generate enough revenue and sponsorship to support the cost.
Abby: Yeah, I think it sounds fantastic, and you know, I’ve really enjoyed your work for National Geographic, you know, when you traveled so many of the exhibitions and were starting to do more and more of that. I just want to discuss IP and traveling exhibitions. You know, they kind of maybe even need to wow and utilize projector screens, expensive technology, you know, keeping the cost reasonable and traveling an exhibition around the world or just across the USA and selling tickets and merchandise. It’s all sort of like a new business model.
I feel like it’s in its infancy, Kathryn, and some companies are focusing on building out what I call theaters or spaces. Others are focusing on sort of square footage and what’s the minimum you need to make the maximum profit but not having too much overhead. So how much equipment and tech do you really need to get that wow. Other companies like Illuminarium – we had Brian Allen on here in Vegas and you know, they have their own space, and they commission content.
So, what do you think? You’ve had a lot of experience doing this. I saw your King Tut, it was – I was very impressed. But what do you think is the future of this business? You know, what did you learn worked and what do you think isn’t there yet?
Kathryn: I do think it’s the future. What I’d like to see is more of this projection technology and multimedia installations coming into more traditional museum settings, right, which is what we’re trying to do here at the Spy Museum is create these immersive environments as a way to bring history to life around our artifacts. But I don’t think it’s going to go away, but I don’t think anyone is making a lot of money off of it either, because I just think it’s the business model is too challenging at this point.
Brenda: I’m so delighted that you mentioned your artifacts and your idea of layering experience and, you know, not looking at just sort of like one approach or the other, but instead really seeking ways to design on many different levels all at the same time to create very dynamic, very multidimensional environments, which you already, in my opinion, do extremely well.
And part of that for me, anyway, is definitely because of the uniqueness of a number of your objects – and I have to confess as well, I really got super nerdy when I saw your Enigma machine. I think I’ve got like ten photos of it on my phone. So, things like that can be just as absorbing and engage folks in deep focus as much as other kinds of technologies in media.
And on that subject, you have 10,000 objects in your collection. You have them all stored at the museum itself. What is the vision or the plan that you have for further activating this large collection with your audience?
Kathryn: Yes, we do. We have the luxury of having our collection on site, and it was initially done out of necessity. When the pandemic happened in 2020, we brought the collection on site. While it was here, we realized how much fun it was for people to go into our collection space and to be shown behind the scenes artifacts that are not on view or new things that have come into the collection. It was like going into a vault, right? Going into a secret space and seeing really special things.
So, that is our plan. We are not – we’re going to keep the collection on site. We’re going to redesign the space to be somewhat of an open storage facility where scholars will be able to go and do research on our collection, but we can also take VIP tours and host small events just to provide people with that behind the scenes experience, and I think that’s really what people are looking for in a museum, particularly people who really love museums. They love to go behind the curtain.
Abby: So, when you think about all these wonderful things that are happening inside your museum and the way that you market that outwards, how you tell your story to tourists, to the locals through marketing and social media, can you sort of talk a little bit about – I’d be interested to hear how you go about that, what your strategy is, is it Tik Tok? Do you go with the latest and greatest? Are you more sort of reserved in your strategy? Like just talk about your marketing.
Kathryn: I think it’s multilayered because we have different audiences, right? So, we sort of tailor our marketing strategies to obviously the audiences that we’re trying to reach. But yes, we have a big social media presence and there are lots of stories to tell, just had the anniversary of the Berlin Wall coming down, so we have a lot of opportunity to kind of promote the museum through the lens of historical anniversaries. We talk a lot about individuals that we feature in our museum, and we try to tease out more interest in them through social media. And then we do obviously, the more traditional outreach to school groups, to tourists, to tour operators.
So, we have, I think, a very creative team. I wouldn’t say there’s one thing that we do that no one else is doing, but I just think the content and the subject matter is just so interesting to people. And, you know, it kind of sometimes feels to me when I’m down in the museum, like there are people in the museum that maybe wouldn’t go to the Smithsonian or an art museum, but they wanted to come to the spy museum because they were curious and it held a certain fascination for them. So, they’re here.
Brenda: Well, I think about it, too, spying and the idea of spy – it’s a universal and it’s something that kids can understand as well as people of any age, right? And it’s something that I think, you know, and even this idea of you know, the voyeuristic experience in a very general way is something that just translates across culture, across time. It doesn’t matter who you are or where you’re from. It’s a human behavior. And I think that part of that, you know, certainly must be a part of the attraction that leads people to your institution. It just, it’s tapping into, again, I think, really, you know, human archetypal experience.
Kathryn: Agreed.
Abby: I know that you came and a lot of it been finished. It opened in 2019. But, you know, how do you currently and moving forward with the new exhibition and exhibitions of the future, how do you bring inclusive design into your museum?
Kathryn: Well, we have a huge audience, right? So, we need to make sure that the stories that we are telling are accessible. And I think that’s been a priority of the Spy Museum from the beginning. And this museum, more than most, has invested in not only exhibit design efforts to make the exhibits more accessible, they have an actual audio tour for low vision visitors and blind visitors, for example. That is something that they’ve had for a little while, and they worked quite hard on. The Neurodiverse community is a very important community here, and they do public programing and even have a special evening and open the museum for people that are neurodiverse. They adjust the settings of the equipment appropriately and they have a special night for people to come in, every year. They do special memory driven programs for older adults, that is an award winning program that they do here.
So, a couple of things that are on the docket for the future are audio tours in multiple languages, obviously, because we have such an international city that we live in and there are so many international visitors to the city, but also trying to make sure and I mentioned this earlier, that our content reflects the audiences that are visiting us, so people are seeing themselves in the stories that we tell.
Brenda: Kathryn, Abby and I are looking at each other as we’re having this dialog with you, and we are just amazed at how much it sounds like you’ve just got it all going on right? Things just seem like they’re going so smoothly, and you make this seem a little bit effortless. We would love to know what are the big challenges that you have right now?
Kathryn: Thank you for saying that. There are a lot of really passionate people that work for this museum. They’re also super creative, very entrepreneurial, and hard working. And I don’t think that this museum would be as successful as it is without a really committed staff. That being said, it is pretty lean and, you know, despite the fact that I mentioned that we’re a nonprofit and we’ve had some success in the philanthropic space, you know, the institution started as a for profit and it’s pretty dependent on earned revenue, right, and a successful business model. But it has had, since it became a nonprofit, it has also adopted and embraced a lot of impact goals, a lot of educational goals, a lot of ways that we want to impact the world, right? So, we call it the double bottom line here. But in truth, it’s trying to succeed on both fronts.
It’s trying to be a very powerful, impactful nonprofit and also generate enough revenue to keep things going. Right? So, and it’s a pretty small staff to be doing both of those things well. So, I think it’s a challenge for the whole institution, not just for me, but I think they have just the right combination of talent, skill, and passion on this team to be able to do it.
That, and just keeping it fresh. Right? You know, it’s just such an exciting place. It’s hard for me to believe that it’s 20 years old because, you know, it’s still feels so popular and maintaining that popularity is hard work. But I am having a ball and I really love the team here. You have to find your tribe in this business, and you know, it feels really comfortable and familiar and I’m just happy to be on the team.
Brenda: It sounds like you’re just such a really good fit in so many ways for an institution that is very effective inside and out. And, you know, Abby and I want to start to wrap up the conversation, but need to ask, in addition to the Bond car exhibition, what else are you really passionate about?
Kathryn: So many things. So many things. I feel that the collection here is really special, but I would say it’s very heavy on a few important areas in our field, right? It’s, we got a lot of Cold War and we have a lot of World War Two and some World War One. But I am super passionate about expanding the net on our stories to include international collections. We also don’t have a lot of Civil War or Revolutionary War artifacts in this collection, so I’m not just interested in the breadth of the collection, but I’m also interested in going back in time a little bit further.
And I also feel that this institution is a legacy institution for people who have devoted their lives to this work, right? The people that serve in the intelligence community and many of these people do very important work and their stories will never be told. So, it’s just the nature of the mission. And so, I feel a responsibility to that community, and I feel that this institution, because of its highly popular public nature, has a responsibility to those communities as well to make sure that we’re telling stories of these heroes.
Abby: It’s very interesting. You started it off at the very beginning of the show and you’re sort of talking about it now – the idea that people come to the International Spy Museum to understand real facts, it’s that credibility that we seem to be lacking in on news and wherever we’re seeking information where we can get it from our museums. And I think that is a heavy load to carry. But I think under your leadership, the International Spy Museum will continue to be a bastion, a place where we can go and learn about these people and the reasons things happened and why they happened and how things came about with feeling that we’re understanding a situation from a holistic perspective and not from a perspective that has an agenda or in some ways corrupting the information or is based on just no facts at all.
Kathryn: Correct.
Abby: So, I just wanted to thank you so much, Kathryn, for sharing basically your excitement for the future of the Spy Museum, our industry – I’m really excited to come see Bond, I’ll be there – and also to sort of encourage everybody to go to the International Spy Museum, take your friends and family. It’s phenomenal. And I can’t wait to see what happens under your leadership.
Brenda: Absolutely. Absolutely. Kathryn, thank you so much.
Kathryn: Thanks for having me.
Abby: And thanks to everyone who tuned in today. If you like what you heard, please subscribe for more episodes of Matters of Experience wherever you listen to podcasts and make sure to leave a rating and a review and please share with a friend. 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.
Espionage and Engaging Exhibits with Kathryn Keane
Breaking the Silos with Gretchen Coss
[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.
[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.
Breaking the Silos with Gretchen Coss
Crafting Emotions in Experience Design
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”
[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.
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”
[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.
Crafting Emotions in Experience Design
Live at the Gilder Center
Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation
Susan and Peter J. Solomon Family Insectarium | AMNH
Mignone Halls of Gems and Minerals | AMNH
Davis Family Butterfly Vivarium | AMNH
[Music]
Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience, a podcast produced by Lorem Ipsum, an experience design company headquartered in New York City. Our podcast explores the creativity, innovation and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. If you’re new, welcome, and to our regular listeners, thanks for tuning in and supporting our conversation. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: And this is Brenda Cowan.
Abby: We just want to share a note from today’s show sponsor, POW!
Sponsor: This is Paul Orselli, Chief Instigator at POW! (Paul Orselli Workshop), and we’re delighted to sponsor this episode of the podcast. Please check out our website at www.Orselli.net for more information about our work, as well as free resources and articles. Thanks.
Abby: Today we are off the tracks. Where are we, Brenda?
Brenda: We are in the American Museum of Natural History experiencing the new Gilder Center.
Abby: Well, Brenda, I’m really excited to talk about some of the phenomenal things, fantastic things we saw today and some of the things that we found a little underwhelming.
Okay, so let’s kick it off. Let’s start positive. Let’s start with things that impressed us, intrigued us, things we enjoyed.
Brenda: Well, I think for me, the thing that really knocked my socks off, on each floor, they have open storage areas that are layered with displays of objects, and the graphic rails talk about the people who do the jobs with the specimens, with the artifacts that you’re seeing, and you get to see the storage behind, you get to see what’s going on sort of behind the scenes. And it’s really visually dynamic.
The thing that also makes those areas on each of the floors really, really perfect in my mind’s eye is that the label copy is all question-based. So, all of the headlines are questions and they’re very natural questions that you would wonder when you’re looking at these really sometimes bizarre, sometimes strange, sometimes really familiar-looking objects.
Oh, the question leads you in. You get a nice hit of content and then you’re on to the next thing. It’s perfect. It’s great exhibitry, and it was fascinating. And I want all of the jobs of all of the people who I saw displayed in all of these areas, because who knew.
Abby: One of the really nice things that I enjoyed about that moment on the floors was being able to see faces, names, and very simply understand the varied jobs that are associated. It was all done in a very easy-to-digest, informative way that I think was inspirational.
Brenda: It was inspirational, and it was just really human, and another thing that I think is really smart – they put objects of material culture next to specimens in jars and fossils and so on and so forth. So, there was this great sort of mix of the human story within the story of the animals.
Abby: And everything that was there had been clearly curated down. Nothing felt overwhelming and everything was very intriguing. I was like, oh my goodness me, what is that? And I thought the use of large interactives with questions like who uses our collections and a very, very simple click-click to get your answers. You didn’t need a lot of ramp up for using the, the interactives. They were very straightforward. I saw kids using them. I saw adults using them. I saw older people engaging. They were just very simple and complemented the themes.
Brenda: Those displays which line the halls, in line the major gallery areas are, I think for me, the very, very best of the Gilder Center. And it’s not to say that there aren’t other really good things going on. Abby and I were just at the Insectarium, which is beautifully designed. It’s a nice open space and yet it’s cohesive. And again, it’s simple, it’s straightforward. They’ve got specimens next to really beautiful graphics. There are some touch screens where you can get more information and it’s a really playful, open area with a lot, a lot of content, a lot of actual living creatures, and it just makes a lot of sense. It’s a very pleasurable exhibit.
Abby: Yeah, I would echo. The Insectarium is gorgeous. It has this amazing ceiling, ribbed ceiling that I think makes it feel very cocoon-like. And then you have these very large recreations of flowers and strawberries that really break up the space and make it feel more immersive and a bit different from a more traditional exhibition. And then having a mix of the live animals, very small moments, they’re not huge, they’re small moments where you can go and see the live animals, and right next door is again some very brief relevant text that’s enjoyable to read, and then you have a very small quick video moment. What I really like here is that you can click through the video moments and they’re about 10 seconds long and it’s all very easy, it’s all digestible and it’s not overwhelming, and you don’t feel like you’re walking through a book.
Brenda: Well, walking through a book. We did start out our journey here in the Hall of Gems and had in so many ways almost the opposite experience from what we’re starting out with right now. It was absolutely stunning to look at. It was like being in a jewelry store, as you would perhaps anticipate, and yet it was so difficult to experience. It was difficult to gain content. It was difficult to do all of the reading. And it was very unapproachable as well. And we’ve got, you know, fascinating content that was really, really a struggle to get a handle on.
Abby: I mean, the collection itself is phenomenal, but the text panels were boring. They were heavy. They were intellectual. They were very heavily scientific. And I couldn’t touch a gem. I wanted to touch one or a cheap version of one. I wanted to feel what they were like. And the only thing we found, or the only thing I found in there was some metal recreations of the shapes inside the gemstones and a scientific and mathematical drawing about them, again, which is very analytic. A lot of the questions I had, the straightforward questions, weren’t answered.
Brenda: There wasn’t anything that really tapped into the culture of gems. You know, people collect, you know, quartz. They collect different gemstones; they collect different types of semi-precious stones. There are so many different types of gems in our everyday lives that people see as being numinous, as being, you know, alive or life-giving or energy giving, and I wanted to understand some of that. I wanted to, I wanted to understand my people a little bit better and why it is that people have relationships that are very, very powerful with gems. And there just wasn’t anything to sort of give me a clue.
Abby: That’s interesting. You bring up the human relationship because I feel like there also wasn’t a real global perspective. There was no real perspective except from a scientific perspective. And I wondered about kids. There was nothing for them to do. Even the interactive that we did was a question and answer interactive. And you know, you needed to be able to read long, complicated words and understand what these were or at least try to understand what these minerals were. And I think that that precluded anybody under the age of 12 or 13.
Can we talk about the floor?
Brenda: I don’t know what it says about us, Abby, or what it says about the museum or, you know, maybe we just are just too enmeshed in our own profession, but we were both really stunned by how beautiful the floor was. This beautiful, beautiful, deep slate gray color that is reflecting back the colors and the lighting of all of the stones all throughout the hall. It was sumptuous.
Abby: Sumptuous is the exact word. It was, it was incredible. Another sort of miss for me was the Minerals are Elementary, exclamation mark, which was this huge. It was about nine screens, and on it was the periodic table. Everybody knows the periodic table. It’s how scientists organize elements. And over we walked, well at least over I walked, and I went to touch one because each of the elements was rather large and it had Cr on it or Mo or Tc, and I was like, oh, this is cool, touch. Nothing happened. It, in fact, was not a large touchscreen at all. It was a piece of media. And what it was telling me, what it was doing, I still don’t know. There was four speakers, and no sound coming out of those speakers. So, I think maybe something was broken, but I had to sit there as they turned a color and then showed me that, you know, almond is made of this. And I felt like interacting with the periodic table could have been so fun.
Brenda: It would have been really, really cool, because as it is, unless you’re already kind of in the club, you just don’t get it.
Abby: And I think that that’s a problem because it definitely hits, yeah, I’ve got several friends and acquaintances who are really into this subject and they loved it, but I think that that’s a miss. I think it’s about getting those people as well as people who’ve come to just learn a bit more. And I do want to say one of the highlights was What Makes Clay Useful. There was a moment when we went into clay and clays are a family of fine-grained aluminum-bearing silica minerals that form sheet-like layers with large surface areas that attract water. Wow. Okay, that’s great. This was this was one of the more interesting text panels. This makes clay moldable when wet while also allowing it to hold its shape when dried.
Brenda: I just, I love that they showed bricks. They just showed ordinary bricks. And then they, they had a lovely image of a person at a potter’s wheel making a clay pot. And then there was the clay pot that was on display. It was so, that was very simple and really quite lovely.
Abby: Yeah, so, bringing it to life with relatable images. And I personally loved the, the clay-based cat litter, which was invented in 1947, and was a boon for pet owners. So, they had a nice little picture there of kitty turned away, so we couldn’t see her cute eyes. But making, I think, some of these things relatable to the visitor, looking at minerals and gems in our everyday life, they could have done a lot more with that; those were the moments that I really connected.
Next, Brenda, we went into Invisible Worlds. So, what’s your perspective on that?
Brenda: I loved it. I hated it. So, I’ve gone there twice and they were very, very different experiences. The first time I went, there were so many people that it was really, really difficult to connect with anything. It was very difficult to have any kind of a really thoughtful experience. The time that you and I just had in the exhibition, far fewer people and I was able to take in the content. I was able to have more of an in-depth experience with the content. So, it’s a ticket entry, but if they could better regulate the number of people that go through, especially the big sort of immersive experience at the end, because the first time I did Invisible Worlds, I hated it. I didn’t get it. I thought that there wasn’t a cohesive story. I didn’t understand how come some things seemed very visible and I understood other things that were invisible. But there are a lot of themes there that didn’t seem connected to me in any way. I was able to have a better time, more focused time, and get a little bit closer to the content with better control of…
Abby: Better flow of traffic.
Brenda: Thank you. That’s what I was looking for. Better traffic flow.
Abby: Yeah. So, it was my first time. So, I read the opening statement about what I was about to see: things that are all around me, small and big, that I’ve never seen before. Very excited. I walked in and sorely disappointed by the initial media pieces where they have sort of material that’s in these swathes around the room, these large white swathes projected just on the center, and you have the stereotypical drone sound, we’re creating an atmosphere, everybody. And then you have one image in the middle, and you’re looking, and there’s a text quote above, and there’s no story, there’s no narrative. I can’t follow anything.
And so, I stood there for a minute or two. I’m like, okay, imagery, walked around the corner, a large area of darkness, and then come to something else, which is another swath and another projection, and then objects inside the projection, physical objects, which are all illuminating. And I’m standing there, and I can’t work out what they’re telling me. I’m like, okay, are they all related? Okay, their genes, they have similar genes, but why is some lighting up and then the next, so I’m not being enabled to guide my own learning. I have to stand and watch and be told.
And it’s that monologue that I think is ancient, and we should stop doing it. It needs to be a dialogue, and I want to touch and access what I want to touch and access. I don’t want to have to stand and try to work out what you’re trying to tell me.
Brenda: Yeah, if there, somewhere, if there was an element that explained the overarching idea in some form, then I missed it. You missed it, which is a real problem, and that’s what was really very necessary. It was not clear in the introduction area what this was all about, and again, you know, we were both really looking really hard. Maybe we were overthinking. I don’t know. Maybe we’re just really jaded, right? Perhaps. But it was really difficult experiencing it. The things that worked the most effectively were these little interactive digital games.
Abby: Yeah, they were superb.
Brenda: They were great. And you could sort of follow specific questions, get quick hits of content. It was a little bit of fun. You got some answers, right, you got some answers wrong. And it was really nice, quick, you know, sort of what do you know, kinds of facts, information, fun facts.
Abby: Yeah, like one was an interactive about our ancestors and that was fun. It was interesting. It was, as you said, easy to use. You know, I didn’t know I was close, more closely related to mold rather than moss. I found that interesting.
Brenda: Oh, you’re more closely related to the whale than you are the big shark.
Abby: All things, yeah, I was like, wow, this is really cool. So, there were elements of how we connect to nature and how we connect to our history and our evolution, which didn’t really remind me of the title Invisible Worlds.
Brenda: Yeah, that’s, that’s what I’m just, I’m really struggling to kind of get that because, again, you were able to pick up on specific thematic areas or chunks of content, but the big message was just really missing, and I think that there was an opportunity in the big culminating event portion of the exhibition, which is this immersive 360 really gorgeous, gorgeous.
Abby: Yeah, gorgeous.
Brenda: It’s stunning. The immersive experience led you through several different environments, and it was really difficult to get the main message, though, like what the takeaways were.
Abby: I totally agree. It was absolutely gorgeous. The visuals were stunning, the sound was amazing, but it felt like a factoid video. So again, they’re telling us something informative. And I found again when I walked out, I’m like, okay, what’s my takeaway? What’s the lasting impression? And it’s, oh, that was a good bit of fun, nothing, like that was great for my Instagram, but I didn’t, I wasn’t moved, I didn’t connect, I didn’t understand what they were trying to tell me.
Brenda: Yeah, and again, and it’s not to, the whole thing is not a loss. It’s not, it’s not like, you know, we think you should scrap the whole thing and start, start all over again. But it is frustrating when so much, clearly, so much time, effort, so much money went into this exhibition, and what we were looking for is really relatively simple. Just give us the big take away and the title itself just seemed to be a little bit misleading.
Abby: One of the moments that I thought resonated best in this 360 experience was when they asked us to step on the brainwaves and shoot, was it shoot the, what did they ask us to do, do you remember?
Brenda: We were shooting synapses? Is that what we were doing?
Abby: That’s what we were doing. I was shooting some synapses, and I was moving and I was running over to my dark bubble and I was shooting out my synapse, but what I liked was it shot along the room to somebody else who was then shooting their synapse back to me. And suddenly I was aware of other people in the room with me and we were doing a communal activity, and I loved that moment.
Brenda: Yeah, the reactive, responsive floor experience was a lot of fun, was really, really compelling and had you, you know, experiencing more of the entirety of the space, which is, which is really great. With a clear story, you would have been all in.
Abby: And there was no drama, right? There was no conflict. There was no adversity that we’ve beaten to get where we are today. I felt like there was none of that. And it’s easy to get excited about, about evolution. So, I, yeah. Then I had another thought. Brenda, which is, you know, as we’re in the business, maybe we overanalyze, and maybe it’s enough for people to take out their phone and go, wow, a whale flying, you know, flying, felt like it was flying around me in the water, cool, making a noise, awesome. But then I walk out, I’m like, no, that’s not enough. I want people to understand why the whale was there, why it was significant, so that they can go away, and it can change who they are, their destiny. And you have a lovely story about your daughter coming here many, many years ago. Tell us about that.
Brenda: So, as with probably just far too much in my life, major milestone moments are entirely about my daughter and I just remember taking her here when she was about four years old, many, many, many years ago, and she could not get enough of the Big Bang video and you sit, you’re watching the video. It’s contained. It is clear. And this tiny person was absolutely enthralled. And she is not a scientist 20 plus years later, but she was captivated because the story was clear and it used powerful images and it was, you know, certainly much less expensive than the experience that we just had. But the story was complete.
Abby: And I agree. I think that I’ve seen it, I went, my kids have seen it, and it makes you feel about, it makes you question your place in the universe. At least it made me question my place in the universe – Brenda is stunned and stunned, shocked in awe. Okay, so let’s move on to the butterflies.
Brenda: Who doesn’t love butterflies? Butterflies are lovely. Here’s the thing that I was a little bit frustrated about. Gorgeous space. Absolutely beautiful, and what a rare delight to be able to be completely immersed in this really, genuinely magical world of these gorgeous plants and butterflies and learning about them in these, you know, tiny little ways through little fact panels here and there that were really thoughtfully integrated.
But my issue, my stumbling block, is that when you got in there, you weren’t supposed to touch the butterflies. And there were occasional little signs that said, don’t touch the butterflies, right, with a little, a little icon. That’s fine. Why, Abby, did we not get information before going in that not only informed us to not touch the butterflies, but why? Because it would have been a great opportunity for empathy, a great moment to really just, if it was through video, you know, while you’re waiting to get into the space or if it was even just a text panel with some images or one of the, you know, people who is stationed there. If somebody could have just said, here’s why we don’t touch butterflies, right? Here’s how we care for butterflies.
Abby: Yeah. That might have prevented the young man I saw trying to get the butterfly on his hand from damaging the poor butterfly’s leg.
Okay, so let’s move on to a space that is probably just as important, I would argue, as any of the touted exhibition spaces that we’ve discussed. It is the connective tissue; it is the joining moment between old and new. It is the moment between the old building and the new building. And Brenda, just describe right now what it’s like.
Brenda: It is like walking through the basement of some kind of business complex. The interstitial connecting areas are white walls. You feel like you are in the wrong place. You feel like you are not supposed to be going through them. There’s little to no signage anywhere that tells you you can enter into the rest of the museum this way.
Abby and I just kept thinking, maybe they’re not finished yet. Maybe they just haven’t gotten to these interstitial spaces yet. And at the same time, fine. Okay. Right. Lots to go, I’m sure. However, do something. Give us some signage that says it’s okay that you are walking in this space right now. And no, you are not about to get lost. You are about to enter the old part of the building and there was just nothing, and this is on all of the floors.
Abby: It’s just very odd. It’s that, transitional spaces are just as important as the main exhibition spaces. They set people up. They’re the prelude before you walk in to the space, and they’re also another place to communicate information. They’re a place of repose. There was nowhere to sit, nowhere to reflect. And it did. It felt like a basement. And I didn’t realize the rest of the museum was there. It sort of is on a bend away from you and it looks like you shouldn’t go there. And so, listeners, Brenda had to tell me to go there, so I would have missed the rest of the Natural History Museum completely had I not known that.
And as Brenda says, I think it’s, it’s simple design things. It’s not expensive. You could do beautiful connecting images or a design that was thematic that would really help. And with these spaces, you know, as we were going up the main staircase, they’d put a beautiful quote from a fellow museum lover. “Learning goes both ways,” and I feel like that’s not what I’ve seen and experienced here today. There was nowhere for me to give back, for me to interact, for me to share my thoughts and ideas. And so, looking at these epic spaces, transitional spaces between the museums, between these times, between these subject matters, I feel, Brenda, these will be wonderful moments where we as the visitors can give our opinions, our thoughts and really play more. There felt like not a lot of play here, and I feel like that we could really seriously use those spaces.
Brenda: Yeah, I think there’s a whole lot of inspiration. There’s a whole lot of prompting, of wonder, prompting of imagination. There’s a lot of care and thoughtfulness here in terms of the design and the visitor experience. And yet, I agree 100%. Wouldn’t it be so much richer if, you know, we were able to share a little story somewhere in a video booth or share a little story or do a little piece of, you know, writing and a feedback wall somewhere and talk about, you know, what kind of scientist I would love to be or which of, you know, all of the different areas in the museum that I saw today, what I most want to live inside of.
Abby: I’ve seen amazing insects I didn’t know ever walk the planet. Gorgeous colors, beautiful textures. And it’s just, it’s been so inspiring. And I feel like I’m going to walk out, unable to do anything about all of these feelings and thoughts I have. There’s so much more that we could do here.
Brenda: It’s making me think of Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which my students know is a book that I am absolutely obsessed about. Annie Dillard, who won the Pulitzer Prize for the book, wrote, “I’m no scientist. I merely explore the neighborhood” when writing this remarkable book that captures an entire year spent literally on her belly in the mud at the side of a creek and documenting the unbelievable beauty, wonder, just it’s a lustful book about science and the natural world. And I wish that that feeling were here. I wish that that feeling of I, you know, may not be a scientist, but I can explore the neighborhood in a way that is personal. I wish that experience were here.
Abby: Well, Brenda, I’ve really enjoyed our time here today. I encourage everybody listening to come. You should see it for yourself, judge for yourselves. Judge us as well as well as the museum. And let us know your thoughts on what you feel works and what doesn’t work. You know how to reach us, but this has been really interesting. It’s been a fantastic way to spend an afternoon.
Brenda: Highly recommend the visit as well and come explore this neighborhood, enjoy it, and take from it what you will.
Abby: Thanks for everyone who tuned in today. If you like what you heard, subscribe for more episodes of Matters of Experience wherever you listen to podcasts and make sure to leave a rating and a review and please share with a friend. See you next time.
Brenda: Thank you everyone.
[Music]
Producer: Matters of Experience is produced by Lorem Ipsum Corp. Tune in next time for more fun discussions about experience design.
Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation
Susan and Peter J. Solomon Family Insectarium | AMNH
Mignone Halls of Gems and Minerals | AMNH
Davis Family Butterfly Vivarium | AMNH
[Music]
Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience, a podcast produced by Lorem Ipsum, an experience design company headquartered in New York City. Our podcast explores the creativity, innovation and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. If you’re new, welcome, and to our regular listeners, thanks for tuning in and supporting our conversation. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: And this is Brenda Cowan.
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Abby: Today we are off the tracks. Where are we, Brenda?
Brenda: We are in the American Museum of Natural History experiencing the new Gilder Center.
Abby: Well, Brenda, I’m really excited to talk about some of the phenomenal things, fantastic things we saw today and some of the things that we found a little underwhelming.
Okay, so let’s kick it off. Let’s start positive. Let’s start with things that impressed us, intrigued us, things we enjoyed.
Brenda: Well, I think for me, the thing that really knocked my socks off, on each floor, they have open storage areas that are layered with displays of objects, and the graphic rails talk about the people who do the jobs with the specimens, with the artifacts that you’re seeing, and you get to see the storage behind, you get to see what’s going on sort of behind the scenes. And it’s really visually dynamic.
The thing that also makes those areas on each of the floors really, really perfect in my mind’s eye is that the label copy is all question-based. So, all of the headlines are questions and they’re very natural questions that you would wonder when you’re looking at these really sometimes bizarre, sometimes strange, sometimes really familiar-looking objects.
Oh, the question leads you in. You get a nice hit of content and then you’re on to the next thing. It’s perfect. It’s great exhibitry, and it was fascinating. And I want all of the jobs of all of the people who I saw displayed in all of these areas, because who knew.
Abby: One of the really nice things that I enjoyed about that moment on the floors was being able to see faces, names, and very simply understand the varied jobs that are associated. It was all done in a very easy-to-digest, informative way that I think was inspirational.
Brenda: It was inspirational, and it was just really human, and another thing that I think is really smart – they put objects of material culture next to specimens in jars and fossils and so on and so forth. So, there was this great sort of mix of the human story within the story of the animals.
Abby: And everything that was there had been clearly curated down. Nothing felt overwhelming and everything was very intriguing. I was like, oh my goodness me, what is that? And I thought the use of large interactives with questions like who uses our collections and a very, very simple click-click to get your answers. You didn’t need a lot of ramp up for using the, the interactives. They were very straightforward. I saw kids using them. I saw adults using them. I saw older people engaging. They were just very simple and complemented the themes.
Brenda: Those displays which line the halls, in line the major gallery areas are, I think for me, the very, very best of the Gilder Center. And it’s not to say that there aren’t other really good things going on. Abby and I were just at the Insectarium, which is beautifully designed. It’s a nice open space and yet it’s cohesive. And again, it’s simple, it’s straightforward. They’ve got specimens next to really beautiful graphics. There are some touch screens where you can get more information and it’s a really playful, open area with a lot, a lot of content, a lot of actual living creatures, and it just makes a lot of sense. It’s a very pleasurable exhibit.
Abby: Yeah, I would echo. The Insectarium is gorgeous. It has this amazing ceiling, ribbed ceiling that I think makes it feel very cocoon-like. And then you have these very large recreations of flowers and strawberries that really break up the space and make it feel more immersive and a bit different from a more traditional exhibition. And then having a mix of the live animals, very small moments, they’re not huge, they’re small moments where you can go and see the live animals, and right next door is again some very brief relevant text that’s enjoyable to read, and then you have a very small quick video moment. What I really like here is that you can click through the video moments and they’re about 10 seconds long and it’s all very easy, it’s all digestible and it’s not overwhelming, and you don’t feel like you’re walking through a book.
Brenda: Well, walking through a book. We did start out our journey here in the Hall of Gems and had in so many ways almost the opposite experience from what we’re starting out with right now. It was absolutely stunning to look at. It was like being in a jewelry store, as you would perhaps anticipate, and yet it was so difficult to experience. It was difficult to gain content. It was difficult to do all of the reading. And it was very unapproachable as well. And we’ve got, you know, fascinating content that was really, really a struggle to get a handle on.
Abby: I mean, the collection itself is phenomenal, but the text panels were boring. They were heavy. They were intellectual. They were very heavily scientific. And I couldn’t touch a gem. I wanted to touch one or a cheap version of one. I wanted to feel what they were like. And the only thing we found, or the only thing I found in there was some metal recreations of the shapes inside the gemstones and a scientific and mathematical drawing about them, again, which is very analytic. A lot of the questions I had, the straightforward questions, weren’t answered.
Brenda: There wasn’t anything that really tapped into the culture of gems. You know, people collect, you know, quartz. They collect different gemstones; they collect different types of semi-precious stones. There are so many different types of gems in our everyday lives that people see as being numinous, as being, you know, alive or life-giving or energy giving, and I wanted to understand some of that. I wanted to, I wanted to understand my people a little bit better and why it is that people have relationships that are very, very powerful with gems. And there just wasn’t anything to sort of give me a clue.
Abby: That’s interesting. You bring up the human relationship because I feel like there also wasn’t a real global perspective. There was no real perspective except from a scientific perspective. And I wondered about kids. There was nothing for them to do. Even the interactive that we did was a question and answer interactive. And you know, you needed to be able to read long, complicated words and understand what these were or at least try to understand what these minerals were. And I think that that precluded anybody under the age of 12 or 13.
Can we talk about the floor?
Brenda: I don’t know what it says about us, Abby, or what it says about the museum or, you know, maybe we just are just too enmeshed in our own profession, but we were both really stunned by how beautiful the floor was. This beautiful, beautiful, deep slate gray color that is reflecting back the colors and the lighting of all of the stones all throughout the hall. It was sumptuous.
Abby: Sumptuous is the exact word. It was, it was incredible. Another sort of miss for me was the Minerals are Elementary, exclamation mark, which was this huge. It was about nine screens, and on it was the periodic table. Everybody knows the periodic table. It’s how scientists organize elements. And over we walked, well at least over I walked, and I went to touch one because each of the elements was rather large and it had Cr on it or Mo or Tc, and I was like, oh, this is cool, touch. Nothing happened. It, in fact, was not a large touchscreen at all. It was a piece of media. And what it was telling me, what it was doing, I still don’t know. There was four speakers, and no sound coming out of those speakers. So, I think maybe something was broken, but I had to sit there as they turned a color and then showed me that, you know, almond is made of this. And I felt like interacting with the periodic table could have been so fun.
Brenda: It would have been really, really cool, because as it is, unless you’re already kind of in the club, you just don’t get it.
Abby: And I think that that’s a problem because it definitely hits, yeah, I’ve got several friends and acquaintances who are really into this subject and they loved it, but I think that that’s a miss. I think it’s about getting those people as well as people who’ve come to just learn a bit more. And I do want to say one of the highlights was What Makes Clay Useful. There was a moment when we went into clay and clays are a family of fine-grained aluminum-bearing silica minerals that form sheet-like layers with large surface areas that attract water. Wow. Okay, that’s great. This was this was one of the more interesting text panels. This makes clay moldable when wet while also allowing it to hold its shape when dried.
Brenda: I just, I love that they showed bricks. They just showed ordinary bricks. And then they, they had a lovely image of a person at a potter’s wheel making a clay pot. And then there was the clay pot that was on display. It was so, that was very simple and really quite lovely.
Abby: Yeah, so, bringing it to life with relatable images. And I personally loved the, the clay-based cat litter, which was invented in 1947, and was a boon for pet owners. So, they had a nice little picture there of kitty turned away, so we couldn’t see her cute eyes. But making, I think, some of these things relatable to the visitor, looking at minerals and gems in our everyday life, they could have done a lot more with that; those were the moments that I really connected.
Next, Brenda, we went into Invisible Worlds. So, what’s your perspective on that?
Brenda: I loved it. I hated it. So, I’ve gone there twice and they were very, very different experiences. The first time I went, there were so many people that it was really, really difficult to connect with anything. It was very difficult to have any kind of a really thoughtful experience. The time that you and I just had in the exhibition, far fewer people and I was able to take in the content. I was able to have more of an in-depth experience with the content. So, it’s a ticket entry, but if they could better regulate the number of people that go through, especially the big sort of immersive experience at the end, because the first time I did Invisible Worlds, I hated it. I didn’t get it. I thought that there wasn’t a cohesive story. I didn’t understand how come some things seemed very visible and I understood other things that were invisible. But there are a lot of themes there that didn’t seem connected to me in any way. I was able to have a better time, more focused time, and get a little bit closer to the content with better control of…
Abby: Better flow of traffic.
Brenda: Thank you. That’s what I was looking for. Better traffic flow.
Abby: Yeah. So, it was my first time. So, I read the opening statement about what I was about to see: things that are all around me, small and big, that I’ve never seen before. Very excited. I walked in and sorely disappointed by the initial media pieces where they have sort of material that’s in these swathes around the room, these large white swathes projected just on the center, and you have the stereotypical drone sound, we’re creating an atmosphere, everybody. And then you have one image in the middle, and you’re looking, and there’s a text quote above, and there’s no story, there’s no narrative. I can’t follow anything.
And so, I stood there for a minute or two. I’m like, okay, imagery, walked around the corner, a large area of darkness, and then come to something else, which is another swath and another projection, and then objects inside the projection, physical objects, which are all illuminating. And I’m standing there, and I can’t work out what they’re telling me. I’m like, okay, are they all related? Okay, their genes, they have similar genes, but why is some lighting up and then the next, so I’m not being enabled to guide my own learning. I have to stand and watch and be told.
And it’s that monologue that I think is ancient, and we should stop doing it. It needs to be a dialogue, and I want to touch and access what I want to touch and access. I don’t want to have to stand and try to work out what you’re trying to tell me.
Brenda: Yeah, if there, somewhere, if there was an element that explained the overarching idea in some form, then I missed it. You missed it, which is a real problem, and that’s what was really very necessary. It was not clear in the introduction area what this was all about, and again, you know, we were both really looking really hard. Maybe we were overthinking. I don’t know. Maybe we’re just really jaded, right? Perhaps. But it was really difficult experiencing it. The things that worked the most effectively were these little interactive digital games.
Abby: Yeah, they were superb.
Brenda: They were great. And you could sort of follow specific questions, get quick hits of content. It was a little bit of fun. You got some answers, right, you got some answers wrong. And it was really nice, quick, you know, sort of what do you know, kinds of facts, information, fun facts.
Abby: Yeah, like one was an interactive about our ancestors and that was fun. It was interesting. It was, as you said, easy to use. You know, I didn’t know I was close, more closely related to mold rather than moss. I found that interesting.
Brenda: Oh, you’re more closely related to the whale than you are the big shark.
Abby: All things, yeah, I was like, wow, this is really cool. So, there were elements of how we connect to nature and how we connect to our history and our evolution, which didn’t really remind me of the title Invisible Worlds.
Brenda: Yeah, that’s, that’s what I’m just, I’m really struggling to kind of get that because, again, you were able to pick up on specific thematic areas or chunks of content, but the big message was just really missing, and I think that there was an opportunity in the big culminating event portion of the exhibition, which is this immersive 360 really gorgeous, gorgeous.
Abby: Yeah, gorgeous.
Brenda: It’s stunning. The immersive experience led you through several different environments, and it was really difficult to get the main message, though, like what the takeaways were.
Abby: I totally agree. It was absolutely gorgeous. The visuals were stunning, the sound was amazing, but it felt like a factoid video. So again, they’re telling us something informative. And I found again when I walked out, I’m like, okay, what’s my takeaway? What’s the lasting impression? And it’s, oh, that was a good bit of fun, nothing, like that was great for my Instagram, but I didn’t, I wasn’t moved, I didn’t connect, I didn’t understand what they were trying to tell me.
Brenda: Yeah, and again, and it’s not to, the whole thing is not a loss. It’s not, it’s not like, you know, we think you should scrap the whole thing and start, start all over again. But it is frustrating when so much, clearly, so much time, effort, so much money went into this exhibition, and what we were looking for is really relatively simple. Just give us the big take away and the title itself just seemed to be a little bit misleading.
Abby: One of the moments that I thought resonated best in this 360 experience was when they asked us to step on the brainwaves and shoot, was it shoot the, what did they ask us to do, do you remember?
Brenda: We were shooting synapses? Is that what we were doing?
Abby: That’s what we were doing. I was shooting some synapses, and I was moving and I was running over to my dark bubble and I was shooting out my synapse, but what I liked was it shot along the room to somebody else who was then shooting their synapse back to me. And suddenly I was aware of other people in the room with me and we were doing a communal activity, and I loved that moment.
Brenda: Yeah, the reactive, responsive floor experience was a lot of fun, was really, really compelling and had you, you know, experiencing more of the entirety of the space, which is, which is really great. With a clear story, you would have been all in.
Abby: And there was no drama, right? There was no conflict. There was no adversity that we’ve beaten to get where we are today. I felt like there was none of that. And it’s easy to get excited about, about evolution. So, I, yeah. Then I had another thought. Brenda, which is, you know, as we’re in the business, maybe we overanalyze, and maybe it’s enough for people to take out their phone and go, wow, a whale flying, you know, flying, felt like it was flying around me in the water, cool, making a noise, awesome. But then I walk out, I’m like, no, that’s not enough. I want people to understand why the whale was there, why it was significant, so that they can go away, and it can change who they are, their destiny. And you have a lovely story about your daughter coming here many, many years ago. Tell us about that.
Brenda: So, as with probably just far too much in my life, major milestone moments are entirely about my daughter and I just remember taking her here when she was about four years old, many, many, many years ago, and she could not get enough of the Big Bang video and you sit, you’re watching the video. It’s contained. It is clear. And this tiny person was absolutely enthralled. And she is not a scientist 20 plus years later, but she was captivated because the story was clear and it used powerful images and it was, you know, certainly much less expensive than the experience that we just had. But the story was complete.
Abby: And I agree. I think that I’ve seen it, I went, my kids have seen it, and it makes you feel about, it makes you question your place in the universe. At least it made me question my place in the universe – Brenda is stunned and stunned, shocked in awe. Okay, so let’s move on to the butterflies.
Brenda: Who doesn’t love butterflies? Butterflies are lovely. Here’s the thing that I was a little bit frustrated about. Gorgeous space. Absolutely beautiful, and what a rare delight to be able to be completely immersed in this really, genuinely magical world of these gorgeous plants and butterflies and learning about them in these, you know, tiny little ways through little fact panels here and there that were really thoughtfully integrated.
But my issue, my stumbling block, is that when you got in there, you weren’t supposed to touch the butterflies. And there were occasional little signs that said, don’t touch the butterflies, right, with a little, a little icon. That’s fine. Why, Abby, did we not get information before going in that not only informed us to not touch the butterflies, but why? Because it would have been a great opportunity for empathy, a great moment to really just, if it was through video, you know, while you’re waiting to get into the space or if it was even just a text panel with some images or one of the, you know, people who is stationed there. If somebody could have just said, here’s why we don’t touch butterflies, right? Here’s how we care for butterflies.
Abby: Yeah. That might have prevented the young man I saw trying to get the butterfly on his hand from damaging the poor butterfly’s leg.
Okay, so let’s move on to a space that is probably just as important, I would argue, as any of the touted exhibition spaces that we’ve discussed. It is the connective tissue; it is the joining moment between old and new. It is the moment between the old building and the new building. And Brenda, just describe right now what it’s like.
Brenda: It is like walking through the basement of some kind of business complex. The interstitial connecting areas are white walls. You feel like you are in the wrong place. You feel like you are not supposed to be going through them. There’s little to no signage anywhere that tells you you can enter into the rest of the museum this way.
Abby and I just kept thinking, maybe they’re not finished yet. Maybe they just haven’t gotten to these interstitial spaces yet. And at the same time, fine. Okay. Right. Lots to go, I’m sure. However, do something. Give us some signage that says it’s okay that you are walking in this space right now. And no, you are not about to get lost. You are about to enter the old part of the building and there was just nothing, and this is on all of the floors.
Abby: It’s just very odd. It’s that, transitional spaces are just as important as the main exhibition spaces. They set people up. They’re the prelude before you walk in to the space, and they’re also another place to communicate information. They’re a place of repose. There was nowhere to sit, nowhere to reflect. And it did. It felt like a basement. And I didn’t realize the rest of the museum was there. It sort of is on a bend away from you and it looks like you shouldn’t go there. And so, listeners, Brenda had to tell me to go there, so I would have missed the rest of the Natural History Museum completely had I not known that.
And as Brenda says, I think it’s, it’s simple design things. It’s not expensive. You could do beautiful connecting images or a design that was thematic that would really help. And with these spaces, you know, as we were going up the main staircase, they’d put a beautiful quote from a fellow museum lover. “Learning goes both ways,” and I feel like that’s not what I’ve seen and experienced here today. There was nowhere for me to give back, for me to interact, for me to share my thoughts and ideas. And so, looking at these epic spaces, transitional spaces between the museums, between these times, between these subject matters, I feel, Brenda, these will be wonderful moments where we as the visitors can give our opinions, our thoughts and really play more. There felt like not a lot of play here, and I feel like that we could really seriously use those spaces.
Brenda: Yeah, I think there’s a whole lot of inspiration. There’s a whole lot of prompting, of wonder, prompting of imagination. There’s a lot of care and thoughtfulness here in terms of the design and the visitor experience. And yet, I agree 100%. Wouldn’t it be so much richer if, you know, we were able to share a little story somewhere in a video booth or share a little story or do a little piece of, you know, writing and a feedback wall somewhere and talk about, you know, what kind of scientist I would love to be or which of, you know, all of the different areas in the museum that I saw today, what I most want to live inside of.
Abby: I’ve seen amazing insects I didn’t know ever walk the planet. Gorgeous colors, beautiful textures. And it’s just, it’s been so inspiring. And I feel like I’m going to walk out, unable to do anything about all of these feelings and thoughts I have. There’s so much more that we could do here.
Brenda: It’s making me think of Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which my students know is a book that I am absolutely obsessed about. Annie Dillard, who won the Pulitzer Prize for the book, wrote, “I’m no scientist. I merely explore the neighborhood” when writing this remarkable book that captures an entire year spent literally on her belly in the mud at the side of a creek and documenting the unbelievable beauty, wonder, just it’s a lustful book about science and the natural world. And I wish that that feeling were here. I wish that that feeling of I, you know, may not be a scientist, but I can explore the neighborhood in a way that is personal. I wish that experience were here.
Abby: Well, Brenda, I’ve really enjoyed our time here today. I encourage everybody listening to come. You should see it for yourself, judge for yourselves. Judge us as well as well as the museum. And let us know your thoughts on what you feel works and what doesn’t work. You know how to reach us, but this has been really interesting. It’s been a fantastic way to spend an afternoon.
Brenda: Highly recommend the visit as well and come explore this neighborhood, enjoy it, and take from it what you will.
Abby: Thanks for everyone who tuned in today. If you like what you heard, subscribe for more episodes of Matters of Experience wherever you listen to podcasts and make sure to leave a rating and a review and please share with a friend. See you next time.
Brenda: Thank you everyone.
[Music]
Producer: Matters of Experience is produced by Lorem Ipsum Corp. Tune in next time for more fun discussions about experience design.
Live at the Gilder Center
The Climate Crisis is Simple with Tom Bowman
Sustainable Materials: With Both Eyes Open | The Use Less Group
[Music]
Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience, a podcast produced by Lorem Ipsum, an experience design company headquartered in New York City. Our podcast explores the creativity, innovation and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. If you’re new, a hearty welcome to you and to our regular listeners, thank you for tuning in and supporting our conversation. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: I’m Brenda Cowan. Hello, everyone.
Abby: Before we begin, we just want to share a note from today’s show sponsor, POW!
Sponsor: This is Paul Orselli, Chief Instigator at POW! (Paul Orselli Workshop), and we’re delighted to sponsor this episode of the podcast. Please check out our website at www.Orselli.net for more information about our work, as well as free resources and articles. Thanks.
Abby: And now it’s my pleasure to welcome Tom Bowman to the show.
Tom: It’s my pleasure to join you.
Abby: Tom, welcome. You’re the founder of Bowman Change, Inc., a consultancy dedicated to helping organizations reap the benefits of working with purpose, making social and environmental transformation central to their missions. Tom regularly provides counsel to federal agencies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Science Foundation, NASA and the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
Going way back to the late 1980s, Tom founded Bowman Design Group, an award-winning exhibit design and management firm that works with leaders of Fortune 1000 corporations, startups, science museums and aquariums. He is the author of three books, which we have links to on our site, and I urge everyone to check them out. Tom’s appeared on Marketplace, CNN, in The New York Times, Yale Environment 360, and now finally here on Matters of Experience. Tom, a huge welcome to the show.
Tom: It’s finally good to step up to something really good.
Brenda: Oh, my goodness.
Tom: Thanks for having me.
Brenda: So, Tom, you and I first met, it was around about 2014 and this was through our engagement with Exhibit Designers and Producers Association and Exhibitor Media Group. And you were talking with the exhibits industry about things such as the alarming amount of waste and the damage being caused and exhibit practices and how we can make a sea change, how we can turn towards becoming leaders, how we can turn towards becoming advocates in addressing climate change. Are there changes that you have seen in the exhibits industry?
Tom: Let’s take one step back first and talk about changes that are happening in our society more broadly. The majority, now, of Americans are pretty concerned about the changing climate and changing environmental conditions that we’re living with. You know, the intensity of storms and drought and flood and all the expensive catastrophes and tragedies that are happening.
There is a shift also in corporate boardrooms. It’s no longer considered acceptable to be a climate denier in the C-suite. The challenge, though, is to see how that trickles down to an industry like the events, exhibits and experience industry, because we exist well below the level of the C-suite for the most part. It’s a very, very diffused industry. It’s made up primarily of small companies that are independently owned.
And if you own a small company on the production side, you know, design, fabrication, and show services and so forth, margins are small and doing things in ways that are reliable and routine and that are making clients happy is really a powerful driving force as it needs to be. And so, introducing new criteria like let’s reduce waste, let’s reuse properties longer, let’s shift to Energy Star rated electronic and electrical equipment as often as we can, these moves feel like extra burdens, and so I’ve spoken with a couple of the other sort of thought leaders in this space who are pioneers in greening their companies and they say that they’re struggling now that they have established this to keep their younger employees engaged with these issues. You know, the, the first wave was kind of the easy part.
And now making it a standard part of the culture is the challenge they’re facing. Most of the people on the client side in this industry, which would be exhibit managers, event managers, meeting managers, tend not to have the same level of authority as directors and vice presidents do in their companies. Now, obviously, there’s a wide range, you know, if you’re in a bigger company, you might be an exhibit manager.
If you’re a smaller company, you might be a vice president or even the owner. So, across that range, in large companies, by and large, the drive to make sustainability a priority in the events industry is not terribly strong. There is a sort of a generally much more welcoming attitude toward green proposals from exhibit houses and, designers and producers. I don’t yet see that it’s become the kind of trend that is driving the industry, though.
Abby: Well, I actually wanted to back up before we sort of jump into the industry and focus on, you know, when we all look back, there’s always been climate change. I mean, we’ve gone from one ice age to the other ice age, and the difference now is the speed of it, right? It’s happening so quickly.
If we take a bigger, even larger view, you know, mankind, I mean, our modern civilization has only been here for about 12,000 years, 11,700 years. Why do we think we’re going to be here for another 11,000? We’ve only been here for a blip. What if climate change caused by us is just part of Earth’s natural progression? It won’t accommodate how we like to live on it, but the Earth will be here in another 4 billion years.
Tom: That’s a really good question, Abigail because that 12,000 years or so that human civilization has existed corresponds to an unusually stable climate period. So, in the short term, the rapid change in climate that’s being caused by all the greenhouse gasses that we’ve been adding to the atmosphere for the last 250 years or so are changing the conditions in which all of human civilization has been established and created.
And it means that the places that we’re living and the places we’re growing food might not all be particularly hospitable to people in the very near term. You know, we’re seeing more floods, more hurricanes, more drought in the West, all of the wildfires in Canada. These are circumstances that are not good for us.
There’s another less well known and really profound change that’s happening. And that is, scientists say that we have entered into the sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s history. Well, in mass extinction events, you lose something like 90% of species. And so, biodiversity is dramatically reduced and these periods of reduced biodiversity can last a million years or so. And that’s happening now, and it’s being driven largely by environmental change caused by civilization.
We’re compartmentalizing ecosystems, so that species don’t have the freedom to move over large areas the way they’re used to. We’re literally killing off species. And so, in the long run, yes, Earth will be here. Life will be here. Whether it’s good for humans or not is an open question. And it’s a, you know, scientists call it a grand experiment. And it’s up to us collectively as a species to decide how much this is going to change.
Brenda: So let’s talk more about that, the element of human psychology within all of this. I was really taken in your book, What If Solving Climate Change Is Simple?, what a grand thought that is, you talk about how the population has the opportunity to shift the status quo, despite our tendency to not want to. And I’m wondering, are you seeing through the work and the engagement that you have, are you seeing this kind of necessary psychological shift that will enable us to actually address these realities? Or are we just stuck in the why bother?
Tom: No, I don’t think we are stuck in the why bother. I really think society has moved beyond that point. One of the things that I’ve talked about for a long time is that there is a very powerful narrative about all the innovations that are taking place across our economies that are making a tremendous difference, and we don’t hear about them as if they’re a coherent story.
We hear about little fragments from time to time. But, there are innovations taking place in battery technology. California, which has the fifth or fourth largest economy in the world all by itself, is decarbonizing its economy and is really sort of driving economically the push toward electrification of transportation and things like that and the decarbonization of our electricity supply through renewable energy.
There are all kinds of people working in all sorts of different processes. You know, there are people who, executives who left Tesla to form a company that recycles batteries, all of the material in batteries from everything from computers to phones to cars. And there are changes in agriculture that are happening that are about sort of rejuvenating the soils, using less water and all of that.
And so there is a groundswell of change occurring. A lot of these changes are going to come to us through businesses, through government, through governance, and we’re going to adapt to them. And it’s not necessary for everybody to get on board with a feeling that environmental action should be their top priority, because for many people, it will just become that without, without their having to really do too much about it.
Brenda: Again, in your book, you talk about Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, and you liken the hero’s journey narrative to how it is that we are experiencing and looking at climate change today on an individual level. Tom, tell us about your own hero’s journey. Let’s, let’s focus on you for a second. When did this path become clear to you? Where did this all begin?
Tom: So, I first really learned about what’s happening in climate back in 2003 and 2004, when my design firm, Bowman Design Group, created a museum for the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. And that meant that our climate exhibit was informed by a steering committee of some of the most eminent climate scientists in the world. That’s who my tutors were.
And I remember leaving that project feeling worried about what the future holds. And I asked one of the scientists, What do you think about this, this is 2003 and 2004, and he said, well, you know, humans aren’t stupid. Thank goodness we have time to work this out. Well, it turns out that just five years later, 2000, well, less than that, 2007, we were invited to do a second exhibit on climate change for Scripps Institution of Oceanography, which has a public aquarium.
And so, there was another steering committee of some of the world’s most eminent climate researchers. And the attitude among the researchers had utterly changed. I mean, instead of this feeling like that we have time to work this out, what they had seen is because of the economic expansion and industrialization of China, carbon emissions were climbing at a rate that exceeded what they had forecast as the worst possible case.
And I was sitting in a meeting and I mentioned just kind of casually that the folks at the National Academy had told me to pay attention to the ocean because the ocean can hold so much heat before ocean temperatures start to rise that once temperatures do begin to rise, we’ll be committed to a changing climate, a different climate for 500 to 1000 years.
And she just blithely said, oh, well, we’re part of this project that has robotic floats all over the world, and we’ve already measured warming in every ocean basin in the world to a depth of a thousand meters. Just, just imagine that, three-quarters of the world’s surface covered 3000 feet deep in water has warmed up already.
And I write about this in the book, you know, the, the term epiphany is usually used in a religious context, but the definition is, it’s a sudden intuitive insight into the reality of something. And it applied in that moment because in a heartbeat, everything I had ever known about the potential dangers and impacts of climate change just came home to roost all at once.
Brenda: Talk about a call to action.
Tom: Yeah, I drove home from that meeting thinking, can I put this toothpaste back in the tube and go back to life the way I knew it 2 hours ago. And, of course, the answer was no. And so, I began experimenting with my company to see if we could cut our emissions., and it turns out you can, and it’s easy.
I mean, it didn’t seem easy as I did it. But once I figured it out and had it measured, it’s remarkably simple. I became, as you mentioned, the EDPA’s sustainability chair. I started writing a column for Exhibitor Magazine, that I wrote for eight years. I ended up writing books, and I also began working with social scientists and scientists and economists and others to, because I looked around me and I didn’t know anyone else who worked in the communication business, who seemed to have as much sort of background in, in what the climate story was than I did.
And so, I went searching for people who did. And I sort of, I started Bowman Change because I needed a vehicle to do work that didn’t involve running a design agency.
Abby: So, Tom, what are some of the initial things you mentioned you went back to, and you did some really simple things to cut emissions. For people listening who are part of smaller companies or own companies or part of bigger companies, just so they can have something to like a next step, just real low hanging fruit. What can people do and think about?
Tom: I like to think about it as staging. What are the things I can do this week versus the things that are going to take me a quarter versus the things that are going to take me a year. And so, you look at the things you can control. Can you change your lighting? Every light in the world should be an LED now.
Plug everything in your company into power strips that you can shut off, or get the smart kind that shut off automatically if the thing’s not in use, because anything that has a chip in it is using electricity when the power is turned off. And in the average household, that can be 10% of your electricity bill, believe it or not. They call it vampire power.
The next big thing to do is look at what you’re driving. Often, the biggest percentage of a company’s emissions come from transportation. Either the company owns vehicles or, you know, you’re paying your employees for the mileage for using their personal vehicles, which of course, are beyond your control. But anything that you own, consider retiring it early if it’s not a high mileage, high MPG, really high MPG vehicle or an electric vehicle.
And I think we’re at the point now where electric vehicles are becoming commonplace enough. And we’ve learned that the cost of ownership is as low as a pretty low-cost gasoline-powered car, if you factor in that you don’t need maintenance, and electricity costs a lot less than gasoline. Those are kind of the, the easiest steps to think about.
And I would start there. And of course, now we live in a world where we can conduct an interview clear across the United States over an electronic platform, like we’re doing right now, right? And so that means all of that travel, all that air travel, all that driving, just got eliminated from my business’s carbon emissions. Those things are so simple to do. And, you know, we did those kinds of things, and we reduced our emissions by two-thirds, literally two-thirds, in a little over a year.
Abby: Just to add one thing, just because it’s top of mind on a project we’re working on; I do want to make it clear that advocating for just not being in person and the mental health things that happen when we all don’t get together, because I’m a big believer in also taking care of people and their mental health, and when you work together and you see each other. So, you know, living in a city, I get to walk around everywhere, take public transport. So, I just don’t, I just want to mention that, you know, when people are thinking about cutting emissions, not seeing each other sometimes has other ramifications.
Tom: Well said.
Abby: Now, talking a little bit more about the sustainability and the exhibits you’ve been working on over the years, it was interesting at the 50th anniversary SEGD conference this year in D.C. I’ll call them the next generation of designers, you know, have the stage and they’re talking about hardware that they’ve been using in their companies and looking at sustainability. And there was a lot of indignation from the older generation, let’s say, I’ll maybe pop you in that, the more established generation.
Tom: Yeah, I’m one of those.
Abby: Who were like, you know, no, we know this. Like, we get this. This is what we’ve been doing, as if it was something potentially new, because, you know, as the next generation come up, they find they discover things for the first time. So, it’s just part of maturing as a designer or it has been until now, when I know Brenda at university, sustainability is the hot topic that everybody now brings into their practice, and it’s very difficult. I don’t also want to make this sound like it’s an easy thing to do because it’s not, especially when, you know, we’re dealing with hardware as well, and like, how does that look? Do you feel like sustainability is just one of the very important key points in for all design now and moving forward?
Tom: Oh, absolutely. I mean, I just don’t think that the next generation of consumers is going to tolerate ignorance of sustainability or a lack of attention to sustainability. And it’s also becoming better equated with cost savings in business. We had a client that went to a lot of trade shows a year, sometimes 40 trade shows a year, and they came to us one year and said we can’t afford to build any new exhibit properties, or at least not any brand-new exhibits, you know, because they were on the, the five-year cycle, the depreciation cycle like everybody else.
You build a new exhibit and once depreciation goes to zero, you throw it away and build a new one and by then you’re sick and tired of it anyway. And so, what we decided to do was reconfigure the properties they had and recolor them. And we built odds and ends, little panels to fill in and new reception counter here and a new theater screen there.
But we discovered that those properties, those wall panels, and basic exhibit furniture remained viable and looked good, not for five years, but for 15 years before they wore out. And it turns out that this fits perfectly with a strategy that I discovered in a book called Sustainable Materials: With Both Eyes Open, and it’s a very simple rule of thumb: if something you own doesn’t use energy, use that thing for as long as you possibly can.
That’s the most environmentally efficient thing you can do with it, right, so you don’t have to make a new one. If it does use energy, but energy efficiency isn’t improving at all, use it for as long as you can because it’s still better to use a thing rather than pour energy into making a new thing. But if it uses energy and energy efficiency is improving over time, replace it more quickly because the energy savings from a more efficient product is going to exceed the energy spent creating that product.
So, TVs, refrigerators, computers, all lighting, all these systems that we use to animate our exhibit experiences fall into that latter category, but the basic properties fall into the first category. So, this created for us, you know, we got to experience the fact that this new system of preserving properties longer and reconfiguring it worked for our client. They had a, one of the fellow exhibitors came up to then and said, how do you guys afford so many new exhibits?
And she said, we don’t come look at all the show stickers on the backs of these panels, you know, and there’d be 30 or 40 stickers on a panel. And it worked for the exhibit fabricator because, the exhibit house, because they were spending time redoing the labor part, they just weren’t replacing material part of the projects. And it worked for the creative firm, that was us, because we were reinventing things all the time, and the environmental footprint was greatly decreased.
Brenda: Tom, it sounds like you’re very optimistic about upcoming decision-makers and leaders. Am I, am I gauging this correctly? Because…
Tom: Yeah, I am.
Brenda: You know, I also get, between my students and also, you know, my daughter who’s 25 and her peers. You know, there’s also a lot of folks who are just feeling defeated and who are too young to be feeling defeated. So is your take that overall, in your experience, that the folks who will be our decision makers that they are going to be feeling the confidence and the ability to, even in some cases, rebound and continue to make the necessary change with the right sort of psychology driving them.
Tom: Yes, there are people who rise to leadership positions. Not everybody does. Not everybody wants to, but the people who do, I mean, I think it’s fair to say that just about everybody in the generations you’re talking about are keenly aware that the impacts on their generations and their kids’ generations are going to be far worse than on my generation and your generation.
So, you hear all the time in surveys and in the news that younger people are really motivated and frustrated with, you know, the pace of governmental change and societal change, which is leaving them in the lurch. So, the people who rise to leadership positions, who have that mentality, are going to be much more aggressively focused on this than the prior generations were.
When I did the Caution Museum in Washington, D.C., everybody thought that it would take 30 or 40 years for power plants to switch from coal to natural gas. Natural gas has a lower carbon footprint than coal by a pretty dramatic amount, at least it was believed at the time. And everybody thought that the investment in, you know, natural gas cost twice as much as coal and these were long-lived investments, so it would be 30 years before anybody changed so we were stuck with coal for 30 years.
And then fracking happened and the price of gas plummeted to below that of coal. And in a matter of a few years, everybody switched, you know, and the thing that we can never predict is state change like that. Big changes like that, because a technology or a market factor or a consumer factor just changes the game in, overnight, in ways that we didn’t expect.
And so, I’m hopeful that decision makers, the young decision makers, are going to have opportunities that our generation didn’t have. The question is, and it’s absolutely fair on this question is how much change will we cause while we’re also in the process of cleaning things up, how bad are we going to let it get? And nobody knows the answer to that question.
Abby: Yeah.
Brenda: Let’s talk about passion. Let’s talk about what it is that you currently in your work feel passionate about. When you start your workday, every day, what is something that is really either exciting you or just really telling you, yes, yes, this is all possible?
Tom: There are a couple of things. One is very direct and one’s very indirect. I’ll tell you the direct one first. I’m in the process of designing a sustainability education center for a water and power utility company, and their primary target audience is fourth-graders on field trips, and they have challenged us to do something I’ve always wanted to do but never had a client that would do it.
And that is, can we get every insight across without having to put a single word on a wall, so that the words we have to put on the wall are there because they really need to be? But the insights are intuitive and experiential.
Abby: Can we just pause for a minute, Tom?
Brenda: We’re jumping up and down.
Abby: This sounds like the perfect client. How did you find them, how they know the visitors so well? Wow. You don’t have to spend weeks and months getting on the same page with who’s coming and how they learn and understand and play? Wow.
Tom: No, we had to spend weeks coming to understand they really meant it.
Abby: Okay.
Brenda: Yeah, right, seriously.
Tom: Right? Because every other sustainability client I’ve had has been driven by engineers and scientists and, you know, bless their hearts, scientists want you to be excited about everything that excites them. And so, they want to tell you a lot of information that bogs you down, and you can’t even see the forest for the trees anymore. And so encouraging museums and aquariums and others, utility companies sometimes, to simplify in an accurate way that gives somebody an insight that then they can do something with rather than barraging them with facts and data is hard work, and it’s always felt like a compromise. I mean, we’ve been through the entire three rounds of conceptual design iteration that are, you know, exhibits that are really thought through and detailed and we haven’t put a single piece of text on any drawing.
Abby: Fantastic.
Brenda: Wow.
Abby: Fantastic. I want to, I want to go, I want to see this, it sounds incredible.
Tom: I do, too. I mean, it looks like this could be a fun experience because by interacting with something, you’re getting the message.
Abby: Yes.
Tom: And then there’ll be some words on a screen or something that give you some context for it or tell you a factoid about it or something. But you’re going to get it. You’re going to get that it takes a lot of effort to generate electricity. You’re going to get that water is a precious resource. You’re going to get all these things intuitively. That’s pretty cool, right?
Abby: It’s really, really cool. And also, I do just want to add, seeing as you mentioned, and we’re very focused at Lorem Ipsum on media, you don’t have to necessarily have text in the media to help tell these stories.
Brenda: I love hearing this from the both of you. It’s called developmental interaction, which is a primary way that humans learn, which is by doing. Love you both.
Tom: And by mimicking also.
Abby: Mimicking.
Brenda: You bet.
Tom: And we don’t change people’s minds by explaining climate change to them.
Abby: No, no.
Tom: There was an educator I got to interview once named David Sobel, who wrote a book called Beyond Ecophobia, and he said that all their research shows that teaching kids about environmentalism isn’t the thing that causes them to become environmentalists when they grow up. The thing that hooks them and creates environmentalists is the amount of time the kids got to spend in an unstructured way in natural settings.
In other words, they had experiences that meant something to them, and because they valued those intuitive and experiential events, they treasured them, they wanted to preserve them. And that became a driving force in their adult lives. And, you know, I think back to my childhood, and that’s exactly what happened to me. So anyway, yeah, I’m as, I’m glad you’re excited by this because that’s the thing that makes me feel like I’m finally doing a sustainability exhibit that targets the general public in a way that’s going to, that might actually do a lot of good.
Abby: Yea.
Brenda: I’ll bet it will.
Abby: Have an impact and make changes.
Brenda: Absolutely amazing.
Abby: Tom, this is so enlightening in so many ways that I didn’t anticipate. I just want to thank you so much for joining us today and this challenging, thoughtful conversation.
Tom: Well, thanks to both of you. It’s really an honor to be part of this with you folks.
Brenda: I also have to say our sponsor, Paul Orselli Workshop, Paul just bought his first all-electric vehicle, and I feel like that is a necessary plug into this conversation.
Abby: It very much is. Congratulations, Paul. Thanks to everyone who tuned in today. If you love what you heard, subscribe for more episodes of Matters of Experience wherever you listen to podcasts. Make sure to leave a rating and a review and share with a friend. We’ll see you next time.
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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.
Sustainable Materials: With Both Eyes Open | The Use Less Group
[Music]
Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience, a podcast produced by Lorem Ipsum, an experience design company headquartered in New York City. Our podcast explores the creativity, innovation and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. If you’re new, a hearty welcome to you and to our regular listeners, thank you for tuning in and supporting our conversation. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: I’m Brenda Cowan. Hello, everyone.
Abby: Before we begin, we just want to share a note from today’s show sponsor, POW!
Sponsor: This is Paul Orselli, Chief Instigator at POW! (Paul Orselli Workshop), and we’re delighted to sponsor this episode of the podcast. Please check out our website at www.Orselli.net for more information about our work, as well as free resources and articles. Thanks.
Abby: And now it’s my pleasure to welcome Tom Bowman to the show.
Tom: It’s my pleasure to join you.
Abby: Tom, welcome. You’re the founder of Bowman Change, Inc., a consultancy dedicated to helping organizations reap the benefits of working with purpose, making social and environmental transformation central to their missions. Tom regularly provides counsel to federal agencies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Science Foundation, NASA and the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
Going way back to the late 1980s, Tom founded Bowman Design Group, an award-winning exhibit design and management firm that works with leaders of Fortune 1000 corporations, startups, science museums and aquariums. He is the author of three books, which we have links to on our site, and I urge everyone to check them out. Tom’s appeared on Marketplace, CNN, in The New York Times, Yale Environment 360, and now finally here on Matters of Experience. Tom, a huge welcome to the show.
Tom: It’s finally good to step up to something really good.
Brenda: Oh, my goodness.
Tom: Thanks for having me.
Brenda: So, Tom, you and I first met, it was around about 2014 and this was through our engagement with Exhibit Designers and Producers Association and Exhibitor Media Group. And you were talking with the exhibits industry about things such as the alarming amount of waste and the damage being caused and exhibit practices and how we can make a sea change, how we can turn towards becoming leaders, how we can turn towards becoming advocates in addressing climate change. Are there changes that you have seen in the exhibits industry?
Tom: Let’s take one step back first and talk about changes that are happening in our society more broadly. The majority, now, of Americans are pretty concerned about the changing climate and changing environmental conditions that we’re living with. You know, the intensity of storms and drought and flood and all the expensive catastrophes and tragedies that are happening.
There is a shift also in corporate boardrooms. It’s no longer considered acceptable to be a climate denier in the C-suite. The challenge, though, is to see how that trickles down to an industry like the events, exhibits and experience industry, because we exist well below the level of the C-suite for the most part. It’s a very, very diffused industry. It’s made up primarily of small companies that are independently owned.
And if you own a small company on the production side, you know, design, fabrication, and show services and so forth, margins are small and doing things in ways that are reliable and routine and that are making clients happy is really a powerful driving force as it needs to be. And so, introducing new criteria like let’s reduce waste, let’s reuse properties longer, let’s shift to Energy Star rated electronic and electrical equipment as often as we can, these moves feel like extra burdens, and so I’ve spoken with a couple of the other sort of thought leaders in this space who are pioneers in greening their companies and they say that they’re struggling now that they have established this to keep their younger employees engaged with these issues. You know, the, the first wave was kind of the easy part.
And now making it a standard part of the culture is the challenge they’re facing. Most of the people on the client side in this industry, which would be exhibit managers, event managers, meeting managers, tend not to have the same level of authority as directors and vice presidents do in their companies. Now, obviously, there’s a wide range, you know, if you’re in a bigger company, you might be an exhibit manager.
If you’re a smaller company, you might be a vice president or even the owner. So, across that range, in large companies, by and large, the drive to make sustainability a priority in the events industry is not terribly strong. There is a sort of a generally much more welcoming attitude toward green proposals from exhibit houses and, designers and producers. I don’t yet see that it’s become the kind of trend that is driving the industry, though.
Abby: Well, I actually wanted to back up before we sort of jump into the industry and focus on, you know, when we all look back, there’s always been climate change. I mean, we’ve gone from one ice age to the other ice age, and the difference now is the speed of it, right? It’s happening so quickly.
If we take a bigger, even larger view, you know, mankind, I mean, our modern civilization has only been here for about 12,000 years, 11,700 years. Why do we think we’re going to be here for another 11,000? We’ve only been here for a blip. What if climate change caused by us is just part of Earth’s natural progression? It won’t accommodate how we like to live on it, but the Earth will be here in another 4 billion years.
Tom: That’s a really good question, Abigail because that 12,000 years or so that human civilization has existed corresponds to an unusually stable climate period. So, in the short term, the rapid change in climate that’s being caused by all the greenhouse gasses that we’ve been adding to the atmosphere for the last 250 years or so are changing the conditions in which all of human civilization has been established and created.
And it means that the places that we’re living and the places we’re growing food might not all be particularly hospitable to people in the very near term. You know, we’re seeing more floods, more hurricanes, more drought in the West, all of the wildfires in Canada. These are circumstances that are not good for us.
There’s another less well known and really profound change that’s happening. And that is, scientists say that we have entered into the sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s history. Well, in mass extinction events, you lose something like 90% of species. And so, biodiversity is dramatically reduced and these periods of reduced biodiversity can last a million years or so. And that’s happening now, and it’s being driven largely by environmental change caused by civilization.
We’re compartmentalizing ecosystems, so that species don’t have the freedom to move over large areas the way they’re used to. We’re literally killing off species. And so, in the long run, yes, Earth will be here. Life will be here. Whether it’s good for humans or not is an open question. And it’s a, you know, scientists call it a grand experiment. And it’s up to us collectively as a species to decide how much this is going to change.
Brenda: So let’s talk more about that, the element of human psychology within all of this. I was really taken in your book, What If Solving Climate Change Is Simple?, what a grand thought that is, you talk about how the population has the opportunity to shift the status quo, despite our tendency to not want to. And I’m wondering, are you seeing through the work and the engagement that you have, are you seeing this kind of necessary psychological shift that will enable us to actually address these realities? Or are we just stuck in the why bother?
Tom: No, I don’t think we are stuck in the why bother. I really think society has moved beyond that point. One of the things that I’ve talked about for a long time is that there is a very powerful narrative about all the innovations that are taking place across our economies that are making a tremendous difference, and we don’t hear about them as if they’re a coherent story.
We hear about little fragments from time to time. But, there are innovations taking place in battery technology. California, which has the fifth or fourth largest economy in the world all by itself, is decarbonizing its economy and is really sort of driving economically the push toward electrification of transportation and things like that and the decarbonization of our electricity supply through renewable energy.
There are all kinds of people working in all sorts of different processes. You know, there are people who, executives who left Tesla to form a company that recycles batteries, all of the material in batteries from everything from computers to phones to cars. And there are changes in agriculture that are happening that are about sort of rejuvenating the soils, using less water and all of that.
And so there is a groundswell of change occurring. A lot of these changes are going to come to us through businesses, through government, through governance, and we’re going to adapt to them. And it’s not necessary for everybody to get on board with a feeling that environmental action should be their top priority, because for many people, it will just become that without, without their having to really do too much about it.
Brenda: Again, in your book, you talk about Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, and you liken the hero’s journey narrative to how it is that we are experiencing and looking at climate change today on an individual level. Tom, tell us about your own hero’s journey. Let’s, let’s focus on you for a second. When did this path become clear to you? Where did this all begin?
Tom: So, I first really learned about what’s happening in climate back in 2003 and 2004, when my design firm, Bowman Design Group, created a museum for the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. And that meant that our climate exhibit was informed by a steering committee of some of the most eminent climate scientists in the world. That’s who my tutors were.
And I remember leaving that project feeling worried about what the future holds. And I asked one of the scientists, What do you think about this, this is 2003 and 2004, and he said, well, you know, humans aren’t stupid. Thank goodness we have time to work this out. Well, it turns out that just five years later, 2000, well, less than that, 2007, we were invited to do a second exhibit on climate change for Scripps Institution of Oceanography, which has a public aquarium.
And so, there was another steering committee of some of the world’s most eminent climate researchers. And the attitude among the researchers had utterly changed. I mean, instead of this feeling like that we have time to work this out, what they had seen is because of the economic expansion and industrialization of China, carbon emissions were climbing at a rate that exceeded what they had forecast as the worst possible case.
And I was sitting in a meeting and I mentioned just kind of casually that the folks at the National Academy had told me to pay attention to the ocean because the ocean can hold so much heat before ocean temperatures start to rise that once temperatures do begin to rise, we’ll be committed to a changing climate, a different climate for 500 to 1000 years.
And she just blithely said, oh, well, we’re part of this project that has robotic floats all over the world, and we’ve already measured warming in every ocean basin in the world to a depth of a thousand meters. Just, just imagine that, three-quarters of the world’s surface covered 3000 feet deep in water has warmed up already.
And I write about this in the book, you know, the, the term epiphany is usually used in a religious context, but the definition is, it’s a sudden intuitive insight into the reality of something. And it applied in that moment because in a heartbeat, everything I had ever known about the potential dangers and impacts of climate change just came home to roost all at once.
Brenda: Talk about a call to action.
Tom: Yeah, I drove home from that meeting thinking, can I put this toothpaste back in the tube and go back to life the way I knew it 2 hours ago. And, of course, the answer was no. And so, I began experimenting with my company to see if we could cut our emissions., and it turns out you can, and it’s easy.
I mean, it didn’t seem easy as I did it. But once I figured it out and had it measured, it’s remarkably simple. I became, as you mentioned, the EDPA’s sustainability chair. I started writing a column for Exhibitor Magazine, that I wrote for eight years. I ended up writing books, and I also began working with social scientists and scientists and economists and others to, because I looked around me and I didn’t know anyone else who worked in the communication business, who seemed to have as much sort of background in, in what the climate story was than I did.
And so, I went searching for people who did. And I sort of, I started Bowman Change because I needed a vehicle to do work that didn’t involve running a design agency.
Abby: So, Tom, what are some of the initial things you mentioned you went back to, and you did some really simple things to cut emissions. For people listening who are part of smaller companies or own companies or part of bigger companies, just so they can have something to like a next step, just real low hanging fruit. What can people do and think about?
Tom: I like to think about it as staging. What are the things I can do this week versus the things that are going to take me a quarter versus the things that are going to take me a year. And so, you look at the things you can control. Can you change your lighting? Every light in the world should be an LED now.
Plug everything in your company into power strips that you can shut off, or get the smart kind that shut off automatically if the thing’s not in use, because anything that has a chip in it is using electricity when the power is turned off. And in the average household, that can be 10% of your electricity bill, believe it or not. They call it vampire power.
The next big thing to do is look at what you’re driving. Often, the biggest percentage of a company’s emissions come from transportation. Either the company owns vehicles or, you know, you’re paying your employees for the mileage for using their personal vehicles, which of course, are beyond your control. But anything that you own, consider retiring it early if it’s not a high mileage, high MPG, really high MPG vehicle or an electric vehicle.
And I think we’re at the point now where electric vehicles are becoming commonplace enough. And we’ve learned that the cost of ownership is as low as a pretty low-cost gasoline-powered car, if you factor in that you don’t need maintenance, and electricity costs a lot less than gasoline. Those are kind of the, the easiest steps to think about.
And I would start there. And of course, now we live in a world where we can conduct an interview clear across the United States over an electronic platform, like we’re doing right now, right? And so that means all of that travel, all that air travel, all that driving, just got eliminated from my business’s carbon emissions. Those things are so simple to do. And, you know, we did those kinds of things, and we reduced our emissions by two-thirds, literally two-thirds, in a little over a year.
Abby: Just to add one thing, just because it’s top of mind on a project we’re working on; I do want to make it clear that advocating for just not being in person and the mental health things that happen when we all don’t get together, because I’m a big believer in also taking care of people and their mental health, and when you work together and you see each other. So, you know, living in a city, I get to walk around everywhere, take public transport. So, I just don’t, I just want to mention that, you know, when people are thinking about cutting emissions, not seeing each other sometimes has other ramifications.
Tom: Well said.
Abby: Now, talking a little bit more about the sustainability and the exhibits you’ve been working on over the years, it was interesting at the 50th anniversary SEGD conference this year in D.C. I’ll call them the next generation of designers, you know, have the stage and they’re talking about hardware that they’ve been using in their companies and looking at sustainability. And there was a lot of indignation from the older generation, let’s say, I’ll maybe pop you in that, the more established generation.
Tom: Yeah, I’m one of those.
Abby: Who were like, you know, no, we know this. Like, we get this. This is what we’ve been doing, as if it was something potentially new, because, you know, as the next generation come up, they find they discover things for the first time. So, it’s just part of maturing as a designer or it has been until now, when I know Brenda at university, sustainability is the hot topic that everybody now brings into their practice, and it’s very difficult. I don’t also want to make this sound like it’s an easy thing to do because it’s not, especially when, you know, we’re dealing with hardware as well, and like, how does that look? Do you feel like sustainability is just one of the very important key points in for all design now and moving forward?
Tom: Oh, absolutely. I mean, I just don’t think that the next generation of consumers is going to tolerate ignorance of sustainability or a lack of attention to sustainability. And it’s also becoming better equated with cost savings in business. We had a client that went to a lot of trade shows a year, sometimes 40 trade shows a year, and they came to us one year and said we can’t afford to build any new exhibit properties, or at least not any brand-new exhibits, you know, because they were on the, the five-year cycle, the depreciation cycle like everybody else.
You build a new exhibit and once depreciation goes to zero, you throw it away and build a new one and by then you’re sick and tired of it anyway. And so, what we decided to do was reconfigure the properties they had and recolor them. And we built odds and ends, little panels to fill in and new reception counter here and a new theater screen there.
But we discovered that those properties, those wall panels, and basic exhibit furniture remained viable and looked good, not for five years, but for 15 years before they wore out. And it turns out that this fits perfectly with a strategy that I discovered in a book called Sustainable Materials: With Both Eyes Open, and it’s a very simple rule of thumb: if something you own doesn’t use energy, use that thing for as long as you possibly can.
That’s the most environmentally efficient thing you can do with it, right, so you don’t have to make a new one. If it does use energy, but energy efficiency isn’t improving at all, use it for as long as you can because it’s still better to use a thing rather than pour energy into making a new thing. But if it uses energy and energy efficiency is improving over time, replace it more quickly because the energy savings from a more efficient product is going to exceed the energy spent creating that product.
So, TVs, refrigerators, computers, all lighting, all these systems that we use to animate our exhibit experiences fall into that latter category, but the basic properties fall into the first category. So, this created for us, you know, we got to experience the fact that this new system of preserving properties longer and reconfiguring it worked for our client. They had a, one of the fellow exhibitors came up to then and said, how do you guys afford so many new exhibits?
And she said, we don’t come look at all the show stickers on the backs of these panels, you know, and there’d be 30 or 40 stickers on a panel. And it worked for the exhibit fabricator because, the exhibit house, because they were spending time redoing the labor part, they just weren’t replacing material part of the projects. And it worked for the creative firm, that was us, because we were reinventing things all the time, and the environmental footprint was greatly decreased.
Brenda: Tom, it sounds like you’re very optimistic about upcoming decision-makers and leaders. Am I, am I gauging this correctly? Because…
Tom: Yeah, I am.
Brenda: You know, I also get, between my students and also, you know, my daughter who’s 25 and her peers. You know, there’s also a lot of folks who are just feeling defeated and who are too young to be feeling defeated. So is your take that overall, in your experience, that the folks who will be our decision makers that they are going to be feeling the confidence and the ability to, even in some cases, rebound and continue to make the necessary change with the right sort of psychology driving them.
Tom: Yes, there are people who rise to leadership positions. Not everybody does. Not everybody wants to, but the people who do, I mean, I think it’s fair to say that just about everybody in the generations you’re talking about are keenly aware that the impacts on their generations and their kids’ generations are going to be far worse than on my generation and your generation.
So, you hear all the time in surveys and in the news that younger people are really motivated and frustrated with, you know, the pace of governmental change and societal change, which is leaving them in the lurch. So, the people who rise to leadership positions, who have that mentality, are going to be much more aggressively focused on this than the prior generations were.
When I did the Caution Museum in Washington, D.C., everybody thought that it would take 30 or 40 years for power plants to switch from coal to natural gas. Natural gas has a lower carbon footprint than coal by a pretty dramatic amount, at least it was believed at the time. And everybody thought that the investment in, you know, natural gas cost twice as much as coal and these were long-lived investments, so it would be 30 years before anybody changed so we were stuck with coal for 30 years.
And then fracking happened and the price of gas plummeted to below that of coal. And in a matter of a few years, everybody switched, you know, and the thing that we can never predict is state change like that. Big changes like that, because a technology or a market factor or a consumer factor just changes the game in, overnight, in ways that we didn’t expect.
And so, I’m hopeful that decision makers, the young decision makers, are going to have opportunities that our generation didn’t have. The question is, and it’s absolutely fair on this question is how much change will we cause while we’re also in the process of cleaning things up, how bad are we going to let it get? And nobody knows the answer to that question.
Abby: Yeah.
Brenda: Let’s talk about passion. Let’s talk about what it is that you currently in your work feel passionate about. When you start your workday, every day, what is something that is really either exciting you or just really telling you, yes, yes, this is all possible?
Tom: There are a couple of things. One is very direct and one’s very indirect. I’ll tell you the direct one first. I’m in the process of designing a sustainability education center for a water and power utility company, and their primary target audience is fourth-graders on field trips, and they have challenged us to do something I’ve always wanted to do but never had a client that would do it.
And that is, can we get every insight across without having to put a single word on a wall, so that the words we have to put on the wall are there because they really need to be? But the insights are intuitive and experiential.
Abby: Can we just pause for a minute, Tom?
Brenda: We’re jumping up and down.
Abby: This sounds like the perfect client. How did you find them, how they know the visitors so well? Wow. You don’t have to spend weeks and months getting on the same page with who’s coming and how they learn and understand and play? Wow.
Tom: No, we had to spend weeks coming to understand they really meant it.
Abby: Okay.
Brenda: Yeah, right, seriously.
Tom: Right? Because every other sustainability client I’ve had has been driven by engineers and scientists and, you know, bless their hearts, scientists want you to be excited about everything that excites them. And so, they want to tell you a lot of information that bogs you down, and you can’t even see the forest for the trees anymore. And so encouraging museums and aquariums and others, utility companies sometimes, to simplify in an accurate way that gives somebody an insight that then they can do something with rather than barraging them with facts and data is hard work, and it’s always felt like a compromise. I mean, we’ve been through the entire three rounds of conceptual design iteration that are, you know, exhibits that are really thought through and detailed and we haven’t put a single piece of text on any drawing.
Abby: Fantastic.
Brenda: Wow.
Abby: Fantastic. I want to, I want to go, I want to see this, it sounds incredible.
Tom: I do, too. I mean, it looks like this could be a fun experience because by interacting with something, you’re getting the message.
Abby: Yes.
Tom: And then there’ll be some words on a screen or something that give you some context for it or tell you a factoid about it or something. But you’re going to get it. You’re going to get that it takes a lot of effort to generate electricity. You’re going to get that water is a precious resource. You’re going to get all these things intuitively. That’s pretty cool, right?
Abby: It’s really, really cool. And also, I do just want to add, seeing as you mentioned, and we’re very focused at Lorem Ipsum on media, you don’t have to necessarily have text in the media to help tell these stories.
Brenda: I love hearing this from the both of you. It’s called developmental interaction, which is a primary way that humans learn, which is by doing. Love you both.
Tom: And by mimicking also.
Abby: Mimicking.
Brenda: You bet.
Tom: And we don’t change people’s minds by explaining climate change to them.
Abby: No, no.
Tom: There was an educator I got to interview once named David Sobel, who wrote a book called Beyond Ecophobia, and he said that all their research shows that teaching kids about environmentalism isn’t the thing that causes them to become environmentalists when they grow up. The thing that hooks them and creates environmentalists is the amount of time the kids got to spend in an unstructured way in natural settings.
In other words, they had experiences that meant something to them, and because they valued those intuitive and experiential events, they treasured them, they wanted to preserve them. And that became a driving force in their adult lives. And, you know, I think back to my childhood, and that’s exactly what happened to me. So anyway, yeah, I’m as, I’m glad you’re excited by this because that’s the thing that makes me feel like I’m finally doing a sustainability exhibit that targets the general public in a way that’s going to, that might actually do a lot of good.
Abby: Yea.
Brenda: I’ll bet it will.
Abby: Have an impact and make changes.
Brenda: Absolutely amazing.
Abby: Tom, this is so enlightening in so many ways that I didn’t anticipate. I just want to thank you so much for joining us today and this challenging, thoughtful conversation.
Tom: Well, thanks to both of you. It’s really an honor to be part of this with you folks.
Brenda: I also have to say our sponsor, Paul Orselli Workshop, Paul just bought his first all-electric vehicle, and I feel like that is a necessary plug into this conversation.
Abby: It very much is. Congratulations, Paul. Thanks to everyone who tuned in today. If you love what you heard, subscribe for more episodes of Matters of Experience wherever you listen to podcasts. Make sure to leave a rating and a review and share with a friend. We’ll see you next time.
[Music]
Producer: Matters of Experience is produced by Lorem Ipsum Corp and recorded at Hangar Studios. Tune in next time for more fun discussions about experience design.
The Climate Crisis is Simple with Tom Bowman
Thinking in Moments with Victor Torregroza
[Music]
Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience, a podcast produced by Lorem Ipsum, an experience design company headquartered in New York City. Our podcast explores the creativity, innovation and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. If you’re new, a hearty welcome to you and to our regular listeners, thank you for tuning in and supporting our conversation. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: Hello, everyone. I’m Brenda Cowan.
Abby: Before we begin, we just want to share a note from today’s show sponsor, POW!
Sponsor: This is Paul Orselli, Chief Instigator at POW! (Paul Orselli Workshop), and we’re delighted to sponsor this episode of the podcast. Please check out our website at www.Orselli.net for more information about our work as well as free resources and articles. Thanks.
Abby: Today we’re talking with Victor Torregroza. Victor is an experiential events program manager for Global Events at Intel Corp. He is a passionate pioneer of experiential marketing, and his mantra, “we eat with our eyes,” is one of my personal favorites and carries more weight as we’re reentering the world with expectations for more meaningful engagements. Hello, Victor. Welcome to the show.
Victor: Estoy tan honrado y emocionado estar aquí. I’m so excited to be here. So, thank you so much for having me.
Abby: So, Intel, Victor is a very recognizable brand. When I think about it, I think…
Brenda: Bum-bum-bum-bum.
Abby: And if that doesn’t immediately transform you to Intel, the commercial, then you really need to go and check out some of the old Intel commercials. But the product itself is really hard to market, it’s sort of invisible, what or how it does what it does to a, to a lot of us is hard to understand. I mean, for me, it’s super-duper exciting and really sci fi, but it’s still hard to quantify. So, Victor, how do you position yourselves for the end consumer?
Victor: So, what’s fascinating about Intel is we’re in the machines, we’re in the cloud. We are truly, absolutely invisible. But the technology is fascinating, and we touch it every single day. So, we bring it to life in ways that are unexpected, that make people want to care and make people want to learn more. So, technology, while it’s a part of our lives, maybe too much now, the challenge that I love about working at Intel is how do you bring that forward and how do you make people, wow, I never thought of that. Tell me more. Because it is truly fascinating.
When you think about silicon, we start with a grain of sand. I may be oversimplifying it a bit, but it truly starts from that level of nature and then through American ingenuity and what humanity is doing with technology, it’s brought out into the world in various parts of it. The cloud, when you’re shopping, in your pocket, on your laptop, it’s everywhere. and it’s truly it’s truly fascinating. And I’m a creative whirling dervish by nature. I’m not a technical genius, but it’s the challenge that keeps me totally excited about working at Intel as an experience designer.
Brenda: Victor, you describe the lens through which you work as thinking in moments. Can you tell us what you mean by that?
Victor: What I’ve come to appreciate about moments and how we design those experiences, everything is these moments that we want to capture. So, whether that moment is an audio experience or something that you smell or something that you touch, that’s the lens. It’s moments of sensory excitement, information, and delight.
Because it is how we engage with the world now. We’re all distracted. We have so many things going on. The distraction is very, very bad in my society, being raised as a polite Catholic, Spanish, Italian, in a stubborn family. But those moments, short informational nuggets of knowledge, interaction, and delight.
Abby: So, when I make experiences, I often focus on what emotion we’re trying to convey as well as the story. When we chatted, you mentioned you seek to spark purposeful joy – and I love that you use that word – joy in the experiences that you create. Can you give an example of what that spark of joy looks like?
Victor: Yes. So, there was this one moment at an enormous industry show in Las Vegas. So here we are. We’re getting ready to put on our show. Our stage is full. Maybe about 100 people in the audience waiting for that moment. And all of a sudden, boom, the lights go out. We’re in complete darkness, in a convention center in Las Vegas, the other city of lights.
So, our violinist was getting to perform, and she said, what do I do? And we said, Anna, the stage is full, you’ve got to go out and perform. People instantly started to light her up with their illuminated screens and she started to perform, and it was just, here we are, strangers in the dark at a trade show in Las Vegas, and we put out a tweet, which still is one of my most favorite. “The human spirit never loses its power.”
And people remember that tweet. They remember that moment as something that could have been terrifying. But it all worked out well, truly joyful. And it’s hard in our world today. It’s hard to convey that, yeah, as part of this business show, we want to have joyous moments because people will look at me and say, you’re insane.
Brenda: I have to ask you, why wouldn’t you then replicate with intentionality this kind of experience? I mean, literally unplugging and sort of doing something surprising, like just because of how successful the human element was, as you said, that sort of came through. Have you ever thought of, jeeze, you know, I wonder if we could replicate this in some way.
Victor: We have. And, you know, and that’s actually quite fascinating. That’s another part of our experience out in the world, now that we’re venturing out after this period of being hobbits in our homes, it’s all about having moments of joy and unplugging. So, if you’ve ever walked out, out in New York, people are, they’re not there. They have their earbuds in or their headphones on. They’re plugged into their cells. We’re not plugged in to the rest of the world.
We are taking a couple of approaches at shows, and it’s all about simplifying that experience so we can truly have that acoustic, interactive, truly sensory experience looking into each other’s eyes, listening, and having conversations. Things that we took for granted before COVID, now, simple things like that – listening, shaking hands, interacting, networking, hearing music – all these things are now joyful moments that I think people that are coming to events, libraries, museums, and experiences appreciate much, much more than ever.
Abby: I always think of it as like not being present. You know, if you’re in your device and you’re in the world of wherever your device is taking you, you’re not here with, in this case, another person. But it’s incredibly difficult, I mean, it sounds like, Victor, it took a blackout, for want of a better word, a temporary blackout in Vegas to actually make everybody go, oh, my gosh, what are we doing and how can we have a communal event? Because we all came for something. I think there’s that communal mindset of we’re all here to see and listen. And I think that those feelings and emotions are what tie us together, they’re the human connection that I would imagine in these moments that you’re trying to create, replicate, make, that’s integral, is bringing people together. Because I would imagine when you’re creating your events, you don’t want people to be so immersed in the technology that they’re not having this connection with one another, and that, that’s an interesting challenge for someone. That must be, sounds like a really tough job.
Victor: You know, as experience designers all of us here, we’re all here for the same purpose. We’re in the business of connecting people to our stories, to our brands, our history, all our cultures, and how can we enable and enrich that human connection. And it is much more challenging now because of these hard glass illuminated devices that we all have.
So, what I’m finding now, as I’m working on several big events, which I’m so excited about, but I’m taking the preschool, kindergarten, everything we’re learned as kids approach, which is simplifying and peeling back that onion of complexity and distraction and going back to simpler, more pure forms of interaction. Simple is hard, but through simplicity, we can have, I believe, better engagement, higher quality engagement. And people will remember that.
Brenda: You’re making me think about, well, so many things and one of the main things is, is that I tell my students right at the very beginning of their degree program that if we do this right, they’re going to end up being able to think like a four year old and all of the incredible curiosity and inquisitiveness and wonder that comes at that age and at that time in our lives.
And it’s very possible to be able to really reignite and reconnect, and through good experience design. You’re also reminding me of a story that I probably bore the socks off of my students with about when my daughter was actually just about that age. And I think we spent a good 45 minutes on a sidewalk looking at a crushed soda can because she just couldn’t move on from being utterly fascinated by this object.
And I was mortified at first, and I just kept trying to move her along. And then I stopped, and I realized in this moment that my daughter was showing me one of the greatest things about being human, which is utter fascination at something that, you know, is ordinary and is every day, and yet is also quite compelling when you look at it in a certain lens. So, thank you for bringing that memory back to my mind.
Victor: I love that. And I just want to touch on that moment that you shared with your daughter and the soda can. So, for the viewers who are listening to this, I am looking at a beautiful hummingbird in the California sunshine at the feeder that’s just through the window. So, I just wanted to share that little moment of wonder.
Brenda: Oh. That’s lovely.
Victor: Yes. So, it’s time for all of us as experience designers, I challenge you, I urge you. Create those moments where we can participate with each other and get back to those states of wonder that we all enjoyed as four-year-olds, as children. That is the aspiration. So, I love that you’re teaching that to your students, Brenda. I think that’s something all of us as experience designers can start to do. I’m starting to do it, and it took me many decades, but we all learned it. We have the tools. It’s time to just take those steps back to wonder, simplicity, and awe. And we don’t have to clutter it with, with collateral and gobbledygook.
Abby: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more, Victor. So, telling a brand story in the form of a museum is very popular for the larger brands. I think about Nike has a really, really nice, fun, small museum over there, and there’s a recreation of a car full of old sneakers, I know Phil Knight used to sell out the back of. So, you have a museum on your physical site at Intel, right?
Victor: We do.
Abby: Yeah. Tell us about that experience. What’s it like?
Victor: So, Intel was founded in 1968. We like to say that we put the silicon in Silicon Valley, but there’s this enormous print with some of our founders and the employees, and they’ve got the, you know, the giant horn-rimmed glasses, the greased hair parted on the side. It’s just this moment in time in the sixties that, to me, is just so beautiful. It’s just a blown-up photo. But you see the joy of the founders at that time founding this company that I’m so proud to work for. That’s one part of it.
The other part that I really love, they have a classroom for kids to come in and they get hands on learning and experiences on technology, on STEM. So that’s like this little beehive in the museum for students to come in, it’s free and it’s staffed by our employees. It’s a lot of fun and they have other moments throughout the museum, but like any museum, always time for an upgrade. But there are these beautiful, memorable jewels in the museum. Yeah, you can see them online, but nothing beats seeing it in person.
Brenda: I love the impulse and the intention that goes into a brand wanting to tell its story, wanting to share itself. And it sounds, because you have such a diversity of experiences that are available, and especially for kids, it sounds like at your museum, it sounds like you’re doing a really remarkable job of tapping into some of the underpinnings of the meaningfulness of this community that you’re building.
Victor: It is. And you know what’s interesting, like I went into the office this morning, I went out into this plaza that we have. It’s a beautiful courtyard in the building, and we just installed this beautiful, we call it a spark, it’s this giant cube with the logo. But as I was going out this morning, hopefully I didn’t end up in somebody’s photo, but there were people just taking pictures right there in the courtyard. It’s a nice public space, but it was just a beautiful experience, people coming back out into the world and they were just taking their photo on our campus, which is just – that’s nice. And they were probably coming to the museum to learn about technology.
Abby: So that’s actually a fantastic segue to my next question, which is about the importance of physical design. So, is sensory, physical, sensory design important in your work? Can you just tell us a little bit about that?
Victor: So, using the senses as part of design, to me is really important. I think more than ever, with all the distractions that we have, another responsibility we have as experience designers is to not annoy, but to inspire people to engage with us. And we have all of those sensory channels to do so. And I think they’re under tapped. I always think that audio pieces are really, really important. Music is always a big part of that. But there are ways, I think, that the possibilities are endless to touch the senses and sensory, it means taking off those earbuds and truly participating in the part of the event that you’re creating.
Brenda: So, let’s expand on multisensory and let’s talk about emotion. How do you plan for emotional experience in immersive design? Can you tell us a little something about your process?
Victor: Yes. No matter how large or small it is, it starts with the who. Who are the folks that you want to engage with? The why. Why is this important to them and why should they care? And then there’s the how. So, for me, it’s making sure that I’m delivering on the business objectives for the program. And once that piece of the cake is done, then it’s time to have a little fun, because people love fun environments. No matter what your title – CEO, CFO, engineer, developer – who doesn’t want a little bit of joy and fun in their lives. Most of the time, for the programs that we’re working on, because we have neighbors in that exhibit hall, it will usually come down to the eyes and the ears and the hands – to see something beautiful, to hear something absolutely amazing, besides our bum-bum-bum-bum. And to touch a piece of technology that, wow, I had no idea.
We were at the World Economic Forum a few years ago and we had a showcase. I called it, myself, The Crown Jewels. But these are the wafers. These are the technology that Intel makes that goes into the cloud, into the laptop, into the enterprises. And these are the unseen ingredients across the technology ecosystem. When people see it and you put it in their hands, they are like the crown jewels because they’re sparkly, they’re beautiful. And we don’t think of it that often, right? Because that’s what we do and that’s what we make. But we have noticed that when we do share it, it’s like, wow, I had no idea. So, pure joy, wonder, absolute amazement, blown away.
Abby: So, when you are working with your team and you’re aspiring to create these amazingly fun, joyous, simple moments, it sounds really easy, but as you mentioned, it’s incredibly difficult. And while your team are aspiring to make something phenomenal, there must be a lot of mistakes along the way. So how do you guide them? Inspire them? It’s not like they, you know, hit it out the park every time right away. So, how do you deal with some of those tougher moments, maybe where a great idea is hard to find and the team is struggling?
Victor: So, one of the best tools that I have in my toolbox as an event experience designer is the creative brief. So, I learned this about 15, 12 years ago from I will just leave her as my own version of Miranda Priestly. But, in all the best ways. So, we have all these aspirational ideas. We have budgets we have to design and build toward, and we have suppliers. So, what I learned is to crystallize the strategic foundation, the creative vision, the key takeaway, and the measurement plan, all into a, ideally a two-page brief. So, you might have a 15,000 or a 20,000 square foot exhibit that is born from a two-page informed, brilliantly concise, creative brief, because it’s the Bible for the teams to go off and build whatever needs to be built and designed.
Brenda: I have never heard anybody wax so poetic about a creative brief. That was absolutely amazing.
Victor: But Brenda, most of my colleagues in the industry. They despise it. They say, oh, I’m not going to do the creative.
Brenda: Really?
Victor: Yes. I have many colleagues who just refuse, they think, oh, it’s like a thesis. It’s like college. It’s very difficult to crystallize the ideas down. But many of them, they laugh at me.
Abby: Creative briefs take time and focus, and you have to eliminate a lot of things. And that enables you to come up with a great end product because you know what it isn’t and you know exactly what it is. But it’s a lot of work, and I think people don’t want to put the work in, to be quite frank, Victor.
Victor: And that’s why I mentioned my colleague, Miranda Priestly. She was ruthless as an editor, but she wanted to design an amazing product and she did.
Abby: Yeah. So, when we’re thinking about sort of simplicity, going back to that statement you used earlier, and eliminating that noise of extra things at events like the pamphlets and all the excess stuff that maybe you don’t need. Can you talk to us about an example of where less was more?
Victor: Oh my God, so, there’s a couple. One of the first ones, it was the Lenovo Yoga, beautiful product, and I have a Lenovo system right in front of me now. But how do you bring to life flexibility, performance, convertibility, and the idea from the agency team, born from the creative brief – oh, that was pretty good. That was not on purpose.
Brenda: That was good.
Abby: That was perfect.
Victor: Born from the creative brief, let’s bring out these acrobatic yoga artists who go on around town, drop the mat, and the performance begins with each other doing these beautiful acrobatic somersaults and yoga performances all around town, with the device incorporated in a purposeful manner.
This was successful. It went on for about a year and a half. We showed up at San Francisco at Moscone Center, did the same event, the same activation with the acrobatic yoga performers, and I look around and I said, Nicole, who is that? And she said, Victor, that’s the co-founder of Google. That’s Sergey Brin. I said, you’re kidding me. He was with us for about an hour and a half during this whole activation. The man’s a billionaire, and here he is spending time in this experience because it was fun. It had purpose and it was pretty simple.
Brenda: Wow. Absolutely amazing. And I just, I so appreciate example after example that you’re giving us of these very core human elements and how metaphorical they are as well, the connection, the communication, the community, because it is really very metaphorical for Intel, and what it does and how it works.
Abby: Yeah, I feel the same way and thinking about sustainability and the planet. How important for you is it to have sustainable design, understanding that the whole events industry, I know, has a long way to go? We’ve had a number of guests on talking about that it really needs to catch up quickly and stop wasting so much, and I know you’re talking about simple design definitely helps with sustainable design, but can you talk a little bit about sustainability and how you approach it?
Victor: Yes. Oh my God, Abigail, it’s so important and I absolutely agree, we’re behind and, you know, a temporary event, we become temporary polluters. So, for me, using recycled elements, reusing elements that we’ve used already, surfacing elements, furnishings, materials within the city or the town where the event will be. No giveaways, no tchotchkes, no tote bags, who needs all of that, and really putting the focus on essential moments. So, the giveaway, it’s the memory, it’s that emotion or that Instagram pic. That’s my focus. Recycle, reuse, source locally, create emotional mementos.
Brenda: I am so excited to ask you this next question, Victor. What is it, and is it even possible for you to be able to pick just one thing that is really inspiring you right now?
Victor: Wow. So, as you said that, another hummingbird came in – it’s nature. It’s going back outside. It’s going back out into the world. For me, it’s a universal feeling because all of us were hobbits and in our homes for such a long period of time. So, it’s stepping out. And I explained this to a colleague that it’s kind of like when we were kids. And it’s that first day of school and I’ve got my shined black shoes, my salt and pepper corduroy pants, my royal blue sweater, my two starched, ironed white shirt. It’s that feeling of the first day of school and going back out to the world. So, there’s innocence, there’s simplicity, and there’s awe and wonder and I’m working on a couple of projects where we’re just going to bring that in easily – air, water, greenery, things to complement the experience.
Brenda: Victor, you are amazing, truly.
Victor: Oh, I’m just a crazy human over here.
Brenda: Oh, my gosh. Bring it on. We are really fortunate to have been able to talk with you today.
Abby: Victor, yeah, the joy and enthusiasm, I think, hopefully for everyone listening has really come through. And yeah, I just want to go to one of your events, so let me know if they’re ever in town.
Brenda: Oh, no question.
Abby: They sound phenomenal.
Brenda: And make sure the lights go out please.
Victor: Oh, and we’ll have a violinist and I just want to say muchisimas gracias ustedes. This has been so fun. And maybe for a future one, you mentioned something with, I think it was Mike McCarthy, and I think it’s something that we all face as event designers – feeding the insatiable appetite of the content beast, a future topic.
Abby: Oh, brilliant.
Brenda: Oh, absolutely.
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.
Victor: Thanks, everyone.
Brenda: Thank you, Victor.
Abby: Bye, Victor.
Brenda: Buh–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.
[Music]
Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience, a podcast produced by Lorem Ipsum, an experience design company headquartered in New York City. Our podcast explores the creativity, innovation and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. If you’re new, a hearty welcome to you and to our regular listeners, thank you for tuning in and supporting our conversation. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: Hello, everyone. I’m Brenda Cowan.
Abby: Before we begin, we just want to share a note from today’s show sponsor, POW!
Sponsor: This is Paul Orselli, Chief Instigator at POW! (Paul Orselli Workshop), and we’re delighted to sponsor this episode of the podcast. Please check out our website at www.Orselli.net for more information about our work as well as free resources and articles. Thanks.
Abby: Today we’re talking with Victor Torregroza. Victor is an experiential events program manager for Global Events at Intel Corp. He is a passionate pioneer of experiential marketing, and his mantra, “we eat with our eyes,” is one of my personal favorites and carries more weight as we’re reentering the world with expectations for more meaningful engagements. Hello, Victor. Welcome to the show.
Victor: Estoy tan honrado y emocionado estar aquí. I’m so excited to be here. So, thank you so much for having me.
Abby: So, Intel, Victor is a very recognizable brand. When I think about it, I think…
Brenda: Bum-bum-bum-bum.
Abby: And if that doesn’t immediately transform you to Intel, the commercial, then you really need to go and check out some of the old Intel commercials. But the product itself is really hard to market, it’s sort of invisible, what or how it does what it does to a, to a lot of us is hard to understand. I mean, for me, it’s super-duper exciting and really sci fi, but it’s still hard to quantify. So, Victor, how do you position yourselves for the end consumer?
Victor: So, what’s fascinating about Intel is we’re in the machines, we’re in the cloud. We are truly, absolutely invisible. But the technology is fascinating, and we touch it every single day. So, we bring it to life in ways that are unexpected, that make people want to care and make people want to learn more. So, technology, while it’s a part of our lives, maybe too much now, the challenge that I love about working at Intel is how do you bring that forward and how do you make people, wow, I never thought of that. Tell me more. Because it is truly fascinating.
When you think about silicon, we start with a grain of sand. I may be oversimplifying it a bit, but it truly starts from that level of nature and then through American ingenuity and what humanity is doing with technology, it’s brought out into the world in various parts of it. The cloud, when you’re shopping, in your pocket, on your laptop, it’s everywhere. and it’s truly it’s truly fascinating. And I’m a creative whirling dervish by nature. I’m not a technical genius, but it’s the challenge that keeps me totally excited about working at Intel as an experience designer.
Brenda: Victor, you describe the lens through which you work as thinking in moments. Can you tell us what you mean by that?
Victor: What I’ve come to appreciate about moments and how we design those experiences, everything is these moments that we want to capture. So, whether that moment is an audio experience or something that you smell or something that you touch, that’s the lens. It’s moments of sensory excitement, information, and delight.
Because it is how we engage with the world now. We’re all distracted. We have so many things going on. The distraction is very, very bad in my society, being raised as a polite Catholic, Spanish, Italian, in a stubborn family. But those moments, short informational nuggets of knowledge, interaction, and delight.
Abby: So, when I make experiences, I often focus on what emotion we’re trying to convey as well as the story. When we chatted, you mentioned you seek to spark purposeful joy – and I love that you use that word – joy in the experiences that you create. Can you give an example of what that spark of joy looks like?
Victor: Yes. So, there was this one moment at an enormous industry show in Las Vegas. So here we are. We’re getting ready to put on our show. Our stage is full. Maybe about 100 people in the audience waiting for that moment. And all of a sudden, boom, the lights go out. We’re in complete darkness, in a convention center in Las Vegas, the other city of lights.
So, our violinist was getting to perform, and she said, what do I do? And we said, Anna, the stage is full, you’ve got to go out and perform. People instantly started to light her up with their illuminated screens and she started to perform, and it was just, here we are, strangers in the dark at a trade show in Las Vegas, and we put out a tweet, which still is one of my most favorite. “The human spirit never loses its power.”
And people remember that tweet. They remember that moment as something that could have been terrifying. But it all worked out well, truly joyful. And it’s hard in our world today. It’s hard to convey that, yeah, as part of this business show, we want to have joyous moments because people will look at me and say, you’re insane.
Brenda: I have to ask you, why wouldn’t you then replicate with intentionality this kind of experience? I mean, literally unplugging and sort of doing something surprising, like just because of how successful the human element was, as you said, that sort of came through. Have you ever thought of, jeeze, you know, I wonder if we could replicate this in some way.
Victor: We have. And, you know, and that’s actually quite fascinating. That’s another part of our experience out in the world, now that we’re venturing out after this period of being hobbits in our homes, it’s all about having moments of joy and unplugging. So, if you’ve ever walked out, out in New York, people are, they’re not there. They have their earbuds in or their headphones on. They’re plugged into their cells. We’re not plugged in to the rest of the world.
We are taking a couple of approaches at shows, and it’s all about simplifying that experience so we can truly have that acoustic, interactive, truly sensory experience looking into each other’s eyes, listening, and having conversations. Things that we took for granted before COVID, now, simple things like that – listening, shaking hands, interacting, networking, hearing music – all these things are now joyful moments that I think people that are coming to events, libraries, museums, and experiences appreciate much, much more than ever.
Abby: I always think of it as like not being present. You know, if you’re in your device and you’re in the world of wherever your device is taking you, you’re not here with, in this case, another person. But it’s incredibly difficult, I mean, it sounds like, Victor, it took a blackout, for want of a better word, a temporary blackout in Vegas to actually make everybody go, oh, my gosh, what are we doing and how can we have a communal event? Because we all came for something. I think there’s that communal mindset of we’re all here to see and listen. And I think that those feelings and emotions are what tie us together, they’re the human connection that I would imagine in these moments that you’re trying to create, replicate, make, that’s integral, is bringing people together. Because I would imagine when you’re creating your events, you don’t want people to be so immersed in the technology that they’re not having this connection with one another, and that, that’s an interesting challenge for someone. That must be, sounds like a really tough job.
Victor: You know, as experience designers all of us here, we’re all here for the same purpose. We’re in the business of connecting people to our stories, to our brands, our history, all our cultures, and how can we enable and enrich that human connection. And it is much more challenging now because of these hard glass illuminated devices that we all have.
So, what I’m finding now, as I’m working on several big events, which I’m so excited about, but I’m taking the preschool, kindergarten, everything we’re learned as kids approach, which is simplifying and peeling back that onion of complexity and distraction and going back to simpler, more pure forms of interaction. Simple is hard, but through simplicity, we can have, I believe, better engagement, higher quality engagement. And people will remember that.
Brenda: You’re making me think about, well, so many things and one of the main things is, is that I tell my students right at the very beginning of their degree program that if we do this right, they’re going to end up being able to think like a four year old and all of the incredible curiosity and inquisitiveness and wonder that comes at that age and at that time in our lives.
And it’s very possible to be able to really reignite and reconnect, and through good experience design. You’re also reminding me of a story that I probably bore the socks off of my students with about when my daughter was actually just about that age. And I think we spent a good 45 minutes on a sidewalk looking at a crushed soda can because she just couldn’t move on from being utterly fascinated by this object.
And I was mortified at first, and I just kept trying to move her along. And then I stopped, and I realized in this moment that my daughter was showing me one of the greatest things about being human, which is utter fascination at something that, you know, is ordinary and is every day, and yet is also quite compelling when you look at it in a certain lens. So, thank you for bringing that memory back to my mind.
Victor: I love that. And I just want to touch on that moment that you shared with your daughter and the soda can. So, for the viewers who are listening to this, I am looking at a beautiful hummingbird in the California sunshine at the feeder that’s just through the window. So, I just wanted to share that little moment of wonder.
Brenda: Oh. That’s lovely.
Victor: Yes. So, it’s time for all of us as experience designers, I challenge you, I urge you. Create those moments where we can participate with each other and get back to those states of wonder that we all enjoyed as four-year-olds, as children. That is the aspiration. So, I love that you’re teaching that to your students, Brenda. I think that’s something all of us as experience designers can start to do. I’m starting to do it, and it took me many decades, but we all learned it. We have the tools. It’s time to just take those steps back to wonder, simplicity, and awe. And we don’t have to clutter it with, with collateral and gobbledygook.
Abby: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more, Victor. So, telling a brand story in the form of a museum is very popular for the larger brands. I think about Nike has a really, really nice, fun, small museum over there, and there’s a recreation of a car full of old sneakers, I know Phil Knight used to sell out the back of. So, you have a museum on your physical site at Intel, right?
Victor: We do.
Abby: Yeah. Tell us about that experience. What’s it like?
Victor: So, Intel was founded in 1968. We like to say that we put the silicon in Silicon Valley, but there’s this enormous print with some of our founders and the employees, and they’ve got the, you know, the giant horn-rimmed glasses, the greased hair parted on the side. It’s just this moment in time in the sixties that, to me, is just so beautiful. It’s just a blown-up photo. But you see the joy of the founders at that time founding this company that I’m so proud to work for. That’s one part of it.
The other part that I really love, they have a classroom for kids to come in and they get hands on learning and experiences on technology, on STEM. So that’s like this little beehive in the museum for students to come in, it’s free and it’s staffed by our employees. It’s a lot of fun and they have other moments throughout the museum, but like any museum, always time for an upgrade. But there are these beautiful, memorable jewels in the museum. Yeah, you can see them online, but nothing beats seeing it in person.
Brenda: I love the impulse and the intention that goes into a brand wanting to tell its story, wanting to share itself. And it sounds, because you have such a diversity of experiences that are available, and especially for kids, it sounds like at your museum, it sounds like you’re doing a really remarkable job of tapping into some of the underpinnings of the meaningfulness of this community that you’re building.
Victor: It is. And you know what’s interesting, like I went into the office this morning, I went out into this plaza that we have. It’s a beautiful courtyard in the building, and we just installed this beautiful, we call it a spark, it’s this giant cube with the logo. But as I was going out this morning, hopefully I didn’t end up in somebody’s photo, but there were people just taking pictures right there in the courtyard. It’s a nice public space, but it was just a beautiful experience, people coming back out into the world and they were just taking their photo on our campus, which is just – that’s nice. And they were probably coming to the museum to learn about technology.
Abby: So that’s actually a fantastic segue to my next question, which is about the importance of physical design. So, is sensory, physical, sensory design important in your work? Can you just tell us a little bit about that?
Victor: So, using the senses as part of design, to me is really important. I think more than ever, with all the distractions that we have, another responsibility we have as experience designers is to not annoy, but to inspire people to engage with us. And we have all of those sensory channels to do so. And I think they’re under tapped. I always think that audio pieces are really, really important. Music is always a big part of that. But there are ways, I think, that the possibilities are endless to touch the senses and sensory, it means taking off those earbuds and truly participating in the part of the event that you’re creating.
Brenda: So, let’s expand on multisensory and let’s talk about emotion. How do you plan for emotional experience in immersive design? Can you tell us a little something about your process?
Victor: Yes. No matter how large or small it is, it starts with the who. Who are the folks that you want to engage with? The why. Why is this important to them and why should they care? And then there’s the how. So, for me, it’s making sure that I’m delivering on the business objectives for the program. And once that piece of the cake is done, then it’s time to have a little fun, because people love fun environments. No matter what your title – CEO, CFO, engineer, developer – who doesn’t want a little bit of joy and fun in their lives. Most of the time, for the programs that we’re working on, because we have neighbors in that exhibit hall, it will usually come down to the eyes and the ears and the hands – to see something beautiful, to hear something absolutely amazing, besides our bum-bum-bum-bum. And to touch a piece of technology that, wow, I had no idea.
We were at the World Economic Forum a few years ago and we had a showcase. I called it, myself, The Crown Jewels. But these are the wafers. These are the technology that Intel makes that goes into the cloud, into the laptop, into the enterprises. And these are the unseen ingredients across the technology ecosystem. When people see it and you put it in their hands, they are like the crown jewels because they’re sparkly, they’re beautiful. And we don’t think of it that often, right? Because that’s what we do and that’s what we make. But we have noticed that when we do share it, it’s like, wow, I had no idea. So, pure joy, wonder, absolute amazement, blown away.
Abby: So, when you are working with your team and you’re aspiring to create these amazingly fun, joyous, simple moments, it sounds really easy, but as you mentioned, it’s incredibly difficult. And while your team are aspiring to make something phenomenal, there must be a lot of mistakes along the way. So how do you guide them? Inspire them? It’s not like they, you know, hit it out the park every time right away. So, how do you deal with some of those tougher moments, maybe where a great idea is hard to find and the team is struggling?
Victor: So, one of the best tools that I have in my toolbox as an event experience designer is the creative brief. So, I learned this about 15, 12 years ago from I will just leave her as my own version of Miranda Priestly. But, in all the best ways. So, we have all these aspirational ideas. We have budgets we have to design and build toward, and we have suppliers. So, what I learned is to crystallize the strategic foundation, the creative vision, the key takeaway, and the measurement plan, all into a, ideally a two-page brief. So, you might have a 15,000 or a 20,000 square foot exhibit that is born from a two-page informed, brilliantly concise, creative brief, because it’s the Bible for the teams to go off and build whatever needs to be built and designed.
Brenda: I have never heard anybody wax so poetic about a creative brief. That was absolutely amazing.
Victor: But Brenda, most of my colleagues in the industry. They despise it. They say, oh, I’m not going to do the creative.
Brenda: Really?
Victor: Yes. I have many colleagues who just refuse, they think, oh, it’s like a thesis. It’s like college. It’s very difficult to crystallize the ideas down. But many of them, they laugh at me.
Abby: Creative briefs take time and focus, and you have to eliminate a lot of things. And that enables you to come up with a great end product because you know what it isn’t and you know exactly what it is. But it’s a lot of work, and I think people don’t want to put the work in, to be quite frank, Victor.
Victor: And that’s why I mentioned my colleague, Miranda Priestly. She was ruthless as an editor, but she wanted to design an amazing product and she did.
Abby: Yeah. So, when we’re thinking about sort of simplicity, going back to that statement you used earlier, and eliminating that noise of extra things at events like the pamphlets and all the excess stuff that maybe you don’t need. Can you talk to us about an example of where less was more?
Victor: Oh my God, so, there’s a couple. One of the first ones, it was the Lenovo Yoga, beautiful product, and I have a Lenovo system right in front of me now. But how do you bring to life flexibility, performance, convertibility, and the idea from the agency team, born from the creative brief – oh, that was pretty good. That was not on purpose.
Brenda: That was good.
Abby: That was perfect.
Victor: Born from the creative brief, let’s bring out these acrobatic yoga artists who go on around town, drop the mat, and the performance begins with each other doing these beautiful acrobatic somersaults and yoga performances all around town, with the device incorporated in a purposeful manner.
This was successful. It went on for about a year and a half. We showed up at San Francisco at Moscone Center, did the same event, the same activation with the acrobatic yoga performers, and I look around and I said, Nicole, who is that? And she said, Victor, that’s the co-founder of Google. That’s Sergey Brin. I said, you’re kidding me. He was with us for about an hour and a half during this whole activation. The man’s a billionaire, and here he is spending time in this experience because it was fun. It had purpose and it was pretty simple.
Brenda: Wow. Absolutely amazing. And I just, I so appreciate example after example that you’re giving us of these very core human elements and how metaphorical they are as well, the connection, the communication, the community, because it is really very metaphorical for Intel, and what it does and how it works.
Abby: Yeah, I feel the same way and thinking about sustainability and the planet. How important for you is it to have sustainable design, understanding that the whole events industry, I know, has a long way to go? We’ve had a number of guests on talking about that it really needs to catch up quickly and stop wasting so much, and I know you’re talking about simple design definitely helps with sustainable design, but can you talk a little bit about sustainability and how you approach it?
Victor: Yes. Oh my God, Abigail, it’s so important and I absolutely agree, we’re behind and, you know, a temporary event, we become temporary polluters. So, for me, using recycled elements, reusing elements that we’ve used already, surfacing elements, furnishings, materials within the city or the town where the event will be. No giveaways, no tchotchkes, no tote bags, who needs all of that, and really putting the focus on essential moments. So, the giveaway, it’s the memory, it’s that emotion or that Instagram pic. That’s my focus. Recycle, reuse, source locally, create emotional mementos.
Brenda: I am so excited to ask you this next question, Victor. What is it, and is it even possible for you to be able to pick just one thing that is really inspiring you right now?
Victor: Wow. So, as you said that, another hummingbird came in – it’s nature. It’s going back outside. It’s going back out into the world. For me, it’s a universal feeling because all of us were hobbits and in our homes for such a long period of time. So, it’s stepping out. And I explained this to a colleague that it’s kind of like when we were kids. And it’s that first day of school and I’ve got my shined black shoes, my salt and pepper corduroy pants, my royal blue sweater, my two starched, ironed white shirt. It’s that feeling of the first day of school and going back out to the world. So, there’s innocence, there’s simplicity, and there’s awe and wonder and I’m working on a couple of projects where we’re just going to bring that in easily – air, water, greenery, things to complement the experience.
Brenda: Victor, you are amazing, truly.
Victor: Oh, I’m just a crazy human over here.
Brenda: Oh, my gosh. Bring it on. We are really fortunate to have been able to talk with you today.
Abby: Victor, yeah, the joy and enthusiasm, I think, hopefully for everyone listening has really come through. And yeah, I just want to go to one of your events, so let me know if they’re ever in town.
Brenda: Oh, no question.
Abby: They sound phenomenal.
Brenda: And make sure the lights go out please.
Victor: Oh, and we’ll have a violinist and I just want to say muchisimas gracias ustedes. This has been so fun. And maybe for a future one, you mentioned something with, I think it was Mike McCarthy, and I think it’s something that we all face as event designers – feeding the insatiable appetite of the content beast, a future topic.
Abby: Oh, brilliant.
Brenda: Oh, absolutely.
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.
Victor: Thanks, everyone.
Brenda: Thank you, Victor.
Abby: Bye, Victor.
Brenda: Buh–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.
Thinking in Moments with Victor Torregroza
Event Strategy and Storytelling with Liz Nacron
In this episode of Matters of Experience, join Abby and Brenda as they explore the dynamic world of trade shows with seasoned industry expert Liz Nacron, Partner & President of Creative and Production at Live Marketing. Liz shares her wealth of knowledge and expertise in creating engaging B2B, B2C, and B2E events and discusses the importance of striking the right balance between technology and the human touch. If you’re curious about the art of creating unforgettable trade show experiences and the role of human connection in the mix, this episode is a must-listen.
Abby: Matters of Experience is a project of Lorem Ipsum, an experience design company headquartered in New York City.
[Music]
Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience, a podcast that explores the creativity, innovation and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. Welcome back, all our regular listeners. Thanks for being here with us today. And if you’re new and enjoy today’s show, please subscribe. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: Hello, this is Brenda Cowan.
Abby: Today we’re talking with the lovely Liz Nacron. She is Partner and President of Creative & Production at Live Marketing, an agency that creates highly engaging B2B and B2E events, whether in-person, virtual or hybrid. Liz has nearly 30 years of experience developing and executing live events rooted in strategic storytelling, working her way up from the ground floor to president, which I can really appreciate. She’s an active board member of the EDPA, which, for those who don’t know, is the Experiential Designers and Producers Association, where she chairs the Future Leaders Committee, serving the next generation of event professionals. Liz, welcome to our show.
Liz: Thank you very much. I’m excited to be here today.
Brenda: Liz, you were introduced to me as one of the shining stars in the events and exhibits industry, especially in the world of trade shows and what makes them great. You are especially noted for your work with the Future Leaders Committee. Describe the trade show environment from your perspective. What’s good and tell us about some of the bad also.
Liz: Well, my answer today is different than maybe what it would have been pre-COVID. Obviously, our industry has been through quite a lot, but I think at the end of the day, the trade show is still good for what the trade show has always been good for. And that is, it’s a rare opportunity where people get to come face to face to test out, learn about and experience products and solutions that brands have to offer.
The brands get an opportunity to really craft and curate the message and the story around their brand specific to that audience. It’s not just their corporate website, it’s, it’s what is this product? What does it mean to this particular target audience? And they get a chance to share that.
So that’s the good thing. I think the bad is that everyone has been through so much with COVID that they’re still very much just coming back into the face-to-face trade show event space. And so it feels like where we were before COVID, where everyone was kind of competing to have the most experiential activity or storytelling experience in their booth has kind of gone on a long pause.
And at this point people are just trying to figure out if they can even attend a trade show in a certain vertical anymore. And if they can, how can they do it but still stay within their new budget confines? So, that’s, I would say, the bad at the moment is there’s a long road ahead of us trying to get back to where we were before, but on the positive side, everyone’s craving it, and so I think it will come back. It’s just a matter of time.
Abby: So when you think about that smaller footprint, let’s say brands who continue to go to trade shows and want to invest, but at a reduced budget size, they’re looking at a much smaller square footage and when you compare it to, let’s say, a museum, which is often a large square footage, a trade show, you just don’t have much space to tell their story quite quickly. It’s sometimes difficult for a team to do. How do you navigate that conversation with your clients, Liz?
Liz: For us, we really don’t try to get our clients to do that part of the work. We’ll get on a call with them and we’ll ask them a bunch of questions, you know, everything from what are your objectives? Who’s your target audience? What is the culture of your company? What’s the tone of the story that you want to tell in your booth? What are the key messages? Do you have any product releases coming? Questions like that. We really ask them way more than we need to know. We let them talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. And then we cull it down into a five-minute story or script or experience.
We then give them something back and they go, oh my gosh, yes, that’s exactly what we were trying to say, and we would have never gotten there on our own because they’re too close to it, and they feel like they have to say it all. And so, they really rely on an agency like ours to do that, that part of the hard work for them and sort of show them the shiny thing that can come from all that, you know, valuable information that they want to convey.
Brenda: Well, it’s definitely the, the art of the craft, isn’t it? And when you define story specifically in the exhibits and events industry, are there specific elements of design or specific touchpoints that are essential to telling the story that, you know, as you’re listening to the brain dump going on, the data dump, are there specific things that you’re listening for because you know that those are going to be one of the essential or several of the essential touchpoints?
Liz: Yes. We always try to craft the story from the perspective of what are the challenges of the body that has entered your booth and sat in this seat and wants to hear what you have to offer. What are the things in their day-to-day job, life, that your brand, your product, your solution will solve for them and that’s what we’re trying to convey.
And then, the second part of that is what can they do at the end of hearing or experiencing that story to take action to help keep the momentum going and take that, you know, maybe piqued interest that we’ve created through that short story and have it lead them into a warmer conversation with a sales rep who is now being introduced to someone who just learned a little bit about how that brand’s going to help them.
Brenda: Now, this is in the museum world, in the events world, and in all of our related experiential worlds, understanding target audience is absolutely critical, and it really is like you were describing the beginning piece. How is it that you are instructing your clients to come to you with audience information? Like, how are you asking them to be able to prime you and your team?
Liz: So, that’s really where our question set typically will start is about their audience. And then we ask questions about what is that audience care-abouts? What are the things in their, you know, personal life that they typically like to do. Like we really try to dig in and understand, you know, who are these people? A lot of our clients have done persona research, and that’s really valuable too, because they’ve kind of already done some of the legwork, creating different personas and profiles, if you will, that we can then use to help us inform the story that we need to tell to those persona types.
Abby: And so, what are some of those touchpoints? So, when you think about the design that seems to be throughout all of the experiences that you craft, is it that there has to be a docent there every time? Is it that there’s an interactive? Is there something physical to take away, physical to touch? Sort of, what are some of the design touchpoints that you always try to think about and integrate into these trade show exhibitions?
Liz: First of all, what is the thing that when this prospect walks by this booth, is going to make them feel compelled to take that one step from the aisle carpet into the booth carpet. We really try to help our clients design booth experiences that have levels.
So, if it’s someone who maybe has never heard of your brand before, we want to start out with some sort of introductory experience, like, let’s set the stage about this company and this brand. Let’s give them the five-minute story and at the end of that five-minute story, they now know something they didn’t know before. And then we offer them a next step. And that next step could be, you know, do you want to participate in a demo? Great. Let me walk you over. At that point, they introduce them to a booth rep who we’re now handing over a warm lead to.
Or their next step might be, you know what? Now that I know a little bit about your company, it’s actually not a good fit. And like, thank you so much for giving me a good experience, but I’m going to keep walking down the aisle to the next trade show booth, and that’s okay too.
So, it really is, just at the core of it, that’s kind of how we, we like to design the experiences is from a distance, what do they see? What’s that experience once they get closer and then what are the activities or experience areas or storytelling activities or product demos in the booth that we can use as tools to help get that person deeper on that journey?
Brenda: So, I have to ask you, you’ve done this for so long and with so much expertise, give us an example of an experience that has lured people to the booth in just, bam, captured them.
Liz: We have a client who we help at a vet tech trade show and the vet tech audience is, is very passionate about what they do and they work really hard. So, we designed a booth experience that started with a theater area on the corner of the booth, sort of the most front facing aisle, and we created an, a schedule of content that changed all throughout the day.
We intentionally wanted to create different presentations focused on different content subject areas that would be interesting to them and ultimately invite them to come back over and over and over again. But once they came for the first time and they sat down, we put an iPad in their hands and we said, you know, from this point forward in your booth experience, you’re going to be using this iPad.
So, we started out our presentation, which was sort of an animated storytelling journey that they were following along these two animals, these two pets, a cat, and a dog. And they were making choices along the way on the iPad that helped our live presenter determine where the story was going to go. Of course, all along the way it was peppered with how this company’s products and solutions helped improve the life of this patient, which in this case was a dog or cat.
We didn’t invite them at the end of the presentation to give their iPad back and head back into the aisle. We said, your journey is only just begun. So, now take your iPad and come around to the other side of this theater booth wall, and you’re going to get to follow along in the life of this cat and dog that you just helped save.
So, they take the iPads around, and we’ve strategically placed triggers in the booth, in all the different booth areas. And we invited them to, at that point really take their own non-linear journey through the booth. And at each stop point they used the tablet to scan one of the triggers and launch a deeper dive part of the story of this cat or dog where we now really showed how that company’s product or solution made an impact on that patient.
By the end of this experience, they turned in their iPad, they answered a few questions, qualifying questions, and in exchange they were given a stuffed animal plushie version of the cat or the dog who they had helped save. And through the qualifying questions that they answered, we now knew if they were a qualified lead or not a qualified lead.
So, if someone handed us the iPad and they weren’t qualified, we handed them the plushie, we thank them, and they went on their merry way. But if they were qualified, one of our professional booth engagers strategically would say it looked like you expressed interest through your journey in X, Y, or Z. I’d like to connect you to our sales rep in this area, and they walked them over and that conversation continued.
And so, what was most amazing about this booth experience was that the average dwell time of people in this booth was 20 minutes. And for people who attend trade shows, often they’d know that’s like a really long time, especially on average for people to spend in a booth. And so, we felt like it was a huge success. The brand felt like it was a huge success, and it just provided this audience with so much information. But in just a fun, you know, storytelling way.
Abby: I think this is such a good idea because you, you got people with play, and I feel like get people playing with your product, get them enjoying your product, get them into and part of it, and then you nicely segue to the soft sell.
Liz: Yeah.
Brenda: Many, many years ago I had a student actually applying for an internship, and the student was applying to one of the larger exhibit and trade show design firms and they gave him a challenge, and the test was to take a target audience that had to go to trade shows as a part of their job, and they hated it.
They found trade shows boring. The target audience were sales reps of a very large consumer appliances company, and the student, so proud, the student knew, make it entirely about the target audience, make it entirely about the people on the floor. And the student designed a pre-show, and at-the-show, on-the-floor, and a post-show experience, that basically took these sales reps and turned them into superheroes.
And the entire design of the booth was the hero’s lair, and the whole pre-show campaign was social media, and it was all about hyping up the booth, and when they were going to meet together with the other superheroes, etc., etc.. It sounds a little corny. It was a knockout, a total knockout.
And I just keep thinking about opportunities when we get to think about the end user, when we get to think about the person on the floor or the customer at the store or whatever the case might be, the person at the museum, any opportunity for them to really feel like this story is about them. It is for them, and that it makes them feel very proud of who they are, that makes them feel like they really belong, and like the space has been customized just for them.
Liz: I do love that. And I think that, like you said, making people feel good is at the heart of it. And sometimes people at trade shows, it’s like the one time of year that they go, that they get out of the office or, or out of the clinic or out of the hospital. And so to give them a good brand experience, educate them on whatever your offerings are and make them feel good, make them feel like the hero, give them some praise and thanks is so impactful to those people.
Brenda: Do you ever find yourself in a situation where you’re having to really kind of break that down for a client that this is about, you know, the end user, that this is about the prospect and that we need to craft this experience in a way that is very welcoming and makes them feel like they’re a part of the story, that they belong?
Abby: Right, not about the product and the features of the product.
Brenda: Mm-hmm.
Liz: Yeah, it’s, it’s a challenge because they start most of them with the products and the features. And that’s important. And we need to know that. But we really have to hone in on sort of that overarching message and the what’s in it for them. And so we really, you know, kind of like I said at the beginning, we let them give us all of that, but then we sort of strong-arm them into the story we know they need to tell.
And once they hear it, you know, the first draft, they go, oh, wow, you know, you got all the product and feature stuff in there. But it’s not about that. And they see at that point, like, you know, it’s like light bulb goes off. Wow. Okay. So we can do both. We can talk about our products and its features, but we can do it with this thematic overlay or this journey that we’re taking them on or this just, you know, kind of exciting story that we’re telling. And oh yeah, the features and benefits are mixed in there too, but we’re not like whacking them over the head with it.
Abby: I’m thinking about the layers, as you just mentioned Liz, of storytelling. There’s obviously layers of ways to tell the story, and I feel like a lot of the best experiences include a human component. When I think about the Rembrandt Museum in Amsterdam, when I was there, they had somebody showing us how to do the printing press, and there was a person, a docent, showing us how to mix all of the, the paint colors and where their origins were and what they were made from.
And it was a lot of hands-on experiential learning, which were actually really brought the experience of visiting that museum to life for me, me and my family. And it reminded me how important this human component is. And so there’s such an essential role in a museum. And I know from my experience with the trade shows, having designed a number of booths, they’re really important when they’re telling the story for people at a trade show. Can you talk a little bit about that human component?
Liz: Yes, and it’s funny what you were just talking about made me think of something else, too, and they kind of go hand in hand. So, speaking about technology, just for another moment, one of the big advances in technology on the trade show floor has been through LED, and LED screens have brought beautiful canvases and immersive environments, and theatrical backdrops into booths that were never possible before.
You know, there’s always been a struggle with projection and holograms and things like this on trade show floors because of the ambient light, and with LED screens, there’s so much saturation of color and detail that you can turn a canvas into anything. And so that’s been really exciting and has provided a lot of amazing storytelling opportunities because now we can put a live presenter in front of one of these screens and we can change the scene 25 times.
We can have them move from their home to the doctor’s office to the hospital, to a car, and back home again. And they didn’t move, you know, five feet. But the wall around them, the LED screen behind them, the graphics behind them came to life and helped us tell that story. Speaking about professional actors, talent, in trade show booths, It is a tough sell, but usually once a brand sees it, they get it.
Again, these are just people, and if we want to have them really sit down and understand something, we need to humanize it. And what better way to do that than to put another human in front of them who can look them in the eye and get their reactions and feedback in real time and just talk to them and tell them a story.
And then on the flip side of it, it’s like you’re at a trade show, you see booth theaters. There’s, there’s 25, 50 booth theaters on this trade show floor. So, you know that there’s people that will sit down and watch a thing. So rather than be like everybody else, why don’t we create something different and more experiential and so that’s how we can kind of tip someone who’s maybe like part way there, like they’re open to a theater, but they’ve never done anything like that in their theater before.
And so, there’s just a range and it’s all about, you know, who’s the audience and who’s the brand and what’s the right fit and what’s the right balance. But if you can strike that right balance, it can make a huge impact. And people, once they kind of see that twinkle in the audience’s eye who are watching something that they definitely did not expect to experience on a trade show floor, it’s, it’s just awesome and so gratifying.
Brenda: We’re really curious to know, we’re talking so much about all of the great stuff and when things go really well and I’m really curious to hear about some of the, some of the worst things that you’ve seen, like Liz, what can go wrong?
Liz: Well, with a huge reliance on technology, there also comes a huge risk, right? So, I was speaking about beautiful LED screens. But when your whole story is is reliant on that, there’s definitely a risk involved in in something happening with the LED screens as an example.
Abby: Not that that ever happened to you of course, Liz, not that you’re drawing on any experience.
Brenda: Never happened!
Liz: Right? No, no!
Brenda: This was somebody else.
Liz: Exactly, I would say another example, it’s a little bit different, but we had a client come to us and they had an idea which they were all excited about to do, kind of like a game showy presentation, and it wasn’t the right audience and it kind of fell flat. And so, we were able to help them execute it. But once it came to life on the trade show floor, it was really not the right fit. And that was disappointing.
Oh, gosh, I mean, like I said, there’s so many things that can go wrong. We did a thing many years ago. We had kind of a live TV studio that was going on on the trade show floor in the center of this massive booth. And we had two professional presenters who were, they never, we never took a break. They were either always on together or one relieved the other. But it was constant for 10 hours, for five days straight. Well, of course, on like day three, one of them got food poisoning, which could totally happen to anyone. And so you’re like, oh my gosh, what do we do?
So luckily, you know, we had backup presenters in place, and we were able to have someone kind of get ready quickly and step in. But that’s what I say about the events industry. It’s like, you know, something’s going to go wrong. It always does. And if it doesn’t, you feel exceptionally lucky. So, you just have to always kind of be thinking about what are the two, three, four or five layers of things that could happen here.
Let’s, let’s try to plan for those and then when we get surprised by something that wasn’t one of those five, we’ll just deal with it in the moment. And that’s the beauty of us as event professionals is: we know how to, you know, work through those moments in the best way possible and come up with creative solutions.
Abby: And it keeps you fun. You clearly love it, and so…
Liz: Oh, definitely.
Abby: Right, it’s, it’s, it’s who you are. So, you chair the Future Leaders Committee serving the next generation of event professionals. So, what’s some advice you give young people coming into this industry, and what are you seeing that excites you about this generation, this next generation?
Liz: Wow. I’ll start with the second part of that. What excites me is that they’re not afraid to tell you what they think and, what they want and what they need.
Abby: I think, wait a minute, I think Brenda knows a little bit about that, teaching profession.
Brenda: Yeah, I’ve never experienced that.
Abby: No, no, no, not afraid.
Brenda: They’re a mystery.
Liz: It could be a challenge, but I appreciate it. It’s like, let’s just get to the point. I may not agree, and I may not be able to do all those things, but now I know what you need and what you want and what you care about, and that’s progress. So, I love that about them, and I think it’s refreshing, frankly.
I was just on a planning meeting today with our Future Leaders committee, and we’re talking about an upcoming event. And I just said to them, all right, if we were sitting in a room with the more experienced people in our industry and you could get on stage and educate them or share an insight with them, what would it be?
What do you want to tell, you know, the rest of us that have been in this industry for a while and some of their answers were really interesting and not at all what I expected, and I loved that. So, I’m just excited about, about that. And also, their creativity. I mean, they’re just thinking outside the box. They’re bringing new ideas.
They’re not afraid to, to bring new ideas. And I think it is so timely to have so many fresh faces in our industry. And I’m also surprised that there are so many people that are interested in our industry. I mean, we need a lot more. The future of our industry will require it, but there’s definitely some, some wonderful, you know, younger generation out there coming up into the ranks.
Abby: So, Liz, thank you for a unique glimpse into your world of events and sharing your experience in such a candid and honest way with us today.
Liz: Thank you. It was my pleasure. It was wonderful to talk with you both.
Brenda: It was wonderful talking with you.
Abby: It was. And thanks to everyone who tuned in today, if you like what you heard, subscribe for more entertaining 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.
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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.
Abby: Matters of Experience is a project of Lorem Ipsum, an experience design company headquartered in New York City.
[Music]
Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience, a podcast that explores the creativity, innovation and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. Welcome back, all our regular listeners. Thanks for being here with us today. And if you’re new and enjoy today’s show, please subscribe. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: Hello, this is Brenda Cowan.
Abby: Today we’re talking with the lovely Liz Nacron. She is Partner and President of Creative & Production at Live Marketing, an agency that creates highly engaging B2B and B2E events, whether in-person, virtual or hybrid. Liz has nearly 30 years of experience developing and executing live events rooted in strategic storytelling, working her way up from the ground floor to president, which I can really appreciate. She’s an active board member of the EDPA, which, for those who don’t know, is the Experiential Designers and Producers Association, where she chairs the Future Leaders Committee, serving the next generation of event professionals. Liz, welcome to our show.
Liz: Thank you very much. I’m excited to be here today.
Brenda: Liz, you were introduced to me as one of the shining stars in the events and exhibits industry, especially in the world of trade shows and what makes them great. You are especially noted for your work with the Future Leaders Committee. Describe the trade show environment from your perspective. What’s good and tell us about some of the bad also.
Liz: Well, my answer today is different than maybe what it would have been pre-COVID. Obviously, our industry has been through quite a lot, but I think at the end of the day, the trade show is still good for what the trade show has always been good for. And that is, it’s a rare opportunity where people get to come face to face to test out, learn about and experience products and solutions that brands have to offer.
The brands get an opportunity to really craft and curate the message and the story around their brand specific to that audience. It’s not just their corporate website, it’s, it’s what is this product? What does it mean to this particular target audience? And they get a chance to share that.
So that’s the good thing. I think the bad is that everyone has been through so much with COVID that they’re still very much just coming back into the face-to-face trade show event space. And so it feels like where we were before COVID, where everyone was kind of competing to have the most experiential activity or storytelling experience in their booth has kind of gone on a long pause.
And at this point people are just trying to figure out if they can even attend a trade show in a certain vertical anymore. And if they can, how can they do it but still stay within their new budget confines? So, that’s, I would say, the bad at the moment is there’s a long road ahead of us trying to get back to where we were before, but on the positive side, everyone’s craving it, and so I think it will come back. It’s just a matter of time.
Abby: So when you think about that smaller footprint, let’s say brands who continue to go to trade shows and want to invest, but at a reduced budget size, they’re looking at a much smaller square footage and when you compare it to, let’s say, a museum, which is often a large square footage, a trade show, you just don’t have much space to tell their story quite quickly. It’s sometimes difficult for a team to do. How do you navigate that conversation with your clients, Liz?
Liz: For us, we really don’t try to get our clients to do that part of the work. We’ll get on a call with them and we’ll ask them a bunch of questions, you know, everything from what are your objectives? Who’s your target audience? What is the culture of your company? What’s the tone of the story that you want to tell in your booth? What are the key messages? Do you have any product releases coming? Questions like that. We really ask them way more than we need to know. We let them talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. And then we cull it down into a five-minute story or script or experience.
We then give them something back and they go, oh my gosh, yes, that’s exactly what we were trying to say, and we would have never gotten there on our own because they’re too close to it, and they feel like they have to say it all. And so, they really rely on an agency like ours to do that, that part of the hard work for them and sort of show them the shiny thing that can come from all that, you know, valuable information that they want to convey.
Brenda: Well, it’s definitely the, the art of the craft, isn’t it? And when you define story specifically in the exhibits and events industry, are there specific elements of design or specific touchpoints that are essential to telling the story that, you know, as you’re listening to the brain dump going on, the data dump, are there specific things that you’re listening for because you know that those are going to be one of the essential or several of the essential touchpoints?
Liz: Yes. We always try to craft the story from the perspective of what are the challenges of the body that has entered your booth and sat in this seat and wants to hear what you have to offer. What are the things in their day-to-day job, life, that your brand, your product, your solution will solve for them and that’s what we’re trying to convey.
And then, the second part of that is what can they do at the end of hearing or experiencing that story to take action to help keep the momentum going and take that, you know, maybe piqued interest that we’ve created through that short story and have it lead them into a warmer conversation with a sales rep who is now being introduced to someone who just learned a little bit about how that brand’s going to help them.
Brenda: Now, this is in the museum world, in the events world, and in all of our related experiential worlds, understanding target audience is absolutely critical, and it really is like you were describing the beginning piece. How is it that you are instructing your clients to come to you with audience information? Like, how are you asking them to be able to prime you and your team?
Liz: So, that’s really where our question set typically will start is about their audience. And then we ask questions about what is that audience care-abouts? What are the things in their, you know, personal life that they typically like to do. Like we really try to dig in and understand, you know, who are these people? A lot of our clients have done persona research, and that’s really valuable too, because they’ve kind of already done some of the legwork, creating different personas and profiles, if you will, that we can then use to help us inform the story that we need to tell to those persona types.
Abby: And so, what are some of those touchpoints? So, when you think about the design that seems to be throughout all of the experiences that you craft, is it that there has to be a docent there every time? Is it that there’s an interactive? Is there something physical to take away, physical to touch? Sort of, what are some of the design touchpoints that you always try to think about and integrate into these trade show exhibitions?
Liz: First of all, what is the thing that when this prospect walks by this booth, is going to make them feel compelled to take that one step from the aisle carpet into the booth carpet. We really try to help our clients design booth experiences that have levels.
So, if it’s someone who maybe has never heard of your brand before, we want to start out with some sort of introductory experience, like, let’s set the stage about this company and this brand. Let’s give them the five-minute story and at the end of that five-minute story, they now know something they didn’t know before. And then we offer them a next step. And that next step could be, you know, do you want to participate in a demo? Great. Let me walk you over. At that point, they introduce them to a booth rep who we’re now handing over a warm lead to.
Or their next step might be, you know what? Now that I know a little bit about your company, it’s actually not a good fit. And like, thank you so much for giving me a good experience, but I’m going to keep walking down the aisle to the next trade show booth, and that’s okay too.
So, it really is, just at the core of it, that’s kind of how we, we like to design the experiences is from a distance, what do they see? What’s that experience once they get closer and then what are the activities or experience areas or storytelling activities or product demos in the booth that we can use as tools to help get that person deeper on that journey?
Brenda: So, I have to ask you, you’ve done this for so long and with so much expertise, give us an example of an experience that has lured people to the booth in just, bam, captured them.
Liz: We have a client who we help at a vet tech trade show and the vet tech audience is, is very passionate about what they do and they work really hard. So, we designed a booth experience that started with a theater area on the corner of the booth, sort of the most front facing aisle, and we created an, a schedule of content that changed all throughout the day.
We intentionally wanted to create different presentations focused on different content subject areas that would be interesting to them and ultimately invite them to come back over and over and over again. But once they came for the first time and they sat down, we put an iPad in their hands and we said, you know, from this point forward in your booth experience, you’re going to be using this iPad.
So, we started out our presentation, which was sort of an animated storytelling journey that they were following along these two animals, these two pets, a cat, and a dog. And they were making choices along the way on the iPad that helped our live presenter determine where the story was going to go. Of course, all along the way it was peppered with how this company’s products and solutions helped improve the life of this patient, which in this case was a dog or cat.
We didn’t invite them at the end of the presentation to give their iPad back and head back into the aisle. We said, your journey is only just begun. So, now take your iPad and come around to the other side of this theater booth wall, and you’re going to get to follow along in the life of this cat and dog that you just helped save.
So, they take the iPads around, and we’ve strategically placed triggers in the booth, in all the different booth areas. And we invited them to, at that point really take their own non-linear journey through the booth. And at each stop point they used the tablet to scan one of the triggers and launch a deeper dive part of the story of this cat or dog where we now really showed how that company’s product or solution made an impact on that patient.
By the end of this experience, they turned in their iPad, they answered a few questions, qualifying questions, and in exchange they were given a stuffed animal plushie version of the cat or the dog who they had helped save. And through the qualifying questions that they answered, we now knew if they were a qualified lead or not a qualified lead.
So, if someone handed us the iPad and they weren’t qualified, we handed them the plushie, we thank them, and they went on their merry way. But if they were qualified, one of our professional booth engagers strategically would say it looked like you expressed interest through your journey in X, Y, or Z. I’d like to connect you to our sales rep in this area, and they walked them over and that conversation continued.
And so, what was most amazing about this booth experience was that the average dwell time of people in this booth was 20 minutes. And for people who attend trade shows, often they’d know that’s like a really long time, especially on average for people to spend in a booth. And so, we felt like it was a huge success. The brand felt like it was a huge success, and it just provided this audience with so much information. But in just a fun, you know, storytelling way.
Abby: I think this is such a good idea because you, you got people with play, and I feel like get people playing with your product, get them enjoying your product, get them into and part of it, and then you nicely segue to the soft sell.
Liz: Yeah.
Brenda: Many, many years ago I had a student actually applying for an internship, and the student was applying to one of the larger exhibit and trade show design firms and they gave him a challenge, and the test was to take a target audience that had to go to trade shows as a part of their job, and they hated it.
They found trade shows boring. The target audience were sales reps of a very large consumer appliances company, and the student, so proud, the student knew, make it entirely about the target audience, make it entirely about the people on the floor. And the student designed a pre-show, and at-the-show, on-the-floor, and a post-show experience, that basically took these sales reps and turned them into superheroes.
And the entire design of the booth was the hero’s lair, and the whole pre-show campaign was social media, and it was all about hyping up the booth, and when they were going to meet together with the other superheroes, etc., etc.. It sounds a little corny. It was a knockout, a total knockout.
And I just keep thinking about opportunities when we get to think about the end user, when we get to think about the person on the floor or the customer at the store or whatever the case might be, the person at the museum, any opportunity for them to really feel like this story is about them. It is for them, and that it makes them feel very proud of who they are, that makes them feel like they really belong, and like the space has been customized just for them.
Liz: I do love that. And I think that, like you said, making people feel good is at the heart of it. And sometimes people at trade shows, it’s like the one time of year that they go, that they get out of the office or, or out of the clinic or out of the hospital. And so to give them a good brand experience, educate them on whatever your offerings are and make them feel good, make them feel like the hero, give them some praise and thanks is so impactful to those people.
Brenda: Do you ever find yourself in a situation where you’re having to really kind of break that down for a client that this is about, you know, the end user, that this is about the prospect and that we need to craft this experience in a way that is very welcoming and makes them feel like they’re a part of the story, that they belong?
Abby: Right, not about the product and the features of the product.
Brenda: Mm-hmm.
Liz: Yeah, it’s, it’s a challenge because they start most of them with the products and the features. And that’s important. And we need to know that. But we really have to hone in on sort of that overarching message and the what’s in it for them. And so we really, you know, kind of like I said at the beginning, we let them give us all of that, but then we sort of strong-arm them into the story we know they need to tell.
And once they hear it, you know, the first draft, they go, oh, wow, you know, you got all the product and feature stuff in there. But it’s not about that. And they see at that point, like, you know, it’s like light bulb goes off. Wow. Okay. So we can do both. We can talk about our products and its features, but we can do it with this thematic overlay or this journey that we’re taking them on or this just, you know, kind of exciting story that we’re telling. And oh yeah, the features and benefits are mixed in there too, but we’re not like whacking them over the head with it.
Abby: I’m thinking about the layers, as you just mentioned Liz, of storytelling. There’s obviously layers of ways to tell the story, and I feel like a lot of the best experiences include a human component. When I think about the Rembrandt Museum in Amsterdam, when I was there, they had somebody showing us how to do the printing press, and there was a person, a docent, showing us how to mix all of the, the paint colors and where their origins were and what they were made from.
And it was a lot of hands-on experiential learning, which were actually really brought the experience of visiting that museum to life for me, me and my family. And it reminded me how important this human component is. And so there’s such an essential role in a museum. And I know from my experience with the trade shows, having designed a number of booths, they’re really important when they’re telling the story for people at a trade show. Can you talk a little bit about that human component?
Liz: Yes, and it’s funny what you were just talking about made me think of something else, too, and they kind of go hand in hand. So, speaking about technology, just for another moment, one of the big advances in technology on the trade show floor has been through LED, and LED screens have brought beautiful canvases and immersive environments, and theatrical backdrops into booths that were never possible before.
You know, there’s always been a struggle with projection and holograms and things like this on trade show floors because of the ambient light, and with LED screens, there’s so much saturation of color and detail that you can turn a canvas into anything. And so that’s been really exciting and has provided a lot of amazing storytelling opportunities because now we can put a live presenter in front of one of these screens and we can change the scene 25 times.
We can have them move from their home to the doctor’s office to the hospital, to a car, and back home again. And they didn’t move, you know, five feet. But the wall around them, the LED screen behind them, the graphics behind them came to life and helped us tell that story. Speaking about professional actors, talent, in trade show booths, It is a tough sell, but usually once a brand sees it, they get it.
Again, these are just people, and if we want to have them really sit down and understand something, we need to humanize it. And what better way to do that than to put another human in front of them who can look them in the eye and get their reactions and feedback in real time and just talk to them and tell them a story.
And then on the flip side of it, it’s like you’re at a trade show, you see booth theaters. There’s, there’s 25, 50 booth theaters on this trade show floor. So, you know that there’s people that will sit down and watch a thing. So rather than be like everybody else, why don’t we create something different and more experiential and so that’s how we can kind of tip someone who’s maybe like part way there, like they’re open to a theater, but they’ve never done anything like that in their theater before.
And so, there’s just a range and it’s all about, you know, who’s the audience and who’s the brand and what’s the right fit and what’s the right balance. But if you can strike that right balance, it can make a huge impact. And people, once they kind of see that twinkle in the audience’s eye who are watching something that they definitely did not expect to experience on a trade show floor, it’s, it’s just awesome and so gratifying.
Brenda: We’re really curious to know, we’re talking so much about all of the great stuff and when things go really well and I’m really curious to hear about some of the, some of the worst things that you’ve seen, like Liz, what can go wrong?
Liz: Well, with a huge reliance on technology, there also comes a huge risk, right? So, I was speaking about beautiful LED screens. But when your whole story is is reliant on that, there’s definitely a risk involved in in something happening with the LED screens as an example.
Abby: Not that that ever happened to you of course, Liz, not that you’re drawing on any experience.
Brenda: Never happened!
Liz: Right? No, no!
Brenda: This was somebody else.
Liz: Exactly, I would say another example, it’s a little bit different, but we had a client come to us and they had an idea which they were all excited about to do, kind of like a game showy presentation, and it wasn’t the right audience and it kind of fell flat. And so, we were able to help them execute it. But once it came to life on the trade show floor, it was really not the right fit. And that was disappointing.
Oh, gosh, I mean, like I said, there’s so many things that can go wrong. We did a thing many years ago. We had kind of a live TV studio that was going on on the trade show floor in the center of this massive booth. And we had two professional presenters who were, they never, we never took a break. They were either always on together or one relieved the other. But it was constant for 10 hours, for five days straight. Well, of course, on like day three, one of them got food poisoning, which could totally happen to anyone. And so you’re like, oh my gosh, what do we do?
So luckily, you know, we had backup presenters in place, and we were able to have someone kind of get ready quickly and step in. But that’s what I say about the events industry. It’s like, you know, something’s going to go wrong. It always does. And if it doesn’t, you feel exceptionally lucky. So, you just have to always kind of be thinking about what are the two, three, four or five layers of things that could happen here.
Let’s, let’s try to plan for those and then when we get surprised by something that wasn’t one of those five, we’ll just deal with it in the moment. And that’s the beauty of us as event professionals is: we know how to, you know, work through those moments in the best way possible and come up with creative solutions.
Abby: And it keeps you fun. You clearly love it, and so…
Liz: Oh, definitely.
Abby: Right, it’s, it’s, it’s who you are. So, you chair the Future Leaders Committee serving the next generation of event professionals. So, what’s some advice you give young people coming into this industry, and what are you seeing that excites you about this generation, this next generation?
Liz: Wow. I’ll start with the second part of that. What excites me is that they’re not afraid to tell you what they think and, what they want and what they need.
Abby: I think, wait a minute, I think Brenda knows a little bit about that, teaching profession.
Brenda: Yeah, I’ve never experienced that.
Abby: No, no, no, not afraid.
Brenda: They’re a mystery.
Liz: It could be a challenge, but I appreciate it. It’s like, let’s just get to the point. I may not agree, and I may not be able to do all those things, but now I know what you need and what you want and what you care about, and that’s progress. So, I love that about them, and I think it’s refreshing, frankly.
I was just on a planning meeting today with our Future Leaders committee, and we’re talking about an upcoming event. And I just said to them, all right, if we were sitting in a room with the more experienced people in our industry and you could get on stage and educate them or share an insight with them, what would it be?
What do you want to tell, you know, the rest of us that have been in this industry for a while and some of their answers were really interesting and not at all what I expected, and I loved that. So, I’m just excited about, about that. And also, their creativity. I mean, they’re just thinking outside the box. They’re bringing new ideas.
They’re not afraid to, to bring new ideas. And I think it is so timely to have so many fresh faces in our industry. And I’m also surprised that there are so many people that are interested in our industry. I mean, we need a lot more. The future of our industry will require it, but there’s definitely some, some wonderful, you know, younger generation out there coming up into the ranks.
Abby: So, Liz, thank you for a unique glimpse into your world of events and sharing your experience in such a candid and honest way with us today.
Liz: Thank you. It was my pleasure. It was wonderful to talk with you both.
Brenda: It was wonderful talking with you.
Abby: It was. And thanks to everyone who tuned in today, if you like what you heard, subscribe for more entertaining 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.
[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.
Event Strategy and Storytelling with Liz Nacron
Special Episode: Live from the 2023 SEGD Conference
About SEGD - The Society for Experiential Graphic Design: We are graphic and exhibition designers, fabricators and architects, media developers and creative technologists, students and educators. Each of our members brings a diverse set of expertise, but we all share a common motivation: to make the built environment more inclusive and intuitive, emotive and engaging, sustainable and shared.
Special Episode: Live from the 2023 SEGD Conference
Human-Centered Design with Andrea Hadley-Johnson
Museum of Making | Derby Museums
Objects of Love, Hope and Fear: a World Collection – Derby Museums
Abby: Matters of experience is a project of Lorem Ipsum, an experienced design company headquartered in New York City.
[Music]
Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience, a podcast that explores the creativity, innovation and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. If you’re new, a warm welcome to you and to our regular listeners, thank you for tuning in and supporting our conversation. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: Hello, everyone. I’m Brenda Cowan.
Abby: Today we’re talking with Andrea Hadley-Johnson, who is an award winning creative producer and curator who currently works as the artistic program manager for the National Justice Museum, NJM, in Nottingham, England, developing exhibitions and creative interventions that explore ideas of crime, justice and injustice. Andrea, I love the description of your work as creative interventions, and I’m looking forward to this conversation. Welcome to our show.
Andrea: Thank you so, so much for inviting me. It’s a wonderful invitation.
Abby: So, Andrea, you and I share a similar background in some ways. We are both from England, but I know that we also share a little bit of a training background, you know, you trained as an artist at university, and so did I. So, tell us about the direction you took after training at college and how you ended up working in museums.
Andrea: So, I knew that I needed to do something creative, but when I left school, I really didn’t know what that might be. I studied textiles and fine art together for five years, actually, and felt like I’d found my tribe. I felt like I’d slotted in with people that were exploring and playing and experimenting. So, I left that course sort of full of ideas and passion for materials and processes, and I thought, that’s it, I’m an artist now, but it didn’t quite work out like that.
I sold a few little bits of work here and there and realized I didn’t know how to make a living as an artist. And I got poorer and hungrier and sort of stepped in intuitively to a job styling with a small interior design company and really a career of styling and interiors grew from there before my career change into museums many, many years after that.
Brenda: Andrea, in your museum life, when were you first exposed to human-centered design? Like how did you first start to include planning for people in the work that you’re doing?
Andrea: So, I have always worked openly. Always. I think people generally are a big part of my creative process. But it was about ten years ago that at Derby Museums, we began to remake the Silk Mill, which was an industrial museum that had been mothballed. And working alongside Hannah Fox, who was leading that program, we began to explore human-centered design, person-centered design, design thinking.
I don’t like really fixing and thingifying some of the processes because there’s a freedom in being able to understand that process and putting people at the heart of a project and standing and learning together what people might want to think, feel and do in a space or with a theme. But it is a human-centered design methodology that we began to learn together as a team, and it was it was an extraordinary process.
Brenda: So, was this just a natural part of how you think and operate, or was this something that you studied sort of more intentionally?
Andrea: I think there is a part of me that, as I sort of alluded to there, has always playfully explored and experimented with people. So, for me, part of any creative process is the what if, what if this happened instead? Or what if this person held it? Or what if? And intentionally human-centered design was put into the Museum of Making process so people out in the community were invited to come and remake the museum with us, and so that, that was a way of working that we could study and learn and improve to make that museum together with the people of Derby.
Abby: So, you studied art, you popped out, you tried to earn a living. It was super-duper tough. Where did you go next? And just talk a little bit about that experience and how you think it informs where you’re at now?
Andrea: Well, it was a tough time, 1989 was when I graduated and it was tough, but I’d seen a job advertised for recent graduates working for this independent entrepreneur. It was like a mini Conran shop in Nottingham. And we came together, a group of us that were creatives. Basically, it was working in that shop selling beautifully designed products for the home. So, it was an interior design store and I got to design some of the window displays and really enjoyed it and felt like that was an extension of my practice.
And then I moved into an organization called Habitat, I don’t know whether you know of Habitat.
Abby: Yeah, yeah, I know Habitat, I’m very familiar.
Andrea: Working in one store in Nottingham, and again, it was about experimenting with product, it was curating that store and I was promoted each year in that company. So, I worked across the region, I worked in projects in Italy and Iceland and France. And I got to a point in that career where I had loved it and I had all these incredible experiences and worked with people across Europe. It was wonderful. It was a real privilege to work there. But I wasn’t learning anything anymore and I literally got itchy fingers, as well. I wanted to be on the floor. I wanted to be with the products and the people that I wanted to be observing and watching how people navigate themselves around these beautiful environments.
So, I decided to go back to college. So, in my mid-thirties and I’d seen this link across to presenting products and presenting objects. And thought I would try my hand at museum studies. So, I did the course at Nottingham and to suddenly have to slow down and really read and think and analyze was a, was a different way of being for me. But I embraced it. I really loved it and I learned such a lot that I could see very clearly those parallels between my first career, you know, observing how people would pick something up and make sense of it in a gallery or a museum or a shop, you can see that those, those connections are very, very clear. What connects human beings with things in retail is not so different to what connects our heads, hearts, and hands in galleries and exhibitions.
Brenda: So, Andrea, I’ll have to say lovingly talks about hands, hearts, and minds of objects. And that’s how Andrea and I met. I got, a sort of an introduction to Andrea through the executive director of the Happy Museum Project in the UK. And Andrea, I think I was your very first Skype call ever.
Andrea: You were.
Brenda: I haunted Andrea. I got a hold of her, and I said, hello, I’m this lady in New York City. I do studies with objects, and I absolutely must come to the Derby Museums, which is where Andrea was at the time. And I said, please let me come and do a study. And Andrea was open arms, and we did some really brilliant work out there talking with people in the Derby Museum and Art Gallery about Objects of Love, which was a brilliant exhibit initiative that Andrea had created, where people were coming in, bringing objects that in one way or another represented love to them. And I got to interview the people and the meanings of the objects. It was absolutely brilliant. But that’s when Andrea and I met for the first time.
Andrea: Oh, that one was at the Museum and Art Gallery, and yeah, Brenda, it was amazing, actually, that week was amazing. And I have to say I met someone recently that was interviewed by you and the team, and she said she still thinks about that moment when she shared her object and you, and then seeing other people engaging with it because it was really special, really emotional for everybody, a really important piece of work.
So, it sat within the Objects of Love, Hope and Fear gallery, and that was the last project I led at Derby Museum. So, I was asked to redesign or reinvigorate the Victorian part of the museum using a collection of objects that had been looted and stolen from around the world and landed in the museum like they do. And it was quite terrifying really, because these amazing, interesting, important belongings had been in the museum store for many, many years, or decades.
And I was working for a short time with an artist called Sonia Barrett, and she was moved to tears in the museum store and said it was the first time of being in the museum where she’d seen objects that connect to her cultural heritage. So, I knew how sensitive this project would be and I really didn’t want to get it wrong. And I really wanted to work with as many people as I could openly to explore where the comfort, where the discomfort was.
So, I decided that a way to do it would be to call out, with a provocation, what three things connect people across the world. I think if I remember right, it was about three and a half thousand of these little cards and tweets came back and they were emotions and they were actions and they were behaviors. So, we started to play with these responses and build a thematic analysis on the gallery floor that people could come in and be part of that process.
And then the other thing was this desire not to get it wrong, really, to think, well, how might we share these objects before the gallery is developed with the people of the city? So, I took objects out on the streets, and I tried to connect the historic object with a contemporary counterpart. So, there were some ancient, I think they were Nigerian, combs that I took with a colleague to a barber shop. Sometimes we walked up to a cafe with bowls or utensils and sat in the cafe and people would come to us and say, what have you got there? And then we could, this interesting dialog would begin. But it was about listening and hearing what people’s thoughts and feelings were, rather than telling them what the object or the belonging was.
There was one really very beautiful example of an object being, where lived experience came in to identify what an object was. There’s a little basket that had been woven from reeds and a lid that had become disconnected from it in the museum store, and no one really knew what they were. And someone, this amazing man we were working with, he was volunteering, and he was seeking asylum in Derby at the time, and he looked at this little basket and he said, I know what that is, it’s a foraging basket and I would have used that. I used one similar when I was a child. He told us about how he used the basket and what he would have collected in it. And then we got this basket sent to a conservator and they analyzed the basket, and they found a tiny wing of an insect inside the basket and researched this insect, and it was only found in that part of the world where Empson had grown up. So, there was this wonderful mix of lived experience and an expert knowledge and research that collided in the most beautiful way.
Abby: Well, I know we have a lot to unpack there, Andrea, there was a lot that you hit on, a nd the first is that idea of collaboration, which seems so important, especially when you’re talking about all of these sensitive topics that I, I see you naturally migrate to. You have this very sort of open-ended creative process, you know, when it seems to come to the brainstorming or what forms the exhibition will actually take. Can you tell us the story, because when you just painted the picture of going into the community, that’s difficult. Can you tell us the story of when you went into the barber shop?
Brenda: And can you begin by explaining how it is that the museum allowed you to take a collection object outside of the museum and to the barber shop?
Andrea: Oh, yes.
Abby: You stole it, didn’t you, Andrea? It’s time for confession time.
Andrea: My pockets are full. Well, actually there was a really, that, a gallery that I had worked on for Derby Museums the year before, it was called Notice Nature Feel Joy, but again it was co-produced and it was a natural history gallery and I had wanted to not cover everything in, in acrylic or glass and had this really interesting conversation with a curator at the time who said, well, you can’t have those things without a case over the top.
And it was a tiger skull that I’d wanted to place. And we had this fantastic, and it stays with me, conversation where that person said, it’s people like you that will ruin these objects and then no one will ever get to see them in the future. Quite an extreme thing to level. But I started by saying how many tiger skulls are there in the region, in museums? And it was like, I don’t know, hundreds and hundreds, and I wanted to know if this one was really special and what would happen if someone took this skull every single day for a year? What would happen?
So that, actually that skull went on the wall and it was it was perfectly fine, and it wasn’t really a risk. The risk, I think, is not sharing the collection. That’s the risk. And building that relationship and enabling the team to feel like it was okay because some of the people that I was working with hadn’t worked like that before, therefore, they were fearful. So, to share the benefit and to celebrate the beautiful things that were beginning to happen was how I was able to influence objects leaving the museum.
So, the first object was a comb going to a barber shop. So, it was this beautiful wooden carved comb and I trotted off to a barber shop, dead excited, this is going to be amazing, and suddenly stopped at the door and thought, oh yeah, it’s all men, and I opened the door a little bit and I could hear voices and there was a lot of chat, but it didn’t understand the language or languages that were being spoken.
So then for me there was another fearful, oh, what if they tell me to leave? And I don’t understand that I’m not supposed to be there because we don’t share a language. What if I say something and the man inside don’t understand me? So, there’s this big flurry of, oh my goodness, what if I get it wrong? But took a step further, took a step further and actually sharing the objects was incredible.
And then someone new arrived and they identified and were very excited that they could recognize some carvings on the comb, and it was from Ethiopia, and we were invited back and got these beautiful photographs of the wooden combs next to contemporary combs, which sparked another idea, and that was to take some of these things into people’s homes to really explore how to un-other the way that people were looking at the objects before they went into their plinths and their vitrines, these ordinary, extraordinary or extraordinary ordinary belongings that had been in the museum sore. When they were placed in people’s hands and they were out in the community with similar objects from a different era, it absolutely cut through all of the, all of the nonsense that happens sometimes with museum objects.
Abby: Andrea, you’re so inspirational with the work you do and the way that I think you don’t realize how courageous and bold you are. It’s so charming that you went in there and without language to begin with, were able to explain. And how did it work? Did they come and actually visit the museum just out of interest?
Andrea: Oh, wow. Yeah. It was incredible to see then, along the way. So, what developed and again is quite iterative is the way that these galleries develop, one needs to, of course there are milestones and dates when things have to be complete, but absolutely within that we need to plan the room to play and to totally respond to what people are saying and doing and how they’re feeling in those spaces.
And the purpose for that originally, Objects of Love, for me was how might that strength of feeling and care that that people have for an object of their own, that the resonance that it has, is that something that could be translated across into a museum where people have that same level of connection.
People came in to help clean the objects and we started to hear people talking about their objects. So, each phase of the project, these beautifully cleaned and loved and careful things felt like they’d been re-ignited. And hearing people come back in and say, oh, where’s that small model boat that I cleaned, that’s mine, and observing people, bringing in family members to share, that was beautiful.
Brenda: And Andrea, I am remembering interviewing one of your curators at Derby about Objects of Love, and she was talking about her experiences throughout the galleries at the museum and she spoke with so much love and so much tenderness and so much gentleness about the objects. And she talked about their spirituality and how it is that they almost speak with her, and I just thought, you know, here’s somebody who really, really gets it. I hope that she was not a curator who ever gave you a hard time. But if it had been the case, she was completely converted.
Andrea: I think, I think that the hard time is good as well, isn’t it? When people challenge, it progresses things for the whole, for the whole organization and provocations, playful provocations, the what ifs, the how might wes, feel to me often that they’re magnetic. Once we start moving around or introduce prototyping or flipping things on their heads to see them through a different lens or from a different perspective, that’s when the really good stuff happens.
Abby: So, you mention un-othering the belongings a lot in your works to enable us to see them differently. I believe you have a really great story; we were talking about your recent exhibition. Is your exhibition called Darkness?
Andrea: Yeah.
Abby: So, this is at the National Justice Museum in Nottingham. Can you sort of talk us through that in relation to the fact that you, you see that engagement is absolutely necessary to connect with people via these provocations? Chat a little bit about the pistol.
Andrea: So, this project began about 18 months ago with this iconic photographer. His name’s Brian Griffin. He’s a super talent and his work is sort of infused with surrealism, I’d say. And Brian and I have worked together before, and he came up to Nottingham to explore the museum with me and we started to talk about some of the object collections, and we went into the museum store.
We were moving around and sort of got this long list of things that Brian perhaps would like to photograph. So, we had, I think there were 12 objects to select from. Brian has often worked with props, but these were the real deal. These were artifacts that had been used and they had a resonance around crime, law and punishment and the brutality of some of the stories that, or the connotations connected to those objects: brutality and trauma. And so, we did this call out for people to come and join the project, and they selected their object and people placed these objects on or around their body. And we ended up with this extraordinary – I think they’re extraordinary – sequence of 12, I’ve called them object person portraits.
And one of the objects in the collection was a pistol. Don’t know what year the pistol came into the museum collection, I think it was in the 1970s. It wasn’t necessarily a contemporary pistol. And right at this stage of installation, a colleague said, actually, I think that’s a safeguarding issue. And we, we can’t show some of them or all of them, and particularly the pistol because of gun crime emerging in the UK, you know, there’s been knife crime. It’s a serious issue. We’re a National Justice Museum, there’s some amazing work that the learning teams do with schools or young people that might be at risk of getting involved in knife crime. And it isn’t something that we’d mess around with.
We had those conversations. It was a very serious, within the play and within the experimentation. It matters. It really matters that we have those conversations. For me, it was censorship, and for me it was an issue around, well, what is the point of having that pistol in our collection if we can’t use it? So, yeah, it was a really big challenge and actually it, I had a real wobble about my practice at that point of yeah, working like this, working so openly, these fluid, meaningful, representative conversations that we have with people are so important and it’s, it’s constant, the dialog is constant, and we are responding. I am responding accordingly all the way through.
And then had some more conversations about, well, actually, if it’s a safeguarding issue for someone to see a photograph of the pistol with somebody in a non-provocative pose, then what is happening in the museum when people walk past the gallows and what is happening when people walk past repulsive things like a scold’s bridle that would have been placed over a woman’s head with a metal plate in her mouth to stop her speaking in medieval times.
If we look at that one image and that decision through that very rigorous process like we have, then we need to step back and look at the whole museum, thinking about trauma informed practice. But having seen the event launch and hearing what people said about it and hearing how it provoked new thoughts, it felt like the building was fizzing and popping with these incredible moments of ignition and connection.
Brenda: Andrea, you said once that, you know, if you’re going to be in the business of museums, that you need to see social justice as your business, as your responsibility. And I love how it is that you see museums as a critical point to bring relevant subjects together to bring social justice.
Andrea: Yeah, I suppose from my personal experience, my dad grew up in care in the, well he’s 80 this year, so he grew up in care from a baby to the age of about 16, and then at the end of that process he was street homeless. He didn’t have anywhere to go. He didn’t have anywhere to be. But he used to say to me, if you have a loaf of bread, you have enough to give half to somebody else. And this is this is a kind of mantra that he’d always have as I grew up.
And there’s something about the practice and the privilege. I have a privilege to be in the job that I’m in. It’s a privilege for me to be able to be with those things and develop those projects and to coach and develop and, and work beside all these amazing people, it is my responsibility to dismantle exclusive practice in order to, for that institution to become more inclusive.
You know, people talk about virtue signaling and performing inclusivity, but it’s got to be really, it’s got to happen, and it’s got to change. And it is a vital moment of agitation and flux. Post-COVID, there are opportunities to do things differently, and we have to just do them, not sit and talk about them. It doesn’t take very much to hop out onto the steps of the museum and have a conversation with people to test an idea. That isn’t courageous. That’s just about being a human being connecting with another human being.
What people say, what people offer, are the essential ingredients for the future of that collection. So, researchers in the future aren’t going to come back into the museum and see the same stories and the same people presenting as the most important. Equitable practice comes from tipping the status quo and actively dismantling the barriers. They don’t just dissolve. You have to get out there and do that.
Abby: Wow. Andrea, thank you so much for sharing your experiences with us. As we discussed, it’s so important to give ideas time to shape, to trust your inner voice, and I know to be bold and thoughtful in our practices whilst breaking down these institutional barriers. It’s a lot to do, but as you said, rewarding work and kind of what we all signed up for. So, thank you so much, Andrea.
Andrea: Thank you so much. It’s been an absolute pleasure sharing and listening and being together. Thank you.
Abby: And thanks to everyone who tuned in today. Please 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. Take care and see you all next time.
Brenda: Be well 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.
Museum of Making | Derby Museums
Objects of Love, Hope and Fear: a World Collection – Derby Museums
Abby: Matters of experience is a project of Lorem Ipsum, an experienced design company headquartered in New York City.
[Music]
Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience, a podcast that explores the creativity, innovation and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. If you’re new, a warm welcome to you and to our regular listeners, thank you for tuning in and supporting our conversation. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: Hello, everyone. I’m Brenda Cowan.
Abby: Today we’re talking with Andrea Hadley-Johnson, who is an award winning creative producer and curator who currently works as the artistic program manager for the National Justice Museum, NJM, in Nottingham, England, developing exhibitions and creative interventions that explore ideas of crime, justice and injustice. Andrea, I love the description of your work as creative interventions, and I’m looking forward to this conversation. Welcome to our show.
Andrea: Thank you so, so much for inviting me. It’s a wonderful invitation.
Abby: So, Andrea, you and I share a similar background in some ways. We are both from England, but I know that we also share a little bit of a training background, you know, you trained as an artist at university, and so did I. So, tell us about the direction you took after training at college and how you ended up working in museums.
Andrea: So, I knew that I needed to do something creative, but when I left school, I really didn’t know what that might be. I studied textiles and fine art together for five years, actually, and felt like I’d found my tribe. I felt like I’d slotted in with people that were exploring and playing and experimenting. So, I left that course sort of full of ideas and passion for materials and processes, and I thought, that’s it, I’m an artist now, but it didn’t quite work out like that.
I sold a few little bits of work here and there and realized I didn’t know how to make a living as an artist. And I got poorer and hungrier and sort of stepped in intuitively to a job styling with a small interior design company and really a career of styling and interiors grew from there before my career change into museums many, many years after that.
Brenda: Andrea, in your museum life, when were you first exposed to human-centered design? Like how did you first start to include planning for people in the work that you’re doing?
Andrea: So, I have always worked openly. Always. I think people generally are a big part of my creative process. But it was about ten years ago that at Derby Museums, we began to remake the Silk Mill, which was an industrial museum that had been mothballed. And working alongside Hannah Fox, who was leading that program, we began to explore human-centered design, person-centered design, design thinking.
I don’t like really fixing and thingifying some of the processes because there’s a freedom in being able to understand that process and putting people at the heart of a project and standing and learning together what people might want to think, feel and do in a space or with a theme. But it is a human-centered design methodology that we began to learn together as a team, and it was it was an extraordinary process.
Brenda: So, was this just a natural part of how you think and operate, or was this something that you studied sort of more intentionally?
Andrea: I think there is a part of me that, as I sort of alluded to there, has always playfully explored and experimented with people. So, for me, part of any creative process is the what if, what if this happened instead? Or what if this person held it? Or what if? And intentionally human-centered design was put into the Museum of Making process so people out in the community were invited to come and remake the museum with us, and so that, that was a way of working that we could study and learn and improve to make that museum together with the people of Derby.
Abby: So, you studied art, you popped out, you tried to earn a living. It was super-duper tough. Where did you go next? And just talk a little bit about that experience and how you think it informs where you’re at now?
Andrea: Well, it was a tough time, 1989 was when I graduated and it was tough, but I’d seen a job advertised for recent graduates working for this independent entrepreneur. It was like a mini Conran shop in Nottingham. And we came together, a group of us that were creatives. Basically, it was working in that shop selling beautifully designed products for the home. So, it was an interior design store and I got to design some of the window displays and really enjoyed it and felt like that was an extension of my practice.
And then I moved into an organization called Habitat, I don’t know whether you know of Habitat.
Abby: Yeah, yeah, I know Habitat, I’m very familiar.
Andrea: Working in one store in Nottingham, and again, it was about experimenting with product, it was curating that store and I was promoted each year in that company. So, I worked across the region, I worked in projects in Italy and Iceland and France. And I got to a point in that career where I had loved it and I had all these incredible experiences and worked with people across Europe. It was wonderful. It was a real privilege to work there. But I wasn’t learning anything anymore and I literally got itchy fingers, as well. I wanted to be on the floor. I wanted to be with the products and the people that I wanted to be observing and watching how people navigate themselves around these beautiful environments.
So, I decided to go back to college. So, in my mid-thirties and I’d seen this link across to presenting products and presenting objects. And thought I would try my hand at museum studies. So, I did the course at Nottingham and to suddenly have to slow down and really read and think and analyze was a, was a different way of being for me. But I embraced it. I really loved it and I learned such a lot that I could see very clearly those parallels between my first career, you know, observing how people would pick something up and make sense of it in a gallery or a museum or a shop, you can see that those, those connections are very, very clear. What connects human beings with things in retail is not so different to what connects our heads, hearts, and hands in galleries and exhibitions.
Brenda: So, Andrea, I’ll have to say lovingly talks about hands, hearts, and minds of objects. And that’s how Andrea and I met. I got, a sort of an introduction to Andrea through the executive director of the Happy Museum Project in the UK. And Andrea, I think I was your very first Skype call ever.
Andrea: You were.
Brenda: I haunted Andrea. I got a hold of her, and I said, hello, I’m this lady in New York City. I do studies with objects, and I absolutely must come to the Derby Museums, which is where Andrea was at the time. And I said, please let me come and do a study. And Andrea was open arms, and we did some really brilliant work out there talking with people in the Derby Museum and Art Gallery about Objects of Love, which was a brilliant exhibit initiative that Andrea had created, where people were coming in, bringing objects that in one way or another represented love to them. And I got to interview the people and the meanings of the objects. It was absolutely brilliant. But that’s when Andrea and I met for the first time.
Andrea: Oh, that one was at the Museum and Art Gallery, and yeah, Brenda, it was amazing, actually, that week was amazing. And I have to say I met someone recently that was interviewed by you and the team, and she said she still thinks about that moment when she shared her object and you, and then seeing other people engaging with it because it was really special, really emotional for everybody, a really important piece of work.
So, it sat within the Objects of Love, Hope and Fear gallery, and that was the last project I led at Derby Museum. So, I was asked to redesign or reinvigorate the Victorian part of the museum using a collection of objects that had been looted and stolen from around the world and landed in the museum like they do. And it was quite terrifying really, because these amazing, interesting, important belongings had been in the museum store for many, many years, or decades.
And I was working for a short time with an artist called Sonia Barrett, and she was moved to tears in the museum store and said it was the first time of being in the museum where she’d seen objects that connect to her cultural heritage. So, I knew how sensitive this project would be and I really didn’t want to get it wrong. And I really wanted to work with as many people as I could openly to explore where the comfort, where the discomfort was.
So, I decided that a way to do it would be to call out, with a provocation, what three things connect people across the world. I think if I remember right, it was about three and a half thousand of these little cards and tweets came back and they were emotions and they were actions and they were behaviors. So, we started to play with these responses and build a thematic analysis on the gallery floor that people could come in and be part of that process.
And then the other thing was this desire not to get it wrong, really, to think, well, how might we share these objects before the gallery is developed with the people of the city? So, I took objects out on the streets, and I tried to connect the historic object with a contemporary counterpart. So, there were some ancient, I think they were Nigerian, combs that I took with a colleague to a barber shop. Sometimes we walked up to a cafe with bowls or utensils and sat in the cafe and people would come to us and say, what have you got there? And then we could, this interesting dialog would begin. But it was about listening and hearing what people’s thoughts and feelings were, rather than telling them what the object or the belonging was.
There was one really very beautiful example of an object being, where lived experience came in to identify what an object was. There’s a little basket that had been woven from reeds and a lid that had become disconnected from it in the museum store, and no one really knew what they were. And someone, this amazing man we were working with, he was volunteering, and he was seeking asylum in Derby at the time, and he looked at this little basket and he said, I know what that is, it’s a foraging basket and I would have used that. I used one similar when I was a child. He told us about how he used the basket and what he would have collected in it. And then we got this basket sent to a conservator and they analyzed the basket, and they found a tiny wing of an insect inside the basket and researched this insect, and it was only found in that part of the world where Empson had grown up. So, there was this wonderful mix of lived experience and an expert knowledge and research that collided in the most beautiful way.
Abby: Well, I know we have a lot to unpack there, Andrea, there was a lot that you hit on, a nd the first is that idea of collaboration, which seems so important, especially when you’re talking about all of these sensitive topics that I, I see you naturally migrate to. You have this very sort of open-ended creative process, you know, when it seems to come to the brainstorming or what forms the exhibition will actually take. Can you tell us the story, because when you just painted the picture of going into the community, that’s difficult. Can you tell us the story of when you went into the barber shop?
Brenda: And can you begin by explaining how it is that the museum allowed you to take a collection object outside of the museum and to the barber shop?
Andrea: Oh, yes.
Abby: You stole it, didn’t you, Andrea? It’s time for confession time.
Andrea: My pockets are full. Well, actually there was a really, that, a gallery that I had worked on for Derby Museums the year before, it was called Notice Nature Feel Joy, but again it was co-produced and it was a natural history gallery and I had wanted to not cover everything in, in acrylic or glass and had this really interesting conversation with a curator at the time who said, well, you can’t have those things without a case over the top.
And it was a tiger skull that I’d wanted to place. And we had this fantastic, and it stays with me, conversation where that person said, it’s people like you that will ruin these objects and then no one will ever get to see them in the future. Quite an extreme thing to level. But I started by saying how many tiger skulls are there in the region, in museums? And it was like, I don’t know, hundreds and hundreds, and I wanted to know if this one was really special and what would happen if someone took this skull every single day for a year? What would happen?
So that, actually that skull went on the wall and it was it was perfectly fine, and it wasn’t really a risk. The risk, I think, is not sharing the collection. That’s the risk. And building that relationship and enabling the team to feel like it was okay because some of the people that I was working with hadn’t worked like that before, therefore, they were fearful. So, to share the benefit and to celebrate the beautiful things that were beginning to happen was how I was able to influence objects leaving the museum.
So, the first object was a comb going to a barber shop. So, it was this beautiful wooden carved comb and I trotted off to a barber shop, dead excited, this is going to be amazing, and suddenly stopped at the door and thought, oh yeah, it’s all men, and I opened the door a little bit and I could hear voices and there was a lot of chat, but it didn’t understand the language or languages that were being spoken.
So then for me there was another fearful, oh, what if they tell me to leave? And I don’t understand that I’m not supposed to be there because we don’t share a language. What if I say something and the man inside don’t understand me? So, there’s this big flurry of, oh my goodness, what if I get it wrong? But took a step further, took a step further and actually sharing the objects was incredible.
And then someone new arrived and they identified and were very excited that they could recognize some carvings on the comb, and it was from Ethiopia, and we were invited back and got these beautiful photographs of the wooden combs next to contemporary combs, which sparked another idea, and that was to take some of these things into people’s homes to really explore how to un-other the way that people were looking at the objects before they went into their plinths and their vitrines, these ordinary, extraordinary or extraordinary ordinary belongings that had been in the museum sore. When they were placed in people’s hands and they were out in the community with similar objects from a different era, it absolutely cut through all of the, all of the nonsense that happens sometimes with museum objects.
Abby: Andrea, you’re so inspirational with the work you do and the way that I think you don’t realize how courageous and bold you are. It’s so charming that you went in there and without language to begin with, were able to explain. And how did it work? Did they come and actually visit the museum just out of interest?
Andrea: Oh, wow. Yeah. It was incredible to see then, along the way. So, what developed and again is quite iterative is the way that these galleries develop, one needs to, of course there are milestones and dates when things have to be complete, but absolutely within that we need to plan the room to play and to totally respond to what people are saying and doing and how they’re feeling in those spaces.
And the purpose for that originally, Objects of Love, for me was how might that strength of feeling and care that that people have for an object of their own, that the resonance that it has, is that something that could be translated across into a museum where people have that same level of connection.
People came in to help clean the objects and we started to hear people talking about their objects. So, each phase of the project, these beautifully cleaned and loved and careful things felt like they’d been re-ignited. And hearing people come back in and say, oh, where’s that small model boat that I cleaned, that’s mine, and observing people, bringing in family members to share, that was beautiful.
Brenda: And Andrea, I am remembering interviewing one of your curators at Derby about Objects of Love, and she was talking about her experiences throughout the galleries at the museum and she spoke with so much love and so much tenderness and so much gentleness about the objects. And she talked about their spirituality and how it is that they almost speak with her, and I just thought, you know, here’s somebody who really, really gets it. I hope that she was not a curator who ever gave you a hard time. But if it had been the case, she was completely converted.
Andrea: I think, I think that the hard time is good as well, isn’t it? When people challenge, it progresses things for the whole, for the whole organization and provocations, playful provocations, the what ifs, the how might wes, feel to me often that they’re magnetic. Once we start moving around or introduce prototyping or flipping things on their heads to see them through a different lens or from a different perspective, that’s when the really good stuff happens.
Abby: So, you mention un-othering the belongings a lot in your works to enable us to see them differently. I believe you have a really great story; we were talking about your recent exhibition. Is your exhibition called Darkness?
Andrea: Yeah.
Abby: So, this is at the National Justice Museum in Nottingham. Can you sort of talk us through that in relation to the fact that you, you see that engagement is absolutely necessary to connect with people via these provocations? Chat a little bit about the pistol.
Andrea: So, this project began about 18 months ago with this iconic photographer. His name’s Brian Griffin. He’s a super talent and his work is sort of infused with surrealism, I’d say. And Brian and I have worked together before, and he came up to Nottingham to explore the museum with me and we started to talk about some of the object collections, and we went into the museum store.
We were moving around and sort of got this long list of things that Brian perhaps would like to photograph. So, we had, I think there were 12 objects to select from. Brian has often worked with props, but these were the real deal. These were artifacts that had been used and they had a resonance around crime, law and punishment and the brutality of some of the stories that, or the connotations connected to those objects: brutality and trauma. And so, we did this call out for people to come and join the project, and they selected their object and people placed these objects on or around their body. And we ended up with this extraordinary – I think they’re extraordinary – sequence of 12, I’ve called them object person portraits.
And one of the objects in the collection was a pistol. Don’t know what year the pistol came into the museum collection, I think it was in the 1970s. It wasn’t necessarily a contemporary pistol. And right at this stage of installation, a colleague said, actually, I think that’s a safeguarding issue. And we, we can’t show some of them or all of them, and particularly the pistol because of gun crime emerging in the UK, you know, there’s been knife crime. It’s a serious issue. We’re a National Justice Museum, there’s some amazing work that the learning teams do with schools or young people that might be at risk of getting involved in knife crime. And it isn’t something that we’d mess around with.
We had those conversations. It was a very serious, within the play and within the experimentation. It matters. It really matters that we have those conversations. For me, it was censorship, and for me it was an issue around, well, what is the point of having that pistol in our collection if we can’t use it? So, yeah, it was a really big challenge and actually it, I had a real wobble about my practice at that point of yeah, working like this, working so openly, these fluid, meaningful, representative conversations that we have with people are so important and it’s, it’s constant, the dialog is constant, and we are responding. I am responding accordingly all the way through.
And then had some more conversations about, well, actually, if it’s a safeguarding issue for someone to see a photograph of the pistol with somebody in a non-provocative pose, then what is happening in the museum when people walk past the gallows and what is happening when people walk past repulsive things like a scold’s bridle that would have been placed over a woman’s head with a metal plate in her mouth to stop her speaking in medieval times.
If we look at that one image and that decision through that very rigorous process like we have, then we need to step back and look at the whole museum, thinking about trauma informed practice. But having seen the event launch and hearing what people said about it and hearing how it provoked new thoughts, it felt like the building was fizzing and popping with these incredible moments of ignition and connection.
Brenda: Andrea, you said once that, you know, if you’re going to be in the business of museums, that you need to see social justice as your business, as your responsibility. And I love how it is that you see museums as a critical point to bring relevant subjects together to bring social justice.
Andrea: Yeah, I suppose from my personal experience, my dad grew up in care in the, well he’s 80 this year, so he grew up in care from a baby to the age of about 16, and then at the end of that process he was street homeless. He didn’t have anywhere to go. He didn’t have anywhere to be. But he used to say to me, if you have a loaf of bread, you have enough to give half to somebody else. And this is this is a kind of mantra that he’d always have as I grew up.
And there’s something about the practice and the privilege. I have a privilege to be in the job that I’m in. It’s a privilege for me to be able to be with those things and develop those projects and to coach and develop and, and work beside all these amazing people, it is my responsibility to dismantle exclusive practice in order to, for that institution to become more inclusive.
You know, people talk about virtue signaling and performing inclusivity, but it’s got to be really, it’s got to happen, and it’s got to change. And it is a vital moment of agitation and flux. Post-COVID, there are opportunities to do things differently, and we have to just do them, not sit and talk about them. It doesn’t take very much to hop out onto the steps of the museum and have a conversation with people to test an idea. That isn’t courageous. That’s just about being a human being connecting with another human being.
What people say, what people offer, are the essential ingredients for the future of that collection. So, researchers in the future aren’t going to come back into the museum and see the same stories and the same people presenting as the most important. Equitable practice comes from tipping the status quo and actively dismantling the barriers. They don’t just dissolve. You have to get out there and do that.
Abby: Wow. Andrea, thank you so much for sharing your experiences with us. As we discussed, it’s so important to give ideas time to shape, to trust your inner voice, and I know to be bold and thoughtful in our practices whilst breaking down these institutional barriers. It’s a lot to do, but as you said, rewarding work and kind of what we all signed up for. So, thank you so much, Andrea.
Andrea: Thank you so much. It’s been an absolute pleasure sharing and listening and being together. Thank you.
Abby: And thanks to everyone who tuned in today. Please 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. Take care and see you all next time.
Brenda: Be well everyone.
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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.
Human-Centered Design with Andrea Hadley-Johnson
Technology and the Human Experience with Brian Allen
Abby: Matters of Experience is a project of Lorem Ipsum, an experience design company headquartered in New York City.
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Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience, a podcast that explores the creativity, innovation and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. If you’re new, hello and welcome. And to our regular listeners, thank you for tuning in again and supporting our conversation. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: Hello everyone. This is Brenda Cowan.
Abby: So today we’re talking, Brenda, about venues that are designed exclusively to tell digital immersive stories. You know, I think they’ve evolved a lot recently out of the success of the multiple Van Gogh exhibits, and they’ve had significant success and love or hate what you saw when you got there, they’ve really created an opportunity which marketers, entrepreneurs, technologists, experience designers like me are really excited to reproduce in many different forms.
So today we’re chatting with Brian Allen, who oversees the creation and development of unique themed content, as well as architects state-of-the-art technological systems and frameworks. Co-founding Illuminarium, Brian designed and built multi-sensory immersive venues and content. Through his work producing Emmy Award and Cannes Lion-winning creations, virtual and augmented reality applications as well as location-based experiences, Brian has become a visionary in the world of immersive. Brian, welcome to the show.
Brian: Really happy to be here.
Brenda: Brian, you had a very unique upbringing. Can you tell us about your dad and how he introduced you to experiences?
Brian: My father was a set designer and a lighting designer, so at a very young age I was in a scenic shop. I was backstage in the theater constantly trying to figure out how things worked. And along these lines of experiences and seeing theatrical productions, seeing TV studios or being up in control booths, I was infinitely exposed to sort of how the sausage is made, so to speak, and it seems to have led me to my career and my drive to create and put on experiences for people, and that’s where I get the most joy.
Brenda: So, I’m really curious, Brian, something that you talk about is about how democratized the experiences are that you create. Can you tell us what you mean by that?
Brian: What we mean by democratizing experiences is not only access to experiences or accessibility of the experience, but I think it’s also about how you can be relatable to as many people as possible. It’s about giving people access and transporting people to places they may not be able to go or may not afford to go to. At Illuminarium, we used that tagline quite a bit, where we would put on shows that were revolving around a safari experience or a walk on the moon and create that emotion, create that memory for people to have a lasting effect.
Abby: So how did this whole technology side, you know, the digital side of the work come into your life, the dark side? When did that sort of like beckon?
Brian: It really started with photography and filmmaking, and I was immensely curious all the time. I took things apart. I learned how to work with my hands, which I think is crucial in this industry, in this business, and this sort of drive to understand how things worked. And after I graduated university, I ended up working at a production studio in New York called Radical Media.
And at that time we didn’t even use the word immersive. I think we called it experiential or experiential marketing, and brands would come to us with ideas and they didn’t want to just create commercials or TV spots or radio ads. They wanted experiences. They wanted a place where consumers could come and touch and feel and smell and interact with whatever product was being offered.
So, we started dreaming. We started dreaming really big. And if we didn’t know how to do something, we would just continue to research it. Trial and error, prototype things. And I think what it did more than teach me about technology was it taught me how to fail. And to me, that’s almost more important because technology is changing every single day, every single hour, and it’s almost more important to understand how to rapidly prototype something, and to get to the end product you have to go through many, many failures, you know, small and large. And so, I’m, it’s driven by this sort of endless curiosity about technology, experience, and creative.
Brenda: So, there’s a lot of human psychology in the work of advertising, connecting people with ideas and things through experiences and using emotion, curiosity, memory, these elements that you’ve been speaking about. What’s the overlap between your work in advertising and what it is that you’re doing here with these immersive environments?
Brian: You have to have this understanding of the human senses. You have to have the understanding of human emotion and how to sort of tease those things out by the way of pictures, video, lighting, scent, sound. You know, I think even before I was working in sort of immersive and location-based entertainment, we would always talk about, okay, well, what is this going to smell like?
What is this going to feel like? What happens when I walk up to it? And that’s really what’s going to drive your experience to the next level, bringing out as much of those thought-provoking, emotion-provoking elements within that experience.
Abby: Why do you think brands wanted to move into this area as opposed to stay where they were doing what they’re doing? Why is it such a powerful space to be in?
Brian: I think they’re beginning to realize that these things are much more powerful because I am physically there, I’m in-person, I’m with other people. It’s sort of a communal experience. It’s a shared experience. It’s something I can bring my partner or my friends to, and I can touch, I can feel, I can smell it. It’s sort of activating my senses beyond my sight and my hearing. That’s going to have a much more powerful impact to me than a 30-second spot.
Abby: So, when we talk about communal experiences, because I was just in a movie theater of all things, and despite loving being there with people, it’s often a double-edged sword. I’ll leave the listener to fill in the blank there.
Brenda: No, I want to hear more about this, Abby.
Abby: Let’s just say some people are about to have a fight. Some people kicking chairs, making too much noise. I was not involved with any of this raucous, but it was a little distracting from the film itself. So, how do you create successful communal experiences? Because I’m sure there’s some challenges.
Brian: To me, it’s all about setting the tone. We call it a palate cleanser. What is this sort of transitional space that’s going to allow you to sink in and be open to this experience? And I think of an experience if it’s powerful enough, if it has true spectacle within it, you’re able to kind of let things go, and you’re so in awe or so moved by what’s happening that you’re kind of, you know, maybe looking around and saying, did you just see that? Is it, are my eyes deceiving me? You have this sort of very emotional reaction with the people that you’re with, which is, in essence, sometimes more powerful than the creative itself.
Brenda: So, awe, as an experience, is pro-social. It’s really fascinating what happens with human beings when they are in nature, when they’re in something incredible like Illuminarium, the spaces that you create, it actually puts people in a perspective of wanting to, just like you were saying, have that did you just see that those experiences are very, very natural and you clearly tap into them beautifully.
Abby: I want to talk a little bit about Illuminarium. We’re talking about it sort of abstractly. Can you you know, just in a couple of words, Brian, describe its mission and what it’s trying to do.
Brian: Illuminarium is a projection based, immersive experience that plays out over two different spaces. At Illuminarium, we layer different technologies to sort of activate all of those senses. So, there’s a haptic system in the floor that generates low-frequency vibration. There’s a scent delivery system that every show has a signature scent. There is a spatial audio system that allows us to beamform audio, which, which essentially means I can place different sounds in the physical space without you having to wear any hardware or anything like that.
We sort of set out to almost give the illusion of reality to, to transport you to a different world, to a different environment. We also have an interactive system that’s sort of a person tracking system that allows us to activate or generate content depending on where you move in the space, which contrasted with maybe something like the Van Gogh experience, we sort of try to amp that up a little bit and use these various technologies on top of that to suspend your disbelief, right, to, to allow you to not realize that you’re in an air-conditioned building in Las Vegas or Atlanta. It was a really interesting format for us to work within. And I think it had challenges, right?
It’s really hard to have a beginning, middle, and end, a sort of linear narrative, when you can’t control someone’s attention. How can I have or convey a narrative, a storyline where there is, are characters and there’s things happening, no matter where I am in this space? I think it’s interesting from a storytelling standpoint in these types of formats, the sort of path that my mind goes down to take advantage of this opportunity is foundationally rooted in something like a Choose Your Own Adventure book.
I think about the use of interactive technology, the use of real-time technology, where it allows me to create content based off of somebody’s movement in real time. And that to me is really interesting because not only is it interactive, but it becomes personalized.
Brenda: Thinking about real-time and thinking about the nature of storytelling, I’m really curious to hear about the good old analog human being that you incorporate within the story. And I’m really curious if your people that you have in your experiences, are they storytellers themselves? Do you consider them storytellers or are they directional devices to help people follow the pattern and the flow? Are they scripted? Can you tell us a little bit more about how do you integrate in a seamless way a human being within this incredible technological spectacular?
Brian: So, there’s a smaller space in Illuminarium, and that’s where you meet your guide. And the guide is usually a human. So, another character of the story. So, in the space show, it’s an astronaut, and the human element is really important in that context because it sort of makes you feel connected to the content, right? So, you’re sort of like having this character break the fourth wall so that not everything is in the digital realm.
What we try and do is, you know, they have a script, but we often encourage these actors and actresses to add their own personal touch to these, these scripts. You know, there are certain things we have to hit, whether they be sort of, you know, rules and regulations. But even the rules and regulations are sort of branded within this story, right?
So, you know, don’t run and jump because there’s no gravity on the moon, which makes it a little more easier to hear and you almost start tricking people because they’re not necessarily hearing your safety procedures, but they’re being entered into this, into this story. You know, I view that person, that character, almost as this like shepherd through the narrative.
And I think it’s really important, no matter how digital and interactive and real-time, something becomes, you always have to have that sort of human element.
Abby: But is this now a beast you feel you have to satiate? Because it isn’t a museum or an institution linked to a specific mission. So how does this type of experience evolve, and who decides what’s next, what stories you’re going to tell, and how much is dictated by your, you know, your target audience and their interests?
Brian: In the first few experiences that we decided to create, we were thinking about experiences that had mass appeal. Experiences that worked in many different markets and that were timeless. It’s sort of akin to the early days of IMAX theater films where you have volcanoes and jungle and underwater, and they were saying, okay, we have this new camera technology, let’s just take it to someplace cool and push record, and we’ll see what we get.
And I think we’re in that sort of stage with this format where it is, you know, sort of in its infancy where how do we have an experience that is relatable to a lot of different age groups and different cultures, etc.? And then I look to sort of, okay, we’ve sort of done that and we have our sort of baseline experiences.
What I’m curious and interested in, is how do we take sort of existing IP that already maybe has a following, already has cultural significance, and create that world, you know, around the IP. So, I think of maybe the Stranger Things experience that was touring where they created an entire world out of a show or can I step into, you know, Picasso’s studio?
How do I sort of create those experiences, because I think they have a lot of emotion attached to them where people are experiencing this creative on one format that they’re really familiar with, and now they get to experience that in a format that they may have never seen before. But it’s this, it’s that sort of throughline of creative.
Abby: There’s a number of different companies, sort of like Illuminarium that are looking at monetizing this new immersive experience. And they’re looking at the square footage of the spaces, what’s ideal from that perspective and IP, is it worth the hundreds of thousands of dollars? You know, there’s a lot of unknowns, but a lot of potential on the flip side.
So, what do you think, Bryan, about the venue based immersion versus the traveling shows question, from a business perspective?
Brian: There’s pros and cons to each, right. So, I think the benefit of a traveling show is I can traverse many places in a short amount of time. I can set things up very quickly, and that could grow as a business, right? Cirque du Soleil has been doing it for years. You can have these very even technologically advanced and elaborate shows when you’re traveling.
The benefit of having a permanent location is you establish this brand presence, right? You have this facility, this place where people know if I go back to Illuminarium, I wonder what’s new, what’s playing next? Maybe that’s an event. Maybe that’s artists and DJs who are coming through town. We could host them Sometimes that was morning yoga sessions. Sometimes that was a new spectacle or a new addition to one of our spectacles. So you have this sort of evergreen nature to the, this sort of permanent aspect of that venue.
Brenda: I love the idea of how it is that this can by having these permanent sort of flagship places, if that’s the right word, can enable you to build community. I’m really curious about the nature of experience design writ large and how there’s so much of a journey of discovery going on right now. What excites you about what you see going on profession-wide and where you see our industry headed?
Brian: To me, what excites me are the people and companies who are trying to tackle the narrative question. We were talking about earlier how challenging it is to create narrative when you can’t control attention. How can I have someone come away from an hour long experience and felt like they just watched an Oscar winning film? The other thing that I am sort of really, really passionate about is the use of real-time and artificial intelligence systems to make things personalized, to make things evergreen, to allow this content to sort of change.
So, if I can have a single show that every time I come back, I not only leave an imprint of myself, but it’s a different show when I come back. And that to me is very, very interesting because it creates that sense of community, like you said, but it also has this sort of cultural center appeal to it, where I know that if I come back, I can, I can show someone, hey, that’s where I left last time this is, you know, whatever that is.
It’s a color palette. It’s a song. It’s a, you know, a character. That is interesting. How, how do we use these systems that are just now really coming to the mainstream culture when people talk about, you know, ChatGPT and DALL-E, those are interesting tools that we have as experience designers to now use within our creative.
Brenda: So, Brian, thinking about the visitor experience, what are the key differences between an object-rich venue designed for content compared with a space that has a more temporary digitally immersive experience inside of it? Do you think that not having physical exhibits or things to touch isn’t ideal, or is, you know, an equivalent kind of experience? How do you see objects and the lack of objects play into the nature of the connection that people are having with the story?
Brian: I think an experience that is object heavy or there is things to touch and interact with is always going to be my preference. I think that there is this grounded nature if I can touch things and and they have texture and they’re a part of the story versus something that’s purely digital, to me, I will always favor the first one. And I think if you’re going to have an experience that is leaning toward the digital side, you have to make up for it in story, in spectacle. But there is this, there’s the rooted connection of, you know, me being able to touch something.
I think back to one of the first sort of room scale VR experiences I ever did, which was put on by The Void. It was the sort of Ghostbusters experience where the digital world matched the physical world, but you couldn’t see that physical world. So, if there was a phone in the VR headset, there was a real phone that you could pick up. And I just remember being blown away by that because now you have this tool that you can texture and color your set however you want, but the object, the physical thing, the wind blowing, the, the smells, they’re all there, they’re all physical, which trick your brain into thinking whatever you saw on the screen was real. And that’s so important.
Abby: We have some listeners who want to know the brass tacks, like how much approximately does it cost to, like, create a space like Illuminarium, you know, and then to update it at all, because a lot of museums are, you know, they rely on donors and the government to keep open. And I know this is privately funded so quantify it for our listeners in some way.
Brian: So, I think there’s a spectrum to these things. And, you know, I think the I mean, let’s talk about the content creation. You know, you look at a blockbuster film cost $100 million or $200 million. We’re doing content for, you know, maybe 10% of that. And I think there’s still a spectrum between that where, you know, you don’t have to have these $10, $20, $30, $40 million budgets to create great content.
It is very expensive and the reason it’s very expensive is because of the sheer amount of real estate you have on your screen, right? So, that increases things like rendering costs, it increases capture costs, post-production, VFX work. Now, in terms of infrastructure, that’s totally scalable, right? You can do something on the Van Gogh side for $2, $3, $4 or $5 million and be able to travel that.
And sort of on the permanent scale side, you know, that’s, you know, in the realms of $10, $20, $30 million. It’s that classic, you know, audiophile question of well how much money do you have, how much do you want to spend? And then there’s a baseline. No matter how much technology you have and what projectors you have or whatnot, it’s always going to boil down to the content. It’s always going to boil down to how good is your story, how good is your narrative, and what do people feel when they come away.
Abby: Brian, thanks so much for joining us today and sharing your thoughts on successful, technologically advanced experiences and reminding us how important a human is at the center of those.
Brenda: And the story, Abby, right? Brian, thank you so much. This was amazing. We really appreciate your time.
Brian: Thank you very much to you both. It was fantastic speaking with you. And I really appreciate your time.
Abby: If you like what you heard today, 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: Bye 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.
Abby: Matters of Experience is a project of Lorem Ipsum, an experience design company headquartered in New York City.
[Music]
Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience, a podcast that explores the creativity, innovation and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. If you’re new, hello and welcome. And to our regular listeners, thank you for tuning in again and supporting our conversation. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: Hello everyone. This is Brenda Cowan.
Abby: So today we’re talking, Brenda, about venues that are designed exclusively to tell digital immersive stories. You know, I think they’ve evolved a lot recently out of the success of the multiple Van Gogh exhibits, and they’ve had significant success and love or hate what you saw when you got there, they’ve really created an opportunity which marketers, entrepreneurs, technologists, experience designers like me are really excited to reproduce in many different forms.
So today we’re chatting with Brian Allen, who oversees the creation and development of unique themed content, as well as architects state-of-the-art technological systems and frameworks. Co-founding Illuminarium, Brian designed and built multi-sensory immersive venues and content. Through his work producing Emmy Award and Cannes Lion-winning creations, virtual and augmented reality applications as well as location-based experiences, Brian has become a visionary in the world of immersive. Brian, welcome to the show.
Brian: Really happy to be here.
Brenda: Brian, you had a very unique upbringing. Can you tell us about your dad and how he introduced you to experiences?
Brian: My father was a set designer and a lighting designer, so at a very young age I was in a scenic shop. I was backstage in the theater constantly trying to figure out how things worked. And along these lines of experiences and seeing theatrical productions, seeing TV studios or being up in control booths, I was infinitely exposed to sort of how the sausage is made, so to speak, and it seems to have led me to my career and my drive to create and put on experiences for people, and that’s where I get the most joy.
Brenda: So, I’m really curious, Brian, something that you talk about is about how democratized the experiences are that you create. Can you tell us what you mean by that?
Brian: What we mean by democratizing experiences is not only access to experiences or accessibility of the experience, but I think it’s also about how you can be relatable to as many people as possible. It’s about giving people access and transporting people to places they may not be able to go or may not afford to go to. At Illuminarium, we used that tagline quite a bit, where we would put on shows that were revolving around a safari experience or a walk on the moon and create that emotion, create that memory for people to have a lasting effect.
Abby: So how did this whole technology side, you know, the digital side of the work come into your life, the dark side? When did that sort of like beckon?
Brian: It really started with photography and filmmaking, and I was immensely curious all the time. I took things apart. I learned how to work with my hands, which I think is crucial in this industry, in this business, and this sort of drive to understand how things worked. And after I graduated university, I ended up working at a production studio in New York called Radical Media.
And at that time we didn’t even use the word immersive. I think we called it experiential or experiential marketing, and brands would come to us with ideas and they didn’t want to just create commercials or TV spots or radio ads. They wanted experiences. They wanted a place where consumers could come and touch and feel and smell and interact with whatever product was being offered.
So, we started dreaming. We started dreaming really big. And if we didn’t know how to do something, we would just continue to research it. Trial and error, prototype things. And I think what it did more than teach me about technology was it taught me how to fail. And to me, that’s almost more important because technology is changing every single day, every single hour, and it’s almost more important to understand how to rapidly prototype something, and to get to the end product you have to go through many, many failures, you know, small and large. And so, I’m, it’s driven by this sort of endless curiosity about technology, experience, and creative.
Brenda: So, there’s a lot of human psychology in the work of advertising, connecting people with ideas and things through experiences and using emotion, curiosity, memory, these elements that you’ve been speaking about. What’s the overlap between your work in advertising and what it is that you’re doing here with these immersive environments?
Brian: You have to have this understanding of the human senses. You have to have the understanding of human emotion and how to sort of tease those things out by the way of pictures, video, lighting, scent, sound. You know, I think even before I was working in sort of immersive and location-based entertainment, we would always talk about, okay, well, what is this going to smell like?
What is this going to feel like? What happens when I walk up to it? And that’s really what’s going to drive your experience to the next level, bringing out as much of those thought-provoking, emotion-provoking elements within that experience.
Abby: Why do you think brands wanted to move into this area as opposed to stay where they were doing what they’re doing? Why is it such a powerful space to be in?
Brian: I think they’re beginning to realize that these things are much more powerful because I am physically there, I’m in-person, I’m with other people. It’s sort of a communal experience. It’s a shared experience. It’s something I can bring my partner or my friends to, and I can touch, I can feel, I can smell it. It’s sort of activating my senses beyond my sight and my hearing. That’s going to have a much more powerful impact to me than a 30-second spot.
Abby: So, when we talk about communal experiences, because I was just in a movie theater of all things, and despite loving being there with people, it’s often a double-edged sword. I’ll leave the listener to fill in the blank there.
Brenda: No, I want to hear more about this, Abby.
Abby: Let’s just say some people are about to have a fight. Some people kicking chairs, making too much noise. I was not involved with any of this raucous, but it was a little distracting from the film itself. So, how do you create successful communal experiences? Because I’m sure there’s some challenges.
Brian: To me, it’s all about setting the tone. We call it a palate cleanser. What is this sort of transitional space that’s going to allow you to sink in and be open to this experience? And I think of an experience if it’s powerful enough, if it has true spectacle within it, you’re able to kind of let things go, and you’re so in awe or so moved by what’s happening that you’re kind of, you know, maybe looking around and saying, did you just see that? Is it, are my eyes deceiving me? You have this sort of very emotional reaction with the people that you’re with, which is, in essence, sometimes more powerful than the creative itself.
Brenda: So, awe, as an experience, is pro-social. It’s really fascinating what happens with human beings when they are in nature, when they’re in something incredible like Illuminarium, the spaces that you create, it actually puts people in a perspective of wanting to, just like you were saying, have that did you just see that those experiences are very, very natural and you clearly tap into them beautifully.
Abby: I want to talk a little bit about Illuminarium. We’re talking about it sort of abstractly. Can you you know, just in a couple of words, Brian, describe its mission and what it’s trying to do.
Brian: Illuminarium is a projection based, immersive experience that plays out over two different spaces. At Illuminarium, we layer different technologies to sort of activate all of those senses. So, there’s a haptic system in the floor that generates low-frequency vibration. There’s a scent delivery system that every show has a signature scent. There is a spatial audio system that allows us to beamform audio, which, which essentially means I can place different sounds in the physical space without you having to wear any hardware or anything like that.
We sort of set out to almost give the illusion of reality to, to transport you to a different world, to a different environment. We also have an interactive system that’s sort of a person tracking system that allows us to activate or generate content depending on where you move in the space, which contrasted with maybe something like the Van Gogh experience, we sort of try to amp that up a little bit and use these various technologies on top of that to suspend your disbelief, right, to, to allow you to not realize that you’re in an air-conditioned building in Las Vegas or Atlanta. It was a really interesting format for us to work within. And I think it had challenges, right?
It’s really hard to have a beginning, middle, and end, a sort of linear narrative, when you can’t control someone’s attention. How can I have or convey a narrative, a storyline where there is, are characters and there’s things happening, no matter where I am in this space? I think it’s interesting from a storytelling standpoint in these types of formats, the sort of path that my mind goes down to take advantage of this opportunity is foundationally rooted in something like a Choose Your Own Adventure book.
I think about the use of interactive technology, the use of real-time technology, where it allows me to create content based off of somebody’s movement in real time. And that to me is really interesting because not only is it interactive, but it becomes personalized.
Brenda: Thinking about real-time and thinking about the nature of storytelling, I’m really curious to hear about the good old analog human being that you incorporate within the story. And I’m really curious if your people that you have in your experiences, are they storytellers themselves? Do you consider them storytellers or are they directional devices to help people follow the pattern and the flow? Are they scripted? Can you tell us a little bit more about how do you integrate in a seamless way a human being within this incredible technological spectacular?
Brian: So, there’s a smaller space in Illuminarium, and that’s where you meet your guide. And the guide is usually a human. So, another character of the story. So, in the space show, it’s an astronaut, and the human element is really important in that context because it sort of makes you feel connected to the content, right? So, you’re sort of like having this character break the fourth wall so that not everything is in the digital realm.
What we try and do is, you know, they have a script, but we often encourage these actors and actresses to add their own personal touch to these, these scripts. You know, there are certain things we have to hit, whether they be sort of, you know, rules and regulations. But even the rules and regulations are sort of branded within this story, right?
So, you know, don’t run and jump because there’s no gravity on the moon, which makes it a little more easier to hear and you almost start tricking people because they’re not necessarily hearing your safety procedures, but they’re being entered into this, into this story. You know, I view that person, that character, almost as this like shepherd through the narrative.
And I think it’s really important, no matter how digital and interactive and real-time, something becomes, you always have to have that sort of human element.
Abby: But is this now a beast you feel you have to satiate? Because it isn’t a museum or an institution linked to a specific mission. So how does this type of experience evolve, and who decides what’s next, what stories you’re going to tell, and how much is dictated by your, you know, your target audience and their interests?
Brian: In the first few experiences that we decided to create, we were thinking about experiences that had mass appeal. Experiences that worked in many different markets and that were timeless. It’s sort of akin to the early days of IMAX theater films where you have volcanoes and jungle and underwater, and they were saying, okay, we have this new camera technology, let’s just take it to someplace cool and push record, and we’ll see what we get.
And I think we’re in that sort of stage with this format where it is, you know, sort of in its infancy where how do we have an experience that is relatable to a lot of different age groups and different cultures, etc.? And then I look to sort of, okay, we’ve sort of done that and we have our sort of baseline experiences.
What I’m curious and interested in, is how do we take sort of existing IP that already maybe has a following, already has cultural significance, and create that world, you know, around the IP. So, I think of maybe the Stranger Things experience that was touring where they created an entire world out of a show or can I step into, you know, Picasso’s studio?
How do I sort of create those experiences, because I think they have a lot of emotion attached to them where people are experiencing this creative on one format that they’re really familiar with, and now they get to experience that in a format that they may have never seen before. But it’s this, it’s that sort of throughline of creative.
Abby: There’s a number of different companies, sort of like Illuminarium that are looking at monetizing this new immersive experience. And they’re looking at the square footage of the spaces, what’s ideal from that perspective and IP, is it worth the hundreds of thousands of dollars? You know, there’s a lot of unknowns, but a lot of potential on the flip side.
So, what do you think, Bryan, about the venue based immersion versus the traveling shows question, from a business perspective?
Brian: There’s pros and cons to each, right. So, I think the benefit of a traveling show is I can traverse many places in a short amount of time. I can set things up very quickly, and that could grow as a business, right? Cirque du Soleil has been doing it for years. You can have these very even technologically advanced and elaborate shows when you’re traveling.
The benefit of having a permanent location is you establish this brand presence, right? You have this facility, this place where people know if I go back to Illuminarium, I wonder what’s new, what’s playing next? Maybe that’s an event. Maybe that’s artists and DJs who are coming through town. We could host them Sometimes that was morning yoga sessions. Sometimes that was a new spectacle or a new addition to one of our spectacles. So you have this sort of evergreen nature to the, this sort of permanent aspect of that venue.
Brenda: I love the idea of how it is that this can by having these permanent sort of flagship places, if that’s the right word, can enable you to build community. I’m really curious about the nature of experience design writ large and how there’s so much of a journey of discovery going on right now. What excites you about what you see going on profession-wide and where you see our industry headed?
Brian: To me, what excites me are the people and companies who are trying to tackle the narrative question. We were talking about earlier how challenging it is to create narrative when you can’t control attention. How can I have someone come away from an hour long experience and felt like they just watched an Oscar winning film? The other thing that I am sort of really, really passionate about is the use of real-time and artificial intelligence systems to make things personalized, to make things evergreen, to allow this content to sort of change.
So, if I can have a single show that every time I come back, I not only leave an imprint of myself, but it’s a different show when I come back. And that to me is very, very interesting because it creates that sense of community, like you said, but it also has this sort of cultural center appeal to it, where I know that if I come back, I can, I can show someone, hey, that’s where I left last time this is, you know, whatever that is.
It’s a color palette. It’s a song. It’s a, you know, a character. That is interesting. How, how do we use these systems that are just now really coming to the mainstream culture when people talk about, you know, ChatGPT and DALL-E, those are interesting tools that we have as experience designers to now use within our creative.
Brenda: So, Brian, thinking about the visitor experience, what are the key differences between an object-rich venue designed for content compared with a space that has a more temporary digitally immersive experience inside of it? Do you think that not having physical exhibits or things to touch isn’t ideal, or is, you know, an equivalent kind of experience? How do you see objects and the lack of objects play into the nature of the connection that people are having with the story?
Brian: I think an experience that is object heavy or there is things to touch and interact with is always going to be my preference. I think that there is this grounded nature if I can touch things and and they have texture and they’re a part of the story versus something that’s purely digital, to me, I will always favor the first one. And I think if you’re going to have an experience that is leaning toward the digital side, you have to make up for it in story, in spectacle. But there is this, there’s the rooted connection of, you know, me being able to touch something.
I think back to one of the first sort of room scale VR experiences I ever did, which was put on by The Void. It was the sort of Ghostbusters experience where the digital world matched the physical world, but you couldn’t see that physical world. So, if there was a phone in the VR headset, there was a real phone that you could pick up. And I just remember being blown away by that because now you have this tool that you can texture and color your set however you want, but the object, the physical thing, the wind blowing, the, the smells, they’re all there, they’re all physical, which trick your brain into thinking whatever you saw on the screen was real. And that’s so important.
Abby: We have some listeners who want to know the brass tacks, like how much approximately does it cost to, like, create a space like Illuminarium, you know, and then to update it at all, because a lot of museums are, you know, they rely on donors and the government to keep open. And I know this is privately funded so quantify it for our listeners in some way.
Brian: So, I think there’s a spectrum to these things. And, you know, I think the I mean, let’s talk about the content creation. You know, you look at a blockbuster film cost $100 million or $200 million. We’re doing content for, you know, maybe 10% of that. And I think there’s still a spectrum between that where, you know, you don’t have to have these $10, $20, $30, $40 million budgets to create great content.
It is very expensive and the reason it’s very expensive is because of the sheer amount of real estate you have on your screen, right? So, that increases things like rendering costs, it increases capture costs, post-production, VFX work. Now, in terms of infrastructure, that’s totally scalable, right? You can do something on the Van Gogh side for $2, $3, $4 or $5 million and be able to travel that.
And sort of on the permanent scale side, you know, that’s, you know, in the realms of $10, $20, $30 million. It’s that classic, you know, audiophile question of well how much money do you have, how much do you want to spend? And then there’s a baseline. No matter how much technology you have and what projectors you have or whatnot, it’s always going to boil down to the content. It’s always going to boil down to how good is your story, how good is your narrative, and what do people feel when they come away.
Abby: Brian, thanks so much for joining us today and sharing your thoughts on successful, technologically advanced experiences and reminding us how important a human is at the center of those.
Brenda: And the story, Abby, right? Brian, thank you so much. This was amazing. We really appreciate your time.
Brian: Thank you very much to you both. It was fantastic speaking with you. And I really appreciate your time.
Abby: If you like what you heard today, 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: Bye 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.
Technology and the Human Experience with Brian Allen
Cultivating Future Design and Industry Leaders with Cybelle Jones
[Music]
Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience, a podcast that explores the creativity, innovation and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. If you’re new, a big hello and to our regular listeners, thank you for tuning in and supporting our conversation. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: Hello, I’m Brenda Cowan.
Abby: Today, we’re talking with my good friend, Cybelle Jones. Cybelle is CEO responsible for strategic leadership that fosters excellence in every aspect of SEGD. Before this, she was Principal and Executive Director of Gallagher & Associates. Cybelle studied architecture at the University of Cincinnati and helped establish the Masters of Exhibition Design program at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, D.C.
Cybelle’s received so many awards and honors that we really don’t have time to list them all here. Cybelle, so sorry, but we just wanted to mention the American Institute of Architects Award of Excellence and that she has been a guest critic and speaker for organizations everywhere, including the V&A, American Alliance of Museums, Building Museums Symposium, International Council of Museums and the Fashion Institute of Technology. Oh my gosh. So, Cybelle, a huge welcome to the show.
Brenda: So, Cybelle, before you joined the Society for Experiential Graphic Design, you spearheaded a lot of the work that was coming out of Gallagher & Associates. Of all the projects, can you name a couple of your favorites and why do they stand out, looking back on them?
Cybelle: That’s an unfair question because I love all of my children. I can’t have a favorite. Being in the field of experience design for as long as I was was just phenomenal. I got to work with former presidents and Olympic athletes and Hollywood stars and civil rights activists, and even mobsters and spies. So, it’s hard to pick a favorite. I’m going to pick a couple that were transformative I think for me personally.
The first one was the first iteration of the International Spy Museum, which opened in Washington, D.C. and at the time that we were working on it, there was not a model of a museum that would be self-sustaining. Most museums at the time relied on philanthropy and government funding to keep their doors open and pay their staff. And we had a client and he said, why can’t we create a museum that is self-sustaining and is fun?
And so, we came up with this concept of building a spy museum in Washington, D.C., and I will tell you the honest truth, people were not excited about that. The museum industry did not want to even call a museum a museum for-profit because it seemed like that was the antithesis of what a museum as an institution should be. And the reputation was building as we were designing this project, that it would fail, that people would not go to it because in the city of Washington, D.C., where every almost every museum is free, why would you pay to go to a museum?
But from my role as the lead designer, I had a client who was not really a museum person, and he really pushed our team to say, if you could just think out of the box and reimagine a model of a museum that people wanted to go to, that were, that was really memorable, it was an experience, what would that look like? And the topic of spying hadn’t been done, like no one had done a museum on spying. So, it was so much fun. It might have been one of the projects where I had the most creative freedom to just think outside of the box.
That museum definitely stood out and there were nerve-wracking moments. We had a Washington Post article that came out before we opened that just was horrible.
Abby: Tell me a little bit about that part, being in the middle of the process and having everybody doubt your success and it sounds like actively work against the success of the Spy Museum. You must have had some self-doubts, knowing you were doing something fun, there must have been something in there, you know. How did the team, how did you deal with those, with those boundaries everyone was putting up for you?
Cybelle: The museum was going to open, there was, the money was invested, the building was leased. Anything great where you’re the underdog and you’re just driven to do the best possible job that you can do. And it was not until probably a month after the opening. I mean, people were like waiting in line even when we were under construction. I mean, I think the sex appeal of the International Spy Museum was very attractive to people. It was so different from anything else they had heard about. And I was doing the punch list, you know, after the project was open and I had a notepad, and some mom came up to me – and we actually, we did audience research, and the target audience for this museum was not families with kids, because we didn’t really think that they would spend the money, we thought it was more like the professional, like 30, 40-year-old professional that would be in Washington, D.C. for work. But there was a mom, and she had her seven-year-old daughter, and the little girl goes this is the best museum ever.
And her mom said, we’ve just spent four days at all the Smithsonians and, and my daughter just loves this. It’s so fun, but she’s learning and – those moments of pride where all of that doubt and anxiety and, you know, we were making a new model. It wasn’t perfect. There were a lot of things that didn’t work perfectly. But I think I’m proud to say people started waking up and saying, hey, maybe this whole thing of a museum actually being an experience, bring some of that energy to the three-dimensional world.
Brenda: Well, the Spy Museum, it’s a tremendous example, and I think a great, one of the great early examples of how to have multi-layer user experience occurring. You can basically visit the exhibition on your own terms, I guess is maybe the best way to put it. And so, it’s really well done. I’m glad that you pointed this out as a favorite, a favorite child of yours.
Cybelle: Yeah. Another project later in my career was similar in the sense that no one was really paying attention to this project. It was the Mississippi Arts + Entertainment Museum in Meridian, Mississippi, which you’re going to say, where is that? Look it up. It’s close to the border of Alabama. And even when I got this project, I wondered how it was going to go. Would these people actually ever raise the money to build a new, world-class museum in this little town of Meridian? And the architect and I started off not on the best foot. We’re very different backgrounds and political beliefs and, but we both believed that providing Mississippi with a world class institution that would celebrate those artists that were homegrown, like Oprah Winfrey and Leontyne Price, who was the first African-American opera singer to perform at the Met.
So, there are all these amazing individuals that came out of Mississippi who didn’t – they weren’t exposed to the arts growing up, and you kind of had to say to yourself, what is it? Is it something in the water here that, you know, you can grow up never going to an opera or a museum or not even being able to see Hollywood films, but then you have a James Earl Jones. So, it became a real passion of mine because I feel like museums oftentimes are only for the elite, and they should be for everyone.
And so, this was a bit of an experiment of how do you make art accessible to people that might not understand what art is, and particularly abstract art. And so, we, we took a really unique approach, but we also, building on the theatrics and immersion that I had been developing as a designer, we just wanted to take people to a place where they could kind of imagine seeing the world through the experiences of these artists before they were famous and what defined them.
I think one of the most memorable takeaways I had was when a high school group visited, and that high school group was from a very rural part of Mississippi, and they had never been to a museum before. They had never eaten out at a restaurant, and they said that they saw people in that museum that looked like them and that they could imagine themselves being. And it was transformative.
Brenda: I know the project in Mississippi. And one of the things that I think is really exciting is how much you and the team engaged the audience in determining how the exhibition could work best and welcome them best, and also really foster that sense of belonging that you were discussing.
Abby: Well, just building on that, actually, it’s really interesting in the two stories, the Spy Museum, and then down in Mississippi, you are acting as a mere filter in a way. You are deciding, it sounds Cybelle, as you are being immersed in these stories, for want of a better word, and you’re giving yourself time to get to the heart of the authenticity before you’re starting to do an interpretive plan, and this is what’s going to look like.
Brenda: I think, too, you operate as an ally, which is a necessary role of everybody who’s in our industry.
Cybelle: That’s interesting, Brenda. I hadn’t really thought about this, but when I was growing up, I moved 16 times by the time I was 13. You won’t believe it, but I was an incredibly shy child and I think that taught me to be a very good observer and to kind of read the room, read the culture, and be adaptable and empathetic. I don’t know why I’m having this aha moment on this podcast, but …
Abby: Well, we’re glad you’re having it with us, with friends.
Brenda: Yes.
Abby: This is a comfortable environment.
Cybelle: With friends, with these two amazing women. I think that’s how I treated, have always tried to treat my clients and my design team is that, that synergy, that collaboration – like for me, if I’m breathing, I’m collaborating. It’s like you’re going on a trip, and you don’t know where you’re going, you don’t know where you’re staying that night, you don’t know what you’re going to eat, but you’re together, and you’re on a mission. And that’s where the magic happens.
Brenda: In a way, this is setting up a nice flow into the next question, which is – Abby, and I are really curious to hear about the idea of legacy, and as you were developing these projects in your years at Gallagher & Associates, how aware were you of the legacy that you were leaving behind?
Cybelle: I never thought about a legacy. I think I thought about a couple of things. One, I always wanted to make – I have three, three daughters – I always wanted to be a role model for my daughters in a sense of that you could do what you loved, and you could be good at it, but that meant you were going to have to work really hard and having had a pretty chaotic life and at times we had to be pretty scrappy, when I look at a project and the fees that they’re paying us and what that cost to build a museum, you really have to honor that this is a tremendous responsibility.
Museums might renovate once in someone, some curator’s, some director’s career. They’re going to put everything into that all their hours. They already have a job. Now they have to have the second job of working with us. That’s not really the job they’re used to doing and then, say if you work at the Smithsonian on a project that sees like 9, 10 million visitors a year.
So, to me, I don’t know that I ever thought about me personally. I don’t think I ever thought anybody would know my name or that I did anything because nobody knows who an exhibit designer is or even what they do. Hopefully that’s changing now, but I think what I was about was giving people an experience that’s going to spark something. The Maya Angelou quote, like, people will forget what you say and what you did, but they’ll never forget how you made them feel. And I felt that way about all my clients. You know, I had to give them the best.
And then also for my design team because you guys know, you work really hard as a designer. I mean, you put so many hours in and you live and breathe these. Like, even if you’re not working, you’re thinking about it in the shower or when you get up or over the weekend, and I needed to make it worth it to them. So, being genuine, a lot of laughter. I know you guys both do that. Like, just be sincere, you know, no B.S. Just try to do your best.
Abby: So when you look at sort of the business and the way that it evolved when you were designing, what were some of those major shifts you saw?
Cybelle: I started my career at George Sexton Associates, and we – I don’t know if you know George, he’s still designing – but we would do art exhibitions, and we were hand drawing, and we were building models. And my youngest daughter just graduated in design school from the University of Oregon. The things that she has to know now, the technical skills she has to have to be able to create photorealistic renderings, but not just the technical side. She has to have an understanding of accessibility, sensory education level, language. It’s a lot. You have to be a jack of all trades. So, I think from the designer side, that’s evolved a lot.
On the business side, that’s a good thing. We have to change. Things have to change. The way we tell stories, who we bring to the table, who we include in the process of designing, and what is the return on the experience. What is the return on the commitment, time, money on behalf of whoever that audience is.
Brenda: Let’s turn our focus to your latest challenge as CEO of SEGD. In some ways, this must be very different from your previous job. Is your work leading SEGD a really huge shift for you, and you know what’s similar and what’s different?
Cybelle: I think what’s the same is that it’s all about the people. It’s finding the best talent. It’s finding the best minds. You know, I have a very small team. I went from 150 people at Gallagher, and I have four people at SEGD, but I have all of you wonderful people that I collaborate with, right? The members, the speakers, the people that work on the education side. So, I think that that connectivity of bringing great minds together, that’s the same to me.
Abby: You are at the heart of this community. I mean, your ideas, from working with you, are innovative. You know how to engage with us, and really, you’ve grown our community incredibly, and it’s such a diverse community. You’re open to bringing in people from all different facets.
So, what was your initial mission when you first started, Cybelle, and how do you feel it’s changed over the years?
Cybelle: I believe that experience design is the field of practice to solve the problems of the future. Why, during COVID, would I go out of my house to go to an office, to, to eat out? It’s because of the experience that I can’t have at home by myself. And we, our community at SEGD, are curators of that. And we know how to do it so well, very differently from any other area of practice, right?
We understand how to bring people in. We know how to get them excited, or to calm them down or how to make a story come to life. And I always felt like when I sit on the plane and somebody would say, what do you do? I design museums. What? I didn’t know people did that. Yes. How are museums born? People have to design museums. So, it’s been a life passion of mine to get the word out.
The members of SEGD, the Global Design Award winners, the fellows are the best in the business. They are outstanding. They stand for design excellence. They stand for doing things the right way with the right process, with the right messages. And I just want to make our organization a model.
Brenda: Thinking about all of the different talent and the cross-disciplinary experts, the students, and the seasoned professionals that comprise SEGD, I’m curious, how do you capture such a breadth of individuals? Like is there a unifying approach that you know speaks to everyone, that pulls everybody together to form this unified community?
Cybelle: You have to celebrate the differences. It’s negotiating. It’s bringing everybody to the table at the same time. And guess what? Not everybody’s going to want the same thing. And that’s okay, right? What do we agree on? We agree on design excellence. We agree that we have to build a path for that next generation.
So, it’s really how I operate. I’ve always operated with a lot of caring, a lot of loving. We don’t use that word enough, a lot of joy. Hey, the world is not great, but we can really make a difference in the work that we do, and that’s unique about our field. I think I look for that. I have great resources of all these rock stars in the field, and they’re supportive, and they give their time, and – like the two of you, you both give a lot of your time, not just to do your jobs, but to help our field of practice and to bring other people up. Right? That’s also my job is, I want all of our members to be employed and I want them to have good projects, and I want them to feel proud about the work.
Brenda: So, in my role in exhibition and experience design at FIT, I know firsthand the level of dedication of SEGD to cultivating future design and industry leaders, and the organization plays this massive role in the mentorship, the nurturance, the support of the younger generation, and also individuals who are entering into the experience design profession from other professional backgrounds. And, but they’re new in many ways. Why is this critical? Why is it critical for SEGD to be providing its vital resources to cultivating this new talent, this future of design?
Cybelle: Well, we wouldn’t survive without it. We don’t understand the world in which this next generation is coming into. And so, there’s no way that we have the ability to do the right thing on behalf of some of our projects and clients. We need that next generation voice. They see the world differently than us. First of all, I don’t think they want to spend all their life just working. They understand about this concept of work-life balance, which the design industry has been really bad about.
But the other thing is that we have so much to give to them, and we have so much to opportunity to share what we’ve learned. I’ve talked to a lot of young women that have started their own business and they need someone to kind of bounce ideas off of and sometimes ask some really tactical questions, right.
And the other thing is not just the students. I mean, we all go through career transitions. When I went through this career transition, that was very hard for me. We’re all going to face some moments in our life, and we need support to get through that.
Abby: So, the big 5-0. it’s a mighty age, the semicentennial. A lot happens over that time period. Fashions change, technology changes. You have this incredible year with I know one of your big flagship events is going to be the annual conference in Washington, D.C. in late August. It’s coming up. I encourage everybody listening to go to the SEGD website – there will be a link on our page – and come, buy a ticket. It’s unbelievable. It will be phenomenal.
The theme is look both ways. So, Cybelle, tell us what it feels like for an organization to turn 50 and the idea of look both ways.
Cybelle: We are going to take our attendees on a journey we’re going to start with the founders and where we came from. We’re going to have amazing speakers like Llisa Demetrios, who is the granddaughter of Ray and Charles Eames. She runs the Eames Institute for Infinite Curiosity. And there’s so many trajectories that we can trace back to the Eames because they were one of the first truly interdisciplinary design firms.
So, we’re going to look at our heritage. We have Lance Wyman will be talking about his work in D.C., this kind of turning point of the government getting good design. But then we’re also going to ask people to reframe the conversation of how we go about doing what we do and who’s telling the stories and how are they telling them. And so, we have speakers talking about that. We’re going to be looking at can you do high-tech, high touch experiences and still have them be sustainable and green? So, we’re going to talk about that. And then our last day, we’re going to reignite. We’re going to celebrate our upcoming fellows, and we are going to ask our community; how do we take this call to action back? Super exciting. And guess what? Brenda and Abigail will be there.
Brenda: Wow.
Abby: They don’t need any other excuse.
Brenda: Hold onto your hats, everybody. So, you made mention of some trends. And what I think of is some of the critical conversations that are being addressed in our industry today. So, sustainability, there’s the nature of technology and user experience, new trends in innovative brand activations, audience research, and so on. What are you seeing out there?
Cybelle: First of all, I’m seeing our community as influencers and we go to a project, and we’re hired by a client and the client may have blindspots. They may not necessarily think that their project has to even touch on or talk about sustainability or neurodiversity or some of the not-so-good history points.
Our members, our leaders, our design leaders, they’re challenging that, and they’re saying, if you’re going to hire us, we’re going to change the process. We’re going to do the process in a way in which is going to get the outcome that should be for this institution or this brand. That is life-altering.
Our members understand how to do the process right. You’re teaching that Brenda, right? You’re not teaching your students just to have a beautiful end product. You ask them to explain what was their thesis and how did they follow through on that, and that in some ways I see is the biggest shift is the why. You as an experienced designer, whatever your area of expertise is, is it fabrication, is it graphic, have an ability to really inform rather than being just a passive doer.
Abby: I want to put you a bit on the spot because nobody really has a definitive correct answer to this. So, I’m thinking about the role –
Cybelle: Oh, great.
Brenda: It’s all on you, Cybelle.
Abby: You like those easy questions. I’m thinking about the role of AI. So, how do you think the role of AI is going to affect our profession? That’s what I meant by a big question, like, oh my gosh, that’s the drop-the-mic question.
Cybelle: Well, I mean, you’ve already been talking to me, and you know that I’m, I mostly tend to be an optimist, so I’m going to talk about the positive of AI. When we did the first Spy Museum, we wanted to put you in the role of being a spy, and RFID was just coming out as a technology, but we couldn’t afford it, and when we did the new Spy, we utilized RFID to track what you did, and it gamifies it, right, but it also could be related to your interest.
Then, one of my last projects I worked on was the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Museum. And that museum, we used it because if you’re in a wheelchair, we could customize the exhibits, the interactive exhibits for you because we know that you’re in a wheelchair. So, that information that we can know about a guest in any circumstance, whether that’s a museum, whether that’s environmental graphics, the intelligence to inform both the museum or the place to help take care of that person in a way, but also for them to get more curated content to their education level if their kid or their interest level is amazing.
So those are the pros, is that we’ll be able to make designed 3D environments more agile. That’s the problem with our industry. We are not agile. You build a branded environment, and the next year it’s obsolete because there’s a new technology, and that new technology the client can’t afford to update. So, I think AI will provide a lot of opportunities to create multiplicity of storytelling, learning, learning from audiences, how people move through airports, what are they seeing and what are they not seeing.
And then obvious things where we can automate. I find that a lot of our process in designing takes a lot of time. If we could automate more for prototyping and spend more time on the creativity. I don’t think it’s going to replace jobs. I think we’ll have new and different jobs. I would like to see us be more creative about problem-solving. We have big problems in the world to figure out and hopefully AI will maybe give us a leg up to be able to do that in a more expeditious way.
Abby: Well, Cybelle, we can’t thank you enough for sharing your experience, your positivity, and all these stories today, but most importantly, for inspiring us all every day to create these engaging, fun, sustainable work that can really make a difference in the world.
Brenda: Thank you, Cybelle.
Cybelle: My goodness. Can I just – I’d like to reverse this because the two of you model phenomenal qualities about sharing your knowledge. So, thank you, and maybe we’ll just have to continue the conversation at the conference, which everyone listening needs to attend.
Abby: Yes, they do.
Cybelle: Washington, D.C., August 23rd through 26 and this month, only, July of 2023, you can re-up your membership at SEGD. We’re giving a gift back to you for $50 off. So, what’s not to like about that?
Abby: That sounds like a win-win. Thank you, everyone who tuned in today. If you like what you heard, subscribe to more episodes of Matters of Experience, wherever you listen to podcasts, make sure to leave a rating, a top, top review, and share with a friend. We’ll see you next time.
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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.
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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 big hello and to our regular listeners, thank you for tuning in and supporting our conversation. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: Hello, I’m Brenda Cowan.
Abby: Today, we’re talking with my good friend, Cybelle Jones. Cybelle is CEO responsible for strategic leadership that fosters excellence in every aspect of SEGD. Before this, she was Principal and Executive Director of Gallagher & Associates. Cybelle studied architecture at the University of Cincinnati and helped establish the Masters of Exhibition Design program at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, D.C.
Cybelle’s received so many awards and honors that we really don’t have time to list them all here. Cybelle, so sorry, but we just wanted to mention the American Institute of Architects Award of Excellence and that she has been a guest critic and speaker for organizations everywhere, including the V&A, American Alliance of Museums, Building Museums Symposium, International Council of Museums and the Fashion Institute of Technology. Oh my gosh. So, Cybelle, a huge welcome to the show.
Brenda: So, Cybelle, before you joined the Society for Experiential Graphic Design, you spearheaded a lot of the work that was coming out of Gallagher & Associates. Of all the projects, can you name a couple of your favorites and why do they stand out, looking back on them?
Cybelle: That’s an unfair question because I love all of my children. I can’t have a favorite. Being in the field of experience design for as long as I was was just phenomenal. I got to work with former presidents and Olympic athletes and Hollywood stars and civil rights activists, and even mobsters and spies. So, it’s hard to pick a favorite. I’m going to pick a couple that were transformative I think for me personally.
The first one was the first iteration of the International Spy Museum, which opened in Washington, D.C. and at the time that we were working on it, there was not a model of a museum that would be self-sustaining. Most museums at the time relied on philanthropy and government funding to keep their doors open and pay their staff. And we had a client and he said, why can’t we create a museum that is self-sustaining and is fun?
And so, we came up with this concept of building a spy museum in Washington, D.C., and I will tell you the honest truth, people were not excited about that. The museum industry did not want to even call a museum a museum for-profit because it seemed like that was the antithesis of what a museum as an institution should be. And the reputation was building as we were designing this project, that it would fail, that people would not go to it because in the city of Washington, D.C., where every almost every museum is free, why would you pay to go to a museum?
But from my role as the lead designer, I had a client who was not really a museum person, and he really pushed our team to say, if you could just think out of the box and reimagine a model of a museum that people wanted to go to, that were, that was really memorable, it was an experience, what would that look like? And the topic of spying hadn’t been done, like no one had done a museum on spying. So, it was so much fun. It might have been one of the projects where I had the most creative freedom to just think outside of the box.
That museum definitely stood out and there were nerve-wracking moments. We had a Washington Post article that came out before we opened that just was horrible.
Abby: Tell me a little bit about that part, being in the middle of the process and having everybody doubt your success and it sounds like actively work against the success of the Spy Museum. You must have had some self-doubts, knowing you were doing something fun, there must have been something in there, you know. How did the team, how did you deal with those, with those boundaries everyone was putting up for you?
Cybelle: The museum was going to open, there was, the money was invested, the building was leased. Anything great where you’re the underdog and you’re just driven to do the best possible job that you can do. And it was not until probably a month after the opening. I mean, people were like waiting in line even when we were under construction. I mean, I think the sex appeal of the International Spy Museum was very attractive to people. It was so different from anything else they had heard about. And I was doing the punch list, you know, after the project was open and I had a notepad, and some mom came up to me – and we actually, we did audience research, and the target audience for this museum was not families with kids, because we didn’t really think that they would spend the money, we thought it was more like the professional, like 30, 40-year-old professional that would be in Washington, D.C. for work. But there was a mom, and she had her seven-year-old daughter, and the little girl goes this is the best museum ever.
And her mom said, we’ve just spent four days at all the Smithsonians and, and my daughter just loves this. It’s so fun, but she’s learning and – those moments of pride where all of that doubt and anxiety and, you know, we were making a new model. It wasn’t perfect. There were a lot of things that didn’t work perfectly. But I think I’m proud to say people started waking up and saying, hey, maybe this whole thing of a museum actually being an experience, bring some of that energy to the three-dimensional world.
Brenda: Well, the Spy Museum, it’s a tremendous example, and I think a great, one of the great early examples of how to have multi-layer user experience occurring. You can basically visit the exhibition on your own terms, I guess is maybe the best way to put it. And so, it’s really well done. I’m glad that you pointed this out as a favorite, a favorite child of yours.
Cybelle: Yeah. Another project later in my career was similar in the sense that no one was really paying attention to this project. It was the Mississippi Arts + Entertainment Museum in Meridian, Mississippi, which you’re going to say, where is that? Look it up. It’s close to the border of Alabama. And even when I got this project, I wondered how it was going to go. Would these people actually ever raise the money to build a new, world-class museum in this little town of Meridian? And the architect and I started off not on the best foot. We’re very different backgrounds and political beliefs and, but we both believed that providing Mississippi with a world class institution that would celebrate those artists that were homegrown, like Oprah Winfrey and Leontyne Price, who was the first African-American opera singer to perform at the Met.
So, there are all these amazing individuals that came out of Mississippi who didn’t – they weren’t exposed to the arts growing up, and you kind of had to say to yourself, what is it? Is it something in the water here that, you know, you can grow up never going to an opera or a museum or not even being able to see Hollywood films, but then you have a James Earl Jones. So, it became a real passion of mine because I feel like museums oftentimes are only for the elite, and they should be for everyone.
And so, this was a bit of an experiment of how do you make art accessible to people that might not understand what art is, and particularly abstract art. And so, we, we took a really unique approach, but we also, building on the theatrics and immersion that I had been developing as a designer, we just wanted to take people to a place where they could kind of imagine seeing the world through the experiences of these artists before they were famous and what defined them.
I think one of the most memorable takeaways I had was when a high school group visited, and that high school group was from a very rural part of Mississippi, and they had never been to a museum before. They had never eaten out at a restaurant, and they said that they saw people in that museum that looked like them and that they could imagine themselves being. And it was transformative.
Brenda: I know the project in Mississippi. And one of the things that I think is really exciting is how much you and the team engaged the audience in determining how the exhibition could work best and welcome them best, and also really foster that sense of belonging that you were discussing.
Abby: Well, just building on that, actually, it’s really interesting in the two stories, the Spy Museum, and then down in Mississippi, you are acting as a mere filter in a way. You are deciding, it sounds Cybelle, as you are being immersed in these stories, for want of a better word, and you’re giving yourself time to get to the heart of the authenticity before you’re starting to do an interpretive plan, and this is what’s going to look like.
Brenda: I think, too, you operate as an ally, which is a necessary role of everybody who’s in our industry.
Cybelle: That’s interesting, Brenda. I hadn’t really thought about this, but when I was growing up, I moved 16 times by the time I was 13. You won’t believe it, but I was an incredibly shy child and I think that taught me to be a very good observer and to kind of read the room, read the culture, and be adaptable and empathetic. I don’t know why I’m having this aha moment on this podcast, but …
Abby: Well, we’re glad you’re having it with us, with friends.
Brenda: Yes.
Abby: This is a comfortable environment.
Cybelle: With friends, with these two amazing women. I think that’s how I treated, have always tried to treat my clients and my design team is that, that synergy, that collaboration – like for me, if I’m breathing, I’m collaborating. It’s like you’re going on a trip, and you don’t know where you’re going, you don’t know where you’re staying that night, you don’t know what you’re going to eat, but you’re together, and you’re on a mission. And that’s where the magic happens.
Brenda: In a way, this is setting up a nice flow into the next question, which is – Abby, and I are really curious to hear about the idea of legacy, and as you were developing these projects in your years at Gallagher & Associates, how aware were you of the legacy that you were leaving behind?
Cybelle: I never thought about a legacy. I think I thought about a couple of things. One, I always wanted to make – I have three, three daughters – I always wanted to be a role model for my daughters in a sense of that you could do what you loved, and you could be good at it, but that meant you were going to have to work really hard and having had a pretty chaotic life and at times we had to be pretty scrappy, when I look at a project and the fees that they’re paying us and what that cost to build a museum, you really have to honor that this is a tremendous responsibility.
Museums might renovate once in someone, some curator’s, some director’s career. They’re going to put everything into that all their hours. They already have a job. Now they have to have the second job of working with us. That’s not really the job they’re used to doing and then, say if you work at the Smithsonian on a project that sees like 9, 10 million visitors a year.
So, to me, I don’t know that I ever thought about me personally. I don’t think I ever thought anybody would know my name or that I did anything because nobody knows who an exhibit designer is or even what they do. Hopefully that’s changing now, but I think what I was about was giving people an experience that’s going to spark something. The Maya Angelou quote, like, people will forget what you say and what you did, but they’ll never forget how you made them feel. And I felt that way about all my clients. You know, I had to give them the best.
And then also for my design team because you guys know, you work really hard as a designer. I mean, you put so many hours in and you live and breathe these. Like, even if you’re not working, you’re thinking about it in the shower or when you get up or over the weekend, and I needed to make it worth it to them. So, being genuine, a lot of laughter. I know you guys both do that. Like, just be sincere, you know, no B.S. Just try to do your best.
Abby: So when you look at sort of the business and the way that it evolved when you were designing, what were some of those major shifts you saw?
Cybelle: I started my career at George Sexton Associates, and we – I don’t know if you know George, he’s still designing – but we would do art exhibitions, and we were hand drawing, and we were building models. And my youngest daughter just graduated in design school from the University of Oregon. The things that she has to know now, the technical skills she has to have to be able to create photorealistic renderings, but not just the technical side. She has to have an understanding of accessibility, sensory education level, language. It’s a lot. You have to be a jack of all trades. So, I think from the designer side, that’s evolved a lot.
On the business side, that’s a good thing. We have to change. Things have to change. The way we tell stories, who we bring to the table, who we include in the process of designing, and what is the return on the experience. What is the return on the commitment, time, money on behalf of whoever that audience is.
Brenda: Let’s turn our focus to your latest challenge as CEO of SEGD. In some ways, this must be very different from your previous job. Is your work leading SEGD a really huge shift for you, and you know what’s similar and what’s different?
Cybelle: I think what’s the same is that it’s all about the people. It’s finding the best talent. It’s finding the best minds. You know, I have a very small team. I went from 150 people at Gallagher, and I have four people at SEGD, but I have all of you wonderful people that I collaborate with, right? The members, the speakers, the people that work on the education side. So, I think that that connectivity of bringing great minds together, that’s the same to me.
Abby: You are at the heart of this community. I mean, your ideas, from working with you, are innovative. You know how to engage with us, and really, you’ve grown our community incredibly, and it’s such a diverse community. You’re open to bringing in people from all different facets.
So, what was your initial mission when you first started, Cybelle, and how do you feel it’s changed over the years?
Cybelle: I believe that experience design is the field of practice to solve the problems of the future. Why, during COVID, would I go out of my house to go to an office, to, to eat out? It’s because of the experience that I can’t have at home by myself. And we, our community at SEGD, are curators of that. And we know how to do it so well, very differently from any other area of practice, right?
We understand how to bring people in. We know how to get them excited, or to calm them down or how to make a story come to life. And I always felt like when I sit on the plane and somebody would say, what do you do? I design museums. What? I didn’t know people did that. Yes. How are museums born? People have to design museums. So, it’s been a life passion of mine to get the word out.
The members of SEGD, the Global Design Award winners, the fellows are the best in the business. They are outstanding. They stand for design excellence. They stand for doing things the right way with the right process, with the right messages. And I just want to make our organization a model.
Brenda: Thinking about all of the different talent and the cross-disciplinary experts, the students, and the seasoned professionals that comprise SEGD, I’m curious, how do you capture such a breadth of individuals? Like is there a unifying approach that you know speaks to everyone, that pulls everybody together to form this unified community?
Cybelle: You have to celebrate the differences. It’s negotiating. It’s bringing everybody to the table at the same time. And guess what? Not everybody’s going to want the same thing. And that’s okay, right? What do we agree on? We agree on design excellence. We agree that we have to build a path for that next generation.
So, it’s really how I operate. I’ve always operated with a lot of caring, a lot of loving. We don’t use that word enough, a lot of joy. Hey, the world is not great, but we can really make a difference in the work that we do, and that’s unique about our field. I think I look for that. I have great resources of all these rock stars in the field, and they’re supportive, and they give their time, and – like the two of you, you both give a lot of your time, not just to do your jobs, but to help our field of practice and to bring other people up. Right? That’s also my job is, I want all of our members to be employed and I want them to have good projects, and I want them to feel proud about the work.
Brenda: So, in my role in exhibition and experience design at FIT, I know firsthand the level of dedication of SEGD to cultivating future design and industry leaders, and the organization plays this massive role in the mentorship, the nurturance, the support of the younger generation, and also individuals who are entering into the experience design profession from other professional backgrounds. And, but they’re new in many ways. Why is this critical? Why is it critical for SEGD to be providing its vital resources to cultivating this new talent, this future of design?
Cybelle: Well, we wouldn’t survive without it. We don’t understand the world in which this next generation is coming into. And so, there’s no way that we have the ability to do the right thing on behalf of some of our projects and clients. We need that next generation voice. They see the world differently than us. First of all, I don’t think they want to spend all their life just working. They understand about this concept of work-life balance, which the design industry has been really bad about.
But the other thing is that we have so much to give to them, and we have so much to opportunity to share what we’ve learned. I’ve talked to a lot of young women that have started their own business and they need someone to kind of bounce ideas off of and sometimes ask some really tactical questions, right.
And the other thing is not just the students. I mean, we all go through career transitions. When I went through this career transition, that was very hard for me. We’re all going to face some moments in our life, and we need support to get through that.
Abby: So, the big 5-0. it’s a mighty age, the semicentennial. A lot happens over that time period. Fashions change, technology changes. You have this incredible year with I know one of your big flagship events is going to be the annual conference in Washington, D.C. in late August. It’s coming up. I encourage everybody listening to go to the SEGD website – there will be a link on our page – and come, buy a ticket. It’s unbelievable. It will be phenomenal.
The theme is look both ways. So, Cybelle, tell us what it feels like for an organization to turn 50 and the idea of look both ways.
Cybelle: We are going to take our attendees on a journey we’re going to start with the founders and where we came from. We’re going to have amazing speakers like Llisa Demetrios, who is the granddaughter of Ray and Charles Eames. She runs the Eames Institute for Infinite Curiosity. And there’s so many trajectories that we can trace back to the Eames because they were one of the first truly interdisciplinary design firms.
So, we’re going to look at our heritage. We have Lance Wyman will be talking about his work in D.C., this kind of turning point of the government getting good design. But then we’re also going to ask people to reframe the conversation of how we go about doing what we do and who’s telling the stories and how are they telling them. And so, we have speakers talking about that. We’re going to be looking at can you do high-tech, high touch experiences and still have them be sustainable and green? So, we’re going to talk about that. And then our last day, we’re going to reignite. We’re going to celebrate our upcoming fellows, and we are going to ask our community; how do we take this call to action back? Super exciting. And guess what? Brenda and Abigail will be there.
Brenda: Wow.
Abby: They don’t need any other excuse.
Brenda: Hold onto your hats, everybody. So, you made mention of some trends. And what I think of is some of the critical conversations that are being addressed in our industry today. So, sustainability, there’s the nature of technology and user experience, new trends in innovative brand activations, audience research, and so on. What are you seeing out there?
Cybelle: First of all, I’m seeing our community as influencers and we go to a project, and we’re hired by a client and the client may have blindspots. They may not necessarily think that their project has to even touch on or talk about sustainability or neurodiversity or some of the not-so-good history points.
Our members, our leaders, our design leaders, they’re challenging that, and they’re saying, if you’re going to hire us, we’re going to change the process. We’re going to do the process in a way in which is going to get the outcome that should be for this institution or this brand. That is life-altering.
Our members understand how to do the process right. You’re teaching that Brenda, right? You’re not teaching your students just to have a beautiful end product. You ask them to explain what was their thesis and how did they follow through on that, and that in some ways I see is the biggest shift is the why. You as an experienced designer, whatever your area of expertise is, is it fabrication, is it graphic, have an ability to really inform rather than being just a passive doer.
Abby: I want to put you a bit on the spot because nobody really has a definitive correct answer to this. So, I’m thinking about the role –
Cybelle: Oh, great.
Brenda: It’s all on you, Cybelle.
Abby: You like those easy questions. I’m thinking about the role of AI. So, how do you think the role of AI is going to affect our profession? That’s what I meant by a big question, like, oh my gosh, that’s the drop-the-mic question.
Cybelle: Well, I mean, you’ve already been talking to me, and you know that I’m, I mostly tend to be an optimist, so I’m going to talk about the positive of AI. When we did the first Spy Museum, we wanted to put you in the role of being a spy, and RFID was just coming out as a technology, but we couldn’t afford it, and when we did the new Spy, we utilized RFID to track what you did, and it gamifies it, right, but it also could be related to your interest.
Then, one of my last projects I worked on was the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Museum. And that museum, we used it because if you’re in a wheelchair, we could customize the exhibits, the interactive exhibits for you because we know that you’re in a wheelchair. So, that information that we can know about a guest in any circumstance, whether that’s a museum, whether that’s environmental graphics, the intelligence to inform both the museum or the place to help take care of that person in a way, but also for them to get more curated content to their education level if their kid or their interest level is amazing.
So those are the pros, is that we’ll be able to make designed 3D environments more agile. That’s the problem with our industry. We are not agile. You build a branded environment, and the next year it’s obsolete because there’s a new technology, and that new technology the client can’t afford to update. So, I think AI will provide a lot of opportunities to create multiplicity of storytelling, learning, learning from audiences, how people move through airports, what are they seeing and what are they not seeing.
And then obvious things where we can automate. I find that a lot of our process in designing takes a lot of time. If we could automate more for prototyping and spend more time on the creativity. I don’t think it’s going to replace jobs. I think we’ll have new and different jobs. I would like to see us be more creative about problem-solving. We have big problems in the world to figure out and hopefully AI will maybe give us a leg up to be able to do that in a more expeditious way.
Abby: Well, Cybelle, we can’t thank you enough for sharing your experience, your positivity, and all these stories today, but most importantly, for inspiring us all every day to create these engaging, fun, sustainable work that can really make a difference in the world.
Brenda: Thank you, Cybelle.
Cybelle: My goodness. Can I just – I’d like to reverse this because the two of you model phenomenal qualities about sharing your knowledge. So, thank you, and maybe we’ll just have to continue the conversation at the conference, which everyone listening needs to attend.
Abby: Yes, they do.
Cybelle: Washington, D.C., August 23rd through 26 and this month, only, July of 2023, you can re-up your membership at SEGD. We’re giving a gift back to you for $50 off. So, what’s not to like about that?
Abby: That sounds like a win-win. Thank you, everyone who tuned in today. If you like what you heard, subscribe to more episodes of Matters of Experience, wherever you listen to podcasts, make sure to leave a rating, a top, top 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.
Cultivating Future Design and Industry Leaders with Cybelle Jones
Reclaiming Heritage Through Repatriation with Terry Snowball
The National Museum of the American Indian Cultural Resources Center
[Music]
Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience, a podcast that explores the creativity, innovation and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. Welcome back, all our regular listeners. Thanks for being here with us today. And if you’re new and enjoy today’s show, please subscribe. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: Hello, I’m Brenda Cowan.
Abby: So today we’re talking with Terry Snowball. Terry is the Museum Specialist in the Collections Management Department at the Smithsonian Institution, where he’s worked for over 26 years, a graduate of the Institute of American Indian Arts. Terry has used his experience to help guide S.I. in their pursuit of Native American historical justice. Terry, welcome to the show.
Terry: Thank you. It’s great to be here. Virtually. And I look forward to sharing my experiences and insights in terms of what I do here at the NMAI.
Abby: To kick off, tell us sort of about the work you do with collections.
Terry: Normally, when you go to a museum, anywhere, a small percentage of the collections are actually on display, the full balance so that it’s going to be in a storage facility and or kept in storage onsite or offsite at the museum. Where I work here in the Cultural Resource Center in Suitland, Maryland, we’re home to over 850,000 plus objects from the entire indigenous people of the Western Hemisphere. And so there’s a lot entailed in terms of both carrying and preserving, also making upgrades in terms of their care.
Brenda: Terry, the repatriation of objects, this is an increasing area of focus in the museum world, I would say very long overdue. And it’s very complex and sensitive work. Terry, You used to work with the repatriation of native objects. Can you share with the listeners what that would entail?
Terry: Sure. One of the things that sort of happened, very important and or significantly in terms of the types of objects and or the importance of the objects, not only to museums and to the public, but also to the communities themselves, the tribes. Their objects and or their ritual practices were both outlawed and or taken away. And so repatriation happened along with the passing of the National Museum of the American Indian Act, to allow for tribes to come to the Smithsonian and primarily work with the National Museum of Natural History, which has Native American collections of human remains and cultural objects, and as well as the National Museum of American Indians.
And so in that there are five main categories that are basically affect the collections and or the means by which tribes can make claim for objects. The first, of course, being human remains that would have been collected and or excavated from different sites, funerary objects and then, of course, objects that were once previously considered communally owned, which are also considered objects of cultural patrimony, which means no one individual in a tribe or community can alienate that object or items from their community.
And then lastly, sacred objects, which are, of course, as the term applies, used and very important and significant ways in the practices of the traditions.
Abby: What sort of conflict then, in your business as you’re trying to do the right thing and repatriate these objects, what are some of the trouble that it causes or the conflicting opinions or perspectives or groups that you encounter and how do you deal with it?
Terry: Well, that’s a good question because it is very complicated in that sense. And one of the things from the outset in terms of the legislation, and I should mention that in while the NMAI Act established the Museum of the American Indian National is the American Indian with the Smithsonian, which now includes 19 museums and a zoo, it also, in that sense, you know, sort of presented the challenge in terms of how you interpret the law, I guess you could say.
So there are basically two forms of interpretation, I guess one could refer to, and that’s, there is a term or a standard which is called preponderance of evidence. And so a preponderance of evidence is a higher standard, say, as opposed to what the NMAI is, is which is a reasonable basis. So the higher the standard, I think in that sense, it’s harder to find agreement in terms of the type of information or record that is that is used or utilized, you know, sort of oral accounts in terms of its histories that maybe not admissible or permissive or even sort of given the same equity and say, an ethnographer or an archeologist or an anthropologist who’s, who’s esteemed or has expertise in that sense or, you know, from the standpoint of institutional standard.
Brenda: I’m going to broaden their focus for a second and share with you that I just got back the other day from a special seminar that was focusing on the work of collections in state and local history museums. And I was in a boardroom with a dozen historians who were really deeply engaged in a really concerning conversation over the nature of collecting in various historical institutions and really this whole idea that there’s a problem with an almost hoarding-like mentality on behalf of historical collections institutions and the efforts to the excess and the efforts to repatriate, where appropriate, are deeply flawed or challenged.
And I’m really curious in terms of the way in which you’re working with collections now kind of across the board at NMAI. What are some of the current efforts that you’re engaged with? You know, are you having to do particularly difficult work or decision-making because of the, you know, incredible size of your collection? Or what are you finding in your daily work?
Terry: Well, I think the challenge to most anything in that sense is sort of the decline of, you know, sort of the cultural stamina, you know, in terms of communities and groups where in that sense, that stamina is based on just how rich their culture is, what is still retained. Languages are constantly sort of in the threat of completely disappearing.
So I think in that sense, the challenge with most collections is to work with the vestiges of those and trying to enrich or replenish that information that’s critical to an object. So that is a challenge from the standpoint of having so much cultural material, but also sort of not really being capable of having that type of expertise available to you.
So we have to work with communities from that standpoint to help us enrich these collections to sort of valorize the meaning or context of these objects.
Brenda: So you’re really collecting towards the mission of the institution, and it sounds like you’re really collecting towards telling the narrative, telling the story.
Terry: Yes, very much so, because that’s part of our mission is to work with community. And one of the things that I think is really important for the NMAI is that, you know, we’re kind of a living museum we consider us a cultural institution. And so our mission is to work with communities. So in that sense, the things that we want to collect or to actively look for is not something from the past, because there’s there’s a lot of that here.
And like I said just before, you know, it’s important to enrich that. But the other part of it is that it’s very important to collect things correctly and appropriately in the sense of that, we’re collecting contemporary things by any number of artists that are about working traditionally and or in modern art.
Abby: Terry, here you are, collecting wonderfully for the future from what’s currently contemporary and you feel needs to be preserved. What you collect now will quickly become the past. If every collection is only at any one moment displaying 2 to 5%. Isn’t it safe to say that a lot of what you’re collecting is sets, collecting dust? And it’s not important if nobody ever sees it.
And if you continue to keep collecting, even if it’s on mission and it goes in a warehouse and nobody’s seeing it, then there’s something, something vain about us all collecting things that we think are important and then putting them away and not showing them. So is there any importance and constantly reviewing the collection you’ve obtained and maybe sifting through and removing from that huge collection some things that have proved to not be of any interest to our communities over the last decade or century or half-century, however long a museum’s there?
Because just sitting there, it’s just like fine for everybody to say we paid a ton of money. It’s really important. Important for what? Sit in a corner, in a box.
Terry: I think the question is, is not always the easiest one to answer in terms of sort of qualitatively or even quantitatively assess, you know, the spectrum of this material culture to say what, you know, what can be best done with this kind of material and or even individuals per se to sort of see how we can interpret them in the future.
And I should say that while we’re also open to and or giving access to native peoples, the collection is also being accessed by researchers who in a particular way or are similarly more at large in terms of developing and or refining information about larger or collections at large that are similar in those ways. And so there are things that kind of come in, and or there are trajectories that do take place in terms of saying that that’s giving resource to things.
But, you know, that’s an important thing from that standpoint, which I think one of the overtures that the Smithsonian is making and or has made is that it is interested in pursuing the route in terms of ethical return of objects and or things that have so great or significant cultural importance to people and communities. And so that similarly, going along those lines in terms of human remains.
So there’s a developing directive in terms of how that becomes a guiding policy for our institutions that are affected in terms of needing to be open to and or receive solicitations from people, individuals, or countries even to request the return of human remains and or significant cultural objects. And as of note, recently, too – our National Museum of African American has returned the Benin Bronzes and its collection.
And those are significant overtures from the standpoint of global impacts to say that we’re doing some of the right things with some of this important material.
Brenda: I’m going to ask a question about the evocative nature of objects, and we know that objects can be very powerful in very numinous ways. They’re sources of inspiration and illumination, and people can have very transformative experiences, sometimes with evocative objects. Now, I know that you have had some transformative moments with collections objects, and Abby and I are hoping that you can maybe share a story with us.
Terry: Sure. We’ve been since the pandemic has sort of eased off on things. We are receiving many more community of people. And so about a month or so ago, we received a delegation of people from communities, and none of it, which is in the Arctic range, is up north through the Arctic Studies program. And so they were housed at our facility in terms of working with those community members to provide access to some of the cultural materials that we had here.
And there was a Nunavut elder that was accompanying them. And one of the things that are standard in terms of how we host and accommodate our community people is we have a ceremonial room that’s built into the facility that gets used by artists in terms of purification or cleansing prior to and after they come in and out of the collections, as well as forms of ceremonial treatment that might take place in that process.
And so this particular elder, well, we were going to escort down to a ceremonial room. And so we asked the question of what type of ceremony was that? Was it going to be entailed? People said that she was wanting to light this oil lamp, which oil lamps for the Nunavut has been used for a millennia where that’s basically lit and heated the homes in the Arctic, as you can imagine, is very cold. So in that moment, it kind of just took a risk in saying that to the objects that were held in a particular workroom could have benefited by having that ceremony or that imparting of the divine to take place right in the room with these objects. And so we all changed course.
And the lady proceeded to light the lamp, there were a couple of moments where we were holding our breath, hoping the sensors wouldn’t go off because of the smoke. But it was very minimal. But I think to transformative thing was in that sense is that we turned off all the lights that we could and in that moment was sort of saying words here, making, maybe making prayer, invoking the divine.
And these objects were sitting there in the dark with this lamp. And I think days of old, they could have been in those moments in those homes with these people feeling that light again. And I thought that was a very powerful thing for this to happen for her. And or for these objects.
Brenda: That is stunning. And I love the visual of this mundane storeroom essentially being lit by something and being involved in such an ancient moment. And it just it just seems so completely appropriate in so many ways.
Abby: Can you talk about what part of your job satisfies you and how you see yourself in your work?
Terry: Well, when I first started as an intern up in New York at the research branch of the National Museum of American Indian, that was an early moment, early time for repatriation. And I should say that upon reflection, I think one of the important things that repatriation legislation and or those mandates did in terms of necessitating that museums and institutions and agencies work with tribes is that there were probably rare or fewer moments in the sense where museums would conduct themselves in that way to sort of customarily work with native peoples.
And so in that sense, that form of engagement that took place because in earlier times too, tribes would literally come to museums. They actually came to the NMAI and in those instances would ask for things that were on display and, you know, of course, be declined and turned away or discouraged from coming back. And so, you know, in that sense, it’s important for me from that standpoint to sort of, you know, help with the civil exchange that takes place from that standpoint.
Abby: We were fortunate enough to create an exhibition. It was supposed to be a temporary exhibition, but was such a hit. It’s still touring up in the northern Arctic with the Nenets up there. And we were very apprehensive because we were making this exhibition for the local community, for the Nenets, and we felt very much ducks out of water.
So we did exactly what you what you’re discussing. We made it with them. So we went right in into the community to talk to them about everything, all walks of life. And they were with us every step of the way because we realized that the subtle nuances, even between the different tribes up there, were sometimes barely perceptible for our eyes.
It was like, Really, this is different. But to them it’s like, you know, left and right. So we needed them to guide us and help us with all of the content we were making. And at the end of it, one of the most amazing moments in my life so far is when it opened and we stood there apprehensively, showing them what we’d created.
And at the end of taking them around, they came over and said to us, Thank you so much for representing our life with integrity. And also we sort of given it a different perspective so that they could then reflect on who they were. It was an incredible moment and one of the highlights of my career to create that and then have it be so successful that they wanted to tour it so everybody could see it up there in the Arctic and the different groups could enjoy it as well. Was was kind of phenomenal.
Terry: You know, one of the things that’s important from that standpoint is trust, and that’s the ultimate benefit in terms of working collaboratively with something and someone is that you actually learn something more about a situation or about a thing in terms of its true context and, you know, I mean, I guess that’s the distrust that we had spoken of earlier in terms of repatriation is that there was a lot of distrust because there’s just a history and or a legacy that is brought from the standpoint of how many times Native people have stood before non-native and had promises made to them. And of course, all those things sort of as expected or anticipated, never made sort of came to fruition for native peoples.
Brenda: You know, I’m listening, and I’m thinking about a colleague of mine who was a curator in Western Australia for many years for a national museum there, and he, you know, was in his twenties and just starting out in the museum world. And his job was to quote, collect indigenous objects. And over many, many years, he collected upwards of 4000 stone tools.
Brenda: Now, 40-plus years later, he has been fighting and fighting and fighting to try to repatriate. And he’s no longer with the institution and he has these profound feelings of guilt and shame and conflict, inner conflict that he’s been struggling with. And during COVID, he actually got special permission to be able to go visit the collections storeroom where all of these 4000 stone tools are.
Brenda: And he went there to have a personal kind of a personal ceremony, a ritual period of time where he took out these thousands of stone tools and apologized and asked their forgiveness.
Terry: Well, you know, I mean, maybe in the course of those collectings, he thought he was doing a good thing. And in some respects, it could have been, but in other respects, it could equally sort of contradicted and or defied, you know, so maybe the order or the ways in which Aboriginal people would have preferred to have things left in state.
And, you know, everything has some form of energy. And sure, I think, you know, I think that that’s sort of maybe a way to sort of acknowledge and or maybe make peace with that and making those apologies. One of the things my mother taught me was, was a prayer that I use on occasion to ask for forgiveness and touching and taking care of these things.
Brenda: Terry, What would you want visitors at NMAI today to walk away with as a result of their encounters with the collections?
Terry: One of the things that I think a lot of people believe or even aren’t aware of, that Native people are still alive or still thriving. So much of the culture that is taught in mainstream is such that it either also has minimized or reduced us to sort of caricature status or the state. So there are things in which we do look at the museum and or wish to share with peoples about who we are and our past.
I think what a lot of people assume a national museum, American Indian is, is is about beads and feathers. And we’re not. We’re so much more. And so I think Hollywood is probably has given a greatest of service to our identities because of what they did and how we were portrayed. They wanted our romanticism, but they didn’t want us.
So, you know, there were these embellishments to these narratives that sort of remain as sort of not a stigma, but just sort of an alter the sort of alter ego or alter identity to who we really are.
Abby: I’m so happy you mentioned Hollywood, Terry, because that’s what was bringing to mind. Which books should our listeners read to get a more realistic account? And also, is there any film where you feel a tribe or tribes are depicted correctly?
Terry: Well, that’s tricky, I think, from that standpoint. But there was a gentleman who was First Nations from Canada who sort of documented his travels and journey to Hollywood to find the Indian, and made these various sort of journeys to places and things where, where those interpretations of native people and or and or even people assuming those identities.
The documentary is called Reel Injuns and Real is spelled R-E-E-L. And Injuns, of course, is somewhat of a derogatory term to, say, Injuns: I-N-J-U-N. Another book is by Dee Brown, which is a book called Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. And so documents the account of the systematic destruction of American Indians.
But also, there is another gentleman. His name is Vine Deloria Jr, and he was, I think, from Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. And one of the books that he was known for was this book called Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. And that gave him national attention to Native American issues in the same year as the Alcatraz takeover during the Red Power Movement in the 70s 60s, with the American Indian Movement.
Abby: Thank you so much, Terry, for sharing your experience and perspective with us today. It’s been enlightening chatting with you, and I feel like we can all sleep a little sounder knowing you’re one of the very valued custodians of our shared past, present, and future.
Terry: So it’s been a pleasure, but I think it’s been too short a time because there’s so many stories and so many places we can go.
Abby: And thanks to everyone who tuned in today. If you like what you heard, please subscribe for more entertaining episodes of Matters of Experience. Make sure to leave a rating and a review and share with a friend. See you next time.
Brenda: Bye 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.
The National Museum of the American Indian Cultural Resources Center
[Music]
Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience, a podcast that explores the creativity, innovation and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. Welcome back, all our regular listeners. Thanks for being here with us today. And if you’re new and enjoy today’s show, please subscribe. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: Hello, I’m Brenda Cowan.
Abby: So today we’re talking with Terry Snowball. Terry is the Museum Specialist in the Collections Management Department at the Smithsonian Institution, where he’s worked for over 26 years, a graduate of the Institute of American Indian Arts. Terry has used his experience to help guide S.I. in their pursuit of Native American historical justice. Terry, welcome to the show.
Terry: Thank you. It’s great to be here. Virtually. And I look forward to sharing my experiences and insights in terms of what I do here at the NMAI.
Abby: To kick off, tell us sort of about the work you do with collections.
Terry: Normally, when you go to a museum, anywhere, a small percentage of the collections are actually on display, the full balance so that it’s going to be in a storage facility and or kept in storage onsite or offsite at the museum. Where I work here in the Cultural Resource Center in Suitland, Maryland, we’re home to over 850,000 plus objects from the entire indigenous people of the Western Hemisphere. And so there’s a lot entailed in terms of both carrying and preserving, also making upgrades in terms of their care.
Brenda: Terry, the repatriation of objects, this is an increasing area of focus in the museum world, I would say very long overdue. And it’s very complex and sensitive work. Terry, You used to work with the repatriation of native objects. Can you share with the listeners what that would entail?
Terry: Sure. One of the things that sort of happened, very important and or significantly in terms of the types of objects and or the importance of the objects, not only to museums and to the public, but also to the communities themselves, the tribes. Their objects and or their ritual practices were both outlawed and or taken away. And so repatriation happened along with the passing of the National Museum of the American Indian Act, to allow for tribes to come to the Smithsonian and primarily work with the National Museum of Natural History, which has Native American collections of human remains and cultural objects, and as well as the National Museum of American Indians.
And so in that there are five main categories that are basically affect the collections and or the means by which tribes can make claim for objects. The first, of course, being human remains that would have been collected and or excavated from different sites, funerary objects and then, of course, objects that were once previously considered communally owned, which are also considered objects of cultural patrimony, which means no one individual in a tribe or community can alienate that object or items from their community.
And then lastly, sacred objects, which are, of course, as the term applies, used and very important and significant ways in the practices of the traditions.
Abby: What sort of conflict then, in your business as you’re trying to do the right thing and repatriate these objects, what are some of the trouble that it causes or the conflicting opinions or perspectives or groups that you encounter and how do you deal with it?
Terry: Well, that’s a good question because it is very complicated in that sense. And one of the things from the outset in terms of the legislation, and I should mention that in while the NMAI Act established the Museum of the American Indian National is the American Indian with the Smithsonian, which now includes 19 museums and a zoo, it also, in that sense, you know, sort of presented the challenge in terms of how you interpret the law, I guess you could say.
So there are basically two forms of interpretation, I guess one could refer to, and that’s, there is a term or a standard which is called preponderance of evidence. And so a preponderance of evidence is a higher standard, say, as opposed to what the NMAI is, is which is a reasonable basis. So the higher the standard, I think in that sense, it’s harder to find agreement in terms of the type of information or record that is that is used or utilized, you know, sort of oral accounts in terms of its histories that maybe not admissible or permissive or even sort of given the same equity and say, an ethnographer or an archeologist or an anthropologist who’s, who’s esteemed or has expertise in that sense or, you know, from the standpoint of institutional standard.
Brenda: I’m going to broaden their focus for a second and share with you that I just got back the other day from a special seminar that was focusing on the work of collections in state and local history museums. And I was in a boardroom with a dozen historians who were really deeply engaged in a really concerning conversation over the nature of collecting in various historical institutions and really this whole idea that there’s a problem with an almost hoarding-like mentality on behalf of historical collections institutions and the efforts to the excess and the efforts to repatriate, where appropriate, are deeply flawed or challenged.
And I’m really curious in terms of the way in which you’re working with collections now kind of across the board at NMAI. What are some of the current efforts that you’re engaged with? You know, are you having to do particularly difficult work or decision-making because of the, you know, incredible size of your collection? Or what are you finding in your daily work?
Terry: Well, I think the challenge to most anything in that sense is sort of the decline of, you know, sort of the cultural stamina, you know, in terms of communities and groups where in that sense, that stamina is based on just how rich their culture is, what is still retained. Languages are constantly sort of in the threat of completely disappearing.
So I think in that sense, the challenge with most collections is to work with the vestiges of those and trying to enrich or replenish that information that’s critical to an object. So that is a challenge from the standpoint of having so much cultural material, but also sort of not really being capable of having that type of expertise available to you.
So we have to work with communities from that standpoint to help us enrich these collections to sort of valorize the meaning or context of these objects.
Brenda: So you’re really collecting towards the mission of the institution, and it sounds like you’re really collecting towards telling the narrative, telling the story.
Terry: Yes, very much so, because that’s part of our mission is to work with community. And one of the things that I think is really important for the NMAI is that, you know, we’re kind of a living museum we consider us a cultural institution. And so our mission is to work with communities. So in that sense, the things that we want to collect or to actively look for is not something from the past, because there’s there’s a lot of that here.
And like I said just before, you know, it’s important to enrich that. But the other part of it is that it’s very important to collect things correctly and appropriately in the sense of that, we’re collecting contemporary things by any number of artists that are about working traditionally and or in modern art.
Abby: Terry, here you are, collecting wonderfully for the future from what’s currently contemporary and you feel needs to be preserved. What you collect now will quickly become the past. If every collection is only at any one moment displaying 2 to 5%. Isn’t it safe to say that a lot of what you’re collecting is sets, collecting dust? And it’s not important if nobody ever sees it.
And if you continue to keep collecting, even if it’s on mission and it goes in a warehouse and nobody’s seeing it, then there’s something, something vain about us all collecting things that we think are important and then putting them away and not showing them. So is there any importance and constantly reviewing the collection you’ve obtained and maybe sifting through and removing from that huge collection some things that have proved to not be of any interest to our communities over the last decade or century or half-century, however long a museum’s there?
Because just sitting there, it’s just like fine for everybody to say we paid a ton of money. It’s really important. Important for what? Sit in a corner, in a box.
Terry: I think the question is, is not always the easiest one to answer in terms of sort of qualitatively or even quantitatively assess, you know, the spectrum of this material culture to say what, you know, what can be best done with this kind of material and or even individuals per se to sort of see how we can interpret them in the future.
And I should say that while we’re also open to and or giving access to native peoples, the collection is also being accessed by researchers who in a particular way or are similarly more at large in terms of developing and or refining information about larger or collections at large that are similar in those ways. And so there are things that kind of come in, and or there are trajectories that do take place in terms of saying that that’s giving resource to things.
But, you know, that’s an important thing from that standpoint, which I think one of the overtures that the Smithsonian is making and or has made is that it is interested in pursuing the route in terms of ethical return of objects and or things that have so great or significant cultural importance to people and communities. And so that similarly, going along those lines in terms of human remains.
So there’s a developing directive in terms of how that becomes a guiding policy for our institutions that are affected in terms of needing to be open to and or receive solicitations from people, individuals, or countries even to request the return of human remains and or significant cultural objects. And as of note, recently, too – our National Museum of African American has returned the Benin Bronzes and its collection.
And those are significant overtures from the standpoint of global impacts to say that we’re doing some of the right things with some of this important material.
Brenda: I’m going to ask a question about the evocative nature of objects, and we know that objects can be very powerful in very numinous ways. They’re sources of inspiration and illumination, and people can have very transformative experiences, sometimes with evocative objects. Now, I know that you have had some transformative moments with collections objects, and Abby and I are hoping that you can maybe share a story with us.
Terry: Sure. We’ve been since the pandemic has sort of eased off on things. We are receiving many more community of people. And so about a month or so ago, we received a delegation of people from communities, and none of it, which is in the Arctic range, is up north through the Arctic Studies program. And so they were housed at our facility in terms of working with those community members to provide access to some of the cultural materials that we had here.
And there was a Nunavut elder that was accompanying them. And one of the things that are standard in terms of how we host and accommodate our community people is we have a ceremonial room that’s built into the facility that gets used by artists in terms of purification or cleansing prior to and after they come in and out of the collections, as well as forms of ceremonial treatment that might take place in that process.
And so this particular elder, well, we were going to escort down to a ceremonial room. And so we asked the question of what type of ceremony was that? Was it going to be entailed? People said that she was wanting to light this oil lamp, which oil lamps for the Nunavut has been used for a millennia where that’s basically lit and heated the homes in the Arctic, as you can imagine, is very cold. So in that moment, it kind of just took a risk in saying that to the objects that were held in a particular workroom could have benefited by having that ceremony or that imparting of the divine to take place right in the room with these objects. And so we all changed course.
And the lady proceeded to light the lamp, there were a couple of moments where we were holding our breath, hoping the sensors wouldn’t go off because of the smoke. But it was very minimal. But I think to transformative thing was in that sense is that we turned off all the lights that we could and in that moment was sort of saying words here, making, maybe making prayer, invoking the divine.
And these objects were sitting there in the dark with this lamp. And I think days of old, they could have been in those moments in those homes with these people feeling that light again. And I thought that was a very powerful thing for this to happen for her. And or for these objects.
Brenda: That is stunning. And I love the visual of this mundane storeroom essentially being lit by something and being involved in such an ancient moment. And it just it just seems so completely appropriate in so many ways.
Abby: Can you talk about what part of your job satisfies you and how you see yourself in your work?
Terry: Well, when I first started as an intern up in New York at the research branch of the National Museum of American Indian, that was an early moment, early time for repatriation. And I should say that upon reflection, I think one of the important things that repatriation legislation and or those mandates did in terms of necessitating that museums and institutions and agencies work with tribes is that there were probably rare or fewer moments in the sense where museums would conduct themselves in that way to sort of customarily work with native peoples.
And so in that sense, that form of engagement that took place because in earlier times too, tribes would literally come to museums. They actually came to the NMAI and in those instances would ask for things that were on display and, you know, of course, be declined and turned away or discouraged from coming back. And so, you know, in that sense, it’s important for me from that standpoint to sort of, you know, help with the civil exchange that takes place from that standpoint.
Abby: We were fortunate enough to create an exhibition. It was supposed to be a temporary exhibition, but was such a hit. It’s still touring up in the northern Arctic with the Nenets up there. And we were very apprehensive because we were making this exhibition for the local community, for the Nenets, and we felt very much ducks out of water.
So we did exactly what you what you’re discussing. We made it with them. So we went right in into the community to talk to them about everything, all walks of life. And they were with us every step of the way because we realized that the subtle nuances, even between the different tribes up there, were sometimes barely perceptible for our eyes.
It was like, Really, this is different. But to them it’s like, you know, left and right. So we needed them to guide us and help us with all of the content we were making. And at the end of it, one of the most amazing moments in my life so far is when it opened and we stood there apprehensively, showing them what we’d created.
And at the end of taking them around, they came over and said to us, Thank you so much for representing our life with integrity. And also we sort of given it a different perspective so that they could then reflect on who they were. It was an incredible moment and one of the highlights of my career to create that and then have it be so successful that they wanted to tour it so everybody could see it up there in the Arctic and the different groups could enjoy it as well. Was was kind of phenomenal.
Terry: You know, one of the things that’s important from that standpoint is trust, and that’s the ultimate benefit in terms of working collaboratively with something and someone is that you actually learn something more about a situation or about a thing in terms of its true context and, you know, I mean, I guess that’s the distrust that we had spoken of earlier in terms of repatriation is that there was a lot of distrust because there’s just a history and or a legacy that is brought from the standpoint of how many times Native people have stood before non-native and had promises made to them. And of course, all those things sort of as expected or anticipated, never made sort of came to fruition for native peoples.
Brenda: You know, I’m listening, and I’m thinking about a colleague of mine who was a curator in Western Australia for many years for a national museum there, and he, you know, was in his twenties and just starting out in the museum world. And his job was to quote, collect indigenous objects. And over many, many years, he collected upwards of 4000 stone tools.
Brenda: Now, 40-plus years later, he has been fighting and fighting and fighting to try to repatriate. And he’s no longer with the institution and he has these profound feelings of guilt and shame and conflict, inner conflict that he’s been struggling with. And during COVID, he actually got special permission to be able to go visit the collections storeroom where all of these 4000 stone tools are.
Brenda: And he went there to have a personal kind of a personal ceremony, a ritual period of time where he took out these thousands of stone tools and apologized and asked their forgiveness.
Terry: Well, you know, I mean, maybe in the course of those collectings, he thought he was doing a good thing. And in some respects, it could have been, but in other respects, it could equally sort of contradicted and or defied, you know, so maybe the order or the ways in which Aboriginal people would have preferred to have things left in state.
And, you know, everything has some form of energy. And sure, I think, you know, I think that that’s sort of maybe a way to sort of acknowledge and or maybe make peace with that and making those apologies. One of the things my mother taught me was, was a prayer that I use on occasion to ask for forgiveness and touching and taking care of these things.
Brenda: Terry, What would you want visitors at NMAI today to walk away with as a result of their encounters with the collections?
Terry: One of the things that I think a lot of people believe or even aren’t aware of, that Native people are still alive or still thriving. So much of the culture that is taught in mainstream is such that it either also has minimized or reduced us to sort of caricature status or the state. So there are things in which we do look at the museum and or wish to share with peoples about who we are and our past.
I think what a lot of people assume a national museum, American Indian is, is is about beads and feathers. And we’re not. We’re so much more. And so I think Hollywood is probably has given a greatest of service to our identities because of what they did and how we were portrayed. They wanted our romanticism, but they didn’t want us.
So, you know, there were these embellishments to these narratives that sort of remain as sort of not a stigma, but just sort of an alter the sort of alter ego or alter identity to who we really are.
Abby: I’m so happy you mentioned Hollywood, Terry, because that’s what was bringing to mind. Which books should our listeners read to get a more realistic account? And also, is there any film where you feel a tribe or tribes are depicted correctly?
Terry: Well, that’s tricky, I think, from that standpoint. But there was a gentleman who was First Nations from Canada who sort of documented his travels and journey to Hollywood to find the Indian, and made these various sort of journeys to places and things where, where those interpretations of native people and or and or even people assuming those identities.
The documentary is called Reel Injuns and Real is spelled R-E-E-L. And Injuns, of course, is somewhat of a derogatory term to, say, Injuns: I-N-J-U-N. Another book is by Dee Brown, which is a book called Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. And so documents the account of the systematic destruction of American Indians.
But also, there is another gentleman. His name is Vine Deloria Jr, and he was, I think, from Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. And one of the books that he was known for was this book called Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. And that gave him national attention to Native American issues in the same year as the Alcatraz takeover during the Red Power Movement in the 70s 60s, with the American Indian Movement.
Abby: Thank you so much, Terry, for sharing your experience and perspective with us today. It’s been enlightening chatting with you, and I feel like we can all sleep a little sounder knowing you’re one of the very valued custodians of our shared past, present, and future.
Terry: So it’s been a pleasure, but I think it’s been too short a time because there’s so many stories and so many places we can go.
Abby: And thanks to everyone who tuned in today. If you like what you heard, please subscribe for more entertaining episodes of Matters of Experience. Make sure to leave a rating and a review and share with a friend. See you next time.
Brenda: Bye 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.
Reclaiming Heritage Through Repatriation with Terry Snowball
Informal Learning and Instinctive Design with Ed Rodley
Star Wars | Where Science Meets Imagination Exhibit
CARNE y ARENA (Virtually present, Physically invisible) | On Tour
[Music]
Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience, a podcast that explores the creativity, psychology and innovation driving designed experiences. A big, hearty welcome to everyone listening. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: Hello, everyone. This is Brenda Cowan.
Abby: Today, we’re talking with Ed Rodley, an award winning experience designer who’s worked for over 25 years creating visitor focused projects for science, natural history and art museums, just to name a few. He’s co-founder and principal at The Experien—- ce Alchemists, an experience design firm serving cultural organizations both large and small. Prior to that, Ed was Associate Director of Integrated Media at the Peabody Essex Museum. He is a passionate believer in what Ed refers to as the informal learning that is at the heart of the visitor experience, which I’m really keen to hear more about today. Ed, welcome to the show.
Ed: Thank you so much for having me, Abby and Brenda.
Brenda: Ed, you began museums as an 11 year old volunteer, not very long ago. And over the years, you’ve done every front-of-house position possible. What first attracted you to museums and what were some of those first really critical jobs?
Ed: Oh, boy. I think probably the first thing that attracted me to museums was that museums offered to take me in, right, so when I when I started at the impossibly young age that you mentioned, there was a program being run by the Museum of Science in Boston where I grew up, where they would invite middle school students to come in and lead tours. Basically, we would walk kindergartners around the museum and read the labels to them. So, the reason that I got interested was not because I had a burning interest at age 11 in museums, but because the museum asked like, please come in. And once in, then obviously the hook was set, as it were. And I proceeded through, as you said, a lot of front-of-house jobs.I was a guard, I was a ticket taker. I worked in, you know, putting sharks’ teeth in bags in the store.
I didn’t even really think about museums as a career option until after college, even though by that time I’d been working in museums for over a decade. It’s as simple as just meeting the right person, which in my case was having lunch with the woman who was in charge of traveling exhibitions at the museum, who was complaining about how overworked and understaffed she was. And it was only really at that point at age, you know, whatever, 24, 25, that the light bulb went on in my head like, oh, wait a minute, people make the things that the museum is full of that people come to see. And that could be a job you could do, instead of being a ticket taker, like, huh, interesting.
Abby: And in terms of sort of the importance of a mentor, can you talk to us about how she mentored you?
Ed: I did not realize the great good fortune I had when I first got my first job in exhibits. The woman who hired me was of that generation of women who’d come up in museums when if you wanted to get ahead, you were basically either going to work in personnel or you were going to be like the executive secretary to the director. So, the idea that you could become a manager in your own right and have some power and authority was something that she had managed to achieve, I think pretty much through sheer dint of personality.
And she was determined that the next generation was not going to go through what she went through. So from the very, from the very get go, she really inculcated in me part of my responsibility as professional was to actually leave the profession better than I found it, which at the time I thought was just what bosses did. It seemed like a very logical boss thing, right? Oh, you’re going to set parameters for me and give me something inspirational to aspire to. And it was only after I had stopped working for her and had many other bosses that I was like, oh, oh, she was a mentor, and all these other ones are really just bosses.
Brenda: Man, I’ve got to say, I had a very similar story to yours where my very first boss, who is at Brooklyn Children’s Museum, all honest, he changed my life. And I knew at the ripe old age of 22 that museums were going to be the rest of my life. So, how is it that you went from there to where it is that you are today?
Ed: The usual, very non-linear path, I guess you could say. I gradually moved over the next many years into doing content development and exhibit development. And one of the shows that I worked on in the mid-nineties was a tiny little exhibit just trying to explain what the World Wide Web was, because I thought this is an interesting thing and it was a brand new technology at the time.
So, then I became the quote unquote computer guy, and that led me into thinking about digital engagement and that interest in the digital and particularly in the intersection of the digital and the physical is a thing that has just stayed with me ever since. And so that was, that was part of the motivation for moving into art museums, because strangely enough, they have much deeper experience thinking digitally than a lot of other museums because they were among the first crop in the sixties to really embrace what they called data processing back in the day.
That led up to the pandemic, and lots of people, including myself, losing their jobs and deciding that, well, you know, in the middle of a pandemic, this is a great time to start an experience design firm and try to do this kind of work for not just museums, but other kinds of clients as well.
Abby: Tell us about some of your adventures, like at Skywalker Ranch. You know, what was that like? Sorry, I love Star Wars, I’m not going to miss this opportunity.
Ed: You’re really just going to drag me into the mud on this thing.
Abby: I know, I totally am.
Ed: 11 years old, Star Wars. Okay. So, one of the other things I did at a very young age was ditch school one fine May day in 1977 to go see a movie that was playing at the, the biggest theater in Boston at the time, which was called Star Wars. And that began a lifelong love of the, of the movies and of the people who made them. One of the highlights of my career was we actually put together a proposal to do an exhibition that used Star Wars as a way to think about and look at new technologies that might be coming in the real world.
We would often run into the problem at the Museum of Science, where we would be thinking about how do you get people to visualize something that doesn’t exist yet, right, because your vision of the future and my vision of the future are probably going to look wildly different so there’s no common frame of reference. Really, without that kind of scaffolding, it’s hard to get people to move where you want them to. So, if we wanted to talk about cryogenically cooled superconducting magnetically levitated trains, right, that doesn’t mean anything to you, probably. If I say like, land speeder, people immediately have an image of what that is.
Abby: Oh, yeah.
Ed: And so we proposed to Lucasfilm that we use Star Wars, really not for Star Wars’ sake, but just as sort of a shorthand to get us to talk about stuff in the real world. This take was different enough that George was actually interested enough to say like, you know, sure, go ahead. Go work with these guys. So I did find myself in the situation of being a lifelong Star Wars dork, like driving up to the unmarked front gate of Skywalker Ranch to go talk to people at both Lucasfilm and Industrial Light & Magic and Skywalker Sound, and actually meeting the people who had made the things that had entranced me as a teenager back in 1977. And interestingly, with all of the real-world scientists and engineers we talked with, there were between them almost a universal similarity in that they’d all had that kind of experience with something, usually a pop culture reference. It might not have been Star Wars per se, but like you could almost, you could rank roboticists by were they the crop of people who went into robotics because they saw 2001: A Space Odyssey or because they saw Star Wars, which was fascinating.
Abby: I was going to say it’s fun when, you know, obviously you often have art imitating nature, but in this case, nature imitating art. And a lso that awesome use of a common language, using Star Wars to tell what were probably quite complex concepts and information is really awesome, and I think when designing museums, it’s a great example of sort of thinking differently, thinking outside the box, thinking about a different way to represent information that can connect with your visitors.–
Ed: Yes.
Brenda: Well, I’d like to bring us a few light years forward to present day. I know I’m hilarious. Right? As you’ve expanded over the years, you’ve observed that the visitor experience was not really very holistic. Has it changed since COVID? How have you helped make things more holistic for visitors and their experiences through some of your recent work?
Ed: One of my strange pet peeves as somebody who spent most of his professional life working in making exhibitions has always been how much less focus gets paid to everything that happens outside of the gallery doors, in museums in particular. The idea that the visit, quote unquote, to a museum is only the part that happens when you’re in the galleries where the stuff is, is really just not the way that people experience museums, right?
The visit is everything. The visit is deciding to go. It’s getting there. It’s parking, it’s walking through the front doors. It’s trying to decide what kind of ticket to buy. All of these things make or break the visit as much, if not more, than the actual content, which is kind of a difficult pill to swallow for somebody who’s interested in making the content.
I’m sure we’ve probably all had the experience of being at a cultural organization with somebody who didn’t want to be there, right? And they are the people who usually drive that experience because the least interested person is the person who’s going to decide when the group leaves. For me, experience design was a very neat way to take that desire to think more holistically about the work the museum does, and also frame it as a way that it was something that I could be part of.
You know, in my, my earliest days working in an exhibits department, you know, well the lobby, that’s not your business, that’s visitor services or the membership desk, you know, that’s not your business, that’s membership’s business. And the hallways belong to security and the garage belongs to the garage. And, you know, for visitors, they don’t make any of that fine distinction. It’s all the museum to them. And for us to take the mental model of the org chart and try to apply that to the visit is just really not helpful.
Abby: Yes. So you started to talk to us a little bit Ed about when you became a digital guy. From your perspective now, what does digital bring to the visitor experience in institutions, good and bad?
Ed: One of the things I think is the agency equation is much more sharply slanted in the visitor’s favor just because if it’s a thing that’s happening on your phone or some kind of device that is yours, you can put it down or you can turn it off or you can stick it in your pocket or your purse. Digital gives you at least the possibility of being much more selective about when you actually are trying to push stuff toward the visitor or when you’re asking them, when you’re using the pull mechanism of like, tell us what you want, and we’ll give it to you when you want it.
The example that I use to try to explain this is one from a museum I went to in Australia called the Museum of Old and New Art. It’s this absolutely crazy private museum in Hobart, Tasmania, literally the bottom of the planet, built by this internet gambling millionaire who amassed a giant collection and built this strange museum. And his whole organizational scheme was he loved art and he hated art museums and he didn’t want to make a museum that looked like a museum.
So, there’s no labels. Zero. All of the interpretation happens via a mobile device. And if you want to learn anything about any of the art, you have to actually look for it and seek it yourself rather than having it just pushed at you. And I wound up having probably one of the most transformative art museum experiences I’ve had because I didn’t have to have anything interfere with the visit that I didn’t want to have interfere with the visit.
There was a particular moment where I was standing in front of a painting and I was looking at it and thinking like, this looks kind of like a crappy Picasso. And having the realization that, like, I don’t like this painting and I look it up, and of course it is a Picasso. And if there had been a tombstone label there that said, you know, Picasso, Pablo, Spanish, active in France, 18, blah, blah, blah to 19, blah, blah, blah, I probably would not have had the ability to have that realization that I didn’t like this piece because everybody ==y knows Picasso is part of the Western art canon.
He’s, he’s a single name artist. Like, you can’t not like him, in the same way that I could like this thing that I had a direct encounter with without any kind of mediation, right, and that was a very important moment for me, just realizing like, oh, yeah, if you put these things out there like labels where everybody can see them all the time, even if you don’t look at them, they still affect your visit.
Brenda: I’d like to talk about really some of the work that you are, I believe, the most well-known for, which is digital immersion. So, you see immersion as the beginning of an experience, not the end all, be all of an exhibition experience or an environmental designed experience. So, build spaces like Meow Wolf or large scale digital environments that integrate built environment with VR and digital technologies.
These are spaces that you see as being rich with potential for visitors to engage deeply into content. Can you give us an example of the best that you’ve experienced so far? Like, what should we all be aiming for?
Ed: Well, one thing I would say is the, the one size fits all solution doesn’t exist. In terms of what makes a successful immersive experience. If you look at and I’m going to say a lot about immersive Van Gogh, which is not to say that I’m going to rain all over immersive Van Gogh, but they are useful exemplar because everybody has heard about it if they haven’t actually seen one of them.
If you go all the way back to the 1990s and people like Janet Murray in Hamlet on the Holodeck, she points out that the word immersion originally had a very specific meaning. The word immersion meant being dunked in water, like jumping into a pool, being baptized, going for a swim, and it’s that sensation of transitioning from one environment to another environment that is radically different enough that you are completely aware of the transition.
So, if you think of the moment after you’ve jumped in the pool, you become intensely aware of that environment and you’re trying to figure out, okay, how do I survive in this environment? In digital immersive environments, that same thing is happening, right? Normally in our default world, stuff isn’t moving on the floors and on the walls and on the ceiling, so when you leave the default world to enter one of these like immersive Van Gogh experiences, your brain does sort of the same thing. You’re trying to figure out like, okay, what are the new rules that apply here? The thing about immersive Van Gogh, that’s sort of a lost opportunity for most of them, I think is eventually that new environment becomes your default environment, right?-=
The immersion basically gives you a very short time span when people are really paying attention and therefore it becomes an opportunity for you to be able to leverage them to do anything else you want. But once that immersion effect wears off, oftentimes that will be the end. If there’s nothing else there, that’s why people get up, they go, okay, big pictures on the walls and ceiling, I get it. And they leave.
Brenda: Yeah, it’s all about the potential, and like you said, the missed opportunity.
Ed: Yeah. The Mexican director, Alejandro Iñárritu, created a VR experience a few years ago called CARNE y ARENA, which was ostensibly a VR experience designed to help people understand what it’s like to be a migrant trying to cross the southern border into the US. But it is actually something that manages to hit almost all of the necessary elements I think you need to have in order to particularly leverage the immersion aspect of what makes an engaging digital experience.
You go into a fairly industrial looking space where you have to take off your shoes and you get a little bit of onboarding about what’s going to happen to you. After you get your training, you get dumped into the center of the experience, which is basically a giant sandbox, literally, like it’s a large empty space with sand on the floor.
They have heat lamps going, so you have the goggles on at this point and you’re seeing a VR film of nighttime in the U.S. South somewhere, and there’s a group of migrants walking along in the dark and they have an encounter with the Border Patrol. You’re getting all of the immersion, you’re getting it reinforced kinesthetically, right? Your feet are actually crunching on sand. Your skin feels warm. And the story of what is happening to these people really takes that immersion and makes this thing an intensely emotionally evocative experience.
And at the end of all of this, there is actually a third space after that that is sort of like a traditional museum gallery where there are pictures of the actors who were in the thing that you just witnessed. Many, I think if not all of them, are actual migrants themselves, and they do a really, I think, delightful job of off boarding you. Right. Because one of the things that we know from psychology is that for intensely emotional experiences, you need time to process it. So, when the, when the learning actually happens is not when you’re experiencing it, it’s when you’re reflecting on that experience, like what just happened.
So, yes, it is an immersive experience, but it is really so much more than an immersive experience. And to shorten it down to just calling it immersive is kind of a disservice to what it’s trying to do.
Abby: It’s interesting the example you just gave, Ed, when I’m thinking about back to the idea of education versus entertainment discussion, I think back to one of my favorite teachers who brought history to life in school in such a really, truly entertaining way that I’ve still managed to remember some of the things he’s taught me to this very day, which is a kind of like small feat because I’ve forgotten almost everything I learned at school.
So for me, when I visit a museum like the Tenement Museum, we were talking to Annie Polland recently, you know, I’m learning, being immersed but also being entertained, it really sort of captured my imagination. So I just wanted to sort of get your thoughts on that balance.
Ed: So, one of the things that has been helpful to me has been to think about the visitor experience as someone who creates the experiences as being in sort of a host guest relationship. The most important thing I think an institution can do is display hospitality, which is getting at sort of your idea about comfort, right? What do you need to do as a good host to be hospitable for the people who are visiting you?
You need to make them feel comfortable. You need to tell them where the bathroom is in case they need to go to the bathroom. If they’re hungry, you need to feed them. And if there are other things going on, it’s really your job for them to have as successful an experience as possible. For me personally, is getting people to think of their audience not as demographic segments but as real people.
It’s very easy to talk about demographics, but it’s also very easy to decide to give up on demographics, where it’s much harder to do that to people. You can say like, Oh, well, you know, Spanish labels are too hard. We’re just not going to do it. But if you actually have a face or even, you know, just a user persona of an actual person representing this group, it’s a lot harder for people to be inhospitable.
And for me, that is sort of the thing I come back to all the time. Hospitality. What does it mean to lay out the welcome mat for people.
Brenda: So let’s talk about your work as an exhibition planner and as an experience planner. You’re a big believer in not being too precious and in doing things such as testing or formative evaluation, prototyping, recrafting. You’ve said that it can be freeing, and I know that from a designer perspective, this can take a lot of humility and a lot of willingness to let go, and that’s pretty tough stuff sometimes.
What are some of your experiences? Do you have any examples to share?
Ed: Certainly the first time I ever sat down with an interactive that I had worked on to watch visitors try unsuccessfully to use it is the kind of humbling experience I think everybody should have the opportunity to have. There’s nothing worse than sitting there with your clipboard watching people just, you know, trying again and again and again to do the thing that they’re trying to do and failing. Being able to take that and say like, okay, that’s not their problem.
That’s my problem. Like, I designed this thing wrong and we need to go back because I don’t want anyone to have the experience ever again. Having watched it. That’s the thing that can end somebody’s visit, right? You get one of these experiences where you’re, you’re trying and you’re trying and it’s just not working. And many, many times people will reflect it back on themselves because they have such great trust in cultural organizations. Like, the thought won’t even occur to many people that like, maybe it’s just a bad design. They will think, I’m stupid, I can’t figure this out.
Abby: I think, you’re talking about instinctive design, I think you’re, you’re dead right to be honest, when we’re designing interactives, it has to be familiar. I mean, we’re all using them all the time. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. And when we had a podcast with Sina Bahram who came on to talk about accessibility, and when you think about layering that on top as well and expectations for those visitors, has to be intuitive, has to be simple.
The design needs to be accessible for everybody. And I think it’s really interesting you mentioned ego, we also have a podcast on ego. I love that idea of interviewing for resiliency because you do, you’re right Ed, you have to be comfortable seeing your work changed by clients, changed by the team, and I think it’s definitely a tough early lesson for, for designers.
Ed: It’s not even an early lesson, I mean, there are, there’s still plenty of room for plenty of people to learn that lesson. When the Star Wars exhibition was finishing its ten year long intercontinental cruise around the planet, a couple of the people who had worked on the show, we’d all moved on by then, but somebody had said like, you know, Star Wars is wrapping up at its last venue in San Jose.
We should go see it on its last day. Three of us decided we were going to fly across the country and we went to see the exhibition on its very last day. And there was something very, very powerful about being there with something that you had brought into the world, seeing it out again on the way. And the very next day, you know, friends who were working at the museum sent me pictures on my phone of like the first load going into the dumpster. I was like, there’s 15 years of my career in the dumpster and, and, and that’s okay.
Abby: Wow. That is the best therapy, I think talking about letting go and ego or in this case, fear of the unknown. I want to turn our focus to AI, and how some of our tasks are being taken over by it. And that’s clearly unnerving for a whole lot of people, a whole lot of creative people, I’m thinking about writers, who are worried their jobs could be over. So, Ed, how do you feel about AI and do you think it’ll disturb the museum experience?
Ed: Whoa.
Abby: I know, I’m sorry.
Brenda: In five words or less. You may not use a chat to answer this question.
Ed: I’m going to take a big, long drink first. I’ve lived through enough technology trends to recognize the truth of the Gartner hype cycle. You guys familiar?
Brenda: No.
Ed: So Gartner, in their market research, realized that with technology trends, there tends to be this sort of parabolic curve that technologies follow where, at the top of that, that parabola, you know, everybody saying it’s going to change everything. And it’s the be all it’s all like, imagine, you know, VR for the last 20 years and then it gets to a point where it stops being novel and interesting and goes down the other way and sort of plummets to like, this is stupid.
It’s not living up to any of the hype. And then eventually it comes back up again to whatever place it really is meant to have in society. And with AI, clearly you’re seeing something that’s at the very top of its hype cycle. But we saw the same thing happen, I mean, I’m going to date myself now, although I already have, you know, computers and exhibits.
Are they going to ruin everything? Yes. Well, maybe not. Yeah, they’re kind of ruining everything. No, they’re just part of the, part of the tool kit that we use now and AI, I’m pretty sure is going to follow the same path. Is it going to put some people out of work? Definitely. I mean, every, every new technology has that kind of disruptive effect.
Abby: Mm hmm.
Brenda: Ed, we want to take a last opportunity to just ask you to tell us about the book that you are currently working on.
Ed: Thank you very much for the opportunity. I have been working for several years on a book on museum experience design that it currently has the working title Designing for Playful Engagement, and it is really an attempt to try to put a sort of a theoretical underpinning under the last 30 odd years of everything I’ve been doing, an opportunity to sort of walk people through what we actually know about how human beings engage with cultural experiences.
In terms of both the museum literature but also the scientific literature as a way, particularly around these new technologies, to not get stuck in the hype cycle, but really try to get into like what does neuroscience and psychology tell us about the usefulness of people being able to experience their emotions comfortably and who are, who are people out there who have done interesting things you can look at because we know museum people love case studies.
Abby: Thank you so much for joining us today, Ed, and sharing your quite candid answers to our pretty big, weighty questions and also for introducing Star Wars finally into one of our episodes. I’m really looking forward to reading your book since playful experiences and creating places to be emotional is so integral to our work, our design work at Loren Ipsum, so really looking forward to reading your book. Thank you.
Brenda: Sounds like a good one for my students as well. Godspeed, Ed. Thank you so much for joining us.
Ed: Thank you for having me. Being in the same company as people like Annie Polland and Sina, I feel like I’ve made the big times.
Abby: You’ve made it.
Brenda: You have.
Abby: And thanks to everyone who tuned in. If you like what you heard, subscribe to more episodes of Matters of Experience wherever you listen to podcasts. Make sure to leave a rating and a review and share with a friend. We’ll see you next time.
[Music]
Producer: Matters of Experience is produced by Lorem Ipsum Corp and recorded at Hangar Studios. Tune in next time for more fun discussions about experience design.
Star Wars | Where Science Meets Imagination Exhibit
CARNE y ARENA (Virtually present, Physically invisible) | On Tour
[Music]
Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience, a podcast that explores the creativity, psychology and innovation driving designed experiences. A big, hearty welcome to everyone listening. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: Hello, everyone. This is Brenda Cowan.
Abby: Today, we’re talking with Ed Rodley, an award winning experience designer who’s worked for over 25 years creating visitor focused projects for science, natural history and art museums, just to name a few. He’s co-founder and principal at The Experien—- ce Alchemists, an experience design firm serving cultural organizations both large and small. Prior to that, Ed was Associate Director of Integrated Media at the Peabody Essex Museum. He is a passionate believer in what Ed refers to as the informal learning that is at the heart of the visitor experience, which I’m really keen to hear more about today. Ed, welcome to the show.
Ed: Thank you so much for having me, Abby and Brenda.
Brenda: Ed, you began museums as an 11 year old volunteer, not very long ago. And over the years, you’ve done every front-of-house position possible. What first attracted you to museums and what were some of those first really critical jobs?
Ed: Oh, boy. I think probably the first thing that attracted me to museums was that museums offered to take me in, right, so when I when I started at the impossibly young age that you mentioned, there was a program being run by the Museum of Science in Boston where I grew up, where they would invite middle school students to come in and lead tours. Basically, we would walk kindergartners around the museum and read the labels to them. So, the reason that I got interested was not because I had a burning interest at age 11 in museums, but because the museum asked like, please come in. And once in, then obviously the hook was set, as it were. And I proceeded through, as you said, a lot of front-of-house jobs.I was a guard, I was a ticket taker. I worked in, you know, putting sharks’ teeth in bags in the store.
I didn’t even really think about museums as a career option until after college, even though by that time I’d been working in museums for over a decade. It’s as simple as just meeting the right person, which in my case was having lunch with the woman who was in charge of traveling exhibitions at the museum, who was complaining about how overworked and understaffed she was. And it was only really at that point at age, you know, whatever, 24, 25, that the light bulb went on in my head like, oh, wait a minute, people make the things that the museum is full of that people come to see. And that could be a job you could do, instead of being a ticket taker, like, huh, interesting.
Abby: And in terms of sort of the importance of a mentor, can you talk to us about how she mentored you?
Ed: I did not realize the great good fortune I had when I first got my first job in exhibits. The woman who hired me was of that generation of women who’d come up in museums when if you wanted to get ahead, you were basically either going to work in personnel or you were going to be like the executive secretary to the director. So, the idea that you could become a manager in your own right and have some power and authority was something that she had managed to achieve, I think pretty much through sheer dint of personality.
And she was determined that the next generation was not going to go through what she went through. So from the very, from the very get go, she really inculcated in me part of my responsibility as professional was to actually leave the profession better than I found it, which at the time I thought was just what bosses did. It seemed like a very logical boss thing, right? Oh, you’re going to set parameters for me and give me something inspirational to aspire to. And it was only after I had stopped working for her and had many other bosses that I was like, oh, oh, she was a mentor, and all these other ones are really just bosses.
Brenda: Man, I’ve got to say, I had a very similar story to yours where my very first boss, who is at Brooklyn Children’s Museum, all honest, he changed my life. And I knew at the ripe old age of 22 that museums were going to be the rest of my life. So, how is it that you went from there to where it is that you are today?
Ed: The usual, very non-linear path, I guess you could say. I gradually moved over the next many years into doing content development and exhibit development. And one of the shows that I worked on in the mid-nineties was a tiny little exhibit just trying to explain what the World Wide Web was, because I thought this is an interesting thing and it was a brand new technology at the time.
So, then I became the quote unquote computer guy, and that led me into thinking about digital engagement and that interest in the digital and particularly in the intersection of the digital and the physical is a thing that has just stayed with me ever since. And so that was, that was part of the motivation for moving into art museums, because strangely enough, they have much deeper experience thinking digitally than a lot of other museums because they were among the first crop in the sixties to really embrace what they called data processing back in the day.
That led up to the pandemic, and lots of people, including myself, losing their jobs and deciding that, well, you know, in the middle of a pandemic, this is a great time to start an experience design firm and try to do this kind of work for not just museums, but other kinds of clients as well.
Abby: Tell us about some of your adventures, like at Skywalker Ranch. You know, what was that like? Sorry, I love Star Wars, I’m not going to miss this opportunity.
Ed: You’re really just going to drag me into the mud on this thing.
Abby: I know, I totally am.
Ed: 11 years old, Star Wars. Okay. So, one of the other things I did at a very young age was ditch school one fine May day in 1977 to go see a movie that was playing at the, the biggest theater in Boston at the time, which was called Star Wars. And that began a lifelong love of the, of the movies and of the people who made them. One of the highlights of my career was we actually put together a proposal to do an exhibition that used Star Wars as a way to think about and look at new technologies that might be coming in the real world.
We would often run into the problem at the Museum of Science, where we would be thinking about how do you get people to visualize something that doesn’t exist yet, right, because your vision of the future and my vision of the future are probably going to look wildly different so there’s no common frame of reference. Really, without that kind of scaffolding, it’s hard to get people to move where you want them to. So, if we wanted to talk about cryogenically cooled superconducting magnetically levitated trains, right, that doesn’t mean anything to you, probably. If I say like, land speeder, people immediately have an image of what that is.
Abby: Oh, yeah.
Ed: And so we proposed to Lucasfilm that we use Star Wars, really not for Star Wars’ sake, but just as sort of a shorthand to get us to talk about stuff in the real world. This take was different enough that George was actually interested enough to say like, you know, sure, go ahead. Go work with these guys. So I did find myself in the situation of being a lifelong Star Wars dork, like driving up to the unmarked front gate of Skywalker Ranch to go talk to people at both Lucasfilm and Industrial Light & Magic and Skywalker Sound, and actually meeting the people who had made the things that had entranced me as a teenager back in 1977. And interestingly, with all of the real-world scientists and engineers we talked with, there were between them almost a universal similarity in that they’d all had that kind of experience with something, usually a pop culture reference. It might not have been Star Wars per se, but like you could almost, you could rank roboticists by were they the crop of people who went into robotics because they saw 2001: A Space Odyssey or because they saw Star Wars, which was fascinating.
Abby: I was going to say it’s fun when, you know, obviously you often have art imitating nature, but in this case, nature imitating art. And a lso that awesome use of a common language, using Star Wars to tell what were probably quite complex concepts and information is really awesome, and I think when designing museums, it’s a great example of sort of thinking differently, thinking outside the box, thinking about a different way to represent information that can connect with your visitors.–
Ed: Yes.
Brenda: Well, I’d like to bring us a few light years forward to present day. I know I’m hilarious. Right? As you’ve expanded over the years, you’ve observed that the visitor experience was not really very holistic. Has it changed since COVID? How have you helped make things more holistic for visitors and their experiences through some of your recent work?
Ed: One of my strange pet peeves as somebody who spent most of his professional life working in making exhibitions has always been how much less focus gets paid to everything that happens outside of the gallery doors, in museums in particular. The idea that the visit, quote unquote, to a museum is only the part that happens when you’re in the galleries where the stuff is, is really just not the way that people experience museums, right?
The visit is everything. The visit is deciding to go. It’s getting there. It’s parking, it’s walking through the front doors. It’s trying to decide what kind of ticket to buy. All of these things make or break the visit as much, if not more, than the actual content, which is kind of a difficult pill to swallow for somebody who’s interested in making the content.
I’m sure we’ve probably all had the experience of being at a cultural organization with somebody who didn’t want to be there, right? And they are the people who usually drive that experience because the least interested person is the person who’s going to decide when the group leaves. For me, experience design was a very neat way to take that desire to think more holistically about the work the museum does, and also frame it as a way that it was something that I could be part of.
You know, in my, my earliest days working in an exhibits department, you know, well the lobby, that’s not your business, that’s visitor services or the membership desk, you know, that’s not your business, that’s membership’s business. And the hallways belong to security and the garage belongs to the garage. And, you know, for visitors, they don’t make any of that fine distinction. It’s all the museum to them. And for us to take the mental model of the org chart and try to apply that to the visit is just really not helpful.
Abby: Yes. So you started to talk to us a little bit Ed about when you became a digital guy. From your perspective now, what does digital bring to the visitor experience in institutions, good and bad?
Ed: One of the things I think is the agency equation is much more sharply slanted in the visitor’s favor just because if it’s a thing that’s happening on your phone or some kind of device that is yours, you can put it down or you can turn it off or you can stick it in your pocket or your purse. Digital gives you at least the possibility of being much more selective about when you actually are trying to push stuff toward the visitor or when you’re asking them, when you’re using the pull mechanism of like, tell us what you want, and we’ll give it to you when you want it.
The example that I use to try to explain this is one from a museum I went to in Australia called the Museum of Old and New Art. It’s this absolutely crazy private museum in Hobart, Tasmania, literally the bottom of the planet, built by this internet gambling millionaire who amassed a giant collection and built this strange museum. And his whole organizational scheme was he loved art and he hated art museums and he didn’t want to make a museum that looked like a museum.
So, there’s no labels. Zero. All of the interpretation happens via a mobile device. And if you want to learn anything about any of the art, you have to actually look for it and seek it yourself rather than having it just pushed at you. And I wound up having probably one of the most transformative art museum experiences I’ve had because I didn’t have to have anything interfere with the visit that I didn’t want to have interfere with the visit.
There was a particular moment where I was standing in front of a painting and I was looking at it and thinking like, this looks kind of like a crappy Picasso. And having the realization that, like, I don’t like this painting and I look it up, and of course it is a Picasso. And if there had been a tombstone label there that said, you know, Picasso, Pablo, Spanish, active in France, 18, blah, blah, blah to 19, blah, blah, blah, I probably would not have had the ability to have that realization that I didn’t like this piece because everybody ==y knows Picasso is part of the Western art canon.
He’s, he’s a single name artist. Like, you can’t not like him, in the same way that I could like this thing that I had a direct encounter with without any kind of mediation, right, and that was a very important moment for me, just realizing like, oh, yeah, if you put these things out there like labels where everybody can see them all the time, even if you don’t look at them, they still affect your visit.
Brenda: I’d like to talk about really some of the work that you are, I believe, the most well-known for, which is digital immersion. So, you see immersion as the beginning of an experience, not the end all, be all of an exhibition experience or an environmental designed experience. So, build spaces like Meow Wolf or large scale digital environments that integrate built environment with VR and digital technologies.
These are spaces that you see as being rich with potential for visitors to engage deeply into content. Can you give us an example of the best that you’ve experienced so far? Like, what should we all be aiming for?
Ed: Well, one thing I would say is the, the one size fits all solution doesn’t exist. In terms of what makes a successful immersive experience. If you look at and I’m going to say a lot about immersive Van Gogh, which is not to say that I’m going to rain all over immersive Van Gogh, but they are useful exemplar because everybody has heard about it if they haven’t actually seen one of them.
If you go all the way back to the 1990s and people like Janet Murray in Hamlet on the Holodeck, she points out that the word immersion originally had a very specific meaning. The word immersion meant being dunked in water, like jumping into a pool, being baptized, going for a swim, and it’s that sensation of transitioning from one environment to another environment that is radically different enough that you are completely aware of the transition.
So, if you think of the moment after you’ve jumped in the pool, you become intensely aware of that environment and you’re trying to figure out, okay, how do I survive in this environment? In digital immersive environments, that same thing is happening, right? Normally in our default world, stuff isn’t moving on the floors and on the walls and on the ceiling, so when you leave the default world to enter one of these like immersive Van Gogh experiences, your brain does sort of the same thing. You’re trying to figure out like, okay, what are the new rules that apply here? The thing about immersive Van Gogh, that’s sort of a lost opportunity for most of them, I think is eventually that new environment becomes your default environment, right?-=
The immersion basically gives you a very short time span when people are really paying attention and therefore it becomes an opportunity for you to be able to leverage them to do anything else you want. But once that immersion effect wears off, oftentimes that will be the end. If there’s nothing else there, that’s why people get up, they go, okay, big pictures on the walls and ceiling, I get it. And they leave.
Brenda: Yeah, it’s all about the potential, and like you said, the missed opportunity.
Ed: Yeah. The Mexican director, Alejandro Iñárritu, created a VR experience a few years ago called CARNE y ARENA, which was ostensibly a VR experience designed to help people understand what it’s like to be a migrant trying to cross the southern border into the US. But it is actually something that manages to hit almost all of the necessary elements I think you need to have in order to particularly leverage the immersion aspect of what makes an engaging digital experience.
You go into a fairly industrial looking space where you have to take off your shoes and you get a little bit of onboarding about what’s going to happen to you. After you get your training, you get dumped into the center of the experience, which is basically a giant sandbox, literally, like it’s a large empty space with sand on the floor.
They have heat lamps going, so you have the goggles on at this point and you’re seeing a VR film of nighttime in the U.S. South somewhere, and there’s a group of migrants walking along in the dark and they have an encounter with the Border Patrol. You’re getting all of the immersion, you’re getting it reinforced kinesthetically, right? Your feet are actually crunching on sand. Your skin feels warm. And the story of what is happening to these people really takes that immersion and makes this thing an intensely emotionally evocative experience.
And at the end of all of this, there is actually a third space after that that is sort of like a traditional museum gallery where there are pictures of the actors who were in the thing that you just witnessed. Many, I think if not all of them, are actual migrants themselves, and they do a really, I think, delightful job of off boarding you. Right. Because one of the things that we know from psychology is that for intensely emotional experiences, you need time to process it. So, when the, when the learning actually happens is not when you’re experiencing it, it’s when you’re reflecting on that experience, like what just happened.
So, yes, it is an immersive experience, but it is really so much more than an immersive experience. And to shorten it down to just calling it immersive is kind of a disservice to what it’s trying to do.
Abby: It’s interesting the example you just gave, Ed, when I’m thinking about back to the idea of education versus entertainment discussion, I think back to one of my favorite teachers who brought history to life in school in such a really, truly entertaining way that I’ve still managed to remember some of the things he’s taught me to this very day, which is a kind of like small feat because I’ve forgotten almost everything I learned at school.
So for me, when I visit a museum like the Tenement Museum, we were talking to Annie Polland recently, you know, I’m learning, being immersed but also being entertained, it really sort of captured my imagination. So I just wanted to sort of get your thoughts on that balance.
Ed: So, one of the things that has been helpful to me has been to think about the visitor experience as someone who creates the experiences as being in sort of a host guest relationship. The most important thing I think an institution can do is display hospitality, which is getting at sort of your idea about comfort, right? What do you need to do as a good host to be hospitable for the people who are visiting you?
You need to make them feel comfortable. You need to tell them where the bathroom is in case they need to go to the bathroom. If they’re hungry, you need to feed them. And if there are other things going on, it’s really your job for them to have as successful an experience as possible. For me personally, is getting people to think of their audience not as demographic segments but as real people.
It’s very easy to talk about demographics, but it’s also very easy to decide to give up on demographics, where it’s much harder to do that to people. You can say like, Oh, well, you know, Spanish labels are too hard. We’re just not going to do it. But if you actually have a face or even, you know, just a user persona of an actual person representing this group, it’s a lot harder for people to be inhospitable.
And for me, that is sort of the thing I come back to all the time. Hospitality. What does it mean to lay out the welcome mat for people.
Brenda: So let’s talk about your work as an exhibition planner and as an experience planner. You’re a big believer in not being too precious and in doing things such as testing or formative evaluation, prototyping, recrafting. You’ve said that it can be freeing, and I know that from a designer perspective, this can take a lot of humility and a lot of willingness to let go, and that’s pretty tough stuff sometimes.
What are some of your experiences? Do you have any examples to share?
Ed: Certainly the first time I ever sat down with an interactive that I had worked on to watch visitors try unsuccessfully to use it is the kind of humbling experience I think everybody should have the opportunity to have. There’s nothing worse than sitting there with your clipboard watching people just, you know, trying again and again and again to do the thing that they’re trying to do and failing. Being able to take that and say like, okay, that’s not their problem.
That’s my problem. Like, I designed this thing wrong and we need to go back because I don’t want anyone to have the experience ever again. Having watched it. That’s the thing that can end somebody’s visit, right? You get one of these experiences where you’re, you’re trying and you’re trying and it’s just not working. And many, many times people will reflect it back on themselves because they have such great trust in cultural organizations. Like, the thought won’t even occur to many people that like, maybe it’s just a bad design. They will think, I’m stupid, I can’t figure this out.
Abby: I think, you’re talking about instinctive design, I think you’re, you’re dead right to be honest, when we’re designing interactives, it has to be familiar. I mean, we’re all using them all the time. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. And when we had a podcast with Sina Bahram who came on to talk about accessibility, and when you think about layering that on top as well and expectations for those visitors, has to be intuitive, has to be simple.
The design needs to be accessible for everybody. And I think it’s really interesting you mentioned ego, we also have a podcast on ego. I love that idea of interviewing for resiliency because you do, you’re right Ed, you have to be comfortable seeing your work changed by clients, changed by the team, and I think it’s definitely a tough early lesson for, for designers.
Ed: It’s not even an early lesson, I mean, there are, there’s still plenty of room for plenty of people to learn that lesson. When the Star Wars exhibition was finishing its ten year long intercontinental cruise around the planet, a couple of the people who had worked on the show, we’d all moved on by then, but somebody had said like, you know, Star Wars is wrapping up at its last venue in San Jose.
We should go see it on its last day. Three of us decided we were going to fly across the country and we went to see the exhibition on its very last day. And there was something very, very powerful about being there with something that you had brought into the world, seeing it out again on the way. And the very next day, you know, friends who were working at the museum sent me pictures on my phone of like the first load going into the dumpster. I was like, there’s 15 years of my career in the dumpster and, and, and that’s okay.
Abby: Wow. That is the best therapy, I think talking about letting go and ego or in this case, fear of the unknown. I want to turn our focus to AI, and how some of our tasks are being taken over by it. And that’s clearly unnerving for a whole lot of people, a whole lot of creative people, I’m thinking about writers, who are worried their jobs could be over. So, Ed, how do you feel about AI and do you think it’ll disturb the museum experience?
Ed: Whoa.
Abby: I know, I’m sorry.
Brenda: In five words or less. You may not use a chat to answer this question.
Ed: I’m going to take a big, long drink first. I’ve lived through enough technology trends to recognize the truth of the Gartner hype cycle. You guys familiar?
Brenda: No.
Ed: So Gartner, in their market research, realized that with technology trends, there tends to be this sort of parabolic curve that technologies follow where, at the top of that, that parabola, you know, everybody saying it’s going to change everything. And it’s the be all it’s all like, imagine, you know, VR for the last 20 years and then it gets to a point where it stops being novel and interesting and goes down the other way and sort of plummets to like, this is stupid.
It’s not living up to any of the hype. And then eventually it comes back up again to whatever place it really is meant to have in society. And with AI, clearly you’re seeing something that’s at the very top of its hype cycle. But we saw the same thing happen, I mean, I’m going to date myself now, although I already have, you know, computers and exhibits.
Are they going to ruin everything? Yes. Well, maybe not. Yeah, they’re kind of ruining everything. No, they’re just part of the, part of the tool kit that we use now and AI, I’m pretty sure is going to follow the same path. Is it going to put some people out of work? Definitely. I mean, every, every new technology has that kind of disruptive effect.
Abby: Mm hmm.
Brenda: Ed, we want to take a last opportunity to just ask you to tell us about the book that you are currently working on.
Ed: Thank you very much for the opportunity. I have been working for several years on a book on museum experience design that it currently has the working title Designing for Playful Engagement, and it is really an attempt to try to put a sort of a theoretical underpinning under the last 30 odd years of everything I’ve been doing, an opportunity to sort of walk people through what we actually know about how human beings engage with cultural experiences.
In terms of both the museum literature but also the scientific literature as a way, particularly around these new technologies, to not get stuck in the hype cycle, but really try to get into like what does neuroscience and psychology tell us about the usefulness of people being able to experience their emotions comfortably and who are, who are people out there who have done interesting things you can look at because we know museum people love case studies.
Abby: Thank you so much for joining us today, Ed, and sharing your quite candid answers to our pretty big, weighty questions and also for introducing Star Wars finally into one of our episodes. I’m really looking forward to reading your book since playful experiences and creating places to be emotional is so integral to our work, our design work at Loren Ipsum, so really looking forward to reading your book. Thank you.
Brenda: Sounds like a good one for my students as well. Godspeed, Ed. Thank you so much for joining us.
Ed: Thank you for having me. Being in the same company as people like Annie Polland and Sina, I feel like I’ve made the big times.
Abby: You’ve made it.
Brenda: You have.
Abby: And thanks to everyone who tuned in. If you like what you heard, subscribe to more episodes of Matters of Experience wherever you listen to podcasts. Make sure to leave a rating and a review and share with a friend. We’ll see you next time.
[Music]
Producer: Matters of Experience is produced by Lorem Ipsum Corp and recorded at Hangar Studios. Tune in next time for more fun discussions about experience design.
Informal Learning and Instinctive Design with Ed Rodley
Multi-sensory Design, Psychology, and Perception with Ellen Lupton
The Senses: Design Beyond Vision | Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
[Music]
Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience, a podcast that explores all the many facets of designed experiences and encounters. If you’re new, a big hello, and to our regular listeners, thanks for tuning in. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: Hello everyone. I’m Brenda Cowan.
Abby: Today we’re talking with Ellen Lupton. Ellen is a designer, writer and educator. Her books about graphic design include Thinking with Type, Design Is Storytelling and Extra Bold: A Feminist, Inclusive, Anti-racist, Nonbinary Field Guide for Graphic Designers. She teaches in the graphic design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and serves as the The Betty Cooke and William O. Steinmetz Design Chair.
And she is curator emerita at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum right here in New York City, where hopefully some of our listeners were lucky enough to see her show The Senses: Design Beyond Vision, which was fantastic, with over 65 design projects and more than 40 objects and installations to touch, hear and smell. Ellen, welcome to the show.
Ellen: Thank you. I’m excited to be here.
Brenda: We are absolutely amazed at how versed you are in all things experience design, typography, multisensory design and of course, areas of psychology and perception. When we look at your vast and fascinating body of work, tell us how did you get into this profession in the first place? What are your own origins, and what have you brought with you?
Ellen: Well, all of my work really stems back to graphic design. I went to art school at the Cooper Union, where I studied art generally, but graphic design more specifically, and really everything I do comes out of that discipline, even though what I do with graphic design is much broader. I’ve become a writer, a curator, a speaker, educator. But the root of all that thinking is really in the art of visualizing language and communication.
Abby: And of course, your storytelling in design, which you so beautifully articulate in your book Design Is Storytelling.
Brenda: Absolutely. You know that by the way, Ellen is a favorite resource in my teaching. Listeners, Ellen brilliantly unpacks the elements of story structure and emotion and multisensory design, all with exhibition creators and users in mind. So, I have to give it a plug. It’s an amazing book.
Abby: So, you know, how is storytelling or let’s say, narrative experience a unifying theme, do you think, across the breadth of your work, Ellen?
Ellen: Well, if we think about design, almost all design has to function. It gets something done. It has a, you know, mechanical or user requirement component to it. But what makes design compelling to people is the element of sensation and emotion and surprise and beauty. And if we think about a story as having a plot, which is really the mechanics, the nuts and bolts, the facts of the story.
But when we talk about storytelling is how those nuts and bolts actually unfold for people. And that experience is temporal. It involves suspense and withholding and false leads, you know, all kinds of manipulations, right, of the mind. So I like to think about design as having that functional architecture but then this delicious, surprising flash of beauty and surprise and humor and sensory detail.
Abby: As you’re thinking about those storytelling points and how you want people to feel. There’s a lot of work that goes into making sure that you’re creating the right emotional response, right?
Ellen: None of it is easy, but it does become intuitive, just like storytelling for a writer becomes intuitive. We start to develop a vocabulary and a set of techniques or methods that seem to be effective.
Abby: And does it resonate with everybody across the board? Or have you noticed responses that surprised you? I’ve seen, for example, things where you thought people would be nervous or scared and they’ve acted in a very different way. So, you know, can you tell us about some of the reactions of the groups?
Ellen: Well, as a museum curator, that is a very humbling experience because we imagine people reading every word that we write and looking at every artifact that we have collected and looking at it in the order in which we intended, and the reality of museum work is that people make their own path through what you lay out in front of them. And so our goal can be to be as inclusive as possible and to consider the needs and interests of as many people as possible. But the reality is that each individual comes to it with their own desires and hang-ups and interests.
Brenda: Ellen, sensory design is a passion of yours at the moment. Can you tell us a little bit about what it is that you’re experimenting with, or what are you exploring at the moment?
Ellen: At the moment I’m actually more focused on typography. I’m finishing up my book Thinking with Type, third edition, which is very visually oriented. But if you think about how we talk about typography, there is certainly a sensory component to it. We talk about a typeface being warm or cool or being hard or soft, or blunt or spiky. And those are all tactile metaphors for what is really just ink on a page, right? We can’t really touch type. It isn’t really sharp. It’s not going to prick our fingers, we’re not going to stub our toes on it. But tactile language is so useful for people to describe what they see.
Abby: Talk to us a little bit about how you work with the different teams. Paint an honest picture, Ellen.
Ellen: Well, when I was a curator at Cooper Hewitt, we worked with wonderful big teams and the curator is really just one voice and is establishing the primary narrative, but we also collaborate with exhibition designers, with education staff who help to interpret the content and make it accessible to as many people as possible. A crew and a team of experts in museum construction who are very involved with the experience of visitors and the safety of visitors and the safety of objects. So it’s very much a big group effort. There are moments that feel lonely, and like you’re all by yourself. But then it very quickly becomes a big group project.
Abby: So something like The Senses then, was that your idea and your vision to start with, or was that brought outside into you?
Ellen: Yeah, that show was my idea. I co-curated it with my beloved colleague Andrea Lipps, and we had just completed together an exhibition about beauty, and when we were working on our exhibition on beauty, we, you know, had to contend with philosophically what is beauty? And one of the things that one keeps coming back to is sensory experience. And so together we thought, what if we did a whole exhibition just about the senses and not limiting it to beauty, but also function and communication, how the senses give us way more than, than beauty and pleasure. They provide us with the tools for survival.
One of the things that we did that was unique is really talk about sensory design in terms of accessibility. So not just, oh, it’s a fun experience, but how do we make this experience accessible to everyone, including people with sensory differences? And the book that we published with the exhibition is still in print and is a guide to sensory design that includes a lot of content about accessibility and how sensory design can be helpful for aging in place, for example, or for creating inclusive museum designs.
Abby: Have you seen then, I mean, thinking about your recent work that the industry has really changed, that exhibitions over the last 20 years, what would you say was some of the key changes that have happened?
Ellen: Well, museums are very interested in incorporating technology, both as an assist to, you know, illuminating traditional museum content, but also as a thing unto itself. Digital art, digital design, digital experience. Accessibility has become really important, has moved to the forefront of many museums. Agenda to make sure that all visitors are welcome, not just by meeting the codes of the ADA, but to actually create a welcoming experience once people are inside the museum. And that’s a learning that many museums are engaging in.
Abby: Actually, it’s funny you mention, like welcoming into the community. We actually created an app for Cooper Hewitt a little over a year and a bit ago, which was all about bringing the Smithsonian, Cooper Hewitt to the people on the streets, to people who didn’t feel welcome at the institution. How important was it to you in your work to create work that reached a new audience?
Ellen: It’s something that we, we aspire to. These audiences, however, have to want what we create and then we have to meet people, you know, where they are.
Abby: Do you think that maybe we should start listening more to the groups that we want to bring in and talking with them and creating a lot more of a sense of community?
Ellen: I do. I think many museums are engaging in that, and it’s, it’s a big job. It isn’t always what the staff is familiar with, right? It requires new skills, new people, new kinds of programs. And then sometimes those programs aren’t successful. You know, sometimes a museum will create something and imagine that the community will come rushing in and the community is still maybe not choosing to go to a museum as their first, you know, leisure activity. It’s tough. Museums have a long history of being intimidating exclusionary spaces, and that isn’t going to crumble overnight.
Abby: I was talking to Max Hollein over at the Met about the fact that they’re spending a lot of money on architects, millions and millions of dollars on three different wings with three different fantastic architects, and then they have their curators who’s going to make sure that all the right things are in there. And when I approached him and talked to him about, you know, experience design, what we do, just to be clear to all the listeners, what we do is we explain why the artifacts are interesting and try and connect with the visitor at a very base level so that they can understand history, enjoy history, have fun with history, and have a very informative and emotive experience in a museum. And he said, I should talk to the head of education, in my opinion, completely missing the point. You create exhibitions which are fantastic, immersive, multisensory. I don’t know how you manage to do it because you’re one of few people within the Smithsonian, I feel, successfully done that. How do you do that when it seems that the establishment doesn’t understand what you’re doing?
Ellen: One of the reasons museums are restrictive, uptight places is because stuff breaks if you touch it. You know, we have valuable things, things that it is our moral duty to protect for future generations. And so that means sometimes the museum is too dark or you can’t see things because there’s glass between you and the object. And you certainly can’t touch things. There just certain things about how museums exist that mitigate against the most inclusive, playful, freewheeling of experiences.
Abby: But isn’t that where technology or where very clever recreations or you could blow things up? Because I agree with you, some of these artifacts need to be preserved. That is definitely the responsibility of the museum. But alongside that, just thinking of other hands-on moments that people could have during their visit, just adding that layer of, as you said, designed storytelling so that the visitors could have a more connected experience and I think it’s very simple. I think it’s not difficult. It’s looking at moments throughout the exhibition where you can help enhance the story, I’ll call it. Beyond just looking with your eyes.
Ellen: Right, so you can create replicas of things that people can touch. There’s incredible work, my friend Steve Landau, who you might know, who does a lot of touch-based museum installations where you can touch an object that also speaks to you and explains what you’re touching, describes what you’re touching. This kind of supplement to artifacts is really great.
And then there’s exhibitions where there is no artifact, and it’s all about those kinds of experiences. But, you know, there are people that then question, is that authentic? The huge popularity of these Van Gogh projection exhibitions, you know, where it’s not the actual painting, it’s a light show. And yet people feel very invited to explore and sit on the floor and experience it at a different scale, experience something that they have some familiarity with. These experiences are extremely popular. Among museum professionals, there’s a lot of skepticism, you know, because it doesn’t seem scholarly and authentic.
Brenda: What’s your take, Ellen?
Ellen: I think it is really important to look at what people love and enjoy and to say, well, if we think there’s something missing there in terms of authenticity, how can we create an authentic experience that incorporates that level of enjoyment?
Abby: Yeah., I’m just thinking about what you’re saying because it’s putting an ultimate value on the authenticity of an object, in this case, let’s say a painting, and then it’s, again, really down to accessibility, because only if I have enough money to be able to travel to see all of Van Gogh’s in all the different places they are, am I truly having an authentic Van Gogh experience? I’m not sure that’s true. It’s a different experience., but sitting and looking at the work and not thinking about the brushstrokes because that’s what you get in person, right? You get the brush strokes, you get the scale of it, you get the intimacy, but you have it at a completely different scale, right? It’s all around you. You’re seeing it brought to life. So, you’re having a different sort of a relationship with the painting.
Ellen: Right, and the question is, is it less authentic? I’m not sure. So, the filmmaker, Peter Greenaway, has been making films of paintings projected inside architectural spaces, since way before the Van Gogh experience. Nobody questions are these authentic? They give us a filmmaker’s unique experience of great works of art that in a way allow us to see them better than we could in the environment where the original exists.
Because it brings us in close. It gives us details. It allows you to kind of enter into the painting. So I think there are like really great artists creating these digital interpretations of art that really become a work of art in and of themselves.
Abby: Peter Greenaway, goodness me, he’s a phenomenal film director, and you’re exactly right, and then who’s to say who’s an artist and who’s not an artist. But I guess that’s what the museum institution is built on and values, which is their knowledge, right, because it’s very important, you know, when it comes to antiquities and objects that they’re verified, that they’re showing us something that historians have approved of. This is genuine. This is real.
Brenda: But I’m thinking about the conversation we just had with Annie Polland at the Tenement Museum and the role of, in their example, the authentic environment with a number of authentic, if you will, objects: the wallpaper, and the linoleum on the floor and some stray objects that they were able to find during various excavations. And then also how they incorporate a lot of other objects that are from the same period that suit the same story that, you know, are really practically just like what would have been used by the family featured in the particular environment.
And yet, you know, the question of authenticity can also be a bit of a, you know, going down a rabbit hole because at the end of the day, you’re serving the story as I see it, and at the end of the day, you’re serving the visitor and bringing them into new ways of thinking, into new ideas, into a story, into an emotive experience, and having as much sensory-rich experience as possible. And I think there’s room for both, I guess is where I’m going.
Abby: Oh, Brenda, Brenda, right on the fence, as usual. She’s straight down the middle, not left, not right.
Brenda: I’m the Libra! Everybody needs to know that, yes, it’s true. I am a Libra, which means I am always going to see both sides.
Abby: I will add that last time I was in, looking at Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Oh, my goodness. Couldn’t get close. It was a complete Instagram moment. It was just a line of people taking that quick picture and that quick picture and that quick picture. So, I was trying to have a profound moment with Mona, but it didn’t quite work that way.
Brenda: Abby, Abby meets Mona.
Abby: Alright, so let’s talk about the role of media. You think that online exhibition experiences, especially during the pandemic, have been unsatisfying, but the programs and workshops did well. What do you see as the role of media and technology in experience design? Like how should it be used, and how should it not?
Ellen: Well, creating experiences for people during the pandemic online was huge. We did so much of it at Cooper Hewitt. I participated in so many events all around the world as an audience member, as a scholar, you know, in every way. It was really incredible. But those were, you know, lectures, programs, workshops. I did not find it satisfying to look at an online exhibition.
I think those might be useful to, you know, a college student writing a paper, you know, for me, doing research, wanting to know what other museums are doing, you know, what websites are super important, journalists writing about exhibitions. But I never found an online exhibition experience that was really satisfying. However, that opening up of the museum to these other kinds of programs was and is incredible and hugely expanding audience and reach and accessibility.
Brenda: Do you think the people are now seeking different kinds of experiences as a result of the pandemic, as a result of their Zoom experiences? Are you seeing a huge shift that’s been prompted now?
Ellen: One is there’s a backlash against all that online experience. So, lots of people don’t want to do things on Zoom anymore. Personally, I hate now speaking on Zoom. I don’t like doing Zoom talks. However, I would be heartbroken if all the institutions that sponsor events on Zoom stopped doing them because as an audience member, I crave the convenience. You know that I can go see something in San Francisco or London and be folding my laundry while I’m watching it is huge.
Brenda: Absolutely.
Abby: What do you think listeners should know about what’s happening in designed experiences right now? Can you share some of your thoughts about what you think’s working over the last few years from a design perspective and what’s not?
Ellen: I think when people go to a museum, they don’t really want to interact too much with like kiosks and touch screens, things where they have to learn how to use the equipment. I think what’s much more successful is highly intuitive experiences like projections or screens that are already playing where you don’t have to do anything to make it play.
I feel like those things are more successful. I certainly enjoy them more when I go to museums and I also just observe often these things kind of abandoned and people not really doing much with them. So I just, I feel that demanding less from people with technology is a plus.
Abby: What about comfort? Do you ever think about comfort?
Ellen: Absolutely. I think seating is really important. I think, you know, light levels, to the degree that it’s safe for objects is really important. I think availability of food nearby is very important. People get fatigued in exhibitions. And so providing rest is, is really crucial.
Abby: What about fatigue with words and reading? You know, what’s, what’s your take on too much text?
Ellen: I think some people really like to read. I know I do. In museums I read quite, quite a bit. And the thing about reading is you don’t have to do it if you don’t want. So I think some museums are too scared about having text available. I think people can decide for themselves how much to read.
Abby: What’s it like designing on a small budget, Ellen? What are the things that you have to take into consideration.
Ellen: I think what’s really essential to doing a beautiful exhibition is working with designers and not thinking that an exhibition is just putting together some cases and, you know, turning on the lights. And so designers are incredibly gifted at value engineering and at finding materials that will do the job for less. They also come up with visionary ideas that cost just too much. But designers are really key to creating experiences that are exciting and beautiful. We just can’t do it without them.
Abby: So how does that work? Say you’re working with a designer and they come up with a great vision. They know roughly your budget, but it’s it’s, as you mentioned, it’s just stretching it a bit too far. How would you, you know, wrangle that designer? How would you inspire that designer to sort of cut corners? What sort of conversations would you have with them?
Ellen: Disappointing ones, and I’m disappointed too. You know, when we can’t do things exactly to the, the vision of the designer it is, is disappointing. But you know, I think all creative work involves having a, having an idea and bringing it down to earth, you know, shaping it, reshaping it. And the restrictions aren’t just about money. They’re also about fire codes and safety of objects and touch distances, foot-candles and all kinds of things that are constraints on the museum environment.
Brenda: Well, I’m thinking back to the Cooper Hewitt, and I’m thinking of the Tools exhibition and an example that I think was tremendously elegant and so much time and attention had been put into the curation, the juxtaposition of objects and very elegant, clean displays that really enabled the objects, this incredible, intelligent and exciting creative breadth of objects really enabled them to shine and to tell the story. And if I recall correctly, there was not a lot of technology.
Ellen: Yeah, there was a machine involving sand and inscribing some pattern or data into sand. There is a huge screen of the surface of the sun that was very impressive. I mean, a screen is not terribly high-tech, but I like what your memory is, how clear and concise and kind of allowing the objects to shine.
Brenda: Yeah, I guess I’m just making an argument for simplicity and for the analog moments as well within an exhibition in that smart design is about using all of these tools and it’s about using technology and frankly, the expensive stuff when it really matters.
Abby: Ellen, as you look at your legacy and the challenges that you want to address in the future, because you’ve done a lot already. So I want to, I want to know what are you excited to do moving forward?
Ellen: I’m excited to write more, which is the ultimate multisensory experience. I mean, when we read fiction and non-fiction, we are transported into people’s minds and what they’re feeling and what they’re seeing. And we have feelings of tactility and sound and atmosphere. It’s just amazing. And it’s all done with no technology. And so, in this phase of my career, I left the Cooper Hewitt one year ago, I’m really just excited about being able to create things with less and to use the tools of language and visual communication in a, in a really simple way.
Abby: What’s interesting about the written word is, as you describe it, I think everybody probably has a very unique experience.
Ellen: Yes, we make our own pictures.
Brenda: I just really appreciate how pardon the pun, but we’ve got bookends here because we began talking about type and we began talking about text, and here we are yet again talking about your love affair, Ellen, with typography, with text, with the written word.
Ellen: Perfect.
Abby: I have just one last question. So, when you’re teaching graphic design, if you could tell your students one thing that they remember throughout their career, what would it be?
Ellen: Imagine the user. Imagine other people encountering your work. What will they make of it?
Abby: Thank you, Ellen. It’s been a lot of fun chatting with you today about your work, your books, and all of our senses. Thank you so much for joining us.
Brenda: Thank you, Ellen.
Ellen: Thanks for having me. I really had fun.
Abby: And thanks to everyone who tuned in today. If you like what you heard, subscribe for more episodes of Matters of Experience. Please 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.
The Senses: Design Beyond Vision | Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
[Music]
Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience, a podcast that explores all the many facets of designed experiences and encounters. If you’re new, a big hello, and to our regular listeners, thanks for tuning in. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: Hello everyone. I’m Brenda Cowan.
Abby: Today we’re talking with Ellen Lupton. Ellen is a designer, writer and educator. Her books about graphic design include Thinking with Type, Design Is Storytelling and Extra Bold: A Feminist, Inclusive, Anti-racist, Nonbinary Field Guide for Graphic Designers. She teaches in the graphic design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and serves as the The Betty Cooke and William O. Steinmetz Design Chair.
And she is curator emerita at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum right here in New York City, where hopefully some of our listeners were lucky enough to see her show The Senses: Design Beyond Vision, which was fantastic, with over 65 design projects and more than 40 objects and installations to touch, hear and smell. Ellen, welcome to the show.
Ellen: Thank you. I’m excited to be here.
Brenda: We are absolutely amazed at how versed you are in all things experience design, typography, multisensory design and of course, areas of psychology and perception. When we look at your vast and fascinating body of work, tell us how did you get into this profession in the first place? What are your own origins, and what have you brought with you?
Ellen: Well, all of my work really stems back to graphic design. I went to art school at the Cooper Union, where I studied art generally, but graphic design more specifically, and really everything I do comes out of that discipline, even though what I do with graphic design is much broader. I’ve become a writer, a curator, a speaker, educator. But the root of all that thinking is really in the art of visualizing language and communication.
Abby: And of course, your storytelling in design, which you so beautifully articulate in your book Design Is Storytelling.
Brenda: Absolutely. You know that by the way, Ellen is a favorite resource in my teaching. Listeners, Ellen brilliantly unpacks the elements of story structure and emotion and multisensory design, all with exhibition creators and users in mind. So, I have to give it a plug. It’s an amazing book.
Abby: So, you know, how is storytelling or let’s say, narrative experience a unifying theme, do you think, across the breadth of your work, Ellen?
Ellen: Well, if we think about design, almost all design has to function. It gets something done. It has a, you know, mechanical or user requirement component to it. But what makes design compelling to people is the element of sensation and emotion and surprise and beauty. And if we think about a story as having a plot, which is really the mechanics, the nuts and bolts, the facts of the story.
But when we talk about storytelling is how those nuts and bolts actually unfold for people. And that experience is temporal. It involves suspense and withholding and false leads, you know, all kinds of manipulations, right, of the mind. So I like to think about design as having that functional architecture but then this delicious, surprising flash of beauty and surprise and humor and sensory detail.
Abby: As you’re thinking about those storytelling points and how you want people to feel. There’s a lot of work that goes into making sure that you’re creating the right emotional response, right?
Ellen: None of it is easy, but it does become intuitive, just like storytelling for a writer becomes intuitive. We start to develop a vocabulary and a set of techniques or methods that seem to be effective.
Abby: And does it resonate with everybody across the board? Or have you noticed responses that surprised you? I’ve seen, for example, things where you thought people would be nervous or scared and they’ve acted in a very different way. So, you know, can you tell us about some of the reactions of the groups?
Ellen: Well, as a museum curator, that is a very humbling experience because we imagine people reading every word that we write and looking at every artifact that we have collected and looking at it in the order in which we intended, and the reality of museum work is that people make their own path through what you lay out in front of them. And so our goal can be to be as inclusive as possible and to consider the needs and interests of as many people as possible. But the reality is that each individual comes to it with their own desires and hang-ups and interests.
Brenda: Ellen, sensory design is a passion of yours at the moment. Can you tell us a little bit about what it is that you’re experimenting with, or what are you exploring at the moment?
Ellen: At the moment I’m actually more focused on typography. I’m finishing up my book Thinking with Type, third edition, which is very visually oriented. But if you think about how we talk about typography, there is certainly a sensory component to it. We talk about a typeface being warm or cool or being hard or soft, or blunt or spiky. And those are all tactile metaphors for what is really just ink on a page, right? We can’t really touch type. It isn’t really sharp. It’s not going to prick our fingers, we’re not going to stub our toes on it. But tactile language is so useful for people to describe what they see.
Abby: Talk to us a little bit about how you work with the different teams. Paint an honest picture, Ellen.
Ellen: Well, when I was a curator at Cooper Hewitt, we worked with wonderful big teams and the curator is really just one voice and is establishing the primary narrative, but we also collaborate with exhibition designers, with education staff who help to interpret the content and make it accessible to as many people as possible. A crew and a team of experts in museum construction who are very involved with the experience of visitors and the safety of visitors and the safety of objects. So it’s very much a big group effort. There are moments that feel lonely, and like you’re all by yourself. But then it very quickly becomes a big group project.
Abby: So something like The Senses then, was that your idea and your vision to start with, or was that brought outside into you?
Ellen: Yeah, that show was my idea. I co-curated it with my beloved colleague Andrea Lipps, and we had just completed together an exhibition about beauty, and when we were working on our exhibition on beauty, we, you know, had to contend with philosophically what is beauty? And one of the things that one keeps coming back to is sensory experience. And so together we thought, what if we did a whole exhibition just about the senses and not limiting it to beauty, but also function and communication, how the senses give us way more than, than beauty and pleasure. They provide us with the tools for survival.
One of the things that we did that was unique is really talk about sensory design in terms of accessibility. So not just, oh, it’s a fun experience, but how do we make this experience accessible to everyone, including people with sensory differences? And the book that we published with the exhibition is still in print and is a guide to sensory design that includes a lot of content about accessibility and how sensory design can be helpful for aging in place, for example, or for creating inclusive museum designs.
Abby: Have you seen then, I mean, thinking about your recent work that the industry has really changed, that exhibitions over the last 20 years, what would you say was some of the key changes that have happened?
Ellen: Well, museums are very interested in incorporating technology, both as an assist to, you know, illuminating traditional museum content, but also as a thing unto itself. Digital art, digital design, digital experience. Accessibility has become really important, has moved to the forefront of many museums. Agenda to make sure that all visitors are welcome, not just by meeting the codes of the ADA, but to actually create a welcoming experience once people are inside the museum. And that’s a learning that many museums are engaging in.
Abby: Actually, it’s funny you mention, like welcoming into the community. We actually created an app for Cooper Hewitt a little over a year and a bit ago, which was all about bringing the Smithsonian, Cooper Hewitt to the people on the streets, to people who didn’t feel welcome at the institution. How important was it to you in your work to create work that reached a new audience?
Ellen: It’s something that we, we aspire to. These audiences, however, have to want what we create and then we have to meet people, you know, where they are.
Abby: Do you think that maybe we should start listening more to the groups that we want to bring in and talking with them and creating a lot more of a sense of community?
Ellen: I do. I think many museums are engaging in that, and it’s, it’s a big job. It isn’t always what the staff is familiar with, right? It requires new skills, new people, new kinds of programs. And then sometimes those programs aren’t successful. You know, sometimes a museum will create something and imagine that the community will come rushing in and the community is still maybe not choosing to go to a museum as their first, you know, leisure activity. It’s tough. Museums have a long history of being intimidating exclusionary spaces, and that isn’t going to crumble overnight.
Abby: I was talking to Max Hollein over at the Met about the fact that they’re spending a lot of money on architects, millions and millions of dollars on three different wings with three different fantastic architects, and then they have their curators who’s going to make sure that all the right things are in there. And when I approached him and talked to him about, you know, experience design, what we do, just to be clear to all the listeners, what we do is we explain why the artifacts are interesting and try and connect with the visitor at a very base level so that they can understand history, enjoy history, have fun with history, and have a very informative and emotive experience in a museum. And he said, I should talk to the head of education, in my opinion, completely missing the point. You create exhibitions which are fantastic, immersive, multisensory. I don’t know how you manage to do it because you’re one of few people within the Smithsonian, I feel, successfully done that. How do you do that when it seems that the establishment doesn’t understand what you’re doing?
Ellen: One of the reasons museums are restrictive, uptight places is because stuff breaks if you touch it. You know, we have valuable things, things that it is our moral duty to protect for future generations. And so that means sometimes the museum is too dark or you can’t see things because there’s glass between you and the object. And you certainly can’t touch things. There just certain things about how museums exist that mitigate against the most inclusive, playful, freewheeling of experiences.
Abby: But isn’t that where technology or where very clever recreations or you could blow things up? Because I agree with you, some of these artifacts need to be preserved. That is definitely the responsibility of the museum. But alongside that, just thinking of other hands-on moments that people could have during their visit, just adding that layer of, as you said, designed storytelling so that the visitors could have a more connected experience and I think it’s very simple. I think it’s not difficult. It’s looking at moments throughout the exhibition where you can help enhance the story, I’ll call it. Beyond just looking with your eyes.
Ellen: Right, so you can create replicas of things that people can touch. There’s incredible work, my friend Steve Landau, who you might know, who does a lot of touch-based museum installations where you can touch an object that also speaks to you and explains what you’re touching, describes what you’re touching. This kind of supplement to artifacts is really great.
And then there’s exhibitions where there is no artifact, and it’s all about those kinds of experiences. But, you know, there are people that then question, is that authentic? The huge popularity of these Van Gogh projection exhibitions, you know, where it’s not the actual painting, it’s a light show. And yet people feel very invited to explore and sit on the floor and experience it at a different scale, experience something that they have some familiarity with. These experiences are extremely popular. Among museum professionals, there’s a lot of skepticism, you know, because it doesn’t seem scholarly and authentic.
Brenda: What’s your take, Ellen?
Ellen: I think it is really important to look at what people love and enjoy and to say, well, if we think there’s something missing there in terms of authenticity, how can we create an authentic experience that incorporates that level of enjoyment?
Abby: Yeah., I’m just thinking about what you’re saying because it’s putting an ultimate value on the authenticity of an object, in this case, let’s say a painting, and then it’s, again, really down to accessibility, because only if I have enough money to be able to travel to see all of Van Gogh’s in all the different places they are, am I truly having an authentic Van Gogh experience? I’m not sure that’s true. It’s a different experience., but sitting and looking at the work and not thinking about the brushstrokes because that’s what you get in person, right? You get the brush strokes, you get the scale of it, you get the intimacy, but you have it at a completely different scale, right? It’s all around you. You’re seeing it brought to life. So, you’re having a different sort of a relationship with the painting.
Ellen: Right, and the question is, is it less authentic? I’m not sure. So, the filmmaker, Peter Greenaway, has been making films of paintings projected inside architectural spaces, since way before the Van Gogh experience. Nobody questions are these authentic? They give us a filmmaker’s unique experience of great works of art that in a way allow us to see them better than we could in the environment where the original exists.
Because it brings us in close. It gives us details. It allows you to kind of enter into the painting. So I think there are like really great artists creating these digital interpretations of art that really become a work of art in and of themselves.
Abby: Peter Greenaway, goodness me, he’s a phenomenal film director, and you’re exactly right, and then who’s to say who’s an artist and who’s not an artist. But I guess that’s what the museum institution is built on and values, which is their knowledge, right, because it’s very important, you know, when it comes to antiquities and objects that they’re verified, that they’re showing us something that historians have approved of. This is genuine. This is real.
Brenda: But I’m thinking about the conversation we just had with Annie Polland at the Tenement Museum and the role of, in their example, the authentic environment with a number of authentic, if you will, objects: the wallpaper, and the linoleum on the floor and some stray objects that they were able to find during various excavations. And then also how they incorporate a lot of other objects that are from the same period that suit the same story that, you know, are really practically just like what would have been used by the family featured in the particular environment.
And yet, you know, the question of authenticity can also be a bit of a, you know, going down a rabbit hole because at the end of the day, you’re serving the story as I see it, and at the end of the day, you’re serving the visitor and bringing them into new ways of thinking, into new ideas, into a story, into an emotive experience, and having as much sensory-rich experience as possible. And I think there’s room for both, I guess is where I’m going.
Abby: Oh, Brenda, Brenda, right on the fence, as usual. She’s straight down the middle, not left, not right.
Brenda: I’m the Libra! Everybody needs to know that, yes, it’s true. I am a Libra, which means I am always going to see both sides.
Abby: I will add that last time I was in, looking at Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Oh, my goodness. Couldn’t get close. It was a complete Instagram moment. It was just a line of people taking that quick picture and that quick picture and that quick picture. So, I was trying to have a profound moment with Mona, but it didn’t quite work that way.
Brenda: Abby, Abby meets Mona.
Abby: Alright, so let’s talk about the role of media. You think that online exhibition experiences, especially during the pandemic, have been unsatisfying, but the programs and workshops did well. What do you see as the role of media and technology in experience design? Like how should it be used, and how should it not?
Ellen: Well, creating experiences for people during the pandemic online was huge. We did so much of it at Cooper Hewitt. I participated in so many events all around the world as an audience member, as a scholar, you know, in every way. It was really incredible. But those were, you know, lectures, programs, workshops. I did not find it satisfying to look at an online exhibition.
I think those might be useful to, you know, a college student writing a paper, you know, for me, doing research, wanting to know what other museums are doing, you know, what websites are super important, journalists writing about exhibitions. But I never found an online exhibition experience that was really satisfying. However, that opening up of the museum to these other kinds of programs was and is incredible and hugely expanding audience and reach and accessibility.
Brenda: Do you think the people are now seeking different kinds of experiences as a result of the pandemic, as a result of their Zoom experiences? Are you seeing a huge shift that’s been prompted now?
Ellen: One is there’s a backlash against all that online experience. So, lots of people don’t want to do things on Zoom anymore. Personally, I hate now speaking on Zoom. I don’t like doing Zoom talks. However, I would be heartbroken if all the institutions that sponsor events on Zoom stopped doing them because as an audience member, I crave the convenience. You know that I can go see something in San Francisco or London and be folding my laundry while I’m watching it is huge.
Brenda: Absolutely.
Abby: What do you think listeners should know about what’s happening in designed experiences right now? Can you share some of your thoughts about what you think’s working over the last few years from a design perspective and what’s not?
Ellen: I think when people go to a museum, they don’t really want to interact too much with like kiosks and touch screens, things where they have to learn how to use the equipment. I think what’s much more successful is highly intuitive experiences like projections or screens that are already playing where you don’t have to do anything to make it play.
I feel like those things are more successful. I certainly enjoy them more when I go to museums and I also just observe often these things kind of abandoned and people not really doing much with them. So I just, I feel that demanding less from people with technology is a plus.
Abby: What about comfort? Do you ever think about comfort?
Ellen: Absolutely. I think seating is really important. I think, you know, light levels, to the degree that it’s safe for objects is really important. I think availability of food nearby is very important. People get fatigued in exhibitions. And so providing rest is, is really crucial.
Abby: What about fatigue with words and reading? You know, what’s, what’s your take on too much text?
Ellen: I think some people really like to read. I know I do. In museums I read quite, quite a bit. And the thing about reading is you don’t have to do it if you don’t want. So I think some museums are too scared about having text available. I think people can decide for themselves how much to read.
Abby: What’s it like designing on a small budget, Ellen? What are the things that you have to take into consideration.
Ellen: I think what’s really essential to doing a beautiful exhibition is working with designers and not thinking that an exhibition is just putting together some cases and, you know, turning on the lights. And so designers are incredibly gifted at value engineering and at finding materials that will do the job for less. They also come up with visionary ideas that cost just too much. But designers are really key to creating experiences that are exciting and beautiful. We just can’t do it without them.
Abby: So how does that work? Say you’re working with a designer and they come up with a great vision. They know roughly your budget, but it’s it’s, as you mentioned, it’s just stretching it a bit too far. How would you, you know, wrangle that designer? How would you inspire that designer to sort of cut corners? What sort of conversations would you have with them?
Ellen: Disappointing ones, and I’m disappointed too. You know, when we can’t do things exactly to the, the vision of the designer it is, is disappointing. But you know, I think all creative work involves having a, having an idea and bringing it down to earth, you know, shaping it, reshaping it. And the restrictions aren’t just about money. They’re also about fire codes and safety of objects and touch distances, foot-candles and all kinds of things that are constraints on the museum environment.
Brenda: Well, I’m thinking back to the Cooper Hewitt, and I’m thinking of the Tools exhibition and an example that I think was tremendously elegant and so much time and attention had been put into the curation, the juxtaposition of objects and very elegant, clean displays that really enabled the objects, this incredible, intelligent and exciting creative breadth of objects really enabled them to shine and to tell the story. And if I recall correctly, there was not a lot of technology.
Ellen: Yeah, there was a machine involving sand and inscribing some pattern or data into sand. There is a huge screen of the surface of the sun that was very impressive. I mean, a screen is not terribly high-tech, but I like what your memory is, how clear and concise and kind of allowing the objects to shine.
Brenda: Yeah, I guess I’m just making an argument for simplicity and for the analog moments as well within an exhibition in that smart design is about using all of these tools and it’s about using technology and frankly, the expensive stuff when it really matters.
Abby: Ellen, as you look at your legacy and the challenges that you want to address in the future, because you’ve done a lot already. So I want to, I want to know what are you excited to do moving forward?
Ellen: I’m excited to write more, which is the ultimate multisensory experience. I mean, when we read fiction and non-fiction, we are transported into people’s minds and what they’re feeling and what they’re seeing. And we have feelings of tactility and sound and atmosphere. It’s just amazing. And it’s all done with no technology. And so, in this phase of my career, I left the Cooper Hewitt one year ago, I’m really just excited about being able to create things with less and to use the tools of language and visual communication in a, in a really simple way.
Abby: What’s interesting about the written word is, as you describe it, I think everybody probably has a very unique experience.
Ellen: Yes, we make our own pictures.
Brenda: I just really appreciate how pardon the pun, but we’ve got bookends here because we began talking about type and we began talking about text, and here we are yet again talking about your love affair, Ellen, with typography, with text, with the written word.
Ellen: Perfect.
Abby: I have just one last question. So, when you’re teaching graphic design, if you could tell your students one thing that they remember throughout their career, what would it be?
Ellen: Imagine the user. Imagine other people encountering your work. What will they make of it?
Abby: Thank you, Ellen. It’s been a lot of fun chatting with you today about your work, your books, and all of our senses. Thank you so much for joining us.
Brenda: Thank you, Ellen.
Ellen: Thanks for having me. I really had fun.
Abby: And thanks to everyone who tuned in today. If you like what you heard, subscribe for more episodes of Matters of Experience. Please make sure to leave a rating and a review and share with a friend. We’ll see you next time.
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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.
Multi-sensory Design, Psychology, and Perception with Ellen Lupton
Unsung Heroes with Mike McCarthy
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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 warm 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: Today we’re talking with Mike McCarthy, who is the VP of Design Communications Ltd., fondly referred to by most of us as DCL, who build really amazing architectural specialty products. DCL’s clients are designers and developers involved in large scale new construction and renovations of things like sports stadiums, theme parks, shopping malls, basically big infrastructure and some really cool places to hang out. Mike’s been involved in thousands of projects over his 20 plus year career, including, and this is a really impressive flex Mike, works at Walt Disney World, SoFi Stadium, TD Garden, Madison Square Garden, Gillette Stadium, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Amazon, Coca-Cola, Hasbro and many, many others.
Brenda: That should have a soundtrack. can I just say, that should have like trumpets sort of layering behind it.
Abby: I think it’d take the entire podcast to list it all out.
Mike: I would like that.
Abby: Yeah. Yeah, he really would. I can imagine. Mike’s also on the board of directors and executive committee of SEGD, and for those listening who may not be aware of this association, it’s the Society of Experiential Graphic Design, which I’m also a member. It has members from across our industry and I recommend everyone to really consider joining. Lastly, he serves on the board of directors of the Massachusetts Business Roundtable and he has a family, and I think my question really should be, Mike, how do you fit it all in?
Mike: Well, it’s all a labor of love. So, I’m lucky and I’m grateful to be here with you both today. Thank you for having me.
Brenda: Well, I’m going to get us kickstarted by talking about everybody’s favorite topic, COVID. Because you have such a broad scope of the industry, what are you seeing evolving in the workplace since COVID? What’s changing?
Mike: Well, first of all, I will point out that COVID is actually not my favorite subject.
Brenda: Fair enough.
Mike: So, we make things for places that people go, so to have sort of a global crisis where people are not allowed to go places, not good. So, I’m glad that is dissipating, let’s put it that way.
You know what I’m certainly seeing in the post-COVID world, people trying to figure out their corporate space. Right. I think everybody’s grappling with, you know, are we doing a back in the office thing? Are we doing a work from home thing or are we doing a hybrid? You know, maybe somebody signed a lease on a big giant space with one mindset ten years ago, and. and they’re really unsure if that’s going to be the same moving forward.
I’m seeing a lot of corporations and heads of corporations trying to figure that out and say, how can we, how can we do this? And if we are going to create a space that we can sort of compete for talent, which is the other big thing right now, right, is, is competing for talent and getting people towork at your place versus another. How can we make those spaces some place that people want to be?
Abby: So, you know, you have also built a really diverse range of incredible spaces and just thinking about how things evolve, you know, what are they looking to add to these spaces over time?
Mike: I think especially with the COVID break or in some ways, if you look at it, it’s almost like a warp in time where all of a sudden, it might be seven years since they updated their space, right? COVID might have been three of those, but nonetheless, all of a sudden you think, wow, it’s been a decade since we put this and or did that. And I think there are a lot of places that are looking to add technology because they see these really exciting areas that have it and they say, hey, we don’t want to get left behind and we want to look like we’re cutting edge and we want to be cutting edge.
Not to mention when you’re dealing with technology, be it LED or projection mapping or whatever, it offers you a chance to do things that sometimes static environments can’t. Right? We can update that information. We can tell a different story. We can use it to inform people and, and inspire people and tell our story and in all those different things. And so, I think that there is definitely a push to technology for anyone who wants to update and stay current and look at a different way to communicate with the people that are using that space.
Abby: How sort of well-thought through is it when some of your clients are coming to you saying we want, want technology? Are they thinking about what that could actually look like in space, how it would work? Because, you know, in my experience, we’ve had a lot of situations where a client would want technology but then haven’t really thought through the application of that and the longevity.
Mike: And it runs the gamut, and so there are people who have figured everything out, here’s what we want to do and here’s how we want to do it. And all you need to do is tell me, you know, where can I get this one screen? And then there’s people who say, what if it like lit up, but also like was like a movie?
Abby: Right.
Mike: Ok, well that, that’s a big scope, and, you know, how can we sort of help figure that out? Now, the one thing we don’t do, we build, we engineer, we project, manage, we install, we do all those things, but the one thing that we don’t do, is we don’t design. A lot of times people reach out to us and say, hey, we want to add technology, we want to do all these things. How can we do that? And the first thing we’ll do is say, okay, well, you need to team up with someone who’s going to help you design this and help tell your story or help you even figure out where you want to be.
And through that, there’s so many interesting things that they can do. They can tell their story as we see so many times, like, here’s the history of our company or whatever it is, or they can go in a completely different direction and use it for public art. We’re seeing that a lot, too, where people are saying, hey, I have this space. We’re going to put a big multimedia installation here, but we really want to use it to promote art and promote the community. I think that in the post-pandemic world, that connection to community is so huge. But even that is maybe more complicated than we’re thinking, right?
Abby: Yeah.
Mike: Because with every media there are restrictions, and you all know this well, there’s restrictions to what you can accept, how big does a file need to be, what, how do we upload it. All those different things, and we will work with partners who will sort of help them through that process.
Abby: There’s that piece to it though, which is once the, the portal, the monitor, the project, whatever is holding the content is up, it’s like a beast that needs to be fed. It’s not good enough often to just have a short term plan. How is that going to evolve? How is it going to change? How is it going to continue to have that dialog with the visitor?
You know, just thinking about the fantastic idea of showing and displaying the work of local artists, you still need a curator. You need somebody who’s going to be there and facilitating the work that goes up there. And I often find that that’s not been accounted for by the client and something that you need to bring up soon because the best laid plans can go awry and make sure that they understand the commitment to, to the content.
Brenda: Mike, how much are places mimicking, wanting to mimic other places? How often do you have somebody come up and say, you know, I just, I was over at Joe’s place and they’re doing, you know, X, Y and Z. I want the exact same thing. Are you getting that a lot?
Mike: Yeah. Yeah.
Brenda: Tell us more.
Mike: Yeah. Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, right? I mean, they see something and they liked it and say, I want to do exactly that. Okay, well, you know, maybe not exactly that, but how could we use a similar concept to work with your space and in your story and, and so forth?
Brenda: Mike, we’ve talked about media and technology. Given your scope of work, you must be seeing some more big trends across the various industries. Can you fill us in? What are you seeing out there?
Mike: Yeah, I see, kind of going back to that theory of people wanting to inspire, and I think that people are trying to be more socially conscious. So even if they’re saying, okay, well, we’re going to tell our story, they want to do it in a way that shows who they are and what their values are. Right? It isn’t just we’re the best, we do this. Why are we doing it? What is the, you know, what’s the purpose of our, our organization, what’s our mission? And so you’re seeing more mission statements. You’re seeing more organizations try to explain who they are and what they do and why they do it.
Abby: We’re seeing that completely, too. So, when you talk about, let’s focus on, on when you want to be invited to the table, because I know it’s not always at the ideal time, sometimes you get that last minute panicked phone call like help.
Mike: Sometimes.
Brenda: Fix this! Quick!
Abby: When do you need to come into the process?
Mike: Earlier is better, and speaking not only for, for DCL, but all fabricators, you know, I think they would all say earlier is better because sometimes if we’re talking with a designer and a client, we can help steer in the right direction.
Abby: Can you give us some examples so people can understand how you can actually help us?
Brenda: Bring us into your world, Mike.
Mike: Yeah, sure. So budget, right? So, we’re thinking, okay, well everybody has a budget of some type and so a fabricator may be able to say, all right, look, if you get us in early, we can take a look at what you’re going for and kind of recommend cost effective ways to fabricate that, that are going to stay within your budget. Right, and many, many times for us, we would rather get in early and say, okay, well, what is the budget? The budget is X, let’s work till that, rather than say, here’s what I want, tell me what your bid is, and, you know, we and others come in at two x, three, x four, x, whatever it is, and and somebody says, no, you got to cut that down. Cut that down to what? I don’t know, but it has to be less.
That, that can sometimes spin a lot of wheels, right. And you can spend a lot of time doing that. And for a designer client, you know, the design firm themselves, they can burn their budget in that process because they too have taken on the work and have hourly rates they have to pay, and that’s how they do their budgeting, and so they don’t want to burn their time on that. And so if they bring somebody in like us early, they can sort of go through that and say, okay, well, how could we chart this course together to get to this particular finish line of the budget and of the schedule and of whatever that constraint is?
Abby: Can you think of some, don’t mean to put you on the spot, Mike, but can you think of some instances not naming any names or a design to build something out of aluminum and you had to make it out of wood or vice versa, like some sort of tangible example.
Mike: We love aluminum, so it’s very rare that we’d be talking anybody out of aluminum that’s our best friend.
Abby: So, you understood when I said, did I say aluminum?
Mike: Well, I went to, I very quickly, I went to Google Translate and it came out as aluminum.
Brenda: Looked up English English.
Mike: So I’m like, oh, that’s what it is. But, yeah, and so with different metals, maybe, that’s a good example, right? They may say, oh, we want it to be titanium or we want it to be this or that and, and that can be very expensive. And we said, okay, well, here’s a finish that we can do out of maybe a painted aluminum or, or maybe a stainless steel or whatever it is. And many times we may say, hey, this method might be more cost efficient, but it also might be more durable. And that’s, that’s a big thing. Durability is something that I think not everybody thinks about but is a big deal.
Brenda: I have a question about the elements of the good fabricator relationship. What are the essential elements that folks should know for making things work well?
Mike: Trust, right? And that takes a while to build. Your only going to have trust if you’ve done a few projects together and you’ve been through a couple of things and, and anyone who’s in the construction field knows that construction does not always go to plan and we’re going to make mistakes and the designer is going to make mistakes and the owner is going to make mistakes and everybody’s going to make mistakes. The question is, how do you respond to those mistakes? Did they stand by their work? Did they say, yeah, we will fix it, we know about this? Did they try to hide problems?
You know, for a fabricator, they’re going to be looking for somebody who wants to have a long-term partnership with them and wants to get them involved in projects early on. One of the things that we always talk to our estimators about is you can’t just constantly price things with people, right? So, if you say, oh, I’m going to get three prices and I know, you know, company, company B and company C are going to be way too high, but I’m going to have them price it anyhow. All right. Well, that’s the that’s a process for them, and that takes them time and that costs them money. And eventually, if they say, look, I’ve priced 40 things for you and I’ve never gotten one, like, thanks, but I really don’t want to be your third price, so you can say, oh God, they’re always too high. A fabricator or vendor or supplier of any type is going to want a relationship that they have with anyone to be fruitful for them too.
Abby: Do you, you know, we often say that if we’ve done our job well, our work goes unnoticed. You know, if that’s great lighting, nobody notices the great lighting or if it’s fantastically designed or the typography, the wayfinding, if it all works together, then the visitor just goes away having had an amazing experience. Do you sometimes feel that the fabricators are truly like the unsung heroes?
Mike: I certainly think we don’t get enough thanks. I mean, there has rarely been a parade, any sort of fanfare like that. I mean, I don’t think, it wouldn’t have to be a big parade, but like a couple thousand people, I don’t think would be out of the question.
Brenda: A few thousand.
Mike: Yeah, you know, I think we’re I think we’re the same. Right. I think if all goes well, no one’s thinking about it. A lot of times when we meet people, even if we’re hiring, people will say, oh, I never even stopped to think about how this stuff was built or that anybody built it or made it, which sounds crazy, but it’s true, right? You think, oh, wow, someone’s making this. Someone did that, and, and that’s true of everything. Somebody makes doors. Somebody makes windows, right? But we take all those things for granted as we’re entering a space and we’re there to experience what the space has to offer, not how was this made.
Abby: And just a small segue, over on Seventh Avenue and 23rd Street, they were renewing, updating, I’ll call it, the, one of the entrances to the subway. Well, they uncovered it and on one side of the street, it’s the green metal. It’s been there forever because it’s made of metal and obviously it’s painted well, repainted whenever they need. It’s been there for a while. We got wood planks, so I kid you not, Mike, we now have painted green wood planks that look so temporary and so ugly and so cheap that I’m completely dumbfounded, because whenever you go to other cities and you look at their infrastructure and their transport and you look at the hubs or the stairs down, you know, there’s some investment, it needs to be there. It’s part of, sort of the flex of the city, right, they’re proud, and ours literally, anybody who wants to go check out 23rd Street and Seventh Avenue to compare the old metal version with the new wood painted one we have, I mean, it’s literally like I could have like knocked it up myself and that’s not saying much.
Brenda: OK, I’m going to age myself, watch the original Taking of Pelham One Two Three, and you will hear the line, “what do you want for your $0.35?” Look it up, folks.
Abby: I just wondered if overall, you know, given you work on some big, I’m imagining, government projects as well, that you see this sort of like, short sighted economy. Because when I think about longevity, I know this wood is going to be pretty useless really soon.
Mike: Yeah, absolutely. And we do work on some municipal projects. You know, I’ll actually go the other way with it and said that I’ve been pleasantly surprised at some of what organizations are doing in the opposite way. Logan Airport, for instance, we’ve been doing all the work for Logan Airport for 30 plus years, and Logan’s really trying hard to look nice, to be updated, to feel modern and to do innovative things. I mean, for years and years we just made black boxes with Helvetica and, or Swiss 721, I think it is, just the most average signs in the world. And over the last ten, 15 years, they’ve really been trying to put some effort into that experience. And that’s a municipal organization and that’s great to see. Apparently that is not the case in New York, but I guess that just might be another reason why Boston beats New York.
Abby: Oh, no. I fed into that. No, it was just, it was upsetting, you know, it’s upsetting when you see something which for me is so important, just look so slapdash.
Brenda: Yeah, poorly done.
Abby: I think it just represents, yeah, something, I was really, really sad, but…
Mike: But, it goes to your earlier point of ideally nobody is stopping to look at it. Right. And so that that design or that solution was the opposite where you stopped and looked at and said what, this is terrible, this isn’t right.
Abby: So, we have a lot of design is listening. What should they be considering from your perspective when they design these experiences?
Mike: So, some of it the fabricator can advise on, right, as far as what’s durable and what’s going to hold up to a lawnmower and all those kind of things. I will say this if you’re doing technology, you need to be able to get electricity there and likely data there. There are some wireless data things that you can do and so forth, but you’re likely going to need to get electricity there.
And yes, there is solar, but solar is kind of limited and you’re not going to run a giant LED screen off the the sunlight of the day. You’ll see that museums that have these giant fields and they’ll say, oh, in the center of the field, let’s do this. You certainly can. But is it in the owners budget to dig up that sidewalk or, you know, however they have to get that electrical service to that spot and that would generally not be in the fabricator scope. That would generally be in the owner’s scope, and if it’s under construction, the general contractor or whatever it is, and that’s expensive.
Abby: Now, that may sound really simple to a few, few designers listening, but also, my call to designers is, don’t just take a screen, don’t just take a 16×9 screen. We have so much amazing technology.
Brenda: A lot of options out there.
Abby: There is tons of options where it can be really part of the environment. So, yeah, don’t just think it has to look like this and be stuck on a wall.
Mike: Yeah, and I would say think about it all year long, right? So, we’re doing work in Cleveland right now. Cleveland gets really cold, but it also gets really hot. Maybe this piece is going to go from a high of 110 degrees in the sun on an afternoon to -12 degrees. And what does that do? And what do you need to think about.
Abby: Mike, you’ve been doing this a long time. Why do you still get out of bed? What do you like about your job? What have you still got to accomplish?
Brenda: Where’s the passion?
Mike: So, for me, it’s two things. One, I’m incredibly vain and so I love when somebody goes somewhere and we did the work. So, someone will go to Disney World and I’ll say, oh, did you, did you like this ride and like that ride? And they’ll say, oh, I loved it. And I’ll just say, you’re welcome! And they’re like, yeah, okay. I know you did the signs, yeah, that’s great. But I love, I love when we work on, on projects and you get to go see it or you see someplace as you’re in a new city and you drive by and say, oh, we did this and we did that, and I truly enjoy seeing projects that we worked on out in the wild.
What I like the best is actually helping people get careers in the art field. And so, I was an art kid in high school and I remember everyone’s like, well, you better give that up because you’re never going to get a job, right? And then I, I ended up going to a university and I double majored in art and mechanical engineering, which worked out good. But for the art part, I thought, man, I wonder if I can ever make this work. I wonder if I can ever take this, this passion that I have and, and have a job and a family and health insurance and all those different things. And helping people realize that is something that I enjoy quite a bit.
So, I like talking to high schools and I like talking to colleges and different youth groups and all these different things and say, look, if you’re really interested in the arts, there are a lot of things that you can do with that. I mean, we know through SEGD, and I mean, I know so many designers that are hiring all the time, and then there are all these graphic designers in all these colleges across the country and I’m sure internationally that are thinking, oh, if I could only find a job and how would I know? And you want so desperately to connect those two and say, wait, no, it can happen. You can be in this industry and you can be doing exciting, visually creative things for the rest of your life. This, this is out there.
And in our case, we hire a lot of sculptor, sculptors and painters and screen printers and all these people that work with their hands. You can come work with us and you can, you can screenprint every day and you can build every day and, and create art every day, and then work with other people who are artists and have the same mindset as you. And, and we can create that great sort of art school environment in a professional setting where every two weeks we will all get a paycheck.
Brenda: Oh, your phone is about to ring.
Mike: But that’s very exciting to me. And whether that’s helping somebody get into DCL or placing them with a designer and that leads into another thing I’m passionate about, which is STEM and STEAM.
So, STEM is science, technology, engineering, math, but STEAM is science, technology, engineering, art and math. And so, I do a lot of work with this in the state of Massachusetts. And if somebody says, oh, you know, we’re into to STEM, I’ll say, okay, cool, but have we thought about STEAM?
Brenda: Right.
Mike: Which is adding art into it. And in so many ways, I mean, everything we do is sort of art-based, right, industrial design and how are we going to make this look and how are we going to make it appealing, so, it’s, it’s one that somebody would select or want to use or whatever it is. There’s art in pretty much everything. And even as we’re talking about these large technological installations that we put up, sometimes they are purely to display art and purely to promote art, and I think that’s a very exciting thing, and as we talk about what are some of the trends that we’re seeing, I think that that is a trend that we’re, I’m seeing a little bit that I’m hoping will expand.
Abby: Well, I wish I’d met you…
Brenda: Yeah, exactly.
Abby: …20 years ago when I was leaving art school and it was, very little opportunities to actually, as you say, make money and survive through art, so, I completely agree with you, Mike, in terms of like art being part of actually everything that we create and do. So that’s incredibly stimulating. And Brenda also gives back to the community. Brenda’s a teacher too, she’s a professor, so, you know, I have a ton of, ton of teachers in my family, so I really respect giving back to the future generations and supporting them to reach their full potential. I think it’s absolutely fantastic.
Mike: Yeah, it’s fun and it’s something that we are fortunate to be able to do and it’s really great. And then when we find somebody who clicks and who fits with us, you know, we’re generally able to keep them here for a long time.
Abby: Thank you, Mike, for sharing your experiences with us today and offering some really useful insights to help us all design more successful experiences. And I want to underscore bringing in a fabricator early and thanking them throughout the process, and especially at the end for coming along on the journey with us and making sure that all of our designs come true.
So, thank you so much for joining us, Mike.
Mike: Oh, absolutely. Thank you for having me.
Abby: So, thanks to everyone who tuned in today. If you like what you heard, subscribe for more episodes of Matters of Experience wherever you watch or listen to shows and make sure to leave a rating and a review and please share it with a friend. Goodbye. We’ll see you next time.
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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.
[Music]
Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience, a podcast that explores the creativity, innovation and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. If you’re new, a warm 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: Today we’re talking with Mike McCarthy, who is the VP of Design Communications Ltd., fondly referred to by most of us as DCL, who build really amazing architectural specialty products. DCL’s clients are designers and developers involved in large scale new construction and renovations of things like sports stadiums, theme parks, shopping malls, basically big infrastructure and some really cool places to hang out. Mike’s been involved in thousands of projects over his 20 plus year career, including, and this is a really impressive flex Mike, works at Walt Disney World, SoFi Stadium, TD Garden, Madison Square Garden, Gillette Stadium, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Amazon, Coca-Cola, Hasbro and many, many others.
Brenda: That should have a soundtrack. can I just say, that should have like trumpets sort of layering behind it.
Abby: I think it’d take the entire podcast to list it all out.
Mike: I would like that.
Abby: Yeah. Yeah, he really would. I can imagine. Mike’s also on the board of directors and executive committee of SEGD, and for those listening who may not be aware of this association, it’s the Society of Experiential Graphic Design, which I’m also a member. It has members from across our industry and I recommend everyone to really consider joining. Lastly, he serves on the board of directors of the Massachusetts Business Roundtable and he has a family, and I think my question really should be, Mike, how do you fit it all in?
Mike: Well, it’s all a labor of love. So, I’m lucky and I’m grateful to be here with you both today. Thank you for having me.
Brenda: Well, I’m going to get us kickstarted by talking about everybody’s favorite topic, COVID. Because you have such a broad scope of the industry, what are you seeing evolving in the workplace since COVID? What’s changing?
Mike: Well, first of all, I will point out that COVID is actually not my favorite subject.
Brenda: Fair enough.
Mike: So, we make things for places that people go, so to have sort of a global crisis where people are not allowed to go places, not good. So, I’m glad that is dissipating, let’s put it that way.
You know what I’m certainly seeing in the post-COVID world, people trying to figure out their corporate space. Right. I think everybody’s grappling with, you know, are we doing a back in the office thing? Are we doing a work from home thing or are we doing a hybrid? You know, maybe somebody signed a lease on a big giant space with one mindset ten years ago, and. and they’re really unsure if that’s going to be the same moving forward.
I’m seeing a lot of corporations and heads of corporations trying to figure that out and say, how can we, how can we do this? And if we are going to create a space that we can sort of compete for talent, which is the other big thing right now, right, is, is competing for talent and getting people towork at your place versus another. How can we make those spaces some place that people want to be?
Abby: So, you know, you have also built a really diverse range of incredible spaces and just thinking about how things evolve, you know, what are they looking to add to these spaces over time?
Mike: I think especially with the COVID break or in some ways, if you look at it, it’s almost like a warp in time where all of a sudden, it might be seven years since they updated their space, right? COVID might have been three of those, but nonetheless, all of a sudden you think, wow, it’s been a decade since we put this and or did that. And I think there are a lot of places that are looking to add technology because they see these really exciting areas that have it and they say, hey, we don’t want to get left behind and we want to look like we’re cutting edge and we want to be cutting edge.
Not to mention when you’re dealing with technology, be it LED or projection mapping or whatever, it offers you a chance to do things that sometimes static environments can’t. Right? We can update that information. We can tell a different story. We can use it to inform people and, and inspire people and tell our story and in all those different things. And so, I think that there is definitely a push to technology for anyone who wants to update and stay current and look at a different way to communicate with the people that are using that space.
Abby: How sort of well-thought through is it when some of your clients are coming to you saying we want, want technology? Are they thinking about what that could actually look like in space, how it would work? Because, you know, in my experience, we’ve had a lot of situations where a client would want technology but then haven’t really thought through the application of that and the longevity.
Mike: And it runs the gamut, and so there are people who have figured everything out, here’s what we want to do and here’s how we want to do it. And all you need to do is tell me, you know, where can I get this one screen? And then there’s people who say, what if it like lit up, but also like was like a movie?
Abby: Right.
Mike: Ok, well that, that’s a big scope, and, you know, how can we sort of help figure that out? Now, the one thing we don’t do, we build, we engineer, we project, manage, we install, we do all those things, but the one thing that we don’t do, is we don’t design. A lot of times people reach out to us and say, hey, we want to add technology, we want to do all these things. How can we do that? And the first thing we’ll do is say, okay, well, you need to team up with someone who’s going to help you design this and help tell your story or help you even figure out where you want to be.
And through that, there’s so many interesting things that they can do. They can tell their story as we see so many times, like, here’s the history of our company or whatever it is, or they can go in a completely different direction and use it for public art. We’re seeing that a lot, too, where people are saying, hey, I have this space. We’re going to put a big multimedia installation here, but we really want to use it to promote art and promote the community. I think that in the post-pandemic world, that connection to community is so huge. But even that is maybe more complicated than we’re thinking, right?
Abby: Yeah.
Mike: Because with every media there are restrictions, and you all know this well, there’s restrictions to what you can accept, how big does a file need to be, what, how do we upload it. All those different things, and we will work with partners who will sort of help them through that process.
Abby: There’s that piece to it though, which is once the, the portal, the monitor, the project, whatever is holding the content is up, it’s like a beast that needs to be fed. It’s not good enough often to just have a short term plan. How is that going to evolve? How is it going to change? How is it going to continue to have that dialog with the visitor?
You know, just thinking about the fantastic idea of showing and displaying the work of local artists, you still need a curator. You need somebody who’s going to be there and facilitating the work that goes up there. And I often find that that’s not been accounted for by the client and something that you need to bring up soon because the best laid plans can go awry and make sure that they understand the commitment to, to the content.
Brenda: Mike, how much are places mimicking, wanting to mimic other places? How often do you have somebody come up and say, you know, I just, I was over at Joe’s place and they’re doing, you know, X, Y and Z. I want the exact same thing. Are you getting that a lot?
Mike: Yeah. Yeah.
Brenda: Tell us more.
Mike: Yeah. Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, right? I mean, they see something and they liked it and say, I want to do exactly that. Okay, well, you know, maybe not exactly that, but how could we use a similar concept to work with your space and in your story and, and so forth?
Brenda: Mike, we’ve talked about media and technology. Given your scope of work, you must be seeing some more big trends across the various industries. Can you fill us in? What are you seeing out there?
Mike: Yeah, I see, kind of going back to that theory of people wanting to inspire, and I think that people are trying to be more socially conscious. So even if they’re saying, okay, well, we’re going to tell our story, they want to do it in a way that shows who they are and what their values are. Right? It isn’t just we’re the best, we do this. Why are we doing it? What is the, you know, what’s the purpose of our, our organization, what’s our mission? And so you’re seeing more mission statements. You’re seeing more organizations try to explain who they are and what they do and why they do it.
Abby: We’re seeing that completely, too. So, when you talk about, let’s focus on, on when you want to be invited to the table, because I know it’s not always at the ideal time, sometimes you get that last minute panicked phone call like help.
Mike: Sometimes.
Brenda: Fix this! Quick!
Abby: When do you need to come into the process?
Mike: Earlier is better, and speaking not only for, for DCL, but all fabricators, you know, I think they would all say earlier is better because sometimes if we’re talking with a designer and a client, we can help steer in the right direction.
Abby: Can you give us some examples so people can understand how you can actually help us?
Brenda: Bring us into your world, Mike.
Mike: Yeah, sure. So budget, right? So, we’re thinking, okay, well everybody has a budget of some type and so a fabricator may be able to say, all right, look, if you get us in early, we can take a look at what you’re going for and kind of recommend cost effective ways to fabricate that, that are going to stay within your budget. Right, and many, many times for us, we would rather get in early and say, okay, well, what is the budget? The budget is X, let’s work till that, rather than say, here’s what I want, tell me what your bid is, and, you know, we and others come in at two x, three, x four, x, whatever it is, and and somebody says, no, you got to cut that down. Cut that down to what? I don’t know, but it has to be less.
That, that can sometimes spin a lot of wheels, right. And you can spend a lot of time doing that. And for a designer client, you know, the design firm themselves, they can burn their budget in that process because they too have taken on the work and have hourly rates they have to pay, and that’s how they do their budgeting, and so they don’t want to burn their time on that. And so if they bring somebody in like us early, they can sort of go through that and say, okay, well, how could we chart this course together to get to this particular finish line of the budget and of the schedule and of whatever that constraint is?
Abby: Can you think of some, don’t mean to put you on the spot, Mike, but can you think of some instances not naming any names or a design to build something out of aluminum and you had to make it out of wood or vice versa, like some sort of tangible example.
Mike: We love aluminum, so it’s very rare that we’d be talking anybody out of aluminum that’s our best friend.
Abby: So, you understood when I said, did I say aluminum?
Mike: Well, I went to, I very quickly, I went to Google Translate and it came out as aluminum.
Brenda: Looked up English English.
Mike: So I’m like, oh, that’s what it is. But, yeah, and so with different metals, maybe, that’s a good example, right? They may say, oh, we want it to be titanium or we want it to be this or that and, and that can be very expensive. And we said, okay, well, here’s a finish that we can do out of maybe a painted aluminum or, or maybe a stainless steel or whatever it is. And many times we may say, hey, this method might be more cost efficient, but it also might be more durable. And that’s, that’s a big thing. Durability is something that I think not everybody thinks about but is a big deal.
Brenda: I have a question about the elements of the good fabricator relationship. What are the essential elements that folks should know for making things work well?
Mike: Trust, right? And that takes a while to build. Your only going to have trust if you’ve done a few projects together and you’ve been through a couple of things and, and anyone who’s in the construction field knows that construction does not always go to plan and we’re going to make mistakes and the designer is going to make mistakes and the owner is going to make mistakes and everybody’s going to make mistakes. The question is, how do you respond to those mistakes? Did they stand by their work? Did they say, yeah, we will fix it, we know about this? Did they try to hide problems?
You know, for a fabricator, they’re going to be looking for somebody who wants to have a long-term partnership with them and wants to get them involved in projects early on. One of the things that we always talk to our estimators about is you can’t just constantly price things with people, right? So, if you say, oh, I’m going to get three prices and I know, you know, company, company B and company C are going to be way too high, but I’m going to have them price it anyhow. All right. Well, that’s the that’s a process for them, and that takes them time and that costs them money. And eventually, if they say, look, I’ve priced 40 things for you and I’ve never gotten one, like, thanks, but I really don’t want to be your third price, so you can say, oh God, they’re always too high. A fabricator or vendor or supplier of any type is going to want a relationship that they have with anyone to be fruitful for them too.
Abby: Do you, you know, we often say that if we’ve done our job well, our work goes unnoticed. You know, if that’s great lighting, nobody notices the great lighting or if it’s fantastically designed or the typography, the wayfinding, if it all works together, then the visitor just goes away having had an amazing experience. Do you sometimes feel that the fabricators are truly like the unsung heroes?
Mike: I certainly think we don’t get enough thanks. I mean, there has rarely been a parade, any sort of fanfare like that. I mean, I don’t think, it wouldn’t have to be a big parade, but like a couple thousand people, I don’t think would be out of the question.
Brenda: A few thousand.
Mike: Yeah, you know, I think we’re I think we’re the same. Right. I think if all goes well, no one’s thinking about it. A lot of times when we meet people, even if we’re hiring, people will say, oh, I never even stopped to think about how this stuff was built or that anybody built it or made it, which sounds crazy, but it’s true, right? You think, oh, wow, someone’s making this. Someone did that, and, and that’s true of everything. Somebody makes doors. Somebody makes windows, right? But we take all those things for granted as we’re entering a space and we’re there to experience what the space has to offer, not how was this made.
Abby: And just a small segue, over on Seventh Avenue and 23rd Street, they were renewing, updating, I’ll call it, the, one of the entrances to the subway. Well, they uncovered it and on one side of the street, it’s the green metal. It’s been there forever because it’s made of metal and obviously it’s painted well, repainted whenever they need. It’s been there for a while. We got wood planks, so I kid you not, Mike, we now have painted green wood planks that look so temporary and so ugly and so cheap that I’m completely dumbfounded, because whenever you go to other cities and you look at their infrastructure and their transport and you look at the hubs or the stairs down, you know, there’s some investment, it needs to be there. It’s part of, sort of the flex of the city, right, they’re proud, and ours literally, anybody who wants to go check out 23rd Street and Seventh Avenue to compare the old metal version with the new wood painted one we have, I mean, it’s literally like I could have like knocked it up myself and that’s not saying much.
Brenda: OK, I’m going to age myself, watch the original Taking of Pelham One Two Three, and you will hear the line, “what do you want for your $0.35?” Look it up, folks.
Abby: I just wondered if overall, you know, given you work on some big, I’m imagining, government projects as well, that you see this sort of like, short sighted economy. Because when I think about longevity, I know this wood is going to be pretty useless really soon.
Mike: Yeah, absolutely. And we do work on some municipal projects. You know, I’ll actually go the other way with it and said that I’ve been pleasantly surprised at some of what organizations are doing in the opposite way. Logan Airport, for instance, we’ve been doing all the work for Logan Airport for 30 plus years, and Logan’s really trying hard to look nice, to be updated, to feel modern and to do innovative things. I mean, for years and years we just made black boxes with Helvetica and, or Swiss 721, I think it is, just the most average signs in the world. And over the last ten, 15 years, they’ve really been trying to put some effort into that experience. And that’s a municipal organization and that’s great to see. Apparently that is not the case in New York, but I guess that just might be another reason why Boston beats New York.
Abby: Oh, no. I fed into that. No, it was just, it was upsetting, you know, it’s upsetting when you see something which for me is so important, just look so slapdash.
Brenda: Yeah, poorly done.
Abby: I think it just represents, yeah, something, I was really, really sad, but…
Mike: But, it goes to your earlier point of ideally nobody is stopping to look at it. Right. And so that that design or that solution was the opposite where you stopped and looked at and said what, this is terrible, this isn’t right.
Abby: So, we have a lot of design is listening. What should they be considering from your perspective when they design these experiences?
Mike: So, some of it the fabricator can advise on, right, as far as what’s durable and what’s going to hold up to a lawnmower and all those kind of things. I will say this if you’re doing technology, you need to be able to get electricity there and likely data there. There are some wireless data things that you can do and so forth, but you’re likely going to need to get electricity there.
And yes, there is solar, but solar is kind of limited and you’re not going to run a giant LED screen off the the sunlight of the day. You’ll see that museums that have these giant fields and they’ll say, oh, in the center of the field, let’s do this. You certainly can. But is it in the owners budget to dig up that sidewalk or, you know, however they have to get that electrical service to that spot and that would generally not be in the fabricator scope. That would generally be in the owner’s scope, and if it’s under construction, the general contractor or whatever it is, and that’s expensive.
Abby: Now, that may sound really simple to a few, few designers listening, but also, my call to designers is, don’t just take a screen, don’t just take a 16×9 screen. We have so much amazing technology.
Brenda: A lot of options out there.
Abby: There is tons of options where it can be really part of the environment. So, yeah, don’t just think it has to look like this and be stuck on a wall.
Mike: Yeah, and I would say think about it all year long, right? So, we’re doing work in Cleveland right now. Cleveland gets really cold, but it also gets really hot. Maybe this piece is going to go from a high of 110 degrees in the sun on an afternoon to -12 degrees. And what does that do? And what do you need to think about.
Abby: Mike, you’ve been doing this a long time. Why do you still get out of bed? What do you like about your job? What have you still got to accomplish?
Brenda: Where’s the passion?
Mike: So, for me, it’s two things. One, I’m incredibly vain and so I love when somebody goes somewhere and we did the work. So, someone will go to Disney World and I’ll say, oh, did you, did you like this ride and like that ride? And they’ll say, oh, I loved it. And I’ll just say, you’re welcome! And they’re like, yeah, okay. I know you did the signs, yeah, that’s great. But I love, I love when we work on, on projects and you get to go see it or you see someplace as you’re in a new city and you drive by and say, oh, we did this and we did that, and I truly enjoy seeing projects that we worked on out in the wild.
What I like the best is actually helping people get careers in the art field. And so, I was an art kid in high school and I remember everyone’s like, well, you better give that up because you’re never going to get a job, right? And then I, I ended up going to a university and I double majored in art and mechanical engineering, which worked out good. But for the art part, I thought, man, I wonder if I can ever make this work. I wonder if I can ever take this, this passion that I have and, and have a job and a family and health insurance and all those different things. And helping people realize that is something that I enjoy quite a bit.
So, I like talking to high schools and I like talking to colleges and different youth groups and all these different things and say, look, if you’re really interested in the arts, there are a lot of things that you can do with that. I mean, we know through SEGD, and I mean, I know so many designers that are hiring all the time, and then there are all these graphic designers in all these colleges across the country and I’m sure internationally that are thinking, oh, if I could only find a job and how would I know? And you want so desperately to connect those two and say, wait, no, it can happen. You can be in this industry and you can be doing exciting, visually creative things for the rest of your life. This, this is out there.
And in our case, we hire a lot of sculptor, sculptors and painters and screen printers and all these people that work with their hands. You can come work with us and you can, you can screenprint every day and you can build every day and, and create art every day, and then work with other people who are artists and have the same mindset as you. And, and we can create that great sort of art school environment in a professional setting where every two weeks we will all get a paycheck.
Brenda: Oh, your phone is about to ring.
Mike: But that’s very exciting to me. And whether that’s helping somebody get into DCL or placing them with a designer and that leads into another thing I’m passionate about, which is STEM and STEAM.
So, STEM is science, technology, engineering, math, but STEAM is science, technology, engineering, art and math. And so, I do a lot of work with this in the state of Massachusetts. And if somebody says, oh, you know, we’re into to STEM, I’ll say, okay, cool, but have we thought about STEAM?
Brenda: Right.
Mike: Which is adding art into it. And in so many ways, I mean, everything we do is sort of art-based, right, industrial design and how are we going to make this look and how are we going to make it appealing, so, it’s, it’s one that somebody would select or want to use or whatever it is. There’s art in pretty much everything. And even as we’re talking about these large technological installations that we put up, sometimes they are purely to display art and purely to promote art, and I think that’s a very exciting thing, and as we talk about what are some of the trends that we’re seeing, I think that that is a trend that we’re, I’m seeing a little bit that I’m hoping will expand.
Abby: Well, I wish I’d met you…
Brenda: Yeah, exactly.
Abby: …20 years ago when I was leaving art school and it was, very little opportunities to actually, as you say, make money and survive through art, so, I completely agree with you, Mike, in terms of like art being part of actually everything that we create and do. So that’s incredibly stimulating. And Brenda also gives back to the community. Brenda’s a teacher too, she’s a professor, so, you know, I have a ton of, ton of teachers in my family, so I really respect giving back to the future generations and supporting them to reach their full potential. I think it’s absolutely fantastic.
Mike: Yeah, it’s fun and it’s something that we are fortunate to be able to do and it’s really great. And then when we find somebody who clicks and who fits with us, you know, we’re generally able to keep them here for a long time.
Abby: Thank you, Mike, for sharing your experiences with us today and offering some really useful insights to help us all design more successful experiences. And I want to underscore bringing in a fabricator early and thanking them throughout the process, and especially at the end for coming along on the journey with us and making sure that all of our designs come true.
So, thank you so much for joining us, Mike.
Mike: Oh, absolutely. Thank you for having me.
Abby: So, thanks to everyone who tuned in today. If you like what you heard, subscribe for more episodes of Matters of Experience wherever you watch or listen to shows and make sure to leave a rating and a review and please share it with a friend. Goodbye. 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.
Unsung Heroes with Mike McCarthy
Feelings aren't Facts with Joe Federbush
[Music]
Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience, a podcast that explores the creativity, innovation, and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. If you’re new here, welcome. We’re happy to have you, and to our regular listeners, thank you for tuning in again. A brief reminder, my name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: Hello, everybody. This is Brenda Cowan.
Abby: Today, we’re speaking with Joe Federbush, President and Chief Strategist of EVOLIO Marketing. Joe works with the entire event ecosystem plus partners with experiential agencies, organizers, and associations. Joe is most known for his expertise in measuring event success, data storytelling, and helping brands develop the most impactful experiences, all with one goal in mind, providing actionable insights that help brands deliver greater return on experience, investment, and objectives. I sound a bit like a walking ad for you. I clearly love your company and everything you do. Joe, welcome to our show.
Joe: Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.
Brenda: Joe, could you tell us a little bit more specifically about what it is that you do? How do you go about doing your work?
Joe: Yeah, I mean, let’s face it, experiences, events, you know, they’re, not a lot of money is being thrown at them these days, we’re fighting for budget, you know, we’re fighting for attention in time with other marketing mediums and activities. So what we really do is those who are creating any type of experience, whether it’s in a museum, whether it’s at a convention, in a park, you name it, what we really want to do is just help them measure success by identifying KPIs, key performance indicators that are going to be the most important metrics to help them understand are they meeting, hopefully exceeding their objectives for that investment, for that brand, for that experience.
Abby: Wow, that’s cool. So, Joe, one of our focuses is storytelling, whatever it is we’re designing. So, I heard that notion of data storytelling, and it sort of piqued my interest. So, what specifically is that, and why is it important?
Joe: Yeah, data storytelling is extremely important, and it kind of plays off of your January 11th, 2023, episode about design experiences in storytelling, right? Now, we look at it the same way, but with numbers, basically. And you know, we’re inundated with data these days, especially when we went to virtual because everything was being captured. It almost did like a 180. Prior to the pandemic, there was not enough data or not enough good data. So now you have, you know, the whole challenge of rudimentary data, too much data. But, like, what’s compelling? What does it mean? What kind of decisions are they going to make from it? So, we look at it is whether it’s surveys, whether it’s, you know, digital data, you know, just what does it all mean? And most importantly, back to your point about the storytelling, what are we going to do with this data?
Actually, a good friend of mine, Victor Torregroza, he’s like an experiential expert at Intel. Years ago, he told me why you helped me so much is because you humanize data. You don’t need me to tell you how to read a pie chart, right? It’s about what are we doing with this information. Give you a perfect example, what seems like rudimentary data upfront when you look at like basic demographic of who’s coming to your event or experience, etc… You know, we look at it as, okay, well, what percentage are executives or what percentage are technical or tactical? Because your delivery has to really align with the audience, with your visitors, with their viewers.
So when you’re talking, alright, 60% of your audience is, you know, say, executive C-suite people, you want to make sure that you’re telling the story about how you can help their business versus, like if you’re talking to like technical or tactical people, you want to maybe show more product features and benefits.
Brenda: You know, I would love to play off of the, the human element that you were just mentioning and think about data collection. So, in my line of work, I’m pretty familiar with qualitative data, collecting focus groups, interviews, and all that kind of thing, and could you share a little bit, what does qualitative data collection look like for you?
Joe: Sure. So for us, you know, we are a full-service market research firm, and so when we look at qualitative, there are several aspects like you mentioned, focus groups, in-depth interviews, but now there’s also amazing AI tools that will take verbatim comments, whether it’s audio or it’s text and, really group it, combine it, code it into the right categories so you can start taking qualitative and actually convert it to quantitative to some degree, of course, depending on the volume of data.
But when we look at qualitative, you know, it’s just it’s getting that like emotion and that sentiment that you’re not going to necessarily get from a statistic. It’s that human connection and emotion.
Brenda: Listeners, you just missed two really alarmed or shocked or amazed expressions on Abby’s and my face when Joe started talking about AI. That’s incredible.
Joe: Yeah, we’re just scratching the surface now, and it’s mind-blowing. It saves and shaves so much hours of work, you know, which either A helps your margins or B, lowers your price so the clients get more value.
Abby: Are you worried you won’t have a job?
Joe: That’s the fear, right?
Abby: See, you didn’t even address that question! That was really slick. He’s like, I’m always going to be here, Abby.
Brenda: I’m not afraid, AI. Bring it on.
Joe: What I’ve learned about AI, the beauty of it is the information has to exist first. Allegedly.
Brenda: Well, but, and you were just talking about the emotional element and the human element, I don’t, I do not see how it is that you could possibly, when we’re talking about data collection in particular and when we’re talking about emotion, and when we’re talking about, you know, the nature of experience, I’m not concerned about AI sort of supplanting that human element.
Joe: I’m not yet either.
Brenda: Yet.
Abby: Yeah.
Brenda: Listeners, you heard that yet, right?
Abby: So when you think about an organization, how do they determine what they value, and how do you sort of quantify that? You know, what are the kinds of conversations you have to help people get at really defining or describing what value means to them?
Joe: Yeah, that is from my experience, in my opinion, that’s like one of the biggest parts of the project, actually. It’s not how to write a questionnaire or how to conduct the interviews. It’s literally all that due diligence and upfront work that has to be conducted to really get inside your stakeholders, your customers, and even their customers’ heads to understand what’s most important and what’s actionable.
You know, a lot of the time clients will come to us, for example, and they have a questionnaire already made, and you know, we kind of snicker at it like, what is this? What are you going to do with this information? So we kind of reverse engineer the process, looking at the end and working backwards. What decisions are you going to make based on, you know, this, this measurement research, etc.? Then let’s design A, the methodology to your point. You know, whether it’s a focus group, maybe it’s a survey, maybe it’s observations, maybe it’s behavioral tracking, maybe it’s social media. There’s so many data sources. What are the best data sources going to be to actually capture the right kinds of actionable information and help our clients really make true business decisions from?
Abby: What I was taught in school when I was in high school doing statistics.
Joe: Couple years ago.
Abby: Oh, I love you, Joe, was that, you know, you can sit there, you can look at a statistic, but it can be interpreted many different ways. So how do you make sure that you’ve asked the right question and you’re interpreting it in the right way?
Joe: Yeah, absolutely, and that’s why, you know, I was saying before about, like it always starts with your objectives and your KPIs so that you don’t really go down a wrong path. I mean, I love it actually a lot of the time when the data, you know, sheds light on something you didn’t think about. But the point is, you know, you don’t want to use data in a dangerous way. You know, it shouldn’t be malicious. Of course, we all go into it hoping for a certain hypothesis or a certain outcome, but really more, it’s about understanding how did we get there? Did we get there, yes or no? What worked, what didn’t? And let’s continuously improve so that the data does get us to where we want to be for continuous improvement.
It’s rare that anyone’s going to get it right the first time and then just be able to like use that as their BKM, their best-known method and just keep repeating, repeating, repeating because things change. And I think, you know, prior to the pandemic, the economy was good, the event industry was exploding, you know, so we were a little, getting a little complacent. Some, not all, of course, but you know, we had a real rude awakening and now with the significant increase in costs for experiential and event marketing, we all have to be smarter, you know? So, we do need data more than we’ve ever needed it before, to your point, Abby, to make those really strong correct decisions and not try to twist the data to do something that it’s really not saying.
Abby: Does it ever put you in conflict? If you’re just responsible for the data and I use the word small J. If you’re doing all data and you’re obviously analyzing somebody else’s work, right, somebody created this event. There’s a whole team or teams of vendors. Are you ever in conflict?
Joe: Unfortunately, yes. Fortunately, unfortunately, however you want to look at it. But the point is it’s not going to fix itself, right, so you may as well identify it when hopefully, it’s just a small problem before it becomes a much larger problem. But there has definitely been instances where, you know, it’s, it’s a little challenging to communicate results that aren’t so great. And that’s, you know, that’s another reason why, you know, EVOLIO’s an independent third party. So, we’re not measuring our own work, you know, so we are going to be truly unbiased in what we present.
Abby: I want your job. You come out always smelling the roses.
Joe: Be careful what you wish for.
Brenda: Well, I’m curious about when we’re measuring success and along the lines of what we’re talking about, companies need to make sure that there’s a return on investment, that they’re spending their money wisely. And I’m curious to know what are the pieces that need to be taken care of, attended to, in order to make sure that the ROI is healthy.
Joe: So our model or framework or methods to help get there are to really understand, you know, first start with again, what are you trying to accomplish? You know, so many events and experiences are designed around different factors and different goals, like whether it’s sales, whether it’s education, whether it’s information, whether it’s, you know, societal things like DEI and sustainability. You know, we see it all the time where we want to measure our ROI, and I have to ask most times, well, how do you define ROI?
Brenda: Sure.
Joe: And a lot of the time, their definition of ROI is not even really about ROI. It’s about ROX, the return on experience, the return on emotion, ROE, you know, the things that we, that you mentioned in the introduction, and then we find out, well, you know if you’re not going to deliver a great experience, why would you expect ROI? So I try to convince a lot of the people that we work with, let’s not start with ROI and look at that as the end result. Let’s look at that as the next phase, making sure that we’re truly delivering great experiences, connecting with the right people in the right way.
Brenda: So you said one of my favorite words, which is emotion, and I would love for you to just give us a quick definition. When you’re talking about return on emotion, what’s in your thinking with that one?
Joe: Yeah. So, couple of ways to go about it because everyone’s always like, oh, that’s intangible, you can’t measure emotion, and there’s so many ways you truly can. It starts with sentiment. And you know, if you think of it from like a survey question point of view, if you do like an intercept survey as people are leaving a museum or an event or activity, say, hey, I would love to ask you some anonymous questions about what you thought about the event. And you have very specific messages designed that they could rate their level of agreement with. And of course, you want to make sure those sentiment statements are not biased. So how happy did this event make you? That’s not the way you ask the question. You know, how do you feel towards this event? Did it make you, you know, on a scale, say, of, you know, excited to bored? And then, obviously the higher end of the scale is where it’s about the positive emotion.
That’s the easiest way to measure return on emotion, in my opinion. Now, the beauty of it is there’s, kind of going back to AI and some other tools, there’s cameras and things that really capture sentiment from like recognition from your biologics, and that can track your, your expressions on your face. And we’re starting to see those now being used at events as well. And the cool thing about that is that it’s capturing information of people walking by, walking by, walking by, stopped, looked, came in, checked it out. Cameras facing them, they could see their like, reactions, and it’s truly now generating the most accurate levels of return on emotion you can get.
Abby: You mentioned a good experience and talking about measuring it, but what is a good experience? What makes a good experience for a visitor?
Joe: Yeah, you know, first is connecting, you know, having that true organic natural connection where it’s not forced, you know, you’re not forcing people into a room to do something that they may or may not feel comfortable doing, seeing being around too many people at the same place, at the same time, obviously after the last couple of years, what we’ve all been through. So what makes a good experience is really like attracting and engaging with the right people, but having the engagers be truly engaging, you know, not to beat up the word, but, you know, so many times we walk into experiences that are designed so impeccably and beautifully, and then it falls flat because the people working it are like, not that excited to be there.
So you know, you’re halfway there, and then I think to get full-way there is, yes, you design something that connects with the right people that you’re trying to attract and engage, and then having that kind of support staff, that team, those ambassadors, whatever the case may be, that really know how to walk you through and treat you as if you’re having a VIP experience. That, to me, is the perfect experience. Now, you know, when you work backwards from that, it’s okay, well, who are the right people, and what do they like to see? And it’s not one size fits all. So you have to make sure that, you know, you’re not setting false expectations of what it is you’re visiting.
Brenda: Joe, I’m particularly curious to know about the arena of social impact and how it is that social impact and social action is being embraced by brands. And I’d love to know: how do you go about measuring whether or not there’s an awareness that social action has truly been prompted?
Joe: It’s huge right now, and I’ll start with those who are not yet doing it. We encourage them to look at ways of measuring, you know, societal metrics versus just business metrics. DEI and even DEIB. If you’ve heard of DEIB, the B is belonging, and this is something I think is so important, especially when you look at it from like an experiential element. If someone who’s not white walks into a room of white people and they just, it’s homogenized, you know, that’s not a good look for that event, for that experience, for that brand. You know, even when we look at it from like a speakers perspective, if you’re at a conference and there’s multiple speakers, multiple tracks, you name it, there has to be diversity with the speakers. It can’t always be equal, but the point is there has to be that introduction that, you know, it just can’t be this homogenized event. And you know, same thing on the sustainability side, you know, especially in the event world. Let’s talk about trade shows for a second, you know, there’s a lot of churn and burn, a lot of carpet, a lot of, fortunately, a lot of recycling, but, you know, reducing carbon footprints in events is extremely important more than it’s ever been because it’s got to go somewhere and it can’t keep going to dumps.
Abby: Now, that’s true. I completely agree with that. Even in terms of all of the design builds we do for all these events. They have to be recyclable. They have to be reused. They have to have that flexibility where especially when you got to take care of the environment. Yeah, I completely agree.
Joe: I mean, in some countries are still 100% build and burn. You know, they haven’t even thought about it yet. And that’s scary.
Brenda: Oh, that is, that is crazy scary.
Joe: Yeah.
Brenda: You know, I’m really curious to know, are there things that we’re talking a lot about, you know, what should be measured and how it could be measured, and I’m curious to hear, what should not be measured?
Joe: Yeah, I think that’s a great question.
Brenda: Where do you draw the line?
Joe: Yeah.
Brenda: Or where should we know to draw the line?
Joe: Yeah, I think, like what shouldn’t be measured are things that are obnoxious and pushy, you know. So, when are you going to buy this? You know, like, and a lot of it, it’s the delivery of how you’re asking. So, you know, how likely would you be to buy this product in the next X number of months is a nice way to say, will you buy this or not? You know, collecting the level of information you’re collecting about people, like personal information, that’s always a turnoff. So it’s like, let it be more of a natural opt-in process. Like, so if I’m answering a survey, that survey should be anonymous because if you want unbiased responses, you don’t want to start off by asking, you know who I am and what’s my email and what’s my job title, what’s my income, and how many kids do I have? And like, you know, like that’s a whole other story. But, you know, you could save those demographics for the end, but just for classification purposes. So we know, am I talking to a Gen Z or am I talking to a boomer because they’re obviously very different types of people, some of them, most of them, not me, but I’m in that gray area between. But yeah, so things that are just aren’t pushy or invasive.
Abby: So I really believe in making mistakes because without making mistakes, you can’t learn, and without learning, there’s no growth. So tell us some mistakes, some horror stories you’ve had along the way, and also some mistakes that clients often make so that anybody listening can try to avoid them.
Joe: You know, and I look through, like, all throughout my career, and I’ve been involved in, you know, event measurement for a pretty long time. And I look back, and it’s not even like those mistakes were always like 20 years ago, you know, just some even more recent where we let the client kind of dictate how to measure. So, there’s been instances where I’ve kicked myself, allowing the client to dictate to us what to do and how to do it. You want to, of course, get the business to help the client. So sometimes, you’ll sacrifice budget to get it done, and then you find yourself taking just a huge hit or a huge loss on the project. And I look at those as the biggest mistakes because then you’re setting the precedent for any future work where they’re like, oh, well, you did it this way last time, and you know, so then you’re kind of digging your own grave, so to speak.
Abby: Yeah, totally relate. Completely understand.
Brenda: Well, we would love to hear what you think in your own personal work, what you think is most successful about what you do.
Joe: I love what I do every day. And so, this is an easy question to answer, fortunately.
Brenda: Softball.
Joe: Yeah, right. Thank you. Thank you for the softball.
Brenda: A soft pitch. Is that what it is?
Joe: Yeah. So, I mean, I just love the fact that, especially if we look at more in the short term compared to the long term, but it’s always been the case. Budgets for event marketing and experiential marketing is always tight. And the fact that we can provide actionable data that helps our clients truly make decisions, it’s such a joy.
Actually, just yesterday, we were on a call with a client, and they did something very different with their experience, and they were really kind of sticking their neck out. We hope this works. So, they had the data because we did the research on-site post-show. The data supported that bringing all their brands together was an extremely successful experience, not only for them but for their customers. So in the past, they had like four different brands in four different locations. So the fact that A, they saved money by consolidating, B, they had more cohesiveness between their brands but still had their unique brand identity for their brands. But they had the data now to say, we did it, it worked, but it wasn’t 100% perfect. And then they realized, Wow, you know, next year we’re going to change this, and we’re going to do this more efficiently. So, it’s more like modifying and tweaking versus like, do we need to reinvent the wheel again?
Brenda: What are some of the lofty goals that you have for yourself for the next few years?
Joe: Yeah, I mean, for, for myself, you know, it’s just really grow the business and be the industry standard when it comes to measurement. You know, we’re working now on building experiential online, in-person, event B2B, B2C benchmarks, for example. So we’ve literally just compiled over 400,000 surveys that we’ve conducted since 2017. So over half a million responses now to create benchmarks for all of those normalized KPIs that a lot of clients want to know, but then, more importantly, be able to filter it between age and gender and geography and event type in industry and things like that. So that’s what we’re really looking forward to continue growing and expanding so that there truly is like normalized data out there so people can really feel good about, if we exceeded the industry benchmarks, congratulations if we’re close to it, congratulations. But if we’re under it, what are we going to need to do to improve our performance and outcomes so that we are exceeding benchmarks?
Brenda: So if you’re looking at years since 2017, I’m curious, what about the impact of COVID? How do you sort of take that into account when you’re looking at longitudinal data analysis such as that?
Joe: Yeah, and that’s a big piece of that segmentation with the benchmarks is, you know, the glory days prior to 2020. Of course, the 2020 through 2021 and a half where it was like, oh, and then now that things are rebounding because, you know, from 2021 when things really started coming back to in-person pretty strong till today, you know, there’s still that momentum that’s being rebuilt. You know, a lot of events, event organizers, associations, museums, you name it, they’re trying to get those bodies back. And now that, you know, social distancing is kind of being put aside, and we can get more bodies back together and not have the limitations of capacity limits and things like that, so we’re starting to see that rebound, and it’s rebounding pretty quick. I mean, I anticipate unless something drastic, God forbid, happens, I anticipate that early 2024 we’re going to be back to normal, whatever back to normal means. But, you know, we’re not going to be in any kind of state of fear, hopefully. But, you know, I speak with some people, and they’re like, oh, it’s not going to be for like two or three more years. I speak with other people, and they’re like it was yesterday, and it depends on your industry, of course, you know, but I think for, collectively and most globally, not all, but I think we will be in a good spot in probably like 9 to 12 more months.
Abby: So thinking about, you touched earlier on the changes that we saw happen due to COVID. How many of them are good and will stick around, and how many do you hope we’ll never see again?
Joe: So, great for QR codes, let’s call it, let’s say that.
Abby: That’s true.
Joe: Love it, digital payments, you know, things just connecting digitally.
Abby: Yeah.
Joe: But understanding where connecting digitally has its limits, you know, networking and all these things that were trying to be done digitally. Very, very difficult. And during the pandemic, we had measured literally hundreds of events, and, you know, it’s great for brand opportunities, excellent for education.
But from that building the connections and networking, you know, no matter how many matchmaking tools and things you tried and did, there were very, very few that were actually successful. I think building community so an event isn’t just three days, say, like now we, we, we understand how to make an event longer for the digital part of it. But yeah, the networking, connecting part, it just fell flat and hopefully, we never have to try to see it again.
Abby: Good. So, in-person still wins.
Brenda: Face to face.
Abby: People want to be with each other.
Joe: Without a doubt.
Brenda: I just remember the conversations back in 20, like 2012, 2013, 2014. Everybody was like, oh, we’ve got to go digital. We don’t need all this expense of face-to-face and, argh, getting people together, it’s so complicated.
Joe: Yeah.
Brenda: Well, here we are.
Joe: Yeah.
Brenda: We want to see each other in person.
Joe: Yeah.
Brenda: I find that very optimistic.
Joe: Hugely optimistic. And you know, digital has its place. We find it’s great for, like, keynotes and, you know, press launches and things like that, so, you know, for, for the masses. But for those that really want that connectivity and that build those relationships, it’s just so hard online. Yeah.
Abby: That intimacy. So three things you love about your job, Joe.
Joe: I love helping my clients with data versus, what is it, feelings aren’t facts. That’s my favorite line to my clients. Feelings aren’t facts.
Abby: I’m stealing that. I’m going to totally steal that.
Joe: Please steal it. I’ll put a little TM over it.
Brenda: TM.
Joe: Feelings are not facts. That’s my number one favorite thing. My number two favorite thing is owning a company and just having a team of employees that I truly love and care about, and I will do anything for them. And number three is just the hurdles. I love the hurdles. You know, everything can’t be easy all the time. And we’ve gone through some hurdles in, whether it’s education or experiential agencies. They only make us smarter and stronger.
Abby: Would you say then, because you’re clearly an entrepreneur, you own your own company, you’re running it very well? It’s growing year after year. Do you think it’s part of who you are? Wanting to be heading a team, wanting to be successful, and also wanting to be challenged? I think it’s like core to what I’ve seen in serial entrepreneurs is that they thrive off it. As soon as everything’s working, it’s boring.
Joe: Yeah. Oh, my employees hate that about me. When it’s working well, then it’s time to change it.
Brenda: Evolve. Let’s use the word evolve.
Joe: You know, that’s funny because EVOLIO literally means evolving your event portfolio, that’s, or experiential portfolio. So that’s where it came from, EVOLIO. It’s about evolution and constantly evolving. So, thank you for that.
Brenda: You betcha. I’m here for you, Joe. I’ve got your back.
Joe: You’ve got my back.
Abby: Yeah, well, you know, in some of my research, before we chatted to you, I did a few surveys.
Joe: There you go.
Abby: And one of them actually gave me a $5 Amazon gift card.
Joe: Only five?
Abby: I thought that was pretty good.
Joe: Oh, no. We do ten.
Abby: Really? Send me some surveys!
Joe: Yeah, between five and ten.
Abby: Is that the norm?
Joe: Yeah, yeah.
Brenda: Look at that. I don’t even like to check the box that says I agree to terms.
Joe: I know, right?
Brenda: That would have been like 10 hours of my time right there, which is how do I feel about these terms.
Joe: Exactly.
Brenda: You know, it took me ten years to get married, so I guess that you know.
Joe: Good things come to those who wait.
Brenda: Yeah, well, that’s for sure. That’s for sure.
Abby: I’ve learned so much today, Joe, from you. It’s incredible. Now I even know what data storytelling is.
Joe: All right!
Brenda: Oh my goodness, Joe, thank you so much for everything.
Joe: Thank you for having me.
Brenda: The work that you’re doing is amazing.
Joe: Well, thank you. And you guys as well. You just bring in some brilliant minds with brilliant people and your perspectives to it, and so thank you for having me.
Abby: Oh, thank you, thank you.
Brenda: Thank you.
Abby: And thanks, everyone for listening. If you like what you heard today, subscribe for more episodes of Matters of Experience wherever you listen to podcasts. We’ll see you next time.
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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.
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Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience, a podcast that explores the creativity, innovation, and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. If you’re new here, welcome. We’re happy to have you, and to our regular listeners, thank you for tuning in again. A brief reminder, my name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: Hello, everybody. This is Brenda Cowan.
Abby: Today, we’re speaking with Joe Federbush, President and Chief Strategist of EVOLIO Marketing. Joe works with the entire event ecosystem plus partners with experiential agencies, organizers, and associations. Joe is most known for his expertise in measuring event success, data storytelling, and helping brands develop the most impactful experiences, all with one goal in mind, providing actionable insights that help brands deliver greater return on experience, investment, and objectives. I sound a bit like a walking ad for you. I clearly love your company and everything you do. Joe, welcome to our show.
Joe: Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.
Brenda: Joe, could you tell us a little bit more specifically about what it is that you do? How do you go about doing your work?
Joe: Yeah, I mean, let’s face it, experiences, events, you know, they’re, not a lot of money is being thrown at them these days, we’re fighting for budget, you know, we’re fighting for attention in time with other marketing mediums and activities. So what we really do is those who are creating any type of experience, whether it’s in a museum, whether it’s at a convention, in a park, you name it, what we really want to do is just help them measure success by identifying KPIs, key performance indicators that are going to be the most important metrics to help them understand are they meeting, hopefully exceeding their objectives for that investment, for that brand, for that experience.
Abby: Wow, that’s cool. So, Joe, one of our focuses is storytelling, whatever it is we’re designing. So, I heard that notion of data storytelling, and it sort of piqued my interest. So, what specifically is that, and why is it important?
Joe: Yeah, data storytelling is extremely important, and it kind of plays off of your January 11th, 2023, episode about design experiences in storytelling, right? Now, we look at it the same way, but with numbers, basically. And you know, we’re inundated with data these days, especially when we went to virtual because everything was being captured. It almost did like a 180. Prior to the pandemic, there was not enough data or not enough good data. So now you have, you know, the whole challenge of rudimentary data, too much data. But, like, what’s compelling? What does it mean? What kind of decisions are they going to make from it? So, we look at it is whether it’s surveys, whether it’s, you know, digital data, you know, just what does it all mean? And most importantly, back to your point about the storytelling, what are we going to do with this data?
Actually, a good friend of mine, Victor Torregroza, he’s like an experiential expert at Intel. Years ago, he told me why you helped me so much is because you humanize data. You don’t need me to tell you how to read a pie chart, right? It’s about what are we doing with this information. Give you a perfect example, what seems like rudimentary data upfront when you look at like basic demographic of who’s coming to your event or experience, etc… You know, we look at it as, okay, well, what percentage are executives or what percentage are technical or tactical? Because your delivery has to really align with the audience, with your visitors, with their viewers.
So when you’re talking, alright, 60% of your audience is, you know, say, executive C-suite people, you want to make sure that you’re telling the story about how you can help their business versus, like if you’re talking to like technical or tactical people, you want to maybe show more product features and benefits.
Brenda: You know, I would love to play off of the, the human element that you were just mentioning and think about data collection. So, in my line of work, I’m pretty familiar with qualitative data, collecting focus groups, interviews, and all that kind of thing, and could you share a little bit, what does qualitative data collection look like for you?
Joe: Sure. So for us, you know, we are a full-service market research firm, and so when we look at qualitative, there are several aspects like you mentioned, focus groups, in-depth interviews, but now there’s also amazing AI tools that will take verbatim comments, whether it’s audio or it’s text and, really group it, combine it, code it into the right categories so you can start taking qualitative and actually convert it to quantitative to some degree, of course, depending on the volume of data.
But when we look at qualitative, you know, it’s just it’s getting that like emotion and that sentiment that you’re not going to necessarily get from a statistic. It’s that human connection and emotion.
Brenda: Listeners, you just missed two really alarmed or shocked or amazed expressions on Abby’s and my face when Joe started talking about AI. That’s incredible.
Joe: Yeah, we’re just scratching the surface now, and it’s mind-blowing. It saves and shaves so much hours of work, you know, which either A helps your margins or B, lowers your price so the clients get more value.
Abby: Are you worried you won’t have a job?
Joe: That’s the fear, right?
Abby: See, you didn’t even address that question! That was really slick. He’s like, I’m always going to be here, Abby.
Brenda: I’m not afraid, AI. Bring it on.
Joe: What I’ve learned about AI, the beauty of it is the information has to exist first. Allegedly.
Brenda: Well, but, and you were just talking about the emotional element and the human element, I don’t, I do not see how it is that you could possibly, when we’re talking about data collection in particular and when we’re talking about emotion, and when we’re talking about, you know, the nature of experience, I’m not concerned about AI sort of supplanting that human element.
Joe: I’m not yet either.
Brenda: Yet.
Abby: Yeah.
Brenda: Listeners, you heard that yet, right?
Abby: So when you think about an organization, how do they determine what they value, and how do you sort of quantify that? You know, what are the kinds of conversations you have to help people get at really defining or describing what value means to them?
Joe: Yeah, that is from my experience, in my opinion, that’s like one of the biggest parts of the project, actually. It’s not how to write a questionnaire or how to conduct the interviews. It’s literally all that due diligence and upfront work that has to be conducted to really get inside your stakeholders, your customers, and even their customers’ heads to understand what’s most important and what’s actionable.
You know, a lot of the time clients will come to us, for example, and they have a questionnaire already made, and you know, we kind of snicker at it like, what is this? What are you going to do with this information? So we kind of reverse engineer the process, looking at the end and working backwards. What decisions are you going to make based on, you know, this, this measurement research, etc.? Then let’s design A, the methodology to your point. You know, whether it’s a focus group, maybe it’s a survey, maybe it’s observations, maybe it’s behavioral tracking, maybe it’s social media. There’s so many data sources. What are the best data sources going to be to actually capture the right kinds of actionable information and help our clients really make true business decisions from?
Abby: What I was taught in school when I was in high school doing statistics.
Joe: Couple years ago.
Abby: Oh, I love you, Joe, was that, you know, you can sit there, you can look at a statistic, but it can be interpreted many different ways. So how do you make sure that you’ve asked the right question and you’re interpreting it in the right way?
Joe: Yeah, absolutely, and that’s why, you know, I was saying before about, like it always starts with your objectives and your KPIs so that you don’t really go down a wrong path. I mean, I love it actually a lot of the time when the data, you know, sheds light on something you didn’t think about. But the point is, you know, you don’t want to use data in a dangerous way. You know, it shouldn’t be malicious. Of course, we all go into it hoping for a certain hypothesis or a certain outcome, but really more, it’s about understanding how did we get there? Did we get there, yes or no? What worked, what didn’t? And let’s continuously improve so that the data does get us to where we want to be for continuous improvement.
It’s rare that anyone’s going to get it right the first time and then just be able to like use that as their BKM, their best-known method and just keep repeating, repeating, repeating because things change. And I think, you know, prior to the pandemic, the economy was good, the event industry was exploding, you know, so we were a little, getting a little complacent. Some, not all, of course, but you know, we had a real rude awakening and now with the significant increase in costs for experiential and event marketing, we all have to be smarter, you know? So, we do need data more than we’ve ever needed it before, to your point, Abby, to make those really strong correct decisions and not try to twist the data to do something that it’s really not saying.
Abby: Does it ever put you in conflict? If you’re just responsible for the data and I use the word small J. If you’re doing all data and you’re obviously analyzing somebody else’s work, right, somebody created this event. There’s a whole team or teams of vendors. Are you ever in conflict?
Joe: Unfortunately, yes. Fortunately, unfortunately, however you want to look at it. But the point is it’s not going to fix itself, right, so you may as well identify it when hopefully, it’s just a small problem before it becomes a much larger problem. But there has definitely been instances where, you know, it’s, it’s a little challenging to communicate results that aren’t so great. And that’s, you know, that’s another reason why, you know, EVOLIO’s an independent third party. So, we’re not measuring our own work, you know, so we are going to be truly unbiased in what we present.
Abby: I want your job. You come out always smelling the roses.
Joe: Be careful what you wish for.
Brenda: Well, I’m curious about when we’re measuring success and along the lines of what we’re talking about, companies need to make sure that there’s a return on investment, that they’re spending their money wisely. And I’m curious to know what are the pieces that need to be taken care of, attended to, in order to make sure that the ROI is healthy.
Joe: So our model or framework or methods to help get there are to really understand, you know, first start with again, what are you trying to accomplish? You know, so many events and experiences are designed around different factors and different goals, like whether it’s sales, whether it’s education, whether it’s information, whether it’s, you know, societal things like DEI and sustainability. You know, we see it all the time where we want to measure our ROI, and I have to ask most times, well, how do you define ROI?
Brenda: Sure.
Joe: And a lot of the time, their definition of ROI is not even really about ROI. It’s about ROX, the return on experience, the return on emotion, ROE, you know, the things that we, that you mentioned in the introduction, and then we find out, well, you know if you’re not going to deliver a great experience, why would you expect ROI? So I try to convince a lot of the people that we work with, let’s not start with ROI and look at that as the end result. Let’s look at that as the next phase, making sure that we’re truly delivering great experiences, connecting with the right people in the right way.
Brenda: So you said one of my favorite words, which is emotion, and I would love for you to just give us a quick definition. When you’re talking about return on emotion, what’s in your thinking with that one?
Joe: Yeah. So, couple of ways to go about it because everyone’s always like, oh, that’s intangible, you can’t measure emotion, and there’s so many ways you truly can. It starts with sentiment. And you know, if you think of it from like a survey question point of view, if you do like an intercept survey as people are leaving a museum or an event or activity, say, hey, I would love to ask you some anonymous questions about what you thought about the event. And you have very specific messages designed that they could rate their level of agreement with. And of course, you want to make sure those sentiment statements are not biased. So how happy did this event make you? That’s not the way you ask the question. You know, how do you feel towards this event? Did it make you, you know, on a scale, say, of, you know, excited to bored? And then, obviously the higher end of the scale is where it’s about the positive emotion.
That’s the easiest way to measure return on emotion, in my opinion. Now, the beauty of it is there’s, kind of going back to AI and some other tools, there’s cameras and things that really capture sentiment from like recognition from your biologics, and that can track your, your expressions on your face. And we’re starting to see those now being used at events as well. And the cool thing about that is that it’s capturing information of people walking by, walking by, walking by, stopped, looked, came in, checked it out. Cameras facing them, they could see their like, reactions, and it’s truly now generating the most accurate levels of return on emotion you can get.
Abby: You mentioned a good experience and talking about measuring it, but what is a good experience? What makes a good experience for a visitor?
Joe: Yeah, you know, first is connecting, you know, having that true organic natural connection where it’s not forced, you know, you’re not forcing people into a room to do something that they may or may not feel comfortable doing, seeing being around too many people at the same place, at the same time, obviously after the last couple of years, what we’ve all been through. So what makes a good experience is really like attracting and engaging with the right people, but having the engagers be truly engaging, you know, not to beat up the word, but, you know, so many times we walk into experiences that are designed so impeccably and beautifully, and then it falls flat because the people working it are like, not that excited to be there.
So you know, you’re halfway there, and then I think to get full-way there is, yes, you design something that connects with the right people that you’re trying to attract and engage, and then having that kind of support staff, that team, those ambassadors, whatever the case may be, that really know how to walk you through and treat you as if you’re having a VIP experience. That, to me, is the perfect experience. Now, you know, when you work backwards from that, it’s okay, well, who are the right people, and what do they like to see? And it’s not one size fits all. So you have to make sure that, you know, you’re not setting false expectations of what it is you’re visiting.
Brenda: Joe, I’m particularly curious to know about the arena of social impact and how it is that social impact and social action is being embraced by brands. And I’d love to know: how do you go about measuring whether or not there’s an awareness that social action has truly been prompted?
Joe: It’s huge right now, and I’ll start with those who are not yet doing it. We encourage them to look at ways of measuring, you know, societal metrics versus just business metrics. DEI and even DEIB. If you’ve heard of DEIB, the B is belonging, and this is something I think is so important, especially when you look at it from like an experiential element. If someone who’s not white walks into a room of white people and they just, it’s homogenized, you know, that’s not a good look for that event, for that experience, for that brand. You know, even when we look at it from like a speakers perspective, if you’re at a conference and there’s multiple speakers, multiple tracks, you name it, there has to be diversity with the speakers. It can’t always be equal, but the point is there has to be that introduction that, you know, it just can’t be this homogenized event. And you know, same thing on the sustainability side, you know, especially in the event world. Let’s talk about trade shows for a second, you know, there’s a lot of churn and burn, a lot of carpet, a lot of, fortunately, a lot of recycling, but, you know, reducing carbon footprints in events is extremely important more than it’s ever been because it’s got to go somewhere and it can’t keep going to dumps.
Abby: Now, that’s true. I completely agree with that. Even in terms of all of the design builds we do for all these events. They have to be recyclable. They have to be reused. They have to have that flexibility where especially when you got to take care of the environment. Yeah, I completely agree.
Joe: I mean, in some countries are still 100% build and burn. You know, they haven’t even thought about it yet. And that’s scary.
Brenda: Oh, that is, that is crazy scary.
Joe: Yeah.
Brenda: You know, I’m really curious to know, are there things that we’re talking a lot about, you know, what should be measured and how it could be measured, and I’m curious to hear, what should not be measured?
Joe: Yeah, I think that’s a great question.
Brenda: Where do you draw the line?
Joe: Yeah.
Brenda: Or where should we know to draw the line?
Joe: Yeah, I think, like what shouldn’t be measured are things that are obnoxious and pushy, you know. So, when are you going to buy this? You know, like, and a lot of it, it’s the delivery of how you’re asking. So, you know, how likely would you be to buy this product in the next X number of months is a nice way to say, will you buy this or not? You know, collecting the level of information you’re collecting about people, like personal information, that’s always a turnoff. So it’s like, let it be more of a natural opt-in process. Like, so if I’m answering a survey, that survey should be anonymous because if you want unbiased responses, you don’t want to start off by asking, you know who I am and what’s my email and what’s my job title, what’s my income, and how many kids do I have? And like, you know, like that’s a whole other story. But, you know, you could save those demographics for the end, but just for classification purposes. So we know, am I talking to a Gen Z or am I talking to a boomer because they’re obviously very different types of people, some of them, most of them, not me, but I’m in that gray area between. But yeah, so things that are just aren’t pushy or invasive.
Abby: So I really believe in making mistakes because without making mistakes, you can’t learn, and without learning, there’s no growth. So tell us some mistakes, some horror stories you’ve had along the way, and also some mistakes that clients often make so that anybody listening can try to avoid them.
Joe: You know, and I look through, like, all throughout my career, and I’ve been involved in, you know, event measurement for a pretty long time. And I look back, and it’s not even like those mistakes were always like 20 years ago, you know, just some even more recent where we let the client kind of dictate how to measure. So, there’s been instances where I’ve kicked myself, allowing the client to dictate to us what to do and how to do it. You want to, of course, get the business to help the client. So sometimes, you’ll sacrifice budget to get it done, and then you find yourself taking just a huge hit or a huge loss on the project. And I look at those as the biggest mistakes because then you’re setting the precedent for any future work where they’re like, oh, well, you did it this way last time, and you know, so then you’re kind of digging your own grave, so to speak.
Abby: Yeah, totally relate. Completely understand.
Brenda: Well, we would love to hear what you think in your own personal work, what you think is most successful about what you do.
Joe: I love what I do every day. And so, this is an easy question to answer, fortunately.
Brenda: Softball.
Joe: Yeah, right. Thank you. Thank you for the softball.
Brenda: A soft pitch. Is that what it is?
Joe: Yeah. So, I mean, I just love the fact that, especially if we look at more in the short term compared to the long term, but it’s always been the case. Budgets for event marketing and experiential marketing is always tight. And the fact that we can provide actionable data that helps our clients truly make decisions, it’s such a joy.
Actually, just yesterday, we were on a call with a client, and they did something very different with their experience, and they were really kind of sticking their neck out. We hope this works. So, they had the data because we did the research on-site post-show. The data supported that bringing all their brands together was an extremely successful experience, not only for them but for their customers. So in the past, they had like four different brands in four different locations. So the fact that A, they saved money by consolidating, B, they had more cohesiveness between their brands but still had their unique brand identity for their brands. But they had the data now to say, we did it, it worked, but it wasn’t 100% perfect. And then they realized, Wow, you know, next year we’re going to change this, and we’re going to do this more efficiently. So, it’s more like modifying and tweaking versus like, do we need to reinvent the wheel again?
Brenda: What are some of the lofty goals that you have for yourself for the next few years?
Joe: Yeah, I mean, for, for myself, you know, it’s just really grow the business and be the industry standard when it comes to measurement. You know, we’re working now on building experiential online, in-person, event B2B, B2C benchmarks, for example. So we’ve literally just compiled over 400,000 surveys that we’ve conducted since 2017. So over half a million responses now to create benchmarks for all of those normalized KPIs that a lot of clients want to know, but then, more importantly, be able to filter it between age and gender and geography and event type in industry and things like that. So that’s what we’re really looking forward to continue growing and expanding so that there truly is like normalized data out there so people can really feel good about, if we exceeded the industry benchmarks, congratulations if we’re close to it, congratulations. But if we’re under it, what are we going to need to do to improve our performance and outcomes so that we are exceeding benchmarks?
Brenda: So if you’re looking at years since 2017, I’m curious, what about the impact of COVID? How do you sort of take that into account when you’re looking at longitudinal data analysis such as that?
Joe: Yeah, and that’s a big piece of that segmentation with the benchmarks is, you know, the glory days prior to 2020. Of course, the 2020 through 2021 and a half where it was like, oh, and then now that things are rebounding because, you know, from 2021 when things really started coming back to in-person pretty strong till today, you know, there’s still that momentum that’s being rebuilt. You know, a lot of events, event organizers, associations, museums, you name it, they’re trying to get those bodies back. And now that, you know, social distancing is kind of being put aside, and we can get more bodies back together and not have the limitations of capacity limits and things like that, so we’re starting to see that rebound, and it’s rebounding pretty quick. I mean, I anticipate unless something drastic, God forbid, happens, I anticipate that early 2024 we’re going to be back to normal, whatever back to normal means. But, you know, we’re not going to be in any kind of state of fear, hopefully. But, you know, I speak with some people, and they’re like, oh, it’s not going to be for like two or three more years. I speak with other people, and they’re like it was yesterday, and it depends on your industry, of course, you know, but I think for, collectively and most globally, not all, but I think we will be in a good spot in probably like 9 to 12 more months.
Abby: So thinking about, you touched earlier on the changes that we saw happen due to COVID. How many of them are good and will stick around, and how many do you hope we’ll never see again?
Joe: So, great for QR codes, let’s call it, let’s say that.
Abby: That’s true.
Joe: Love it, digital payments, you know, things just connecting digitally.
Abby: Yeah.
Joe: But understanding where connecting digitally has its limits, you know, networking and all these things that were trying to be done digitally. Very, very difficult. And during the pandemic, we had measured literally hundreds of events, and, you know, it’s great for brand opportunities, excellent for education.
But from that building the connections and networking, you know, no matter how many matchmaking tools and things you tried and did, there were very, very few that were actually successful. I think building community so an event isn’t just three days, say, like now we, we, we understand how to make an event longer for the digital part of it. But yeah, the networking, connecting part, it just fell flat and hopefully, we never have to try to see it again.
Abby: Good. So, in-person still wins.
Brenda: Face to face.
Abby: People want to be with each other.
Joe: Without a doubt.
Brenda: I just remember the conversations back in 20, like 2012, 2013, 2014. Everybody was like, oh, we’ve got to go digital. We don’t need all this expense of face-to-face and, argh, getting people together, it’s so complicated.
Joe: Yeah.
Brenda: Well, here we are.
Joe: Yeah.
Brenda: We want to see each other in person.
Joe: Yeah.
Brenda: I find that very optimistic.
Joe: Hugely optimistic. And you know, digital has its place. We find it’s great for, like, keynotes and, you know, press launches and things like that, so, you know, for, for the masses. But for those that really want that connectivity and that build those relationships, it’s just so hard online. Yeah.
Abby: That intimacy. So three things you love about your job, Joe.
Joe: I love helping my clients with data versus, what is it, feelings aren’t facts. That’s my favorite line to my clients. Feelings aren’t facts.
Abby: I’m stealing that. I’m going to totally steal that.
Joe: Please steal it. I’ll put a little TM over it.
Brenda: TM.
Joe: Feelings are not facts. That’s my number one favorite thing. My number two favorite thing is owning a company and just having a team of employees that I truly love and care about, and I will do anything for them. And number three is just the hurdles. I love the hurdles. You know, everything can’t be easy all the time. And we’ve gone through some hurdles in, whether it’s education or experiential agencies. They only make us smarter and stronger.
Abby: Would you say then, because you’re clearly an entrepreneur, you own your own company, you’re running it very well? It’s growing year after year. Do you think it’s part of who you are? Wanting to be heading a team, wanting to be successful, and also wanting to be challenged? I think it’s like core to what I’ve seen in serial entrepreneurs is that they thrive off it. As soon as everything’s working, it’s boring.
Joe: Yeah. Oh, my employees hate that about me. When it’s working well, then it’s time to change it.
Brenda: Evolve. Let’s use the word evolve.
Joe: You know, that’s funny because EVOLIO literally means evolving your event portfolio, that’s, or experiential portfolio. So that’s where it came from, EVOLIO. It’s about evolution and constantly evolving. So, thank you for that.
Brenda: You betcha. I’m here for you, Joe. I’ve got your back.
Joe: You’ve got my back.
Abby: Yeah, well, you know, in some of my research, before we chatted to you, I did a few surveys.
Joe: There you go.
Abby: And one of them actually gave me a $5 Amazon gift card.
Joe: Only five?
Abby: I thought that was pretty good.
Joe: Oh, no. We do ten.
Abby: Really? Send me some surveys!
Joe: Yeah, between five and ten.
Abby: Is that the norm?
Joe: Yeah, yeah.
Brenda: Look at that. I don’t even like to check the box that says I agree to terms.
Joe: I know, right?
Brenda: That would have been like 10 hours of my time right there, which is how do I feel about these terms.
Joe: Exactly.
Brenda: You know, it took me ten years to get married, so I guess that you know.
Joe: Good things come to those who wait.
Brenda: Yeah, well, that’s for sure. That’s for sure.
Abby: I’ve learned so much today, Joe, from you. It’s incredible. Now I even know what data storytelling is.
Joe: All right!
Brenda: Oh my goodness, Joe, thank you so much for everything.
Joe: Thank you for having me.
Brenda: The work that you’re doing is amazing.
Joe: Well, thank you. And you guys as well. You just bring in some brilliant minds with brilliant people and your perspectives to it, and so thank you for having me.
Abby: Oh, thank you, thank you.
Brenda: Thank you.
Abby: And thanks, everyone for listening. If you like what you heard today, subscribe for more episodes of Matters of Experience wherever you listen to podcasts. 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.
Feelings aren't Facts with Joe Federbush
Mob Museum Mentality with Jonathan Ullman
Interactive Experiences – The Mob Museum
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Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience, a podcast that explores the creativity, innovation, and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. If you’re new here, welcome, and a big hello to our regular listeners. As you know, my name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: Hello, everybody. This is Brenda Cowan.
Abby: Today, we’re speaking with Jonathan Ullman, President and CEO of the Mob Museum: The National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement, located in downtown Las Vegas with the mission of advancing the public understanding of organized crime’s history and impact on society. Jonathan is responsible for leading the organization that’s been ranked number 20 on Tripadvisor’s list of top museums in the United States.
I think that’s kind of phenomenal. Jonathan’s museum career began at Liberty Science Center, New Jersey’s most visited museum, where he was intimately involved in the strategic planning and operation of the facility following a 109 million capital expansion. Prior to joining the Mob Museum, Jonathan was the president and COO at the National Soccer Hall of Fame, where he led the dramatic transformation of the organization’s operating model.
Jonathan has earned a huge list of accolades to his name, and it’s truly my pleasure to welcome him to the show. Jonathan, hello.
Jonathan: Hello. Thank you so much for having me.
Abby: So the first time I went to the museum was with the wonderful Cybelle Jones, SEGD’s CEO, and she was on the Gallagher team that worked on creating the Mob Museum, as she reiterated many, many times, working very, very closely with you, Jonathan. So can you talk about that time, the museum concept and design, and sort of the overall mission in those first early stages and how you collaborated with the experience design team to really create this truly wonderful institution?
Jonathan: Sure, they actually were involved with the Mob Museum twice; the initial opening in 2012, then in 2017, we embarked on what we referred to as the Museum Improvement Project, which was a renovation of the first floor. And then we also took the basement of our historic building.
You’ve been through the building, so, you know, it’s a former U.S. post office and federal courthouse, and it’s on the National Register of Historic Places. It’s this amazing 1933, just beautiful federal building and being historic, nationally significant, not just locally, but nationally significant because of events that took place in the courtroom. We had to be very careful about how the exhibits were developed and to not do anything that would alter the historic integrity of the building.
I think Gallagher did an amazing job of helping us create these really kind of just very immersive and kind of amazingly themed spaces, but doing it in a way that respected the historic integrity of the building.
Brenda: So you’re number 20 right now, which is pretty incredible. And my question, Jonathan, has to do with before you even opened. Did you have anxieties? Did you have doubts? Did you think there’s no way this is going to really happen and we’d love to hear what the thoughts were that were going through your head.
Jonathan: We don’t have enough time in the show to talk about my anxiety and doubts.
Brenda: Number one, number two.
Jonathan: But, I will say, look, you know, this project was an amazing opportunity. I mean, I think for someone like myself, having been in the museum industry, to know that you had, first of all, the support of the city of Las Vegas, you know, that was investing, you know, had the vision to, and the support at the highest levels. I mean, this is, you know, we still regard the then mayor, Oscar Goodman, as our chief visionary of the museum. And knowing that the organizations that were contracted to do the renovation were really world-class firms. So, there was no question in my mind that the quality of the experience, that this was going to be something unique and special, and amazing.
At the same time, Las Vegas marketplace is really tough and tough in a number of regards. I think one is if you take the list of metropolitan areas that are known for cultural experiences and museums, you’ll see, you know, right at the tippy top of the list, you know, Washington, D.C. Everybody knows, you know, some of the most amazing landmarks and museums are in Washington, D.C. People visit D.C. to go to those types of institutions.
Not quite the same thing in Las Vegas. You know, the first thing that comes to mind about going to Las Vegas isn’t like, you know, I’ve heard they have amazing museums.
Brenda:
Let’s have a cultural moment in Las Vegas.
Jonathan: You know, on the one hand, the visitor volume in this marketplace is extraordinary. I mean, there’s, you know, 40-plus million people come to Las Vegas every year. You know, the vast majority of people that you’re going to be attracting are people that are not from here, which, again, you know, cuts both ways. I mean, there’s this enormous base of people, but they also don’t necessarily have a lot of awareness or familiarity with what’s here, and there’s a lot of noise you have to cut through.
So, we felt really good about what we had created and knew that this was something that was really unique in terms of not just, you know, both the subject matter as well as the way in which we were delivering the subject matter, felt very confident in the quality of what we created. But that’s also just, I don’t know if it’s half the battle or just part of the battle, you know, you still have to make people aware of it and make certain that you’re operating at a really high level. So there certainly was a great deal of anxiety when we opened of whether or not would we be able to have that type of penetration and that success.
And, you know, there was this great surge of interest when we first opened. You know, the first six weeks, there’s a lot of attention, and there’s a lot of people that have been waiting to see it and, you know, come out, and then you start to go into this period where you have to, it’s not quite pound the pavement so much, but you have to encourage people to come create some urgency for people to come and you don’t start off knowing necessarily what the seasonality is going to be for your visitation.
February and March are great months. Things start to head down again in the summertime until you get to October, which is an amazing month in Las Vegas. The weather’s so, you know, fantastic. Lots of tourists come out, and things kind of come back up again. But the first time around, you don’t necessarily know if we’re, you know, hey, what’s going on here? Is this the natural kind of ebbs and flows of things, or is this all it’s going to be?
Abby: Can you talk a little bit about these sort of parallel stories? Tell the audience about those stories and how you struggled with which way to weight them, and also education versus entertainment at the same time.
Jonathan: Yeah. So, first of all, our mission is to advance the public understanding of organized crime’s history and impact on American society. Pretty broad. And when you go through the museum, you will see it becomes abundantly clear that this is very much a law enforcement museum. You know, we take visitors on this journey, starts at the turn of the 20th century, and you see how organized crime takes root in America. And you see the different factors. You know, it’s very much an immigration story. It’s a story about social mobility or the lack thereof and the things that allow, or at times even encourage crime to take root, but also at the same time, you know, it’s all of the tools and techniques and innovations of law enforcement and the criminal justice system and how they’re combating crime.
But, you know, there is this certain amount of romanticism that some people have for these stories of these mobsters. They’re familiar with movies like The Godfather, and they, you know, and they like to sometimes have fun with this kind of playacting, that sort of thing. And a certain amount of that is perfectly okay, right, but at the end of the day, we are a serious educational institution, and we also need to make clear to people that criminal behavior is not okay and that a lot of these mobsters that are at times, you know, that there’s this aura of glamour around their, you know, organizations, were doing really, really bad things, and the, actually, the heroes that we should be celebrating are on the law enforcement side.
So, you’re constantly trying to do this balance. You know, I think for us, it’s making certain that we don’t compromise the integrity of what we’re conveying, you know, the underlying educational messages and the historical facts and the importance of understanding how all of this fits into how our country has evolved.
Brenda: You’re making me think about an earlier podcast, and Abby was mentioning exhibitions at the Mob Museum that use empathy to challenge perceptions. Can you talk a little bit about how it is that you use empathy to encourage sort of enabling folks to think more multidimensional about your subjects?
Jonathan: Yeah, if we’re doing what we should be doing, we are helping to kind of transport people to other times and places and be able to see historical events or understand issues through the lens of people that live those experiences. Right, I mean, that’s what separates the type of environment that, you know, that a museum can create.
So how do you create that kind of emotional connection and help people feel it? Some of that is just about creating the right environment. So, when you’re temporally transported back to a particular point in time. So, whether it’s going through the lineup experience or walking into a space that’s about very, very early Las Vegas or the vintage Vegas time period, and you have the bright lights, and you have the sounds of, you know, what some of us can remember when slot machines actually had coins in them, and they would clink, you know.
Brenda: They don’t have coins anymore? I had no idea. Okay.
Abby: Ruined, you’re never going.
Brenda: I’m learning. I’m learning every day.
Jonathan: But you try to create those multi-sensory experiences. We have these great interactives where you can listen to wiretaps, real wiretaps that were used to prosecute different criminals like a John Gotti, or you can see some of the undercover agents’ tools and try to imagine what it must be like to strap on one of these cassette players.
So, I think one of the experiences that Abby and I talked about a great deal on her visit when we renovated the first floor, we added a couple of new, more experiential spaces that are about policing. So there’s this interactive crime lab where you can go into this area and actually try ballistics testing and match striations of bullets as, you know, as you might see on, you know, a CSI-type program.
There’s also this whole area that we’ve dedicated to use of force. And I think people recognize certainly it’s, you know, it’s one of the hotbed issues of the day, and I think often with these types of conversations when you’re trying to understand these things, you know, we can talk about them in a very kind of intellectual and almost detached sorts of ways, and we convey a lot of the information in that way, also I mean, we do talk about, you know, what does the law say is appropriate or excessive force. But what we’ve created for our visitors is a way to kind of step in the shoes of a law enforcement officer by replicating the training that officers will often use. And we worked very closely with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department to develop this, and I think they’ve, you know, they are, you know, absolutely the standard bearers right now in terms of kind of training and a lot of the best practices with regard to use of force.
But you go through this simulator, you get paired up with one of our staff members who’s a training officer. You get a duty belt that has, you know, so it kind of replicates the heft and the weight of a real duty belt. You get a simulated firearm that has a, you know, it’s got a CO2 cartridge, so it’s got a little kick to it, and it’s got a laser sight on it. You get briefed by a real member of, senior member of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, you know, in a video underscoring that this is, you know, this is not intended to be an experience like a video game. This is designed to replicate training.
So, you then go into a couple of rooms where you first encounter these digital scenarios. So you see a video up on a screen that you are, you, as a police officer, are responding to a call, and it might be at a convenience store, it might be some other location. And you have to see what’s going on in this video, and you respond with these, you know, very basic shoot or don’t shoot situations.
What really kind of cuts to the heart of this, though, is that when you get to the last room, we actually have a live-action role-play. So you go into this small space where an officer, you know, our staff member, now explains to you the call that you’re responding to. So maybe you are responding to a call of a suspicious person in a parking lot, and you have to respond to this call, and then you go through the door and you enter this room.
Ultimately, the goal you’re trying to accomplish is to resolve this situation without using force. And I think ultimately, you know, what we’re hoping to achieve with this is for people to recognize how complicated these situations are. And, how important it is for, you know, the 17,000 plus law enforcement agencies across the country that, you know, training is so critical and being able to do, you know, have training that is robust because these situations that you can be in are so complicated.
People generally do not characterize this experience as fun, but it is consistently one of the highest-ranked areas of the museum for our visitors. You know, there’s such an emotional component to it, and you are kind of transport added in this, you know, into this situation that has such kind of tension and kind of, you know, it brings you to another place that it’s it is really an extraordinary experience.
Abby: So, in this immersive experience, you’re putting the visitor literally in the shoes of the police officer, and you’re creating this really empathetic, immersive experience. This is an amazing storytelling device. It’s a way of getting people to challenge their preconceived ideas, and I think it’s really difficult to do, to come up with exhibits or moments in a museum that do this. And you found one which really, really is powerful. So, you know, if you were working in another museum completely, what would you recommend other directors or the designers of museums think about when they’re thinking about what experiences they should create?
Jonathan: Yeah, I think that’s for me, I think that’s the ultimate question. And there’s certain types of experiences, you know, I think this is, you know, this particular kind of experience that we’ve been talking about is, you know, is really provocative. But it also lends itself, I mean, there’s kind of a very clear way to how you can kind of create that type of experience.
Other types of, for lack of a better way of putting it, learning objectives are maybe more difficult. It kind of starts from a place of what are we trying to convey? Like what are we hoping to achieve with the guests, right? Like, what are we, you know, what do we want them to be understanding, and then how do we make it as multidimensional and rich as an experience as possible? Like all the things that touch people in terms of how they feel when they encounter a space, like how do you create that for whatever it is that you’re trying to convey?
I mean, I think that’s for us, as we, as we look ahead to how do we how are we going to grow and create new exhibit spaces and experience spaces like this, how do you accomplish that kind of visceral, emotional connection that is transporting people to another time, another place?
Brenda: You know, we’re talking about technology used for really specific aims and end goals and to develop perspectives and empathy and to enable people to have very rich, very personal, intimate, emotional experiences. And my question is about investing in technology. So, did you anticipate or plan for any potential redundancies in technology? Did you play it safe? How did you go through the process of determining how much you wanted to use technology and towards what aims?
Jonathan: Yeah, part of what makes that tough is that the world has changed so much in such a short amount of time. Right? When we created those experiences, you know, the crime lab, the use of force exhibition space, we also created this, you know, touch wall, we call it the global networks wall, where you can see how does organized crime manifest and law enforcement groups manifest, you know, internationally now.
You can search geographically or by crime groups or law enforcement groups, and it’s visually alluring, not as engaging as I think we hoped it would be. And I think that there’s there is a certain amount of a trap here, too, to be, be honest with you. I mean, technology is tantalizing.
You know, we have this amazing app, right? And it’s it’s, you know, there’s tours and missions that you can go on when you visit the museum. There’s this amazing ‘doppelgangster’ feature that uses facial recognition technology. So, if you take our app, you take a picture of yourself, and then it’ll search a database, and you’ll get three matches of people that are either criminals or members of law enforcement or kind of pop culture figures that were somehow related to organized crime and law enforcement.
And it’s super fun, right? But there’s big barriers to getting people to, you know, to pull out their phone, to download an app or to follow a QR code and then, you know, do this or do that. And I think it’s, you know, I also want to make a distinction between what we’re doing for the onsite experience as opposed to things that we try to push out for people that aren’t traveling here and to make it, you know, make some kind of rich an engaging experience through the website. I mean, I think that’s like that’s a different topic.
But for the onsite experience, I think it’s a, it’s a tricky mix. I mean, it’s always tempting to say that we want interactives, but we don’t necessarily mean the same thing when we say that. I mean, for a lot of, you know, museum professionals, interactive kind of like makes you think of, you know, that it’s some type of an interactive technology or digitally based exhibit.
You know, it’s touch screens. It’s something that you, that you’re manipulating as opposed to interactivity that, from the guest perspective, is often, it’s a confluence of things. It’s the exhibit, but it’s also the people that are helping to facilitate the experience on the staff side. And it’s being able to have, like, there’s a very important kind of human component of the experience that you can’t understate. And I think that you know, finding the sweet spot is using technology but also not abandoning the people and remembering that the guests want to share their stories, too, and they want to be met where they are. And so, you know, having a person that’s mediating that engagement between the guests and the exhibits and is part of that experience is really, really important.
Abby: Well, one of the things I know when I visited with you, Jonathan, was you had a mobster, I forget his name, what was his name, standing, talking to the audience?
Jonathan: Oh, well, there’s a fellow Frank LaPena, which we would characterize as mob adjacent. He’s not a mobster.
Abby: Sorry, mob adjacent.
Jonathan: Mob adjacent.
Abby: Got to be PC with my mob language. So, Frank was there, and he was talking, and as we approached the room, the room was packed with people. All the visitors were cramming around, and there was Frank telling these wonderful yarns about his time being mob adjacent. And so, it was really, really cool, and it reminds me of what you’re talking about. That interactivity from a visitor perspective is very different to the way that we use interactivity from a digital perspective. And what they get from these moments can be as simple as sitting and listening to a storyteller, and that can really be a transformative experience where you connect so much with the information, with the story. And so, I thought it was another reason why I’m such a fan of the Mob Museum is these different techniques that you use, some of them super, as old as humanity, storytelling, and you use them really effectively throughout.
Jonathan: Abby, thank you for saying that. You know, I think that there is a thread that runs through all of these experiences, and it’s really about authenticity. What’s so gripping about, you know, Frank LaPena is that he lived this life in which he was in, you know, he was around these mobsters, and he was actually not just prosecuted, but he was convicted of a very heinous crime, subsequently exonerated not just pardoned.
So, the life journey that he has been on is so captivating. And to be able to hear that story directly, what possibly could be more engaging and captivating? If you can figure out how to bring people that have had these real-life experiences and can convey that in a way that it’s, I mean, you could hear a pin drop in that room because it’s so mesmerizing and it’s so real.
Brenda: So I wanted to take a quick pivot, actually, and ask you about your return on experience. I’m wondering, do you think about your return on experience and what you’re seeing now as a result?
Jonathan: You talk about timeless elements of, of, of museums, right? Measuring, measuring our impact is, is, you know, one of the timeless challenges that we face. So, we have a number of different metrics that we use. And I think we’re always seeking better ways to understand, but we, we do get feedback from people and survey people on how they consider the value of the experience, you know, across different categories.
So, you know, with educational value as well as entertainment value, as well as monetary value as well as time spent value. You know, the one metric that we follow the most is, you know, people’s likelihood to recommend the experience to a friend or family member. That doesn’t get you at the question of how much did they learn from the experience.
But it gets you to answer the question of: How much value do they believe they derive from the experience? And I, you know, never want to suggest that, you know, that there’s a pure relationship between how entertaining something is and how little or much educational value there is. But we do know that there are certain experiences that are a little bit light on content. And we do know that there are certain things that are really, really dense, particularly when we look at things like our educational outreach, for example.
We have this speakeasy experience where we take people back in time to the prohibition era. When you go down the end of the hall, you then get to, you know, two doorways, and on one side is the speakeasy space where we, you know, take people into an environment that’s about where people consume booze during prohibition. And then on the other side is the distillery space where we talk about how did it get there, how is it manufactured or bootlegged, you know, rum running and all that. And we’re actually distilling and making moonshine over there. And when you’re in this space, you’re not just transported in time, and you don’t simply see objects behind cases, but you can also get a drink, and you can have a bartender explain to you the history of how these things were made and why people were consuming it and what the you know, what the environment was like back then, right.
But anyway, part of the point is, you know, people also like to have a drink, like people like to hear the music. I’m proud of the fact that we have a menu that tells great stories and, you know, and educates people while they’re figuring out what they’re going to eat or drink.
Brenda: I’m so appreciating what, what you’re sharing with us right now, and I wanted to sort of underscore what you’re talking about. You know, Abby and I had the pleasure of speaking with John Falk in a prior podcast. and, you know, I think to your point about, you know, this is not solely about education or how do you actually measure education and the value of that and when there’s so much going on with all of these experiences, and John was sharing with us that actually in what he’s discovering is that the real value is satisfaction. And it sure sounds like folks who go to the Mob Museum and experience the exhibits and experience that drink at the speakeasy are having an awful lot of satisfaction.
Abby: And I can echo that because that was another thing is, is when we look at museums, they’re turning into, and they need to provide for the community. Because, John, when you’re thinking about your speakeasy, I know you have a lot of repeat visitors, people from the local community, so you’re tailoring to them as well as to the tourists, and it’s just an amazing place to be. And I think you’re also touching on the fact that people go to museums with different expectations and needing different things. And so, it’s up to, the jobs tough, but it’s up to a museum to make sure that there’s those very different access points where people can get out of the place, what they need, even on a given day, right?
Jonathan: That’s an excellent point. You know, we have this ability, and we take very seriously this notion that, I mean, museums should be gathering places. We have a very dense calendar of programs that we do that are very focused on the local community. You know, they can be historical topics, contemporary topics. They can be things that are, you know, very practical about living more safely in a community and what types of legislation might be coming up that people should be more informed about that relate to the topics in the museum. You have an ability with the folks that are here to continue to get deeper and deeper.
You know, I think with a lot of the tourists, you know, when you think about what’s the return and how do you know if you’re doing well, you know, if we can get people to say boy, I can’t wait to you know, I’d love to go back there again, you know, I’d love to go learn more about this and whether they learn more about this by coming back to us again or going somewhere else, you know, if we’re just whetting their appetite, you know, piquing their interest and they’re going somewhere else, then we’re doing our job. That’s what we’re supposed to do.
Abby: Tell me three things you and you got to be honest now, three things you absolutely love about your job, and three things you wish you could change but can’t.
Jonathan: I don’t know where to begin with what I love about my job. I mean, I’m, like, and I don’t for a second take for granted what a wonderful, how’d I get to have such a fantastic gig. I mean, this place is, place is amazing, and I get to work with such amazing people, and it’s so fascinating. I mean, it’s just tremendous opportunity. You know, we have the greatest board, the greatest staff, phenomenal city, the fascinating folks that we get to interact with, I mean, I, you know, real-life heroes. And to be able to couple that with the ability to be creative, to get to imagine things like the underground, the speakeasy space or, you know, new exhibit galleries, new experiences, whatever comes down the pike. I mean, it’s a phenomenal opportunity, and I’m super grateful. I mean, I’m very, very lucky. So I don’t know if that was three. I mean, I feel like that was maybe more than three. I feel like it was kind of two, but like a lot more than three. Yeah.
Brenda: They were big.
Abby: They were big, they were big. And you’re pleading the fifth on the three things you wish you could change.
Jonathan: It’d be great to have more resources. The team here is so great, and the number of ideas for how we can grow this organization and the number of potential partners, you know, there truly just, there aren’t enough hours in the day. I mean, the people that work here are so committed and passionate about what they’re doing that sometimes it’s hard to turn it off, and sometimes it’s frustrating that you can’t do everything that you wish that you could do, so, you know, so that gets to be a little tough, too, but it’s still worth it.
Brenda: Clearly, enthusiasm is, is coming from above, I can assure you. What an incredible pleasure to be speaking with you today, Jonathan.
Jonathan: Well, thank you both. This is an honor and a delight to be here.
Abby: Thank you so much, Jonathan, for joining us today. Thanks for listening, everyone. If you like what you heard, subscribe for more episodes of Matters of Experience wherever you listen to podcasts, and make sure to leave a rating and a review and share with a friend. We’ll see you next time.
Brenda: Take 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.
Interactive Experiences – The Mob Museum
[Music]
Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience, a podcast that explores the creativity, innovation, and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. If you’re new here, welcome, and a big hello to our regular listeners. As you know, my name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: Hello, everybody. This is Brenda Cowan.
Abby: Today, we’re speaking with Jonathan Ullman, President and CEO of the Mob Museum: The National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement, located in downtown Las Vegas with the mission of advancing the public understanding of organized crime’s history and impact on society. Jonathan is responsible for leading the organization that’s been ranked number 20 on Tripadvisor’s list of top museums in the United States.
I think that’s kind of phenomenal. Jonathan’s museum career began at Liberty Science Center, New Jersey’s most visited museum, where he was intimately involved in the strategic planning and operation of the facility following a 109 million capital expansion. Prior to joining the Mob Museum, Jonathan was the president and COO at the National Soccer Hall of Fame, where he led the dramatic transformation of the organization’s operating model.
Jonathan has earned a huge list of accolades to his name, and it’s truly my pleasure to welcome him to the show. Jonathan, hello.
Jonathan: Hello. Thank you so much for having me.
Abby: So the first time I went to the museum was with the wonderful Cybelle Jones, SEGD’s CEO, and she was on the Gallagher team that worked on creating the Mob Museum, as she reiterated many, many times, working very, very closely with you, Jonathan. So can you talk about that time, the museum concept and design, and sort of the overall mission in those first early stages and how you collaborated with the experience design team to really create this truly wonderful institution?
Jonathan: Sure, they actually were involved with the Mob Museum twice; the initial opening in 2012, then in 2017, we embarked on what we referred to as the Museum Improvement Project, which was a renovation of the first floor. And then we also took the basement of our historic building.
You’ve been through the building, so, you know, it’s a former U.S. post office and federal courthouse, and it’s on the National Register of Historic Places. It’s this amazing 1933, just beautiful federal building and being historic, nationally significant, not just locally, but nationally significant because of events that took place in the courtroom. We had to be very careful about how the exhibits were developed and to not do anything that would alter the historic integrity of the building.
I think Gallagher did an amazing job of helping us create these really kind of just very immersive and kind of amazingly themed spaces, but doing it in a way that respected the historic integrity of the building.
Brenda: So you’re number 20 right now, which is pretty incredible. And my question, Jonathan, has to do with before you even opened. Did you have anxieties? Did you have doubts? Did you think there’s no way this is going to really happen and we’d love to hear what the thoughts were that were going through your head.
Jonathan: We don’t have enough time in the show to talk about my anxiety and doubts.
Brenda: Number one, number two.
Jonathan: But, I will say, look, you know, this project was an amazing opportunity. I mean, I think for someone like myself, having been in the museum industry, to know that you had, first of all, the support of the city of Las Vegas, you know, that was investing, you know, had the vision to, and the support at the highest levels. I mean, this is, you know, we still regard the then mayor, Oscar Goodman, as our chief visionary of the museum. And knowing that the organizations that were contracted to do the renovation were really world-class firms. So, there was no question in my mind that the quality of the experience, that this was going to be something unique and special, and amazing.
At the same time, Las Vegas marketplace is really tough and tough in a number of regards. I think one is if you take the list of metropolitan areas that are known for cultural experiences and museums, you’ll see, you know, right at the tippy top of the list, you know, Washington, D.C. Everybody knows, you know, some of the most amazing landmarks and museums are in Washington, D.C. People visit D.C. to go to those types of institutions.
Not quite the same thing in Las Vegas. You know, the first thing that comes to mind about going to Las Vegas isn’t like, you know, I’ve heard they have amazing museums.
Brenda:
Let’s have a cultural moment in Las Vegas.
Jonathan: You know, on the one hand, the visitor volume in this marketplace is extraordinary. I mean, there’s, you know, 40-plus million people come to Las Vegas every year. You know, the vast majority of people that you’re going to be attracting are people that are not from here, which, again, you know, cuts both ways. I mean, there’s this enormous base of people, but they also don’t necessarily have a lot of awareness or familiarity with what’s here, and there’s a lot of noise you have to cut through.
So, we felt really good about what we had created and knew that this was something that was really unique in terms of not just, you know, both the subject matter as well as the way in which we were delivering the subject matter, felt very confident in the quality of what we created. But that’s also just, I don’t know if it’s half the battle or just part of the battle, you know, you still have to make people aware of it and make certain that you’re operating at a really high level. So there certainly was a great deal of anxiety when we opened of whether or not would we be able to have that type of penetration and that success.
And, you know, there was this great surge of interest when we first opened. You know, the first six weeks, there’s a lot of attention, and there’s a lot of people that have been waiting to see it and, you know, come out, and then you start to go into this period where you have to, it’s not quite pound the pavement so much, but you have to encourage people to come create some urgency for people to come and you don’t start off knowing necessarily what the seasonality is going to be for your visitation.
February and March are great months. Things start to head down again in the summertime until you get to October, which is an amazing month in Las Vegas. The weather’s so, you know, fantastic. Lots of tourists come out, and things kind of come back up again. But the first time around, you don’t necessarily know if we’re, you know, hey, what’s going on here? Is this the natural kind of ebbs and flows of things, or is this all it’s going to be?
Abby: Can you talk a little bit about these sort of parallel stories? Tell the audience about those stories and how you struggled with which way to weight them, and also education versus entertainment at the same time.
Jonathan: Yeah. So, first of all, our mission is to advance the public understanding of organized crime’s history and impact on American society. Pretty broad. And when you go through the museum, you will see it becomes abundantly clear that this is very much a law enforcement museum. You know, we take visitors on this journey, starts at the turn of the 20th century, and you see how organized crime takes root in America. And you see the different factors. You know, it’s very much an immigration story. It’s a story about social mobility or the lack thereof and the things that allow, or at times even encourage crime to take root, but also at the same time, you know, it’s all of the tools and techniques and innovations of law enforcement and the criminal justice system and how they’re combating crime.
But, you know, there is this certain amount of romanticism that some people have for these stories of these mobsters. They’re familiar with movies like The Godfather, and they, you know, and they like to sometimes have fun with this kind of playacting, that sort of thing. And a certain amount of that is perfectly okay, right, but at the end of the day, we are a serious educational institution, and we also need to make clear to people that criminal behavior is not okay and that a lot of these mobsters that are at times, you know, that there’s this aura of glamour around their, you know, organizations, were doing really, really bad things, and the, actually, the heroes that we should be celebrating are on the law enforcement side.
So, you’re constantly trying to do this balance. You know, I think for us, it’s making certain that we don’t compromise the integrity of what we’re conveying, you know, the underlying educational messages and the historical facts and the importance of understanding how all of this fits into how our country has evolved.
Brenda: You’re making me think about an earlier podcast, and Abby was mentioning exhibitions at the Mob Museum that use empathy to challenge perceptions. Can you talk a little bit about how it is that you use empathy to encourage sort of enabling folks to think more multidimensional about your subjects?
Jonathan: Yeah, if we’re doing what we should be doing, we are helping to kind of transport people to other times and places and be able to see historical events or understand issues through the lens of people that live those experiences. Right, I mean, that’s what separates the type of environment that, you know, that a museum can create.
So how do you create that kind of emotional connection and help people feel it? Some of that is just about creating the right environment. So, when you’re temporally transported back to a particular point in time. So, whether it’s going through the lineup experience or walking into a space that’s about very, very early Las Vegas or the vintage Vegas time period, and you have the bright lights, and you have the sounds of, you know, what some of us can remember when slot machines actually had coins in them, and they would clink, you know.
Brenda: They don’t have coins anymore? I had no idea. Okay.
Abby: Ruined, you’re never going.
Brenda: I’m learning. I’m learning every day.
Jonathan: But you try to create those multi-sensory experiences. We have these great interactives where you can listen to wiretaps, real wiretaps that were used to prosecute different criminals like a John Gotti, or you can see some of the undercover agents’ tools and try to imagine what it must be like to strap on one of these cassette players.
So, I think one of the experiences that Abby and I talked about a great deal on her visit when we renovated the first floor, we added a couple of new, more experiential spaces that are about policing. So there’s this interactive crime lab where you can go into this area and actually try ballistics testing and match striations of bullets as, you know, as you might see on, you know, a CSI-type program.
There’s also this whole area that we’ve dedicated to use of force. And I think people recognize certainly it’s, you know, it’s one of the hotbed issues of the day, and I think often with these types of conversations when you’re trying to understand these things, you know, we can talk about them in a very kind of intellectual and almost detached sorts of ways, and we convey a lot of the information in that way, also I mean, we do talk about, you know, what does the law say is appropriate or excessive force. But what we’ve created for our visitors is a way to kind of step in the shoes of a law enforcement officer by replicating the training that officers will often use. And we worked very closely with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department to develop this, and I think they’ve, you know, they are, you know, absolutely the standard bearers right now in terms of kind of training and a lot of the best practices with regard to use of force.
But you go through this simulator, you get paired up with one of our staff members who’s a training officer. You get a duty belt that has, you know, so it kind of replicates the heft and the weight of a real duty belt. You get a simulated firearm that has a, you know, it’s got a CO2 cartridge, so it’s got a little kick to it, and it’s got a laser sight on it. You get briefed by a real member of, senior member of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, you know, in a video underscoring that this is, you know, this is not intended to be an experience like a video game. This is designed to replicate training.
So, you then go into a couple of rooms where you first encounter these digital scenarios. So you see a video up on a screen that you are, you, as a police officer, are responding to a call, and it might be at a convenience store, it might be some other location. And you have to see what’s going on in this video, and you respond with these, you know, very basic shoot or don’t shoot situations.
What really kind of cuts to the heart of this, though, is that when you get to the last room, we actually have a live-action role-play. So you go into this small space where an officer, you know, our staff member, now explains to you the call that you’re responding to. So maybe you are responding to a call of a suspicious person in a parking lot, and you have to respond to this call, and then you go through the door and you enter this room.
Ultimately, the goal you’re trying to accomplish is to resolve this situation without using force. And I think ultimately, you know, what we’re hoping to achieve with this is for people to recognize how complicated these situations are. And, how important it is for, you know, the 17,000 plus law enforcement agencies across the country that, you know, training is so critical and being able to do, you know, have training that is robust because these situations that you can be in are so complicated.
People generally do not characterize this experience as fun, but it is consistently one of the highest-ranked areas of the museum for our visitors. You know, there’s such an emotional component to it, and you are kind of transport added in this, you know, into this situation that has such kind of tension and kind of, you know, it brings you to another place that it’s it is really an extraordinary experience.
Abby: So, in this immersive experience, you’re putting the visitor literally in the shoes of the police officer, and you’re creating this really empathetic, immersive experience. This is an amazing storytelling device. It’s a way of getting people to challenge their preconceived ideas, and I think it’s really difficult to do, to come up with exhibits or moments in a museum that do this. And you found one which really, really is powerful. So, you know, if you were working in another museum completely, what would you recommend other directors or the designers of museums think about when they’re thinking about what experiences they should create?
Jonathan: Yeah, I think that’s for me, I think that’s the ultimate question. And there’s certain types of experiences, you know, I think this is, you know, this particular kind of experience that we’ve been talking about is, you know, is really provocative. But it also lends itself, I mean, there’s kind of a very clear way to how you can kind of create that type of experience.
Other types of, for lack of a better way of putting it, learning objectives are maybe more difficult. It kind of starts from a place of what are we trying to convey? Like what are we hoping to achieve with the guests, right? Like, what are we, you know, what do we want them to be understanding, and then how do we make it as multidimensional and rich as an experience as possible? Like all the things that touch people in terms of how they feel when they encounter a space, like how do you create that for whatever it is that you’re trying to convey?
I mean, I think that’s for us, as we, as we look ahead to how do we how are we going to grow and create new exhibit spaces and experience spaces like this, how do you accomplish that kind of visceral, emotional connection that is transporting people to another time, another place?
Brenda: You know, we’re talking about technology used for really specific aims and end goals and to develop perspectives and empathy and to enable people to have very rich, very personal, intimate, emotional experiences. And my question is about investing in technology. So, did you anticipate or plan for any potential redundancies in technology? Did you play it safe? How did you go through the process of determining how much you wanted to use technology and towards what aims?
Jonathan: Yeah, part of what makes that tough is that the world has changed so much in such a short amount of time. Right? When we created those experiences, you know, the crime lab, the use of force exhibition space, we also created this, you know, touch wall, we call it the global networks wall, where you can see how does organized crime manifest and law enforcement groups manifest, you know, internationally now.
You can search geographically or by crime groups or law enforcement groups, and it’s visually alluring, not as engaging as I think we hoped it would be. And I think that there’s there is a certain amount of a trap here, too, to be, be honest with you. I mean, technology is tantalizing.
You know, we have this amazing app, right? And it’s it’s, you know, there’s tours and missions that you can go on when you visit the museum. There’s this amazing ‘doppelgangster’ feature that uses facial recognition technology. So, if you take our app, you take a picture of yourself, and then it’ll search a database, and you’ll get three matches of people that are either criminals or members of law enforcement or kind of pop culture figures that were somehow related to organized crime and law enforcement.
And it’s super fun, right? But there’s big barriers to getting people to, you know, to pull out their phone, to download an app or to follow a QR code and then, you know, do this or do that. And I think it’s, you know, I also want to make a distinction between what we’re doing for the onsite experience as opposed to things that we try to push out for people that aren’t traveling here and to make it, you know, make some kind of rich an engaging experience through the website. I mean, I think that’s like that’s a different topic.
But for the onsite experience, I think it’s a, it’s a tricky mix. I mean, it’s always tempting to say that we want interactives, but we don’t necessarily mean the same thing when we say that. I mean, for a lot of, you know, museum professionals, interactive kind of like makes you think of, you know, that it’s some type of an interactive technology or digitally based exhibit.
You know, it’s touch screens. It’s something that you, that you’re manipulating as opposed to interactivity that, from the guest perspective, is often, it’s a confluence of things. It’s the exhibit, but it’s also the people that are helping to facilitate the experience on the staff side. And it’s being able to have, like, there’s a very important kind of human component of the experience that you can’t understate. And I think that you know, finding the sweet spot is using technology but also not abandoning the people and remembering that the guests want to share their stories, too, and they want to be met where they are. And so, you know, having a person that’s mediating that engagement between the guests and the exhibits and is part of that experience is really, really important.
Abby: Well, one of the things I know when I visited with you, Jonathan, was you had a mobster, I forget his name, what was his name, standing, talking to the audience?
Jonathan: Oh, well, there’s a fellow Frank LaPena, which we would characterize as mob adjacent. He’s not a mobster.
Abby: Sorry, mob adjacent.
Jonathan: Mob adjacent.
Abby: Got to be PC with my mob language. So, Frank was there, and he was talking, and as we approached the room, the room was packed with people. All the visitors were cramming around, and there was Frank telling these wonderful yarns about his time being mob adjacent. And so, it was really, really cool, and it reminds me of what you’re talking about. That interactivity from a visitor perspective is very different to the way that we use interactivity from a digital perspective. And what they get from these moments can be as simple as sitting and listening to a storyteller, and that can really be a transformative experience where you connect so much with the information, with the story. And so, I thought it was another reason why I’m such a fan of the Mob Museum is these different techniques that you use, some of them super, as old as humanity, storytelling, and you use them really effectively throughout.
Jonathan: Abby, thank you for saying that. You know, I think that there is a thread that runs through all of these experiences, and it’s really about authenticity. What’s so gripping about, you know, Frank LaPena is that he lived this life in which he was in, you know, he was around these mobsters, and he was actually not just prosecuted, but he was convicted of a very heinous crime, subsequently exonerated not just pardoned.
So, the life journey that he has been on is so captivating. And to be able to hear that story directly, what possibly could be more engaging and captivating? If you can figure out how to bring people that have had these real-life experiences and can convey that in a way that it’s, I mean, you could hear a pin drop in that room because it’s so mesmerizing and it’s so real.
Brenda: So I wanted to take a quick pivot, actually, and ask you about your return on experience. I’m wondering, do you think about your return on experience and what you’re seeing now as a result?
Jonathan: You talk about timeless elements of, of, of museums, right? Measuring, measuring our impact is, is, you know, one of the timeless challenges that we face. So, we have a number of different metrics that we use. And I think we’re always seeking better ways to understand, but we, we do get feedback from people and survey people on how they consider the value of the experience, you know, across different categories.
So, you know, with educational value as well as entertainment value, as well as monetary value as well as time spent value. You know, the one metric that we follow the most is, you know, people’s likelihood to recommend the experience to a friend or family member. That doesn’t get you at the question of how much did they learn from the experience.
But it gets you to answer the question of: How much value do they believe they derive from the experience? And I, you know, never want to suggest that, you know, that there’s a pure relationship between how entertaining something is and how little or much educational value there is. But we do know that there are certain experiences that are a little bit light on content. And we do know that there are certain things that are really, really dense, particularly when we look at things like our educational outreach, for example.
We have this speakeasy experience where we take people back in time to the prohibition era. When you go down the end of the hall, you then get to, you know, two doorways, and on one side is the speakeasy space where we, you know, take people into an environment that’s about where people consume booze during prohibition. And then on the other side is the distillery space where we talk about how did it get there, how is it manufactured or bootlegged, you know, rum running and all that. And we’re actually distilling and making moonshine over there. And when you’re in this space, you’re not just transported in time, and you don’t simply see objects behind cases, but you can also get a drink, and you can have a bartender explain to you the history of how these things were made and why people were consuming it and what the you know, what the environment was like back then, right.
But anyway, part of the point is, you know, people also like to have a drink, like people like to hear the music. I’m proud of the fact that we have a menu that tells great stories and, you know, and educates people while they’re figuring out what they’re going to eat or drink.
Brenda: I’m so appreciating what, what you’re sharing with us right now, and I wanted to sort of underscore what you’re talking about. You know, Abby and I had the pleasure of speaking with John Falk in a prior podcast. and, you know, I think to your point about, you know, this is not solely about education or how do you actually measure education and the value of that and when there’s so much going on with all of these experiences, and John was sharing with us that actually in what he’s discovering is that the real value is satisfaction. And it sure sounds like folks who go to the Mob Museum and experience the exhibits and experience that drink at the speakeasy are having an awful lot of satisfaction.
Abby: And I can echo that because that was another thing is, is when we look at museums, they’re turning into, and they need to provide for the community. Because, John, when you’re thinking about your speakeasy, I know you have a lot of repeat visitors, people from the local community, so you’re tailoring to them as well as to the tourists, and it’s just an amazing place to be. And I think you’re also touching on the fact that people go to museums with different expectations and needing different things. And so, it’s up to, the jobs tough, but it’s up to a museum to make sure that there’s those very different access points where people can get out of the place, what they need, even on a given day, right?
Jonathan: That’s an excellent point. You know, we have this ability, and we take very seriously this notion that, I mean, museums should be gathering places. We have a very dense calendar of programs that we do that are very focused on the local community. You know, they can be historical topics, contemporary topics. They can be things that are, you know, very practical about living more safely in a community and what types of legislation might be coming up that people should be more informed about that relate to the topics in the museum. You have an ability with the folks that are here to continue to get deeper and deeper.
You know, I think with a lot of the tourists, you know, when you think about what’s the return and how do you know if you’re doing well, you know, if we can get people to say boy, I can’t wait to you know, I’d love to go back there again, you know, I’d love to go learn more about this and whether they learn more about this by coming back to us again or going somewhere else, you know, if we’re just whetting their appetite, you know, piquing their interest and they’re going somewhere else, then we’re doing our job. That’s what we’re supposed to do.
Abby: Tell me three things you and you got to be honest now, three things you absolutely love about your job, and three things you wish you could change but can’t.
Jonathan: I don’t know where to begin with what I love about my job. I mean, I’m, like, and I don’t for a second take for granted what a wonderful, how’d I get to have such a fantastic gig. I mean, this place is, place is amazing, and I get to work with such amazing people, and it’s so fascinating. I mean, it’s just tremendous opportunity. You know, we have the greatest board, the greatest staff, phenomenal city, the fascinating folks that we get to interact with, I mean, I, you know, real-life heroes. And to be able to couple that with the ability to be creative, to get to imagine things like the underground, the speakeasy space or, you know, new exhibit galleries, new experiences, whatever comes down the pike. I mean, it’s a phenomenal opportunity, and I’m super grateful. I mean, I’m very, very lucky. So I don’t know if that was three. I mean, I feel like that was maybe more than three. I feel like it was kind of two, but like a lot more than three. Yeah.
Brenda: They were big.
Abby: They were big, they were big. And you’re pleading the fifth on the three things you wish you could change.
Jonathan: It’d be great to have more resources. The team here is so great, and the number of ideas for how we can grow this organization and the number of potential partners, you know, there truly just, there aren’t enough hours in the day. I mean, the people that work here are so committed and passionate about what they’re doing that sometimes it’s hard to turn it off, and sometimes it’s frustrating that you can’t do everything that you wish that you could do, so, you know, so that gets to be a little tough, too, but it’s still worth it.
Brenda: Clearly, enthusiasm is, is coming from above, I can assure you. What an incredible pleasure to be speaking with you today, Jonathan.
Jonathan: Well, thank you both. This is an honor and a delight to be here.
Abby: Thank you so much, Jonathan, for joining us today. Thanks for listening, everyone. If you like what you heard, subscribe for more episodes of Matters of Experience wherever you listen to podcasts, and make sure to leave a rating and a review and share with a friend. We’ll see you next time.
Brenda: Take 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.
Mob Museum Mentality with Jonathan Ullman
An American Immigrant and Migrant Experience with Annie Polland
American Jewish Historical Society
Amazon.com: Annie Polland: Books
Your Story, Our Story | Tenement Museum
The Washington Post’s Lede Lab takes readers inside the Tenement Museum in New York City
Tenement Museum Virtual Tour using Photogrammetry – Washington Post
[Music]
Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience, a podcast that explores the creativity, innovation, and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. If you’re new, a hearty welcome to you 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: Today we’re talking with Dr. Annie Polland, who is a public historian, author, and president of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. Previously, she served as the executive director of the American Jewish Historical Society. She is also an author, and we will have links to her books in our notes.
Annie, I was recently at the Tenement Museum and discovered that it defines itself not as a history museum but as a storytelling museum. For those who are new to the museum, it tells stories of working-class tenement residents who immigrated and migrated to New York City. The Tenement Museum refreshingly does not talk about famous people. In fact, it prides itself on talking about real people in real families. Annie, welcome to the show.
Annie: Thank you so much. It’s wonderful to be here.
Brenda: We are so excited to have you here and like so many people, I’ve been a fan of the Tenement Museum since, really since its beginnings in 1988. And if you do not know this, listeners, visitors can take immersive building tours of these recreated homes, of these apartments, their hallways, the stairwells, kitchens, bedrooms, it’s so intimate, of former residents between the 1860s and the 1980s.
And they can also take walking tours that the museum offers throughout the neighborhood on the Lower East Side. Annie, could you share with our listeners your own journey and how it is that you came to be the institution’s president?
Annie: Sure. So, I was a fan of the Tenement Museum. I remember I came to New York for graduate school in the 1990s, and then I worked for a company called Big Onion Walking Tours, which employed graduate students to tell history, you know, to give walking tours of New York neighborhoods and talk about the history, and I was assigned for my first tour, the Lower East Side.
And at the time, those tours met at the Tenement Museum. And so, I remember I was so nervous to go. I had like studied on the train and the books I was reading fell apart because I was grasping them so tightly. And I showed up, but as soon as I got there and saw the people who were like in line clamoring to learn about history, I was sold.
It was almost like a religious experience, like to be able to walk in, in this neighborhood with so many 19th century buildings still standing and to bring history alive for people and to see people’s reaction. That was really exciting for me. And so it was, again, like a conversion experience where I realized like, oh, I’d like to do this, I like this. This is why I came to New York.
Abby: Did I read in The New York Times this summer there was a moment when it was going to close, or there was speculation?
Annie: Absolutely, yeah, no, no, no, you got it. So in April of 2020, when the pandemic had just begun, The New York Times wrote a story, and I think it was headlined “A Museum That Tells the Story of Survivors Faces Its Own Fight to Live,” and talking about how the Tenement Museum, perhaps more than other museums, was affected adversely by the pandemic, because for so many years, the Tenement Museum relied on earned income. So as soon as the doors closed and everyone started to know by April that this was not going to go away any time soon, the museum was in jeopardy, and a lot of people throughout the country and even in other places in the world saw that article and realized like their responsibility to help the museum. And so donations came in that were helpful in rebuilding.
Abby: Was that the first time that donations had been elicited or, or come in? It was mostly, as you mentioned, just on, on ticket sales and merch sales and things like that?
Annie: Yeah, well there had always been a development department and philanthropy of course was always part of it and fundraising always so important. And yet almost because the earned revenue was something that you could plan and you could kind of schedule and you could, you know, it was viewed as a wonderful thing that we were paying our way, so to speak.
But I think the pandemic taught everyone that there was a need to kind of really develop that development even more and that philanthropy even more to keep the cultural institution going and to help it thrive. So, I guess that would be another silver lining in a way, is the kind of the understanding of how as we rebuild, how do we want to balance that philanthropy and the development versus our earned revenue.
Abby: Right. I found the Tenement Museum very progressive for a museum. You seem to have come at this whole industry from a really unique perspective, as you mentioned, the walking tours. Do you see yourself as a progressive institution?
Annie: Well, first, I have to pay homage to the founders of the museum. They were the truly progressive ones who could look at a tenement and say that should be a museum. And so a lot of the innovation and the progressive ideas came from the museum right from the beginning, and when you think of that as 1988, that was not a time that immigration was really part of the national narrative.
So that was a big deal for them to kind of put that stake down and say this was this is what it’s about. And, of course, in addition to being an immigration museum and having that be innovative, it was really a museum about the working class, which doesn’t get told as often as it should. When a museum starts with that premise, you really you can only go forward with it.
It’s hard to go backwards. Like I think it pushes you to keep thinking about how to do things in new ways, how to share the story, how to expand the stories. I think that was also the really, you know, innovative spirit that we feel like, you know, it’s in our blood and it’s in the air of the Lower East Side, certainly to kind of keep that, keep that moving.
Abby: And then, in terms of when you’re at the American Jewish Historical Society, how is that different? Because I can imagine after being at the Tenement Museum with this very immersive, very innovative place, then moving there, what were some of the challenges?
Annie: When I first moved there, I was so captivated by the archives, but what I missed was the people. I missed being able to just get up from my desk and say, I’m going to give a tour right now, which is what I’m able to do at the Tenement Museum.
Brenda: You’re still giving tours yourself?
Annie: I gave one today. Yes.
Brenda: Fantastic.
Annie: Well, that’s how you know. I mean, that’s how you are able to see what people like, what they don’t like, what they respond to, what you can test out. It’s storytelling, but it’s, it’s messy storytelling. It’s storytelling that’s not set in stone, and so because it’s not set in stone and it’s not written down in a script, you get to play with that.
And so that, you know, for me to run a museum in which that’s what’s happening, I need to do it too. I would love to give one every day, but they don’t let me out of my office as much as…
Brenda: I love messy storytelling, I think that that’s a thread that we need to definitely keep going.
Abby: Yeah, and I love that theatrical aspect of it as well, that the way that no performance, quote unquote, is the same. Like when you’re there, you could go back on the same tour a week later, and it will be different, and it’ll evolve. I think it makes a very dynamic and alive and living museum.
Brenda: It’s really apparent and really palpable at the Tenement Museum, you know, I’ve gone on a number of tours, the exact same tour a number of times, I should say, and it is always genuinely different, and it is different because the shape of the, you know, visiting group has been different, and, and also the fact that clearly your interpreters are able to really bring themselves and their own passions and their own areas of expertise, I think, into each of the tours as well. It’s one of the best repeat museums that I know of.
Annie: Oh, well, that’s good, and tell people that because I think that…
Brenda: I just did. You hear that, everyone? Write that down.
Annie: Come back again. No, and, you know, a tour that I gave today was about Nathalie Gumpertz. It’s the 1870s. There’s been a panic of 1873. And when I first came to the museum in 2009, it was right in the wake of the recession. And a lot of the focus on that tour then was on the panic of 1873. And what was that, and how did that affect people? It’s who’s on the tour, it’s who’s giving the tour, and it’s also what’s going on in the world that kind of shapes the emphases of the interpretation.
Abby: Well, I think that’s what’s so successful about it because the same thing happened when I was on the tour. Everything was relatable to today, and that was what was so amazing is this ability to connect with the past and also to see the future, which is, I think, these stepping stones and that we’re always connected with our ancestors.
Brenda: I’d like to expand upon the conversation about relevancy to today and a question that’s really been percolating for me. I would love to hear, Annie, your thoughts on, you know, how one of the museum’s major aims is to build inclusive, expansive American identity. How does the work of the Tenement Museum fit within current national views of culture and immigration in the United States today?
Annie: One of the things I’ve thought about a lot is that you know, in some ways, the Bible of the Tenement Museum is the census. You know, we want to tell the stories of real people who lived in these buildings, and the census provides that map to be able to do that, and it’s also important for us to step outside of that and say who was not able to be here?
All the people, by virtue of them being in the building, were included in some way, but who at the time in American history was excluded? So, we spent a lot of time with the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. And so what that meant is there were certain people that could come and live in these buildings and, and others that couldn’t, and that how could we even as we’re telling the stories of those who were there, also talk about those who were not there.
The idea of inclusion and exclusion also makes us think about the black community that was on the Lower East Side and in Lower Manhattan, albeit in lower numbers than the immigrant groups that were rising at the same time that their numbers were diminishing. What we found was that black New Yorkers were living in the Eighth Ward, which is what is now Soho, and there are no tenements still standing there to tell that story.
And we realized that it would be important to tell that story in our building as well. So, we’re kind of bending the original rules with regard to methodology, although not with mission. So, we’ve been thinking, I think, quite concretely about inclusion and exclusion and how we, how we honor that even as we honor the place based and the importance of real stories too.
Abby: Has the Tenement Museum ever had to face the challenge of inviting the public in without what I’ll call the storytellers that, the docents like, they seem incredibly integral to your visit.
Annie: Absolutely. It’s like one of those things where the strength of the museum is that it is a storytelling museum and that it’s a person telling you the story. Like, I just don’t think it would work if you were walking around with headsets and listening to, you know, an audio guide like I, I think that works in some museums. It doesn’t work for ours because of the intimacy that you both…
Brenda: It’s very dialogic and visitor to visitor as well as visitor to docent.
Annie: It’s the educator that can stitch together a story that includes the people on the tour and all of their backgrounds. It speaks to the person whose story they’re telling, in other words, the resident of that apartment, weaves in the primary sources, makes them accessible to people, and weaves in the objects and kind of puts that together, and you just can’t do that in a with an audio guide. I mean, you could do a more static passive version of it. But again, it’s that dynamism of the messiness of trying to put all of that together that I think makes it work.
Abby: So you keep calling them educators. When I was there, that obviously educating you, they’re telling you information, but that’s why I really gravitate more towards the fact they’re storytellers, and there were so many questions getting answered. We were all stimulated. We’re all asking questions. Other people are answering, had a fantastic time there, touching when I wasn’t supposed to be touching, you’re not supposed to touch anything and I was secretly smelling too, because I like smell and I just wish that there’d been a little bit more because I just sort of wanted to play a bit more.
Annie: Yes. No, and we learn through touching things. And I think you’re, when you’re in a building like that, you see so many surfaces. And, of course, with 97 Orchard, we don’t have things behind ropes or glass or anything. So, one of the first tours that was created for consumptive use, meaning you could touch things and sit on things, was the apartment of Victoria Confino. And so that apartment was recreated with consumptive use. You could sit down, and especially for kids, they could pass around a manta, they could pass around the blanket that she would have slept on.
Brenda: Let’s talk about a remarkable recreated sewing factory at the Tenement Museum. It’s absolutely incredible.
Annie: I know, I love it, okay, so we recreated a portion of a garment shop. We had real sewing machines. And basically, there’s a point at the tour where visitors can just explore. You touch a sewing machine, and projected onto the cloth is a story, a video, and you can, you know, pick up the headset and listen as well. And different sewing machines have different stories. There’s a rice cooking machine that also allows you to access the story. And so basically using the things in a shop that people would touch to be places to embed the story. We joke that you know, you don’t have to sew a garment, but you get to piece together a story.
Abby: It sounds wonderful, but then you don’t need the storytellers as much, right?
Annie: Exactly. The storyteller, the educator, is still important and kind of scaffolding that up and setting up the story and then kind of stepping back, but then kind of bringing everyone back together, really building in time in that sequence for the dialog, for the conversation, for the visitors to react to the stories and ask questions.
Brenda: Every time I hear you talk about the scaffolding of the experience, part of what I keep thinking about is, of course, the environments that they’re in and then also the objects. And, Abby, I absolutely, this is so cool. So they’ve got, of course, the original wallpapers and original linoleum and some original objects, things that were found during the renovation, the restoration.
But then they also have some objects that were bought on eBay because they were just like the one that they saw in the photograph of the family that was living in that living room. And what are the discussions that are happening at the museum around that?
Annie: That’s a great question. And another pool are the ones that the descendants of the families have given to us. Now, you know, people get rid of the old furniture, and it doesn’t get passed down in the same way you would if, you know, you had a very wealthy great aunt who passed down a beautiful like painting to you.
So, but in certain cases, we’ve been able to add objects that the families have donated to us, like sewing shears. And those are then embedded into the exhibits or in some cases in like display cases where we also put things that were found under the floorboards. But you’re absolutely right. In the early years, it was going to fairs and finding things.
And now you’re right, it is more eBay, you know, putting together an assemblage of objects that would have been from the time period and and, you know, trying to kind of create that, I guess, mise-en-scène. So what is real or what is authentic? I guess, you know, what’s authentic are the floorboards of the Tenement Museum that we’re now so meticulously preserving as part of this construction project.
But the most authentic thing, I think, are the documents. That is what we have to kind of provide the base to let people explore and stitch the story together so the authenticity comes in. This is what we know of the family, and this is the story we’re going to tell based on it.
Abby: Well, I love that reference to reality, because what really is reality, and I completely agree, I think as long as the experience resonates with you as one that is perceived as reality or could have been reality or very authentic, which again, being authentic and being real, two different things, I think.
Annie: And I think what we try to do is be transparent about everything as much as possible. And I think the most important thing is visitors are empowered to go back and think about their own family histories. What do they know? What are the memories that were just passed down? Everyone has gaps in family history. No one, there’s no one walking around right now that knows the complete family history because there are some things that are passed down, and there are some things that are quite, quite purposefully not passed down.
Brenda: I would love to take another perspective on the question of authentic and likewise playing with the idea of objects. I’m thinking of Your Story, Our Story. So, this is your online collection, and it is populated by the public, and it is the sharing of images of personal objects, family objects, and very short little stories with each. And it is now a massive collection. And tell us about Your Story, Our Story, and what you see as being the most meaningful part of it.
Annie: That’s what people do with the object that’s been passed down to them. And in that effort to kind of write a few, a paragraph really about that, it requires them to kind of think about that object and, and understand it. And usually, I would say most of the time, the stories and the objects that are put up are not of real, you know, any kind of monetary value.
It’s the story value that they have that, that’s really important. And it started when my daughter went to a elementary school in Kensington, Brooklyn, which is a very diverse neighborhood. And so we started working with the teacher, the teachers at the school and had the fifth-grade classes who came to visit the museum experiment with this. So, before it was a website, it was just a school program.
And the most moving thing about that is that we invited the parents and grandparents and the students to share their objects at the museum. So, the students first came to the museum, went on a tour, saw the objects that were in the family apartments, did this assignment. The teachers did a lot of work, you know, guiding this, shepherding this, then brought them back so they could share this as a kind of assembly with the message being your stories and your objects are as important as the objects that are showcased at the museum.
And then to see the connections being formed across different cultures. And this is, again, a very diverse school ‚Jamaican, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, you know, Irish, Italian, Chinese, Jewish, Black, Puerto Rican, like this is all in one school. So any one class is going to have this multiplicity of stories, and yet the thread that binds them together are the way in which this is a way that people are making sense of their own culture. And so now teachers across the country can actually even create their own web page within the website so that they’re able to see their students year after year.
Abby: My next question was going to be how do you take this very personal and intimate on-location experience that a lot of people from around the world or even in New York City will never be able to have for one reason or another, and how do you make the mission reach all those people? And it sounds like just naturally because of who you are, which is why the Tenement Museum is so lucky to have you as president, you’ve started to do that through a relatively simple personal program with your local school, and then you’re always thinking about scalability. How do I see what works? How does it ladder up to our mission? How do I listen to our visitors, to people who are interacting with us? And then how do I grow bigger and bigger until now, it’s global?
Annie: Right, and I think always keeping in mind the relationship between bricks and mortar and digital, right, that that you want to have the digital mirror as much as possible, the kind of bricks and mortar interactions. And so, you know, we created the website so that even when they put the website up, they can then print it out and put up like an exhibit board in the classroom.
Also, really important to all of that are the relationships that can be formed with teachers so that we’re hearing what’s happening and we’re able to support that, and also the IMLS gave us that grant to scale it. So none of this can be scaled without funding. So again, a big shout out to funders like the IMLS or the NEH, for example, that has helped us in, in that work and kind of taking some of our ideas and scaling them to reach more people.
And it goes back to this idea about inclusion and exclusion. We only have so much space in these tenements, like there’s only so many stories we can do. How can we create other venues so that we’re able to keep adding stories and learning from the stories? And then, oh my God, my favorite, where we were dealing with a lot of college students in the New York area, CUNY students, and a number of them brought dictionaries.
And what these were were their parents, when they first came to this country, carried dictionaries with them. Chinese-English, Russian-English, Spanish-English. And so, the fact that then their children, now grown, were picking those as objects that was about their family history, I thought was so important. And then to bring it back to the Tenement Museum, once in a while, we’ll have people who will say something like, oh, immigrants back then learned English faster or, you know, immigrants today, they’re not learning English.
That kind of, of rhetoric. It’s amazing to kind of then use this example of the dictionary that people are carrying with them from place to place, from job to home to the subway, in order to learn this language and to grapple with it. It takes away the way that people can kind of simplify something in a statement. And the object makes us think about this, this process and this ordeal of coming to a new country and having to learn.
Brenda: The level of nuance between the storytellers and the objects themselves and the residents of the space is really quite remarkable. And again, the fact that the storytellers get to respond and even encourage, I think, questions and perspectives and points of view that they can then work with and weave together and braid together. And maybe that’s a nice, it’s a way that I like to think about the nature of the dynamic experience is that it is very much so, like a co-created weaving that each of the story ends up being by the very end.
Abby: So going back to one of my pet peeves still. It seems very everything’s very natural for you. You have the theatricality of it. You have the storytelling, you have the education, you’re listening to the visitor, you think visitor experience is important, like you’re here because we think you’re a shining example of how to do everything right. I see sometimes people may come away and go, well, we just don’t have the stories that Tenement Museum has. I think some people don’t listen to their visitors and don’t understand the stories that the visitors want to be told. They’re not listening. They’re doing the top-down decision-making. And for me, everything you’re saying seems very natural. And this is, of course, how it should be, but I don’t think it is that way everywhere.
Annie: But for us, we have to. Right. So I think that just the nature of how the tours were set up, the nature of the building, the kind of, I think the philosophy of the museum from the beginning, which was to make stories accessible and tell the stories of of ordinary people, of regular people. I think all of that just kind of lends itself to almost relying on hearing what it is that that people, the questions that people have and, and adapting to that.
Annie: Like we don’t have the luxury of creating a gallery, putting beautiful art on the wall, and just saying, you know, walk around.
Abby: Sure, sure.
Annie: Although, I mean, I think that’s a wonderful thing. I love to go to art museums and walk around, but.
Abby: But I think it’s not enough. I think the problem is that these places are going to age out or that people are going to go to more of the pop-up immersive experiences like King Tut, where you’ll start to learn about history in a different way, in maybe a more accessible way. So, I think this is an accessibility issue happening with some of our older institutions that needs to be tackled to get people in, to have fun, and be excited about history again instead of it being a group of I know objects are really important, but just objects that I don’t understand why I should care about them.
And so, I think what can be learned from your example is that you’re not special and that everybody should be doing what you’re doing within reason, obviously. The way that you’re approaching your mission and your visitors through storytelling, I think is something a lot of other institutions need to think about.
Annie: I’m trying to think in my mind if I had to decide what was more important, an immersive space versus a storyteller and educator, and I don’t know because I think they’re both so important. But I’m just wondering, you know, I find I love going to museums where there is an immersive space. So, I grew up in Milwaukee, and the Milwaukee Public Museum has this amazing exhibit. It’s called The Streets of Old Milwaukee. And they recreated a Milwaukee street from the turn of the 20th century, and I remember as a child, like every kid who grew up in Milwaukee, remembers walking through the cobblestone space. There’s like an old grandmother on a rocking chair that’s a little eerie. There’s like water that you could pump, and then you looked into stores and could see, like, again, these scenes.
And I think that fires up the imagination more than any card or text, wall text, or audio. It’s being able to kind of be thrust into the middle of a scene and have to make sense of it. So, you know, I think there are ways other museums can kind of like create interesting immersive spaces that get into the background of the artist or the writer or the inventor that they’re doing just to kind of set a scene for people and engage people in a slightly different way.
I saw this, the New York Public Library, I don’t know, maybe a decade ago, had a whole thing on writing, and you got to go into a room and try out different types of writing utensils to kind of get a sense of how things were put together. And it was so, you would have loved it, so multisensory and so hands-on.
And so, you know, I think there are really creative ways that people can kind of complement, even take a traditional exhibit, put the traditional exhibit up, but create something on the side that is speaking more towards the visitors’ need for a multisensory experience or the visitors need to get in the mind or the space of, of another creator.
Brenda: One of the things that Abby and I talk with folks about are digital technologies, and I’m thinking about our museums and the big digital immersive experiences that are all the rage these days. So, I’m just curious, how far do you push it? Because you could, you could really go a great distance with technology. What do you? What’s the conversation?
Annie: Where we are experimenting more with technology is actually in our virtual programs. So The Washington Post in December 2021 did this really great piece, and we’re so forever grateful to them where they use something called photogrammetry to recreate our saloon space and our Rogarshevsky apartment and our Levine apartment, and essentially it’s like they take these 3D photos, a million photos, and stitch them together in a digital model.
And so the experience is really immersive, and there’s real texture to the spaces. And so we then got a grant to have the whole building photogrammetry-ed, I don’t know, I’m sure there’s some a better word to use. And so then we’re able to, on our virtual field trips, be like, oh, here’s the Baldizzi apartment and actually use, use that or here’s the front hallway.
Brenda: That’s brilliant.
Annie: And I use it even teaching with my college students. And we were on their campus, which was very different from the Lower East Side, but to be able to kind of use the space, you really feel like you were there. Like the next day, I was like, oh, I was just at 97 Orchard, but I wasn’t, what was going on?
And I was like, Oh yeah, I was in that building. So I think there are great ways that technology can help us recreate the immersive experience and be able to kind of send our tours throughout the country again with the partnership of teachers who are willing to experiment with us.
Abby: She’s speaking my language. I love it. I couldn’t agree more. I was going to say that I think also what really gets me excited about the way you’re talking about these experiences is what, you know, at Lorem Ipsum, we talk about all the time, which is merging that physical interaction, the digital interaction, the visitors with the docents, with even digital docents, how you use lighting, how you use actors, how you use projection and use all of these tools in the toolbox.
And I think it’s at the very, very beginnings. I think we’re seeing more and more different places start experimenting, and I think there’s definitely no right and wrong. So it’s just really exciting to hear that the Tenement Museum is so innovative as well in the way that they’re presenting the information, the technology you’re open to using, and the storytelling you’re doing always, always thinking about the stories you’re telling and how they connect to the visitors.
Brenda: Where’s the Tenement Museum going to be in ten years?
Annie: It’s funny because my guess is that it will be some combination of looking back to our roots and always being inspired by the work that Ruth and Anita and so many of the founders of the museum did. Being inspired by our visitors and being inspired by our educators to kind of help us, help us move forward again, grounded in, grounded in some of the dynamics that were discovered and evolved early on in the, in the museum.
Abby: And so you’re not saying AI, then? I’m not hearing AI.
Brenda: Oh, stop it.
Annie: No. I don’t, no. I mean, the whole here’s what it is. I think, again, that so many people now we rely on, you know, our phones for community. We rely on computers for this and that. I mean, what makes the Tenement Museum innovative these days is how old-fashioned it is. It’s the fact that it is a bunch of people in a room trying to understand history, like how nerdy is that, but also how unique is that?
And that becomes, in some ways, the most radical thing is, is coming together in real-time with real people to tell the stories of real people.
Brenda: And it’s real people also trying to understand themselves.
Annie: I think that’s right, yeah.
Brenda: And each other, and that’s definitely something that plays out at the Tenement Museum.
Abby: Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Annie. This has been really a joy to hear all about your experiences and get to share them with everybody today. And I encourage everyone to head over to the Tenement Museum. Check it out for yourself, and you’ll have an amazing, amazing time. And if you like what you heard today, subscribe for more episodes of Matters of Experience wherever you listen to podcasts, and make sure to please leave a rating and a review and share with a friend. We’ll see you next time.
Brenda: Thank you, everybody.
Annie: Thank you so much.
[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.
American Jewish Historical Society
Amazon.com: Annie Polland: Books
Your Story, Our Story | Tenement Museum
The Washington Post’s Lede Lab takes readers inside the Tenement Museum in New York City
Tenement Museum Virtual Tour using Photogrammetry – Washington Post
[Music]
Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience, a podcast that explores the creativity, innovation, and psychology driving designed experiences and encounters. If you’re new, a hearty welcome to you 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: Today we’re talking with Dr. Annie Polland, who is a public historian, author, and president of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. Previously, she served as the executive director of the American Jewish Historical Society. She is also an author, and we will have links to her books in our notes.
Annie, I was recently at the Tenement Museum and discovered that it defines itself not as a history museum but as a storytelling museum. For those who are new to the museum, it tells stories of working-class tenement residents who immigrated and migrated to New York City. The Tenement Museum refreshingly does not talk about famous people. In fact, it prides itself on talking about real people in real families. Annie, welcome to the show.
Annie: Thank you so much. It’s wonderful to be here.
Brenda: We are so excited to have you here and like so many people, I’ve been a fan of the Tenement Museum since, really since its beginnings in 1988. And if you do not know this, listeners, visitors can take immersive building tours of these recreated homes, of these apartments, their hallways, the stairwells, kitchens, bedrooms, it’s so intimate, of former residents between the 1860s and the 1980s.
And they can also take walking tours that the museum offers throughout the neighborhood on the Lower East Side. Annie, could you share with our listeners your own journey and how it is that you came to be the institution’s president?
Annie: Sure. So, I was a fan of the Tenement Museum. I remember I came to New York for graduate school in the 1990s, and then I worked for a company called Big Onion Walking Tours, which employed graduate students to tell history, you know, to give walking tours of New York neighborhoods and talk about the history, and I was assigned for my first tour, the Lower East Side.
And at the time, those tours met at the Tenement Museum. And so, I remember I was so nervous to go. I had like studied on the train and the books I was reading fell apart because I was grasping them so tightly. And I showed up, but as soon as I got there and saw the people who were like in line clamoring to learn about history, I was sold.
It was almost like a religious experience, like to be able to walk in, in this neighborhood with so many 19th century buildings still standing and to bring history alive for people and to see people’s reaction. That was really exciting for me. And so it was, again, like a conversion experience where I realized like, oh, I’d like to do this, I like this. This is why I came to New York.
Abby: Did I read in The New York Times this summer there was a moment when it was going to close, or there was speculation?
Annie: Absolutely, yeah, no, no, no, you got it. So in April of 2020, when the pandemic had just begun, The New York Times wrote a story, and I think it was headlined “A Museum That Tells the Story of Survivors Faces Its Own Fight to Live,” and talking about how the Tenement Museum, perhaps more than other museums, was affected adversely by the pandemic, because for so many years, the Tenement Museum relied on earned income. So as soon as the doors closed and everyone started to know by April that this was not going to go away any time soon, the museum was in jeopardy, and a lot of people throughout the country and even in other places in the world saw that article and realized like their responsibility to help the museum. And so donations came in that were helpful in rebuilding.
Abby: Was that the first time that donations had been elicited or, or come in? It was mostly, as you mentioned, just on, on ticket sales and merch sales and things like that?
Annie: Yeah, well there had always been a development department and philanthropy of course was always part of it and fundraising always so important. And yet almost because the earned revenue was something that you could plan and you could kind of schedule and you could, you know, it was viewed as a wonderful thing that we were paying our way, so to speak.
But I think the pandemic taught everyone that there was a need to kind of really develop that development even more and that philanthropy even more to keep the cultural institution going and to help it thrive. So, I guess that would be another silver lining in a way, is the kind of the understanding of how as we rebuild, how do we want to balance that philanthropy and the development versus our earned revenue.
Abby: Right. I found the Tenement Museum very progressive for a museum. You seem to have come at this whole industry from a really unique perspective, as you mentioned, the walking tours. Do you see yourself as a progressive institution?
Annie: Well, first, I have to pay homage to the founders of the museum. They were the truly progressive ones who could look at a tenement and say that should be a museum. And so a lot of the innovation and the progressive ideas came from the museum right from the beginning, and when you think of that as 1988, that was not a time that immigration was really part of the national narrative.
So that was a big deal for them to kind of put that stake down and say this was this is what it’s about. And, of course, in addition to being an immigration museum and having that be innovative, it was really a museum about the working class, which doesn’t get told as often as it should. When a museum starts with that premise, you really you can only go forward with it.
It’s hard to go backwards. Like I think it pushes you to keep thinking about how to do things in new ways, how to share the story, how to expand the stories. I think that was also the really, you know, innovative spirit that we feel like, you know, it’s in our blood and it’s in the air of the Lower East Side, certainly to kind of keep that, keep that moving.
Abby: And then, in terms of when you’re at the American Jewish Historical Society, how is that different? Because I can imagine after being at the Tenement Museum with this very immersive, very innovative place, then moving there, what were some of the challenges?
Annie: When I first moved there, I was so captivated by the archives, but what I missed was the people. I missed being able to just get up from my desk and say, I’m going to give a tour right now, which is what I’m able to do at the Tenement Museum.
Brenda: You’re still giving tours yourself?
Annie: I gave one today. Yes.
Brenda: Fantastic.
Annie: Well, that’s how you know. I mean, that’s how you are able to see what people like, what they don’t like, what they respond to, what you can test out. It’s storytelling, but it’s, it’s messy storytelling. It’s storytelling that’s not set in stone, and so because it’s not set in stone and it’s not written down in a script, you get to play with that.
And so that, you know, for me to run a museum in which that’s what’s happening, I need to do it too. I would love to give one every day, but they don’t let me out of my office as much as…
Brenda: I love messy storytelling, I think that that’s a thread that we need to definitely keep going.
Abby: Yeah, and I love that theatrical aspect of it as well, that the way that no performance, quote unquote, is the same. Like when you’re there, you could go back on the same tour a week later, and it will be different, and it’ll evolve. I think it makes a very dynamic and alive and living museum.
Brenda: It’s really apparent and really palpable at the Tenement Museum, you know, I’ve gone on a number of tours, the exact same tour a number of times, I should say, and it is always genuinely different, and it is different because the shape of the, you know, visiting group has been different, and, and also the fact that clearly your interpreters are able to really bring themselves and their own passions and their own areas of expertise, I think, into each of the tours as well. It’s one of the best repeat museums that I know of.
Annie: Oh, well, that’s good, and tell people that because I think that…
Brenda: I just did. You hear that, everyone? Write that down.
Annie: Come back again. No, and, you know, a tour that I gave today was about Nathalie Gumpertz. It’s the 1870s. There’s been a panic of 1873. And when I first came to the museum in 2009, it was right in the wake of the recession. And a lot of the focus on that tour then was on the panic of 1873. And what was that, and how did that affect people? It’s who’s on the tour, it’s who’s giving the tour, and it’s also what’s going on in the world that kind of shapes the emphases of the interpretation.
Abby: Well, I think that’s what’s so successful about it because the same thing happened when I was on the tour. Everything was relatable to today, and that was what was so amazing is this ability to connect with the past and also to see the future, which is, I think, these stepping stones and that we’re always connected with our ancestors.
Brenda: I’d like to expand upon the conversation about relevancy to today and a question that’s really been percolating for me. I would love to hear, Annie, your thoughts on, you know, how one of the museum’s major aims is to build inclusive, expansive American identity. How does the work of the Tenement Museum fit within current national views of culture and immigration in the United States today?
Annie: One of the things I’ve thought about a lot is that you know, in some ways, the Bible of the Tenement Museum is the census. You know, we want to tell the stories of real people who lived in these buildings, and the census provides that map to be able to do that, and it’s also important for us to step outside of that and say who was not able to be here?
All the people, by virtue of them being in the building, were included in some way, but who at the time in American history was excluded? So, we spent a lot of time with the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. And so what that meant is there were certain people that could come and live in these buildings and, and others that couldn’t, and that how could we even as we’re telling the stories of those who were there, also talk about those who were not there.
The idea of inclusion and exclusion also makes us think about the black community that was on the Lower East Side and in Lower Manhattan, albeit in lower numbers than the immigrant groups that were rising at the same time that their numbers were diminishing. What we found was that black New Yorkers were living in the Eighth Ward, which is what is now Soho, and there are no tenements still standing there to tell that story.
And we realized that it would be important to tell that story in our building as well. So, we’re kind of bending the original rules with regard to methodology, although not with mission. So, we’ve been thinking, I think, quite concretely about inclusion and exclusion and how we, how we honor that even as we honor the place based and the importance of real stories too.
Abby: Has the Tenement Museum ever had to face the challenge of inviting the public in without what I’ll call the storytellers that, the docents like, they seem incredibly integral to your visit.
Annie: Absolutely. It’s like one of those things where the strength of the museum is that it is a storytelling museum and that it’s a person telling you the story. Like, I just don’t think it would work if you were walking around with headsets and listening to, you know, an audio guide like I, I think that works in some museums. It doesn’t work for ours because of the intimacy that you both…
Brenda: It’s very dialogic and visitor to visitor as well as visitor to docent.
Annie: It’s the educator that can stitch together a story that includes the people on the tour and all of their backgrounds. It speaks to the person whose story they’re telling, in other words, the resident of that apartment, weaves in the primary sources, makes them accessible to people, and weaves in the objects and kind of puts that together, and you just can’t do that in a with an audio guide. I mean, you could do a more static passive version of it. But again, it’s that dynamism of the messiness of trying to put all of that together that I think makes it work.
Abby: So you keep calling them educators. When I was there, that obviously educating you, they’re telling you information, but that’s why I really gravitate more towards the fact they’re storytellers, and there were so many questions getting answered. We were all stimulated. We’re all asking questions. Other people are answering, had a fantastic time there, touching when I wasn’t supposed to be touching, you’re not supposed to touch anything and I was secretly smelling too, because I like smell and I just wish that there’d been a little bit more because I just sort of wanted to play a bit more.
Annie: Yes. No, and we learn through touching things. And I think you’re, when you’re in a building like that, you see so many surfaces. And, of course, with 97 Orchard, we don’t have things behind ropes or glass or anything. So, one of the first tours that was created for consumptive use, meaning you could touch things and sit on things, was the apartment of Victoria Confino. And so that apartment was recreated with consumptive use. You could sit down, and especially for kids, they could pass around a manta, they could pass around the blanket that she would have slept on.
Brenda: Let’s talk about a remarkable recreated sewing factory at the Tenement Museum. It’s absolutely incredible.
Annie: I know, I love it, okay, so we recreated a portion of a garment shop. We had real sewing machines. And basically, there’s a point at the tour where visitors can just explore. You touch a sewing machine, and projected onto the cloth is a story, a video, and you can, you know, pick up the headset and listen as well. And different sewing machines have different stories. There’s a rice cooking machine that also allows you to access the story. And so basically using the things in a shop that people would touch to be places to embed the story. We joke that you know, you don’t have to sew a garment, but you get to piece together a story.
Abby: It sounds wonderful, but then you don’t need the storytellers as much, right?
Annie: Exactly. The storyteller, the educator, is still important and kind of scaffolding that up and setting up the story and then kind of stepping back, but then kind of bringing everyone back together, really building in time in that sequence for the dialog, for the conversation, for the visitors to react to the stories and ask questions.
Brenda: Every time I hear you talk about the scaffolding of the experience, part of what I keep thinking about is, of course, the environments that they’re in and then also the objects. And, Abby, I absolutely, this is so cool. So they’ve got, of course, the original wallpapers and original linoleum and some original objects, things that were found during the renovation, the restoration.
But then they also have some objects that were bought on eBay because they were just like the one that they saw in the photograph of the family that was living in that living room. And what are the discussions that are happening at the museum around that?
Annie: That’s a great question. And another pool are the ones that the descendants of the families have given to us. Now, you know, people get rid of the old furniture, and it doesn’t get passed down in the same way you would if, you know, you had a very wealthy great aunt who passed down a beautiful like painting to you.
So, but in certain cases, we’ve been able to add objects that the families have donated to us, like sewing shears. And those are then embedded into the exhibits or in some cases in like display cases where we also put things that were found under the floorboards. But you’re absolutely right. In the early years, it was going to fairs and finding things.
And now you’re right, it is more eBay, you know, putting together an assemblage of objects that would have been from the time period and and, you know, trying to kind of create that, I guess, mise-en-scène. So what is real or what is authentic? I guess, you know, what’s authentic are the floorboards of the Tenement Museum that we’re now so meticulously preserving as part of this construction project.
But the most authentic thing, I think, are the documents. That is what we have to kind of provide the base to let people explore and stitch the story together so the authenticity comes in. This is what we know of the family, and this is the story we’re going to tell based on it.
Abby: Well, I love that reference to reality, because what really is reality, and I completely agree, I think as long as the experience resonates with you as one that is perceived as reality or could have been reality or very authentic, which again, being authentic and being real, two different things, I think.
Annie: And I think what we try to do is be transparent about everything as much as possible. And I think the most important thing is visitors are empowered to go back and think about their own family histories. What do they know? What are the memories that were just passed down? Everyone has gaps in family history. No one, there’s no one walking around right now that knows the complete family history because there are some things that are passed down, and there are some things that are quite, quite purposefully not passed down.
Brenda: I would love to take another perspective on the question of authentic and likewise playing with the idea of objects. I’m thinking of Your Story, Our Story. So, this is your online collection, and it is populated by the public, and it is the sharing of images of personal objects, family objects, and very short little stories with each. And it is now a massive collection. And tell us about Your Story, Our Story, and what you see as being the most meaningful part of it.
Annie: That’s what people do with the object that’s been passed down to them. And in that effort to kind of write a few, a paragraph really about that, it requires them to kind of think about that object and, and understand it. And usually, I would say most of the time, the stories and the objects that are put up are not of real, you know, any kind of monetary value.
It’s the story value that they have that, that’s really important. And it started when my daughter went to a elementary school in Kensington, Brooklyn, which is a very diverse neighborhood. And so we started working with the teacher, the teachers at the school and had the fifth-grade classes who came to visit the museum experiment with this. So, before it was a website, it was just a school program.
And the most moving thing about that is that we invited the parents and grandparents and the students to share their objects at the museum. So, the students first came to the museum, went on a tour, saw the objects that were in the family apartments, did this assignment. The teachers did a lot of work, you know, guiding this, shepherding this, then brought them back so they could share this as a kind of assembly with the message being your stories and your objects are as important as the objects that are showcased at the museum.
And then to see the connections being formed across different cultures. And this is, again, a very diverse school ‚Jamaican, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, you know, Irish, Italian, Chinese, Jewish, Black, Puerto Rican, like this is all in one school. So any one class is going to have this multiplicity of stories, and yet the thread that binds them together are the way in which this is a way that people are making sense of their own culture. And so now teachers across the country can actually even create their own web page within the website so that they’re able to see their students year after year.
Abby: My next question was going to be how do you take this very personal and intimate on-location experience that a lot of people from around the world or even in New York City will never be able to have for one reason or another, and how do you make the mission reach all those people? And it sounds like just naturally because of who you are, which is why the Tenement Museum is so lucky to have you as president, you’ve started to do that through a relatively simple personal program with your local school, and then you’re always thinking about scalability. How do I see what works? How does it ladder up to our mission? How do I listen to our visitors, to people who are interacting with us? And then how do I grow bigger and bigger until now, it’s global?
Annie: Right, and I think always keeping in mind the relationship between bricks and mortar and digital, right, that that you want to have the digital mirror as much as possible, the kind of bricks and mortar interactions. And so, you know, we created the website so that even when they put the website up, they can then print it out and put up like an exhibit board in the classroom.
Also, really important to all of that are the relationships that can be formed with teachers so that we’re hearing what’s happening and we’re able to support that, and also the IMLS gave us that grant to scale it. So none of this can be scaled without funding. So again, a big shout out to funders like the IMLS or the NEH, for example, that has helped us in, in that work and kind of taking some of our ideas and scaling them to reach more people.
And it goes back to this idea about inclusion and exclusion. We only have so much space in these tenements, like there’s only so many stories we can do. How can we create other venues so that we’re able to keep adding stories and learning from the stories? And then, oh my God, my favorite, where we were dealing with a lot of college students in the New York area, CUNY students, and a number of them brought dictionaries.
And what these were were their parents, when they first came to this country, carried dictionaries with them. Chinese-English, Russian-English, Spanish-English. And so, the fact that then their children, now grown, were picking those as objects that was about their family history, I thought was so important. And then to bring it back to the Tenement Museum, once in a while, we’ll have people who will say something like, oh, immigrants back then learned English faster or, you know, immigrants today, they’re not learning English.
That kind of, of rhetoric. It’s amazing to kind of then use this example of the dictionary that people are carrying with them from place to place, from job to home to the subway, in order to learn this language and to grapple with it. It takes away the way that people can kind of simplify something in a statement. And the object makes us think about this, this process and this ordeal of coming to a new country and having to learn.
Brenda: The level of nuance between the storytellers and the objects themselves and the residents of the space is really quite remarkable. And again, the fact that the storytellers get to respond and even encourage, I think, questions and perspectives and points of view that they can then work with and weave together and braid together. And maybe that’s a nice, it’s a way that I like to think about the nature of the dynamic experience is that it is very much so, like a co-created weaving that each of the story ends up being by the very end.
Abby: So going back to one of my pet peeves still. It seems very everything’s very natural for you. You have the theatricality of it. You have the storytelling, you have the education, you’re listening to the visitor, you think visitor experience is important, like you’re here because we think you’re a shining example of how to do everything right. I see sometimes people may come away and go, well, we just don’t have the stories that Tenement Museum has. I think some people don’t listen to their visitors and don’t understand the stories that the visitors want to be told. They’re not listening. They’re doing the top-down decision-making. And for me, everything you’re saying seems very natural. And this is, of course, how it should be, but I don’t think it is that way everywhere.
Annie: But for us, we have to. Right. So I think that just the nature of how the tours were set up, the nature of the building, the kind of, I think the philosophy of the museum from the beginning, which was to make stories accessible and tell the stories of of ordinary people, of regular people. I think all of that just kind of lends itself to almost relying on hearing what it is that that people, the questions that people have and, and adapting to that.
Annie: Like we don’t have the luxury of creating a gallery, putting beautiful art on the wall, and just saying, you know, walk around.
Abby: Sure, sure.
Annie: Although, I mean, I think that’s a wonderful thing. I love to go to art museums and walk around, but.
Abby: But I think it’s not enough. I think the problem is that these places are going to age out or that people are going to go to more of the pop-up immersive experiences like King Tut, where you’ll start to learn about history in a different way, in maybe a more accessible way. So, I think this is an accessibility issue happening with some of our older institutions that needs to be tackled to get people in, to have fun, and be excited about history again instead of it being a group of I know objects are really important, but just objects that I don’t understand why I should care about them.
And so, I think what can be learned from your example is that you’re not special and that everybody should be doing what you’re doing within reason, obviously. The way that you’re approaching your mission and your visitors through storytelling, I think is something a lot of other institutions need to think about.
Annie: I’m trying to think in my mind if I had to decide what was more important, an immersive space versus a storyteller and educator, and I don’t know because I think they’re both so important. But I’m just wondering, you know, I find I love going to museums where there is an immersive space. So, I grew up in Milwaukee, and the Milwaukee Public Museum has this amazing exhibit. It’s called The Streets of Old Milwaukee. And they recreated a Milwaukee street from the turn of the 20th century, and I remember as a child, like every kid who grew up in Milwaukee, remembers walking through the cobblestone space. There’s like an old grandmother on a rocking chair that’s a little eerie. There’s like water that you could pump, and then you looked into stores and could see, like, again, these scenes.
And I think that fires up the imagination more than any card or text, wall text, or audio. It’s being able to kind of be thrust into the middle of a scene and have to make sense of it. So, you know, I think there are ways other museums can kind of like create interesting immersive spaces that get into the background of the artist or the writer or the inventor that they’re doing just to kind of set a scene for people and engage people in a slightly different way.
I saw this, the New York Public Library, I don’t know, maybe a decade ago, had a whole thing on writing, and you got to go into a room and try out different types of writing utensils to kind of get a sense of how things were put together. And it was so, you would have loved it, so multisensory and so hands-on.
And so, you know, I think there are really creative ways that people can kind of complement, even take a traditional exhibit, put the traditional exhibit up, but create something on the side that is speaking more towards the visitors’ need for a multisensory experience or the visitors need to get in the mind or the space of, of another creator.
Brenda: One of the things that Abby and I talk with folks about are digital technologies, and I’m thinking about our museums and the big digital immersive experiences that are all the rage these days. So, I’m just curious, how far do you push it? Because you could, you could really go a great distance with technology. What do you? What’s the conversation?
Annie: Where we are experimenting more with technology is actually in our virtual programs. So The Washington Post in December 2021 did this really great piece, and we’re so forever grateful to them where they use something called photogrammetry to recreate our saloon space and our Rogarshevsky apartment and our Levine apartment, and essentially it’s like they take these 3D photos, a million photos, and stitch them together in a digital model.
And so the experience is really immersive, and there’s real texture to the spaces. And so we then got a grant to have the whole building photogrammetry-ed, I don’t know, I’m sure there’s some a better word to use. And so then we’re able to, on our virtual field trips, be like, oh, here’s the Baldizzi apartment and actually use, use that or here’s the front hallway.
Brenda: That’s brilliant.
Annie: And I use it even teaching with my college students. And we were on their campus, which was very different from the Lower East Side, but to be able to kind of use the space, you really feel like you were there. Like the next day, I was like, oh, I was just at 97 Orchard, but I wasn’t, what was going on?
And I was like, Oh yeah, I was in that building. So I think there are great ways that technology can help us recreate the immersive experience and be able to kind of send our tours throughout the country again with the partnership of teachers who are willing to experiment with us.
Abby: She’s speaking my language. I love it. I couldn’t agree more. I was going to say that I think also what really gets me excited about the way you’re talking about these experiences is what, you know, at Lorem Ipsum, we talk about all the time, which is merging that physical interaction, the digital interaction, the visitors with the docents, with even digital docents, how you use lighting, how you use actors, how you use projection and use all of these tools in the toolbox.
And I think it’s at the very, very beginnings. I think we’re seeing more and more different places start experimenting, and I think there’s definitely no right and wrong. So it’s just really exciting to hear that the Tenement Museum is so innovative as well in the way that they’re presenting the information, the technology you’re open to using, and the storytelling you’re doing always, always thinking about the stories you’re telling and how they connect to the visitors.
Brenda: Where’s the Tenement Museum going to be in ten years?
Annie: It’s funny because my guess is that it will be some combination of looking back to our roots and always being inspired by the work that Ruth and Anita and so many of the founders of the museum did. Being inspired by our visitors and being inspired by our educators to kind of help us, help us move forward again, grounded in, grounded in some of the dynamics that were discovered and evolved early on in the, in the museum.
Abby: And so you’re not saying AI, then? I’m not hearing AI.
Brenda: Oh, stop it.
Annie: No. I don’t, no. I mean, the whole here’s what it is. I think, again, that so many people now we rely on, you know, our phones for community. We rely on computers for this and that. I mean, what makes the Tenement Museum innovative these days is how old-fashioned it is. It’s the fact that it is a bunch of people in a room trying to understand history, like how nerdy is that, but also how unique is that?
And that becomes, in some ways, the most radical thing is, is coming together in real-time with real people to tell the stories of real people.
Brenda: And it’s real people also trying to understand themselves.
Annie: I think that’s right, yeah.
Brenda: And each other, and that’s definitely something that plays out at the Tenement Museum.
Abby: Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Annie. This has been really a joy to hear all about your experiences and get to share them with everybody today. And I encourage everyone to head over to the Tenement Museum. Check it out for yourself, and you’ll have an amazing, amazing time. And if you like what you heard today, subscribe for more episodes of Matters of Experience wherever you listen to podcasts, and make sure to please leave a rating and a review and share with a friend. We’ll see you next time.
Brenda: Thank you, everybody.
Annie: Thank you so much.
[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.
An American Immigrant and Migrant Experience with Annie Polland
Data-Driven Designed Experiences with Cathy Sigmond
[Music]
Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: I’m Brenda Cowan.
Abby: So today we’re speaking with Cathy Sigmond, Head of Strategy for Kera Collective, a firm that specializes in research, evaluation, and strategy for museums and cultural institutions. Now, Cathy’s been called many things in her career. She’s worn many hats, ranging from evaluator, UX researcher to strategist. I’m keen to find out which hat fits most comfortably. So Cathy, welcome to Matters of Experience.
Cathy: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.
Abby: Okay, so I’m going to start off by setting the stage a little bit and in a bit of dramatic way.
Brenda: As always. Hold on, listeners.
Abby: I feel sometimes that museums and cultural institutions really need to evaluate their role in society, and to do that, they need to listen more to what the visitors want instead of assuming as an institution that they know what they want and assume that what they’re presenting is actually hitting the mark when often it isn’t. So overall, Cathy, how is the landscape for museums right now?
Cathy: Very big question, but an exciting one. So, I feel like the landscape for museums is really good and always has been. For me, I got into the field because I was always fascinated by how museums are this really great convergence of different stories and ideas and creative people who visit them and creative people who work in them. And I think that that blend of creativity and diversity just really keeps me fueled working in them and keeps me optimistic about the landscape for museums.
And you mentioned thinking about the idea of whether what they’re doing really hits the mark. Not everything is always going to, but that’s okay. I feel always optimistic that as long as museums are listening and learning, then the landscape is always going to be really good, and there’s always an opportunity to grow from any experience.
Brenda: Cathy, with your work, you aim to help museums, as you put it, make a positive difference in everyone’s lives, and that’s a very lofty, very important ambition, and we would love to hear. How do you think a museum can make a positive, lasting difference in someone’s life, and how do you capture everyone?
Cathy: Well, it is a lofty ambition. I’d say that it’s not just my own. It’s one that I share with all of my teammates at Kera Collective, and I feel that’s important because working with the team is really, really essential to how we work. But I think that that’s also not an ambition that’s unique to our firm and our way of working.
I think no one would be in the museum fields doing whatever it is the amazing work they do is if they didn’t believe that there was a possibility that museums could make a positive difference in someone’s life, right? It’s kind of like, what’s the point? Why are you here if you don’t believe that as well? And so we really seek to work with museums and our clients, both through formal official projects and through just conversations that we have with our colleagues in the field to keep everything really grounded on the visitor and the audience and thinking about, well you’re doing something for someone to receive it, right? And for me, keeping that sort of the center of what you do is, is really what drives me. Now, to your point about like, well, how can you possibly touch everybody positively? The thing is, is like not every single thing is going to, but that’s okay.
One of the things we do a lot of work with our clients on is clarifying through this initiative, right? So through this exhibition, through this program, through this app, who is it that you hope to most effect, really who is this for, and what would success look like for them? So if it, if there was a positive outcome, tell us what that would look like. What would people say? What would people do? What would you see happen?
I think it’s being really clear that it’s not sort of trying to make a positive difference with every single person through every single thing, but through the collective set of things that you offer as an institution, that’s really sort of where the magic is.
Abby: So overall, I think a lot of museums have a generalized idea of visitors. It’s pretty common in our industry. You group them into, you know, four – families, locals, tourists. Brenda, you have really fun names that you teach. What are your names?
Brenda: Oh, well, I don’t know how fun they are, but maybe you’re thinking of streakers, strollers, and studiers?
Abby: That’s what I’m thinking about.
Brenda: Okay. Yup.
Abby: But I think, though, that these groups don’t tell us what audiences value, right? Or believe in. Are you saying that we can’t group people anymore? So, just sort of give me your thoughts on this.
Cathy: The way that we like to think about grouping people in a way we find helpful for museums and really for any type of organization, if I’m being honest, is thinking about grouping people by their values. So it is not about, it’s not about demographics, it’s not about people’s age, it’s not about where they live necessarily. I mean, there’s very good reasons to focus on geography and demographics, which is sort of a whole other thing.
But generally, I find when you think about focusing your work and what you do for a group of people who value X or who are motivated by X, and you identify that as your target audience, you know that person could be an adult in their sixties who tends to visit museums alone, or that person who values this could be somebody of a much younger age who tends to visit, you know, in social groups, and there could be all sorts of demographics thrown into this bucket. But the common thing that this persona or this audience type has is that the motivations and values that they share.
Abby: So how does data, Cathy, help museums understand these groups better?
Cathy: Well, data is a big term. Working as a researcher, I love the word data, and I work with, with audience data every day. But the word data is also a bit misleading if you ask me because what you’re really gathering is like stories from people. Thinking of it as data can kind of like remove you a bit from the fact that it’s, it’s sort of a human talking.
But broadly speaking, if you have not just made assumptions about these audiences but really heard from them, heard from them through lots of different methods, could be through interviews, could be through focus groups, could be through some sort of survey, observed their behavior both in and outside of museum spaces. All of this data can help paint a picture for you of who these people are, and maybe it’s learning more about what brought them through the door. Maybe it’s gathering data on what they did while they were there, I’ve mentioned observations of people in spaces. Maybe it’s doing that and also talking to them after and seeing what you can learn both from what they share was memorable from them and what you observe them doing, and maybe any pain points or barriers that come up along the way.
Brenda: Isn’t it critical for evaluators especially to use the idea of, you know, or I’ll say your word, data? Isn’t that sort of layer of remove really critical so that there’s objectivity when you’re actually trying to measure success or determine value? When you are listening to people’s stories, don’t you need to really sort of think about it in a scientific way, for lack of a better word, so that you’re really, really being very objective?
Cathy: Yeah, totally. It’s kind of a push and pull that I think exists within the evaluation fields because, you know, on the one hand, we’re people too, and we, you know, we feel along with people, when people share sensitive information with us, you know, something that’s been difficult for them about their museum experience or that has been a barrier for them to coming, and we’re trying to understand why. And, you know, so it’s, it’s a bit false in a way for us to have to put on that like removed lens, you know, to be one step away from that. And we try really hard when collecting data and knowing that that when we’re quote-unquote, collecting data, you know, that means we’re speaking with, we have the privilege of speaking with members of a museum’s audience or people who aren’t museums audience yet, but who are important to them and who are in the community in some way.
And, you know, it’s really important for us that no one we’re ever working with to gather data from to learn about ever feels like they’re being treated as data. But you’re right that on the analytical side of things, one of the main jobs of an evaluation, evaluator at all, and particularly an evaluation firm like ours that operates in a consulting manner. And for us, you know, we are not the, we’re not as attached on a day-to-day basis to the work the museum is doing. We immerse ourselves in it as much as possible when we have the privilege to work with the place. But it’s also our role to be that third party and to say, Well, well, hang on. You know, this is sounds like a really great idea you have. But what we just learned from our audiences through X, Y, or Z method or methods tells us that maybe, you know, a different direction should be something we should consider. And so it’s our role sort of play that advocate for the audience based on the data that we’re gathering at all times.
It’s kind of a push and pull as I said, it can be tricky to maintain that level of quote-unquote objectivity. And, you know, everybody has their biases. So we’re, we’re as objective as we tell ourselves we are.
Brenda: I want to pull over to the word success, which has come up a couple of times now. Cathy, in your experience, how are museums and cultural institutions defining what success even means?
Cathy: Yeah, I mean, there’s no one size fits all definition for success. One of the things we work a lot with our clients on is helping them to identify what we call their distinct qualities. This is, you know, you could call it lots of different things, but it boils down to what as an institution makes you unique, you know, what do you offer or could you offer or do you have at your disposal that no other place has?
You know, we work a lot with our clients and helping them before we even get to any stage of evaluation, helping them think about what it is that they’re passionate about the work for, you know what, what drives them and their staff and their team, and what makes this place, this museum, the medium through which everyone who is there does their work for the public. What is it that you that sort of makes you unique? Then we can talk about what success will mean for each of those things.
I think when you think about it on a smaller level, not always this big institutional level because that’s that’s really hard, I guess is what I’m trying to say, like it’s really hard to think about what would make this museum successful as a whole, but thinking about what would make this exhibition successful for the target audience and really working with people to say, okay, well, what would you hope to see, in what ways would someone be changed? And we talk about it a lot about outcomes being maybe behavioral, so people would learn a new skill. We talk about outcomes in terms of cognitive outcomes, so that’s thinking about, something museums think about a lot, learning, right? What, what new facts or ways, or attitudes would people come away with?
We think about outcomes in terms of emotions. What kinds of emotions do you want this experience to bring up for people and why? And then we think about, okay, well, so those are the outcomes that you’ve defined would be successful. Let’s talk about what would you see people do? What would you hear them say? Sometimes it’s kind of it’s easy, but it, some of the outcomes, it’s like, well, well, that’s not measurable. You know, that’s not we’ll never know if that’s actually happening. That’s the outcome we’re aspiring to. But it’s not measurable. And we’ll say, no, it is, we, we can think about the kinds of things that people would say, what are some of the words they would say to describe this thing?
If you want them to think about, you know, outer space in this new particular way? Well, let’s talk about how, you know, what kinds of questions might they ask. And we try to get really specific with, like, let’s talk about success in the context of this initiative you’re working on now. Because I think that when you do that, and you do that regularly as part of your practice as a museum for each new thing that you do, there is a purpose behind each of it, and it adds up to some some sort of success on a bigger level.
Abby: So, Cathy, you don’t design, correct? Your company doesn’t do the designs.
Cathy: We don’t. So it depends who you ask. No, we don’t do the designs, but we do work a lot with designers. That would be through what we call front-end or formative evaluation, where we’re doing contact testing for an exhibition. And concept testing, in that case, might be like, for example, we worked with the museum years ago that was designing a, an exhibition, an art exhibition on home and Brenda, you’ve heard this story many times. I think.
Brenda: I love this example so much.
Cathy: Yeah, it’s one of my favorites. I always come back to it. It was a beautiful concept, you know, the idea of home, something that that in some way, shape, or form, whether positively or negatively, everybody has a connection to this idea. And they had a couple of specific ways that they wanted to talk about the idea of home in the exhibition.
And it was an object-based exhibition with objects from their collection, but all sorts of art objects from all different years, all different types of art, you know, some sculptures, some photographs. And they had a few ways they wanted to talk about home, and they basically hired us to put some of these ideas in front of visitors to the museum and have a conversation with them before we even showed them anything about what home means to them. What comes to mind when we think of that idea, and then slowly introducing some of the ways through really rough, I wouldn’t even call it label text, just like a rough outline of, well, we might talk about this, and we might talk about this, or if I give you these key words like, what does this make you think of and show you these objects related to this phrase, what associations do you make?
And those aren’t literally the questions we’re asking visitors. Those are more the things that the museums wanted to know. And through some some really cleverly designed interviews, we’re able to extract so much information that helped to shape designs. So we were able to understand what kinds of associations people within the museum currently make with the idea of home, what objects that the museum has selected really do evoke an idea of home for people and which don’t and why? What kinds of questions people are asking about the idea of home, and what they wonder about other people’s experiences of home.
All this to say, we, we do a lot of sort of concept testing and front end evaluation early on to help shape designs, and then we do do prototyping in a more formative sense, you know, that could be hands-on prototyping or even really specific message testing when you’re at maybe 60, 60 percent design, something like that.
Abby: Yeah, because I was thinking as you were talking your process, you do an awful lot of research and obviously work closely with museums and cultural institutions. There’s a huge difference, though, from getting that list together. Everything looks fantastic for you. Everything looks great for the institution. But then the implementation, the design, you know, is a definitely a completely different stage, and I believe things can get lost. Things can get lost in translation, and if there’s not a lot of coordination and if you’re not there in some way, shape, or form, I can imagine that you know, a separate design team could interpolate the findings you have in a very different direction or completely ignore them.
Cathy: Yeah, and you’re totally right. I’ve seen it happen, but that needle has moved a lot in my experience with designers and museums. We used to have to fight for, for that presence with design teams, maybe a lot more. And I’m happy to say that at least in my, my small window of experience, that that has started to really shift.
Lots of people can’t quite pinpoint like what’s the point of human-centered research. And really, it’s to be the advocates for the people who are going to experience the thing that you are designing. Right? And, you know, we’re not here to be these sort of like data dictators and saying you have to do it this way because the data says. We’re sort of here to help guide and shape, just making sure that every decision is made with the audience in mind.
And sometimes, we have big gaps in our knowledge about what an audience’s reaction is going to be to something. Or, as I mentioned, you know, the motivations of this particular audience. We – an exhibition, for example, might be being designed because there is, on a global scale, a lack of knowledge, you know, about a really important topic. If you don’t bring people along for the ride, they don’t feel like it’s something that’s made for them. But you also are kind of designing a bit blind and working based off assumptions. So I really see the role of designers and evaluators slash UX researcher slash human-centered researchers slash strategists, you know, call them what you will, but I really see the, that tie between designers and data gatherers and synthesizers as really, really strong.
Brenda: On another note, tell us about a situation that you’ve been in because I’d be willing to bet that you’ve been in this situation where an institution is asking something from you, and you know that what they really need doesn’t match with what it is that they’re asking you to do.
Cathy: Well, I’ll say that this happens, but it doesn’t happen because any place is like completely, you know, has no idea what they need, and we’re the ones who can come in and tell you how to do everything. I find that happens in a very specific situation. It’s when we get contacted, you know, an email from somebody or a message of some sort about possibly doing a study or whether it’s an RFP that’s very, you know, it explains what the thing that they would like evaluated is, but then it’s very prescriptive on the methods that should be used to gather the data. You know, we want this many surveys with a sample size of this and, you know, this many interviews done exactly with these people.
It’s not to say that those methods are necessarily always a bad recommendation, but oftentimes we really like to get as many questions in early as we can because we find out more information later about, like, oh, you’re really actually wondering about this? Well, if that’s the case and this is what you would need to help you forward in your design work or to help you make decisions about, you know, about how to do this program differently for the next year, then we really should think about maybe not doing a survey, because a survey, while it gets you a lot of data really quickly, doesn’t really go deep with any one individual and doesn’t get at the nuance of people’s experiences. Maybe we need to do focus groups instead. Sometimes people have the best of intentions and they, they know what questions they’ve got, but they don’t quite know how to go about answering them.
Abby: Yeah, we also sort of see, an institution will come at the very beginning and think that they actually have one set of problems that they need to solve, but from our research, it turns out that it’s actually not the right set of problems and guiding them along this almost journey of self-discovery is really hard because I think as we are in our individual lives, you know what we want to be and what we are are often two very different things.
Bringing those two things together and being real, keeping it real and understanding sort of what problems you need to solve is often really difficult. Have you ever experienced clients that are potentially coming, thinking that if they can solve this set of problems, then it’ll fix everything, but actually, when you’ve done the research, you’ve realized it’s a totally different set of problems?
Cathy: In general, yeah, I think this kind of thing happens all the time that you know, sometimes this happens when an institution wants to go straight to doing evaluation. They want to go straight to some form of measuring, and we find that it’s almost too early to do that, that what really needed to be done and needs to be done is a defining of who this, who this exhibition or who this program or who this initiative is for, so defining of audience and then really articulating sort of the why, like the outcomes that you hope for and doing all of that before you go out and just measure for the sake of measuring. I find that that kind of thing comes up quite a lot.
But yeah, it’s definitely sort of we’re, we’re always learning as we go with clients and getting to know – because we’re not there every day. Like that’s a, that’s a consulting thing as well. But it sounds like you’ve experienced too where there’s often like sort of a second layer to peel back of what’s really going on. And it’s as you begin the work that you start to realize that there’s a lot more to it. And so that’s, that’s a part of being adaptable and we try to be very flexible in our strategy and evaluation work.
Abby: So, let’s think about success from your personal perspective. You can have a happy client, you can have a happy institution, but you know you’re not happy. And I know there’s been instances because that’s always those instances. So, when you think back to those moments, what is it that real success, you know, for Cathy looks like?
Cathy: So it’s funny. For being such an audience advocate through our work, I often don’t get to see the end result, especially when we are working primarily on those front-end concept testing and more formative prototyping or sort of testing designs as their further along. That’s still early and it’s before the thing is out there for the world to really experience at scale.
For me, like the satisfaction comes from hearing later, hopefully, you know, through just an email or conversation, that you’ve been returning to the data, that those tools that we left you with are continuing to be used. We were really fortunate several years ago to do a lot of prototyping and concept testing work as the Americans exhibition at the National Museum of the American Indian, which is a Smithsonian Institution in DC, as that was being designed, and it was a new permanent exhibition, so meant to be up for quite a long time.
And it’s all about the pervasiveness of Indian imagery and in, in our lives. But it’s it’s a really powerful exhibition about our shared history with Native Americans and the testing that we did, and the time in the project at which we got to be audience advocates was quite early on. Then, you know, I – it was kind of not intentionally, but a bit of a closed door situation where then all of a sudden, you know, it was up later on, and I have to say that, you know, just going to visit that space on my own afterwards and overhearing some of the conversations that I got to hear from visitors unofficially, you know, I wasn’t, I wasn’t officially gathering data for any work at that point.
I remembered some of the messages and ideas that the museum had been going for and things that they hoped people would wonder about or, or the time that they hoped people would linger in the space. And I’m being a bad evaluator now, just speaking based on, based on, one anecdotal visit. But for me, I remember just thinking in that moment, oh, this is what they were going for, you know, and I’m so happy that the work that we helped do early on helped them get to a point of shaping the design that this was even possible to happen.
Abby: I was going to say, I don’t think you’re the only person who’s actually sort of haunted the halls after an exhibition has opened. I know I’ve done that, and it’s amazing because you just want to be that fly on the wall as people are enjoying and investigating and playing with your, your exhibition. So yeah, I think there’s a lot of people listening right now who’ve done the same thing.
So, what are some of the components of a contemporary museum experience? We chatted with Monica O. Montgomery about museums being community centers, a place for people to get together, share their stories. And I’m also thinking about social media and how important, quite frankly, that is to storytelling. So can you sort of talk about the components of a contemporary immersive experience from your perspective and what you’ve seen evolving over the last five years?
Cathy: Museums have to think about themselves as this sort of like, this like living organism that’s constantly changing, and you, you can’t just rest on your laurels of thinking of experience design and interaction with visitors as one handful of things that you know and do really well. It’s great to have a handful of things that you know and do really well, but there’s always going to be more that you could do.
And I think the thing that we do a lot as strategists and as human-centered researchers is really helping museums realize that every single touchpoint with a person matters and that there are so many possible touchpoints you could have that museums aren’t in the habit historically of always, always thinking about. If we are going to talk about an exhibition, well, let’s talk about it, and let’s really drill down into what you want to do with that thing.
But you also have to step back and realize it’s not the only thing that you’re doing, and it is not the only way that a person could come across something that your museum does. There’s all sorts of ways, through social media, through a blog post, through what your museum staff is writing on LinkedIn, through gosh, there’s so many different, there are many different avenues.
And I feel like hearing myself say that it sounds like I’m advocating for just do more, do more, do more, do more, do more. I think that’s not really it. It’s finding a balance between not being afraid to try new things but also trying new things with purpose and saying, okay, there’s always one or two things we already do and do really, really well. Let’s keep doing those while leaving a little bit of room to try some new stuff.
Brenda: I actually, as a strategist, I’m really curious, what have some of your favorite projects been that are really, really innovative?
Cathy: Putting me on the spot here to, to pick favorites in the museum world. But, I will name one organization that I’m now a very big fan of. They’re called Made by Us, and they are a coalition, a consortium of history museums and organizations. They have kind of a, a great team that’s coalescing all of these disparate organizations.
Their mission is really about engaging 18 to 30-year-olds with history and history museums, but not just for the benefit of museums, for them doing civic good in society. And I think, though, the way that they do their work is, is actually, it’s sort of museums operating in a totally different way, and it really has caught my attention.
It’s all digital, and it’s all remote, but they’re still trying to add some in-person events and it’s, it’s really building on the strengths that history organizations bring to the table and helping them be in conversation with 18 to 30-year-olds, which is a really pivotal time for doing public good, figuring out who you are. We were fortunate to do some evaluation work on their flagship program, which is called Civic Season. It runs every summer.
We’ve also had some great work recently with organizations doing innovative stuff in sort of the digital gaming space around teaching science concepts through gaming. And so that’s sort of an area that I’m really excited to see. And then, you know, for me, I’m really always going to be passionate about exhibitions. I’m by no means an expert on it, but I really look to all the great organizations that are experimenting with different immersive stuff out there, both in and out of museums, and so for me, that’s kind of an area to watch that I as an evaluator and an audience, audience advocate, I really love to be able to work more in.
Abby: Well, Cathy, thank you so much for enduring our rapid-fire questions today. I just love the way you describe a museum as a living organism that’s constantly changing. I think that’s absolutely fantastic and something we should all aspire to create. And that idea of balancing between sort of trying new things with purpose and keeping what’s working as part of that visitor experience, I think, is really an inspiration and keeps you on solid ground, so thank you so much for joining us, Cathy, and thanks for everyone out there listening. If you liked what you heard today, 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.
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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.
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Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: I’m Brenda Cowan.
Abby: So today we’re speaking with Cathy Sigmond, Head of Strategy for Kera Collective, a firm that specializes in research, evaluation, and strategy for museums and cultural institutions. Now, Cathy’s been called many things in her career. She’s worn many hats, ranging from evaluator, UX researcher to strategist. I’m keen to find out which hat fits most comfortably. So Cathy, welcome to Matters of Experience.
Cathy: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.
Abby: Okay, so I’m going to start off by setting the stage a little bit and in a bit of dramatic way.
Brenda: As always. Hold on, listeners.
Abby: I feel sometimes that museums and cultural institutions really need to evaluate their role in society, and to do that, they need to listen more to what the visitors want instead of assuming as an institution that they know what they want and assume that what they’re presenting is actually hitting the mark when often it isn’t. So overall, Cathy, how is the landscape for museums right now?
Cathy: Very big question, but an exciting one. So, I feel like the landscape for museums is really good and always has been. For me, I got into the field because I was always fascinated by how museums are this really great convergence of different stories and ideas and creative people who visit them and creative people who work in them. And I think that that blend of creativity and diversity just really keeps me fueled working in them and keeps me optimistic about the landscape for museums.
And you mentioned thinking about the idea of whether what they’re doing really hits the mark. Not everything is always going to, but that’s okay. I feel always optimistic that as long as museums are listening and learning, then the landscape is always going to be really good, and there’s always an opportunity to grow from any experience.
Brenda: Cathy, with your work, you aim to help museums, as you put it, make a positive difference in everyone’s lives, and that’s a very lofty, very important ambition, and we would love to hear. How do you think a museum can make a positive, lasting difference in someone’s life, and how do you capture everyone?
Cathy: Well, it is a lofty ambition. I’d say that it’s not just my own. It’s one that I share with all of my teammates at Kera Collective, and I feel that’s important because working with the team is really, really essential to how we work. But I think that that’s also not an ambition that’s unique to our firm and our way of working.
I think no one would be in the museum fields doing whatever it is the amazing work they do is if they didn’t believe that there was a possibility that museums could make a positive difference in someone’s life, right? It’s kind of like, what’s the point? Why are you here if you don’t believe that as well? And so we really seek to work with museums and our clients, both through formal official projects and through just conversations that we have with our colleagues in the field to keep everything really grounded on the visitor and the audience and thinking about, well you’re doing something for someone to receive it, right? And for me, keeping that sort of the center of what you do is, is really what drives me. Now, to your point about like, well, how can you possibly touch everybody positively? The thing is, is like not every single thing is going to, but that’s okay.
One of the things we do a lot of work with our clients on is clarifying through this initiative, right? So through this exhibition, through this program, through this app, who is it that you hope to most effect, really who is this for, and what would success look like for them? So if it, if there was a positive outcome, tell us what that would look like. What would people say? What would people do? What would you see happen?
I think it’s being really clear that it’s not sort of trying to make a positive difference with every single person through every single thing, but through the collective set of things that you offer as an institution, that’s really sort of where the magic is.
Abby: So overall, I think a lot of museums have a generalized idea of visitors. It’s pretty common in our industry. You group them into, you know, four – families, locals, tourists. Brenda, you have really fun names that you teach. What are your names?
Brenda: Oh, well, I don’t know how fun they are, but maybe you’re thinking of streakers, strollers, and studiers?
Abby: That’s what I’m thinking about.
Brenda: Okay. Yup.
Abby: But I think, though, that these groups don’t tell us what audiences value, right? Or believe in. Are you saying that we can’t group people anymore? So, just sort of give me your thoughts on this.
Cathy: The way that we like to think about grouping people in a way we find helpful for museums and really for any type of organization, if I’m being honest, is thinking about grouping people by their values. So it is not about, it’s not about demographics, it’s not about people’s age, it’s not about where they live necessarily. I mean, there’s very good reasons to focus on geography and demographics, which is sort of a whole other thing.
But generally, I find when you think about focusing your work and what you do for a group of people who value X or who are motivated by X, and you identify that as your target audience, you know that person could be an adult in their sixties who tends to visit museums alone, or that person who values this could be somebody of a much younger age who tends to visit, you know, in social groups, and there could be all sorts of demographics thrown into this bucket. But the common thing that this persona or this audience type has is that the motivations and values that they share.
Abby: So how does data, Cathy, help museums understand these groups better?
Cathy: Well, data is a big term. Working as a researcher, I love the word data, and I work with, with audience data every day. But the word data is also a bit misleading if you ask me because what you’re really gathering is like stories from people. Thinking of it as data can kind of like remove you a bit from the fact that it’s, it’s sort of a human talking.
But broadly speaking, if you have not just made assumptions about these audiences but really heard from them, heard from them through lots of different methods, could be through interviews, could be through focus groups, could be through some sort of survey, observed their behavior both in and outside of museum spaces. All of this data can help paint a picture for you of who these people are, and maybe it’s learning more about what brought them through the door. Maybe it’s gathering data on what they did while they were there, I’ve mentioned observations of people in spaces. Maybe it’s doing that and also talking to them after and seeing what you can learn both from what they share was memorable from them and what you observe them doing, and maybe any pain points or barriers that come up along the way.
Brenda: Isn’t it critical for evaluators especially to use the idea of, you know, or I’ll say your word, data? Isn’t that sort of layer of remove really critical so that there’s objectivity when you’re actually trying to measure success or determine value? When you are listening to people’s stories, don’t you need to really sort of think about it in a scientific way, for lack of a better word, so that you’re really, really being very objective?
Cathy: Yeah, totally. It’s kind of a push and pull that I think exists within the evaluation fields because, you know, on the one hand, we’re people too, and we, you know, we feel along with people, when people share sensitive information with us, you know, something that’s been difficult for them about their museum experience or that has been a barrier for them to coming, and we’re trying to understand why. And, you know, so it’s, it’s a bit false in a way for us to have to put on that like removed lens, you know, to be one step away from that. And we try really hard when collecting data and knowing that that when we’re quote-unquote, collecting data, you know, that means we’re speaking with, we have the privilege of speaking with members of a museum’s audience or people who aren’t museums audience yet, but who are important to them and who are in the community in some way.
And, you know, it’s really important for us that no one we’re ever working with to gather data from to learn about ever feels like they’re being treated as data. But you’re right that on the analytical side of things, one of the main jobs of an evaluation, evaluator at all, and particularly an evaluation firm like ours that operates in a consulting manner. And for us, you know, we are not the, we’re not as attached on a day-to-day basis to the work the museum is doing. We immerse ourselves in it as much as possible when we have the privilege to work with the place. But it’s also our role to be that third party and to say, Well, well, hang on. You know, this is sounds like a really great idea you have. But what we just learned from our audiences through X, Y, or Z method or methods tells us that maybe, you know, a different direction should be something we should consider. And so it’s our role sort of play that advocate for the audience based on the data that we’re gathering at all times.
It’s kind of a push and pull as I said, it can be tricky to maintain that level of quote-unquote objectivity. And, you know, everybody has their biases. So we’re, we’re as objective as we tell ourselves we are.
Brenda: I want to pull over to the word success, which has come up a couple of times now. Cathy, in your experience, how are museums and cultural institutions defining what success even means?
Cathy: Yeah, I mean, there’s no one size fits all definition for success. One of the things we work a lot with our clients on is helping them to identify what we call their distinct qualities. This is, you know, you could call it lots of different things, but it boils down to what as an institution makes you unique, you know, what do you offer or could you offer or do you have at your disposal that no other place has?
You know, we work a lot with our clients and helping them before we even get to any stage of evaluation, helping them think about what it is that they’re passionate about the work for, you know what, what drives them and their staff and their team, and what makes this place, this museum, the medium through which everyone who is there does their work for the public. What is it that you that sort of makes you unique? Then we can talk about what success will mean for each of those things.
I think when you think about it on a smaller level, not always this big institutional level because that’s that’s really hard, I guess is what I’m trying to say, like it’s really hard to think about what would make this museum successful as a whole, but thinking about what would make this exhibition successful for the target audience and really working with people to say, okay, well, what would you hope to see, in what ways would someone be changed? And we talk about it a lot about outcomes being maybe behavioral, so people would learn a new skill. We talk about outcomes in terms of cognitive outcomes, so that’s thinking about, something museums think about a lot, learning, right? What, what new facts or ways, or attitudes would people come away with?
We think about outcomes in terms of emotions. What kinds of emotions do you want this experience to bring up for people and why? And then we think about, okay, well, so those are the outcomes that you’ve defined would be successful. Let’s talk about what would you see people do? What would you hear them say? Sometimes it’s kind of it’s easy, but it, some of the outcomes, it’s like, well, well, that’s not measurable. You know, that’s not we’ll never know if that’s actually happening. That’s the outcome we’re aspiring to. But it’s not measurable. And we’ll say, no, it is, we, we can think about the kinds of things that people would say, what are some of the words they would say to describe this thing?
If you want them to think about, you know, outer space in this new particular way? Well, let’s talk about how, you know, what kinds of questions might they ask. And we try to get really specific with, like, let’s talk about success in the context of this initiative you’re working on now. Because I think that when you do that, and you do that regularly as part of your practice as a museum for each new thing that you do, there is a purpose behind each of it, and it adds up to some some sort of success on a bigger level.
Abby: So, Cathy, you don’t design, correct? Your company doesn’t do the designs.
Cathy: We don’t. So it depends who you ask. No, we don’t do the designs, but we do work a lot with designers. That would be through what we call front-end or formative evaluation, where we’re doing contact testing for an exhibition. And concept testing, in that case, might be like, for example, we worked with the museum years ago that was designing a, an exhibition, an art exhibition on home and Brenda, you’ve heard this story many times. I think.
Brenda: I love this example so much.
Cathy: Yeah, it’s one of my favorites. I always come back to it. It was a beautiful concept, you know, the idea of home, something that that in some way, shape, or form, whether positively or negatively, everybody has a connection to this idea. And they had a couple of specific ways that they wanted to talk about the idea of home in the exhibition.
And it was an object-based exhibition with objects from their collection, but all sorts of art objects from all different years, all different types of art, you know, some sculptures, some photographs. And they had a few ways they wanted to talk about home, and they basically hired us to put some of these ideas in front of visitors to the museum and have a conversation with them before we even showed them anything about what home means to them. What comes to mind when we think of that idea, and then slowly introducing some of the ways through really rough, I wouldn’t even call it label text, just like a rough outline of, well, we might talk about this, and we might talk about this, or if I give you these key words like, what does this make you think of and show you these objects related to this phrase, what associations do you make?
And those aren’t literally the questions we’re asking visitors. Those are more the things that the museums wanted to know. And through some some really cleverly designed interviews, we’re able to extract so much information that helped to shape designs. So we were able to understand what kinds of associations people within the museum currently make with the idea of home, what objects that the museum has selected really do evoke an idea of home for people and which don’t and why? What kinds of questions people are asking about the idea of home, and what they wonder about other people’s experiences of home.
All this to say, we, we do a lot of sort of concept testing and front end evaluation early on to help shape designs, and then we do do prototyping in a more formative sense, you know, that could be hands-on prototyping or even really specific message testing when you’re at maybe 60, 60 percent design, something like that.
Abby: Yeah, because I was thinking as you were talking your process, you do an awful lot of research and obviously work closely with museums and cultural institutions. There’s a huge difference, though, from getting that list together. Everything looks fantastic for you. Everything looks great for the institution. But then the implementation, the design, you know, is a definitely a completely different stage, and I believe things can get lost. Things can get lost in translation, and if there’s not a lot of coordination and if you’re not there in some way, shape, or form, I can imagine that you know, a separate design team could interpolate the findings you have in a very different direction or completely ignore them.
Cathy: Yeah, and you’re totally right. I’ve seen it happen, but that needle has moved a lot in my experience with designers and museums. We used to have to fight for, for that presence with design teams, maybe a lot more. And I’m happy to say that at least in my, my small window of experience, that that has started to really shift.
Lots of people can’t quite pinpoint like what’s the point of human-centered research. And really, it’s to be the advocates for the people who are going to experience the thing that you are designing. Right? And, you know, we’re not here to be these sort of like data dictators and saying you have to do it this way because the data says. We’re sort of here to help guide and shape, just making sure that every decision is made with the audience in mind.
And sometimes, we have big gaps in our knowledge about what an audience’s reaction is going to be to something. Or, as I mentioned, you know, the motivations of this particular audience. We – an exhibition, for example, might be being designed because there is, on a global scale, a lack of knowledge, you know, about a really important topic. If you don’t bring people along for the ride, they don’t feel like it’s something that’s made for them. But you also are kind of designing a bit blind and working based off assumptions. So I really see the role of designers and evaluators slash UX researcher slash human-centered researchers slash strategists, you know, call them what you will, but I really see the, that tie between designers and data gatherers and synthesizers as really, really strong.
Brenda: On another note, tell us about a situation that you’ve been in because I’d be willing to bet that you’ve been in this situation where an institution is asking something from you, and you know that what they really need doesn’t match with what it is that they’re asking you to do.
Cathy: Well, I’ll say that this happens, but it doesn’t happen because any place is like completely, you know, has no idea what they need, and we’re the ones who can come in and tell you how to do everything. I find that happens in a very specific situation. It’s when we get contacted, you know, an email from somebody or a message of some sort about possibly doing a study or whether it’s an RFP that’s very, you know, it explains what the thing that they would like evaluated is, but then it’s very prescriptive on the methods that should be used to gather the data. You know, we want this many surveys with a sample size of this and, you know, this many interviews done exactly with these people.
It’s not to say that those methods are necessarily always a bad recommendation, but oftentimes we really like to get as many questions in early as we can because we find out more information later about, like, oh, you’re really actually wondering about this? Well, if that’s the case and this is what you would need to help you forward in your design work or to help you make decisions about, you know, about how to do this program differently for the next year, then we really should think about maybe not doing a survey, because a survey, while it gets you a lot of data really quickly, doesn’t really go deep with any one individual and doesn’t get at the nuance of people’s experiences. Maybe we need to do focus groups instead. Sometimes people have the best of intentions and they, they know what questions they’ve got, but they don’t quite know how to go about answering them.
Abby: Yeah, we also sort of see, an institution will come at the very beginning and think that they actually have one set of problems that they need to solve, but from our research, it turns out that it’s actually not the right set of problems and guiding them along this almost journey of self-discovery is really hard because I think as we are in our individual lives, you know what we want to be and what we are are often two very different things.
Bringing those two things together and being real, keeping it real and understanding sort of what problems you need to solve is often really difficult. Have you ever experienced clients that are potentially coming, thinking that if they can solve this set of problems, then it’ll fix everything, but actually, when you’ve done the research, you’ve realized it’s a totally different set of problems?
Cathy: In general, yeah, I think this kind of thing happens all the time that you know, sometimes this happens when an institution wants to go straight to doing evaluation. They want to go straight to some form of measuring, and we find that it’s almost too early to do that, that what really needed to be done and needs to be done is a defining of who this, who this exhibition or who this program or who this initiative is for, so defining of audience and then really articulating sort of the why, like the outcomes that you hope for and doing all of that before you go out and just measure for the sake of measuring. I find that that kind of thing comes up quite a lot.
But yeah, it’s definitely sort of we’re, we’re always learning as we go with clients and getting to know – because we’re not there every day. Like that’s a, that’s a consulting thing as well. But it sounds like you’ve experienced too where there’s often like sort of a second layer to peel back of what’s really going on. And it’s as you begin the work that you start to realize that there’s a lot more to it. And so that’s, that’s a part of being adaptable and we try to be very flexible in our strategy and evaluation work.
Abby: So, let’s think about success from your personal perspective. You can have a happy client, you can have a happy institution, but you know you’re not happy. And I know there’s been instances because that’s always those instances. So, when you think back to those moments, what is it that real success, you know, for Cathy looks like?
Cathy: So it’s funny. For being such an audience advocate through our work, I often don’t get to see the end result, especially when we are working primarily on those front-end concept testing and more formative prototyping or sort of testing designs as their further along. That’s still early and it’s before the thing is out there for the world to really experience at scale.
For me, like the satisfaction comes from hearing later, hopefully, you know, through just an email or conversation, that you’ve been returning to the data, that those tools that we left you with are continuing to be used. We were really fortunate several years ago to do a lot of prototyping and concept testing work as the Americans exhibition at the National Museum of the American Indian, which is a Smithsonian Institution in DC, as that was being designed, and it was a new permanent exhibition, so meant to be up for quite a long time.
And it’s all about the pervasiveness of Indian imagery and in, in our lives. But it’s it’s a really powerful exhibition about our shared history with Native Americans and the testing that we did, and the time in the project at which we got to be audience advocates was quite early on. Then, you know, I – it was kind of not intentionally, but a bit of a closed door situation where then all of a sudden, you know, it was up later on, and I have to say that, you know, just going to visit that space on my own afterwards and overhearing some of the conversations that I got to hear from visitors unofficially, you know, I wasn’t, I wasn’t officially gathering data for any work at that point.
I remembered some of the messages and ideas that the museum had been going for and things that they hoped people would wonder about or, or the time that they hoped people would linger in the space. And I’m being a bad evaluator now, just speaking based on, based on, one anecdotal visit. But for me, I remember just thinking in that moment, oh, this is what they were going for, you know, and I’m so happy that the work that we helped do early on helped them get to a point of shaping the design that this was even possible to happen.
Abby: I was going to say, I don’t think you’re the only person who’s actually sort of haunted the halls after an exhibition has opened. I know I’ve done that, and it’s amazing because you just want to be that fly on the wall as people are enjoying and investigating and playing with your, your exhibition. So yeah, I think there’s a lot of people listening right now who’ve done the same thing.
So, what are some of the components of a contemporary museum experience? We chatted with Monica O. Montgomery about museums being community centers, a place for people to get together, share their stories. And I’m also thinking about social media and how important, quite frankly, that is to storytelling. So can you sort of talk about the components of a contemporary immersive experience from your perspective and what you’ve seen evolving over the last five years?
Cathy: Museums have to think about themselves as this sort of like, this like living organism that’s constantly changing, and you, you can’t just rest on your laurels of thinking of experience design and interaction with visitors as one handful of things that you know and do really well. It’s great to have a handful of things that you know and do really well, but there’s always going to be more that you could do.
And I think the thing that we do a lot as strategists and as human-centered researchers is really helping museums realize that every single touchpoint with a person matters and that there are so many possible touchpoints you could have that museums aren’t in the habit historically of always, always thinking about. If we are going to talk about an exhibition, well, let’s talk about it, and let’s really drill down into what you want to do with that thing.
But you also have to step back and realize it’s not the only thing that you’re doing, and it is not the only way that a person could come across something that your museum does. There’s all sorts of ways, through social media, through a blog post, through what your museum staff is writing on LinkedIn, through gosh, there’s so many different, there are many different avenues.
And I feel like hearing myself say that it sounds like I’m advocating for just do more, do more, do more, do more, do more. I think that’s not really it. It’s finding a balance between not being afraid to try new things but also trying new things with purpose and saying, okay, there’s always one or two things we already do and do really, really well. Let’s keep doing those while leaving a little bit of room to try some new stuff.
Brenda: I actually, as a strategist, I’m really curious, what have some of your favorite projects been that are really, really innovative?
Cathy: Putting me on the spot here to, to pick favorites in the museum world. But, I will name one organization that I’m now a very big fan of. They’re called Made by Us, and they are a coalition, a consortium of history museums and organizations. They have kind of a, a great team that’s coalescing all of these disparate organizations.
Their mission is really about engaging 18 to 30-year-olds with history and history museums, but not just for the benefit of museums, for them doing civic good in society. And I think, though, the way that they do their work is, is actually, it’s sort of museums operating in a totally different way, and it really has caught my attention.
It’s all digital, and it’s all remote, but they’re still trying to add some in-person events and it’s, it’s really building on the strengths that history organizations bring to the table and helping them be in conversation with 18 to 30-year-olds, which is a really pivotal time for doing public good, figuring out who you are. We were fortunate to do some evaluation work on their flagship program, which is called Civic Season. It runs every summer.
We’ve also had some great work recently with organizations doing innovative stuff in sort of the digital gaming space around teaching science concepts through gaming. And so that’s sort of an area that I’m really excited to see. And then, you know, for me, I’m really always going to be passionate about exhibitions. I’m by no means an expert on it, but I really look to all the great organizations that are experimenting with different immersive stuff out there, both in and out of museums, and so for me, that’s kind of an area to watch that I as an evaluator and an audience, audience advocate, I really love to be able to work more in.
Abby: Well, Cathy, thank you so much for enduring our rapid-fire questions today. I just love the way you describe a museum as a living organism that’s constantly changing. I think that’s absolutely fantastic and something we should all aspire to create. And that idea of balancing between sort of trying new things with purpose and keeping what’s working as part of that visitor experience, I think, is really an inspiration and keeps you on solid ground, so thank you so much for joining us, Cathy, and thanks for everyone out there listening. If you liked what you heard today, 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.
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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.
Data-Driven Designed Experiences with Cathy Sigmond
The Object of It All
Museums Health and Healing Projects | Objectdynamics
[Music]
Abby: Hello and welcome to Matters of Experience. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: And I’m Brenda Cowan.
Abby: Welcome to this week’s podcast, The Object of it All, where we talk all about objects, those in our everyday lives, and especially those in museums and institutions.
Brenda: Let’s play that game where you tell me what you would grab if your house was on fire, God forbid, and you could only save one thing. What would it be and why?
Abby: Okay. Well, first, Brenda, little known fact and small segue, and not to be too macabre, but I actually was in a house fire.
Brenda: Oh, no!
Abby: Can you believe it? Yes. Well, obviously, I got out alive.
Brenda: Oh my God! This is the trauma podcast. I’m so sorry.
Abby: Well, we had a chip pan fire, and that’s where you sort of like – in England, it’s called a chip pan, sort of like this place where you put a lot of fat, and you chop up your potatoes, and you put them in, and you make you make chips a.k.a French fries here.
And my mum had run out of potatoes, but she already had the chip pan on because you need to sort of heat it up, and she comes in, and she says, “we’ve got no — can’t make you any chips, girls. I’ll go out and buy, go to the chippy, and get some French fries there.” So off she went, and we were in the back playing on our computer, and then my sister rushes in, and she goes, “there’s a fire!”
And you know, that moment, you know, we have jokes backwards and forwards with my sister, you know, always pulling each other’s leg. But, you know, there’s a moment where somebody is really telling the truth. So I stood up, rushed out, and there, sure enough, coming out of our former chip pan, all the way up to the ceiling, licking across the ceiling, is this fire.
So I’m like… “run!” Worried about the cat because I’m like, oh my gosh, we had a cat. “I hope the cat’s okay,” puddled over, and it was all like little tiny pebbles. And we had little socks on. It’s wet and rainy in England. So, “ow, ow, ow, ow, ow!” as you’re running on the stones, get to the neighbor, and then obviously they called the fire brigade.
My mum drives home, suddenly realizes, “Oh my goodness, I’ve left the chip pan on. Oh my goodness,” you know, “what’s happened to my girls?” Gets there. We’re all fine. It was no problem. Everything had been put out. But yeah, ironic, ironic story, just to let you know.
Brenda: Oh, my God. And the cat was okay.
Abby: Everybody was okay. It just needed a repaint. But suffice to say, I didn’t pick anything up when I left. That was the last thing on my mind. So I always actually, fondly love this, this game, because I’m like, if I was going to hang around, what would I grab? So I would grab a small card that my mum was given when I was born.
It has on it, B and F, which stands for baby female, and my date of birth. It’s got my time of birth, the length of my body, my head circumference, which obviously seems incredibly important as you grow, and weight, all on it. And so it’s sort of like, I think why I keep it, and it reminds me of me so much is because it’s the first record of my existence, even before my birth certificate, I had this little card. So yeah, it means a lot to me. And it’s, it’s not very nice to look at. It’s just like a little piece of card with words on it. But yeah, it’s kind of very poignant.
Brenda: This is really, really interesting because you are the third person who I’ve asked about a meaningful object and who has mentioned one of these types of identification cards. When you really think about that card and how it makes you feel, what is that feeling that you have?
Abby: It’s definitely a feeling of comfort. That’s what I would say first. It’s like nobody can take that away from you. And it also makes me feel very attached to my mother, for some reason, because it was, it was given to her, and it has her last name on it. And also that she kept it because it could so easily have been thrown out. It’s not a certificate. And, you know, I was her first born, and she tells me how harrowing and awful it was trying to push me out for those hours and days, and then finally I came out.
Brenda: Listeners, you needed to know.
Abby: And so for me, this is maybe the, the nicest moment, and the fact she kept it and thought it was important and gave it to me makes it even more poignant and important.
Brenda: We’re talking about objects that are evocative and the evocative nature of things. So when I’m talking about an object being evocative, such as your identification card, objects that are evocative are repositories of memories. They bear witness to important life events. They are companions, they are silent life partners, and it sounds like that little card is a lot of those things for you.
They’re also numinous and numinous, evocative objects – now, this is where things get really interesting – numinous objects, and I have to give a shout out to Kiersten F. Latham, who’s really this expert in numinous objects, but a numinous object is transformative. It can be even spiritual. Sometimes people have objects in their lives that prompt really transcendent feelings, and it’s an amazing characteristic of some objects.
But when I’m talking about evocative objects, what I’m talking about is what you expressed in just this tiny, you know, quick little back and forth. What you expressed is the meaningfulness of this little piece of paper that is very evocative to you, and the fact that it’s kind of like a legacy that it was passed down to you is another aspect of what makes it evocative for you.
Abby: It sounds almost romantically magical and almost like it stepped out of a Harry Potter novel when you talk about numinous objects, right?
Brenda: Yeah, When we’re talking about numinous objects, we’re definitely talking about how some people would use the word magic. And it’s all associative. It’s all subjective. This is all personal. This is what a person sees in an object, and it truly can be described as magical, this sort of like heightened characteristic that we’re talking about in particular.
But there’s also, you know, it doesn’t have to be such a heightened experience either. And I want to go back to some of your other object experiences, because I know that you have some other objects that are meaningful to you. Tell me about those.
Abby: So, in England we have cases for your pajamas, Brenda, and mine is a teddy bear. So you imagine it has a head of a teddy bear, body of a teddy bear, arms of a teddy bear, and where teddy bear has legs, has a huge voluminous skirt. So I was given it when I was born. It’s gone everywhere with me, even to university, even when I moved to America, not for my pajamas anymore, because obviously it became one of those little keepsakes. It’s my little teddy bear, and still have it. But, you know, it’s tucked away again in a box.
Brenda: I love this, so much, and I love the fact that you keep it in a box, and clearly, this isn’t something that you look at every day.
Abby: No.
Brenda: But it’s important to you, right?
Abby: Yes.
Brenda: That it’s in the box, that you know where it is. And it makes no sense.
Abby: No sense.
Brenda: This makes no sense at all, does it?
Abby: No, because I actually don’t – I get rid of a lot of things. I think I’m quite streamlined at home. We don’t like a lot of clutter, and I don’t think we’re overly sentimental either.
Brenda: Yeah, and again, the thing that I love about talking about the objects that are meaningful to people is how little it makes sense, and yet when you think about it and when you think about what it is that objects actually do, all of the sudden they become absolutely and utterly essential. One of the things that I love is a quote, this is Sherry Turkle, who’s another object expert, and she talks about how objects that are evocative are things that we feel at one with. They resonate with us. They’re a part of our lives, and very much so, like these objects that are very difficult for you to get rid of.
Abby: Can I ask you a question, Brenda? So do you have any objects, have you got any that you feel particularly close to?
Brenda: So I’ve been doing this really, really, really in-depth object research for I think it’s going on six or seven years now. And I have, I have a lot of beautiful things that are, you know, special in one way or another. I have one object that is utterly, utterly important to me in this way. Do you want to know what it is?
Abby: I am desperate. I think our listeners are desperate.
Brenda: Yes, everybody is just, yes, with white knuckles waiting to hear – it’s a horse skull.
Abby: Oh, wow.
Brenda: Yeah, and it’s a fascinating – it’s got a story. I was a teenager, I, the horse had died. I came upon it in the mountains. It’s a very unusual story. I spent two months while her, this is so disgusting. Her carcass decomposed, and I saved her bones.
I was going through a major, major Georgia O’Keeffe period in my life, and I saved her bones, and I saved her skull and used it for, you know, making art. And once I started becoming a teacher, I started using her as a teaching tool and about how to look at objects. And so this whole sort of way of thinking for me began actually when I was in my early twenties and first training to become a teacher.
And the thing about the horse skull at this point is that it’s getting, she, I should say, is getting very, very fragile, and she’s broken a number of times. There was at one point, you know, many years ago, she fell, and her jaw broke, and I can’t even begin to tell you the devastation that I felt. And I had, you know, good friends at the Museum of Natural History, and I rushed her as if I was taking her to a hospital, to the dinosaur experts at the Museum of Natural History, and they repaired her for me. But it’s interesting. The relationship is so evocative, and it’s a caretaking thing for me, and especially as I get older and especially as this object gets older.
Abby: Do you think that this object was the reason why you went towards the study of objects, the relationship you had with her, or do you feel like it was destiny you were going to end up here, and so she came along?
Brenda: I don’t know about that necessarily. All of the work that I do pertaining to objects really explicitly began when I was starting to teach grad school, and I was teaching about objects and evocative objects and the role that objects play in exhibitions and how powerful they are and how important it is that we think about objects when we are thinking about design and when we’re thinking about experience.
And I was endlessly dissatisfied because I could teach about objects being evocative. I could teach about how to use objects to craft experiences and to get people to have these meaningful connections with content and stuff like that. And yet I was so unsatisfied because I could never explain why. Why? And I found myself in an adolescent therapeutic wilderness facility and was able to do some field research and was witnessing how it is that therapists use objects, objects from the woods and from the mountains like sticks and stones, and twigs.
How therapists were using these kinds of objects as a part of healing therapies. And these were adolescents who were experiencing profound trauma, and they were healing by using these little inconsequential things. And I witnessed this and learned a lot about how the therapies work. I learned a lot about the dynamic activity with which these objects were used. And I started thinking, you know, it’s so weird. People do this same kind of stuff with objects in their everyday lives.
Then I started to realize, wait a minute, people do some of these same kinds of things with objects in museums. And I began to really think about and construct the theory really, that I’ve been working with, which is that we make these meaningful connections with objects in our everyday lives and even in museum environments, because it is a way in which we maintain our well-being and they are ways in which people self-heal.
Abby: What’s really interesting is it’s something that I hadn’t considered before, but when I go and visit a museum, I feel nourished, I feel more whole, I feel more centered. And a lot of that I thought, was because my mind had been, something had happened. I’ve been educated and enlightened. But now you bring up the power of the object, and I’m reconsidering what’s nourishing me.
So, I talked about objects that are very special to me. You’ve spoken about your dead horse’s head, the bones of your, of the horse…
Brenda: So lovely.
Abby: …that were very important and still are to you and your journey. How can an object resonate with more than just a single person or more than just the person who found it was given it, etc.?
Brenda: It’s, it’s all subjective. It’s all about where people are coming from, and, you know, there’s a really well-known story about a traveling exhibition that featured Abraham Lincoln’s stovepipe hat, and on display, people would see it, they would gather around it, and they would weep. Whatever those associations were, that hat was doing something for them. They were connecting with it.
I’m thinking of another example as well, Syrian oil lamps that are on display at a museum that I did a study at. So many people I interviewed at this one museum, and this was like volunteers as well as staff as well as visitors, all talked about how these little handmade clay oil lamps transported them back in time or made them feel like they were a part of other people’s homes.
And these oil lamps were like thousands of years old. And part of it as well that was really interesting was that people talked about the fact that they were clearly handmade, hand sculpted, and they could still see impressions of thumbs, and they resonated for a lot of people. And if you dive into this, there are certain cultural connections that people were making. A lot of it, though, was because they were domestic objects. These are very resonant with people.
Abby: Do you think some narratives or some topics are easier from an object perspective to elicit responses? I’m thinking about the National September 11th Memorial Museum. You know, I was here when all of that happened, so when I go into that museum, it seems like a lot easier, low-hanging fruit when you see those huge artifacts, those huge, you know, what once was a fire truck, you see those familiar objects all mangled, that you immediately know what that represents and it elicits a response. Whereas when you’re going somewhere, maybe it’s a clothing exhibition, something else, that it’s harder to get those emotional responses.
Brenda: Oh, on the contrary. There’s another example that I really love. This was a study that I did with the museum at FIT, which is a fashion museum, and you know, we’re looking at, you know, pieces of haute couture, and really just very rarified items of clothing. And the study I did there also featured so many people talking about how looking at these items of clothing brought them back to their childhoods.
When you start interviewing people, and I’ve done work now across four countries, five different, you know, institutions, really looking very in-depth, 1 and 2 hour long interviews, per person, and you will hear the same things over and over, people having these connections and these resonant experiences.
Abby: Do you feel like the more, the merrier? More objects, more artifacts, the better? Or is it in your experience that there’s sometimes too many things to look at, and then you become numb?
Brenda: That’s a great question. I think that, you know, less is more is, this whole conversation is a great design question, and it really depends on the, the particular museum, the nature of the display, and yeah, absolutely there’s too much can be too much, and the way the 911 Memorial Museum does it is there are many exits that you can take if you’ve been triggered or activated or if you just if you’re just done. And they have areas where you can just sit and sort of, you know, collect yourself or recharge or reflect or whatever it is that you need to do, take a pause. That kind of thing is absolutely essential.
Another institution that I worked with that is so remarkable, this is the War Childhood Museum in Sarajevo. These are also personal objects that are childhood things, and they are things that adults who had been children during the war years. So we’re talking over 20 years ago. These are objects that people had saved and in many cases had been waiting to unburden themselves of so that they can move on from the trauma of the war years. The War Childhood Museum displays things with a lot of space around them and does so very intentionally because they’re very aware of the power of their objects and of how evocative they are and how they can really be very, you know, again, emotionally activating.
Abby: Are they using the objects in a therapeutic way? Are there objects there that are therapeutic?
Brenda: Sure. So in any participatory museum where people get to engage in one way or another with objects, if they can touch objects, if they can make objects, if they can donate objects or share personal objects. Right there, those are actually healing therapies. People being able to share a personal object as a part of a larger collection is this act of synergy, and people respond to this.
Here’s how complex this dynamic can get. Two different museums. One, the Stories from Syria exhibition, the other, back to the War Childhood Museum. In each exhibition are childhood toys. So in the Stories from Syria exhibition, there’s a collection of Barbies, and visitors and staff would talk about the Barbies, and the whole Barbie display, which was bright and pink and colorful and so dynamic, and the story behind it is tragic. You know, this is, this is an adult woman who had saved these from her childhood, and they were essential, essential to her. And she went to great lengths to bring them with her when she was forced from her home.
And yet when she talks about her Barbies, she lights up, and she is so filled with happiness. And when visitors see the Barbies, they get so excited, and they automatically go to, you know, which ones they had or which ones, you know, their sibling had or whatever the case might be. And there was a lot of joy. And the same thing at War Childhood Museum, which has a lot of objects on display that are toys or, you know, little Kinder egg, or a bicycle or a little, you know, magic wand, you know, childhood toy.
And people get so excited. People would, when I would interview them, they would say, oh, my God, this was the best object because I had the same one. I had the same one, or, oh, I loved Kinder Egg. Kinder Egg was so special, and, you know, I loved Kinder Egg, and they’re tragic.
Abby: Mm-hmm. Yeah, that’s very interesting. So it’s like. It’s like the assoc – so we always bring ourselves, right?
Brenda: Yeah.
Abby: We spotlight, we’re there, and we’re like, we can associate with this so that it feels like we’re bridging the gap between the donor, what happened to them.
Brenda: Yep.
Abby: And sort of like our lives as a connection. And there’s also, potentially, going back to the, the love that a child feels for an object, right? Because that’s what it also represents, the instance of the lady with the Barbies is she loved these dolls, right?
Brenda: Sure.
Abby: And there’s so much love when there’s so much awfulness going on, but so much love from a single child, in this case towards its object. And I think that we can all relate to that love and care, that transcends the story, time, place and provides hope.
Brenda: Here’s – and hope is one of the big resounding themes to all of this work. Hope comes up again and again and again. And hope, of course, is another essential part of our mental health and our well-being. Hope and a belief in a future. You’re making me think of, back to Stories from Syria, a woman had loaned her house key, and it was a house key for a house that had been blown up. And when I was interviewing her about it, she talked about its irony, and she said that she will never, ever, ever get rid of this key. And she says, But there’s no house for this key. There will never be a house for this key. And then she stopped herself, and she said, there will be a house for this key. And she said, My house is the museum. The museum is my house because my key fits there and it belongs there.
Abby: It sounds almost Brenda, like every museum instead of having whatever their collection was, whoever it was given to, single person or curator needs to have this as part of their offering. There needs to be a moment when the community are invited in to share their thoughts or their feelings on a given exhibition and contribute.
Brenda: No, without question. And I should also say, you know, part of what I love about this work is that sometimes it’s so hidden. Sometimes people don’t even realize how meaningful objects are until you sit down and you just say, “Tell me about your object.” But people form these intense connections with museums, and I just keep thinking, what museum would not want that?
Abby: Completely.
Brenda: Talk about, talk about success. It’s part of why the work I think has been so well received. It basically enables an institution to see itself as a place of well-being.
Abby: What happens if you don’t have an exhibit that actually has artifacts? So, you know, could you tell us some of your experiences with object-less exhibitions?
Brenda: Object-less. I haven’t done research with object-less exhibitions. I think the closest that I can come – and this, this is really fun – is, I have begun to collect data on digital objects. When people are looking at objects in digital form, the exact same dynamics play out.
.
Abby: Interesting.
Brenda: It’s fascinating. At the Derby Museum and Art Gallery, people were asked to contribute a photograph of an object of love, and interviewing dozens of object donors, people were moved to tears about being able to submit an object, and there is this feeling of giving and then being received which is, I mean, that’s an enormous helpful, well-being and healing dynamic. But the digital experience and the digital life, absolutely was the same experience as what people would describe and experience with objects in the flesh, if you will.
Abby: That’s very interesting.
Brenda: Yeah.
Abby: So what do you do then? If you’re a designer? How do we design for objects that move us?
Brenda: Sure. I think that giving people breathing room to be able to connect with objects is one thing. Thinking about certain kinds of objects, like domestic items, like I was mentioning or items of clothing, you can see that there are certain types and categories of objects that are going to be more meaningful. So designing with those kinds of things and taking objects that are stimulating, if you will, this is the work of Stephen Bitgood – can I just like shout out to every awesome scholar in the world because I just endlessly want to talk about you and your work. So Stephen Bitgood talks to us about stimulating objects and how it’s an object that people know is going to be particularly evocative and really using the qualities of light, the qualities of display of accessibility, of inclusivity, so that people can really see the object and engage with it.
But then there’s another thing that, you know, someday I hope to be able to really do this, to design an exhibition with helpful and healing outcomes. And specifically, these seven different dynamic actions, for example, could be thematic areas or thematic experiences that you could design with and design for people to experience in one way or another. And that would be programmatic as well as elements of display and as well as really a whole strategic plan for an exhibition. And that, you know, someday.
Abby: Sounds wonderful.
Brenda: Doesn’t that sound wonderful?
Abby: It sounds like somebody needs to make it.
Brenda: Let’s do it. Somebody does need to make that. Give me a call, folks.
Abby: Oh, my goodness. Well, Brenda, this has been a fascinating conversation about objects. I had no idea where we were going to go. Do just want to ask you, what’s your book called? Because you have a book all about this.
Brenda: Museum Objects, Health, and Healing.
Abby: So if anybody would like to check that book out, I heard it’s a good read.
Brenda: Oh, it’s fabulous.
Abby: So thank you, Brenda. Today, it was phenomenal. Thanks for sharing all your expertise.
Brenda: Totally. Thank you, Abby.
Abby: It was a lot of fun.
Brenda: All right.
Abby: 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.
Museums Health and Healing Projects | Objectdynamics
[Music]
Abby: Hello and welcome to Matters of Experience. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: And I’m Brenda Cowan.
Abby: Welcome to this week’s podcast, The Object of it All, where we talk all about objects, those in our everyday lives, and especially those in museums and institutions.
Brenda: Let’s play that game where you tell me what you would grab if your house was on fire, God forbid, and you could only save one thing. What would it be and why?
Abby: Okay. Well, first, Brenda, little known fact and small segue, and not to be too macabre, but I actually was in a house fire.
Brenda: Oh, no!
Abby: Can you believe it? Yes. Well, obviously, I got out alive.
Brenda: Oh my God! This is the trauma podcast. I’m so sorry.
Abby: Well, we had a chip pan fire, and that’s where you sort of like – in England, it’s called a chip pan, sort of like this place where you put a lot of fat, and you chop up your potatoes, and you put them in, and you make you make chips a.k.a French fries here.
And my mum had run out of potatoes, but she already had the chip pan on because you need to sort of heat it up, and she comes in, and she says, “we’ve got no — can’t make you any chips, girls. I’ll go out and buy, go to the chippy, and get some French fries there.” So off she went, and we were in the back playing on our computer, and then my sister rushes in, and she goes, “there’s a fire!”
And you know, that moment, you know, we have jokes backwards and forwards with my sister, you know, always pulling each other’s leg. But, you know, there’s a moment where somebody is really telling the truth. So I stood up, rushed out, and there, sure enough, coming out of our former chip pan, all the way up to the ceiling, licking across the ceiling, is this fire.
So I’m like… “run!” Worried about the cat because I’m like, oh my gosh, we had a cat. “I hope the cat’s okay,” puddled over, and it was all like little tiny pebbles. And we had little socks on. It’s wet and rainy in England. So, “ow, ow, ow, ow, ow!” as you’re running on the stones, get to the neighbor, and then obviously they called the fire brigade.
My mum drives home, suddenly realizes, “Oh my goodness, I’ve left the chip pan on. Oh my goodness,” you know, “what’s happened to my girls?” Gets there. We’re all fine. It was no problem. Everything had been put out. But yeah, ironic, ironic story, just to let you know.
Brenda: Oh, my God. And the cat was okay.
Abby: Everybody was okay. It just needed a repaint. But suffice to say, I didn’t pick anything up when I left. That was the last thing on my mind. So I always actually, fondly love this, this game, because I’m like, if I was going to hang around, what would I grab? So I would grab a small card that my mum was given when I was born.
It has on it, B and F, which stands for baby female, and my date of birth. It’s got my time of birth, the length of my body, my head circumference, which obviously seems incredibly important as you grow, and weight, all on it. And so it’s sort of like, I think why I keep it, and it reminds me of me so much is because it’s the first record of my existence, even before my birth certificate, I had this little card. So yeah, it means a lot to me. And it’s, it’s not very nice to look at. It’s just like a little piece of card with words on it. But yeah, it’s kind of very poignant.
Brenda: This is really, really interesting because you are the third person who I’ve asked about a meaningful object and who has mentioned one of these types of identification cards. When you really think about that card and how it makes you feel, what is that feeling that you have?
Abby: It’s definitely a feeling of comfort. That’s what I would say first. It’s like nobody can take that away from you. And it also makes me feel very attached to my mother, for some reason, because it was, it was given to her, and it has her last name on it. And also that she kept it because it could so easily have been thrown out. It’s not a certificate. And, you know, I was her first born, and she tells me how harrowing and awful it was trying to push me out for those hours and days, and then finally I came out.
Brenda: Listeners, you needed to know.
Abby: And so for me, this is maybe the, the nicest moment, and the fact she kept it and thought it was important and gave it to me makes it even more poignant and important.
Brenda: We’re talking about objects that are evocative and the evocative nature of things. So when I’m talking about an object being evocative, such as your identification card, objects that are evocative are repositories of memories. They bear witness to important life events. They are companions, they are silent life partners, and it sounds like that little card is a lot of those things for you.
They’re also numinous and numinous, evocative objects – now, this is where things get really interesting – numinous objects, and I have to give a shout out to Kiersten F. Latham, who’s really this expert in numinous objects, but a numinous object is transformative. It can be even spiritual. Sometimes people have objects in their lives that prompt really transcendent feelings, and it’s an amazing characteristic of some objects.
But when I’m talking about evocative objects, what I’m talking about is what you expressed in just this tiny, you know, quick little back and forth. What you expressed is the meaningfulness of this little piece of paper that is very evocative to you, and the fact that it’s kind of like a legacy that it was passed down to you is another aspect of what makes it evocative for you.
Abby: It sounds almost romantically magical and almost like it stepped out of a Harry Potter novel when you talk about numinous objects, right?
Brenda: Yeah, When we’re talking about numinous objects, we’re definitely talking about how some people would use the word magic. And it’s all associative. It’s all subjective. This is all personal. This is what a person sees in an object, and it truly can be described as magical, this sort of like heightened characteristic that we’re talking about in particular.
But there’s also, you know, it doesn’t have to be such a heightened experience either. And I want to go back to some of your other object experiences, because I know that you have some other objects that are meaningful to you. Tell me about those.
Abby: So, in England we have cases for your pajamas, Brenda, and mine is a teddy bear. So you imagine it has a head of a teddy bear, body of a teddy bear, arms of a teddy bear, and where teddy bear has legs, has a huge voluminous skirt. So I was given it when I was born. It’s gone everywhere with me, even to university, even when I moved to America, not for my pajamas anymore, because obviously it became one of those little keepsakes. It’s my little teddy bear, and still have it. But, you know, it’s tucked away again in a box.
Brenda: I love this, so much, and I love the fact that you keep it in a box, and clearly, this isn’t something that you look at every day.
Abby: No.
Brenda: But it’s important to you, right?
Abby: Yes.
Brenda: That it’s in the box, that you know where it is. And it makes no sense.
Abby: No sense.
Brenda: This makes no sense at all, does it?
Abby: No, because I actually don’t – I get rid of a lot of things. I think I’m quite streamlined at home. We don’t like a lot of clutter, and I don’t think we’re overly sentimental either.
Brenda: Yeah, and again, the thing that I love about talking about the objects that are meaningful to people is how little it makes sense, and yet when you think about it and when you think about what it is that objects actually do, all of the sudden they become absolutely and utterly essential. One of the things that I love is a quote, this is Sherry Turkle, who’s another object expert, and she talks about how objects that are evocative are things that we feel at one with. They resonate with us. They’re a part of our lives, and very much so, like these objects that are very difficult for you to get rid of.
Abby: Can I ask you a question, Brenda? So do you have any objects, have you got any that you feel particularly close to?
Brenda: So I’ve been doing this really, really, really in-depth object research for I think it’s going on six or seven years now. And I have, I have a lot of beautiful things that are, you know, special in one way or another. I have one object that is utterly, utterly important to me in this way. Do you want to know what it is?
Abby: I am desperate. I think our listeners are desperate.
Brenda: Yes, everybody is just, yes, with white knuckles waiting to hear – it’s a horse skull.
Abby: Oh, wow.
Brenda: Yeah, and it’s a fascinating – it’s got a story. I was a teenager, I, the horse had died. I came upon it in the mountains. It’s a very unusual story. I spent two months while her, this is so disgusting. Her carcass decomposed, and I saved her bones.
I was going through a major, major Georgia O’Keeffe period in my life, and I saved her bones, and I saved her skull and used it for, you know, making art. And once I started becoming a teacher, I started using her as a teaching tool and about how to look at objects. And so this whole sort of way of thinking for me began actually when I was in my early twenties and first training to become a teacher.
And the thing about the horse skull at this point is that it’s getting, she, I should say, is getting very, very fragile, and she’s broken a number of times. There was at one point, you know, many years ago, she fell, and her jaw broke, and I can’t even begin to tell you the devastation that I felt. And I had, you know, good friends at the Museum of Natural History, and I rushed her as if I was taking her to a hospital, to the dinosaur experts at the Museum of Natural History, and they repaired her for me. But it’s interesting. The relationship is so evocative, and it’s a caretaking thing for me, and especially as I get older and especially as this object gets older.
Abby: Do you think that this object was the reason why you went towards the study of objects, the relationship you had with her, or do you feel like it was destiny you were going to end up here, and so she came along?
Brenda: I don’t know about that necessarily. All of the work that I do pertaining to objects really explicitly began when I was starting to teach grad school, and I was teaching about objects and evocative objects and the role that objects play in exhibitions and how powerful they are and how important it is that we think about objects when we are thinking about design and when we’re thinking about experience.
And I was endlessly dissatisfied because I could teach about objects being evocative. I could teach about how to use objects to craft experiences and to get people to have these meaningful connections with content and stuff like that. And yet I was so unsatisfied because I could never explain why. Why? And I found myself in an adolescent therapeutic wilderness facility and was able to do some field research and was witnessing how it is that therapists use objects, objects from the woods and from the mountains like sticks and stones, and twigs.
How therapists were using these kinds of objects as a part of healing therapies. And these were adolescents who were experiencing profound trauma, and they were healing by using these little inconsequential things. And I witnessed this and learned a lot about how the therapies work. I learned a lot about the dynamic activity with which these objects were used. And I started thinking, you know, it’s so weird. People do this same kind of stuff with objects in their everyday lives.
Then I started to realize, wait a minute, people do some of these same kinds of things with objects in museums. And I began to really think about and construct the theory really, that I’ve been working with, which is that we make these meaningful connections with objects in our everyday lives and even in museum environments, because it is a way in which we maintain our well-being and they are ways in which people self-heal.
Abby: What’s really interesting is it’s something that I hadn’t considered before, but when I go and visit a museum, I feel nourished, I feel more whole, I feel more centered. And a lot of that I thought, was because my mind had been, something had happened. I’ve been educated and enlightened. But now you bring up the power of the object, and I’m reconsidering what’s nourishing me.
So, I talked about objects that are very special to me. You’ve spoken about your dead horse’s head, the bones of your, of the horse…
Brenda: So lovely.
Abby: …that were very important and still are to you and your journey. How can an object resonate with more than just a single person or more than just the person who found it was given it, etc.?
Brenda: It’s, it’s all subjective. It’s all about where people are coming from, and, you know, there’s a really well-known story about a traveling exhibition that featured Abraham Lincoln’s stovepipe hat, and on display, people would see it, they would gather around it, and they would weep. Whatever those associations were, that hat was doing something for them. They were connecting with it.
I’m thinking of another example as well, Syrian oil lamps that are on display at a museum that I did a study at. So many people I interviewed at this one museum, and this was like volunteers as well as staff as well as visitors, all talked about how these little handmade clay oil lamps transported them back in time or made them feel like they were a part of other people’s homes.
And these oil lamps were like thousands of years old. And part of it as well that was really interesting was that people talked about the fact that they were clearly handmade, hand sculpted, and they could still see impressions of thumbs, and they resonated for a lot of people. And if you dive into this, there are certain cultural connections that people were making. A lot of it, though, was because they were domestic objects. These are very resonant with people.
Abby: Do you think some narratives or some topics are easier from an object perspective to elicit responses? I’m thinking about the National September 11th Memorial Museum. You know, I was here when all of that happened, so when I go into that museum, it seems like a lot easier, low-hanging fruit when you see those huge artifacts, those huge, you know, what once was a fire truck, you see those familiar objects all mangled, that you immediately know what that represents and it elicits a response. Whereas when you’re going somewhere, maybe it’s a clothing exhibition, something else, that it’s harder to get those emotional responses.
Brenda: Oh, on the contrary. There’s another example that I really love. This was a study that I did with the museum at FIT, which is a fashion museum, and you know, we’re looking at, you know, pieces of haute couture, and really just very rarified items of clothing. And the study I did there also featured so many people talking about how looking at these items of clothing brought them back to their childhoods.
When you start interviewing people, and I’ve done work now across four countries, five different, you know, institutions, really looking very in-depth, 1 and 2 hour long interviews, per person, and you will hear the same things over and over, people having these connections and these resonant experiences.
Abby: Do you feel like the more, the merrier? More objects, more artifacts, the better? Or is it in your experience that there’s sometimes too many things to look at, and then you become numb?
Brenda: That’s a great question. I think that, you know, less is more is, this whole conversation is a great design question, and it really depends on the, the particular museum, the nature of the display, and yeah, absolutely there’s too much can be too much, and the way the 911 Memorial Museum does it is there are many exits that you can take if you’ve been triggered or activated or if you just if you’re just done. And they have areas where you can just sit and sort of, you know, collect yourself or recharge or reflect or whatever it is that you need to do, take a pause. That kind of thing is absolutely essential.
Another institution that I worked with that is so remarkable, this is the War Childhood Museum in Sarajevo. These are also personal objects that are childhood things, and they are things that adults who had been children during the war years. So we’re talking over 20 years ago. These are objects that people had saved and in many cases had been waiting to unburden themselves of so that they can move on from the trauma of the war years. The War Childhood Museum displays things with a lot of space around them and does so very intentionally because they’re very aware of the power of their objects and of how evocative they are and how they can really be very, you know, again, emotionally activating.
Abby: Are they using the objects in a therapeutic way? Are there objects there that are therapeutic?
Brenda: Sure. So in any participatory museum where people get to engage in one way or another with objects, if they can touch objects, if they can make objects, if they can donate objects or share personal objects. Right there, those are actually healing therapies. People being able to share a personal object as a part of a larger collection is this act of synergy, and people respond to this.
Here’s how complex this dynamic can get. Two different museums. One, the Stories from Syria exhibition, the other, back to the War Childhood Museum. In each exhibition are childhood toys. So in the Stories from Syria exhibition, there’s a collection of Barbies, and visitors and staff would talk about the Barbies, and the whole Barbie display, which was bright and pink and colorful and so dynamic, and the story behind it is tragic. You know, this is, this is an adult woman who had saved these from her childhood, and they were essential, essential to her. And she went to great lengths to bring them with her when she was forced from her home.
And yet when she talks about her Barbies, she lights up, and she is so filled with happiness. And when visitors see the Barbies, they get so excited, and they automatically go to, you know, which ones they had or which ones, you know, their sibling had or whatever the case might be. And there was a lot of joy. And the same thing at War Childhood Museum, which has a lot of objects on display that are toys or, you know, little Kinder egg, or a bicycle or a little, you know, magic wand, you know, childhood toy.
And people get so excited. People would, when I would interview them, they would say, oh, my God, this was the best object because I had the same one. I had the same one, or, oh, I loved Kinder Egg. Kinder Egg was so special, and, you know, I loved Kinder Egg, and they’re tragic.
Abby: Mm-hmm. Yeah, that’s very interesting. So it’s like. It’s like the assoc – so we always bring ourselves, right?
Brenda: Yeah.
Abby: We spotlight, we’re there, and we’re like, we can associate with this so that it feels like we’re bridging the gap between the donor, what happened to them.
Brenda: Yep.
Abby: And sort of like our lives as a connection. And there’s also, potentially, going back to the, the love that a child feels for an object, right? Because that’s what it also represents, the instance of the lady with the Barbies is she loved these dolls, right?
Brenda: Sure.
Abby: And there’s so much love when there’s so much awfulness going on, but so much love from a single child, in this case towards its object. And I think that we can all relate to that love and care, that transcends the story, time, place and provides hope.
Brenda: Here’s – and hope is one of the big resounding themes to all of this work. Hope comes up again and again and again. And hope, of course, is another essential part of our mental health and our well-being. Hope and a belief in a future. You’re making me think of, back to Stories from Syria, a woman had loaned her house key, and it was a house key for a house that had been blown up. And when I was interviewing her about it, she talked about its irony, and she said that she will never, ever, ever get rid of this key. And she says, But there’s no house for this key. There will never be a house for this key. And then she stopped herself, and she said, there will be a house for this key. And she said, My house is the museum. The museum is my house because my key fits there and it belongs there.
Abby: It sounds almost Brenda, like every museum instead of having whatever their collection was, whoever it was given to, single person or curator needs to have this as part of their offering. There needs to be a moment when the community are invited in to share their thoughts or their feelings on a given exhibition and contribute.
Brenda: No, without question. And I should also say, you know, part of what I love about this work is that sometimes it’s so hidden. Sometimes people don’t even realize how meaningful objects are until you sit down and you just say, “Tell me about your object.” But people form these intense connections with museums, and I just keep thinking, what museum would not want that?
Abby: Completely.
Brenda: Talk about, talk about success. It’s part of why the work I think has been so well received. It basically enables an institution to see itself as a place of well-being.
Abby: What happens if you don’t have an exhibit that actually has artifacts? So, you know, could you tell us some of your experiences with object-less exhibitions?
Brenda: Object-less. I haven’t done research with object-less exhibitions. I think the closest that I can come – and this, this is really fun – is, I have begun to collect data on digital objects. When people are looking at objects in digital form, the exact same dynamics play out.
.
Abby: Interesting.
Brenda: It’s fascinating. At the Derby Museum and Art Gallery, people were asked to contribute a photograph of an object of love, and interviewing dozens of object donors, people were moved to tears about being able to submit an object, and there is this feeling of giving and then being received which is, I mean, that’s an enormous helpful, well-being and healing dynamic. But the digital experience and the digital life, absolutely was the same experience as what people would describe and experience with objects in the flesh, if you will.
Abby: That’s very interesting.
Brenda: Yeah.
Abby: So what do you do then? If you’re a designer? How do we design for objects that move us?
Brenda: Sure. I think that giving people breathing room to be able to connect with objects is one thing. Thinking about certain kinds of objects, like domestic items, like I was mentioning or items of clothing, you can see that there are certain types and categories of objects that are going to be more meaningful. So designing with those kinds of things and taking objects that are stimulating, if you will, this is the work of Stephen Bitgood – can I just like shout out to every awesome scholar in the world because I just endlessly want to talk about you and your work. So Stephen Bitgood talks to us about stimulating objects and how it’s an object that people know is going to be particularly evocative and really using the qualities of light, the qualities of display of accessibility, of inclusivity, so that people can really see the object and engage with it.
But then there’s another thing that, you know, someday I hope to be able to really do this, to design an exhibition with helpful and healing outcomes. And specifically, these seven different dynamic actions, for example, could be thematic areas or thematic experiences that you could design with and design for people to experience in one way or another. And that would be programmatic as well as elements of display and as well as really a whole strategic plan for an exhibition. And that, you know, someday.
Abby: Sounds wonderful.
Brenda: Doesn’t that sound wonderful?
Abby: It sounds like somebody needs to make it.
Brenda: Let’s do it. Somebody does need to make that. Give me a call, folks.
Abby: Oh, my goodness. Well, Brenda, this has been a fascinating conversation about objects. I had no idea where we were going to go. Do just want to ask you, what’s your book called? Because you have a book all about this.
Brenda: Museum Objects, Health, and Healing.
Abby: So if anybody would like to check that book out, I heard it’s a good read.
Brenda: Oh, it’s fabulous.
Abby: So thank you, Brenda. Today, it was phenomenal. Thanks for sharing all your expertise.
Brenda: Totally. Thank you, Abby.
Abby: It was a lot of fun.
Brenda: All right.
Abby: 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.
The Object of It All
The Art of Storytelling with Yan Vizinberg
[Music]
Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: And I’m Brenda Cowan.
Abby: Today, we’re discussing an often bandied around, and I think misinterpreted word in our industry: story, Brenda. It’s used a lot and can be many things, so on the show today, we’re going to dissect what a story is and isn’t and how to tell a story in a museum. Our guest on this journey is Yan Vizinberg, my co-founder at Lorem Ipsum. He studied story at film school, which is where we met, and he’s produced and directed films as well as curated large-scale museum and experience design projects around the world.
Brenda: Yan, welcome so much to the show.
Yan: Thanks for having me.
Brenda: So tell us a little bit about your background, and within that, give us a sense of how you and story began.
Yan: Well, I went to film school in Boston, and at first, I wasn’t thinking of films as stories, actually. I thought of them as visual mediums. And so when people said, Oh, I’m a storyteller, I always thought, Well, why are you saying this? Because not all films are stories. And then, slowly, the more you watch films, the more you study films, the more you understand that all dramatic mediums sort of gravitate to storytelling.
And, you know, we made films, and we made commercials, we started a production company. And at some point, Ralph Applebaum and Associates approached us to create media for the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center. And we ended up being the media partner, creating everything that moves, everything that’s on the screen. And this way, we sort of watched them work, and we thought, Well, we can do this too, and maybe we can bring our filmmaking and storytelling backgrounds to experience design. And so this is how we ended up sort of doing that line of work, too.
Abby: We’ve been in business together; you’ve been in business for over 20 years now. Has the business changed from a storytelling perspective in the work that you’ve been doing?
Yan: I think technology has been merging for the past 20 years, right? So it’s all becoming one thing, but I don’t think storytelling has changed and I think we need to talk about what we actually mean when we say story and storytelling. I think we have to define the terms because everything is now called the story. Everything is storytelling. Every PowerPoint presentation, every museum exhibit is now a story.
Abby: So what makes a story, then? Let’s think about, you know, obviously, I completely agree. I think a lot of people are bandying around this word story and potentially are thinking about it in a different way, so from your perspective, what makes a story?
Yan: Well, a story’s very simple. For something to be a story, it has to have a willing protagonist who has a desire to achieve something, and that protagonist has obstacles that he has to or she has to overcome. And then, he learns something about himself or about the world at the end of that story. Now we can talk about how this could be applied to things other than books about people and films about people. Because when we’re talking about a person, it’s very simple. And when we’re talking about other things, it’s maybe not as simple.
Abby: So are you saying then that story isn’t, “Hey, I went to A, and then I did B, I got the groceries, I cooked a meal.”
Yan: So there’s a lot of types of information in the world, right? There’s a lot of structured information. There are essays, and there are recipes, and there are all kinds of narratives, and even a lot of museum exhibits that are not stories. You know, there’s just a lot of information, there’s a sequence of events, and none of this is storytelling. Storytelling implies a built-in mechanism that works a certain way, that makes us want to turn the page and find out what happens next.
Brenda: Yeah, and I have to interject as well. I don’t know if you can have like an expertise in storytelling. I imagine that you quite do. I certainly, from my walk of, you know, life, there’s a lot of folks who have done so much scholarly research in story and in storytelling and people who are, what I would call raconteurs, right, people who really genuinely are not just professional storytellers, but also quite gifted. What do you think about that? Do you think that there really is a learned and a trained and a gifted storyteller that differentiates them from, you know, story being used all over the place, like ubiquitously?
Yan: Well, I think some people are naturally gifted at that without being able to reflect on their skill, and some people can reflect on that but are not gifted at actually the storytelling itself. And some people can do both. Some people are good at storytelling, and they understand the mechanics of it. And I think we’ve been telling stories for many thousands of years, and certainly I think it’s one of the most effective mechanism to engage people, to make people follow and pay attention.
And I think movies are the best example because if you look at the way movies are structured, there is a certain contract between the author and the audience. We enter a dark room, we sit down, and so we’re saying for the next 2 hours, I give all of my attention to the screen and I will not make any decisions.
The author will make all of the decisions, what’s on the screen, who is saying what, what am I looking at? And that’s how you tell a story. Now we’re talking about museums, it’s a whole different beast because museums and spaces, in general, are interactive by their nature. You decide where to go, where to look, to skip a certain text panel, or to read it. And that sort of goes against all the principles of storytelling. And so our goal in museums is to find a way to control the attention of the visitor.
Brenda: I wanted to just for, for a second, pivot back to the idea of what some of the fundamental things are about humans and storytelling and one of the things that I think about so much and that I absolutely love, in part from raising my own child and, but in part from when I teach and teaching about story and in my own courses, I think about how children begin to speak and to socialize at that time in our life when we are quite little, three, four or five years old, stories are a part of how we make meaning of the world around us. And much of this takes the form of asking questions, following impulses of wonder, of curiosity, and about the most mundane things. And I find this endlessly optimistic and filled with hope, and I wish that more was done in exhibitions to inspire this natural tendency of asking questions and of wondering and how that is really fundamental. I’m wondering if you have come across any or if you yourself employ any strategies in sparking curiosity, sparking story by using question strategies.
Yan: Well, so, I think the imagine if, imagine a situation type of question leads directly to identification with characters, right? So you begin, imagine if you were this. Imagine yourself in this situation, right, and identification with the protagonist is sort of the main element of storytelling. Because if you imagine yourself watching a film, you’re identifying with the character to a point where you are not scared for him. You are scared as if he were you, right?
When DiCaprio is drowning, you don’t think, Oh, I’m sad for Kate Winslet because he is drowning. You are drowning with him, right? So you completely, you abandon your reality, and you become them for a second. That is what makes us want to continue flipping the page, right, and finding out what’s what’s happening next, because it’s happening to me.
And I think one of the main questions we need to ask is how do we make visitors identifying with our story, identifying with whatever, whoever, or whatever the protagonist is so that they can be as involved.
Abby: And why we sort of do that because as a film director, for example, or a writer, you’re doing that because you want to connect with your audience, you want to move them. So I think it’s also about that objective for a museum, actually wanting to touch and move emotionally the visitors that come rather than maybe just educate.
Brenda: How does that play out in the design that you do? How do you lead, lead an audience through emotional arc? What was that, what does that look like?
Yan: Well, sometimes, again, when there’s a strong human protagonist, it’s a little easier because it’s very similar. So, for example, in the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library, Boris Yeltsin was the main protagonist, and we could follow his plight and understand his decisions, and sort of craft the story out of his presidency. So that’s very similar to films and books. And sometimes, you know, people often say that in a good drama, there are three levels of conflict. So there’s a conflict between the main protagonist and a personified enemy. There’s the protagonist against the system, sort of against the empire or whatever.
Abby: Star Wars springs to mind.
Yan: Star Wars, for example. And then there’s also…
Brenda: Okay, I was going to sing, but I’m going to spare everybody.
Abby: You big tease, Brenda.
Brenda: It’s not that kind of a podcast.
Yan: And so the third level is, is your internal conflict, when you’re battling yourself, you are battling your fears, or you’re trying to change, right, and so in a good drama and in the Boris Yeltsin case, it was easy to identify. Now, when you’re talking about a science museum for a second, suddenly there is not one human, and there is no protagonist, and you’re like, okay, well then we can’t tell the story because it’s just basically a bunch of artifacts or little mini stories about different things. But I think what we’re trying to do is to say, no, well, let’s hold on, let’s think. Is there a story? For example, the story of science is the story of humanity’s fight for knowledge against the obstacles that nature is presenting us with.
And so maybe this is one way to go because now we have the protagonist and now we have the obstacles. Now we’re overcoming; we’re trying to learn. Maybe there’s some other path, but basically look for that path before just deciding, Oh, well, let’s just structure chronologically or let’s, you know, divide it, this is mathematical, and this is physics, and this is chemistry.
Abby: Or, thematically, yeah.
Brenda: I’m wondering if we can pivot for a second and talk about a favorite subject of mine, which is objects. So props are essential elements, as I understand it, in film. Yan, how do objects play out in terms of storytelling devices and exhibitions, and is there a similarity?
Yan: I personally love immersive exhibits, and when I say immersive, I really mean immersive in the sense that there are a lot of film-style decorations, and if they’re done well, they do immerse me in a certain atmosphere and help me feel things, help me place myself in a certain place or a certain time, and so I think props can be used very efficient, very effectively.
I think we need to think of this as a new art form, new art discipline, because you can tell a story by listening to a radio play, you can read this in the book, you can watch a theater show, you can watch a movie, or you can go do that, you know – that experience. And I think it’s using all the same elements. But in addition, there is like one more important thing, which is space and your body.
Abby: I like the idea that it’s, it’s a new art form because I do, I think about immersive theater as well, and I think about a lot of these experiences that are popping up now, like, like the Van Gogh, like the National Geographic’s King Tut, and, you know, I think about the fact that I think they’re getting a lot of visitors, a lot of families, because they’re enjoying that style of immersion.
And I think it’s imperative when we look at museums and institutions that they start to make this pivot, so they don’t lose market share. So they don’t just become a historical place that only maybe a few people go, researchers, analysts, historians. They need to be a place of entertainment as well as education. And so Yan, what do you think the problem is with storytelling in museums right now? How are museums dealing with this, with storytelling? Are they or are they not?
Yan: Well, first of all, it’s a, it’s a fight for people who have been working in museums for years and years because they thought of themselves as historians that preserve culture and history and objects. And now we’re coming in with our decorations, and it was like, this is just hokey stuff. Like, this is not a museum. And I think now they’re learning to understand that they’re competing not with other museums, they’re competing with cinema, they’re competing with zoos, and they have to participate.
You have to engage me. I don’t care unless I’m specifically interested in the topic. I don’t care. Now, how do they do that? I think that one of the problems that we just discussed is in the museum everything is distracting me from the story. The coffee shop is right here, so the smells are coming from over there. My kids are running around, people are talking.
So there are a lot of things that are happening. And I can look left. I can look right. I can make my own decisions so suddenly, like I’m interacting with the space rather than following the author. So one sort of tendency that we see as museums build, build paths so that I cannot deviate from the path I have to see this, then I have to see that. And so I go from station to station so that a story could be told, because if I skip stations, the story’s broken.
Brenda: So, can story be told in a non-linear fashion?
Yan: I think a story can be told in a non-linear fashion, but the author has to define the non-linearity of it. And also we have to say that, look, not everything has to be a story. Sometimes there can be beautiful things that work, and they’re not stories. So we have to admit that we’re just trying to say stories are one of the most efficient way to engage people, but we can’t force that structure onto everything.
Abby: I think when we look at museums and institutions right now, one of the problems is, or issues that they need to overcome, is it feels to me like they’ve taken a book and they’ve put it on the wall. So they’ve taken text out of a book, up it goes, they’ve taken images, there’s images, now it’s just a 16 by 9 screen.
It doesn’t feel like it’s using the space. And I think there needs to be a shift, a change, looking through a different lens when we’re now moving forward, creating these stories, these museums, these narratives where you don’t start with the information. When we look at an interpretive plan, we look at the story points first and what we’re going to tell, and then what’s the best way to tell them.
Every space we design from scratch with no limits. Is there going to be any text in here at all, does there need to be any text. Is it going to be an audio piece to tell this part of the story?
Yan: Right. Because if you think about it, a story is an attempt to build some harmony out of this chaos. It’s organizing things for us and out of this organization, out of this harmony, meaning is sort of etched out of that, and meaning that we’re sort of lacking in life because the life is just so chaotic and so random and so unfair or and so just, there is no meaning that we can kind of grab on to without telling ourselves these stories.
Brenda: And ultimately, isn’t the intention of an exhibition, and I’ll be very specific here to exhibitions. Isn’t ultimately the intention, if not the responsibility, to convey content and to see to it that content is conveyed in as meaningful and as in dialogic a way as humanly possible. And I don’t know how you do that without having some kind of a narrative experience.
I still think that at the root of this because human beings are storytelling animals, shout out by the way, if y’all don’t know Jonathan Gottschall, he is somebody to know about who talks about the storytelling animal. But I think that there’s a responsibility for museums anyway and for exhibitions to be story-based environments.
Yan: Right, and I think we see all artforms gravitate to storytelling, to a dramatic storytelling. Most films, most novels, most writing, because that’s how we consume, that’s how we can sort of learn about our world is through dramatic stories. And I think museums will gravitate to it too. And we will see in, you know, 20 years that museums tell stories, spaces, I guess, not museums, spaces tell stories first, and then there’ll be experimental spaces where a story is not at the center of it.
Abby: And I think there’s always, I mean, Yan and I have this back and forth because I have a painting background, and he’s very much the writing background. So I’m always like, yeah, not everything has to have a story Yan, and I can be incredibly moved, as a lot of people know, by the Seagram murals and Mark Rothko’s work. And so I sort of feel like there’s, as Yan’s sort of intimating, room for everything.
I’m excited to do what we do because we get to use all, it’s multidisciplinary. We get to use all these tools creatively to be able to move someone, reach someone, and the idea of telling stories is about almost making you feel like you’re not alone in the world, right? That’s how I feel when I’ve watched the best story. It’s moved me, it’s touched me, and something’s sort of given my heart a warm hug. But Yan, how do you decide whose story to tell?
Yan: Well, so first of all, to continue what you were talking about, about the different tools, I think we’re all still learning to use these tools because some of the, you know, again, talking about film, there’s a very specific way to make films. Everybody who makes films knows how films are made. There are no conversations about what the structure of the team will be, how we’ll do this, how we’ll do that.
You just go and do that because there are 100 years of filmmaking sort of taught the humans how to make films. With what we’re trying to do here, everything is new, so we’re trying to learn the tools, we’re trying to understand how to approach it, and finding a point of view is one of those things that we have to learn how to do because we’re not always telling stories of humans, right?
So you have to sit down, and the very first question is, okay, whose story is it? Who is the protagonist here? And I think it’s very often, most often, it’s not obvious. You have to search for it. You have to attack it from different perspectives and finally say, oh, maybe it’s a story of this. It could be a collective brain, it could be society.
Sometimes you have to invent, maybe, a protagonist. So I think it’s always a fight. But I think this is the most important fight. You have to sit down and you have to figure out who the character is, what the story is, and not move to structuring content before you actually decided what the story is.
Abby: I love Yan’s use of the word fight. Could you imagine us fighting, no, it’s more like a creative discussion. Passionate discussion.
Brenda: Well, but, I mean, I think, and depending on how you, you know, how you’re getting at, but one of the things that I think I’m interpreting or hearing when you use the word fight a lot is that this is, it’s a mission. It is done with intention, and it’s hard to do. You’re dealing with a lot of players who are not even familiar with the idea of narrative experience or the nature of human experience in spaces.
I keep thinking too, and you know, if it’s not necessarily about a fight, or, you know, even a conflict with the other people who are involved in the creative process, I keep thinking that there’s almost sort of like a creative fight that can happen internally about needing to find the thread. You know, this, again, this intention and this desire, this quest and this determination, really, to find the story, to tell the story, to do it well, to connect with other humans, and to open things up for other humans to experience. That is, I think, an innate fight.
Abby: Once you understand what that story is, once you’ve worked it out, it’s like the hanger that you can put all the clothes on. And once you have that lens, it makes curation a lot easier because once you’re clear on what it is, what it says, you then become clear on what it isn’t. And so suddenly, you can really move forward.
And that’s another way that everybody can get on board. Because the other thing is when a few of you understand conceptually what the story is going to be, you still have to make sure that everybody’s on board and all the stakeholders and that it makes sense. And sometimes, when you’re creating things, there isn’t something that’s gone before.
We’re often asked, Oh, could we see other examples of people who’ve done this before? And we’re like, Oh my gosh, we’re going to have to draw it all from scratch. We’re going to have to model it from scratch, because it hasn’t been done before. And so a lot of the work that we do is for the first time, it is in some ways hopeful and optimistic, but still trial and error.
And we have to be able to pivot at failure because if you’re going to aspire to do something well, different, creative, new, there’s going to be failure. And we call it failing forward because you learn, and then you pivot. And obviously we have over 20 years of experience of doing this, but it’s hard. It’s not just; here’s the blueprint at the beginning, and let’s just go to build.
Brenda: From your perspective, is there a specific job with a specific job description where it falls to a person to see to it that the story has been crafted? Do tell us, Yan. Is it you?
Yan: I think, like, within our company, we think of the pyramid as very similar to the film pyramid. So there’s a director at the helm of the film, same as we in this, the storytelling, space storytelling, we call that person the creative director, but is basically a director, but that person is assisted by all the people around, right?
So there’s the cinematographer on the visual side, then there’s the scriptwriter on the content side, and the same happens in in museum exhibit design, except for there may be even more because you have the technologists and you have the architects, and you have the 3D designers, and you have the, the scriptwriters who are writing scripts and copy. But basically, it’s still, there’s, there’s a vision that needs to be realized, and there’s a person at the top of it.
Abby: It’s very interesting because you have to have everybody involved from the beginning. With that spark of the idea and the concept and the story, it’s often made richer by workshopping with this team because they bring ideas and thoughts and perspectives, which is why it’s really important to have a diverse team and one of the things that we’ve always focused on, because it’s not like the creative director goes, “This is it. This is what I’ve decided we’re going to do.”
It’s a group thing. So there’s the stakeholders of the museum, the institution, the curators, the stakeholders within the community, and making sure that we’re listening. As Yan said, this is all a new discipline. You need everybody involved, and you need to have major listening skills.
Brenda: Well, a billion years ago, when I was entering into practice and coming out of the children’s museum world, there, there was the role of developer and who in many ways was the keeper of the flame. And I know that’s still a very distinct role and profession that people go into exhibition development, but I keep thinking about how essential it is to have that person, whatever the title is, that you might be using it in your given firm or your given institution, how essential it is to have that person who’s the keeper of the flame, that person who’s ultimate responsibility it is not just to keep the story, to frame it out and to see to the mechanics, but to love the story, to fall in love with the story, to believe in the story, to keep the dream alive of the story, despite all of the challenges and the frustrations and the obstacles, and despite this struggle of the technical aspects at time, there is something that can be trained, and that is a gift. And it is something that hopefully we instruct well in our program with our grad students, the ability to stay in love from beginning to end and, you know, I think, listeners, as many of you know, a museum project can be four years, five years, six years. That’s a lot of love. And being married to a story and sticking with it and being able to go through all of the pitfalls and the highs and the lows. What a, what a gift it is to be able to do that. And also, I think what a privilege.
Abby: It’s interesting to bring up the longevity of these projects. And you’re right, the curiosity, the passion, because we often joke that we feel like we tell a story three times. There’s three, three moments. The moment at the concept stage, then the moment when you actually realize it and design it, and you’re like, oop, need to change this, need to address this story point in a new manner, or we need to augment here, or this isn’t coming through. And then the fabrication, the build, you know, you try to build as closely as you can to design, but inevitably, again, during prototyping, etc., things get tweaked and changed. So it’s almost like sort of three versions of the same story. And so that can often be frustrating.
Yan: It’s a fight.
Abby: It’s another fight. So it’s like being adaptable also as a creative lead and able to take sort of these, these challenges on and be able to come up with solutions that still adhere to the overall concept and the overall story you’re trying to tell.
Yan: It’s also a fight, going back to the fight, it’s a fight on cliches as well because it’s very easy to fall into things that have been tried before, and they tend to crawl into our brain and sort of create the little worlds inside our brains so that whenever we think of something, they just come out, right and there’s, we need a very strong filter to make sure they’re not falling into sort of repeating the same things because cliches are cliches for a reason. They were very, very effective at some point, and so there were repeated and repeated and repeated to the point where they’ve sort of lost the impact. So I think it’s another aspect of sort of developing stories and trying to make sure that we’re looking for fresh ways to do this.
Brenda: Well, and maybe fresh ways to tell great archetypal stories. The great universal stories. And I really appreciate how even in our brief dialog today, you’ve really given us some cues into how it is that the small worlds inside of our head can actually be opened up to being the large world that we all share and how that plays out in exhibitions. Yan, what a pleasure it is talking with you.
Yan: Thank you for having me.
Abby: Yeah, thanks, Yan.
Yan: It was fun.
[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.
[Music]
Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: And I’m Brenda Cowan.
Abby: Today, we’re discussing an often bandied around, and I think misinterpreted word in our industry: story, Brenda. It’s used a lot and can be many things, so on the show today, we’re going to dissect what a story is and isn’t and how to tell a story in a museum. Our guest on this journey is Yan Vizinberg, my co-founder at Lorem Ipsum. He studied story at film school, which is where we met, and he’s produced and directed films as well as curated large-scale museum and experience design projects around the world.
Brenda: Yan, welcome so much to the show.
Yan: Thanks for having me.
Brenda: So tell us a little bit about your background, and within that, give us a sense of how you and story began.
Yan: Well, I went to film school in Boston, and at first, I wasn’t thinking of films as stories, actually. I thought of them as visual mediums. And so when people said, Oh, I’m a storyteller, I always thought, Well, why are you saying this? Because not all films are stories. And then, slowly, the more you watch films, the more you study films, the more you understand that all dramatic mediums sort of gravitate to storytelling.
And, you know, we made films, and we made commercials, we started a production company. And at some point, Ralph Applebaum and Associates approached us to create media for the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center. And we ended up being the media partner, creating everything that moves, everything that’s on the screen. And this way, we sort of watched them work, and we thought, Well, we can do this too, and maybe we can bring our filmmaking and storytelling backgrounds to experience design. And so this is how we ended up sort of doing that line of work, too.
Abby: We’ve been in business together; you’ve been in business for over 20 years now. Has the business changed from a storytelling perspective in the work that you’ve been doing?
Yan: I think technology has been merging for the past 20 years, right? So it’s all becoming one thing, but I don’t think storytelling has changed and I think we need to talk about what we actually mean when we say story and storytelling. I think we have to define the terms because everything is now called the story. Everything is storytelling. Every PowerPoint presentation, every museum exhibit is now a story.
Abby: So what makes a story, then? Let’s think about, you know, obviously, I completely agree. I think a lot of people are bandying around this word story and potentially are thinking about it in a different way, so from your perspective, what makes a story?
Yan: Well, a story’s very simple. For something to be a story, it has to have a willing protagonist who has a desire to achieve something, and that protagonist has obstacles that he has to or she has to overcome. And then, he learns something about himself or about the world at the end of that story. Now we can talk about how this could be applied to things other than books about people and films about people. Because when we’re talking about a person, it’s very simple. And when we’re talking about other things, it’s maybe not as simple.
Abby: So are you saying then that story isn’t, “Hey, I went to A, and then I did B, I got the groceries, I cooked a meal.”
Yan: So there’s a lot of types of information in the world, right? There’s a lot of structured information. There are essays, and there are recipes, and there are all kinds of narratives, and even a lot of museum exhibits that are not stories. You know, there’s just a lot of information, there’s a sequence of events, and none of this is storytelling. Storytelling implies a built-in mechanism that works a certain way, that makes us want to turn the page and find out what happens next.
Brenda: Yeah, and I have to interject as well. I don’t know if you can have like an expertise in storytelling. I imagine that you quite do. I certainly, from my walk of, you know, life, there’s a lot of folks who have done so much scholarly research in story and in storytelling and people who are, what I would call raconteurs, right, people who really genuinely are not just professional storytellers, but also quite gifted. What do you think about that? Do you think that there really is a learned and a trained and a gifted storyteller that differentiates them from, you know, story being used all over the place, like ubiquitously?
Yan: Well, I think some people are naturally gifted at that without being able to reflect on their skill, and some people can reflect on that but are not gifted at actually the storytelling itself. And some people can do both. Some people are good at storytelling, and they understand the mechanics of it. And I think we’ve been telling stories for many thousands of years, and certainly I think it’s one of the most effective mechanism to engage people, to make people follow and pay attention.
And I think movies are the best example because if you look at the way movies are structured, there is a certain contract between the author and the audience. We enter a dark room, we sit down, and so we’re saying for the next 2 hours, I give all of my attention to the screen and I will not make any decisions.
The author will make all of the decisions, what’s on the screen, who is saying what, what am I looking at? And that’s how you tell a story. Now we’re talking about museums, it’s a whole different beast because museums and spaces, in general, are interactive by their nature. You decide where to go, where to look, to skip a certain text panel, or to read it. And that sort of goes against all the principles of storytelling. And so our goal in museums is to find a way to control the attention of the visitor.
Brenda: I wanted to just for, for a second, pivot back to the idea of what some of the fundamental things are about humans and storytelling and one of the things that I think about so much and that I absolutely love, in part from raising my own child and, but in part from when I teach and teaching about story and in my own courses, I think about how children begin to speak and to socialize at that time in our life when we are quite little, three, four or five years old, stories are a part of how we make meaning of the world around us. And much of this takes the form of asking questions, following impulses of wonder, of curiosity, and about the most mundane things. And I find this endlessly optimistic and filled with hope, and I wish that more was done in exhibitions to inspire this natural tendency of asking questions and of wondering and how that is really fundamental. I’m wondering if you have come across any or if you yourself employ any strategies in sparking curiosity, sparking story by using question strategies.
Yan: Well, so, I think the imagine if, imagine a situation type of question leads directly to identification with characters, right? So you begin, imagine if you were this. Imagine yourself in this situation, right, and identification with the protagonist is sort of the main element of storytelling. Because if you imagine yourself watching a film, you’re identifying with the character to a point where you are not scared for him. You are scared as if he were you, right?
When DiCaprio is drowning, you don’t think, Oh, I’m sad for Kate Winslet because he is drowning. You are drowning with him, right? So you completely, you abandon your reality, and you become them for a second. That is what makes us want to continue flipping the page, right, and finding out what’s what’s happening next, because it’s happening to me.
And I think one of the main questions we need to ask is how do we make visitors identifying with our story, identifying with whatever, whoever, or whatever the protagonist is so that they can be as involved.
Abby: And why we sort of do that because as a film director, for example, or a writer, you’re doing that because you want to connect with your audience, you want to move them. So I think it’s also about that objective for a museum, actually wanting to touch and move emotionally the visitors that come rather than maybe just educate.
Brenda: How does that play out in the design that you do? How do you lead, lead an audience through emotional arc? What was that, what does that look like?
Yan: Well, sometimes, again, when there’s a strong human protagonist, it’s a little easier because it’s very similar. So, for example, in the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library, Boris Yeltsin was the main protagonist, and we could follow his plight and understand his decisions, and sort of craft the story out of his presidency. So that’s very similar to films and books. And sometimes, you know, people often say that in a good drama, there are three levels of conflict. So there’s a conflict between the main protagonist and a personified enemy. There’s the protagonist against the system, sort of against the empire or whatever.
Abby: Star Wars springs to mind.
Yan: Star Wars, for example. And then there’s also…
Brenda: Okay, I was going to sing, but I’m going to spare everybody.
Abby: You big tease, Brenda.
Brenda: It’s not that kind of a podcast.
Yan: And so the third level is, is your internal conflict, when you’re battling yourself, you are battling your fears, or you’re trying to change, right, and so in a good drama and in the Boris Yeltsin case, it was easy to identify. Now, when you’re talking about a science museum for a second, suddenly there is not one human, and there is no protagonist, and you’re like, okay, well then we can’t tell the story because it’s just basically a bunch of artifacts or little mini stories about different things. But I think what we’re trying to do is to say, no, well, let’s hold on, let’s think. Is there a story? For example, the story of science is the story of humanity’s fight for knowledge against the obstacles that nature is presenting us with.
And so maybe this is one way to go because now we have the protagonist and now we have the obstacles. Now we’re overcoming; we’re trying to learn. Maybe there’s some other path, but basically look for that path before just deciding, Oh, well, let’s just structure chronologically or let’s, you know, divide it, this is mathematical, and this is physics, and this is chemistry.
Abby: Or, thematically, yeah.
Brenda: I’m wondering if we can pivot for a second and talk about a favorite subject of mine, which is objects. So props are essential elements, as I understand it, in film. Yan, how do objects play out in terms of storytelling devices and exhibitions, and is there a similarity?
Yan: I personally love immersive exhibits, and when I say immersive, I really mean immersive in the sense that there are a lot of film-style decorations, and if they’re done well, they do immerse me in a certain atmosphere and help me feel things, help me place myself in a certain place or a certain time, and so I think props can be used very efficient, very effectively.
I think we need to think of this as a new art form, new art discipline, because you can tell a story by listening to a radio play, you can read this in the book, you can watch a theater show, you can watch a movie, or you can go do that, you know – that experience. And I think it’s using all the same elements. But in addition, there is like one more important thing, which is space and your body.
Abby: I like the idea that it’s, it’s a new art form because I do, I think about immersive theater as well, and I think about a lot of these experiences that are popping up now, like, like the Van Gogh, like the National Geographic’s King Tut, and, you know, I think about the fact that I think they’re getting a lot of visitors, a lot of families, because they’re enjoying that style of immersion.
And I think it’s imperative when we look at museums and institutions that they start to make this pivot, so they don’t lose market share. So they don’t just become a historical place that only maybe a few people go, researchers, analysts, historians. They need to be a place of entertainment as well as education. And so Yan, what do you think the problem is with storytelling in museums right now? How are museums dealing with this, with storytelling? Are they or are they not?
Yan: Well, first of all, it’s a, it’s a fight for people who have been working in museums for years and years because they thought of themselves as historians that preserve culture and history and objects. And now we’re coming in with our decorations, and it was like, this is just hokey stuff. Like, this is not a museum. And I think now they’re learning to understand that they’re competing not with other museums, they’re competing with cinema, they’re competing with zoos, and they have to participate.
You have to engage me. I don’t care unless I’m specifically interested in the topic. I don’t care. Now, how do they do that? I think that one of the problems that we just discussed is in the museum everything is distracting me from the story. The coffee shop is right here, so the smells are coming from over there. My kids are running around, people are talking.
So there are a lot of things that are happening. And I can look left. I can look right. I can make my own decisions so suddenly, like I’m interacting with the space rather than following the author. So one sort of tendency that we see as museums build, build paths so that I cannot deviate from the path I have to see this, then I have to see that. And so I go from station to station so that a story could be told, because if I skip stations, the story’s broken.
Brenda: So, can story be told in a non-linear fashion?
Yan: I think a story can be told in a non-linear fashion, but the author has to define the non-linearity of it. And also we have to say that, look, not everything has to be a story. Sometimes there can be beautiful things that work, and they’re not stories. So we have to admit that we’re just trying to say stories are one of the most efficient way to engage people, but we can’t force that structure onto everything.
Abby: I think when we look at museums and institutions right now, one of the problems is, or issues that they need to overcome, is it feels to me like they’ve taken a book and they’ve put it on the wall. So they’ve taken text out of a book, up it goes, they’ve taken images, there’s images, now it’s just a 16 by 9 screen.
It doesn’t feel like it’s using the space. And I think there needs to be a shift, a change, looking through a different lens when we’re now moving forward, creating these stories, these museums, these narratives where you don’t start with the information. When we look at an interpretive plan, we look at the story points first and what we’re going to tell, and then what’s the best way to tell them.
Every space we design from scratch with no limits. Is there going to be any text in here at all, does there need to be any text. Is it going to be an audio piece to tell this part of the story?
Yan: Right. Because if you think about it, a story is an attempt to build some harmony out of this chaos. It’s organizing things for us and out of this organization, out of this harmony, meaning is sort of etched out of that, and meaning that we’re sort of lacking in life because the life is just so chaotic and so random and so unfair or and so just, there is no meaning that we can kind of grab on to without telling ourselves these stories.
Brenda: And ultimately, isn’t the intention of an exhibition, and I’ll be very specific here to exhibitions. Isn’t ultimately the intention, if not the responsibility, to convey content and to see to it that content is conveyed in as meaningful and as in dialogic a way as humanly possible. And I don’t know how you do that without having some kind of a narrative experience.
I still think that at the root of this because human beings are storytelling animals, shout out by the way, if y’all don’t know Jonathan Gottschall, he is somebody to know about who talks about the storytelling animal. But I think that there’s a responsibility for museums anyway and for exhibitions to be story-based environments.
Yan: Right, and I think we see all artforms gravitate to storytelling, to a dramatic storytelling. Most films, most novels, most writing, because that’s how we consume, that’s how we can sort of learn about our world is through dramatic stories. And I think museums will gravitate to it too. And we will see in, you know, 20 years that museums tell stories, spaces, I guess, not museums, spaces tell stories first, and then there’ll be experimental spaces where a story is not at the center of it.
Abby: And I think there’s always, I mean, Yan and I have this back and forth because I have a painting background, and he’s very much the writing background. So I’m always like, yeah, not everything has to have a story Yan, and I can be incredibly moved, as a lot of people know, by the Seagram murals and Mark Rothko’s work. And so I sort of feel like there’s, as Yan’s sort of intimating, room for everything.
I’m excited to do what we do because we get to use all, it’s multidisciplinary. We get to use all these tools creatively to be able to move someone, reach someone, and the idea of telling stories is about almost making you feel like you’re not alone in the world, right? That’s how I feel when I’ve watched the best story. It’s moved me, it’s touched me, and something’s sort of given my heart a warm hug. But Yan, how do you decide whose story to tell?
Yan: Well, so first of all, to continue what you were talking about, about the different tools, I think we’re all still learning to use these tools because some of the, you know, again, talking about film, there’s a very specific way to make films. Everybody who makes films knows how films are made. There are no conversations about what the structure of the team will be, how we’ll do this, how we’ll do that.
You just go and do that because there are 100 years of filmmaking sort of taught the humans how to make films. With what we’re trying to do here, everything is new, so we’re trying to learn the tools, we’re trying to understand how to approach it, and finding a point of view is one of those things that we have to learn how to do because we’re not always telling stories of humans, right?
So you have to sit down, and the very first question is, okay, whose story is it? Who is the protagonist here? And I think it’s very often, most often, it’s not obvious. You have to search for it. You have to attack it from different perspectives and finally say, oh, maybe it’s a story of this. It could be a collective brain, it could be society.
Sometimes you have to invent, maybe, a protagonist. So I think it’s always a fight. But I think this is the most important fight. You have to sit down and you have to figure out who the character is, what the story is, and not move to structuring content before you actually decided what the story is.
Abby: I love Yan’s use of the word fight. Could you imagine us fighting, no, it’s more like a creative discussion. Passionate discussion.
Brenda: Well, but, I mean, I think, and depending on how you, you know, how you’re getting at, but one of the things that I think I’m interpreting or hearing when you use the word fight a lot is that this is, it’s a mission. It is done with intention, and it’s hard to do. You’re dealing with a lot of players who are not even familiar with the idea of narrative experience or the nature of human experience in spaces.
I keep thinking too, and you know, if it’s not necessarily about a fight, or, you know, even a conflict with the other people who are involved in the creative process, I keep thinking that there’s almost sort of like a creative fight that can happen internally about needing to find the thread. You know, this, again, this intention and this desire, this quest and this determination, really, to find the story, to tell the story, to do it well, to connect with other humans, and to open things up for other humans to experience. That is, I think, an innate fight.
Abby: Once you understand what that story is, once you’ve worked it out, it’s like the hanger that you can put all the clothes on. And once you have that lens, it makes curation a lot easier because once you’re clear on what it is, what it says, you then become clear on what it isn’t. And so suddenly, you can really move forward.
And that’s another way that everybody can get on board. Because the other thing is when a few of you understand conceptually what the story is going to be, you still have to make sure that everybody’s on board and all the stakeholders and that it makes sense. And sometimes, when you’re creating things, there isn’t something that’s gone before.
We’re often asked, Oh, could we see other examples of people who’ve done this before? And we’re like, Oh my gosh, we’re going to have to draw it all from scratch. We’re going to have to model it from scratch, because it hasn’t been done before. And so a lot of the work that we do is for the first time, it is in some ways hopeful and optimistic, but still trial and error.
And we have to be able to pivot at failure because if you’re going to aspire to do something well, different, creative, new, there’s going to be failure. And we call it failing forward because you learn, and then you pivot. And obviously we have over 20 years of experience of doing this, but it’s hard. It’s not just; here’s the blueprint at the beginning, and let’s just go to build.
Brenda: From your perspective, is there a specific job with a specific job description where it falls to a person to see to it that the story has been crafted? Do tell us, Yan. Is it you?
Yan: I think, like, within our company, we think of the pyramid as very similar to the film pyramid. So there’s a director at the helm of the film, same as we in this, the storytelling, space storytelling, we call that person the creative director, but is basically a director, but that person is assisted by all the people around, right?
So there’s the cinematographer on the visual side, then there’s the scriptwriter on the content side, and the same happens in in museum exhibit design, except for there may be even more because you have the technologists and you have the architects, and you have the 3D designers, and you have the, the scriptwriters who are writing scripts and copy. But basically, it’s still, there’s, there’s a vision that needs to be realized, and there’s a person at the top of it.
Abby: It’s very interesting because you have to have everybody involved from the beginning. With that spark of the idea and the concept and the story, it’s often made richer by workshopping with this team because they bring ideas and thoughts and perspectives, which is why it’s really important to have a diverse team and one of the things that we’ve always focused on, because it’s not like the creative director goes, “This is it. This is what I’ve decided we’re going to do.”
It’s a group thing. So there’s the stakeholders of the museum, the institution, the curators, the stakeholders within the community, and making sure that we’re listening. As Yan said, this is all a new discipline. You need everybody involved, and you need to have major listening skills.
Brenda: Well, a billion years ago, when I was entering into practice and coming out of the children’s museum world, there, there was the role of developer and who in many ways was the keeper of the flame. And I know that’s still a very distinct role and profession that people go into exhibition development, but I keep thinking about how essential it is to have that person, whatever the title is, that you might be using it in your given firm or your given institution, how essential it is to have that person who’s the keeper of the flame, that person who’s ultimate responsibility it is not just to keep the story, to frame it out and to see to the mechanics, but to love the story, to fall in love with the story, to believe in the story, to keep the dream alive of the story, despite all of the challenges and the frustrations and the obstacles, and despite this struggle of the technical aspects at time, there is something that can be trained, and that is a gift. And it is something that hopefully we instruct well in our program with our grad students, the ability to stay in love from beginning to end and, you know, I think, listeners, as many of you know, a museum project can be four years, five years, six years. That’s a lot of love. And being married to a story and sticking with it and being able to go through all of the pitfalls and the highs and the lows. What a, what a gift it is to be able to do that. And also, I think what a privilege.
Abby: It’s interesting to bring up the longevity of these projects. And you’re right, the curiosity, the passion, because we often joke that we feel like we tell a story three times. There’s three, three moments. The moment at the concept stage, then the moment when you actually realize it and design it, and you’re like, oop, need to change this, need to address this story point in a new manner, or we need to augment here, or this isn’t coming through. And then the fabrication, the build, you know, you try to build as closely as you can to design, but inevitably, again, during prototyping, etc., things get tweaked and changed. So it’s almost like sort of three versions of the same story. And so that can often be frustrating.
Yan: It’s a fight.
Abby: It’s another fight. So it’s like being adaptable also as a creative lead and able to take sort of these, these challenges on and be able to come up with solutions that still adhere to the overall concept and the overall story you’re trying to tell.
Yan: It’s also a fight, going back to the fight, it’s a fight on cliches as well because it’s very easy to fall into things that have been tried before, and they tend to crawl into our brain and sort of create the little worlds inside our brains so that whenever we think of something, they just come out, right and there’s, we need a very strong filter to make sure they’re not falling into sort of repeating the same things because cliches are cliches for a reason. They were very, very effective at some point, and so there were repeated and repeated and repeated to the point where they’ve sort of lost the impact. So I think it’s another aspect of sort of developing stories and trying to make sure that we’re looking for fresh ways to do this.
Brenda: Well, and maybe fresh ways to tell great archetypal stories. The great universal stories. And I really appreciate how even in our brief dialog today, you’ve really given us some cues into how it is that the small worlds inside of our head can actually be opened up to being the large world that we all share and how that plays out in exhibitions. Yan, what a pleasure it is talking with you.
Yan: Thank you for having me.
Abby: Yeah, thanks, Yan.
Yan: It was fun.
[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.
The Art of Storytelling with Yan Vizinberg
Empathy in Design with Elif Gokcigdem
Fostering Empathy Through Museums – Elif Gokcigdem
[Music]
Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: And I’m Brenda Cowan.
Abby: Today, we’re going to talk about empathy in design, how we create experiences that help the visitor feel the feelings of the people in the story because that is a very powerful way to promote understanding of each other and help us realize that we have more in common than differentiates us. We all need to be reminded we’re all humans with similar wants, needs, and challenges.
So I’m very excited to welcome today’s guest, Elif Gokcigdem, an author, professor, and founding president of ONE: Organization of Networks for Empathy. Elif curated and co-chaired the world’s first Summit on Fostering Universal Ethics and Compassion through Museums with His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama and she leads major strategic international partnerships in arts, culture, museums, and biodiversity conservation around the world. Welcome to the show, Elif.
Brenda: Hello, Elif, I’d love it for you to be able to share with our listeners how did you come to become a professor and leader of this international organization focused on building empathy?
Elif: First of all, thank you so much for having me for this conversation. My path to empathy has, I guess, began with my interest in history of art. I studied history of art with a focus on Islamic arts. I grew up in Turkey, and I finished my Ph.D. on this topic, mostly focusing on Islamic arts and mysticism, Islamic mysticism, and also the geometric patterns, you know, the symbols of light in Islamic mysticism, which connected me to empathy.
So I guess the destiny brought me back to this, you know, arts culture in museums. I’m just trying to do the best that I can in a way, that, how I can contribute to this cause of empathy-building in our world.
Abby: So empathy, I really want to define what empathy is, because empathy and understanding like, can you explain to me the difference? And better yet, is there one way to define empathy?
Elif: The short answer is there are many ways to define empathy. There’s, you know, there are several scientific definitions of empathy. There’s a Webster Dictionary definition of empathy. And there’s you know, there are many understandings of empathy depending on the discipline and the work you are involved in.
Abby: But just jumping in here, empathy is actually, you know, when I just pulled it up, now it says the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
Elif: Yes. And also, I mean, feel, this is a very human-centric definition that leaves, you know, our ability to empathize with nature and animals and other beings. You know, that, I mean, there are so many cultures, especially indigenous cultures that talk about empathizing with a mountain or a river. So that definition, I think, leaves all these possibilities out.
And before actually, you know, we talk about the definition of empathy. I think we also need to talk about why empathy, you know, why is it important? Why are we even having this discussion? And that actually brings me back to your question of human-centric versus more expanded understanding of empathy. When you turn on the news, you’ll see these, you know, sort of cries from all different kinds of organizations and institutions.
For example, the United Nations. Just to give you an example, the United Nations keeps telling us, you know, to achieve a sustainable future for all, we need to act urgently to protect biodiversity, the web of life that connects and supports us all. So if we go back and look at the statement and similar statements like this, there’s this urgency to care for all and to act and to protect, and there’s this like this oneness and the whole that we need to care for, we need to learn to care for. And I believe that’s where empathy is important; empathy comes in. And that’s why we need to work on the definition of empathy and not get stuck on one definition or one understanding. The platform that I’m creating is actually because of this, so that we can include, you know, cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary, cross-sectoral understanding of empathy so that we can better define empathy for our collective future so that we can better develop the tools that we need to foster empathy in our world.
In my view, empathy is critical for us to go from a fragmented worldview to a worldview where everything is interdependent and interconnected. And I call this the oneness mindset. And all the work that I have done so far brought me to this sort of working definition of empathy. Empathy is a form of perception that enables us to connect with ourselves and with others while awakening us into our oneness. So, in this case, empathy leads us to develop a recognition of the intrinsic value of each unique element that makes up the whole and encourages us to calibrate and harmonize our attitudes, actions, and behavior accordingly.
Brenda: So you see a lack of empathy as being a public health issue on a global scale. And you talk about how museums are natural platforms for health and empathy practice. Elif, I’d love for you to talk more about what you see as being particularly instrumental about museum environments and experiences when talking about empathy and the practice of empathy.
Elif: Well, you know, empathy is often discussed as something that can help us help others. You know, it’s, it is often confused with sympathy, just like feeling bad for somebody’s, you know, misfortune. I believe empathy is a portal for human flourishing, not just, you know, physical well-being, but spiritual well-being as well, because empathy through self-knowledge enables us to connect with our own internal world and allows us to recognize those, you know, biases and filters through which we perceive the other.
This, this is where museums come into play because empathy is not a linear process. It is not an intellectual process. It is a lived experience, and museums are the perfect platforms where anyone can experience empathy building to get a knowledge of their own selves within a collective experience. Many of those around also are going through similar experiences. Even if you’re in the same room looking at the same thing, there’s a multitude of expressions, reactions around the reality, what we call reality, and that’s the reality of the world we live in, of our existence. So an understanding of this expands our library of narratives into, oh, you know, actually there are many other ways of being, there are many other ways of perceiving, and mine is not the only way.
Brenda: I really, I love the idea of museums as being a place of equal footing for people in empathy building, and I know you were recently speaking with one of my students, actually, and I know that you had spoken to her about what sparks empathy in museums and that you used an analogy of nature walks as a means through which visitors can experience and develop empathy in their own way.
Can you tell us a little bit more about this? Like, do you, are we literally talking about walks in nature or is this also an analogy for other kinds of ways in which people can practice empathy in their everyday lives?
Elif: Exactly, so the framework that I’m working on equips individuals to come prepared and be intentional about empathy building and have some maybe questions and ways of looking and articulating and noticing how we look at things. And museums are particularly useful for this. My first book, called Fostering Empathy Through Museums, collected case studies from different kinds of museums, not just arts museums, but from animal sanctuaries, science centers, civil rights centers.
And at the end of the day, the sort of the executive summary of that book is that museums can be platforms for empathy building in five evidence based, science based ways which are: you know museums, first of all, hold a mirror to society. They can be a safe place for encountering the other. The other way that museums can be useful in empathy building is through storytelling and creating new narratives, new ways of being, new futures, getting us to imagine other ways of being and other ways of existing in the future, and also museums are places for experiential learning.
This is essential, but not just being in a museum and doing a hands on experience on some science experiments. You have to be intentional and you have to sort of articulate the steps and what is going on and the outcome. To make your point that, you know, what you, what you just went through is related to empathy and empathy building.
Brenda: When you said that museums are like mirrors to society, I find that really, really provocative and in a variety of ways, and I’m really curious, what is it like when that mirror shows us things that we aren’t very comfortable with?
Elif: Yes, and that’s exactly the point, you know, creating discomfort. I don’t say it in a way that we are just beautiful and we’re looking at ourselves and admiring ourselves in the mirror of museums. That’s not what I meant at all.
Brenda: Right.
Elif: This is basically, museums are mirrors with their colonialistic past and their racism and all kinds of baggage that they bring to the, you know, today, you know, like the institutions that they are.
We can take a look and learn from that and imagine new ways of being, new ways of creating museums, or museums behaving differently in our new reality. How can they be helpful for a, for a collective vision of being inclusive and equitable and accessible, and respectful? I mean, there’s, there’s a story of, like a fable, right. This ancient story where the lion and the rabbit, you know, this lion terrorizes this forest and all the animals, and one day this, you know, smart rabbit decides to take the lion to this well, deep well, where there’s just a little water left in the bottom, which creates this mirroring effect.
And the lion thinking that, you know, there’s this other king that is claiming his territory, he just keeps roaring into the well, and all he hears is his own roar coming back at him. And eventually, he jumps into the well to kill that other lion. But in, of course, there’s no other. It was just him all along. And I think our world right now, the news and our institutions and what we are going through is that moment of lion, us, roaring, you know, and thinking that, oh, you know, like we are all-powerful, we are at the center and everything has to be around us.
But this is the moment. This is a critical moment to face the mirror in that way so that we don’t choose to die, but we choose to imagine a new future and better ways of being in this world.
Brenda: Well, I like the idea that there’s an awful lot of clever rabbits out there, sort of pointing out the, the way and leading us to the well.
Abby: Let’s talk practically. It’s very hard to have empathy for others if you’re sort of not used to looking at things from other people’s perspectives or you have really strong beliefs when you’re walking into a museum or a situation. When we think about politics right now, our world is incredibly divisive, and it’s easy to put that stake in the ground and not to actually listen, hear, or debate the gray areas, right?
For some of our work, a visitor’s already coming in with what I call this loaded gun when it comes to their perspective and how they believe they perceive the truth, what’s true, what’s untrue. And they filter a lot of that based on their biases as we all do, so our challenge isn’t always to provoke because sometimes provoking somebody shuts them right down immediately.
So we tell a story in a sort of a slow and subtle way to gradually win people over or start to have people think at least a little bit differently. You know, we think about how is our protagonist relatable? Why do I care about this person? Why are they interesting? What’s their inner and outer conflict rather than actually focus a story on, on the visitor’s beliefs and try and challenge them that way.
What’s your experience Elif, when it comes to people really being open to empathy in museums or being ready to receive the information from a design perspective in a museum experience?
Elif: Yes, that reminded me of the study that was done by Smithsonian Visitor Services, I guess, that looked at visitor experience with the goal of defining what is a transformative experience, and they came up with this IPOP. So we each come to the museum experience with our own identities, right? And they identified ideas people, people people, objects people and physical or tactile sort of oriented visitors.
But what, how they define transformative experience is being able to shift people from you know, I just go to this, let’s say the Asian Art Museum to admire objects just for their beauty. But what about I could also add to that a tactile experience and changing or extending my perspective or perception of that art form. But in designing for empathy, what I am suggesting is utilizing museums as spaces.
And if you can create those safe spaces where people just can come in and be open to an experience in an intentional way, we can create moments of empathy building. It is really not through design, but I’m mostly focusing on, you know, bringing people in front of an object or into a space and having them experience how they can shift their own perspective while around other people going through similar situations or challenges or experiences.
So it ends up with self-knowledge that, the knowledge that, oh, you know, I was able to expand my perspective. Empathy does not mean that you need to agree completely, agree with another. Doesn’t mean that you have to let go of your boundaries or your identities. Empathy is a way, the way I see it, is an expansion of our, you know, abilities of perception, perspective, and narratives and worldviews, where the more we expand that pool that we have, the more we are open to other ways of being.
Abby: Are there any practical things or examples of museums that you think are doing this well so that I can sort of wrestle with how to bring it into my practice?
Elif: So the first part is that you know, an empathy-building experience is where the visitor is the subject and the object of the experience. This can happen when you face the visitor with a real-life, real-time dilemma, where the visitor is expected to make an immediate real-time choice and act in a certain way. Through that action, when that action is experienced, that is a lived experience on the individual’s part. At this point, once that experience happens, this immediate choice is acted upon. You can actually invite individuals to have what I call the triple focus, an intentional observation of the self – as I said, the empathy is an internal job, an inside job – and let us focus at what just took place and take a moment to articulate and notice if there are any biases that are arising and where they might be coming from at the point of their emerging.
And then at the same time, because this isn’t a museum, it’s a collective experience, although you are experiencing the previous part in a very subtle way, in your privacy of your own body or your emotions or your mind, you’re also at the same time observing the others around you, and you are noticing, consciously or unconsciously, that, you know, simultaneously there are many ways of being and many ways of reacting to the same thing that’s happening to all of us.
The third part is also essential that this kind of experience observing the self and the other can invite us to also experience the whole, which is the realization that this whole that we are living this moment, this conflict of a shared moment is comprised with different viewpoints, life experiences, and qualities. And that’s what’s making it one.
Abby: So I was just in Las Vegas at a conference and I happened to go to the Mob Museum, I thoroughly recommend it to anybody. Incredible Museum. Gallagher designed it, Jonathan heads it up. Amazing place. Within the Mob Museum, they have an incredible experience where you go, and you learn all about de-escalating a situation, and you know, the police and how they handle things is a very divisive conversation right now in America.
And so when you go into this experience, you are taught how to de-escalate a situation. And you go into a situation, and you don’t know if it’s an innocent person with a problem or if it’s a perpetrator and a lot of the time, people are scared. They’re nervous. They don’t know who this person is. And I know that after that experience and seeing the way you react in that situation, you sit for 2 hours after you’ve done it, analyzing why you did what you did, and so it’s exactly what you’re describing. It’s having empathy and understanding for people in a situation that you’ve never been in before, and so it’s an unbelievably immersive, phenomenal experience. I recommend anybody to go and try it out. That’s at the Mob Museum.
Brenda: I wish we had another hour…
Abby: Me too, yeah.
Brenda: …to talk with you. Elif, you’re just making me think, though, when you were giving us your sort of your three, outlining these, these three crucial interrelated steps. First of all, just good design, period, being very inclusive. That good design, period, should always, and just by nature, intentionally include all people of all abilities.
And it seems that maybe empathy and designing for empathy is quite the similar thing. It’s not like, it’s something that you do with intention, if I hear you correctly, but it’s something that always is going to involve the physical, the emotional, the intellectual person and the social person. Is that a manner of thinking that would enable us to begin to really build towards empathy practice?
Elif: I think, you know, museums really should pay attention to create heart connections, heart to heart and opening people’s hearts. This is not an intellectual activity. This is not about knowing about numbers or facts. This is, as you said, emotional, but it is deeper than emotional. This is about our humanness and our ability to choose to see the world in a certain way and choose to be in a certain way in this greater whole that we are all a part and creating in a safe environment for everyone begins with all, you know, self-work. You know, each designer should start with the self. We cannot give something that we don’t have. And this begins at the individual level, in our own personal lives, in our own relationships, in our, you know, what we call private lives, you know, other social lives, and, and then at work, you know, this can only be a reflection of what we have. And so this requires lifelong learning and experiencing and intention.
Brenda: What a wonderful place to wrap up on. That was really heartening, and I think will be really helpful for our listeners as they go on about the practical work that they do.
Abby: Thank you so much for sharing this completely new perspective with us today. It’s been phenomenal. Thank you, Elif.
Elif: It’s been my pleasure. Thank you.
[Music]
Producer: Matters of Experience is produced by Lorem Ipsum Corp and recorded at Hangar Studios. Tune in next time for more fun discussions about experience design.
Fostering Empathy Through Museums – Elif Gokcigdem
[Music]
Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: And I’m Brenda Cowan.
Abby: Today, we’re going to talk about empathy in design, how we create experiences that help the visitor feel the feelings of the people in the story because that is a very powerful way to promote understanding of each other and help us realize that we have more in common than differentiates us. We all need to be reminded we’re all humans with similar wants, needs, and challenges.
So I’m very excited to welcome today’s guest, Elif Gokcigdem, an author, professor, and founding president of ONE: Organization of Networks for Empathy. Elif curated and co-chaired the world’s first Summit on Fostering Universal Ethics and Compassion through Museums with His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama and she leads major strategic international partnerships in arts, culture, museums, and biodiversity conservation around the world. Welcome to the show, Elif.
Brenda: Hello, Elif, I’d love it for you to be able to share with our listeners how did you come to become a professor and leader of this international organization focused on building empathy?
Elif: First of all, thank you so much for having me for this conversation. My path to empathy has, I guess, began with my interest in history of art. I studied history of art with a focus on Islamic arts. I grew up in Turkey, and I finished my Ph.D. on this topic, mostly focusing on Islamic arts and mysticism, Islamic mysticism, and also the geometric patterns, you know, the symbols of light in Islamic mysticism, which connected me to empathy.
So I guess the destiny brought me back to this, you know, arts culture in museums. I’m just trying to do the best that I can in a way, that, how I can contribute to this cause of empathy-building in our world.
Abby: So empathy, I really want to define what empathy is, because empathy and understanding like, can you explain to me the difference? And better yet, is there one way to define empathy?
Elif: The short answer is there are many ways to define empathy. There’s, you know, there are several scientific definitions of empathy. There’s a Webster Dictionary definition of empathy. And there’s you know, there are many understandings of empathy depending on the discipline and the work you are involved in.
Abby: But just jumping in here, empathy is actually, you know, when I just pulled it up, now it says the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
Elif: Yes. And also, I mean, feel, this is a very human-centric definition that leaves, you know, our ability to empathize with nature and animals and other beings. You know, that, I mean, there are so many cultures, especially indigenous cultures that talk about empathizing with a mountain or a river. So that definition, I think, leaves all these possibilities out.
And before actually, you know, we talk about the definition of empathy. I think we also need to talk about why empathy, you know, why is it important? Why are we even having this discussion? And that actually brings me back to your question of human-centric versus more expanded understanding of empathy. When you turn on the news, you’ll see these, you know, sort of cries from all different kinds of organizations and institutions.
For example, the United Nations. Just to give you an example, the United Nations keeps telling us, you know, to achieve a sustainable future for all, we need to act urgently to protect biodiversity, the web of life that connects and supports us all. So if we go back and look at the statement and similar statements like this, there’s this urgency to care for all and to act and to protect, and there’s this like this oneness and the whole that we need to care for, we need to learn to care for. And I believe that’s where empathy is important; empathy comes in. And that’s why we need to work on the definition of empathy and not get stuck on one definition or one understanding. The platform that I’m creating is actually because of this, so that we can include, you know, cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary, cross-sectoral understanding of empathy so that we can better define empathy for our collective future so that we can better develop the tools that we need to foster empathy in our world.
In my view, empathy is critical for us to go from a fragmented worldview to a worldview where everything is interdependent and interconnected. And I call this the oneness mindset. And all the work that I have done so far brought me to this sort of working definition of empathy. Empathy is a form of perception that enables us to connect with ourselves and with others while awakening us into our oneness. So, in this case, empathy leads us to develop a recognition of the intrinsic value of each unique element that makes up the whole and encourages us to calibrate and harmonize our attitudes, actions, and behavior accordingly.
Brenda: So you see a lack of empathy as being a public health issue on a global scale. And you talk about how museums are natural platforms for health and empathy practice. Elif, I’d love for you to talk more about what you see as being particularly instrumental about museum environments and experiences when talking about empathy and the practice of empathy.
Elif: Well, you know, empathy is often discussed as something that can help us help others. You know, it’s, it is often confused with sympathy, just like feeling bad for somebody’s, you know, misfortune. I believe empathy is a portal for human flourishing, not just, you know, physical well-being, but spiritual well-being as well, because empathy through self-knowledge enables us to connect with our own internal world and allows us to recognize those, you know, biases and filters through which we perceive the other.
This, this is where museums come into play because empathy is not a linear process. It is not an intellectual process. It is a lived experience, and museums are the perfect platforms where anyone can experience empathy building to get a knowledge of their own selves within a collective experience. Many of those around also are going through similar experiences. Even if you’re in the same room looking at the same thing, there’s a multitude of expressions, reactions around the reality, what we call reality, and that’s the reality of the world we live in, of our existence. So an understanding of this expands our library of narratives into, oh, you know, actually there are many other ways of being, there are many other ways of perceiving, and mine is not the only way.
Brenda: I really, I love the idea of museums as being a place of equal footing for people in empathy building, and I know you were recently speaking with one of my students, actually, and I know that you had spoken to her about what sparks empathy in museums and that you used an analogy of nature walks as a means through which visitors can experience and develop empathy in their own way.
Can you tell us a little bit more about this? Like, do you, are we literally talking about walks in nature or is this also an analogy for other kinds of ways in which people can practice empathy in their everyday lives?
Elif: Exactly, so the framework that I’m working on equips individuals to come prepared and be intentional about empathy building and have some maybe questions and ways of looking and articulating and noticing how we look at things. And museums are particularly useful for this. My first book, called Fostering Empathy Through Museums, collected case studies from different kinds of museums, not just arts museums, but from animal sanctuaries, science centers, civil rights centers.
And at the end of the day, the sort of the executive summary of that book is that museums can be platforms for empathy building in five evidence based, science based ways which are: you know museums, first of all, hold a mirror to society. They can be a safe place for encountering the other. The other way that museums can be useful in empathy building is through storytelling and creating new narratives, new ways of being, new futures, getting us to imagine other ways of being and other ways of existing in the future, and also museums are places for experiential learning.
This is essential, but not just being in a museum and doing a hands on experience on some science experiments. You have to be intentional and you have to sort of articulate the steps and what is going on and the outcome. To make your point that, you know, what you, what you just went through is related to empathy and empathy building.
Brenda: When you said that museums are like mirrors to society, I find that really, really provocative and in a variety of ways, and I’m really curious, what is it like when that mirror shows us things that we aren’t very comfortable with?
Elif: Yes, and that’s exactly the point, you know, creating discomfort. I don’t say it in a way that we are just beautiful and we’re looking at ourselves and admiring ourselves in the mirror of museums. That’s not what I meant at all.
Brenda: Right.
Elif: This is basically, museums are mirrors with their colonialistic past and their racism and all kinds of baggage that they bring to the, you know, today, you know, like the institutions that they are.
We can take a look and learn from that and imagine new ways of being, new ways of creating museums, or museums behaving differently in our new reality. How can they be helpful for a, for a collective vision of being inclusive and equitable and accessible, and respectful? I mean, there’s, there’s a story of, like a fable, right. This ancient story where the lion and the rabbit, you know, this lion terrorizes this forest and all the animals, and one day this, you know, smart rabbit decides to take the lion to this well, deep well, where there’s just a little water left in the bottom, which creates this mirroring effect.
And the lion thinking that, you know, there’s this other king that is claiming his territory, he just keeps roaring into the well, and all he hears is his own roar coming back at him. And eventually, he jumps into the well to kill that other lion. But in, of course, there’s no other. It was just him all along. And I think our world right now, the news and our institutions and what we are going through is that moment of lion, us, roaring, you know, and thinking that, oh, you know, like we are all-powerful, we are at the center and everything has to be around us.
But this is the moment. This is a critical moment to face the mirror in that way so that we don’t choose to die, but we choose to imagine a new future and better ways of being in this world.
Brenda: Well, I like the idea that there’s an awful lot of clever rabbits out there, sort of pointing out the, the way and leading us to the well.
Abby: Let’s talk practically. It’s very hard to have empathy for others if you’re sort of not used to looking at things from other people’s perspectives or you have really strong beliefs when you’re walking into a museum or a situation. When we think about politics right now, our world is incredibly divisive, and it’s easy to put that stake in the ground and not to actually listen, hear, or debate the gray areas, right?
For some of our work, a visitor’s already coming in with what I call this loaded gun when it comes to their perspective and how they believe they perceive the truth, what’s true, what’s untrue. And they filter a lot of that based on their biases as we all do, so our challenge isn’t always to provoke because sometimes provoking somebody shuts them right down immediately.
So we tell a story in a sort of a slow and subtle way to gradually win people over or start to have people think at least a little bit differently. You know, we think about how is our protagonist relatable? Why do I care about this person? Why are they interesting? What’s their inner and outer conflict rather than actually focus a story on, on the visitor’s beliefs and try and challenge them that way.
What’s your experience Elif, when it comes to people really being open to empathy in museums or being ready to receive the information from a design perspective in a museum experience?
Elif: Yes, that reminded me of the study that was done by Smithsonian Visitor Services, I guess, that looked at visitor experience with the goal of defining what is a transformative experience, and they came up with this IPOP. So we each come to the museum experience with our own identities, right? And they identified ideas people, people people, objects people and physical or tactile sort of oriented visitors.
But what, how they define transformative experience is being able to shift people from you know, I just go to this, let’s say the Asian Art Museum to admire objects just for their beauty. But what about I could also add to that a tactile experience and changing or extending my perspective or perception of that art form. But in designing for empathy, what I am suggesting is utilizing museums as spaces.
And if you can create those safe spaces where people just can come in and be open to an experience in an intentional way, we can create moments of empathy building. It is really not through design, but I’m mostly focusing on, you know, bringing people in front of an object or into a space and having them experience how they can shift their own perspective while around other people going through similar situations or challenges or experiences.
So it ends up with self-knowledge that, the knowledge that, oh, you know, I was able to expand my perspective. Empathy does not mean that you need to agree completely, agree with another. Doesn’t mean that you have to let go of your boundaries or your identities. Empathy is a way, the way I see it, is an expansion of our, you know, abilities of perception, perspective, and narratives and worldviews, where the more we expand that pool that we have, the more we are open to other ways of being.
Abby: Are there any practical things or examples of museums that you think are doing this well so that I can sort of wrestle with how to bring it into my practice?
Elif: So the first part is that you know, an empathy-building experience is where the visitor is the subject and the object of the experience. This can happen when you face the visitor with a real-life, real-time dilemma, where the visitor is expected to make an immediate real-time choice and act in a certain way. Through that action, when that action is experienced, that is a lived experience on the individual’s part. At this point, once that experience happens, this immediate choice is acted upon. You can actually invite individuals to have what I call the triple focus, an intentional observation of the self – as I said, the empathy is an internal job, an inside job – and let us focus at what just took place and take a moment to articulate and notice if there are any biases that are arising and where they might be coming from at the point of their emerging.
And then at the same time, because this isn’t a museum, it’s a collective experience, although you are experiencing the previous part in a very subtle way, in your privacy of your own body or your emotions or your mind, you’re also at the same time observing the others around you, and you are noticing, consciously or unconsciously, that, you know, simultaneously there are many ways of being and many ways of reacting to the same thing that’s happening to all of us.
The third part is also essential that this kind of experience observing the self and the other can invite us to also experience the whole, which is the realization that this whole that we are living this moment, this conflict of a shared moment is comprised with different viewpoints, life experiences, and qualities. And that’s what’s making it one.
Abby: So I was just in Las Vegas at a conference and I happened to go to the Mob Museum, I thoroughly recommend it to anybody. Incredible Museum. Gallagher designed it, Jonathan heads it up. Amazing place. Within the Mob Museum, they have an incredible experience where you go, and you learn all about de-escalating a situation, and you know, the police and how they handle things is a very divisive conversation right now in America.
And so when you go into this experience, you are taught how to de-escalate a situation. And you go into a situation, and you don’t know if it’s an innocent person with a problem or if it’s a perpetrator and a lot of the time, people are scared. They’re nervous. They don’t know who this person is. And I know that after that experience and seeing the way you react in that situation, you sit for 2 hours after you’ve done it, analyzing why you did what you did, and so it’s exactly what you’re describing. It’s having empathy and understanding for people in a situation that you’ve never been in before, and so it’s an unbelievably immersive, phenomenal experience. I recommend anybody to go and try it out. That’s at the Mob Museum.
Brenda: I wish we had another hour…
Abby: Me too, yeah.
Brenda: …to talk with you. Elif, you’re just making me think, though, when you were giving us your sort of your three, outlining these, these three crucial interrelated steps. First of all, just good design, period, being very inclusive. That good design, period, should always, and just by nature, intentionally include all people of all abilities.
And it seems that maybe empathy and designing for empathy is quite the similar thing. It’s not like, it’s something that you do with intention, if I hear you correctly, but it’s something that always is going to involve the physical, the emotional, the intellectual person and the social person. Is that a manner of thinking that would enable us to begin to really build towards empathy practice?
Elif: I think, you know, museums really should pay attention to create heart connections, heart to heart and opening people’s hearts. This is not an intellectual activity. This is not about knowing about numbers or facts. This is, as you said, emotional, but it is deeper than emotional. This is about our humanness and our ability to choose to see the world in a certain way and choose to be in a certain way in this greater whole that we are all a part and creating in a safe environment for everyone begins with all, you know, self-work. You know, each designer should start with the self. We cannot give something that we don’t have. And this begins at the individual level, in our own personal lives, in our own relationships, in our, you know, what we call private lives, you know, other social lives, and, and then at work, you know, this can only be a reflection of what we have. And so this requires lifelong learning and experiencing and intention.
Brenda: What a wonderful place to wrap up on. That was really heartening, and I think will be really helpful for our listeners as they go on about the practical work that they do.
Abby: Thank you so much for sharing this completely new perspective with us today. It’s been phenomenal. Thank you, Elif.
Elif: It’s been my pleasure. Thank you.
[Music]
Producer: Matters of Experience is produced by Lorem Ipsum Corp and recorded at Hangar Studios. Tune in next time for more fun discussions about experience design.
Empathy in Design with Elif Gokcigdem
The Spectacular with Chris Wangro
The Lawn On D – Home | Signature Boston
Virtual Concert In The Metaverse: The Future of the Musical Industry
[Music]
Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: And I’m Brenda Cowan.
Abby: Today we’re discussing the spectacular with the former circus ringmaster and tsar of Special Events for the City of New York, Chris Wangro. Chris has spent the past four decades as a creative strategist for the design of better public spaces. He’s brought to life celebrated festivals and cultural programs as well as presidential summits and papal visits seen around the world. Known as a master of community building and spectacle, he’s worked with legends as diverse as the Dalai Lama and Dolly Parton. Welcome to the show, Chris.
Brenda: Chris, we are so excited to have you here. I want to get the ball rolling by asking you about your work as a social activist. You’ve produced events for environmental and humanitarian, and social justice organizations all around the world. You’ve generated over $100 million for those in need. How do you approach an event like these?
Chris: Oh, a part of my upbringing, part of the time I grew up in, was, you know, infused with social consciousness. And some point in my life, I sort of realized that for me there were two things really worth doing and one was contributing to the greater good. And the other was to create something really beautiful. And I think those are the two things that artists can do.
Artists can do other things, but those are the two things that I focus on artists doing and trying to do with whatever my art is at the moment. And in terms of the art of creating events, for lack of better terms, there’s an inherent beauty of bringing people together and bringing people together, whether it’s a birthday party or a concert for a few hundred thousand people, has a certain kind of power and lasting afterglow of being part of that community that has come together for the event. You know, that’s really the starting place for me. And I think that then if you can at the same time be bringing people together for a purpose, if you can do both of those things well. The beauty part, the community part, or the social action part, then I guess that’s sort of what I’ve been after.
What I realize now, having done it for a lifetime, the thing that’s unique about my path, if you will, my my story is I’ve done a lot of different things. It’s very diverse. There are common threads. But, you know, at one point, I might be putting together an environmental summit in Abu Dhabi. At another point, I might be doing, you know, a massive bit of street theater down Broadway in New York City. Each thing is very different.
Brenda: What’s important to you personally? What is it that really keeps you going and keeps you feeling the love of this work?
Chris: A part of it, I believe, for me, what keeps me going are new challenges. Part of it is a belief that that project can reach a lot of people or reach a small amount of people in a big way, but they can really begin to effect some kind of change. And that can be many different things.
You know, I’m working currently on a project with a bunch of folks from overseas called The Walk, which involves a Syrian refugee girl, and she has been separated from her parents and her mother on her way from Syria to Turkey. And then she lost her way and ended up walking from Turkey to London. And that walk was an actual walk made by this actual Syrian refugee girl. But the Syrian refugee girl was a 12-foot puppet. So it was a massive piece of spectacle theater that took place over the course of 5000 miles. We’re doing that again in the States and sort of reframing it in a different manner, but pretty much the same project. That project will reach and has reached literally over 100 million eyeballs.
The puppet, whose name is Little Amal, has a TikTok following of over 35 million. So this project is reaching tremendous amount of people, both online and in a really heartfelt way on the street. But I’m also working on projects that are small public art interventions in places like Sarasota and Raleigh that will reach far fewer people and have probably almost no online presence, but they transform people’s experience of a place, and so transform their life.
The other thing I should say is that a big part of what will motivate me to be on a project is who I’m working with. It’s really all about who I get to work and play with. I just want to work with interesting, creative, thoughtful people. And when I find them, you know, it’s hard for me to say no.
Abby: So in England, we have a unique event every year at Christmas, it’s called a pantomime, and it’s essentially a play where men dress up as the female character, and the male leads played by a woman, already very progressive when you think it’s hundreds of years old. What’s interesting about it is there’s a lot of audience participation, you know, when the bad person comes out on stage and is hiding behind the lead, the goody, the audience yells, “He’s behind you.” And there’s similar statements throughout the play, like lots of boos and look over there. But what I think is innovative is that it brings the audience into the play. They become an active participant, which is what we try to do with our work at Lorem Ipsum when we’re creating these meaningful, impactful stories, is really try to make them resonate with the visitor and include them as much as possible in that story. How do you fold the audience into your work?
Chris: I mean, I think part of it is, you know, I do sometimes and I don’t sometimes. I think, you know, if I go to a concert and I’m sitting in an audience and again, it could be 50 people or 50,000 people, I’m immersed. I’m with the people, I’m in a theater, there’s, you know, there’s music and there’s lights. It’s immersive. And I think there’s a lot of push to make things immersive in some interactive way, but it’s not really all that important.
Case in point, going back to my own bag of tricks, a few years ago, I was working on the development and creation of a new park up in Boston, the park’s called the Lawn on D. And when we built it, it was built to be temporary. It’s still there. It was, it was a big hit. Part of the reason it was a big hit was that we commissioned a piece called Swing Time, which I created with the great design team Höweler + Yoon up in Boston, and Swing Time was a large 70-foot-long set of swings.
The swings were made of plastic, a sort of milky plastic with lights inside. They’re hoop shape. And as you swing around in them, the motion will trigger the light. A tremendously successful piece and very much a, a case study and actually oft imitated. I would say that the interactivity layer, which is the lights changing when you swing is virtually useless, adds very little to the program.
But what works well, the swings, like you get to be on a swing set, you know, being on the swing set is enough, right? The extra layer of interactivity, which was sort of a mandate because of this moment in time, seemed somewhat frivolous. But, you know, I do think at times about interactivity within projects, but only if it feels intrinsic and essential, because otherwise I think it’s, could just be sort of superfluous and distracting.
Abby: I think we’re using the word interactivity differently, maybe as well, because when I think about sitting on a swing and moving my body to move, move a swing, that to me is a form of interactivity. And I remember Chris being at one of your presentations when you made us all gets up and around. We all went in the room, and it was highly interactive. So I think potentially this word interactivity, as well as the word immersion, again bandied around, thrown, thrown around and mean different things to different people, especially in our business. So I think for our clients, often it can get very confusing.
Chris: All of that I totally agree with. And it’s funny you bring up the reference you did, which was really there to break what I imagined was going to be a very formal setting of people sitting in their chairs and listening to a speech which is just not my way. And I wanted to do an actual demonstration of what it’s like to get people up and out of their chairs and a little creative mayhem if you will.
Brenda: I love that you use the term creative mayhem, and as another person who has likewise been sprinkled with your pixie dust and coated in streamers and danced along with an impromptu marching band at one of your, quote, lectures, I’m really curious to know what happens when the mayhem goes sideways or when the mayhem as hoped and dreamed for doesn’t quite happen in the way that you were hoping it would go. You’ve kind of got one shot to get things right.
Chris: I love that. You spend, it can be six months, six weeks, whatever it is, preparing for something that may last all of 5 minutes. And I love that you have one shot to get it right. And, you know, to some extent, I’m probably experienced enough that I’m generally confident that things will go somewhat according to plan. You know some are going to be better than others on average over a lifetime of doing them. You know, you can’t win them all. But in general, I don’t worry too much about it not working. I just, I just try and make it work. I think experiences is everything. And my words of advice to folks in, in FIT and others that I’ve taught has always been just do it. Just get out there and do it.
You know, I think a lot of the book learning and school learning is just secondary to going out there and figuring out how to create an event, just, you know, oh, you don’t know what to do. You know, create, create an exhibit and slam it on the street and see what happens.
Brenda: Well, experience and faith are fellows. There’s no question about that.
Abby: So, Chris, I’m glad you mentioned sort of the idea of bringing something to life because before that even can happen, you need a client who really wants something different and innovative. It’s often easy for us to dream up these innovative concepts but very difficult to get the buy-in and really bring them to life. especially when you’re pushing the envelope like your work does. So when we look at your work in the public realm and how truly fresh and different your original programming and community-building strategies are, how were you working within the confines of budget and timeframes?
Chris: I come from a world of really not-for-profit. I come from a, I come from a world where we used to dig through the dump to get materials to build our shows. But I am really all about like, on time, on budget. I’m very realistic. To your other point, I think it’s interesting, like, how do you get clients to go along with doing things that are creative?
They’re doing it, and of course, it’s frustrating for all of us because we see what the client wants to achieve. We can come up with creative ways for the client to do it, and you know, you can’t get them out of their own way.
Abby: No. And often, they want to see what you’re dreaming up, but nobody else has done it. So it’s like, can we see something similar? No, it doesn’t exist.
Chris: You want something bespoke, and you want it, especially if you know, you want something new and different, and you’ve got to get a pay for a little R&D to get it off the ground. You know, I went through a long period of my life. I worked as an independent most all of my life. And so of course I did, you know, anything and everything for a long time.
But ultimately, because I did things that were unusual, because my sensibility is a little askew, that’s what people started coming to me for. So, perhaps easier said than done, but perhaps don’t do the boring stuff because you will then be in the rut of doing the boring stuff.
Brenda: Chris, you work with so many creative people, with so many artists and unusual suspects, if there is such a thing. In addition to working with clients and clients who have their own specific vision or lack of vision, their own needs, I’m really curious about how it is that you integrate work with other artists and other cultural communities, how that has sort of impassioned you to do more.
Chris: Well, the first thing that came to mind is something I’ve said a lot over the years, which is what I do is a team sport. You can’t do this stuff alone. If you’re putting together a major public event, you need all kinds of folks. And frankly, I’m pretty, as I say, horizontal about all this stuff. I don’t mind leading the charge, but I think I sincerely feel that, you know, the guys running the power lines are as important to me as the creatives designing the stage.
It’s just the way I am. Not everyone I work with is like that. But, you know, if you if you sort of have that mindset, then everybody you work with has something to bring to the table. And the more stuff you lay on that table and the more you can bat ideas around with creative people or interesting people, the more interesting stuff will emerge.
Brenda: So who has really opened your eyes, Chris, in the course of your career?
Chris: Well, when I was in college, I learned about a whole sort of school of whacko, social, well, political arts folks in England, and I quit school and went to find them. And I spent pretty much, I mean, I spent a year on the road, and I spent probably, you know, whatever, six months or more working with those folks in various capacities. And they were all a bit older than I, right, they’re all like, you know, ten years older than I am or so. And, you know, I learned a tremendous amount about the world from them and about, you know, about having a work ethos.
When I was here in the States, I felt like people were all sort of rehearsing to do something. And the folks I worked with in Europe, many of whom were my age as well, were not rehearsing, they were doing it. They were just doing it. So, you know, as you know, I came, I started a circus when I was whatever, 19 years old. And I had learned from them in Europe, don’t keep rehearsing. Just do it. Do the damn thing. And so I just said, yeah, I’m going to do this. That was probably a pretty watershed moment.
And the other thing I would say is in a more professional life in the last, you know, whatever, 10 to 20 years, I was very busy. I was always handling many jobs and many projects at once. And there was a cadre of folks that I worked with that were producers and designers and of all kinds that I would call on, and we would work together.
I always sort of think of it like Orson Welles, who had his cadre of folks that he made different films with. For me, it was not so much as a company, but a bunch of independents that I could call on for different projects that their skills applied to. But we all learned to work together, and I think elevate each other’s abilities through those collaborations.
Abby: Building on that idea of your mentor or being mentored throughout life, I know I’ve had mentors at certain phases and mentored me for different things from a business perspective. Is mentoring an important part of what you do, Chris, and what advice do you have for the younger generations who want to make meaningful work?
Chris: I very happily try to mentor people, and I think try to just help people out because I think it’s it’s important, you know, it’s hard. What we do is unusual, and it’s hard, and there’s no real organization for it. And we all sort of have to watch each other’s backs.
The other thing I’d say, which is more akin to what I did when I was traveling, was go find people who are doing it. Find the people who are doing the work that you think is really great and go work with them. It’s interesting for me. I’ve been reading developmental psychology books because of my five-year-old daughter, and one of the things that an author I like a lot has said that really stuck with me is that we don’t teach by doing here.
And what she says in her book is that previously, through most cultures and most epochs in time, there was essentially an apprenticeship, right? She said, Well, you know, imagine if we taught baseball by teaching kids about balls and why they’re round and how you make a round ball and how you sew them, and then you teach them about velocity, and you teach them about pitching. You teach them about catching, the velocity of a ball, the arc of the curve. And then you start talking about bats in seventh grade, but you never let the kid play ball. Right. If you taught that way, kids would never know how to play ball.
Brenda: You’re making me think of something that Lois Silverman said to me once. She said, Brenda, do the work that’s meaningful to you, and the world will be better for it. And I can’t tell you how often I’ve clung to that.
Chris: I thought of something else a minute ago and I want to, I want to interject it. In the world of advice, I would say for me over the years, again, working as an independent, I always felt that maybe if I was doing two jobs out of five, two projects out of five that I could believe in, I was doing okay.
So yeah, I would do projects like the launch of Verizon in New York or some, you know, commercial project like that. But those projects allowed me not only the money, not only the money I needed to live, but they they kept informing me, kept honing my skills, you know, and allowed me to do projects for organizations like the United Nations who, you might think would pay real money, but they don’t. And a host of other not-for-profit where I could just say, I’ll do it, I’ll just do it, you know. But it was finding a balance like that so that I would do the interesting projects and the meaningful projects. But I had to do the other stuff just to keep going.
The other thing I’d say about the work I did is because it was an endless train of one-offs, as it were, going back to the one shot deal nature of my profession never got under my skin that much. Whatever I was working on, I was going to be done with soon enough.
Abby: So, thinking about things that weren’t done soon enough, we’re going to turn our attention to COVID, and public events and experiences seem to have undergone a dramatic shift since then. So what has this meant for the world of large-scale spectaculars, from your perspective, Chris? And what do you think’s permanently changed, maybe for the better, since COVID?
Chris: I think the pall of the plague is not behind us in terms of public events. I think people are still afraid in many cases to go out and be in mass crowds or in small places, you know, a theater for 500, but sitting sandwiched between people you don’t know still makes those folks uncomfortable. And I also think it’s changed habits.
I think, you know, there are a lot of people who probably by habit went out two nights a week or something, and they stopped for two years. And so it’s no longer a habit for them. And I think that’s a real problem. I can only think, though, and maybe this is just my perspective and my, again, my age, but I can only think that we will sooner than later, pretty much return to where we were.
I think there’s something indispensable about bringing people together in, in actual proximity, and virtual proximity is fascinating, but ain’t nothing like the real thing, baby. And being together in a room full of people is irreplaceable, and I think that that’s likely to continue. Whether or not there’s, you know, more and more digital presence within the, within public gatherings or not.
I think the public gatherings will continue. And the technology is just another technology that will layer on. You know, I don’t think amplified – my father wouldn’t agree with you, but I don’t think amplified music or the advent of amplification decimated Broadway and the experience of seeing shows. I think Broadway shows just became more technologically infused. And I imagine that’s what’s going to happen in general.
Abby: Yes. So you mentioned, you know, the role of technology in large-scale productions, which has just got more and more involved, bigger and bigger. When you just look at lighting, moving stages, pyrotechnics alone. Now we’re starting to see AR in particular at live shows and, over the past years, performances in the metaverse, like Justin Bieber, who went live as an avatar in his own virtual universe, Travis Scott in Fortnite, which actually had over 12 million players watching, and Ariana Grande whose concert played over a number of days.
So looking at time frames that actually extended beyond what she could actually perform. This is a completely new realm for concerts and events. How do you think these technologies, the metaverse, and advances, will change the playing field?
Chris: Well, let me see. I think they’re good because it’s interesting for a whole new wave of creative expression. I think they’re good because, in theory, if you’re a Justin Bieber fan and you live in Outer Mongolia, you can get down with Justin. I think it’s bad only in that I feel there’s a loss of what we would call authenticity.
And that leads into point B, which is because creating those experiences costs God-awful amounts of money. And so those mega transmissions, especially for now, until technology allows them to be simplified and cheaper, that’s the domain of big business. One of the beautiful things I think we all recognize about the web until it gets altered is that it’s so open, you know?
Yeah, great. I mean, I think the influencer phenomena is sometimes nauseating, but it’s really cool that some 17-year-old kid can start making movies and become a star around the world. And he can do it basically for $5. It’s a matter of that person’s worldview and creativity that can reach so many people. That’s incredible. But that’s a very different thing than the heavy-weight experiences that are being generated now by big stars.
Brenda: When people experience awe, when they experience things that are spectacular and that trigger wonder in them, it actually prompts pro-social behavior. I think that it’s going to be really fascinating to continue to see how it is that this pro-social behavior is going to continue to, to be activated. And the thing that just makes it so exciting to me is in all of these different forms, when people are triggered by the spectacular, when they are activated through a sense of, through a sense of wonder, the drive to do something that is helpful to others is really profound.
Chris: But Brenda, it’s also the same drive that allowed Leni Riefenstahl to make films, or it made Adolf Hitler allow to have parades that make people go out and do horrible things. It’s not the technology that creates a pro-social behavior. It’s the artist, it’s the human behind it. The technology’s but a tool.
Brenda: So then, what’s the future, Chris? When we’re thinking about how things can go sideways, they can, you know, aim high, they can aim low. And especially with advanced technologies when people of all sorts have so much at their disposal and can reach such mass audiences. What do you see as being the social future for the spectacular?
Chris: The global nature of our era is remarkable. For all the wall builders out there, I’m sorry to let you know it’s not going to work. We are really one world now, whether you like it or not. And that means that if you strike a right note, you can bring positive social behavior together in a global way to massive amounts of people. And that’s incredible. There’s an incredible potential there.
But of course, there’s also a credible potential for dark clouds and storms to gather and we’re seeing, frankly, in a way, more of that, I think, through technology than the good stuff when there are as many people creating really what you and I, because we share values would think of as positive social messages and positive social programs for our country when there are as many of those folks out there as there are people who are conspiracy theorists, etc., then we’ll be doing great.
Abby: You seem to have done it all. And so, in all earnestness, what really have you got still to achieve?
Chris: What I really want to do is exercise a bunch of my sort of creative focus that I haven’t been able to do because I was running so hard doing everything else for the last 40 years. You know, I want to make things with my hands, and I want to play music, and I want to do those things. And I want to spend a lot of time with my kid.
What I have found that’s interesting is that as I have cut back from doing the kind of work I’ve been doing and as I’ve been spending more time working with my hands, playing music, that type of thing, I find that my rhythm has changed. And when once my rhythm begins to change, my head begins to change, and I begin to think differently and begin to think in a way that I consider is actually a little bit more thoughtful, a little bit more considered.
There is time. There’s time to actually think things over, to mull things over, and not just to keep moving, keep moving, keep moving. You know, maybe what I would what I would say is I aspire to is to live a little bit more thoughtful existence and see where it gets me. And that’s not – thoughtful may be different than mindful, you know, mindful is a certain set of things that we, it tends to mean a certain kind of things. And I have nothing against being mindful but being thoughtful and taking the time to consider life. And something I missed out on a lot because of how hard the world pushes us.
Brenda: Chris, You’ve got such an eye for poetry and an eye for beauty and perhaps a giant heart for play. I can imagine that there’s going to be something pretty powerful in your future, whatever that is, even if it’s a quiet something powerful. And I, for one, am really excited for the time when that comes.
Abby: Chris, thanks for sharing the idea of taking our time. I think that’s really wise advice and that our listeners should all take a pause today, take some time when you’re creating, don’t rush, don’t push. Chris, it’s been a delight to have you here with us today, sharing your unique view of events and our world with our listeners. I’m very excited to see what’s next for you. Thank you.
Chris: Thank you.
Brenda: Thank you so much, Chris. It’s been such a pleasure.
Chris: A real treat. Be well, talk to you soon.
Brenda: Take care.
[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.
The Lawn On D – Home | Signature Boston
Virtual Concert In The Metaverse: The Future of the Musical Industry
[Music]
Abby: Welcome to Matters of Experience. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: And I’m Brenda Cowan.
Abby: Today we’re discussing the spectacular with the former circus ringmaster and tsar of Special Events for the City of New York, Chris Wangro. Chris has spent the past four decades as a creative strategist for the design of better public spaces. He’s brought to life celebrated festivals and cultural programs as well as presidential summits and papal visits seen around the world. Known as a master of community building and spectacle, he’s worked with legends as diverse as the Dalai Lama and Dolly Parton. Welcome to the show, Chris.
Brenda: Chris, we are so excited to have you here. I want to get the ball rolling by asking you about your work as a social activist. You’ve produced events for environmental and humanitarian, and social justice organizations all around the world. You’ve generated over $100 million for those in need. How do you approach an event like these?
Chris: Oh, a part of my upbringing, part of the time I grew up in, was, you know, infused with social consciousness. And some point in my life, I sort of realized that for me there were two things really worth doing and one was contributing to the greater good. And the other was to create something really beautiful. And I think those are the two things that artists can do.
Artists can do other things, but those are the two things that I focus on artists doing and trying to do with whatever my art is at the moment. And in terms of the art of creating events, for lack of better terms, there’s an inherent beauty of bringing people together and bringing people together, whether it’s a birthday party or a concert for a few hundred thousand people, has a certain kind of power and lasting afterglow of being part of that community that has come together for the event. You know, that’s really the starting place for me. And I think that then if you can at the same time be bringing people together for a purpose, if you can do both of those things well. The beauty part, the community part, or the social action part, then I guess that’s sort of what I’ve been after.
What I realize now, having done it for a lifetime, the thing that’s unique about my path, if you will, my my story is I’ve done a lot of different things. It’s very diverse. There are common threads. But, you know, at one point, I might be putting together an environmental summit in Abu Dhabi. At another point, I might be doing, you know, a massive bit of street theater down Broadway in New York City. Each thing is very different.
Brenda: What’s important to you personally? What is it that really keeps you going and keeps you feeling the love of this work?
Chris: A part of it, I believe, for me, what keeps me going are new challenges. Part of it is a belief that that project can reach a lot of people or reach a small amount of people in a big way, but they can really begin to effect some kind of change. And that can be many different things.
You know, I’m working currently on a project with a bunch of folks from overseas called The Walk, which involves a Syrian refugee girl, and she has been separated from her parents and her mother on her way from Syria to Turkey. And then she lost her way and ended up walking from Turkey to London. And that walk was an actual walk made by this actual Syrian refugee girl. But the Syrian refugee girl was a 12-foot puppet. So it was a massive piece of spectacle theater that took place over the course of 5000 miles. We’re doing that again in the States and sort of reframing it in a different manner, but pretty much the same project. That project will reach and has reached literally over 100 million eyeballs.
The puppet, whose name is Little Amal, has a TikTok following of over 35 million. So this project is reaching tremendous amount of people, both online and in a really heartfelt way on the street. But I’m also working on projects that are small public art interventions in places like Sarasota and Raleigh that will reach far fewer people and have probably almost no online presence, but they transform people’s experience of a place, and so transform their life.
The other thing I should say is that a big part of what will motivate me to be on a project is who I’m working with. It’s really all about who I get to work and play with. I just want to work with interesting, creative, thoughtful people. And when I find them, you know, it’s hard for me to say no.
Abby: So in England, we have a unique event every year at Christmas, it’s called a pantomime, and it’s essentially a play where men dress up as the female character, and the male leads played by a woman, already very progressive when you think it’s hundreds of years old. What’s interesting about it is there’s a lot of audience participation, you know, when the bad person comes out on stage and is hiding behind the lead, the goody, the audience yells, “He’s behind you.” And there’s similar statements throughout the play, like lots of boos and look over there. But what I think is innovative is that it brings the audience into the play. They become an active participant, which is what we try to do with our work at Lorem Ipsum when we’re creating these meaningful, impactful stories, is really try to make them resonate with the visitor and include them as much as possible in that story. How do you fold the audience into your work?
Chris: I mean, I think part of it is, you know, I do sometimes and I don’t sometimes. I think, you know, if I go to a concert and I’m sitting in an audience and again, it could be 50 people or 50,000 people, I’m immersed. I’m with the people, I’m in a theater, there’s, you know, there’s music and there’s lights. It’s immersive. And I think there’s a lot of push to make things immersive in some interactive way, but it’s not really all that important.
Case in point, going back to my own bag of tricks, a few years ago, I was working on the development and creation of a new park up in Boston, the park’s called the Lawn on D. And when we built it, it was built to be temporary. It’s still there. It was, it was a big hit. Part of the reason it was a big hit was that we commissioned a piece called Swing Time, which I created with the great design team Höweler + Yoon up in Boston, and Swing Time was a large 70-foot-long set of swings.
The swings were made of plastic, a sort of milky plastic with lights inside. They’re hoop shape. And as you swing around in them, the motion will trigger the light. A tremendously successful piece and very much a, a case study and actually oft imitated. I would say that the interactivity layer, which is the lights changing when you swing is virtually useless, adds very little to the program.
But what works well, the swings, like you get to be on a swing set, you know, being on the swing set is enough, right? The extra layer of interactivity, which was sort of a mandate because of this moment in time, seemed somewhat frivolous. But, you know, I do think at times about interactivity within projects, but only if it feels intrinsic and essential, because otherwise I think it’s, could just be sort of superfluous and distracting.
Abby: I think we’re using the word interactivity differently, maybe as well, because when I think about sitting on a swing and moving my body to move, move a swing, that to me is a form of interactivity. And I remember Chris being at one of your presentations when you made us all gets up and around. We all went in the room, and it was highly interactive. So I think potentially this word interactivity, as well as the word immersion, again bandied around, thrown, thrown around and mean different things to different people, especially in our business. So I think for our clients, often it can get very confusing.
Chris: All of that I totally agree with. And it’s funny you bring up the reference you did, which was really there to break what I imagined was going to be a very formal setting of people sitting in their chairs and listening to a speech which is just not my way. And I wanted to do an actual demonstration of what it’s like to get people up and out of their chairs and a little creative mayhem if you will.
Brenda: I love that you use the term creative mayhem, and as another person who has likewise been sprinkled with your pixie dust and coated in streamers and danced along with an impromptu marching band at one of your, quote, lectures, I’m really curious to know what happens when the mayhem goes sideways or when the mayhem as hoped and dreamed for doesn’t quite happen in the way that you were hoping it would go. You’ve kind of got one shot to get things right.
Chris: I love that. You spend, it can be six months, six weeks, whatever it is, preparing for something that may last all of 5 minutes. And I love that you have one shot to get it right. And, you know, to some extent, I’m probably experienced enough that I’m generally confident that things will go somewhat according to plan. You know some are going to be better than others on average over a lifetime of doing them. You know, you can’t win them all. But in general, I don’t worry too much about it not working. I just, I just try and make it work. I think experiences is everything. And my words of advice to folks in, in FIT and others that I’ve taught has always been just do it. Just get out there and do it.
You know, I think a lot of the book learning and school learning is just secondary to going out there and figuring out how to create an event, just, you know, oh, you don’t know what to do. You know, create, create an exhibit and slam it on the street and see what happens.
Brenda: Well, experience and faith are fellows. There’s no question about that.
Abby: So, Chris, I’m glad you mentioned sort of the idea of bringing something to life because before that even can happen, you need a client who really wants something different and innovative. It’s often easy for us to dream up these innovative concepts but very difficult to get the buy-in and really bring them to life. especially when you’re pushing the envelope like your work does. So when we look at your work in the public realm and how truly fresh and different your original programming and community-building strategies are, how were you working within the confines of budget and timeframes?
Chris: I come from a world of really not-for-profit. I come from a, I come from a world where we used to dig through the dump to get materials to build our shows. But I am really all about like, on time, on budget. I’m very realistic. To your other point, I think it’s interesting, like, how do you get clients to go along with doing things that are creative?
They’re doing it, and of course, it’s frustrating for all of us because we see what the client wants to achieve. We can come up with creative ways for the client to do it, and you know, you can’t get them out of their own way.
Abby: No. And often, they want to see what you’re dreaming up, but nobody else has done it. So it’s like, can we see something similar? No, it doesn’t exist.
Chris: You want something bespoke, and you want it, especially if you know, you want something new and different, and you’ve got to get a pay for a little R&D to get it off the ground. You know, I went through a long period of my life. I worked as an independent most all of my life. And so of course I did, you know, anything and everything for a long time.
But ultimately, because I did things that were unusual, because my sensibility is a little askew, that’s what people started coming to me for. So, perhaps easier said than done, but perhaps don’t do the boring stuff because you will then be in the rut of doing the boring stuff.
Brenda: Chris, you work with so many creative people, with so many artists and unusual suspects, if there is such a thing. In addition to working with clients and clients who have their own specific vision or lack of vision, their own needs, I’m really curious about how it is that you integrate work with other artists and other cultural communities, how that has sort of impassioned you to do more.
Chris: Well, the first thing that came to mind is something I’ve said a lot over the years, which is what I do is a team sport. You can’t do this stuff alone. If you’re putting together a major public event, you need all kinds of folks. And frankly, I’m pretty, as I say, horizontal about all this stuff. I don’t mind leading the charge, but I think I sincerely feel that, you know, the guys running the power lines are as important to me as the creatives designing the stage.
It’s just the way I am. Not everyone I work with is like that. But, you know, if you if you sort of have that mindset, then everybody you work with has something to bring to the table. And the more stuff you lay on that table and the more you can bat ideas around with creative people or interesting people, the more interesting stuff will emerge.
Brenda: So who has really opened your eyes, Chris, in the course of your career?
Chris: Well, when I was in college, I learned about a whole sort of school of whacko, social, well, political arts folks in England, and I quit school and went to find them. And I spent pretty much, I mean, I spent a year on the road, and I spent probably, you know, whatever, six months or more working with those folks in various capacities. And they were all a bit older than I, right, they’re all like, you know, ten years older than I am or so. And, you know, I learned a tremendous amount about the world from them and about, you know, about having a work ethos.
When I was here in the States, I felt like people were all sort of rehearsing to do something. And the folks I worked with in Europe, many of whom were my age as well, were not rehearsing, they were doing it. They were just doing it. So, you know, as you know, I came, I started a circus when I was whatever, 19 years old. And I had learned from them in Europe, don’t keep rehearsing. Just do it. Do the damn thing. And so I just said, yeah, I’m going to do this. That was probably a pretty watershed moment.
And the other thing I would say is in a more professional life in the last, you know, whatever, 10 to 20 years, I was very busy. I was always handling many jobs and many projects at once. And there was a cadre of folks that I worked with that were producers and designers and of all kinds that I would call on, and we would work together.
I always sort of think of it like Orson Welles, who had his cadre of folks that he made different films with. For me, it was not so much as a company, but a bunch of independents that I could call on for different projects that their skills applied to. But we all learned to work together, and I think elevate each other’s abilities through those collaborations.
Abby: Building on that idea of your mentor or being mentored throughout life, I know I’ve had mentors at certain phases and mentored me for different things from a business perspective. Is mentoring an important part of what you do, Chris, and what advice do you have for the younger generations who want to make meaningful work?
Chris: I very happily try to mentor people, and I think try to just help people out because I think it’s it’s important, you know, it’s hard. What we do is unusual, and it’s hard, and there’s no real organization for it. And we all sort of have to watch each other’s backs.
The other thing I’d say, which is more akin to what I did when I was traveling, was go find people who are doing it. Find the people who are doing the work that you think is really great and go work with them. It’s interesting for me. I’ve been reading developmental psychology books because of my five-year-old daughter, and one of the things that an author I like a lot has said that really stuck with me is that we don’t teach by doing here.
And what she says in her book is that previously, through most cultures and most epochs in time, there was essentially an apprenticeship, right? She said, Well, you know, imagine if we taught baseball by teaching kids about balls and why they’re round and how you make a round ball and how you sew them, and then you teach them about velocity, and you teach them about pitching. You teach them about catching, the velocity of a ball, the arc of the curve. And then you start talking about bats in seventh grade, but you never let the kid play ball. Right. If you taught that way, kids would never know how to play ball.
Brenda: You’re making me think of something that Lois Silverman said to me once. She said, Brenda, do the work that’s meaningful to you, and the world will be better for it. And I can’t tell you how often I’ve clung to that.
Chris: I thought of something else a minute ago and I want to, I want to interject it. In the world of advice, I would say for me over the years, again, working as an independent, I always felt that maybe if I was doing two jobs out of five, two projects out of five that I could believe in, I was doing okay.
So yeah, I would do projects like the launch of Verizon in New York or some, you know, commercial project like that. But those projects allowed me not only the money, not only the money I needed to live, but they they kept informing me, kept honing my skills, you know, and allowed me to do projects for organizations like the United Nations who, you might think would pay real money, but they don’t. And a host of other not-for-profit where I could just say, I’ll do it, I’ll just do it, you know. But it was finding a balance like that so that I would do the interesting projects and the meaningful projects. But I had to do the other stuff just to keep going.
The other thing I’d say about the work I did is because it was an endless train of one-offs, as it were, going back to the one shot deal nature of my profession never got under my skin that much. Whatever I was working on, I was going to be done with soon enough.
Abby: So, thinking about things that weren’t done soon enough, we’re going to turn our attention to COVID, and public events and experiences seem to have undergone a dramatic shift since then. So what has this meant for the world of large-scale spectaculars, from your perspective, Chris? And what do you think’s permanently changed, maybe for the better, since COVID?
Chris: I think the pall of the plague is not behind us in terms of public events. I think people are still afraid in many cases to go out and be in mass crowds or in small places, you know, a theater for 500, but sitting sandwiched between people you don’t know still makes those folks uncomfortable. And I also think it’s changed habits.
I think, you know, there are a lot of people who probably by habit went out two nights a week or something, and they stopped for two years. And so it’s no longer a habit for them. And I think that’s a real problem. I can only think, though, and maybe this is just my perspective and my, again, my age, but I can only think that we will sooner than later, pretty much return to where we were.
I think there’s something indispensable about bringing people together in, in actual proximity, and virtual proximity is fascinating, but ain’t nothing like the real thing, baby. And being together in a room full of people is irreplaceable, and I think that that’s likely to continue. Whether or not there’s, you know, more and more digital presence within the, within public gatherings or not.
I think the public gatherings will continue. And the technology is just another technology that will layer on. You know, I don’t think amplified – my father wouldn’t agree with you, but I don’t think amplified music or the advent of amplification decimated Broadway and the experience of seeing shows. I think Broadway shows just became more technologically infused. And I imagine that’s what’s going to happen in general.
Abby: Yes. So you mentioned, you know, the role of technology in large-scale productions, which has just got more and more involved, bigger and bigger. When you just look at lighting, moving stages, pyrotechnics alone. Now we’re starting to see AR in particular at live shows and, over the past years, performances in the metaverse, like Justin Bieber, who went live as an avatar in his own virtual universe, Travis Scott in Fortnite, which actually had over 12 million players watching, and Ariana Grande whose concert played over a number of days.
So looking at time frames that actually extended beyond what she could actually perform. This is a completely new realm for concerts and events. How do you think these technologies, the metaverse, and advances, will change the playing field?
Chris: Well, let me see. I think they’re good because it’s interesting for a whole new wave of creative expression. I think they’re good because, in theory, if you’re a Justin Bieber fan and you live in Outer Mongolia, you can get down with Justin. I think it’s bad only in that I feel there’s a loss of what we would call authenticity.
And that leads into point B, which is because creating those experiences costs God-awful amounts of money. And so those mega transmissions, especially for now, until technology allows them to be simplified and cheaper, that’s the domain of big business. One of the beautiful things I think we all recognize about the web until it gets altered is that it’s so open, you know?
Yeah, great. I mean, I think the influencer phenomena is sometimes nauseating, but it’s really cool that some 17-year-old kid can start making movies and become a star around the world. And he can do it basically for $5. It’s a matter of that person’s worldview and creativity that can reach so many people. That’s incredible. But that’s a very different thing than the heavy-weight experiences that are being generated now by big stars.
Brenda: When people experience awe, when they experience things that are spectacular and that trigger wonder in them, it actually prompts pro-social behavior. I think that it’s going to be really fascinating to continue to see how it is that this pro-social behavior is going to continue to, to be activated. And the thing that just makes it so exciting to me is in all of these different forms, when people are triggered by the spectacular, when they are activated through a sense of, through a sense of wonder, the drive to do something that is helpful to others is really profound.
Chris: But Brenda, it’s also the same drive that allowed Leni Riefenstahl to make films, or it made Adolf Hitler allow to have parades that make people go out and do horrible things. It’s not the technology that creates a pro-social behavior. It’s the artist, it’s the human behind it. The technology’s but a tool.
Brenda: So then, what’s the future, Chris? When we’re thinking about how things can go sideways, they can, you know, aim high, they can aim low. And especially with advanced technologies when people of all sorts have so much at their disposal and can reach such mass audiences. What do you see as being the social future for the spectacular?
Chris: The global nature of our era is remarkable. For all the wall builders out there, I’m sorry to let you know it’s not going to work. We are really one world now, whether you like it or not. And that means that if you strike a right note, you can bring positive social behavior together in a global way to massive amounts of people. And that’s incredible. There’s an incredible potential there.
But of course, there’s also a credible potential for dark clouds and storms to gather and we’re seeing, frankly, in a way, more of that, I think, through technology than the good stuff when there are as many people creating really what you and I, because we share values would think of as positive social messages and positive social programs for our country when there are as many of those folks out there as there are people who are conspiracy theorists, etc., then we’ll be doing great.
Abby: You seem to have done it all. And so, in all earnestness, what really have you got still to achieve?
Chris: What I really want to do is exercise a bunch of my sort of creative focus that I haven’t been able to do because I was running so hard doing everything else for the last 40 years. You know, I want to make things with my hands, and I want to play music, and I want to do those things. And I want to spend a lot of time with my kid.
What I have found that’s interesting is that as I have cut back from doing the kind of work I’ve been doing and as I’ve been spending more time working with my hands, playing music, that type of thing, I find that my rhythm has changed. And when once my rhythm begins to change, my head begins to change, and I begin to think differently and begin to think in a way that I consider is actually a little bit more thoughtful, a little bit more considered.
There is time. There’s time to actually think things over, to mull things over, and not just to keep moving, keep moving, keep moving. You know, maybe what I would what I would say is I aspire to is to live a little bit more thoughtful existence and see where it gets me. And that’s not – thoughtful may be different than mindful, you know, mindful is a certain set of things that we, it tends to mean a certain kind of things. And I have nothing against being mindful but being thoughtful and taking the time to consider life. And something I missed out on a lot because of how hard the world pushes us.
Brenda: Chris, You’ve got such an eye for poetry and an eye for beauty and perhaps a giant heart for play. I can imagine that there’s going to be something pretty powerful in your future, whatever that is, even if it’s a quiet something powerful. And I, for one, am really excited for the time when that comes.
Abby: Chris, thanks for sharing the idea of taking our time. I think that’s really wise advice and that our listeners should all take a pause today, take some time when you’re creating, don’t rush, don’t push. Chris, it’s been a delight to have you here with us today, sharing your unique view of events and our world with our listeners. I’m very excited to see what’s next for you. Thank you.
Chris: Thank you.
Brenda: Thank you so much, Chris. It’s been such a pleasure.
Chris: A real treat. Be well, talk to you soon.
Brenda: Take care.
[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.
The Spectacular with Chris Wangro
Museums & War with Jasminko Halilovic
In a world affected by tension, polarization and war, can museums act as a voice for love, unity, and peace? This week’s guest tackles this very question. Jasminko Halilovic is the founder and managing director of the War Childhood Museum, and in this episode shares how a book about objects and their stories from war survivors inspired the birth of a museum.
Halilovic developed the War Childhood Museum from the War Childhood book, a mosaic of short memories that he collected from more than 1,000 people. Before the WCM, he founded several not-for-profit and for-profit entities.
Jasminko holds a master’s degree in financial management. He has been a keynote speaker at various museum, peacebuilding, and entrepreneurship conferences in more than ten countries, and is regularly invited to present or teach at leading universities around the world. His books have been translated into six languages.
For his work with the WCM, which expanded to become an international organization with offices in four countries, Halilovic was selected for the Forbes "30 under 30" list.
A Museum Where Every Object Helped a Child Endure War – The New York Times
[Music]
Abby: Hello and welcome to Matters of Experience. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: Hello, I’m Brenda Cowan.
Abby: Welcome to this week’s podcast, Museums and War. We are thrilled to be speaking with q in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, the world’s only museum dedicated to children affected by armed conflict. Since the museum’s opening in 2016, Jasminko has been expanding the War Childhood Museum exhibitions, taking them around the world to places where children’s lives are being altered due to war and conflict, like Kiev in Ukraine.
Jasminko, welcome, and thank you so much for joining us today.
Jasminko: Hi, thank you for having me.
Brenda: Jasminko, I’m going to get us kickstarted with just a very fond remembrance of my own meeting you just as you were opening, and I remember so well the spirits of you and your staff being so strong and so confident. Starting from the first seed idea for the War Childhood Museum, where did the idea come from? And given that it takes tenacity, determination, and a little luck, how confident were you that you would succeed?
Jasminko: Yes, I think you said it well. It takes some determination but also some luck. I think we had both. In the very beginning, we were very confident. However, it was not always easy and smooth journey. Just a couple of days to go, I stumbled upon an article about the museum from this period, and the first sentence in the article is Jasminko Halilovic is tired. And so it was funny to me that the journalist used this as the first sentence in the article, and I think it turned out well that we were really exhausted creating the, creating anything, but especially creating a museum which is community-centered and around such a topic which carries some gravity with it. I think it’s a really demanding process. But if you take this as your mission, if you would take it as something that has to happen, then I think regardless of challenges that will happen, and it happened in our case, and today we are very lucky with the fact that we succeeded. But even before the museum existed for us, this was not the question, of if we would get there. It was only the question of how to get there.
Abby: Why for you – you know, Jasminko, we only walk this way once – what made you, like, tell us a little bit maybe about your history or why did you decide to focus and devote your life to the War Childhood Museum?
Jasminko: Well, it’s both easy and not easy answer. The easy part is obviously that I’m also part of the generation and the generation which are who have been affected by the Bosnian war. And this is obviously the very straightforward explanation why I’m interested in the topic. However, on the other hand, I had nothing to do with museums in my life.
So the museum as a medium, as a tool is not so straightforward for me. I was involved with culture and actually, I started this project with the desire to do the book about this experience, and I did the book. But through the process for creating the book, I started communicating with people, and I understood that there is something around objects that they tend to connect their memory to objects, and that’s how the idea for the museum was born.
Brenda: I’m wondering if, for our listeners who aren’t familiar with the unusual way that the museum started, if you could just give us a description of the rather brilliant book project that you’re describing about objects and their stories from war survivors.
Jasminko: So the easiest way to imagine this book for someone who never saw it would be to imagine the collection of tweets. Because the format of the book, it was 2010 when I started the project, and I limited people’s answers to 160 characters. So very similar to tweets. And more than 1000 people responded, and I made a mosaic of these short recollections. So that’s actually the concept of the book, and that’s the reason why the community was created around the book, and out of these interactions, the idea for the museum was born.
Abby: Well, this is the first time, actually, Brenda, that I’ve ever heard of a museum coming out of a book so directly in this way and absolutely poetic and wonderful. And I love the idea of, you know, limiting the number of characters to get feedback because then you get feedback, right? The gateway to admission is a lot easier than if you want, expect people to write these long copious stories.
So I think that’s absolutely fantastic. Now, the title is very arresting: War Childhood Museum. It really makes me sort of pause and take a moment to think deeper about what it represents. Why didn’t you call it something like the Children’s War Museum or maybe Children Affected by War. You know, why did you name it War Childhood Museum?
Jasminko: Okay. It’s not a children’s museum. You know when we say children’s museum, someone would assume it’s for children only, and this is not the case. I wanted the name to be pretty straightforward. Some people told me the word has some difficult meaning with it; the brands, the corporations will not, will not be very happy to be associated with it and stuff like this.
But I wanted the name to really represent what the museum is. And it’s not only childhood in war. It’s also childhood affected by war. And just to touch upon what you mentioned, the museum created from the book, but there is one very famous example in Europe. Orhan Pamuk is a Nobel Prize-winning novelist, and his novel Museum of Innocence was turned by him into a brilliant Museum of Innocence in Istanbul.
And that was one of the most inspiring case studies I witnessed while I was taking this similar journey on a very different topic in different way. But there is one thing which I think Museum of Innocence and the War Childhood Museum share, and this is the focus on very personal stories of, let’s say, ordinary people, and this is something Orhan Pamuk mentioned in his manifesto for museums. He says it’s not a big challenge to tell the history of nations or countries, but what we need to do is to tell the stories of people. And this is also at the heart of the War Childhood Museum’s mission.
Brenda: One of the things that I particularly appreciate about the War Childhood Museum book is that it is the reality of people all around the world and in the voices of so many different people. And the stories that you wanted to tell were really the stories of the people who contributed to the book and who contributed, frankly, their own vulnerabilities, their own spirits, and their own souls to the development of the museum.
I’m wondering, can you talk to us about how it is that the museum evolved over the years since you’ve opened its doors with those initial stories?
Jasminko: The museum evolved a lot, of course, in the scope of its activities. They were born in one context in Bosnia, and then we expanded. Now we have projects in over ten countries, I guess, then also our collection grew. Now it includes objects and stories from different places, different conflicts, and then obviously, all other activities have all developed like our peace education programs, our interactions with the community.
There was a lot of change, but maybe the biggest change was within our team as well. We were a group of people with no previous experience in museums, but I think over the years, of course, being exposed to the industry and being part of the industry, getting some awards within the industry, I think that all of this helped us to understand better how powerful museums can be and how we had a huge opportunity to interact with audiences in so many different ways.
And we are really trying to use this and to connect even more with people and to connect people with our collections and also to connect people with other people through our museum.
Abby: Lorem Ipsum has worked on a number of tough subjects in museums, tackling the content of war and survivors. Now I always find it’s incredibly difficult. You have to understand the societal and the global nuances of the stories being told, and it’s often very complex, especially when you’re creating museums around the world, deciding what angles of a story to highlight and whose voices and how is really at the heart of a successful museum experience.
How did you adapt the book into a museum? How did you choose which stories to tell and how to tell them? Because obviously, a book is a very different medium to a museum. Could you take us through that process?
Jasminko: Yes, of course. During the work on the book, people already submitted some personal belongings by email. They would say, can you publish this in the book as well? This was not part of the plan because the book was meant to be only a collection of these short memories. But then, inspired by these emails, I added the third part of the book, where I already showed some of these personal belongings and the stories that that explained them and their meaning. And this transfer from the book to the museum was actually, for me, a very natural process.
There was nothing strange in it. Of course, the focus shifted more towards the objects, but we certainly remained, and we still are a platform to tell these stories. And the objects are there only to illustrate the stories, and of course, there is a special dynamics around these objects and the way that visitors interact with them, and that’s why I think museums are so powerful because you really are able to witness in front of your eyes a part of someone’s history. And this is, this can be very, very powerful.
Abby: Who was your target audience for the museum? Who were, who were you ideally targeting as a visitor?
Jasminko: It’s a, we are a small medium, but we have very broad audience. And as a small museum, we cannot have like a special exhibition for each target group, but we have to communicate all target groups at one exhibition, and of course, there are a couple of special target groups within the general public, which we especially target. It’s the survivors themselves, people who share this experience.
This is very important for us because I think museums such as ours, it doesn’t make too much sense to have these museums if they are not accepted by the community. So my biggest fear may be what will be the feedback, and immediately after the first temporary exhibition, I was there every day talking to people, and after this one, I was certain this is a good idea, and it should be a permanent museum.
And then, of course, the new generation. For our peace education programs, we work with hundreds of schools, thousands of children every year, and this is specifically important for us because, as you know, around the world, there is so much tension and so much polarization in the society, so we want to be one additional voice for peace, and I think that is a critical part of our mission as well.
Brenda: I was able to do a study with you about the impact that was happening on people and specifically when they were seeing the objects and engaging with the objects in your collection, and you are directly contributing to people’s mental health, to their well-being, and you’re enabling people to heal. And I think that that’s just an important thing to sort of add in there; the level of depth that we’re talking about here is rather extraordinary, and it’s risky, and it’s working very well.
Jasminko: I agree. I continuously and consistently get the feedback that the fact that you are able to tell your story, to donate your object, to contribute your object to the collection, to have it exhibited to a broad audience, that this can have some kind of healing effect. And we are very proud of this. There are so many beautiful stories of people deciding to come back for the first time to their home city because of our work or reconnecting with some family members, or starting some discussions that they never could start otherwise. So this is very rewarding, and this is what keeps us moving forward. And this is very central to our work.
Abby: So, for some of our listeners, can you take us through a few of the objects and the stories that move you?
Jasminko: There are many. We have now more than 5000 objects from 20 different armed conflicts. So there are many, many different stories. I don’t know which one to pick now. People are sometimes surprised because when they see the type of the name of our museum, they always expect only dark stories and only sad stories. But we also have beautiful stories about friendship, about love, about learning, about play, stories that make you laugh.
We have very diverse objects and belongings from some that highlight the creativity of children during war, for example, the ballet shoe or guitar or some other musical instruments like violin. And then we have like some very basic things you use at your home, like radio or, or even we have even a laptop. So like many, many different things in this diverse collection.
And the focus is on the story that this person tell. And the story is sometimes completely connected to the object and sometimes just mentions the object. So this diversity of voices, is something was the most beautiful about our collection, and even after 5000 objects, I still get surprised by what people choose to contribute and how they tell their story. And now we see some shifts, for example, with Ukraine and some contemporary conflicts, we see a shift in our collection towards digital objects.
For example, during the Bosnian war, no one had a smartphone and you couldn’t produce your own video or photograph or something like that. But now we get many digital objects because kids have smartphones and they are taking photos and videos. So there is, if you look at from this perspective, changes that happen with time.
Brenda: When talking about the objects that are shared and the particular stories and the fact that they aren’t all sad, that a lot of them are affiliated, like you said, with play and with moments of childhood that are uplifting and enjoyable, and I remember speaking with some visitors to the museum who were almost excited to see some of the childhood toys and even some, you know, little wrappers from candies that they were familiar with and that they had had as children.
And the response was one of familiarity and of connection. And that’s something that I think is really underscored by the work that you’re doing, is that the stories and through the objects that you’re sharing are relevant to us all, and they’re important to us all. And I think that it’s a brilliant example of the relevance of a museum on the most intimate level.
Jasminko: Another thing is also the universality of these objects because when you are familiar with something, it’s easier to understand, to get the message, to connect. If you can connect it to your own childhood, then you can better understand the narrative. So I think this is something which has helped us to communicate our collection. And I think this universality is beautiful because wherever we go in the world with our exhibition, it’s the same. People still can recognize some things, and they connect with them.
Abby: Is there a way that visitors can tell their stories, their personal stories when they’re actually inside the museum?
Jasminko: Yes. At the entrance of the museum, they are interacting with our staff, and if they mention that they also share this experience, they are invited to access our website and to share their memories as well. This happens regularly, yes.
Abby: That’s lovely.
Brenda: I’m wondering if you could talk just a little bit about the challenges that museums need to consider and that you might be experiencing when seeking to expand in new ways and into new places.
Jasminko: It’s always challenging. It’s particularly challenging, I think, if you are coming from developing markets and countries as we do because then everything is expensive, and many things are out of reach. But the biggest challenge here is actually different contexts, some cultural differences, and how to establish trust wherever you go. And this is why we rely a lot on local expertise.
Wherever we have a project, we always just support local people to implement projects for their community. And I think this is critical because it’s much easier to build the trust with the community if local people are doing it. Aside from the trust and the relationship in the community, of course, logistics are always the challenge. You need to do a lot of fundraising. You need to do human resources.
But I would say logistics, the money, resources, everything is possible to solve if you have a good foundation.
Brenda: I’m wondering if you could share a little bit about your recent speaking engagement at ICOM’s conference. This was in Prague, and it was when ICOM launched its new definition of what a museum is. And this is a hotly anticipated definition. So as the founder of a museum dedicated to social change, societal well-being, can you share your thoughts on this new museum definition? Do you think it captures what it is that the profession needs to be?
Jasminko: You know, I think that the question of the new definition of museums is not an easy discussion because obviously it’s a huge industry, and hundreds of thousands of museum professionals around the world are trying to contribute to it or to discuss it. And if you ask even five different people from the museum industry to put together a definition, you will get five different definitions.
I knew, and it’s very clear, that it’s impossible to create a definition that everyone would be happy with. With the definition which was in the end established, I think it more or less captures well some of the concepts. I think it doesn’t speak about the future. I think museums are not only places where we document past and discuss present, I think we also can imagine our futures in these places.
I think the word future is missing from the definition. I also don’t like some words which were included, like not-for-profit, this is the first, the definition starts with “a museum is a not-for-profit, permanent institution.” I don’t think it should be; this should be like it. I think that beautiful initiatives can be for profit as well. I think by enabling museums also to be for profit, I think it also gives some additional fuel to the industry because then there is more motivation for entrepreneurs, founders, and others to engage with the industry and create something interesting or like new concepts, experiments, and other things. So I don’t know why it’s so critical to be a not-for-profit.
Brenda: I think it’s really interesting when the current newly revised definition includes inclusivity, equity, accessibility, transformation, and yet they’re being specific to not-for-profits. I think that that challenges their very own definition.
Jasminko: Even the concepts that you mentioned now, the sustainability, the inclusivity, accessibility, diversity, all of these standards, these are not imposed by the definition. This is something we already created in our institution. And then the definition only confirms this. And that’s why I don’t think that the definition is here to show the way. I think the definition is here to acknowledge what we already built.
Abby: Yes, overall, I completely agree. I think the definition comes on the heels of what good museums are actually already doing. I feel it’s pretty long overdue. I mean, two years, a lot of changes in two years, and ICOM, far from leading, is reacting to pressures to modernize. So I’d like to see them leading a little bit more and as you said, the not-for-profit, and there’s a few other things in there that, you know, open to discussion.
The other thing I had an idea of, well, why does it matter anyway? As you mentioned, Jasminko, it didn’t stop you creating what sounds to me, and I know what Brenda’s enjoyed an incredible experience. Brenda, from your perspective, is it irrelevant what ICOM calls a museum?
Brenda: I don’t know if it’s not, you know, whether or not it’s leading the charge per se, and I have to say I definitely agree with both you and Jasminko that this is work that museums have been doing for a long time. I think putting the language together is essential. I think that it’s important to have some kind of a handrail, especially for new institutions. But even as our existing and our sort of venerated old institutions are doing strategic work and reframing their own missions, I do think that these messages of inclusivity and equity, the call to sustainability, it’s important to have these reminders out there.
It’s making me think about when the Smithsonian secretary, Dr. Lonnie Bunch, who really led this charge, was leading this moment to reimagine institutions and relationships with audiences, business models, the way that museums serve their countries and communities. He said that ultimately all of our job is to define reality and to give hope and to challenge our institutions to be places of inspiration, curiosity, learning, I think very importantly, to be places of listening and of course, to be the voices of their audiences. And personally, coming from the world of design, I can tell you, man, there’s a lot of work to be done just to aspire to that level of thinking.
Jasminko, with all of this in mind, I’m curious what you think museums can do to help raise greater awareness and specifically in your world, about war children. How can people participate in making a difference and, you know, what kind of responsibility do our museums need to take?
Jasminko: Yeah, I think it’s not only about the topic we deal with, I think it’s about any important topic or cause in our society. I think there is something what I call the shared responsibility of the whole industry. I think any museum can find its own way to contribute, and I think for this century we are currently in, one of the biggest things museums will need to stand for together is equality and human rights. And this is why I think this is a shared challenge and I’m very, very happy to see museums engaging with these causes.
Abby: Seems to me that you’re very entrepreneurial and have always sort of trodden along your own path, despite what other people may have said. For others listening who may doubt themselves as we all do, what words of encouragement would you give them for going along their own path, having the courage to continue along and have that vision while other people may say, oh, don’t do that, you shouldn’t do that, that won’t work?
Jasminko: Yeah, as someone who created a museum, people get in touch with me when they want to create museums. What they all have in common is none of them go to check the museum definition. So, they have their own idea, they have their own vision of what they want to create, and I think this is good. I think we should not be binded by what already exists or how someone imagines the industry should be, or these places should be.
When I decided to create the War Childhood Museum, I knew nothing about museums. I was just an average museum visitor. But then you learn, and you navigate. I think there has to be some kind of force of special motivation. Creating a museum is not a short journey, and there are no easy answers. It’s like any startup I want to say, even if you create ten startups, the 11th one will come with some questions you never answered. So that’s how it also is with museums because it’s a place that interacts with so many communities, so many audiences. It’s a place which carries so much gravity for people, people trust museums, they have high expectations from museums, so it’s not something that you can do as a side activity.
This is what I tried, but then it became a full-time job, but also the main occupation of life. So it’s something you really need. If you want to make it happen from scratch, you really need to devote yourself to it. You need to be ready to give everything you have. And I think with that kind of approach, I think you can create anything in life, including a museum.
Abby: I completely agree. Very inspiring words, Jasminko. So, what’s next for you? What’s next for the museum? Tell us some of the things you’re looking forward to over the next, I’ll keep it small, next few years.
Jasminko: Yes. I mean, I, currently I try to work towards our 2030 goals, and we have 2030 strategy, and what they are doing continuously is expanding our collection. We want our collection to include objects and stories from any major conflict which happened after the Second World War. Also, with our peace education programs, we are now working to expand them globally and not to work with hundreds of schools and thousands of students, but to work with thousands of schools and maybe millions of students. So this is the path we are following, and I’m confident that the War Childhood Museum will become an international platform for everyone and will reach millions around the world.
Abby: Jasminko, do you have any plans to bring the exhibit over to the U.S.?
Jasminko: Yes, we opened a very small office in New York City recently, and we plan to start documenting and collecting and creating our U.S. collection and then doing some temporary exhibitions, and then we will see, but yeah, this is the plan.
Brenda: Jasminko, listening to you, I can only say that I believe wholeheartedly that you and your institution will indeed become this global platform for dialog, for sharing, for hope, and for promise. And I want to give you a hearty appreciation for all that you do and for all that you’re continuing to do.
Jasminko: Thank you so much. And thank you for mentioning the word hope. This is something that’s very important for me and this is something that I really believe will stay consistent in the feedback that we get. Because now, when I take our guest book, I see this word very often, and I want it to stay like that.
Abby: It’s been amazing to chat with you. Jasminko, Thank you so much for sharing your story with us today.
Jasminko: And thank you for having me. Thank you.
Brenda: Take care.
[Music]
Producer: Matters of Experience is produced by Lorem Ipsum Corp. Please tune in next week for another conversation. Thank you all for listening.
Halilovic developed the War Childhood Museum from the War Childhood book, a mosaic of short memories that he collected from more than 1,000 people. Before the WCM, he founded several not-for-profit and for-profit entities.
Jasminko holds a master’s degree in financial management. He has been a keynote speaker at various museum, peacebuilding, and entrepreneurship conferences in more than ten countries, and is regularly invited to present or teach at leading universities around the world. His books have been translated into six languages.
For his work with the WCM, which expanded to become an international organization with offices in four countries, Halilovic was selected for the Forbes "30 under 30" list.
A Museum Where Every Object Helped a Child Endure War – The New York Times
[Music]
Abby: Hello and welcome to Matters of Experience. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: Hello, I’m Brenda Cowan.
Abby: Welcome to this week’s podcast, Museums and War. We are thrilled to be speaking with q in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, the world’s only museum dedicated to children affected by armed conflict. Since the museum’s opening in 2016, Jasminko has been expanding the War Childhood Museum exhibitions, taking them around the world to places where children’s lives are being altered due to war and conflict, like Kiev in Ukraine.
Jasminko, welcome, and thank you so much for joining us today.
Jasminko: Hi, thank you for having me.
Brenda: Jasminko, I’m going to get us kickstarted with just a very fond remembrance of my own meeting you just as you were opening, and I remember so well the spirits of you and your staff being so strong and so confident. Starting from the first seed idea for the War Childhood Museum, where did the idea come from? And given that it takes tenacity, determination, and a little luck, how confident were you that you would succeed?
Jasminko: Yes, I think you said it well. It takes some determination but also some luck. I think we had both. In the very beginning, we were very confident. However, it was not always easy and smooth journey. Just a couple of days to go, I stumbled upon an article about the museum from this period, and the first sentence in the article is Jasminko Halilovic is tired. And so it was funny to me that the journalist used this as the first sentence in the article, and I think it turned out well that we were really exhausted creating the, creating anything, but especially creating a museum which is community-centered and around such a topic which carries some gravity with it. I think it’s a really demanding process. But if you take this as your mission, if you would take it as something that has to happen, then I think regardless of challenges that will happen, and it happened in our case, and today we are very lucky with the fact that we succeeded. But even before the museum existed for us, this was not the question, of if we would get there. It was only the question of how to get there.
Abby: Why for you – you know, Jasminko, we only walk this way once – what made you, like, tell us a little bit maybe about your history or why did you decide to focus and devote your life to the War Childhood Museum?
Jasminko: Well, it’s both easy and not easy answer. The easy part is obviously that I’m also part of the generation and the generation which are who have been affected by the Bosnian war. And this is obviously the very straightforward explanation why I’m interested in the topic. However, on the other hand, I had nothing to do with museums in my life.
So the museum as a medium, as a tool is not so straightforward for me. I was involved with culture and actually, I started this project with the desire to do the book about this experience, and I did the book. But through the process for creating the book, I started communicating with people, and I understood that there is something around objects that they tend to connect their memory to objects, and that’s how the idea for the museum was born.
Brenda: I’m wondering if, for our listeners who aren’t familiar with the unusual way that the museum started, if you could just give us a description of the rather brilliant book project that you’re describing about objects and their stories from war survivors.
Jasminko: So the easiest way to imagine this book for someone who never saw it would be to imagine the collection of tweets. Because the format of the book, it was 2010 when I started the project, and I limited people’s answers to 160 characters. So very similar to tweets. And more than 1000 people responded, and I made a mosaic of these short recollections. So that’s actually the concept of the book, and that’s the reason why the community was created around the book, and out of these interactions, the idea for the museum was born.
Abby: Well, this is the first time, actually, Brenda, that I’ve ever heard of a museum coming out of a book so directly in this way and absolutely poetic and wonderful. And I love the idea of, you know, limiting the number of characters to get feedback because then you get feedback, right? The gateway to admission is a lot easier than if you want, expect people to write these long copious stories.
So I think that’s absolutely fantastic. Now, the title is very arresting: War Childhood Museum. It really makes me sort of pause and take a moment to think deeper about what it represents. Why didn’t you call it something like the Children’s War Museum or maybe Children Affected by War. You know, why did you name it War Childhood Museum?
Jasminko: Okay. It’s not a children’s museum. You know when we say children’s museum, someone would assume it’s for children only, and this is not the case. I wanted the name to be pretty straightforward. Some people told me the word has some difficult meaning with it; the brands, the corporations will not, will not be very happy to be associated with it and stuff like this.
But I wanted the name to really represent what the museum is. And it’s not only childhood in war. It’s also childhood affected by war. And just to touch upon what you mentioned, the museum created from the book, but there is one very famous example in Europe. Orhan Pamuk is a Nobel Prize-winning novelist, and his novel Museum of Innocence was turned by him into a brilliant Museum of Innocence in Istanbul.
And that was one of the most inspiring case studies I witnessed while I was taking this similar journey on a very different topic in different way. But there is one thing which I think Museum of Innocence and the War Childhood Museum share, and this is the focus on very personal stories of, let’s say, ordinary people, and this is something Orhan Pamuk mentioned in his manifesto for museums. He says it’s not a big challenge to tell the history of nations or countries, but what we need to do is to tell the stories of people. And this is also at the heart of the War Childhood Museum’s mission.
Brenda: One of the things that I particularly appreciate about the War Childhood Museum book is that it is the reality of people all around the world and in the voices of so many different people. And the stories that you wanted to tell were really the stories of the people who contributed to the book and who contributed, frankly, their own vulnerabilities, their own spirits, and their own souls to the development of the museum.
I’m wondering, can you talk to us about how it is that the museum evolved over the years since you’ve opened its doors with those initial stories?
Jasminko: The museum evolved a lot, of course, in the scope of its activities. They were born in one context in Bosnia, and then we expanded. Now we have projects in over ten countries, I guess, then also our collection grew. Now it includes objects and stories from different places, different conflicts, and then obviously, all other activities have all developed like our peace education programs, our interactions with the community.
There was a lot of change, but maybe the biggest change was within our team as well. We were a group of people with no previous experience in museums, but I think over the years, of course, being exposed to the industry and being part of the industry, getting some awards within the industry, I think that all of this helped us to understand better how powerful museums can be and how we had a huge opportunity to interact with audiences in so many different ways.
And we are really trying to use this and to connect even more with people and to connect people with our collections and also to connect people with other people through our museum.
Abby: Lorem Ipsum has worked on a number of tough subjects in museums, tackling the content of war and survivors. Now I always find it’s incredibly difficult. You have to understand the societal and the global nuances of the stories being told, and it’s often very complex, especially when you’re creating museums around the world, deciding what angles of a story to highlight and whose voices and how is really at the heart of a successful museum experience.
How did you adapt the book into a museum? How did you choose which stories to tell and how to tell them? Because obviously, a book is a very different medium to a museum. Could you take us through that process?
Jasminko: Yes, of course. During the work on the book, people already submitted some personal belongings by email. They would say, can you publish this in the book as well? This was not part of the plan because the book was meant to be only a collection of these short memories. But then, inspired by these emails, I added the third part of the book, where I already showed some of these personal belongings and the stories that that explained them and their meaning. And this transfer from the book to the museum was actually, for me, a very natural process.
There was nothing strange in it. Of course, the focus shifted more towards the objects, but we certainly remained, and we still are a platform to tell these stories. And the objects are there only to illustrate the stories, and of course, there is a special dynamics around these objects and the way that visitors interact with them, and that’s why I think museums are so powerful because you really are able to witness in front of your eyes a part of someone’s history. And this is, this can be very, very powerful.
Abby: Who was your target audience for the museum? Who were, who were you ideally targeting as a visitor?
Jasminko: It’s a, we are a small medium, but we have very broad audience. And as a small museum, we cannot have like a special exhibition for each target group, but we have to communicate all target groups at one exhibition, and of course, there are a couple of special target groups within the general public, which we especially target. It’s the survivors themselves, people who share this experience.
This is very important for us because I think museums such as ours, it doesn’t make too much sense to have these museums if they are not accepted by the community. So my biggest fear may be what will be the feedback, and immediately after the first temporary exhibition, I was there every day talking to people, and after this one, I was certain this is a good idea, and it should be a permanent museum.
And then, of course, the new generation. For our peace education programs, we work with hundreds of schools, thousands of children every year, and this is specifically important for us because, as you know, around the world, there is so much tension and so much polarization in the society, so we want to be one additional voice for peace, and I think that is a critical part of our mission as well.
Brenda: I was able to do a study with you about the impact that was happening on people and specifically when they were seeing the objects and engaging with the objects in your collection, and you are directly contributing to people’s mental health, to their well-being, and you’re enabling people to heal. And I think that that’s just an important thing to sort of add in there; the level of depth that we’re talking about here is rather extraordinary, and it’s risky, and it’s working very well.
Jasminko: I agree. I continuously and consistently get the feedback that the fact that you are able to tell your story, to donate your object, to contribute your object to the collection, to have it exhibited to a broad audience, that this can have some kind of healing effect. And we are very proud of this. There are so many beautiful stories of people deciding to come back for the first time to their home city because of our work or reconnecting with some family members, or starting some discussions that they never could start otherwise. So this is very rewarding, and this is what keeps us moving forward. And this is very central to our work.
Abby: So, for some of our listeners, can you take us through a few of the objects and the stories that move you?
Jasminko: There are many. We have now more than 5000 objects from 20 different armed conflicts. So there are many, many different stories. I don’t know which one to pick now. People are sometimes surprised because when they see the type of the name of our museum, they always expect only dark stories and only sad stories. But we also have beautiful stories about friendship, about love, about learning, about play, stories that make you laugh.
We have very diverse objects and belongings from some that highlight the creativity of children during war, for example, the ballet shoe or guitar or some other musical instruments like violin. And then we have like some very basic things you use at your home, like radio or, or even we have even a laptop. So like many, many different things in this diverse collection.
And the focus is on the story that this person tell. And the story is sometimes completely connected to the object and sometimes just mentions the object. So this diversity of voices, is something was the most beautiful about our collection, and even after 5000 objects, I still get surprised by what people choose to contribute and how they tell their story. And now we see some shifts, for example, with Ukraine and some contemporary conflicts, we see a shift in our collection towards digital objects.
For example, during the Bosnian war, no one had a smartphone and you couldn’t produce your own video or photograph or something like that. But now we get many digital objects because kids have smartphones and they are taking photos and videos. So there is, if you look at from this perspective, changes that happen with time.
Brenda: When talking about the objects that are shared and the particular stories and the fact that they aren’t all sad, that a lot of them are affiliated, like you said, with play and with moments of childhood that are uplifting and enjoyable, and I remember speaking with some visitors to the museum who were almost excited to see some of the childhood toys and even some, you know, little wrappers from candies that they were familiar with and that they had had as children.
And the response was one of familiarity and of connection. And that’s something that I think is really underscored by the work that you’re doing, is that the stories and through the objects that you’re sharing are relevant to us all, and they’re important to us all. And I think that it’s a brilliant example of the relevance of a museum on the most intimate level.
Jasminko: Another thing is also the universality of these objects because when you are familiar with something, it’s easier to understand, to get the message, to connect. If you can connect it to your own childhood, then you can better understand the narrative. So I think this is something which has helped us to communicate our collection. And I think this universality is beautiful because wherever we go in the world with our exhibition, it’s the same. People still can recognize some things, and they connect with them.
Abby: Is there a way that visitors can tell their stories, their personal stories when they’re actually inside the museum?
Jasminko: Yes. At the entrance of the museum, they are interacting with our staff, and if they mention that they also share this experience, they are invited to access our website and to share their memories as well. This happens regularly, yes.
Abby: That’s lovely.
Brenda: I’m wondering if you could talk just a little bit about the challenges that museums need to consider and that you might be experiencing when seeking to expand in new ways and into new places.
Jasminko: It’s always challenging. It’s particularly challenging, I think, if you are coming from developing markets and countries as we do because then everything is expensive, and many things are out of reach. But the biggest challenge here is actually different contexts, some cultural differences, and how to establish trust wherever you go. And this is why we rely a lot on local expertise.
Wherever we have a project, we always just support local people to implement projects for their community. And I think this is critical because it’s much easier to build the trust with the community if local people are doing it. Aside from the trust and the relationship in the community, of course, logistics are always the challenge. You need to do a lot of fundraising. You need to do human resources.
But I would say logistics, the money, resources, everything is possible to solve if you have a good foundation.
Brenda: I’m wondering if you could share a little bit about your recent speaking engagement at ICOM’s conference. This was in Prague, and it was when ICOM launched its new definition of what a museum is. And this is a hotly anticipated definition. So as the founder of a museum dedicated to social change, societal well-being, can you share your thoughts on this new museum definition? Do you think it captures what it is that the profession needs to be?
Jasminko: You know, I think that the question of the new definition of museums is not an easy discussion because obviously it’s a huge industry, and hundreds of thousands of museum professionals around the world are trying to contribute to it or to discuss it. And if you ask even five different people from the museum industry to put together a definition, you will get five different definitions.
I knew, and it’s very clear, that it’s impossible to create a definition that everyone would be happy with. With the definition which was in the end established, I think it more or less captures well some of the concepts. I think it doesn’t speak about the future. I think museums are not only places where we document past and discuss present, I think we also can imagine our futures in these places.
I think the word future is missing from the definition. I also don’t like some words which were included, like not-for-profit, this is the first, the definition starts with “a museum is a not-for-profit, permanent institution.” I don’t think it should be; this should be like it. I think that beautiful initiatives can be for profit as well. I think by enabling museums also to be for profit, I think it also gives some additional fuel to the industry because then there is more motivation for entrepreneurs, founders, and others to engage with the industry and create something interesting or like new concepts, experiments, and other things. So I don’t know why it’s so critical to be a not-for-profit.
Brenda: I think it’s really interesting when the current newly revised definition includes inclusivity, equity, accessibility, transformation, and yet they’re being specific to not-for-profits. I think that that challenges their very own definition.
Jasminko: Even the concepts that you mentioned now, the sustainability, the inclusivity, accessibility, diversity, all of these standards, these are not imposed by the definition. This is something we already created in our institution. And then the definition only confirms this. And that’s why I don’t think that the definition is here to show the way. I think the definition is here to acknowledge what we already built.
Abby: Yes, overall, I completely agree. I think the definition comes on the heels of what good museums are actually already doing. I feel it’s pretty long overdue. I mean, two years, a lot of changes in two years, and ICOM, far from leading, is reacting to pressures to modernize. So I’d like to see them leading a little bit more and as you said, the not-for-profit, and there’s a few other things in there that, you know, open to discussion.
The other thing I had an idea of, well, why does it matter anyway? As you mentioned, Jasminko, it didn’t stop you creating what sounds to me, and I know what Brenda’s enjoyed an incredible experience. Brenda, from your perspective, is it irrelevant what ICOM calls a museum?
Brenda: I don’t know if it’s not, you know, whether or not it’s leading the charge per se, and I have to say I definitely agree with both you and Jasminko that this is work that museums have been doing for a long time. I think putting the language together is essential. I think that it’s important to have some kind of a handrail, especially for new institutions. But even as our existing and our sort of venerated old institutions are doing strategic work and reframing their own missions, I do think that these messages of inclusivity and equity, the call to sustainability, it’s important to have these reminders out there.
It’s making me think about when the Smithsonian secretary, Dr. Lonnie Bunch, who really led this charge, was leading this moment to reimagine institutions and relationships with audiences, business models, the way that museums serve their countries and communities. He said that ultimately all of our job is to define reality and to give hope and to challenge our institutions to be places of inspiration, curiosity, learning, I think very importantly, to be places of listening and of course, to be the voices of their audiences. And personally, coming from the world of design, I can tell you, man, there’s a lot of work to be done just to aspire to that level of thinking.
Jasminko, with all of this in mind, I’m curious what you think museums can do to help raise greater awareness and specifically in your world, about war children. How can people participate in making a difference and, you know, what kind of responsibility do our museums need to take?
Jasminko: Yeah, I think it’s not only about the topic we deal with, I think it’s about any important topic or cause in our society. I think there is something what I call the shared responsibility of the whole industry. I think any museum can find its own way to contribute, and I think for this century we are currently in, one of the biggest things museums will need to stand for together is equality and human rights. And this is why I think this is a shared challenge and I’m very, very happy to see museums engaging with these causes.
Abby: Seems to me that you’re very entrepreneurial and have always sort of trodden along your own path, despite what other people may have said. For others listening who may doubt themselves as we all do, what words of encouragement would you give them for going along their own path, having the courage to continue along and have that vision while other people may say, oh, don’t do that, you shouldn’t do that, that won’t work?
Jasminko: Yeah, as someone who created a museum, people get in touch with me when they want to create museums. What they all have in common is none of them go to check the museum definition. So, they have their own idea, they have their own vision of what they want to create, and I think this is good. I think we should not be binded by what already exists or how someone imagines the industry should be, or these places should be.
When I decided to create the War Childhood Museum, I knew nothing about museums. I was just an average museum visitor. But then you learn, and you navigate. I think there has to be some kind of force of special motivation. Creating a museum is not a short journey, and there are no easy answers. It’s like any startup I want to say, even if you create ten startups, the 11th one will come with some questions you never answered. So that’s how it also is with museums because it’s a place that interacts with so many communities, so many audiences. It’s a place which carries so much gravity for people, people trust museums, they have high expectations from museums, so it’s not something that you can do as a side activity.
This is what I tried, but then it became a full-time job, but also the main occupation of life. So it’s something you really need. If you want to make it happen from scratch, you really need to devote yourself to it. You need to be ready to give everything you have. And I think with that kind of approach, I think you can create anything in life, including a museum.
Abby: I completely agree. Very inspiring words, Jasminko. So, what’s next for you? What’s next for the museum? Tell us some of the things you’re looking forward to over the next, I’ll keep it small, next few years.
Jasminko: Yes. I mean, I, currently I try to work towards our 2030 goals, and we have 2030 strategy, and what they are doing continuously is expanding our collection. We want our collection to include objects and stories from any major conflict which happened after the Second World War. Also, with our peace education programs, we are now working to expand them globally and not to work with hundreds of schools and thousands of students, but to work with thousands of schools and maybe millions of students. So this is the path we are following, and I’m confident that the War Childhood Museum will become an international platform for everyone and will reach millions around the world.
Abby: Jasminko, do you have any plans to bring the exhibit over to the U.S.?
Jasminko: Yes, we opened a very small office in New York City recently, and we plan to start documenting and collecting and creating our U.S. collection and then doing some temporary exhibitions, and then we will see, but yeah, this is the plan.
Brenda: Jasminko, listening to you, I can only say that I believe wholeheartedly that you and your institution will indeed become this global platform for dialog, for sharing, for hope, and for promise. And I want to give you a hearty appreciation for all that you do and for all that you’re continuing to do.
Jasminko: Thank you so much. And thank you for mentioning the word hope. This is something that’s very important for me and this is something that I really believe will stay consistent in the feedback that we get. Because now, when I take our guest book, I see this word very often, and I want it to stay like that.
Abby: It’s been amazing to chat with you. Jasminko, Thank you so much for sharing your story with us today.
Jasminko: And thank you for having me. Thank you.
Brenda: Take care.
[Music]
Producer: Matters of Experience is produced by Lorem Ipsum Corp. Please tune in next week for another conversation. Thank you all for listening.
Museums & War with Jasminko Halilovic
Storytelling in Experience Design
Visit Churchill War Rooms – Plan Your Visit | Imperial War Museums
Open House: If These Walls Could Talk | Minnesota Historical Society
[Music]
Abby: Hello and welcome to Matters of Experience. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: And this is Brenda Cowan.
Abby: Today on this show, we’re focusing on storytelling in experience design; why it’s important to tell stories, how experience design has an amazing toolset for creating truly immersive narratives and how to tell stories effectively. This whole topic is very near and dear to my heart, as you know, Brenda, since my background is filmmaking. Why don’t we kick off with the idea of story and why it exists at all?
Brenda: Well, it exists because humans exist. Stories exist because they are the means through which people at the earliest age make sense of their lives, of their relationships between themselves and the world around them. It’s something that’s inherent to all human beings. So think about it like this, Abby. Think about, you have children. I have a child and think about the four-year-old or even the three-year-old who comes home from a play date or a young child coming home from school or whatever, and just telling you endlessly about what happened during school, what the teacher said, what the other kids did, and also interspersing a lot of questions.
Where did that come from? Why did that happen? How does this work, Mom? What do you think about that? Etc., etc., etc… These recountings of daily experiences are the earliest forms of storytelling and they are literally how it is that young children figure out how the world works and how things work around them and what their relationship is to it and that’s storytelling, and it’s the basis of communication, it’s how human beings make connections with each other. So these, these are stories. They’re our earliest stories, and they’re evolutionary. They’re just simply a part of how we need to function as individuals.
Abby: Yeah, no, I completely agree with you, and it felt a little bit like you were obviously a fly on the wall in my house as well, the constant barrage of questions. But I think if we look back at our earliest forms of storytelling, I think about cave paintings. So humans really want to connect. It’s like, as you said, our basic instinct.
It’s how we survive and multiply. And when you think about it at the next level, a little deeper, we now want to communicate our emotions. It’s not just a story about what we did. It’s about how it made us feel. And that’s one of the very basic reasons why we tell stories to communicate and share our feelings through these personal stories.
When I think about experiences we create, the stories we tell really must touch the visitor in a very personal way and help them connect with the world around them and think about our place in history. In order to do that. There are a few things you need to think about in order to tell a good story.
Brenda: Absolutely, and I think that at its most fundamental level, I think that a really good story, I think that a great story is one that is an archetype. It’s one that is universal to all people. So, folks, if you’re familiar with Joseph Campbell, yes, I am pulling from the Joseph Campbell playbook and The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and I’m talking about how stories that are archetypal are things such as the story of the hero’s journey or stories of love and hate, or challenges to be overcome. These are stories that are familiar to people across culture and throughout time and even throughout age. Very young children can understand great archetypal stories in the same way that somebody who is in their senior years is going to be able to understand and have their own specific relationship to a story.
When you’ve got really archetypal stories that you are telling in whatever form you’re telling them, they’re going to be unifiers of people, and in our cases, people who come into exhibitions will come together, will have pro-social behavior even when the story is one that is familiar to all of them and that is very meaningful to all of them.
Abby: And I think as well as understanding the type of story you’re telling, the next question is, what’s your plot? And we always think, what are the key moments? And this is how we break up and decide actually on our zoning plan. We start with the story we’re telling and break that up into episodes. Very, very top line, but then we start to spread them around in the space already because our discipline is wholly unique.
I really think we’re telling an overall story in a physical space. I don’t know anybody else or any group of people who are able to do that and face that challenge. It’s a really amazing challenge. It’s one of the things I love about what we do—that challenge of moving people through a space and controlling how they feel.
In a film, you’re a captive audience. You actually pay a ticket. You sit down and you’re willing to contribute the 2, 3 hours to the film. But in a museum experience or a retail experience or any other sort of immersive experience you really have freedom as a visitor to select moments of the story and what you focus on and take in.
And I love trying in some ways to be able to control and manage and curate this visitor emotional experience to make sure that we’re really connecting, telling the stories we want to tell in the most effective and visceral way.
Brenda: Well, I really want to underscore, when you were talking about people having freedom and choice when they are experiencing the stories, and that freedom and choice of participation is something that is in some ways unique to the exhibition or the experience-designed space and exhibitions that attempt to function in a very linear narrative way, like a film, I think are probably the least effective kind.
But instead, when you give people a narrative or a story that is designed into a space where people have freedom of choice to experience it in a number of different ways, then you’ve got people who are going to be able to really engage. And you’re making me think of the timeless words of Jerome Bruner, who talked about narrative experience.
So we’re talking about story. What is story? And then there is the way in which people experience the story. And there’s actually a field called narrativity. And the brilliant museum scholar Leslie Bedford does a lot of terrific writing about narrativity and narrative experience and how it is very different, actually than the story. It’s how you are telling the story and how people are experiencing the story through narrativity. When we’re talking about narrative experience, we think about how people experience the stories, and in the exhibition forum, there still needs to be emotional arc, there needs to be variances of pace, there needs to be moments of great drama, and great heightened emotion, but then also moments of pause and moments of quietude, let’s say. Just like a great book. Just like a great film.
Abby: Yeah.
Brenda: Just in a unique form.
Abby: I completely agree. Drama is about a juxtaposition. It’s about a conflict. So you have to have the moments of the highs and the moments of the lows. I see it almost like music. It needs to ebb and it needs to flow. Moments when they’re fully immersed in the experience that really reaches and touches you to the core and truly moves you. And then you often need after that moment, you need to reflect. You need a space to breathe, especially when you’re dealing with some of the harder subject matters. Otherwise, it becomes overwhelming and I think, becomes an unsuccessful experience.
Brenda: And also resonance. I mean, I would argue as well that when you have high drama of whatever sort it is, even even if it’s something very hilarious, right, something particularly funny that you experience; if there isn’t a space and a moment of pause afterwards, it’s not going to be able to kind of reverberate.
Abby: One of the things I always think about is some people are visual learners and some are oral, and your exhibit really needs to work for both of these groups, and it needs to be very succinct and straight to the point. When you think about a 30-second commercial, for example, some of the best move you and you have a takeaway, right?
You watch them, they’re quick, they get their message out there and you’re moved. People can’t retain huge details after a museum visit. It’s usually just a few key points, key emotions, key things that they actually remember and share with friends and family afterwards. I always challenge our team with answering the question: what are the key points from this museum design, from this experience design, that you want the visitor to leave with? What are we trying to do? And we constantly refer back to that at every moment to make sure that we’re hitting that at the very least, and make sure your narrative reiterates it over and over again.
Brenda: The thing that I love about crafting story and thinking about narrative experience like you’re describing is understanding that stories always have a point of view. And when you take that as a touchpoint in the beginning of crafting your experience, it really enables you to make a lot of, I think, really intelligent design decisions. One of my favorite things is thinking about first person narrative, and especially thinking about exhibitions that are, let’s say, very challenging, or exhibitions where there are multiple truths, which is kind of almost like every exhibition, but taking a position of first person narrative, for example, as a way of telling the story could be a very, very effective way to shape exhibitions.
Also, I think about other great strategies of storytelling in exhibitions are using questions, questions as a strategy, questions that allow visitors to direct their own experience, questions that enable visitors and encourage them, or prompt them to really craft their own stories and to personalize things in very deep ways.
Abby: Yeah, I completely agree with you. Picking up with that idea of the first-person narrative. I was actually just in London and visited Churchill’s War Rooms and the museum there. I was listening to the voiceover explaining the story, which was fine, but it didn’t really touch me. It was very factual. It’s informational; it was interesting, right? But I wasn’t moved until there was a moment when one of the ladies who’d worked in the war rooms at this period started to talk to me and she started to tell me her story.
And then another one told me her story. And why it was so moving is because the stories they told were sort of odd and interesting and obscure and not what you’d expect. And the way they painted the picture of what it was like from their perspective really broke through that ice and resonated with me, and I got chills up my spine, and I imagined them in the space and it really transported me back in time.
Brenda: I think that thinking back to the idea of archetype as well, when you take a great archetypal story, something that is just as if it were pulled out of today’s headlines, something about, you know, love and hate or peace and war or any kind of conflict or forbidden love, stories such as this. All of the sudden, you really need to have multiple voices telling these stories because there are multiple truths.
And I think that what we’re finding in terms of storytelling in exhibitions now is that there’s a responsibility for that to be the case. We need to hear the audiences in our visitors voices as a part of the telling of the stories in our exhibitions. And I just love thinking about how powerful first-person narrative is, just experientially in terms of emotion. But I’m also thinking about how it’s really necessary if we’re going to really do an honest job of creating experiences.
Abby: The idea of listening to the stories from visitors broadens the net of the stories around the subject – you are curating, you have to curate, and so you have to make decisions. And I think it’s a wonderful opportunity to enable the visitor to expand those opportunities by telling us their perspective on this story. And I think it also enables museums to not become static, to constantly evolve with the visitor and share new perspectives.
If we’re talking about historical museums or anything that’s sort of from the past, hearing different people’s perspectives enables the visitor to enjoy putting them together like a puzzle and feeling that more palpable truth, I’ll say, that more alive truth and also more believable context of the story.
Brenda: Sure.
Abby: We’re talking about the voice of the story. I want to shift it a little bit now and talk about how you can tell a story without words. Very powerful stories can be told in just a simple image or emotions conveyed with a sound or a piece of music. I think it’s too easy to fall back on simple storytelling conventions or ways to tell stories when maybe there is a better way to tell that story. So, for example, we look at first, are there any artifacts that tell this story really well. For us, it’s a lot about curating what’s the best way, most effective way to tell the story.
So it’s really important to look at the story and not always default to a convention of, maybe a voiceover or a piece of media or a text panel. There’s lots of other ways, very efficient, simple ways that will resonate with a really broad audience. So I think it’s just important to note that there are so many ways to tell stories.
Brenda: And I have a wonderful example of sound in exhibitions that relates directly to stories. I am going back many, many, many years to the Minnesota Historical Society, the exhibition If These Walls Could Talk and it was a history exhibition, and all you need to know is that you were in a room that was loosely mocked up as a living room, and you could press your ear against the wall, and you could hear the neighbors talking.
And it was through this experience of listening and in a very voyeuristic, which is so human and so natural, but in a very voyeuristic fashion, you are listening to your quote neighbors having a conversation and you are gaining story through that. And it is absolutely compelling and such an intelligent use of audio.
Abby: I love that.
Brenda: It’s so simple.
Abby: So simple, completely immerses you as if you are the neighbor listening to the story, I mean, putting you into the story. And that, I think, is phenomenal experience design. So I think our experiences should utilize all the senses. One of our recent projects for the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, we used a lot of props. So we had bread, seeds and it gave off this smell, naturally, that was so immersive and so nostalgic that just that was enough to throw people back to the period and it really helped convey the mood that we were trying to create.
Brenda: Smell is the most immediately linked sense with memory.
Abby: Yep.
Brenda: It’s really extraordinary. And we mentioned props, but there’s another way in which objects serve as really critical storytelling devices. And I’m thinking about how it is that increasingly you’re finding in museums objects that are everyday, that are mundane. I’m thinking about the 911 Memorial Museum that uses the ordinary, everyday objects that people donated and how the objects are used by the Memorial Museum to tell the story of the events of that day, and we’re talking about things like people’s, you know, burnt and tattered ID badges.
We’re talking about a crushed wristwatch and on and on. There are so many objects used in that, in the entire institution, to tell the story of what happened and from all of the different perspectives, and I think about a couple of different things. And again, this is not unique to the 911 Memorial Museum; this is a device for how to tell a story and how to tell, we were talking about multiple truths using personal objects, ordinary, everyday objects to tell a story can be one of the most authentic and truth-bearing ways of telling a story. And also, in some instances, I think the most effective.
Abby: I agree.
Brenda: The most emotional, the most powerful – great objects are archetypal. Think of a key. Think about how universal a key is. Cutting across age, cutting across culture, cutting across time. You’ve got certain things that are so symbolic and so relatable that when you see them in an exhibition, you’re going to have a very personal connection with them. And I think that as storytelling devices, curating with objects is one of the best modalities for telling a great story. And the objects will do the lifting for you. They really, they really will. Objects will do the storytelling for you.
Abby: I think the critical thing is making sure that you’re selecting and using the object or showing the object in support of the story and the moment you’re trying to tell. I think that’s in the curating, it’s in the design, it’s in the lighting, it’s in the flow of what somebody’s just seen. And it all has to come together to tell that story point in the right way.
I think that’s what’s really tricky, because in the example you just gave, we all recognize what those objects represent. As you mentioned, there are imbued with a history, with a narrative that when we see them, moves us, and you don’t need to see a lot of those to be moved. They’re, they’re wonderfully descriptive objects.
Brenda: Think about shoes. Shoes, as they’re used in the Holocaust Museum so brilliantly. Shoes in an exhibition that I saw not long ago about Syrian refugees and a little child’s pair of sneakers. With shoes you’ve already, you’ve got an age, right? You’ve got an idea of a stature, of a human body. You’ve got an idea of a culture, right, or a place in the world or even maybe a type of work. They’re hugely personal.
Abby: Yeah. And having the courage to display sometimes a few things rather than a lot. I think an effective story is told efficiently. It doesn’t need extra things around it to support it.
Brenda: So, Abby, when you’re talking about visitor overload and when you’re talking about this temptation with objects in particular to, to just pack them in, sometimes that makes a lot of sense. Sometimes it doesn’t. I think it really depends on the, you know, the situation and the uniqueness of the experience that you’re creating and the story that you’re telling. But it makes me think of something that, I learned this from museum scholar Leslie Bedford, who talks about how it is that great exhibition environments can be designed and the narrative can be constructed in the subjunctive mood, which is actually taken from literature.
But the idea of subjunctive mood is you leave blanks in the information, which means maybe you don’t put in a hundred objects, maybe you put in ten objects. And when you put in those ten objects, people can for themselves automatically construct the story. They can believe that they are in this other time or in this other place. They can relate to these objects and understand: young child. Young child who was in some kind of a difficult situation because it’s all covered, the shoes are covered in mud or whatever the case might be.
Abby: So it’s editing, editing, editing.
Brenda: Its editing, editing, editing, and it’s editing towards really understanding that human beings, they will bring the story in. Garrison Keillor, this is another wonderful reference that Leslie loves to make, Garrison Keillor, the great storyteller, talks about this in his work. You can listen to a radio program and you’re not seeing the pictures. You’re not seeing that living room.
You’re not seeing exactly what the dining table looks like or what those chairs. But you’re getting a visual in your mind of living room, of dining table, of mom’s best china or whatever, you know, the setting might be. People will fill in the blanks.
Abby: Yeah, they use their imagination, and they create the visuals.
Brenda: Which is such an important and it takes a lot of courage – you used the word courage earlier and I’ll reinforce that as well – it takes a lot of courage for a curator, for a design team to kind of think in that way when telling a story. But it is, when it is done right, it’s so much more, it’s so much more powerful. So much more effective.
Abby: Yeah. I often think that it’s those simple design solutions that are always the most effective, and I mentioned courage, but having the confidence to know that that’s going to be effective and work, that takes years of experience. You know, you’ve got to overcrowd a few things before you like, nope, we need to strip this down and start seeing what works.
And there’s also visitor overload from just coming into the museum or the experience and starting to read and sit and listen. And I think there’s a moment where, at least for me, you’ve seen enough, like it’s too much, or you start switching off, or you can’t absorb anything else, and you need a rest. You literally need, need a break from info coming in.
So after a few hours in an amazing experience when you’ve had some deep emotional engagement, even when you’ve had moments of relief, we just all need a time out. You need to go. You need to rest. Come back to the museum a different day. You don’t have to get around. There’s no obligation to complete things. I think if you’ve gone, enjoyed even part of a story, or it’s resonated with you, that’s enough.
Brenda: Well, I know in another episode we’re going to be talking about prototyping, and we’re going to be talking about engagement in the exhibition, in the whole development process, and all of that, because fine tuning these things, getting them just right, these are these are the reasons why we prototype and why we engage target audiences in our development processes as well, because it is telling these stories well and getting it just right is a real trick.
Abby: So this one thing is the story when you actually visit the museum and the other, as you were mentioning, this arc, the arc within the museum, and then there’s the larger arc before you visit and after you visit, and hopefully when you repeat visit. So there’s that overarching story. And how do you incorporate the visitor into that and how does your story change over time?
Which I think is, you know, also another thing to think about. It’s overwhelming. It’s very challenging to replicate the story from within the museum outside. And I think what’s exciting is we have things like social media, we have the web to be able to talk about the story in a different way because you’re not physically in the space, so you’re not designing physically, but you’re still designing and telling that story, and I find that really fascinating, using all the different types of tools we have at our disposal to, I would say, magnify the story.
Brenda: I mean, I’m listening to you, and I tend to think of it as the extended visitor experience. So there’s always the pre-visit, there’s always the post-visit, and a great design team always accounts for that. I love the idea of really this metanarrative that, you know, the actually being on-site at the institution or being in the experience, whatever it is, is really just one piece of it.
And we see increasingly in recent years how much sort of personalization and customization people doing things online through social media before going to the experience or the exhibition is increasingly really an expected tool. I’m also thinking about post-visit where again predominantly through social media or even repeat visitation that these things are being accounted for to enable people to be engaged in sort of taking the story that they experience in the space into their own everyday lives in one way or another.
I’m thinking as well, though, of a very recent read that I did that was just so fun. I was talking about TikTok with my colleague and how museums are increasingly using TikTok, and she kind of sighed and she said, yeah, I guess it’s not going to be a fad after all. And, so I love TikTok.
I think it’s a really terrific tool. And just as an example, Abby, I see it as a storytelling tool, I really do. And I think about curators who use TikTok to tell a very quick one minute little personal stories related to the content of the exhibitions that are charming, quite frankly, and that are just extending the narrative.
Abby: I also think with tools like TikTok, social media, that it reaches a new audience, and I think that’s really important to bring that new audience, that younger audience into the fold, into these experiences and eventually, hopefully through the walls of the museum and actually experience it themselves.
Brenda: And use social media to collect people’s story, which is why places like the Hip Hop Museum, Washington, D.C., they use hashtags, and they are collecting tons and tons and tons of personal stories, all related to hip hop music and people’s experiences with hip hop culture.
Abby: Because the stories continue. Oftentimes you can go to any historical museum and those stories need to evolve and they need to be relevant today. So enabling people to tell their story about whatever theme or message is in your museum, I think just builds the legacy of the story.
Brenda: Perhaps unlike a film, there really is no big, the end.
Abby: No, there isn’t.
Brenda: When it comes to this particular work that we do, which is kind of gorgeous.
Abby: It is. It’s very unique, and we’re very lucky. Thank you, everyone, for tuning in this week. I hope you heard something useful for your practice. We want to hear from you, so please send us in your questions, thoughts, or observations on any and all your experiences. Bye for now.
Brenda: Thank you so much, everybody. Goodbye.
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Producer: Matters of Experience is produced by Lorem Ipsum Corp. Please tune in next week for another conversation. Thank you all for listening.
Visit Churchill War Rooms – Plan Your Visit | Imperial War Museums
Open House: If These Walls Could Talk | Minnesota Historical Society
[Music]
Abby: Hello and welcome to Matters of Experience. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: And this is Brenda Cowan.
Abby: Today on this show, we’re focusing on storytelling in experience design; why it’s important to tell stories, how experience design has an amazing toolset for creating truly immersive narratives and how to tell stories effectively. This whole topic is very near and dear to my heart, as you know, Brenda, since my background is filmmaking. Why don’t we kick off with the idea of story and why it exists at all?
Brenda: Well, it exists because humans exist. Stories exist because they are the means through which people at the earliest age make sense of their lives, of their relationships between themselves and the world around them. It’s something that’s inherent to all human beings. So think about it like this, Abby. Think about, you have children. I have a child and think about the four-year-old or even the three-year-old who comes home from a play date or a young child coming home from school or whatever, and just telling you endlessly about what happened during school, what the teacher said, what the other kids did, and also interspersing a lot of questions.
Where did that come from? Why did that happen? How does this work, Mom? What do you think about that? Etc., etc., etc… These recountings of daily experiences are the earliest forms of storytelling and they are literally how it is that young children figure out how the world works and how things work around them and what their relationship is to it and that’s storytelling, and it’s the basis of communication, it’s how human beings make connections with each other. So these, these are stories. They’re our earliest stories, and they’re evolutionary. They’re just simply a part of how we need to function as individuals.
Abby: Yeah, no, I completely agree with you, and it felt a little bit like you were obviously a fly on the wall in my house as well, the constant barrage of questions. But I think if we look back at our earliest forms of storytelling, I think about cave paintings. So humans really want to connect. It’s like, as you said, our basic instinct.
It’s how we survive and multiply. And when you think about it at the next level, a little deeper, we now want to communicate our emotions. It’s not just a story about what we did. It’s about how it made us feel. And that’s one of the very basic reasons why we tell stories to communicate and share our feelings through these personal stories.
When I think about experiences we create, the stories we tell really must touch the visitor in a very personal way and help them connect with the world around them and think about our place in history. In order to do that. There are a few things you need to think about in order to tell a good story.
Brenda: Absolutely, and I think that at its most fundamental level, I think that a really good story, I think that a great story is one that is an archetype. It’s one that is universal to all people. So, folks, if you’re familiar with Joseph Campbell, yes, I am pulling from the Joseph Campbell playbook and The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and I’m talking about how stories that are archetypal are things such as the story of the hero’s journey or stories of love and hate, or challenges to be overcome. These are stories that are familiar to people across culture and throughout time and even throughout age. Very young children can understand great archetypal stories in the same way that somebody who is in their senior years is going to be able to understand and have their own specific relationship to a story.
When you’ve got really archetypal stories that you are telling in whatever form you’re telling them, they’re going to be unifiers of people, and in our cases, people who come into exhibitions will come together, will have pro-social behavior even when the story is one that is familiar to all of them and that is very meaningful to all of them.
Abby: And I think as well as understanding the type of story you’re telling, the next question is, what’s your plot? And we always think, what are the key moments? And this is how we break up and decide actually on our zoning plan. We start with the story we’re telling and break that up into episodes. Very, very top line, but then we start to spread them around in the space already because our discipline is wholly unique.
I really think we’re telling an overall story in a physical space. I don’t know anybody else or any group of people who are able to do that and face that challenge. It’s a really amazing challenge. It’s one of the things I love about what we do—that challenge of moving people through a space and controlling how they feel.
In a film, you’re a captive audience. You actually pay a ticket. You sit down and you’re willing to contribute the 2, 3 hours to the film. But in a museum experience or a retail experience or any other sort of immersive experience you really have freedom as a visitor to select moments of the story and what you focus on and take in.
And I love trying in some ways to be able to control and manage and curate this visitor emotional experience to make sure that we’re really connecting, telling the stories we want to tell in the most effective and visceral way.
Brenda: Well, I really want to underscore, when you were talking about people having freedom and choice when they are experiencing the stories, and that freedom and choice of participation is something that is in some ways unique to the exhibition or the experience-designed space and exhibitions that attempt to function in a very linear narrative way, like a film, I think are probably the least effective kind.
But instead, when you give people a narrative or a story that is designed into a space where people have freedom of choice to experience it in a number of different ways, then you’ve got people who are going to be able to really engage. And you’re making me think of the timeless words of Jerome Bruner, who talked about narrative experience.
So we’re talking about story. What is story? And then there is the way in which people experience the story. And there’s actually a field called narrativity. And the brilliant museum scholar Leslie Bedford does a lot of terrific writing about narrativity and narrative experience and how it is very different, actually than the story. It’s how you are telling the story and how people are experiencing the story through narrativity. When we’re talking about narrative experience, we think about how people experience the stories, and in the exhibition forum, there still needs to be emotional arc, there needs to be variances of pace, there needs to be moments of great drama, and great heightened emotion, but then also moments of pause and moments of quietude, let’s say. Just like a great book. Just like a great film.
Abby: Yeah.
Brenda: Just in a unique form.
Abby: I completely agree. Drama is about a juxtaposition. It’s about a conflict. So you have to have the moments of the highs and the moments of the lows. I see it almost like music. It needs to ebb and it needs to flow. Moments when they’re fully immersed in the experience that really reaches and touches you to the core and truly moves you. And then you often need after that moment, you need to reflect. You need a space to breathe, especially when you’re dealing with some of the harder subject matters. Otherwise, it becomes overwhelming and I think, becomes an unsuccessful experience.
Brenda: And also resonance. I mean, I would argue as well that when you have high drama of whatever sort it is, even even if it’s something very hilarious, right, something particularly funny that you experience; if there isn’t a space and a moment of pause afterwards, it’s not going to be able to kind of reverberate.
Abby: One of the things I always think about is some people are visual learners and some are oral, and your exhibit really needs to work for both of these groups, and it needs to be very succinct and straight to the point. When you think about a 30-second commercial, for example, some of the best move you and you have a takeaway, right?
You watch them, they’re quick, they get their message out there and you’re moved. People can’t retain huge details after a museum visit. It’s usually just a few key points, key emotions, key things that they actually remember and share with friends and family afterwards. I always challenge our team with answering the question: what are the key points from this museum design, from this experience design, that you want the visitor to leave with? What are we trying to do? And we constantly refer back to that at every moment to make sure that we’re hitting that at the very least, and make sure your narrative reiterates it over and over again.
Brenda: The thing that I love about crafting story and thinking about narrative experience like you’re describing is understanding that stories always have a point of view. And when you take that as a touchpoint in the beginning of crafting your experience, it really enables you to make a lot of, I think, really intelligent design decisions. One of my favorite things is thinking about first person narrative, and especially thinking about exhibitions that are, let’s say, very challenging, or exhibitions where there are multiple truths, which is kind of almost like every exhibition, but taking a position of first person narrative, for example, as a way of telling the story could be a very, very effective way to shape exhibitions.
Also, I think about other great strategies of storytelling in exhibitions are using questions, questions as a strategy, questions that allow visitors to direct their own experience, questions that enable visitors and encourage them, or prompt them to really craft their own stories and to personalize things in very deep ways.
Abby: Yeah, I completely agree with you. Picking up with that idea of the first-person narrative. I was actually just in London and visited Churchill’s War Rooms and the museum there. I was listening to the voiceover explaining the story, which was fine, but it didn’t really touch me. It was very factual. It’s informational; it was interesting, right? But I wasn’t moved until there was a moment when one of the ladies who’d worked in the war rooms at this period started to talk to me and she started to tell me her story.
And then another one told me her story. And why it was so moving is because the stories they told were sort of odd and interesting and obscure and not what you’d expect. And the way they painted the picture of what it was like from their perspective really broke through that ice and resonated with me, and I got chills up my spine, and I imagined them in the space and it really transported me back in time.
Brenda: I think that thinking back to the idea of archetype as well, when you take a great archetypal story, something that is just as if it were pulled out of today’s headlines, something about, you know, love and hate or peace and war or any kind of conflict or forbidden love, stories such as this. All of the sudden, you really need to have multiple voices telling these stories because there are multiple truths.
And I think that what we’re finding in terms of storytelling in exhibitions now is that there’s a responsibility for that to be the case. We need to hear the audiences in our visitors voices as a part of the telling of the stories in our exhibitions. And I just love thinking about how powerful first-person narrative is, just experientially in terms of emotion. But I’m also thinking about how it’s really necessary if we’re going to really do an honest job of creating experiences.
Abby: The idea of listening to the stories from visitors broadens the net of the stories around the subject – you are curating, you have to curate, and so you have to make decisions. And I think it’s a wonderful opportunity to enable the visitor to expand those opportunities by telling us their perspective on this story. And I think it also enables museums to not become static, to constantly evolve with the visitor and share new perspectives.
If we’re talking about historical museums or anything that’s sort of from the past, hearing different people’s perspectives enables the visitor to enjoy putting them together like a puzzle and feeling that more palpable truth, I’ll say, that more alive truth and also more believable context of the story.
Brenda: Sure.
Abby: We’re talking about the voice of the story. I want to shift it a little bit now and talk about how you can tell a story without words. Very powerful stories can be told in just a simple image or emotions conveyed with a sound or a piece of music. I think it’s too easy to fall back on simple storytelling conventions or ways to tell stories when maybe there is a better way to tell that story. So, for example, we look at first, are there any artifacts that tell this story really well. For us, it’s a lot about curating what’s the best way, most effective way to tell the story.
So it’s really important to look at the story and not always default to a convention of, maybe a voiceover or a piece of media or a text panel. There’s lots of other ways, very efficient, simple ways that will resonate with a really broad audience. So I think it’s just important to note that there are so many ways to tell stories.
Brenda: And I have a wonderful example of sound in exhibitions that relates directly to stories. I am going back many, many, many years to the Minnesota Historical Society, the exhibition If These Walls Could Talk and it was a history exhibition, and all you need to know is that you were in a room that was loosely mocked up as a living room, and you could press your ear against the wall, and you could hear the neighbors talking.
And it was through this experience of listening and in a very voyeuristic, which is so human and so natural, but in a very voyeuristic fashion, you are listening to your quote neighbors having a conversation and you are gaining story through that. And it is absolutely compelling and such an intelligent use of audio.
Abby: I love that.
Brenda: It’s so simple.
Abby: So simple, completely immerses you as if you are the neighbor listening to the story, I mean, putting you into the story. And that, I think, is phenomenal experience design. So I think our experiences should utilize all the senses. One of our recent projects for the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, we used a lot of props. So we had bread, seeds and it gave off this smell, naturally, that was so immersive and so nostalgic that just that was enough to throw people back to the period and it really helped convey the mood that we were trying to create.
Brenda: Smell is the most immediately linked sense with memory.
Abby: Yep.
Brenda: It’s really extraordinary. And we mentioned props, but there’s another way in which objects serve as really critical storytelling devices. And I’m thinking about how it is that increasingly you’re finding in museums objects that are everyday, that are mundane. I’m thinking about the 911 Memorial Museum that uses the ordinary, everyday objects that people donated and how the objects are used by the Memorial Museum to tell the story of the events of that day, and we’re talking about things like people’s, you know, burnt and tattered ID badges.
We’re talking about a crushed wristwatch and on and on. There are so many objects used in that, in the entire institution, to tell the story of what happened and from all of the different perspectives, and I think about a couple of different things. And again, this is not unique to the 911 Memorial Museum; this is a device for how to tell a story and how to tell, we were talking about multiple truths using personal objects, ordinary, everyday objects to tell a story can be one of the most authentic and truth-bearing ways of telling a story. And also, in some instances, I think the most effective.
Abby: I agree.
Brenda: The most emotional, the most powerful – great objects are archetypal. Think of a key. Think about how universal a key is. Cutting across age, cutting across culture, cutting across time. You’ve got certain things that are so symbolic and so relatable that when you see them in an exhibition, you’re going to have a very personal connection with them. And I think that as storytelling devices, curating with objects is one of the best modalities for telling a great story. And the objects will do the lifting for you. They really, they really will. Objects will do the storytelling for you.
Abby: I think the critical thing is making sure that you’re selecting and using the object or showing the object in support of the story and the moment you’re trying to tell. I think that’s in the curating, it’s in the design, it’s in the lighting, it’s in the flow of what somebody’s just seen. And it all has to come together to tell that story point in the right way.
I think that’s what’s really tricky, because in the example you just gave, we all recognize what those objects represent. As you mentioned, there are imbued with a history, with a narrative that when we see them, moves us, and you don’t need to see a lot of those to be moved. They’re, they’re wonderfully descriptive objects.
Brenda: Think about shoes. Shoes, as they’re used in the Holocaust Museum so brilliantly. Shoes in an exhibition that I saw not long ago about Syrian refugees and a little child’s pair of sneakers. With shoes you’ve already, you’ve got an age, right? You’ve got an idea of a stature, of a human body. You’ve got an idea of a culture, right, or a place in the world or even maybe a type of work. They’re hugely personal.
Abby: Yeah. And having the courage to display sometimes a few things rather than a lot. I think an effective story is told efficiently. It doesn’t need extra things around it to support it.
Brenda: So, Abby, when you’re talking about visitor overload and when you’re talking about this temptation with objects in particular to, to just pack them in, sometimes that makes a lot of sense. Sometimes it doesn’t. I think it really depends on the, you know, the situation and the uniqueness of the experience that you’re creating and the story that you’re telling. But it makes me think of something that, I learned this from museum scholar Leslie Bedford, who talks about how it is that great exhibition environments can be designed and the narrative can be constructed in the subjunctive mood, which is actually taken from literature.
But the idea of subjunctive mood is you leave blanks in the information, which means maybe you don’t put in a hundred objects, maybe you put in ten objects. And when you put in those ten objects, people can for themselves automatically construct the story. They can believe that they are in this other time or in this other place. They can relate to these objects and understand: young child. Young child who was in some kind of a difficult situation because it’s all covered, the shoes are covered in mud or whatever the case might be.
Abby: So it’s editing, editing, editing.
Brenda: Its editing, editing, editing, and it’s editing towards really understanding that human beings, they will bring the story in. Garrison Keillor, this is another wonderful reference that Leslie loves to make, Garrison Keillor, the great storyteller, talks about this in his work. You can listen to a radio program and you’re not seeing the pictures. You’re not seeing that living room.
You’re not seeing exactly what the dining table looks like or what those chairs. But you’re getting a visual in your mind of living room, of dining table, of mom’s best china or whatever, you know, the setting might be. People will fill in the blanks.
Abby: Yeah, they use their imagination, and they create the visuals.
Brenda: Which is such an important and it takes a lot of courage – you used the word courage earlier and I’ll reinforce that as well – it takes a lot of courage for a curator, for a design team to kind of think in that way when telling a story. But it is, when it is done right, it’s so much more, it’s so much more powerful. So much more effective.
Abby: Yeah. I often think that it’s those simple design solutions that are always the most effective, and I mentioned courage, but having the confidence to know that that’s going to be effective and work, that takes years of experience. You know, you’ve got to overcrowd a few things before you like, nope, we need to strip this down and start seeing what works.
And there’s also visitor overload from just coming into the museum or the experience and starting to read and sit and listen. And I think there’s a moment where, at least for me, you’ve seen enough, like it’s too much, or you start switching off, or you can’t absorb anything else, and you need a rest. You literally need, need a break from info coming in.
So after a few hours in an amazing experience when you’ve had some deep emotional engagement, even when you’ve had moments of relief, we just all need a time out. You need to go. You need to rest. Come back to the museum a different day. You don’t have to get around. There’s no obligation to complete things. I think if you’ve gone, enjoyed even part of a story, or it’s resonated with you, that’s enough.
Brenda: Well, I know in another episode we’re going to be talking about prototyping, and we’re going to be talking about engagement in the exhibition, in the whole development process, and all of that, because fine tuning these things, getting them just right, these are these are the reasons why we prototype and why we engage target audiences in our development processes as well, because it is telling these stories well and getting it just right is a real trick.
Abby: So this one thing is the story when you actually visit the museum and the other, as you were mentioning, this arc, the arc within the museum, and then there’s the larger arc before you visit and after you visit, and hopefully when you repeat visit. So there’s that overarching story. And how do you incorporate the visitor into that and how does your story change over time?
Which I think is, you know, also another thing to think about. It’s overwhelming. It’s very challenging to replicate the story from within the museum outside. And I think what’s exciting is we have things like social media, we have the web to be able to talk about the story in a different way because you’re not physically in the space, so you’re not designing physically, but you’re still designing and telling that story, and I find that really fascinating, using all the different types of tools we have at our disposal to, I would say, magnify the story.
Brenda: I mean, I’m listening to you, and I tend to think of it as the extended visitor experience. So there’s always the pre-visit, there’s always the post-visit, and a great design team always accounts for that. I love the idea of really this metanarrative that, you know, the actually being on-site at the institution or being in the experience, whatever it is, is really just one piece of it.
And we see increasingly in recent years how much sort of personalization and customization people doing things online through social media before going to the experience or the exhibition is increasingly really an expected tool. I’m also thinking about post-visit where again predominantly through social media or even repeat visitation that these things are being accounted for to enable people to be engaged in sort of taking the story that they experience in the space into their own everyday lives in one way or another.
I’m thinking as well, though, of a very recent read that I did that was just so fun. I was talking about TikTok with my colleague and how museums are increasingly using TikTok, and she kind of sighed and she said, yeah, I guess it’s not going to be a fad after all. And, so I love TikTok.
I think it’s a really terrific tool. And just as an example, Abby, I see it as a storytelling tool, I really do. And I think about curators who use TikTok to tell a very quick one minute little personal stories related to the content of the exhibitions that are charming, quite frankly, and that are just extending the narrative.
Abby: I also think with tools like TikTok, social media, that it reaches a new audience, and I think that’s really important to bring that new audience, that younger audience into the fold, into these experiences and eventually, hopefully through the walls of the museum and actually experience it themselves.
Brenda: And use social media to collect people’s story, which is why places like the Hip Hop Museum, Washington, D.C., they use hashtags, and they are collecting tons and tons and tons of personal stories, all related to hip hop music and people’s experiences with hip hop culture.
Abby: Because the stories continue. Oftentimes you can go to any historical museum and those stories need to evolve and they need to be relevant today. So enabling people to tell their story about whatever theme or message is in your museum, I think just builds the legacy of the story.
Brenda: Perhaps unlike a film, there really is no big, the end.
Abby: No, there isn’t.
Brenda: When it comes to this particular work that we do, which is kind of gorgeous.
Abby: It is. It’s very unique, and we’re very lucky. Thank you, everyone, for tuning in this week. I hope you heard something useful for your practice. We want to hear from you, so please send us in your questions, thoughts, or observations on any and all your experiences. Bye for now.
Brenda: Thank you so much, everybody. Goodbye.
[Music]
Producer: Matters of Experience is produced by Lorem Ipsum Corp. Please tune in next week for another conversation. Thank you all for listening.
Storytelling in Experience Design
Taming of the Wild Beast with Rob Cohen
[Music]
Abby: Hello and welcome to Matters of Experience. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: And I’m Brenda Cowan.
Abby: Welcome to this week’s podcast, Taming the Wild Beast with our guest, Rob Cohen. Rob is VP and general counsel of Display Supply & Lighting and its related companies. He is responsible for managing all aspects of the business as well as the legal affairs. Yes, Rob is also a lawyer. Rob has also helped to launch and sell off a variety of startup companies so he has a range of experiences throughout the business world.
Rob, this is a pretty formidable resume and an interesting path into our industry. I look forward to learning more. Thanks for joining us today.
Rob: Well, thank you for inviting an aging man to share some thoughts.
Brenda: Rob, for our listeners, could you share the work that you do in the exhibits industry and how did you get here?
Rob: I guess my story is just like everyone else’s with a little sarcasm there. In 1996, while practicing law and wanting to get back into the business world, I had a group of clients that were willing to back me to buy a company. And then I found a small company that manufactured clamp-on arm lights, and it took us ten months to buy this little company.
And then three years later, we pulled off merging three significant companies together to create what is known as Display Supply & Lighting. We sell supplies products, lighting products to resellers of folks that build and design trade shows, as well as all types of experiential environments.
Abby: So, what happened to you then? Your trajectory changed to sort of running a business, right? Were you the CEO, were you at the helm of it?
Rob: I was the CEO of the company. I actually hired my father to work for me, which is a very, very strange thing that I can talk about in therapy someday. It was a good three years together that we got to spend while growing the first company and living through everything from after acquisition, finding out that the seller had lied to us and that there was a big manufacturing defect that existed, to growing the company, expanding its product base, and learning a new industry at the same time.
Abby: So it sounds like you started the company, and you already had a business ethics issue close at hand.
Rob: That’s great insight. And I also found out that the person I bought the company from withheld inventory from me and competed against me for a period of time. So, learned a lot of lessons very quickly.
Brenda: Rob, you have a formula for success in business practice. So, what do you mean by success? Are we talking financial success or something more intangible?
Rob: There are lots of ways of defining success. And if you asked me this question two years ago, I wouldn’t have been ready to formulate the response, but my dear friend Brenda Cowan pushed me and asked me and was kind enough to request that I write a piece for an upcoming book that she’s working on for the museum industry. And I came up with a really simple equation to hopefully explain success, and that was gratitude plus ethics equals success, and success comes in many forms.
Certainly there’s monetary success and if we’re in a for-profit business world we have to drive profit. But along with that comes customer satisfaction, company longevity, satisfaction and opportunities for our employees, as well as industry impact. And I think all of those collectively are elements of what I think of as success.
Brenda: Rob, where does this formula come from? You are, of course, a lawyer, a business owner, and I know that your Judaism is an important part of your life. Does that come into play here as well?
Rob: It certainly does, and I don’t want to be preaching religion. I’m a very traditional person. My upbringing, a family business, taught me to always be thankful to customers. I had parents who instilled in me to appreciate what we have and to always give back. My ethics go back, I think, to my immigrant great-grandfather, who is a founder of an organization down in Rhode Island called the Providence Hebrew Free Loan Association, which gave interest-free loans to new immigrants.
My religion has a teaching and a book that’s very close to me. The book is called Ethics of Our Fathers, and this particular teaching states that the world is based on three pillars: study, prayer – and interestingly, the Hebrew word for prayer is also the Hebrew word for work – and also acts of loving kindness. So being grateful for what we have and helping others in need is a cornerstone for so many faiths.
And I think if you take those and incorporate them into your work, again without preaching, you can have a really good ethical base for how to go about running a business.
Brenda: I think that it’s a really important model, the fact that you’re willing to talk about it as a part of your business world and the work that you do and everything. I mean, I think that there’s a really good teaching in that, that we’re whole people. We don’t just turn on and turn off who we are.
Abby: My kids go to UNIS and it’s really not about how well you do. It’s about what kind of a person you are; who are you holistically in this world? And I think Rob, that’s really important in business. It’s who you are from a 360, and what you bring to your business should be all of you, should be the same as when you’re at home and all of those values.
I think that people who think that it’s about making money any way they can end up completely unfulfilled. Let’s talk about Albert Camus’ quote that “a person without ethics is a wild beast loosened upon this world”. Is that how you feel in terms of business ethics?
Rob: I would think so and I’m not a perfect person. I want to be really clear about that. But I want to be around other people who are good people and who want to make our industry better. And fortunately, there are a lot of those people in our industry, which is really quite like a family in many ways. And I can appreciate and respect them for their beliefs.
They can appreciate and respect me for mine. We can know that we’re all going to fall down at some point and make a mistake, and we can say, as long as you’re there to correct the mistake, we can continue to work together.
Abby: So let’s say you have a employee who favors the blame game, they are never to blame for anything and they can talk their way out of everything. How do you handle that?
Rob: I try to have a straight-up conversation with them and say, listen, we all make mistakes. The important thing is admitting to the mistake, working together to see how we get through the mistake, and make sure that it doesn’t become a pattern.
Brenda: Rob, nurturing good relationships is obviously a huge part of your ethos and I’m curious specific to the exhibits industry. I’m wondering is there something particular about our profession that makes these kinds of good relationships particularly challenging?
Rob: This is an industry that’s very much in the now. I need this now. Time is everything. And people are under that pressure, and things can get personal when you get in the heat of the moment. We also travel a lot together and socialize together on the road with these people. I urge the members of my team, even though this is business, to go and create personal relationships with these people, get to know them, relate on a personal level, and show that you care.
I enjoy just as much checking in with colleagues on their families or personal problems that may have struck them as I do trying to sell the next project. And, you know, people remember you if you just act as a good person, and that brings with it opportunities. So relationships are critical in my book.
Abby: Another thing I think is critical is trust. In my business, we’re always looking to make sure that our clients and our colleagues can trust that we’re going to deliver, can trust on the quality of what we’re going to create, and can, you know, trust that we stand behind everything that we’re creating. And with that, obviously, there does come a little bit, as you said, tension in the moment as you’re installing or as you’re turning on the technology, which can sometimes be a little fickle.
You have to sort of take a deep breath, take a step back and understand and believe that it’s all going to be okay at the end of the day, because I think we get very overwhelmed in that moment, Rob, and it’d be interesting to find out how, sort of, do you have any techniques to help the team see the bigger picture when they’re in the rabbit hole?
Rob: It’s a great point you make about trust, Abby. We even take a selling philosophy within our organization, and we’ve taught this to our team and they use it that when you’re presenting to the customer, tell them we can be one of two things. We can be a vendor and we can sell you product when you want product. But our value comes when you allow us to be a vendor partner.
And when you give us insight into your project, and you share about your vision with us so that we can then share alternative strategies and alternative products to bringing your vision to life. When we are in that rabbit hole, the first thing that that we teach our customer service people is solve the problem for the customer. Don’t worry about who’s going to pay to solve the problem.
There are times when products are just defective. There are times when there are programming issues. There are times when there are lots of things that can go wrong. Solve the problem, and if we have a real partnership, we’ll be able to talk with the customer afterwards and sort everything out.
Brenda: Rob, I’m curious about the past few years, the COVID years, and I’m wondering, have the COVID years presented any opportunities in the exhibit industry or, you know, has the decimation of so many businesses sort of challenge the idea of altruism as a means to success?
Rob: Sadly, I think that the COVID years have actually afforded an opportunity to build deeper bonds within the industry. All of a sudden, people have time on their hands and some chose to go hide in their rabbit holes. Others chose to get involved a little deeper, and getting involved was on different levels. For me, I had never been involved in federal advocacy work, and this afforded me the opportunity to demonstrate a sincere and caring dedication, I hope, to the industry.
I also observed many groups that formed that met on Zoom to support one another. People were talking about everything from am I going to be able to keep my doors open to, as things came around, have you heard about things like the employee retention tax credit and how you can go about applying. Also, taking the time to reach out one-on-one with people in the industry and stay in touch created deeper, more sincere relationships.
So those were three things I was thankful for. We were very fortunate in our company that we had a big chunk of business that we had landed outside of the industry before COVID hit. So, we were able to do that while still staying in touch with the industry and keeping ourselves financially healthy.
Abby: As a business then, Rob, it sounds like being able to pivot quickly and being able to leverage different opportunities sometimes outside the industry, that brings, you know, most bang for its buck that that’s a good thing and something that you would encourage businesses to always do, so all their eggs are not in one basket, so to speak.
Rob: Yeah, you said my least favorite word, Abby, and that’s pivot, because I don’t think anyone should be pivoting. I think that they should have a broader landscape of how they conduct business from the beginning. We’re fortunate in that even during economic downturns pre-COVID, we never had more than 7% of our business with any single customer. And that’s an important thing to understand, is the diversification of your customers, because if you have a concentration with a particular customer or two particular customers and they fall on financial hard times, then your goose is cooked along with theirs, and the more you can spread that risk out over a wider landscape, the more insulated you are from the financial success or metrics of your customers.
Brenda: How do you then, how do you advise a startup with this frame of thinking, folks who are only just starting to build a client base and get themselves established? Can you give any particular bits of advice to how to actually begin to create, as you put it, that broad landscape?
Rob: Don’t just focus on slaying the big dragon or, you know, to reel them in as a customer. The more you can put small pieces of business together with more customers, the more solid of a foundation you’re going to have. You’re also spreading, you know, your risk with smaller bets, so to speak. If I can place $5 bets with 20 customers rather than one $100 bet with one customer, I have a much better percentage rate of success in all likelihood.
So spread that risk out as much as you can. And yes, that may take more work on your part to begin with. But if business was easy, everyone would be an owner.
Abby: You have to have a certain appetite to be an entrepreneur I think, Rob, and it’s a very…
Rob: I don’t know if it’s an appetite or craziness, you know.
Brenda: Well, Abby, what’s what’s it for you being a business owner?
Abby: It’s craziness.
Brenda: Okay, so it’s craziness for your part. Okay.
Abby: Definitely enjoying a bit of craziness. So in terms of building a business, you’re an entrepreneur, as Brenda mentioned. Yours essentially was a sort of startup, Rob, in the very beginning. Sales teams. How big is your sales team now, and were you it at the beginning?
Rob: Oh, I was the chief cook and bottle washer at the beginning. I’d go from writing orders to strapping packages together in the back at night, and I remember when the box company delivered boxes, they would drop them outside in the parking lot, and I had to walk them up a flight of stairs.
I still think it’s important for the business owner though to always get their hands dirty. It’s not that you’ve become the CEO and you just wear a white collar all the time. When I’m out in my office in Illinois, I like to make sure everyone at headquarters understands the fact that there’s no job I’m not willing to do. And I make sure I spend time in the warehouse, working with the guys, assembling product, working with the team, and in stocking shelves.
The guy who empties the garbage cans, I try to find one night to walk around with him while he’s emptying the garbage cans. And it’s not just to empty the cans, but it’s for me to get to know that person a little bit better as well. I think that’s, that’s pretty important here.
Abby: But Rob, that all sounds wonderful and like a harmonious, amazing place to work and we all want to come and work for you, but what about…
Rob: No, you don’t, because you got to listen to me, too. That’s not that much fun.
Abby: What about when you’re trying to protect your employees because maybe you didn’t have enough money in and so you’re taking a pay cut yourselves or you’re taking some hits that you don’t necessarily want to share. I know open communication is really important, but sometimes from morale perspective or any sort of particular reasons, you may want to hide things from your colleagues, from your team.
Rob: I’m still a lawyer, and I do believe that there’s still a difference between stockholders and employees. And we have to find that correct balance of what do you share and what is not out there to be shared? You know, I don’t think that necessarily our employee base is entitled to know what my partner and I make financially. But at the same time, that’s only fair if the employees are all being treated fairly, both from a normal compensation standpoint, as well as bonuses based on the success of the business.
That’s an individual line that has to be drawn. When we merged the companies together, I found that nothing was being shared before from the bigger company and I had to sit down and explain to the folks that worked in the warehouse what all the widgets cost to make the component, because many of them had the understanding or belief that if we sold a product for $75, we made $75.They didn’t understand the cost equation and what was a gross profit margin and how valuable all these little pieces were. And when you drop a piece of glass and it broke, that cost us money.
So, education of the employee and understanding the business is important. They’re not going to understand every aspect of the business, but certainly taking pride of ownership for their portion of it, I think is critical.
Brenda: Abby, I’m curious. I want to ask you a question actually, as you’re listening to Rob and his works in the exhibits industry and a lot of the trade show and corporate interests, now you do a lot of work for museums and non for profits. And I’m just curious what’s resonating with you or are there things where you’re kind of thinking inside that fabulous head of yours, well, it doesn’t really work across the board though.
Abby: For us, the biggest thing is they want the world, and their budgets tend to get smaller and smaller. When we start a project, there’s a lot of talk about what we can do and what we can achieve, and then when the rubber hits the road and it comes time to signing and okay, let’s move ahead, things tend to shift.
Rob: So, it’s interesting because the corollary over to the world I live in, if everyone could just be honest about budgets, we could go a lot further a lot faster.
Abby: Yeah.
Rob: And customers think that we’re asking so that we can increase how much money we’re going to make.
Brenda: Right, right.
Rob: And that’s not the case at all, and so we can be recommending products and technology that fit in so that people aren’t disappointed at the end, that they can only afford this as opposed to that.
Abby: That’s exactly right. We face that all the time, Rob. And I say to people, I say, you’d like a house. We could build you a house for $100,000 or we can build your house for 10 million. How much money do you have? Let us approach even concepting with that in mind.
Rob: When we get the benefit of going in and speaking to students in the industry, we try to teach these students right from the beginning about the partnership and that it’s okay to share budgets. Their clients are investing in their designs. They have to be investing in the right technology, too, and quality of product.
Brenda: Well, Rob, let me also just throw out a big gratitude to you for all of the work that you do with with students on the undergrad and on the grad level. What do you say to folks who think that that is nice, but really not of benefit to you and perhaps doesn’t equate to the time that you spend.
Rob: One, I’d let them know that I think the most important thing we can do is give of our time and help teach and educate. It’s critical to be giving back and whether you’re doing a sales presentation and teaching, whether you’re at a conference and giving up your time to speak of an area of expertise or stepping into a classroom on the graduate, undergraduate, trade school level, high school level, all those things are critical. And what we have to share as participants of an industry can go a long way to help molding the future of the industry.
Abby: I don’t think we do a great job, or we haven’t in the past of sort of promoting our industry. You know, when clients think that they have a new job, they’ll maybe go to an architect, or they’ll go to an agency. One of the things I feel is that they don’t necessarily think about us, and we are the ones with all the experience in designing these immersive, pun-intended experiences.
So Rob, how can we do a better job of advocating for our industry and letting people know what we bring to the table in terms of all of our services?
Rob: You can join the great trade association, the Experiential Designers and Producers Association, the EDPA and become a part of a new initiative of theirs, which is the future workforce. This group, which I am a part of, is actually developing slideshows to have members of our industry go out and reach out from the trade school level on up to talk about our industry and all the jobs that are available in it. From working in a shop and bringing carpentry skills and electrical skills to the show floor or shop floor through project management, account management, design, and letting them know that there’s this great hidden industry out there to be a part of. And by the way, we’ll be more than glad to tell you about employers in your area.
Abby: But it’s not sexy. Architects have this aura about them, and when people have the purse strings, they do want to emotionally spend. They want to be associating with people who seem to be very uber-creative and dress a certain way and act a certain way.
Brenda: Glamour. Glamour sells.
Abby: So how do we make ourselves a little bit more endearing or at least competitive with with that group?
Rob: Glamor sells, but you invited me for a reason on a podcast and there’s no…
Abby: You’re saying you’re not glamorous, Rob Cohen?
Rob: No. This is a face for radio.
Brenda: Ladies and gentlemen, he’s going to be here all day.
Rob: There is a sexy aspect to the industry. You get to travel. You get to see new places. You get to meet new people. You get to have great experiences. We have to talk about that as well, and we have to talk about how sexy it is to create and then see our creations. From a museum standpoint, how wonderful is it to sit back and actually watch people partake in the experience?
Abby: Tell me about a recent project that went well and personally why you felt a lot of gratification.
Rob: I’ll talk about the biggest one we did, which was several years ago. We got called in by a very large customer. They said, Could you help us to update down at the old Atlanta Braves baseball stadium known as Turner Field, The Coca-Cola Bottle out in left field. So we want to bring technology and life to a 50-foot-tall Coca-Cola bottle.
I said, sure we can. And then I ran back and grabbed my lead engineer and said, how the heck can we do that? And we got brought in to meetings with our customer and people from the world of Coke, and we helped to bring along a realistic vision of a 50-foot-tall Coca-Cola bottle with changing colored light in it with a ten-foot-tall 360-degree LED screen, custom built to the contours of a Coca-Cola bottle for the label of the bottle. And inside the bottle, they kept the guts of a dumbwaiter, an elevator, that brought fireworks to the top of the bottle whenever the Braves hit a home run or won a game, and they shot fireworks off, which we took an exclusion in our warranty on our products, too.
But to collaborate with so many different people, we had never done anything like this before in our lives, but we joined in with a team and pulled it off, and it was a great project that, to this day, people still talk about even though the stadiums gone and they moved on to a new stadium, and the bottle was taken apart and thrown away.
Abby: Oh, did you have to end on such a sad note? Well, it obviously lives on in a lot of people’s memories, and I just really want to do a shout-out to those phone calls from clients and you say, yep, we can do that. And then you turn to your team and you say, how the hell can we do that? I love those moments. That’s when I feel the most excited, the most alive when we’re given a challenge that’s never been done before.
Rob: Absolutely.
Brenda: Rob, I wish we had all day to talk with you. And I want to give you a hearty thanks for your time and for sharing with us. This has been wonderful.
Rob: Oh, thank you, Abby. And thank you, Brenda. I truly appreciate and am honored to have been asked to be a part of your podcast. And I hope that your listeners can at least find one tidbit to take away and help them to grow their businesses and careers.
Abby: Thank you so much, Rob.
[Music]
Producer: Matters of Experience is produced by Lorem Ipsum Corp. Please tune in next week for another conversation. Thank you all for listening.
[Music]
Abby: Hello and welcome to Matters of Experience. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: And I’m Brenda Cowan.
Abby: Welcome to this week’s podcast, Taming the Wild Beast with our guest, Rob Cohen. Rob is VP and general counsel of Display Supply & Lighting and its related companies. He is responsible for managing all aspects of the business as well as the legal affairs. Yes, Rob is also a lawyer. Rob has also helped to launch and sell off a variety of startup companies so he has a range of experiences throughout the business world.
Rob, this is a pretty formidable resume and an interesting path into our industry. I look forward to learning more. Thanks for joining us today.
Rob: Well, thank you for inviting an aging man to share some thoughts.
Brenda: Rob, for our listeners, could you share the work that you do in the exhibits industry and how did you get here?
Rob: I guess my story is just like everyone else’s with a little sarcasm there. In 1996, while practicing law and wanting to get back into the business world, I had a group of clients that were willing to back me to buy a company. And then I found a small company that manufactured clamp-on arm lights, and it took us ten months to buy this little company.
And then three years later, we pulled off merging three significant companies together to create what is known as Display Supply & Lighting. We sell supplies products, lighting products to resellers of folks that build and design trade shows, as well as all types of experiential environments.
Abby: So, what happened to you then? Your trajectory changed to sort of running a business, right? Were you the CEO, were you at the helm of it?
Rob: I was the CEO of the company. I actually hired my father to work for me, which is a very, very strange thing that I can talk about in therapy someday. It was a good three years together that we got to spend while growing the first company and living through everything from after acquisition, finding out that the seller had lied to us and that there was a big manufacturing defect that existed, to growing the company, expanding its product base, and learning a new industry at the same time.
Abby: So it sounds like you started the company, and you already had a business ethics issue close at hand.
Rob: That’s great insight. And I also found out that the person I bought the company from withheld inventory from me and competed against me for a period of time. So, learned a lot of lessons very quickly.
Brenda: Rob, you have a formula for success in business practice. So, what do you mean by success? Are we talking financial success or something more intangible?
Rob: There are lots of ways of defining success. And if you asked me this question two years ago, I wouldn’t have been ready to formulate the response, but my dear friend Brenda Cowan pushed me and asked me and was kind enough to request that I write a piece for an upcoming book that she’s working on for the museum industry. And I came up with a really simple equation to hopefully explain success, and that was gratitude plus ethics equals success, and success comes in many forms.
Certainly there’s monetary success and if we’re in a for-profit business world we have to drive profit. But along with that comes customer satisfaction, company longevity, satisfaction and opportunities for our employees, as well as industry impact. And I think all of those collectively are elements of what I think of as success.
Brenda: Rob, where does this formula come from? You are, of course, a lawyer, a business owner, and I know that your Judaism is an important part of your life. Does that come into play here as well?
Rob: It certainly does, and I don’t want to be preaching religion. I’m a very traditional person. My upbringing, a family business, taught me to always be thankful to customers. I had parents who instilled in me to appreciate what we have and to always give back. My ethics go back, I think, to my immigrant great-grandfather, who is a founder of an organization down in Rhode Island called the Providence Hebrew Free Loan Association, which gave interest-free loans to new immigrants.
My religion has a teaching and a book that’s very close to me. The book is called Ethics of Our Fathers, and this particular teaching states that the world is based on three pillars: study, prayer – and interestingly, the Hebrew word for prayer is also the Hebrew word for work – and also acts of loving kindness. So being grateful for what we have and helping others in need is a cornerstone for so many faiths.
And I think if you take those and incorporate them into your work, again without preaching, you can have a really good ethical base for how to go about running a business.
Brenda: I think that it’s a really important model, the fact that you’re willing to talk about it as a part of your business world and the work that you do and everything. I mean, I think that there’s a really good teaching in that, that we’re whole people. We don’t just turn on and turn off who we are.
Abby: My kids go to UNIS and it’s really not about how well you do. It’s about what kind of a person you are; who are you holistically in this world? And I think Rob, that’s really important in business. It’s who you are from a 360, and what you bring to your business should be all of you, should be the same as when you’re at home and all of those values.
I think that people who think that it’s about making money any way they can end up completely unfulfilled. Let’s talk about Albert Camus’ quote that “a person without ethics is a wild beast loosened upon this world”. Is that how you feel in terms of business ethics?
Rob: I would think so and I’m not a perfect person. I want to be really clear about that. But I want to be around other people who are good people and who want to make our industry better. And fortunately, there are a lot of those people in our industry, which is really quite like a family in many ways. And I can appreciate and respect them for their beliefs.
They can appreciate and respect me for mine. We can know that we’re all going to fall down at some point and make a mistake, and we can say, as long as you’re there to correct the mistake, we can continue to work together.
Abby: So let’s say you have a employee who favors the blame game, they are never to blame for anything and they can talk their way out of everything. How do you handle that?
Rob: I try to have a straight-up conversation with them and say, listen, we all make mistakes. The important thing is admitting to the mistake, working together to see how we get through the mistake, and make sure that it doesn’t become a pattern.
Brenda: Rob, nurturing good relationships is obviously a huge part of your ethos and I’m curious specific to the exhibits industry. I’m wondering is there something particular about our profession that makes these kinds of good relationships particularly challenging?
Rob: This is an industry that’s very much in the now. I need this now. Time is everything. And people are under that pressure, and things can get personal when you get in the heat of the moment. We also travel a lot together and socialize together on the road with these people. I urge the members of my team, even though this is business, to go and create personal relationships with these people, get to know them, relate on a personal level, and show that you care.
I enjoy just as much checking in with colleagues on their families or personal problems that may have struck them as I do trying to sell the next project. And, you know, people remember you if you just act as a good person, and that brings with it opportunities. So relationships are critical in my book.
Abby: Another thing I think is critical is trust. In my business, we’re always looking to make sure that our clients and our colleagues can trust that we’re going to deliver, can trust on the quality of what we’re going to create, and can, you know, trust that we stand behind everything that we’re creating. And with that, obviously, there does come a little bit, as you said, tension in the moment as you’re installing or as you’re turning on the technology, which can sometimes be a little fickle.
You have to sort of take a deep breath, take a step back and understand and believe that it’s all going to be okay at the end of the day, because I think we get very overwhelmed in that moment, Rob, and it’d be interesting to find out how, sort of, do you have any techniques to help the team see the bigger picture when they’re in the rabbit hole?
Rob: It’s a great point you make about trust, Abby. We even take a selling philosophy within our organization, and we’ve taught this to our team and they use it that when you’re presenting to the customer, tell them we can be one of two things. We can be a vendor and we can sell you product when you want product. But our value comes when you allow us to be a vendor partner.
And when you give us insight into your project, and you share about your vision with us so that we can then share alternative strategies and alternative products to bringing your vision to life. When we are in that rabbit hole, the first thing that that we teach our customer service people is solve the problem for the customer. Don’t worry about who’s going to pay to solve the problem.
There are times when products are just defective. There are times when there are programming issues. There are times when there are lots of things that can go wrong. Solve the problem, and if we have a real partnership, we’ll be able to talk with the customer afterwards and sort everything out.
Brenda: Rob, I’m curious about the past few years, the COVID years, and I’m wondering, have the COVID years presented any opportunities in the exhibit industry or, you know, has the decimation of so many businesses sort of challenge the idea of altruism as a means to success?
Rob: Sadly, I think that the COVID years have actually afforded an opportunity to build deeper bonds within the industry. All of a sudden, people have time on their hands and some chose to go hide in their rabbit holes. Others chose to get involved a little deeper, and getting involved was on different levels. For me, I had never been involved in federal advocacy work, and this afforded me the opportunity to demonstrate a sincere and caring dedication, I hope, to the industry.
I also observed many groups that formed that met on Zoom to support one another. People were talking about everything from am I going to be able to keep my doors open to, as things came around, have you heard about things like the employee retention tax credit and how you can go about applying. Also, taking the time to reach out one-on-one with people in the industry and stay in touch created deeper, more sincere relationships.
So those were three things I was thankful for. We were very fortunate in our company that we had a big chunk of business that we had landed outside of the industry before COVID hit. So, we were able to do that while still staying in touch with the industry and keeping ourselves financially healthy.
Abby: As a business then, Rob, it sounds like being able to pivot quickly and being able to leverage different opportunities sometimes outside the industry, that brings, you know, most bang for its buck that that’s a good thing and something that you would encourage businesses to always do, so all their eggs are not in one basket, so to speak.
Rob: Yeah, you said my least favorite word, Abby, and that’s pivot, because I don’t think anyone should be pivoting. I think that they should have a broader landscape of how they conduct business from the beginning. We’re fortunate in that even during economic downturns pre-COVID, we never had more than 7% of our business with any single customer. And that’s an important thing to understand, is the diversification of your customers, because if you have a concentration with a particular customer or two particular customers and they fall on financial hard times, then your goose is cooked along with theirs, and the more you can spread that risk out over a wider landscape, the more insulated you are from the financial success or metrics of your customers.
Brenda: How do you then, how do you advise a startup with this frame of thinking, folks who are only just starting to build a client base and get themselves established? Can you give any particular bits of advice to how to actually begin to create, as you put it, that broad landscape?
Rob: Don’t just focus on slaying the big dragon or, you know, to reel them in as a customer. The more you can put small pieces of business together with more customers, the more solid of a foundation you’re going to have. You’re also spreading, you know, your risk with smaller bets, so to speak. If I can place $5 bets with 20 customers rather than one $100 bet with one customer, I have a much better percentage rate of success in all likelihood.
So spread that risk out as much as you can. And yes, that may take more work on your part to begin with. But if business was easy, everyone would be an owner.
Abby: You have to have a certain appetite to be an entrepreneur I think, Rob, and it’s a very…
Rob: I don’t know if it’s an appetite or craziness, you know.
Brenda: Well, Abby, what’s what’s it for you being a business owner?
Abby: It’s craziness.
Brenda: Okay, so it’s craziness for your part. Okay.
Abby: Definitely enjoying a bit of craziness. So in terms of building a business, you’re an entrepreneur, as Brenda mentioned. Yours essentially was a sort of startup, Rob, in the very beginning. Sales teams. How big is your sales team now, and were you it at the beginning?
Rob: Oh, I was the chief cook and bottle washer at the beginning. I’d go from writing orders to strapping packages together in the back at night, and I remember when the box company delivered boxes, they would drop them outside in the parking lot, and I had to walk them up a flight of stairs.
I still think it’s important for the business owner though to always get their hands dirty. It’s not that you’ve become the CEO and you just wear a white collar all the time. When I’m out in my office in Illinois, I like to make sure everyone at headquarters understands the fact that there’s no job I’m not willing to do. And I make sure I spend time in the warehouse, working with the guys, assembling product, working with the team, and in stocking shelves.
The guy who empties the garbage cans, I try to find one night to walk around with him while he’s emptying the garbage cans. And it’s not just to empty the cans, but it’s for me to get to know that person a little bit better as well. I think that’s, that’s pretty important here.
Abby: But Rob, that all sounds wonderful and like a harmonious, amazing place to work and we all want to come and work for you, but what about…
Rob: No, you don’t, because you got to listen to me, too. That’s not that much fun.
Abby: What about when you’re trying to protect your employees because maybe you didn’t have enough money in and so you’re taking a pay cut yourselves or you’re taking some hits that you don’t necessarily want to share. I know open communication is really important, but sometimes from morale perspective or any sort of particular reasons, you may want to hide things from your colleagues, from your team.
Rob: I’m still a lawyer, and I do believe that there’s still a difference between stockholders and employees. And we have to find that correct balance of what do you share and what is not out there to be shared? You know, I don’t think that necessarily our employee base is entitled to know what my partner and I make financially. But at the same time, that’s only fair if the employees are all being treated fairly, both from a normal compensation standpoint, as well as bonuses based on the success of the business.
That’s an individual line that has to be drawn. When we merged the companies together, I found that nothing was being shared before from the bigger company and I had to sit down and explain to the folks that worked in the warehouse what all the widgets cost to make the component, because many of them had the understanding or belief that if we sold a product for $75, we made $75.They didn’t understand the cost equation and what was a gross profit margin and how valuable all these little pieces were. And when you drop a piece of glass and it broke, that cost us money.
So, education of the employee and understanding the business is important. They’re not going to understand every aspect of the business, but certainly taking pride of ownership for their portion of it, I think is critical.
Brenda: Abby, I’m curious. I want to ask you a question actually, as you’re listening to Rob and his works in the exhibits industry and a lot of the trade show and corporate interests, now you do a lot of work for museums and non for profits. And I’m just curious what’s resonating with you or are there things where you’re kind of thinking inside that fabulous head of yours, well, it doesn’t really work across the board though.
Abby: For us, the biggest thing is they want the world, and their budgets tend to get smaller and smaller. When we start a project, there’s a lot of talk about what we can do and what we can achieve, and then when the rubber hits the road and it comes time to signing and okay, let’s move ahead, things tend to shift.
Rob: So, it’s interesting because the corollary over to the world I live in, if everyone could just be honest about budgets, we could go a lot further a lot faster.
Abby: Yeah.
Rob: And customers think that we’re asking so that we can increase how much money we’re going to make.
Brenda: Right, right.
Rob: And that’s not the case at all, and so we can be recommending products and technology that fit in so that people aren’t disappointed at the end, that they can only afford this as opposed to that.
Abby: That’s exactly right. We face that all the time, Rob. And I say to people, I say, you’d like a house. We could build you a house for $100,000 or we can build your house for 10 million. How much money do you have? Let us approach even concepting with that in mind.
Rob: When we get the benefit of going in and speaking to students in the industry, we try to teach these students right from the beginning about the partnership and that it’s okay to share budgets. Their clients are investing in their designs. They have to be investing in the right technology, too, and quality of product.
Brenda: Well, Rob, let me also just throw out a big gratitude to you for all of the work that you do with with students on the undergrad and on the grad level. What do you say to folks who think that that is nice, but really not of benefit to you and perhaps doesn’t equate to the time that you spend.
Rob: One, I’d let them know that I think the most important thing we can do is give of our time and help teach and educate. It’s critical to be giving back and whether you’re doing a sales presentation and teaching, whether you’re at a conference and giving up your time to speak of an area of expertise or stepping into a classroom on the graduate, undergraduate, trade school level, high school level, all those things are critical. And what we have to share as participants of an industry can go a long way to help molding the future of the industry.
Abby: I don’t think we do a great job, or we haven’t in the past of sort of promoting our industry. You know, when clients think that they have a new job, they’ll maybe go to an architect, or they’ll go to an agency. One of the things I feel is that they don’t necessarily think about us, and we are the ones with all the experience in designing these immersive, pun-intended experiences.
So Rob, how can we do a better job of advocating for our industry and letting people know what we bring to the table in terms of all of our services?
Rob: You can join the great trade association, the Experiential Designers and Producers Association, the EDPA and become a part of a new initiative of theirs, which is the future workforce. This group, which I am a part of, is actually developing slideshows to have members of our industry go out and reach out from the trade school level on up to talk about our industry and all the jobs that are available in it. From working in a shop and bringing carpentry skills and electrical skills to the show floor or shop floor through project management, account management, design, and letting them know that there’s this great hidden industry out there to be a part of. And by the way, we’ll be more than glad to tell you about employers in your area.
Abby: But it’s not sexy. Architects have this aura about them, and when people have the purse strings, they do want to emotionally spend. They want to be associating with people who seem to be very uber-creative and dress a certain way and act a certain way.
Brenda: Glamour. Glamour sells.
Abby: So how do we make ourselves a little bit more endearing or at least competitive with with that group?
Rob: Glamor sells, but you invited me for a reason on a podcast and there’s no…
Abby: You’re saying you’re not glamorous, Rob Cohen?
Rob: No. This is a face for radio.
Brenda: Ladies and gentlemen, he’s going to be here all day.
Rob: There is a sexy aspect to the industry. You get to travel. You get to see new places. You get to meet new people. You get to have great experiences. We have to talk about that as well, and we have to talk about how sexy it is to create and then see our creations. From a museum standpoint, how wonderful is it to sit back and actually watch people partake in the experience?
Abby: Tell me about a recent project that went well and personally why you felt a lot of gratification.
Rob: I’ll talk about the biggest one we did, which was several years ago. We got called in by a very large customer. They said, Could you help us to update down at the old Atlanta Braves baseball stadium known as Turner Field, The Coca-Cola Bottle out in left field. So we want to bring technology and life to a 50-foot-tall Coca-Cola bottle.
I said, sure we can. And then I ran back and grabbed my lead engineer and said, how the heck can we do that? And we got brought in to meetings with our customer and people from the world of Coke, and we helped to bring along a realistic vision of a 50-foot-tall Coca-Cola bottle with changing colored light in it with a ten-foot-tall 360-degree LED screen, custom built to the contours of a Coca-Cola bottle for the label of the bottle. And inside the bottle, they kept the guts of a dumbwaiter, an elevator, that brought fireworks to the top of the bottle whenever the Braves hit a home run or won a game, and they shot fireworks off, which we took an exclusion in our warranty on our products, too.
But to collaborate with so many different people, we had never done anything like this before in our lives, but we joined in with a team and pulled it off, and it was a great project that, to this day, people still talk about even though the stadiums gone and they moved on to a new stadium, and the bottle was taken apart and thrown away.
Abby: Oh, did you have to end on such a sad note? Well, it obviously lives on in a lot of people’s memories, and I just really want to do a shout-out to those phone calls from clients and you say, yep, we can do that. And then you turn to your team and you say, how the hell can we do that? I love those moments. That’s when I feel the most excited, the most alive when we’re given a challenge that’s never been done before.
Rob: Absolutely.
Brenda: Rob, I wish we had all day to talk with you. And I want to give you a hearty thanks for your time and for sharing with us. This has been wonderful.
Rob: Oh, thank you, Abby. And thank you, Brenda. I truly appreciate and am honored to have been asked to be a part of your podcast. And I hope that your listeners can at least find one tidbit to take away and help them to grow their businesses and careers.
Abby: Thank you so much, Rob.
[Music]
Producer: Matters of Experience is produced by Lorem Ipsum Corp. Please tune in next week for another conversation. Thank you all for listening.
Taming of the Wild Beast with Rob Cohen
Art and Experience in the Metaverse with Raina Mehler
Mojo Lens | The World’s First True Smart Contact Lens
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[Music]
Abby: Hello and welcome to Matters of Experience. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: And I’m Brenda Cowan.
Abby: Today on the show, we’re focusing on experiences in the metaverse. Yes, another heady topic in its early stages, but never afraid to shy away from a hot topic, I’m excited to welcome Raina Mehler, Pace Gallery’s director, where she has worked for over a decade. Among the many things Raina does at Pace, she’s part of Pace Verso, the gallery’s Web3 hub.
And prior to this, she was part of the founding team who created and launched Superblue in Miami. It’s a new enterprise dedicated to producing and exhibiting large-scale immersive art installations for ticketed experiences, definitely a must see for everyone traveling to Miami. Raina is an emerging authority in the pioneering field of experiential time-based art and the Web3 space, seeking to bridge the gap between fine art and NFTs.
Brenda: So, let’s start at the beginning. Raina, what pulled you into the fine art space initially? And well, why is art important to us?
Raina: I actually got interested in art very early on. I went to a liberal arts Catholic high school, which is kind of an oxymoron, but I was able to take classes on ceramics, photography, drawing, and art history, and I was much better at the writing and art history part than art. But I saw from a very early age about the importance of art, the significance of it, how it can enhance lives, and just how, you know, it really conveys contemporary life.
And I studied art history in college, and I got a masters in it, and I worked in both museum and gallery worlds and ultimately, you know, preferred the gallery route because I really love working with living artists and having the opportunity to talk with them and figure out the best way to execute their artistic vision.
Abby: It’s interesting, Raina, you and I actually share similar heritage in terms of I also went to art school. I studied painting, actually.
Brenda: I did too.
Abby: And Brenda did too, so we’re all budding artist wannabees. And so can you sort of elaborate a little bit? Tell us about your perspective on the importance of art to humanity.
Raina: Yeah, definitely. I always go back to the very first painting of humanity in the cave of Lascaux, those handprints, and how even very early on, our ancestors were acknowledging their existence and who they are, and what they were seeing. And I think that also coincides with technology. You know, we developed tools which was integral to our survival as a species. And so for me, art and technology has always gone hand in hand, in a sense, and it is an important part of our evolution.
And I just remember when I learned about how dictators and authoritarians banned art and were burning it and destroying it. It really, for me, was this, like light bulb that went off because it showed the power of art, especially the power of, you know, abstraction in a sense, too, and the way that we can interpret it and all get meaning from it.
Brenda: It is definitely telling that when, you know, a society is being upended, art, education, books, literature, those are the first things that get attacked. And I think that it is not only because it’s where original thought exists and where cultural and individual expression exists, but it is also where intellectualism and ideas and idealism exist.
Raina: Yeah, and I also just find it so interesting because artists, you know, they just have this innate motivation to create. And I also think we as a species have this like hunger and drive to see things and experience things and to experience them with each other.
Abby: Yeah, that’s interesting you bring up that innate need to experience things together. I think it’s fundamental when you think about art when you think about visiting an exhibition. I think deep down there’s this shared connection, the shared bond that we want to have with each other. I think there’s something at our core that needs to be satiated by these group activities.
Brenda: No, absolutely, and I think the things that elicit wonder and awe, they absolutely promote and prompt pro-social behavior. It’s just built into the human animal.
Abby: I think that was one of the big things during COVID that a lot of us experienced was you didn’t have those shared experiences anymore. How did it affect you, Raina, personally, and how did it affect you in the workplace?
Raina: It’s interesting that you said, you know, you didn’t have that shared experience, and I really think that’s when digital realities became more important in our life, is because of COVID. There was a shift from going to the office and having meetings in person to having meetings on Zoom. And you’re seeing everyone’s faces, right, but you cannot read their body language.
And also, the way you remember is different. One way that we remember things is through like spatial awareness. And I just find that really interesting because when you’re in a meeting, you remember things that were said based on kind of the spatial and audio awareness, which you really don’t get in Zoom. And I think that’s a really interesting thing that’s being developed with VR and headsets and stuff like that.
But going back to COVID and how that personally affected me, I was working at the time on, you know, a ticketed experience and we had to do everything over Zoom. But honestly, a lot of the artists that I work with live in different countries around the world. So I’m very used to having to log on to a screen and have a meeting and figure out things.
And I think the biggest thing was not having any kind of human contact and having to do everything virtually. And I think it made it a lot harder. I mean, you get Zoom fatigue. You’re sitting all day. It was back to back meetings. It was really exhausting in some ways. And I think it, you know, it hindered the ability to have like a free-form brainstorming session.
Abby: You were into digital before COVID, though, so what sort of drew you to the darkside? I’m joking, jokingly referring to digital as the darkside, as it’s one of my favorite places to be. But in my work, I’ve been interested in that balance that you mentioned between technology and art and how they collaborate together. So what interested you and still interests you about digital art?
Raina: Well, when I first started working at Pace, one of the first shows I worked on was teamLabs’ first exhibition at any Pace location in 2014 in Chelsea, and it really was like a game changer for me and inspiring because the way people were interacting with it compared to when you go and are looking at contemporary painting – and I just want to, you know, before I get into this, I love paintings, and I love photography, and I love sculpture, but I think that the generations growing up right now with like a phone in their hand, they’re more open in a sense, to seeing it as fine art rather than this like inferior medium of digital media.
And, you know, after that show, I wanted to work with all of these interdisciplinary art collectives because I do feel like there’s a shift from wanting to possess something or own something versus wanting to experience it. And there’s been this huge, you know, just a lot of excitement about the experience economy. And I think, you know, sometimes immersive and interactive installations, they allow you to participate and to have that experience with somebody else in a different way than looking, you know, maybe at an abstract painting where everyone’s seen different things, whether it’s textures or colors and they apply different mediums.
I think it in some ways allows for this kind of shared connection and also this idea that the viewer kind of completes the piece, like really goes back to conceptualism and performance art and other, you know, earlier movements. So I really see it coming out of the arc of art history and looking at artists like Bob Whitman, James Turrell, they were, you know, using the medium of their time. You know, Turrell was using these cutting edge like laser photography and started using light. And I think technology’s just ubiquitous in our lives. You know, everyone has a laptop now, everyone has an iPhone and having access, unprecedented access to information like what is happening globally around the world, but also misinformation and how does this all affect us and how will we live and exist in this world when we’re becoming increasingly more intertwined with the digital and the physical?
Abby: You’re so right. Artists working today have so much meat to chew on in terms of responding to the world around us, the situations we are in and reflecting those back to their audience. I think now is a very exciting time to be – a very worrying maybe – but a very exciting time. Just thinking back to discussing propaganda, misinformation. It’s such a fascinating area to immerse yourself into, and as an artist, I think it’s really challenging and a fun challenge.
Raina: Yeah.
Brenda: I’d love to be able to just talk a little bit about the metaverse. I have a really difficult time grasping all of what the metaverse really is and what it means. And I’m wondering, Raina, if you could give us a sort of point of entry to understanding what metaverse really is and also what it can be. And for the sake of our conversation, we can say that it’s a group of technologies that includes VR and metaverse includes AR. But it’s important to note that these spaces don’t have to be exclusively accessed via VR or AR, or headsets. It could be a desktop, a laptop, a game console, it can be your phone. And these are all starting to refer to themselves as being able to access the metaverse, so if you could just give us a quick intro to how do you define the metaverse and then how you see it as a transformational tool and experience.
Raina: Yeah, I mean, how, how I would start off explaining it is that it is a virtual environment that allows for people to have real-time interactions and experiences, you know, across the globe. And as you mentioned, you can experience this through your web browser or in like a VR headset, and you have all these different virtual environments that people can log on to, and in the future, the goal is to really have all of these different metaverses connect and communicate with one another so you can jump from place to place and have these different kind of portals.
Abby: I’m going to jump in here because how realistic is that? Businesses are never going to collaborate. Like, what’s your feeling on that in reality?
Raina: I mean, I think it’s just going to cost a lot of money to have the infrastructure. But ultimately if you’re not pigeonholed to one metaverse, you know, you want people to kind of jump around and go through all the things, and businesses could have theoretically different buildings or spaces throughout the different metaverses, just like there’s chains of restaurants and fashion stores where you can visit them in different cities around the world, you know, you have Chanel in New York and London and Paris. I think it’s just more about who’s going to build this infrastructure that then everyone can kind of benefit and use it.
And I am glad you mentioned companies because for me, I think the biggest concern about the metaverse is that it isn’t just ruled and run by greedy corporations that are feeding us content or things that we don’t even really need or want. And I curated this NFT sale that was about this, it was about inclusiveness in the metaverse, and how do we kind of prevent this cycle that continuously disenfranchises the same group of people and minorities? How do we truly make the metaverse accessible and inclusive for all?
Because that is what people are saying, right? Like about NFTs and the metaverse, you know, it’s for everyone, but in a sense it’s not, right? You have to have the understanding of it, the knowledge, and the tools too. So I think that’s something that’s kind of touted by the Web3 community, but not necessarily true, and I think there needs to be more education about 3D tools in general and, you know, taught in schools and just kind of a massive, I think, education rollout in every community so that it truly can be accessible.
But, think about the future of the world, like where are we going? There’s a lot of concerns about climate. And let’s just say fast-forward 100 years and really go to like a doomsday scenario. Maybe you can’t even go outside during the day because it’s too hot or there’s sandstorms or there’s flooding, and the only way that you can really connect with people is through VR.
And at that point in time, if you can go to the metaverse and see your friends, see your family and connect with them and do things and do activities and see music, that will feel more like the life we know now, right, than being stuck inside all the time, which we totally had a glimpse of through COVID when we were isolated and stuck at home all the time and didn’t have access to the things we were used to. And what effect did that have on future generations?
And then the other idea about the metaverse is very like Westworld, Westworldy if you’ve seen it, is that like literally people’s consciousnesses can be uploaded to the metaverse and like exist and have like their own lives in this complete virtual world.
Abby: Well, you’ve just mentioned a number of very interesting things in terms of like the doomsday scenario where we’re all stuck in our little tiny box with a bathroom, and not even a pet, and everything else is sort of inside the metaverse. I immediately jump to, how am I, are we atrophied and we’re just a brain with some arms lifting the device on and off.
Brenda: Oh now we’re back to, what is it? Wall-E.
Abby: Oh, Wall-E.
Brenda: The movie, remember that? They were on target.
Raina: But you can work out, you know.
Abby: You can. Yeah, that’s true. Well, I’m guessing that we would have a small box we would be able to move in. So, the near future for you. What do you find about the metaverse that is exciting, personally?
Raina: I think the metaverses will become more high fidelity and more realistic, and I think that will make it more interesting to go to, because some of them right now have this, I don’t know, like Sims kind of quality, you know, like cartoony and I don’t know, I can see why some people are kind of turned off by it, but I think it’s going to get more like high-res and high fidelity.
But I think, you know what Krista Kim has been speaking about, and she created a metaverse that’s launching this fall called [0], which is supposed to be super high fidelity and high quality. And she looks at it as this place for meditation and reflection, and higher thought. And I think that could be a really interesting thing is the therapeutic aspect, how like lights and sound could be used to kind of help, I don’t know, just to help people, like whether it’s relax, or meditate or you know, there really hasn’t been any studies into like whether it could help with trauma.
I think going back to art, though, what’s so amazing about the metaverse is that you do not have the same constraints of reality. You’re not refined to scale or weight. You can have things upside down or ever turning, you know, deep in the ground, like high above the ground, any shape. And I think that’s going to allow for really cool architecture in the metaverse and artistic landscapes. I mean, artists don’t need to even be confined to like a specific space, like they can just create the whole space. And I think it’s going to be super interesting to see how the digital and physical will merge through exhibitions.
Brenda: Raina, I’m wondering if the architects who are listening are feeling a sense of dread. How do you think that whole profession is developing and what do you think experiences in general could evolve there from an architectural perspective?
Raina: Well, a lot of architects that I’ve been meeting with are architects in real life, and some of them were super excited because a lot of things they couldn’t realize in real life, they’re able to in the metaverse, because you just don’t have the same limits to reality because of gravity and weight and time and space. You can have buildings that are like in ruins or moving or constantly changing or any material you want.
You can walk into a room that looks like something you recognize with four white walls, but open the window and go out and you’re like, on top of the moon, and I just think the possibilities are endless. And for artists and architects, I think it would be a really exciting time when they’re partnered with the right people to create something just new and something that we can’t even fathom now.
And I think that’s what’s amazing about you know, artists in general. It’s like you give them a tool and they discover something completely new. And I think those, those accidents that will happen in 3D or in the, you know, in the metaverse will be really interesting and exciting that then become commonplace.
Abby: So there’s three things I want to address that you mentioned, Raina. I’m going to go for the first one. The idea of this immersive environment in VR where you have therapeutic sessions for, potentially people with PTSD or who have experienced anything tragic in their lives that they’d like to escape and get well in sitting in these environments. I know of a company called Reulay. They’ve actually done a lot of white papers on this. They’ve created an immersive experience, VR experience that does just as you say. So I think there’s a lot of companies out there now starting to create these relaxing environments, and I think that’s fantastic.
And then you mentioned AR. There’s now been launched by Mojo Lens; They have contact lenses which have the augmented reality on top. I feel, as you mentioned, that this technology goes incredibly quickly. So I could imagine coming into Pace, popping my lenses in, and off I go with those amazing, incredible artistic overlays that are AR, maybe it’s also supplemented in some way by VR, and then in putting on a headset, who knows, that’s for the artist to decide, but I think it’s going to get there incredibly quickly.
Raina: Yeah, no, I completely agree. I mean, Meta partnered with Ray-Bans to create these AR glasses that actually have a camera inside it and it’s so small that you can’t even see it. And they can take a photo or take a video. But yeah, I think it’s going to develop quickly, and just like all tech it will be super expensive at first and then, you know, everyone’s going to have it pretty soon. Just like the iPhone.
Abby: Yeah, yeah, I know, completely. And then talking about architects, you know, we work closely with architects when we’re designing our experiences. And even if I think internally to Lorem Ipsum and our staff when we’re building out our 3D spaces, they use completely different software to what our architects are using. I feel like the metaverse is very multidisciplinary. What happens internally with us is we have our renderers, we have our 3D modelers, but even they are starting to have to use gaming engines and work out how their software can collaborate with an Unreal, for example. Like it’s very complicated from a technological perspective. It’s not just, oh, just build it in the metaverse. And so there’s a real deep understanding and a whole team, is what I’m getting to, that needs to be able to create these things.
Brenda: Well, this brings me to something that, you know, I think about quite a bit, honestly, when I think about these new tools and technologies. I’m really curious about co-creation, though, between artists and museums, but also if you see visitors, the broader public, also supporting, informing, you know, the subjects of the museum’s content or the experience’s content as well as the shape of the environments, the shape of the experiences. How much is co-creation on a visitor level and on a public level, do you think is going to play into the future of, you know, the kinds of spaces that we’re talking about?
Raina: Yeah, I do think co-creation is a huge part of it, especially in the beginning of a new, like, genre, I guess in a sense. Because I even think about the interdisciplinary art collectives that I work with, you know, there is kind of a head or a duo or something that are the head creatives, in a sense. They think about the content, but then they have on their team engineers, sometimes architects, mathematicians, CGI animators, AV, IT. You really need so many different levels of expertise to create these immersive multimedia installations or even digital realities. And people really have to collaborate and partner to execute something and I think, you know, as the public goes to view it, there are these layers of education that is needed.
Like I just think about sometimes when you go to shows, you get this email kind of like telling you no running or, you know, this might have flashing lights and could cause a seizure, like, I don’t know, just kind of like the warnings and rules, which is like the really unsexy side of it.
But then you also have the meaning behind it from the artist, which is more of a concept. And that explains to you, like if the intention of it is for you to lay down, or the intention is for you to stay in it for the full cycle. And then there’s often people on site that explain to you, how do you interact with something?
And even, you know, in the metaverse there are these like live chats with people that can help you navigate through it and also explain to you how you can run or jump or move, and even with the metaverse, like, I think there needs to be ethical rules, and people should really understand their privacy settings. And, you know, you can, you can give distances about how close people can get to you or like where’s the freeze button or the exit or stuff like that, like that seems so simple, but like in the moment, if you’re feeling shock, you really want to understand how to get yourself out of the situation.
Brenda: That’s such an extraordinary arena of thought. How do you think an ethos will evolve that protects people and that enables people, like you’re saying, to know how to behave and to have, sort of, guidelines of what’s appropriate. And you know, what isn’t appropriate.
Raina: One thought is you don’t really want a world, right, where there’s Big Brother oversight. Is there a world where you have like AI moderating the universe, just looking for, like, certain words, you know, or actions or something that then it can like pause you, or you can get warnings. But then, yeah, who develops that sort of system?
I, at this point don’t really know. I just think that this sort of governance system should be a group of people, but like from every ethnicity, you know, every kind of background, female, male, self-identifying, male self-identifying, female, like every single person needs to have a voice in this to figure it out and decide.
Abby: So looking at the art world in general, embracing the metaverse, these new digital realities, tell us from your perspective what’s working and also what’s not.
Raina: Yeah, I think, you know, because of COVID, we saw this really huge emergence of the online gallery and online viewing rooms and art fairs. They all became virtual. And I think, you know, from the gallery perspective versus like an NFT marketplace where artists can upload their work, you have no control over like who you’re next to, and there’s just like, on some of the sites, like hundreds of images next to each other, and it’s very overwhelming. And I think as a gallery or a museum that’s doing something virtually, you know, you really need to consider the whole experience of how one moves through the space, what artwork is next to another, how people can read about it. You really want to be, I think, really user, user friendly. And also on brand with your gallery or institution. I think it’s important to show quality art. I think it’s important to have curated content. And to you know, have shows that have a purpose and convey the issues of our, of our time. It should be meaningful and thoughtful and not just random and spontaneous.
Abby: And what about the role of the curator, then? How is that going to be different in the metaverse?
Raina: Curators are always so important. I see them as mediators of, you know, mediators of art. You know, they, they mediate between the artist and the viewer, and I think it’s going to continue to be a significant part of that dynamic. Curators kind of explain why something is important or significant. They contextualize it, and it’s a really important part of the whole process.
Abby: Yeah, Raina, I think that ultimately as we move into the metaverse, my takeaway is it’s still about stories, it’s still about connecting at a base level, it’s still about connecting with each other. Whether we’re in a dystopian future or not, at least what happened back in the caveman times is still needed today, that idea of communicating with each other our emotions, our feelings and telling stories.
Raina: Yeah, I see the metaverse as the next step in our evolution, and it’s going to help preserve contemporary life. It’s going to allow us to imagine a different future without the restrictions of reality and, you know, going to be the next step that allows us to kind of transform and transmute.
Abby: Well, Raina, thank you so much for joining us today. And for everyone listening, please write in with your thoughts, comments, or suggestions. We really want to hear from you. Email us at ask@loremipsumcorp.com. Thanks for listening.
Raina: Thank you so much. I had so much fun chatting about the future of the metaverse with you.
Brenda: It was fantastic. Thank you so much.
[Music]
Producer: Matters of Experience is produced by Lorem Ipsum Corp. Please tune in next week for another conversation. Thank you all for listening.
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Abby: Hello and welcome to Matters of Experience. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: And I’m Brenda Cowan.
Abby: Today on the show, we’re focusing on experiences in the metaverse. Yes, another heady topic in its early stages, but never afraid to shy away from a hot topic, I’m excited to welcome Raina Mehler, Pace Gallery’s director, where she has worked for over a decade. Among the many things Raina does at Pace, she’s part of Pace Verso, the gallery’s Web3 hub.
And prior to this, she was part of the founding team who created and launched Superblue in Miami. It’s a new enterprise dedicated to producing and exhibiting large-scale immersive art installations for ticketed experiences, definitely a must see for everyone traveling to Miami. Raina is an emerging authority in the pioneering field of experiential time-based art and the Web3 space, seeking to bridge the gap between fine art and NFTs.
Brenda: So, let’s start at the beginning. Raina, what pulled you into the fine art space initially? And well, why is art important to us?
Raina: I actually got interested in art very early on. I went to a liberal arts Catholic high school, which is kind of an oxymoron, but I was able to take classes on ceramics, photography, drawing, and art history, and I was much better at the writing and art history part than art. But I saw from a very early age about the importance of art, the significance of it, how it can enhance lives, and just how, you know, it really conveys contemporary life.
And I studied art history in college, and I got a masters in it, and I worked in both museum and gallery worlds and ultimately, you know, preferred the gallery route because I really love working with living artists and having the opportunity to talk with them and figure out the best way to execute their artistic vision.
Abby: It’s interesting, Raina, you and I actually share similar heritage in terms of I also went to art school. I studied painting, actually.
Brenda: I did too.
Abby: And Brenda did too, so we’re all budding artist wannabees. And so can you sort of elaborate a little bit? Tell us about your perspective on the importance of art to humanity.
Raina: Yeah, definitely. I always go back to the very first painting of humanity in the cave of Lascaux, those handprints, and how even very early on, our ancestors were acknowledging their existence and who they are, and what they were seeing. And I think that also coincides with technology. You know, we developed tools which was integral to our survival as a species. And so for me, art and technology has always gone hand in hand, in a sense, and it is an important part of our evolution.
And I just remember when I learned about how dictators and authoritarians banned art and were burning it and destroying it. It really, for me, was this, like light bulb that went off because it showed the power of art, especially the power of, you know, abstraction in a sense, too, and the way that we can interpret it and all get meaning from it.
Brenda: It is definitely telling that when, you know, a society is being upended, art, education, books, literature, those are the first things that get attacked. And I think that it is not only because it’s where original thought exists and where cultural and individual expression exists, but it is also where intellectualism and ideas and idealism exist.
Raina: Yeah, and I also just find it so interesting because artists, you know, they just have this innate motivation to create. And I also think we as a species have this like hunger and drive to see things and experience things and to experience them with each other.
Abby: Yeah, that’s interesting you bring up that innate need to experience things together. I think it’s fundamental when you think about art when you think about visiting an exhibition. I think deep down there’s this shared connection, the shared bond that we want to have with each other. I think there’s something at our core that needs to be satiated by these group activities.
Brenda: No, absolutely, and I think the things that elicit wonder and awe, they absolutely promote and prompt pro-social behavior. It’s just built into the human animal.
Abby: I think that was one of the big things during COVID that a lot of us experienced was you didn’t have those shared experiences anymore. How did it affect you, Raina, personally, and how did it affect you in the workplace?
Raina: It’s interesting that you said, you know, you didn’t have that shared experience, and I really think that’s when digital realities became more important in our life, is because of COVID. There was a shift from going to the office and having meetings in person to having meetings on Zoom. And you’re seeing everyone’s faces, right, but you cannot read their body language.
And also, the way you remember is different. One way that we remember things is through like spatial awareness. And I just find that really interesting because when you’re in a meeting, you remember things that were said based on kind of the spatial and audio awareness, which you really don’t get in Zoom. And I think that’s a really interesting thing that’s being developed with VR and headsets and stuff like that.
But going back to COVID and how that personally affected me, I was working at the time on, you know, a ticketed experience and we had to do everything over Zoom. But honestly, a lot of the artists that I work with live in different countries around the world. So I’m very used to having to log on to a screen and have a meeting and figure out things.
And I think the biggest thing was not having any kind of human contact and having to do everything virtually. And I think it made it a lot harder. I mean, you get Zoom fatigue. You’re sitting all day. It was back to back meetings. It was really exhausting in some ways. And I think it, you know, it hindered the ability to have like a free-form brainstorming session.
Abby: You were into digital before COVID, though, so what sort of drew you to the darkside? I’m joking, jokingly referring to digital as the darkside, as it’s one of my favorite places to be. But in my work, I’ve been interested in that balance that you mentioned between technology and art and how they collaborate together. So what interested you and still interests you about digital art?
Raina: Well, when I first started working at Pace, one of the first shows I worked on was teamLabs’ first exhibition at any Pace location in 2014 in Chelsea, and it really was like a game changer for me and inspiring because the way people were interacting with it compared to when you go and are looking at contemporary painting – and I just want to, you know, before I get into this, I love paintings, and I love photography, and I love sculpture, but I think that the generations growing up right now with like a phone in their hand, they’re more open in a sense, to seeing it as fine art rather than this like inferior medium of digital media.
And, you know, after that show, I wanted to work with all of these interdisciplinary art collectives because I do feel like there’s a shift from wanting to possess something or own something versus wanting to experience it. And there’s been this huge, you know, just a lot of excitement about the experience economy. And I think, you know, sometimes immersive and interactive installations, they allow you to participate and to have that experience with somebody else in a different way than looking, you know, maybe at an abstract painting where everyone’s seen different things, whether it’s textures or colors and they apply different mediums.
I think it in some ways allows for this kind of shared connection and also this idea that the viewer kind of completes the piece, like really goes back to conceptualism and performance art and other, you know, earlier movements. So I really see it coming out of the arc of art history and looking at artists like Bob Whitman, James Turrell, they were, you know, using the medium of their time. You know, Turrell was using these cutting edge like laser photography and started using light. And I think technology’s just ubiquitous in our lives. You know, everyone has a laptop now, everyone has an iPhone and having access, unprecedented access to information like what is happening globally around the world, but also misinformation and how does this all affect us and how will we live and exist in this world when we’re becoming increasingly more intertwined with the digital and the physical?
Abby: You’re so right. Artists working today have so much meat to chew on in terms of responding to the world around us, the situations we are in and reflecting those back to their audience. I think now is a very exciting time to be – a very worrying maybe – but a very exciting time. Just thinking back to discussing propaganda, misinformation. It’s such a fascinating area to immerse yourself into, and as an artist, I think it’s really challenging and a fun challenge.
Raina: Yeah.
Brenda: I’d love to be able to just talk a little bit about the metaverse. I have a really difficult time grasping all of what the metaverse really is and what it means. And I’m wondering, Raina, if you could give us a sort of point of entry to understanding what metaverse really is and also what it can be. And for the sake of our conversation, we can say that it’s a group of technologies that includes VR and metaverse includes AR. But it’s important to note that these spaces don’t have to be exclusively accessed via VR or AR, or headsets. It could be a desktop, a laptop, a game console, it can be your phone. And these are all starting to refer to themselves as being able to access the metaverse, so if you could just give us a quick intro to how do you define the metaverse and then how you see it as a transformational tool and experience.
Raina: Yeah, I mean, how, how I would start off explaining it is that it is a virtual environment that allows for people to have real-time interactions and experiences, you know, across the globe. And as you mentioned, you can experience this through your web browser or in like a VR headset, and you have all these different virtual environments that people can log on to, and in the future, the goal is to really have all of these different metaverses connect and communicate with one another so you can jump from place to place and have these different kind of portals.
Abby: I’m going to jump in here because how realistic is that? Businesses are never going to collaborate. Like, what’s your feeling on that in reality?
Raina: I mean, I think it’s just going to cost a lot of money to have the infrastructure. But ultimately if you’re not pigeonholed to one metaverse, you know, you want people to kind of jump around and go through all the things, and businesses could have theoretically different buildings or spaces throughout the different metaverses, just like there’s chains of restaurants and fashion stores where you can visit them in different cities around the world, you know, you have Chanel in New York and London and Paris. I think it’s just more about who’s going to build this infrastructure that then everyone can kind of benefit and use it.
And I am glad you mentioned companies because for me, I think the biggest concern about the metaverse is that it isn’t just ruled and run by greedy corporations that are feeding us content or things that we don’t even really need or want. And I curated this NFT sale that was about this, it was about inclusiveness in the metaverse, and how do we kind of prevent this cycle that continuously disenfranchises the same group of people and minorities? How do we truly make the metaverse accessible and inclusive for all?
Because that is what people are saying, right? Like about NFTs and the metaverse, you know, it’s for everyone, but in a sense it’s not, right? You have to have the understanding of it, the knowledge, and the tools too. So I think that’s something that’s kind of touted by the Web3 community, but not necessarily true, and I think there needs to be more education about 3D tools in general and, you know, taught in schools and just kind of a massive, I think, education rollout in every community so that it truly can be accessible.
But, think about the future of the world, like where are we going? There’s a lot of concerns about climate. And let’s just say fast-forward 100 years and really go to like a doomsday scenario. Maybe you can’t even go outside during the day because it’s too hot or there’s sandstorms or there’s flooding, and the only way that you can really connect with people is through VR.
And at that point in time, if you can go to the metaverse and see your friends, see your family and connect with them and do things and do activities and see music, that will feel more like the life we know now, right, than being stuck inside all the time, which we totally had a glimpse of through COVID when we were isolated and stuck at home all the time and didn’t have access to the things we were used to. And what effect did that have on future generations?
And then the other idea about the metaverse is very like Westworld, Westworldy if you’ve seen it, is that like literally people’s consciousnesses can be uploaded to the metaverse and like exist and have like their own lives in this complete virtual world.
Abby: Well, you’ve just mentioned a number of very interesting things in terms of like the doomsday scenario where we’re all stuck in our little tiny box with a bathroom, and not even a pet, and everything else is sort of inside the metaverse. I immediately jump to, how am I, are we atrophied and we’re just a brain with some arms lifting the device on and off.
Brenda: Oh now we’re back to, what is it? Wall-E.
Abby: Oh, Wall-E.
Brenda: The movie, remember that? They were on target.
Raina: But you can work out, you know.
Abby: You can. Yeah, that’s true. Well, I’m guessing that we would have a small box we would be able to move in. So, the near future for you. What do you find about the metaverse that is exciting, personally?
Raina: I think the metaverses will become more high fidelity and more realistic, and I think that will make it more interesting to go to, because some of them right now have this, I don’t know, like Sims kind of quality, you know, like cartoony and I don’t know, I can see why some people are kind of turned off by it, but I think it’s going to get more like high-res and high fidelity.
But I think, you know what Krista Kim has been speaking about, and she created a metaverse that’s launching this fall called [0], which is supposed to be super high fidelity and high quality. And she looks at it as this place for meditation and reflection, and higher thought. And I think that could be a really interesting thing is the therapeutic aspect, how like lights and sound could be used to kind of help, I don’t know, just to help people, like whether it’s relax, or meditate or you know, there really hasn’t been any studies into like whether it could help with trauma.
I think going back to art, though, what’s so amazing about the metaverse is that you do not have the same constraints of reality. You’re not refined to scale or weight. You can have things upside down or ever turning, you know, deep in the ground, like high above the ground, any shape. And I think that’s going to allow for really cool architecture in the metaverse and artistic landscapes. I mean, artists don’t need to even be confined to like a specific space, like they can just create the whole space. And I think it’s going to be super interesting to see how the digital and physical will merge through exhibitions.
Brenda: Raina, I’m wondering if the architects who are listening are feeling a sense of dread. How do you think that whole profession is developing and what do you think experiences in general could evolve there from an architectural perspective?
Raina: Well, a lot of architects that I’ve been meeting with are architects in real life, and some of them were super excited because a lot of things they couldn’t realize in real life, they’re able to in the metaverse, because you just don’t have the same limits to reality because of gravity and weight and time and space. You can have buildings that are like in ruins or moving or constantly changing or any material you want.
You can walk into a room that looks like something you recognize with four white walls, but open the window and go out and you’re like, on top of the moon, and I just think the possibilities are endless. And for artists and architects, I think it would be a really exciting time when they’re partnered with the right people to create something just new and something that we can’t even fathom now.
And I think that’s what’s amazing about you know, artists in general. It’s like you give them a tool and they discover something completely new. And I think those, those accidents that will happen in 3D or in the, you know, in the metaverse will be really interesting and exciting that then become commonplace.
Abby: So there’s three things I want to address that you mentioned, Raina. I’m going to go for the first one. The idea of this immersive environment in VR where you have therapeutic sessions for, potentially people with PTSD or who have experienced anything tragic in their lives that they’d like to escape and get well in sitting in these environments. I know of a company called Reulay. They’ve actually done a lot of white papers on this. They’ve created an immersive experience, VR experience that does just as you say. So I think there’s a lot of companies out there now starting to create these relaxing environments, and I think that’s fantastic.
And then you mentioned AR. There’s now been launched by Mojo Lens; They have contact lenses which have the augmented reality on top. I feel, as you mentioned, that this technology goes incredibly quickly. So I could imagine coming into Pace, popping my lenses in, and off I go with those amazing, incredible artistic overlays that are AR, maybe it’s also supplemented in some way by VR, and then in putting on a headset, who knows, that’s for the artist to decide, but I think it’s going to get there incredibly quickly.
Raina: Yeah, no, I completely agree. I mean, Meta partnered with Ray-Bans to create these AR glasses that actually have a camera inside it and it’s so small that you can’t even see it. And they can take a photo or take a video. But yeah, I think it’s going to develop quickly, and just like all tech it will be super expensive at first and then, you know, everyone’s going to have it pretty soon. Just like the iPhone.
Abby: Yeah, yeah, I know, completely. And then talking about architects, you know, we work closely with architects when we’re designing our experiences. And even if I think internally to Lorem Ipsum and our staff when we’re building out our 3D spaces, they use completely different software to what our architects are using. I feel like the metaverse is very multidisciplinary. What happens internally with us is we have our renderers, we have our 3D modelers, but even they are starting to have to use gaming engines and work out how their software can collaborate with an Unreal, for example. Like it’s very complicated from a technological perspective. It’s not just, oh, just build it in the metaverse. And so there’s a real deep understanding and a whole team, is what I’m getting to, that needs to be able to create these things.
Brenda: Well, this brings me to something that, you know, I think about quite a bit, honestly, when I think about these new tools and technologies. I’m really curious about co-creation, though, between artists and museums, but also if you see visitors, the broader public, also supporting, informing, you know, the subjects of the museum’s content or the experience’s content as well as the shape of the environments, the shape of the experiences. How much is co-creation on a visitor level and on a public level, do you think is going to play into the future of, you know, the kinds of spaces that we’re talking about?
Raina: Yeah, I do think co-creation is a huge part of it, especially in the beginning of a new, like, genre, I guess in a sense. Because I even think about the interdisciplinary art collectives that I work with, you know, there is kind of a head or a duo or something that are the head creatives, in a sense. They think about the content, but then they have on their team engineers, sometimes architects, mathematicians, CGI animators, AV, IT. You really need so many different levels of expertise to create these immersive multimedia installations or even digital realities. And people really have to collaborate and partner to execute something and I think, you know, as the public goes to view it, there are these layers of education that is needed.
Like I just think about sometimes when you go to shows, you get this email kind of like telling you no running or, you know, this might have flashing lights and could cause a seizure, like, I don’t know, just kind of like the warnings and rules, which is like the really unsexy side of it.
But then you also have the meaning behind it from the artist, which is more of a concept. And that explains to you, like if the intention of it is for you to lay down, or the intention is for you to stay in it for the full cycle. And then there’s often people on site that explain to you, how do you interact with something?
And even, you know, in the metaverse there are these like live chats with people that can help you navigate through it and also explain to you how you can run or jump or move, and even with the metaverse, like, I think there needs to be ethical rules, and people should really understand their privacy settings. And, you know, you can, you can give distances about how close people can get to you or like where’s the freeze button or the exit or stuff like that, like that seems so simple, but like in the moment, if you’re feeling shock, you really want to understand how to get yourself out of the situation.
Brenda: That’s such an extraordinary arena of thought. How do you think an ethos will evolve that protects people and that enables people, like you’re saying, to know how to behave and to have, sort of, guidelines of what’s appropriate. And you know, what isn’t appropriate.
Raina: One thought is you don’t really want a world, right, where there’s Big Brother oversight. Is there a world where you have like AI moderating the universe, just looking for, like, certain words, you know, or actions or something that then it can like pause you, or you can get warnings. But then, yeah, who develops that sort of system?
I, at this point don’t really know. I just think that this sort of governance system should be a group of people, but like from every ethnicity, you know, every kind of background, female, male, self-identifying, male self-identifying, female, like every single person needs to have a voice in this to figure it out and decide.
Abby: So looking at the art world in general, embracing the metaverse, these new digital realities, tell us from your perspective what’s working and also what’s not.
Raina: Yeah, I think, you know, because of COVID, we saw this really huge emergence of the online gallery and online viewing rooms and art fairs. They all became virtual. And I think, you know, from the gallery perspective versus like an NFT marketplace where artists can upload their work, you have no control over like who you’re next to, and there’s just like, on some of the sites, like hundreds of images next to each other, and it’s very overwhelming. And I think as a gallery or a museum that’s doing something virtually, you know, you really need to consider the whole experience of how one moves through the space, what artwork is next to another, how people can read about it. You really want to be, I think, really user, user friendly. And also on brand with your gallery or institution. I think it’s important to show quality art. I think it’s important to have curated content. And to you know, have shows that have a purpose and convey the issues of our, of our time. It should be meaningful and thoughtful and not just random and spontaneous.
Abby: And what about the role of the curator, then? How is that going to be different in the metaverse?
Raina: Curators are always so important. I see them as mediators of, you know, mediators of art. You know, they, they mediate between the artist and the viewer, and I think it’s going to continue to be a significant part of that dynamic. Curators kind of explain why something is important or significant. They contextualize it, and it’s a really important part of the whole process.
Abby: Yeah, Raina, I think that ultimately as we move into the metaverse, my takeaway is it’s still about stories, it’s still about connecting at a base level, it’s still about connecting with each other. Whether we’re in a dystopian future or not, at least what happened back in the caveman times is still needed today, that idea of communicating with each other our emotions, our feelings and telling stories.
Raina: Yeah, I see the metaverse as the next step in our evolution, and it’s going to help preserve contemporary life. It’s going to allow us to imagine a different future without the restrictions of reality and, you know, going to be the next step that allows us to kind of transform and transmute.
Abby: Well, Raina, thank you so much for joining us today. And for everyone listening, please write in with your thoughts, comments, or suggestions. We really want to hear from you. Email us at ask@loremipsumcorp.com. Thanks for listening.
Raina: Thank you so much. I had so much fun chatting about the future of the metaverse with you.
Brenda: It was fantastic. Thank you so much.
[Music]
Producer: Matters of Experience is produced by Lorem Ipsum Corp. Please tune in next week for another conversation. Thank you all for listening.
Art and Experience in the Metaverse with Raina Mehler
Reinventing the Retail Experience with Giovanni Zaccariello
Coach gives a little festive love with first NFT collection
[Music]
Abby: Hello and welcome to Matters of Experience. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: I’m Brenda Cowan.
Abby: Today on the show, we’re focusing on retail experiences, how we consume stories at retail, the shift to Web3, and what constitutes a successful brand experience.
It’s not an original thought, but worth restating that the way we consume is changing. It started with technology helping us buy whatever we want, wherever we are, with a simple click of a button. And it’s now affected the idea of the retail store’s purpose. Things have changed and are changing. They now have to be more than a place to transact, but they need to start leveraging experiences to customers rather than products. Retail strategies are also being shaped by a new generation of customers who shop in a very different way to earlier generations, and we appreciate that technology is a differentiator, not a constraint.
So this group really challenges us to create these unique, immersive moments that include technology as a driver. So, with this in mind, I’m excited to introduce our guest on this journey, Giovanni Zaccariello, who is the senior vice president of Global Visual Experience at Coach. Born in Italy, he’s worked around the globe before landing here in the Big Apple. He currently leads visual merchandising, 3D creative studio, brand events, and, most recently, the Digital Experience Team at Coach. Gio, welcome to the show.
Gio: Thank you for having me. I’m so excited to be here with you today.
Brenda: Well, we’re very excited to have you and Gio; I’m going to kick start by mentioning the very interesting journey that has led you here today. Could you tell us the path that you followed to get here? And what are some of the obstacles that you had to overcome?
Gio: Yeah, so I think, as you mentioned, originally Italian, from my long name and surname, which you did really well pronouncing by the way, and really lived across, first Oxford, where I went to university, then London in the UK, Holland. And then I really took a chance in my career and I joined Coach, which I’m very happy about, and moved to Hong Kong. And now I’ve been in New York for over six years. And what I think all of these experiences have in common is the idea that you know, we do live in one world, and this idea of globalization, it’s part of everyday life, and I think one of the obstacles has always been about, you know, kind of being an immigrant in some of those countries and really trying to understand, you know, the country, the region and really learn and get educated before you really get immersed. The beginning isn’t always easy, right, but then once you get to it, it can unleash so much creativity and so much new bonds and new friendships. So I definitely would do it all over again.
Abby: The future of retail includes embracing ecosystems like offering free classes or workshops, so, you know, we see a number of brands doing this. It’s not purely about selling the products anymore. You know, I think the future of retail will probably all be experiential. I want to put my neck out and say that, it will all be the experience economy, so, what does a consumer want to feel when they walk into a store in general Gio, and how are stores changing to meet consumers needs?
Gio: Yeah, I think this is kind of like a $1,000,000 question and it’s something that I think we’ve all started to think a lot more about, especially because of the pandemic. But, I think at Coach, we kind of started to have those conversations way before and I think today the statement is that stores are not just the place where there’s bags on shelves, right, because the consumers kind of learn how to buy those bags online.
So I think about my job and the creatives jobs around the world is to really create that emotional connection with the consumer. And we’re using some words in my team, you know, one of the words is hyperphysical. The physical, the way it used to be is not enough anymore, so we are calling it hyperphysical in this way that is the nature of creating immersive experiences, thinking about connecting with the consumer across the five senses, creating immersive spaces where people can hang out. They don’t just need to shop the brand, but they can consume the brand, so I don’t think one of the elements is the solution, I think it’s about this diverging of creating the full immersive space because we’ve been at home for such a long time, and now that we’re starting to go out again, we really want more.
Brenda: Because you do so much tailoring of your experiences to different locations and different cultural centers, we’re curious to know, how do you exercise certain sensitivities? I’m wondering if you could give us an example, perhaps, of how you’ve had to really understand a local culture and tailor an experience for it.
Gio: Yeah, so I think one of the way that we do it here at Coach from a creative perspective is this idea of “glocal” experiences. So it’s a mixture of like a global idea, but then with a local touch. For example, in the past three years, we’ve been opening a few digital stores around the world where the customer can be fully immersed into the brand ethos. And what we’ve been doing is, as much as the design of the store is unified across the globe, the content of the screen is actually made in partnership with the local artist. Not even of the actual country, but of the city where the story is in, or the actual town where the story is in, and we are giving the artists a little bit of a free range. We’re just saying, okay, this is some of the Coach codes, this is, those are the value of the brand, and really express yourself through our Coach stores and I think we’ve seen a huge resonance.
We also partner with a lot of local hospitality vendors. If I think about what we did in Singapore, for example, last year with the bagel shop, or even like the way we are bringing to life craft and heritage around the world, we love to partner with artists to create motifs in different artwork on the bag. We have a program called Coach Create in the majority of our stores globally. We invite artists into stores to support customization, and this has been very, very, very, very successful. We also have incredible talent in the region, within my team, and within the larger Coach ecosystem, so, we really work with them closely before we go to execute an idea.
Also, we do some campaigns that are incredibly local, and they are only local, if I think about Ishii, the way we also bring our efforts around Lunar New Year. This is our very first time that we have launched a Diwali campaign in India. We have used our incredible Coach mascot Rexy, the Coach dino, and we partner with a local artist to create and celebrate the Festival of Lights, which is Diwali. And we have had incredible success. We are not going in and kind of trying to take over the brand or the culture, but really partnering with local ambassadors.
Abby: Talking about your Diwali activation, you activated, you know, throughout the store, the windows, the packaging, I know there was a photo moment, and digitally, you have the AR game. Where does that seed of the idea originate from? Tell us some of the ingredients that need to be present to make a successful activation.
Gio: Yeah, so I think, you know, it all starts with the Coach India team coming to us just saying, hey, we think we have a big idea here. We really want to celebrate the Festival of Lights this year. We really wanted to go a little bit bigger to really create an immersive space, an incredible experience. Once that brief was sent over, I think, you know, my team huddled and we kind of knew, kind of like, that we wanted to bring Rexy to life, but what was missing was a little bit of an understanding of the culture and what Diwali really meant.
Of course, we know it from our own perspective, but we did a little bit of a deep dive with the Coach India team, and then from there, the creative team really goes, goes wild usually, right, and creates a lot of different options that we were able to bring to life. And I’m happy that we were able not only to do a physical installation, but through the augmented reality game that we did, everybody around India, but also around the world, was able to celebrate Festival of Lights.
Abby: How do you work with vendors, like who’s creative on your team, and when do you go outside?
Gio: Most of the creative that you see through windows, pop-ups, installations, it’s done internally at Coach. What we do externally is production, so we have really strong production teams around the world across North America, China, and Japan, Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, you name it, Europe, London. So those are the teams that kind of take the idea and then go and do some bidding with some of the vendors from a production standpoint.
Due to the number of activations, we have started to actually go out and pitch to some agencies, and I think that’s kind of like what the future holds for us, to even challenge the brand a little bit and really create a little bit more innovation and creativity at the forefront. But most of the creative is done in-house.
We have a very small but very talented team here in New York, and the team is incredibly diverse. Their background is diverse. They come from all around the world and they’re able to really understand what each region really needs, and I think so far has been incredibly successful.
Brenda: Gio, this question is a bit of a build off of what you were talking about. What is it that you and your team do to always put yourself in an innovative mindset?
Gio: Yeah, there’s one piece that we say when we start a new season, a new idea, we say no idea is a bad idea. And I think when we kind of start brainstorming, you know, no ideas come from the top. You know, we work really closely together, but starting the conversation with we are not going to do something that we have already done. We’re not going to do something that someone else has already done. We really want to come up with something that feels a little bit new and different. And then the other thing that I keep saying a lot to the team is, if you don’t feel uncomfortable about this project, that means you’re doing the same thing again, right? So you really need to feel like you’re taking a risk. You’re really pushing the barriers because that’s when you’re doing something new and that’s when you can really touch the hearts and minds of the consumers. Consumers don’t want to see the same thing twice, right. Also, I think as a leader, I get really bored of doing the same thing twice. And I think that mindset has trickled down to the organization, to the team, not just the creative team, even the production. The way we produce needs to change, the way we embed technology and digital and AI into the conversations and to the projects that we have, the way we embed events, entertainment, hospitality, pop culture.
So we really start with a blank slate every single time. One of the other things, as well, that we talk a lot about at Coach is test and learn mentality, right? Some ideas are big, some ideas are small, but testing is fundamental, and learning from either success or failure before we start the next project is fundamental, so we do a lot of regroups internally around what did we learn, what went well, what can we do better?
Brenda: One of the things that really stuck in my mind was when you talked about a position of discomfort within the creative team. Now, Abby and I work with a lot of creative teams and a lot of creative individuals, and it is something that I think we might agree is really necessary, and I’m just curious what it is that you do that really fosters creativity and innovation while putting creatives in a position where they don’t know what’s going to happen.
Gio: I guess as a leader and a creative thinker, I guess I’m never too specific about the creative. I do share with them a lot of research, a lot of swipes. I’m online all the time, really trying to read a lot, watch seminars, literally a social media fanatic, to really understand what’s happening in the world. And when that happens with your team, you start seeing trends, right? You start understanding, okay, this is where the world is going. This is what the Gen Z are reacting to. And I think having a dialog with like-minded creatives, like me, even in New York, I mean, I made a lot of friends through this business and really sharing that with my team versus just saying I want you to create a Rexy for Diwali.
Right? And I think that sparks imagination because they think they have an opportunity to make great things. And I think when that becomes part of the culture, I think not only you have a great creative as an output, but you also have an inspired team that wants to continue to do greater and better things every day.
Abby: Yeah, I think it’s a lot about the leader and feeling comfortable being uncomfortable and also wanting to constantly challenge yourself creatively. Because I’ve had people join our creative teams and at first they’re like, whoa, we’re doing like, what are we doing? Where are we going? And it’s about really just letting them know that failure is great. We learn from failure. It’s important. True innovation only comes from stumbling and falling time and time and time again. So it sounds like you also imbue that in the team that works with you and that’s their fuel as well. You know, like when you’re with other people who feel the same way, you can’t help but bubble with inspiration and ideas. And I really feel like amazing things, magical things happen that one person didn’t create. I think it’s really key in a team to have everybody contributing to make that experience even better than it could have been.
Gio: I love it. If I can give you an example of this, exactly what you said, so last year was challenging, right? Every region was in a different part of coming out of the pandemic. We had this holiday campaign with animals going through the snow, and we ended up calling it Give a Little Love, and they were literally finding hearts around New York City, and then you share love with friends, family, loved ones. And two weeks before we launched a game, I just said to the team, those animals are so cute. What if we make them into NFTs. Two weeks before the launch.
Abby: I bet they loved you. They were like, oh yeah, Gio, no problem!
Brenda: Thanks Gio! No problem!
Gio: Right? So rallied a lot of individuals that were totally obsessed with this project, and we launched it on time. We crashed the Coach.com website, and we sold out within 2 seconds.
Abby: Wow.
Brenda: It’s amazing.
Gio: So you can make the impossible possible if you have a vision, but also if you have the team to come on that vision with you, right? So I guess what I’m saying is, it keeps going back to its about creating a culture of change and creating a culture of accepting failure, creating a culture of empowering innovation. Just because we’re doing well doesn’t mean we’re going to keep doing well, right, because the customer is changing so rapidly. We need to move as fast as them.
Abby: So let’s talk about community. People want to come together and share in a common experience. If we didn’t know that before COVID, we certainly know it now. Human connection is fundamental to who we are and how we relate to one another in the world around us. So tell us about the importance of human connection for you. Why do people want to go into a store rather than buy online?
Gio: You know I think I know I say this a lot, but we do have the best workforce in the industry. I am always so inspired when I go into our stores, not just in the US, everywhere around the world. And you know, starting with the store managers, they treat the stores as their houses. Especially during the pandemic, we learned that most of the store staff were actually getting to know the customers’ families, their habits, what do they do, what are they going through in their life? And I think you cannot do that online. And I think creating those meaningful connections are fundamental for the physical world. And I think that’s one of the reasons why I’m still here after 12 years. I think that those connections, not even in stores, but even in the corporate office, like it feels like it’s a big family, and that is very hard to find.
Brenda: I love what you’re saying about the personal relationships and the feeling and the sense of family that’s being generated. And it’s making me think of a recent quote from Paco Underhill, the retail researcher. He recently said that the hardest thing to change is operating culture and suggested that one of the things that many senior executives are asking these days are about what kind of operational changes they should be considering, and it sounds like you at Coach and your team there are already thinking like this. He said that shortening the distance between the executive suite and the front door is essential, and that is, as stores reopen, senior management need to commit to spend at least one weekend a month on the floor being visible to their staff, listening and watching what customers do, and that leadership in times of crisis is about leading from the front. Would you agree with this?
Gio: 100%. I do think that is part of our culture. The corporate team can learn from the field. The field can learn from corporate, so it’s an exchange of education, it’s an exchange of knowledge, but also it’s a big thank you when we travel, right? The store staff are at the forefront of managing all the challenges that we’re facing culturally, politically, also how consumers are changing, and I think once you get there and you really speak to some of the store managers and sales staff, you really understand what’s going on. Actually, as part of training, everybody at corporate spends time in the field as part of their role. It doesn’t matter what team you work in, whether it’s finance, procurement, creative, visual merchandising, HR. So it is a big part of our culture, so I’m glad you asked that question because it’s really true to our values here at Coach.
Abby: When we look at experiential exhibits that we create, we really try to focus on using and stimulating the five senses of visitors. We created an exhibition for the Jewish Museum, which had props that were food that we actually switched out once a week, and the smells that they created, it was a period piece, really took people back to the time.
So the five senses are so powerful in creating a connection. I really think the best shopping in a store isn’t driven by this sort of necessity to purchase the product. It’s driven by a sense of discovery and the excitement of finding something new. So how do you use the five senses in your work?
Gio: The touch comes to mind the most just because we mainly sell leather goods. So in our stores, we have, we call it the heart of the store, is our craftsmanship bar. We have leathers that you can touch. We also have details of the bags. You can actually see how the bags are made, so the touch is an incredible part of that.
Some of the other elements that we have started to look into are things like, for example, sounds, music, and smell. A lot of our activations include entertainment. Most of our brand ambassadors, including Lil Nas, which was just announced, are musicians. So music is a big part of our pop culture heritage. But also food. I mean, we’ve been bringing a lot of activations through hospitality.
And then also things that you can actually see, like we love things like color, but also bold experiential, bold moves, bold installations, so that even from ten meters away, you can actually see and then you can kind of get attracted to the experience, then once you are close to it, then things like smell and music become a little bit more dominant, but I think from far away, you always kind of start with the eye, right, the eye component, so, we talk a lot about ten meters, seven meters and one meter in terms of how we activate the five senses, Not all experiences count for all five, but I think we are trying to emerge, depending on what we are trying to do.
We do the same thing online. We are about to launch our very first virtual store. We have been discussing a lot about music because music can really create that immersive experience, it’s why you shop and actually what we are doing for the first time, we are activating pieces like Shop with Friends, for example, so you can actually, because you cannot do that on a website, you can shop by yourself, of course a friend could be next to you, but we are launching a Shop with Friend facilities as part of our virtual stores. So, you can do it in different ways. And I think this is an area that I think we will continue to evolve, and it’s fast moving incredibly fast moving and it fascinates me.
Abby: I just want to sort of pop in something that our team is working on right now. We’re part of the Ghost program with Snap and so we’re creating a Lens right now that, we feel like a lot of the AR try on, it looks very fake. It doesn’t realistic. The colors aren’t true. So we’ve developed a Lens where it’s completely realistic.
Our clothing matches the swatch in person, matches the swatch online. So you would walk into a real changing room and then you, for example, could be wearing a white or a black or a blue version of a t-shirt, and then using the lens you flick through and you can try on different colors. Thinking about that idea of collaboration and shopping with a friend, our hope for the next generation of it is this collaboration that you will be able to do on the Lens where, you know, I could be trying something on, and I could share it with Brenda, and she can flick through and show me what she thinks I should be wearing.
Because, you know, when you shop with a friend, you come out, do you like it? You’re not like it or boyfriend or girlfriend or whatever you with, and so there’s a lot of fun things that we’re working with AR right now in the retail space that we really think are going to be so useful and so much fun for the consumer in the future.
Gio: I love that. And you know, one thing that resonates with me is this idea of hidden digital, right, like what you are saying. Something that feels very seamless, I think for me, like just adding screens for the sake of adding screens, like it just doesn’t make sense for the brand. You know, we are such a heritage brand, and I think the way we are going to use digital is seamless, right. To your point, AR could be a great way of doing this, but I think some brands are doing it better than others. And I think what you describe for me is genius because it’s invisible, right? It’s an invisible layer.
Abby: Yeah.
Gio: And it’s going to make your experience smoother.
Abby: Yes.
Gio: And I think that for me, is what success looks like.
Brenda: I’m curious to know, sort of as an extension from this, Gio, what’s the role of social media in the work that you’re doing now?
Gio: Wow. I think social media, I would say, is at the heart of everything that we do because everything that we install, everything that we produce, it’s everywhere on social, right? People love to take photos. People love to share their experiences, and that’s why we actually design the spaces with that in mind. The ecosystem is complex, right? Because everybody’s everywhere. There’s so many different platforms, and I think we definitely, that’s at the heart of our creative process, to be honest. We work very closely with our social media team here in New York City so that not only we have their support from the beginning, but also when we launch something it’s widely distributed on our social channels so people know what’s going on.
Abby: Now let’s focus on Web3 and the metaverse, everybody’s favorite subject. How do you think this is going to affect your industry? Is it something you have to jump into because the risk of not getting in is too big?
Gio: So, you know, I think the word metaverse is being used so much and somehow has become a little bit of a buzzword. I think the way I see metaverse is somehow the future of social and just another channel about how people are interactive. I think about, for example, before social media, right?
Abby: When was that? I don’t think I remember life before social media.
Gio: Exactly, so I think that, that’s really for me, what metaverse is, it’s this kind of like new ecosystem that’s kind of taking off, and NFT and gaming are becoming the heart of the metaverse, but what this is going to look like in the next 4 to 5 years, it’s kind of hard to tell. And I think what we are doing in my team is again, testing and learning.
We’re going to try and experiment. That’s actually the word I was looking for. We’re going to try and experiment, and I think what we’re going to experiment in the US is very different to what we’re going to try and do in China because the consumer is in a different place with Web3 adaptation, and we’re going to have fun with it.
We’re not going to be in the Web3 world because everybody else is in the Web3 world. That is not how we’re going to do it. It’s just a trend. We’re not going to do something because, oh, it’s a PR stunt, you know, like we’re going to do it because it’s going to make sense for us and because it’s going to help us reach a new audience and maybe is not consuming Coach today.
Abby: That makes perfect sense. I hope there’s a lot of your peers here listening in because I think that’s good sound advice.
Brenda: I’d love to follow up by asking, how do you personally measure success?
Gio: Wow, big question. I think, I think for me it’s seeing consumers reactions to what we’re doing, not just in sales but also about changing that perception of the brand, which is true. It’s more like qualitative feedback than quantitative feedback. I think seeing consumer happy makes me happy. And you know, there’s a lot of things that we do because our consumers want it, right?
And I think the work that we do, especially in the creative world, is so hard when it becomes so personal, right? You need to make every creative more objective about the customer, not about you. Once you do that and once the customers are happy, I think the possibilities are really endless, and I try to get a lot of feedback from our local teams in region for every project so that we know whether we have reached the consumer in the right way and what they have to say. So for me, that’s a critical part of the process.
Abby: So before we wrap up, talking about personal things you actually enjoy, you know, I know you like coffee, maybe almost as much as I love my coffee. So, my favorite coffee shop right now is Coffee Project on Seventh Avenue. I think they really serve the best espresso. And I wanted to ask you what your favorite coffee shop is here in New York?
Brenda: The question everybody’s waiting to hear.
Gio: Oh, my God. You know what? I live in Hell’s Kitchen in Midtown and I would not survive without a small café that’s on 45th and 9th called Bird & Branch. They were my savior during the pandemic, you know, when we were all stuck inside the house, and I literally used to take my 30-minute break and go and get the coffee through the window, because you couldn’t get in. And there is such a sense of community. Every single neighbor goes there. We chat in the morning very early. It’s about the quality of coffee, but also like a place that’s become like a neighborhood hangout if you know what I mean. It’s one of a kind. They also try and recruit kids that maybe have difficulties and have maybe hard, it’s hard for them to find a job. So I kind of love all about it, to be honest, culturally, and I will give them my business every day. So, but also incredible coffee.
Abby: Yup, key, key.
Gio: Incredible coffee and I love my strong coffee, so, being from an Italian heritage.
Abby: Me too.
Gio: Great question. I wasn’t expecting that.
Abby: Well, it’s such an amazing experience going into a great coffee shop. And, you know, as you said, the smells, the people, the community, you know, and another place to gain inspiration. So, Gio, it has been amazing to have you with us on Matters of Experience today. Thank you so much.
Brenda: Thank you, Gio.
Gio: Thank you for having me, and chat soon.
Abby: Bye.
Brenda: Ciao, ciao.
[Music]
Producer: Matters of Experience is produced by Lorem Ipsum Corp. Please tune in next week for another conversation. Thank you all for listening.
Coach gives a little festive love with first NFT collection
[Music]
Abby: Hello and welcome to Matters of Experience. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: I’m Brenda Cowan.
Abby: Today on the show, we’re focusing on retail experiences, how we consume stories at retail, the shift to Web3, and what constitutes a successful brand experience.
It’s not an original thought, but worth restating that the way we consume is changing. It started with technology helping us buy whatever we want, wherever we are, with a simple click of a button. And it’s now affected the idea of the retail store’s purpose. Things have changed and are changing. They now have to be more than a place to transact, but they need to start leveraging experiences to customers rather than products. Retail strategies are also being shaped by a new generation of customers who shop in a very different way to earlier generations, and we appreciate that technology is a differentiator, not a constraint.
So this group really challenges us to create these unique, immersive moments that include technology as a driver. So, with this in mind, I’m excited to introduce our guest on this journey, Giovanni Zaccariello, who is the senior vice president of Global Visual Experience at Coach. Born in Italy, he’s worked around the globe before landing here in the Big Apple. He currently leads visual merchandising, 3D creative studio, brand events, and, most recently, the Digital Experience Team at Coach. Gio, welcome to the show.
Gio: Thank you for having me. I’m so excited to be here with you today.
Brenda: Well, we’re very excited to have you and Gio; I’m going to kick start by mentioning the very interesting journey that has led you here today. Could you tell us the path that you followed to get here? And what are some of the obstacles that you had to overcome?
Gio: Yeah, so I think, as you mentioned, originally Italian, from my long name and surname, which you did really well pronouncing by the way, and really lived across, first Oxford, where I went to university, then London in the UK, Holland. And then I really took a chance in my career and I joined Coach, which I’m very happy about, and moved to Hong Kong. And now I’ve been in New York for over six years. And what I think all of these experiences have in common is the idea that you know, we do live in one world, and this idea of globalization, it’s part of everyday life, and I think one of the obstacles has always been about, you know, kind of being an immigrant in some of those countries and really trying to understand, you know, the country, the region and really learn and get educated before you really get immersed. The beginning isn’t always easy, right, but then once you get to it, it can unleash so much creativity and so much new bonds and new friendships. So I definitely would do it all over again.
Abby: The future of retail includes embracing ecosystems like offering free classes or workshops, so, you know, we see a number of brands doing this. It’s not purely about selling the products anymore. You know, I think the future of retail will probably all be experiential. I want to put my neck out and say that, it will all be the experience economy, so, what does a consumer want to feel when they walk into a store in general Gio, and how are stores changing to meet consumers needs?
Gio: Yeah, I think this is kind of like a $1,000,000 question and it’s something that I think we’ve all started to think a lot more about, especially because of the pandemic. But, I think at Coach, we kind of started to have those conversations way before and I think today the statement is that stores are not just the place where there’s bags on shelves, right, because the consumers kind of learn how to buy those bags online.
So I think about my job and the creatives jobs around the world is to really create that emotional connection with the consumer. And we’re using some words in my team, you know, one of the words is hyperphysical. The physical, the way it used to be is not enough anymore, so we are calling it hyperphysical in this way that is the nature of creating immersive experiences, thinking about connecting with the consumer across the five senses, creating immersive spaces where people can hang out. They don’t just need to shop the brand, but they can consume the brand, so I don’t think one of the elements is the solution, I think it’s about this diverging of creating the full immersive space because we’ve been at home for such a long time, and now that we’re starting to go out again, we really want more.
Brenda: Because you do so much tailoring of your experiences to different locations and different cultural centers, we’re curious to know, how do you exercise certain sensitivities? I’m wondering if you could give us an example, perhaps, of how you’ve had to really understand a local culture and tailor an experience for it.
Gio: Yeah, so I think one of the way that we do it here at Coach from a creative perspective is this idea of “glocal” experiences. So it’s a mixture of like a global idea, but then with a local touch. For example, in the past three years, we’ve been opening a few digital stores around the world where the customer can be fully immersed into the brand ethos. And what we’ve been doing is, as much as the design of the store is unified across the globe, the content of the screen is actually made in partnership with the local artist. Not even of the actual country, but of the city where the story is in, or the actual town where the story is in, and we are giving the artists a little bit of a free range. We’re just saying, okay, this is some of the Coach codes, this is, those are the value of the brand, and really express yourself through our Coach stores and I think we’ve seen a huge resonance.
We also partner with a lot of local hospitality vendors. If I think about what we did in Singapore, for example, last year with the bagel shop, or even like the way we are bringing to life craft and heritage around the world, we love to partner with artists to create motifs in different artwork on the bag. We have a program called Coach Create in the majority of our stores globally. We invite artists into stores to support customization, and this has been very, very, very, very successful. We also have incredible talent in the region, within my team, and within the larger Coach ecosystem, so, we really work with them closely before we go to execute an idea.
Also, we do some campaigns that are incredibly local, and they are only local, if I think about Ishii, the way we also bring our efforts around Lunar New Year. This is our very first time that we have launched a Diwali campaign in India. We have used our incredible Coach mascot Rexy, the Coach dino, and we partner with a local artist to create and celebrate the Festival of Lights, which is Diwali. And we have had incredible success. We are not going in and kind of trying to take over the brand or the culture, but really partnering with local ambassadors.
Abby: Talking about your Diwali activation, you activated, you know, throughout the store, the windows, the packaging, I know there was a photo moment, and digitally, you have the AR game. Where does that seed of the idea originate from? Tell us some of the ingredients that need to be present to make a successful activation.
Gio: Yeah, so I think, you know, it all starts with the Coach India team coming to us just saying, hey, we think we have a big idea here. We really want to celebrate the Festival of Lights this year. We really wanted to go a little bit bigger to really create an immersive space, an incredible experience. Once that brief was sent over, I think, you know, my team huddled and we kind of knew, kind of like, that we wanted to bring Rexy to life, but what was missing was a little bit of an understanding of the culture and what Diwali really meant.
Of course, we know it from our own perspective, but we did a little bit of a deep dive with the Coach India team, and then from there, the creative team really goes, goes wild usually, right, and creates a lot of different options that we were able to bring to life. And I’m happy that we were able not only to do a physical installation, but through the augmented reality game that we did, everybody around India, but also around the world, was able to celebrate Festival of Lights.
Abby: How do you work with vendors, like who’s creative on your team, and when do you go outside?
Gio: Most of the creative that you see through windows, pop-ups, installations, it’s done internally at Coach. What we do externally is production, so we have really strong production teams around the world across North America, China, and Japan, Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, you name it, Europe, London. So those are the teams that kind of take the idea and then go and do some bidding with some of the vendors from a production standpoint.
Due to the number of activations, we have started to actually go out and pitch to some agencies, and I think that’s kind of like what the future holds for us, to even challenge the brand a little bit and really create a little bit more innovation and creativity at the forefront. But most of the creative is done in-house.
We have a very small but very talented team here in New York, and the team is incredibly diverse. Their background is diverse. They come from all around the world and they’re able to really understand what each region really needs, and I think so far has been incredibly successful.
Brenda: Gio, this question is a bit of a build off of what you were talking about. What is it that you and your team do to always put yourself in an innovative mindset?
Gio: Yeah, there’s one piece that we say when we start a new season, a new idea, we say no idea is a bad idea. And I think when we kind of start brainstorming, you know, no ideas come from the top. You know, we work really closely together, but starting the conversation with we are not going to do something that we have already done. We’re not going to do something that someone else has already done. We really want to come up with something that feels a little bit new and different. And then the other thing that I keep saying a lot to the team is, if you don’t feel uncomfortable about this project, that means you’re doing the same thing again, right? So you really need to feel like you’re taking a risk. You’re really pushing the barriers because that’s when you’re doing something new and that’s when you can really touch the hearts and minds of the consumers. Consumers don’t want to see the same thing twice, right. Also, I think as a leader, I get really bored of doing the same thing twice. And I think that mindset has trickled down to the organization, to the team, not just the creative team, even the production. The way we produce needs to change, the way we embed technology and digital and AI into the conversations and to the projects that we have, the way we embed events, entertainment, hospitality, pop culture.
So we really start with a blank slate every single time. One of the other things, as well, that we talk a lot about at Coach is test and learn mentality, right? Some ideas are big, some ideas are small, but testing is fundamental, and learning from either success or failure before we start the next project is fundamental, so we do a lot of regroups internally around what did we learn, what went well, what can we do better?
Brenda: One of the things that really stuck in my mind was when you talked about a position of discomfort within the creative team. Now, Abby and I work with a lot of creative teams and a lot of creative individuals, and it is something that I think we might agree is really necessary, and I’m just curious what it is that you do that really fosters creativity and innovation while putting creatives in a position where they don’t know what’s going to happen.
Gio: I guess as a leader and a creative thinker, I guess I’m never too specific about the creative. I do share with them a lot of research, a lot of swipes. I’m online all the time, really trying to read a lot, watch seminars, literally a social media fanatic, to really understand what’s happening in the world. And when that happens with your team, you start seeing trends, right? You start understanding, okay, this is where the world is going. This is what the Gen Z are reacting to. And I think having a dialog with like-minded creatives, like me, even in New York, I mean, I made a lot of friends through this business and really sharing that with my team versus just saying I want you to create a Rexy for Diwali.
Right? And I think that sparks imagination because they think they have an opportunity to make great things. And I think when that becomes part of the culture, I think not only you have a great creative as an output, but you also have an inspired team that wants to continue to do greater and better things every day.
Abby: Yeah, I think it’s a lot about the leader and feeling comfortable being uncomfortable and also wanting to constantly challenge yourself creatively. Because I’ve had people join our creative teams and at first they’re like, whoa, we’re doing like, what are we doing? Where are we going? And it’s about really just letting them know that failure is great. We learn from failure. It’s important. True innovation only comes from stumbling and falling time and time and time again. So it sounds like you also imbue that in the team that works with you and that’s their fuel as well. You know, like when you’re with other people who feel the same way, you can’t help but bubble with inspiration and ideas. And I really feel like amazing things, magical things happen that one person didn’t create. I think it’s really key in a team to have everybody contributing to make that experience even better than it could have been.
Gio: I love it. If I can give you an example of this, exactly what you said, so last year was challenging, right? Every region was in a different part of coming out of the pandemic. We had this holiday campaign with animals going through the snow, and we ended up calling it Give a Little Love, and they were literally finding hearts around New York City, and then you share love with friends, family, loved ones. And two weeks before we launched a game, I just said to the team, those animals are so cute. What if we make them into NFTs. Two weeks before the launch.
Abby: I bet they loved you. They were like, oh yeah, Gio, no problem!
Brenda: Thanks Gio! No problem!
Gio: Right? So rallied a lot of individuals that were totally obsessed with this project, and we launched it on time. We crashed the Coach.com website, and we sold out within 2 seconds.
Abby: Wow.
Brenda: It’s amazing.
Gio: So you can make the impossible possible if you have a vision, but also if you have the team to come on that vision with you, right? So I guess what I’m saying is, it keeps going back to its about creating a culture of change and creating a culture of accepting failure, creating a culture of empowering innovation. Just because we’re doing well doesn’t mean we’re going to keep doing well, right, because the customer is changing so rapidly. We need to move as fast as them.
Abby: So let’s talk about community. People want to come together and share in a common experience. If we didn’t know that before COVID, we certainly know it now. Human connection is fundamental to who we are and how we relate to one another in the world around us. So tell us about the importance of human connection for you. Why do people want to go into a store rather than buy online?
Gio: You know I think I know I say this a lot, but we do have the best workforce in the industry. I am always so inspired when I go into our stores, not just in the US, everywhere around the world. And you know, starting with the store managers, they treat the stores as their houses. Especially during the pandemic, we learned that most of the store staff were actually getting to know the customers’ families, their habits, what do they do, what are they going through in their life? And I think you cannot do that online. And I think creating those meaningful connections are fundamental for the physical world. And I think that’s one of the reasons why I’m still here after 12 years. I think that those connections, not even in stores, but even in the corporate office, like it feels like it’s a big family, and that is very hard to find.
Brenda: I love what you’re saying about the personal relationships and the feeling and the sense of family that’s being generated. And it’s making me think of a recent quote from Paco Underhill, the retail researcher. He recently said that the hardest thing to change is operating culture and suggested that one of the things that many senior executives are asking these days are about what kind of operational changes they should be considering, and it sounds like you at Coach and your team there are already thinking like this. He said that shortening the distance between the executive suite and the front door is essential, and that is, as stores reopen, senior management need to commit to spend at least one weekend a month on the floor being visible to their staff, listening and watching what customers do, and that leadership in times of crisis is about leading from the front. Would you agree with this?
Gio: 100%. I do think that is part of our culture. The corporate team can learn from the field. The field can learn from corporate, so it’s an exchange of education, it’s an exchange of knowledge, but also it’s a big thank you when we travel, right? The store staff are at the forefront of managing all the challenges that we’re facing culturally, politically, also how consumers are changing, and I think once you get there and you really speak to some of the store managers and sales staff, you really understand what’s going on. Actually, as part of training, everybody at corporate spends time in the field as part of their role. It doesn’t matter what team you work in, whether it’s finance, procurement, creative, visual merchandising, HR. So it is a big part of our culture, so I’m glad you asked that question because it’s really true to our values here at Coach.
Abby: When we look at experiential exhibits that we create, we really try to focus on using and stimulating the five senses of visitors. We created an exhibition for the Jewish Museum, which had props that were food that we actually switched out once a week, and the smells that they created, it was a period piece, really took people back to the time.
So the five senses are so powerful in creating a connection. I really think the best shopping in a store isn’t driven by this sort of necessity to purchase the product. It’s driven by a sense of discovery and the excitement of finding something new. So how do you use the five senses in your work?
Gio: The touch comes to mind the most just because we mainly sell leather goods. So in our stores, we have, we call it the heart of the store, is our craftsmanship bar. We have leathers that you can touch. We also have details of the bags. You can actually see how the bags are made, so the touch is an incredible part of that.
Some of the other elements that we have started to look into are things like, for example, sounds, music, and smell. A lot of our activations include entertainment. Most of our brand ambassadors, including Lil Nas, which was just announced, are musicians. So music is a big part of our pop culture heritage. But also food. I mean, we’ve been bringing a lot of activations through hospitality.
And then also things that you can actually see, like we love things like color, but also bold experiential, bold moves, bold installations, so that even from ten meters away, you can actually see and then you can kind of get attracted to the experience, then once you are close to it, then things like smell and music become a little bit more dominant, but I think from far away, you always kind of start with the eye, right, the eye component, so, we talk a lot about ten meters, seven meters and one meter in terms of how we activate the five senses, Not all experiences count for all five, but I think we are trying to emerge, depending on what we are trying to do.
We do the same thing online. We are about to launch our very first virtual store. We have been discussing a lot about music because music can really create that immersive experience, it’s why you shop and actually what we are doing for the first time, we are activating pieces like Shop with Friends, for example, so you can actually, because you cannot do that on a website, you can shop by yourself, of course a friend could be next to you, but we are launching a Shop with Friend facilities as part of our virtual stores. So, you can do it in different ways. And I think this is an area that I think we will continue to evolve, and it’s fast moving incredibly fast moving and it fascinates me.
Abby: I just want to sort of pop in something that our team is working on right now. We’re part of the Ghost program with Snap and so we’re creating a Lens right now that, we feel like a lot of the AR try on, it looks very fake. It doesn’t realistic. The colors aren’t true. So we’ve developed a Lens where it’s completely realistic.
Our clothing matches the swatch in person, matches the swatch online. So you would walk into a real changing room and then you, for example, could be wearing a white or a black or a blue version of a t-shirt, and then using the lens you flick through and you can try on different colors. Thinking about that idea of collaboration and shopping with a friend, our hope for the next generation of it is this collaboration that you will be able to do on the Lens where, you know, I could be trying something on, and I could share it with Brenda, and she can flick through and show me what she thinks I should be wearing.
Because, you know, when you shop with a friend, you come out, do you like it? You’re not like it or boyfriend or girlfriend or whatever you with, and so there’s a lot of fun things that we’re working with AR right now in the retail space that we really think are going to be so useful and so much fun for the consumer in the future.
Gio: I love that. And you know, one thing that resonates with me is this idea of hidden digital, right, like what you are saying. Something that feels very seamless, I think for me, like just adding screens for the sake of adding screens, like it just doesn’t make sense for the brand. You know, we are such a heritage brand, and I think the way we are going to use digital is seamless, right. To your point, AR could be a great way of doing this, but I think some brands are doing it better than others. And I think what you describe for me is genius because it’s invisible, right? It’s an invisible layer.
Abby: Yeah.
Gio: And it’s going to make your experience smoother.
Abby: Yes.
Gio: And I think that for me, is what success looks like.
Brenda: I’m curious to know, sort of as an extension from this, Gio, what’s the role of social media in the work that you’re doing now?
Gio: Wow. I think social media, I would say, is at the heart of everything that we do because everything that we install, everything that we produce, it’s everywhere on social, right? People love to take photos. People love to share their experiences, and that’s why we actually design the spaces with that in mind. The ecosystem is complex, right? Because everybody’s everywhere. There’s so many different platforms, and I think we definitely, that’s at the heart of our creative process, to be honest. We work very closely with our social media team here in New York City so that not only we have their support from the beginning, but also when we launch something it’s widely distributed on our social channels so people know what’s going on.
Abby: Now let’s focus on Web3 and the metaverse, everybody’s favorite subject. How do you think this is going to affect your industry? Is it something you have to jump into because the risk of not getting in is too big?
Gio: So, you know, I think the word metaverse is being used so much and somehow has become a little bit of a buzzword. I think the way I see metaverse is somehow the future of social and just another channel about how people are interactive. I think about, for example, before social media, right?
Abby: When was that? I don’t think I remember life before social media.
Gio: Exactly, so I think that, that’s really for me, what metaverse is, it’s this kind of like new ecosystem that’s kind of taking off, and NFT and gaming are becoming the heart of the metaverse, but what this is going to look like in the next 4 to 5 years, it’s kind of hard to tell. And I think what we are doing in my team is again, testing and learning.
We’re going to try and experiment. That’s actually the word I was looking for. We’re going to try and experiment, and I think what we’re going to experiment in the US is very different to what we’re going to try and do in China because the consumer is in a different place with Web3 adaptation, and we’re going to have fun with it.
We’re not going to be in the Web3 world because everybody else is in the Web3 world. That is not how we’re going to do it. It’s just a trend. We’re not going to do something because, oh, it’s a PR stunt, you know, like we’re going to do it because it’s going to make sense for us and because it’s going to help us reach a new audience and maybe is not consuming Coach today.
Abby: That makes perfect sense. I hope there’s a lot of your peers here listening in because I think that’s good sound advice.
Brenda: I’d love to follow up by asking, how do you personally measure success?
Gio: Wow, big question. I think, I think for me it’s seeing consumers reactions to what we’re doing, not just in sales but also about changing that perception of the brand, which is true. It’s more like qualitative feedback than quantitative feedback. I think seeing consumer happy makes me happy. And you know, there’s a lot of things that we do because our consumers want it, right?
And I think the work that we do, especially in the creative world, is so hard when it becomes so personal, right? You need to make every creative more objective about the customer, not about you. Once you do that and once the customers are happy, I think the possibilities are really endless, and I try to get a lot of feedback from our local teams in region for every project so that we know whether we have reached the consumer in the right way and what they have to say. So for me, that’s a critical part of the process.
Abby: So before we wrap up, talking about personal things you actually enjoy, you know, I know you like coffee, maybe almost as much as I love my coffee. So, my favorite coffee shop right now is Coffee Project on Seventh Avenue. I think they really serve the best espresso. And I wanted to ask you what your favorite coffee shop is here in New York?
Brenda: The question everybody’s waiting to hear.
Gio: Oh, my God. You know what? I live in Hell’s Kitchen in Midtown and I would not survive without a small café that’s on 45th and 9th called Bird & Branch. They were my savior during the pandemic, you know, when we were all stuck inside the house, and I literally used to take my 30-minute break and go and get the coffee through the window, because you couldn’t get in. And there is such a sense of community. Every single neighbor goes there. We chat in the morning very early. It’s about the quality of coffee, but also like a place that’s become like a neighborhood hangout if you know what I mean. It’s one of a kind. They also try and recruit kids that maybe have difficulties and have maybe hard, it’s hard for them to find a job. So I kind of love all about it, to be honest, culturally, and I will give them my business every day. So, but also incredible coffee.
Abby: Yup, key, key.
Gio: Incredible coffee and I love my strong coffee, so, being from an Italian heritage.
Abby: Me too.
Gio: Great question. I wasn’t expecting that.
Abby: Well, it’s such an amazing experience going into a great coffee shop. And, you know, as you said, the smells, the people, the community, you know, and another place to gain inspiration. So, Gio, it has been amazing to have you with us on Matters of Experience today. Thank you so much.
Brenda: Thank you, Gio.
Gio: Thank you for having me, and chat soon.
Abby: Bye.
Brenda: Ciao, ciao.
[Music]
Producer: Matters of Experience is produced by Lorem Ipsum Corp. Please tune in next week for another conversation. Thank you all for listening.
Reinventing the Retail Experience with Giovanni Zaccariello
Where's the Bathroom? with Alex Bitus
Judy Rand’s Visitors Bill of Rights
[Music]
Abby: Hello and welcome to Matters of Experience. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: And I am Brenda Cowan.
Abby: The title of our show – Where’s the Bathroom? – may seem odd, but in our work the bathroom is an excellent subject to represent the difference of opinion, and let’s call it, that we experienced designers have with architects. I think it’s a good place to start exploring the sometimes tumultuous relationship we have with each other. Brenda, I’m referring to the stereotype that the architect thinks people come to see the building, and we think they come to visit the content.
Brenda: Well, with our special guest today, we’re certainly going to get the very important architectural perspective so that maybe we can battle the stereotype. But, as regards what the visitor is coming for, I think that they come for both the architecture and the designed experience. We can’t separate the two, which is why I think in my experience, like yours as well, Abby, it’s difficult to understand why it is that the two are often separated when the process is underway. One cannot work well without the other.
Abby: Yep, completely. And I’m looking forward to today’s podcast discussion because I’m very proud to introduce Alex Bitus. Alex, hello.
Alex: Hello.
Abby: Alex is the founder of Buro Bitus, an award-winning international architecture and urban design firm that values cooperation, not competition, and ideas, not egos. Buro Bitus is 100% employee owned and very proud of it. Alex trained as a structural and civil engineer as well as an architect, and his early days were spent working closely with British architects Tony Kettle and Will Alsop.
Brenda: Alex, I’m going to kick it off with the title of this podcast, Where’s the Bathroom, and why the bathroom is illustrative of the battle between the architect and the design firm, and also why it’s indicative to a visitor as to the thoroughness and care of the design and the architecture of the building. Alex, what does a bathroom mean to you?
Alex: Well, in my opinion, the bathroom is the most important room in the building, and when I visit any public buildings, I’m trying to make sure I visit bathroom, just to see. In my opinion, it’s an indicator of the quality of work, and personally, I’ve had lots of experience designing bathrooms, and at Buro Bitus we put a lot of efforts in designing bathrooms.
We designed Platov Airport, and we spent lots of time designing the bathroom in that airport, and a few years later, we were doing another airport, and I went on the web to search, sort of I would say, common trends about modern design. And when I typed modern bathroom airport design, I swear, a quarter of the results that Google threw back at me was that bathroom we designed at Platov Airport. I would never imagine that so many people would take a picture of a bathroom and post it on the web.
Abby: Look at that. It’s not just this obsessed with bathroom, it’s the users, too. I’m so happy about that. Well, I have many bathroom, or as I’ve been known to call it, loo stories. My most relevant to this conversation is when we are brought on midway through the design of a building and not at the very beginning. And a really prominent architectural firm had provided us with client-approved designs for a five story building, which is about 10,000 square meters, and it had one bathroom, I kid you not. Not one per floor, just one bathroom. We had to have several meetings to explain the importance of more than one bathroom. Clearly, none of these people ever needed to use the loo.
Brenda: Or have children.
Abby: Exactly. Because what I feel some architects forget is that we’re creating an experience and it has to be a comfortable experience. In the case of museums or, as you mentioned, retail experiences, which means things have to be practical. Nobody really wants to be dragging that child along who’s desperate to go to the bathroom up three flights of stairs only to have to stand in a really long line.
So I also really enjoy themed bathrooms, and one of the toilets stalls I’d like to highlight is there’s five stalls at Liberty Market in Gilbert, Arizona, where each stall, Brenda, reflects the individual contributions that go into running that restaurant. So each one’s like designed by a member of the staff and has things like a unique playlist and unique artifacts and photos.
So, for example, the co-owner and chef there, David Traynor’s stall has recipes, photos of his creations, and dangling cooking tools. I love this because it’s not just design. It tells you a story while you sit.
Brenda: This is so mind-boggling. I am so creating a playlist for my bathroom at home. I’ve got to tell you, you know, Judy Rand, museum great, created the Visitor Bill of Rights back in the 1990s. And the right for a visitor to be comfortable is a top item. Nothing has changed since then, and yet the right to have this level of comfort is still a question, which I find mind-boggling. Alex, what are your thoughts about the rights for visitors to have comfort as a top priority? How is it that you’re thinking about things like site, and, pardon the pun, visitor flow?
Alex: Yes, one of the key drivers that we consider is the visitor’s comfort. We do lots of airport design, and air travel for some people is a stressful situation. What we find that calm, sort of calm environment can be created by lighting and natural materials. We tend to provide a comfort, visual comfort and actually, it works. It works, I must say, I’m reading lots of reviews on the web, and people are happy with the environment.
Flow, I believe it needs to be predicted. It shouldn’t be a maze. We tend to do a predicted experience, predicted flow, so people do not get lost, they know where they are going, and high ceilings, big rooms, they tend to help. Yeah. We always consider that in our design.
Abby: Oh, that’s interesting you mention high ceilings. So you’re saying that high ceilings make people feel more comfortable than lower, more, sort of cozy ceilings?
Alex: Lower ceilings tend to provide sort of tension and – well, that’s how I feel.
Abby: Yeah. Yeah.
Alex: High ceiling gives more air. You can put a sign that’s easier to observe from a distance. So if space allows, if design allows, we would have a high ceiling, definitely.
Abby: Let’s talk about the visitor flow in the Arctic Museum that we worked on.
Alex: Yes, I think you were the first to come up with the idea of the museum. And I believe that at that point, you didn’t have any information about the site. In your vision, you had sort of five areas, and those five areas supposed to be five different floors in the building. And when I saw the site, it’s actually a thin, narrow site that the building with five stories or six stories, it actually wouldn’t fit with the surrounding.
So I was trying to find a way to make it flat to fill the site as much as we can. But I also knew that there has to be another area, the common hall, where we enter, where we leave, where the restaurant is, where the auditorium is, cloakroom. So that sixth area has to be somewhere between those five areas, and as the site is thin and long, I put that area right in the middle. And I also was trying to find a way how we visit all the areas by a single floor, entering through and leaving the building through the same area, because, in my opinion, the returning experience is also experience.
A returning experience in Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan is quite interesting because it’s a spiral rotunda. You’re going up visiting all the areas, and then to return, you’re going back the same route. So I was trying to find a different solution that you shouldn’t go through the areas you visited before. So it’s a clockwise direction, but shifting the areas would allow us to visit them once and not bypass them on your way back.
Brenda: I’d love to zero in even further on the exhibition space and a real classic challenge that can oftentimes come up between the design firm and the client and the architect is on the subject of windows. So, when we have collections and when we have artifacts that need to be preserved, that sets up kind of an automatic challenge regarding planning for windows and how that could work within concept and visitor experience.
Alex, can you talk to us about how it is that you design solutions is for spaces where you have to either incorporate windows in new and unique ways or somehow convince a client and or exhibition design firm that they can’t have what they want.
Alex: Yes, in Arctic Museum, we, I think initially we had more windows and then you guys said that, no, no, no, we don’t want them. So we left them in the central core and we left them in one of the areas that you actually find a nice solution to, to include them into your experience area. But yeah, there are some buildings that by nature has to be without windows like a retail mall.
With one of the retail malls, we found a quite interesting solution by wrapping the facade with a tensile fabric. It’s a folded fabric. It represents ballerina skirt, and it was the main idea because it was in a city and the city was famous for its ballet, and it looks fantastic, even without windows. So, buildings without windows is possible. It’s a challenge, but it’s an interesting task to find a solution.
Abby: Well, I love that solution because as you mentioned, it’s a city had a large focus on ballet, taking that narrative and using it around the building continues that story. I just think that’s like a wonderful design solution and content moment. Let’s focus on inspiration for a moment. Do you have a style, and where do you get your inspiration from for a project?
Alex: Well, I think there are a few key drivers. First is environment. I think the building needs to fit with the surrounding location. I don’t say it has to blend with it. No, it can stand on its own, but with respect to what’s surrounding it. Materials is another source of inspiration. As I mentioned earlier, the tensile fabric that we used on one of the retail malls. Historic contexts. If there is a site history. Shapes. If you’re looking to design an interesting, exciting building, then shapes of the building could be another source of inspiration.
Brenda: I’ve got to say, I’m really, really happy to hear you talk about not having this, you know, sort of signature that you just stamp on every single project, and it’s making me think of a question that I received from a student not long ago who was very, very concerned, and he pulls me aside, and he’s like, “Professor, I don’t have a style. And what am I going to do? I’m never going to get work. I don’t have a look.” And I told him, you’re doing the right thing because it’s not about you. It’s about the audience. It’s about everything. It’s about the context and the story. It’s really, really about those things. And no one should ever go into an exhibition and ask themselves about the exhibition designer. It’s our job to allow everything else to speak for itself.
I would love to hear an example, Alex, of a time when you have been able to work with a client, the experienced design company, and you all worked together really, really well. What was at the heart of the success?
Alex: Well, I think the latest project that we had with Lorem Ipsum, Arctic Museum, was a nice example of collaboration between architects, experience designers, and the client. Client is definitely one of the key factors because client never sort of pushed in terms of design. They were happy with our competence, with our experience, and they left it entirely to us.
So, maybe one of the key factors that we knew each other before starting this project, we sort of on the same wave, so we work together respecting each other opinion. And as I think the result is, is quite nice.
Abby: Yeah, I think it’s interesting that you mentioned the client, and their role is so key. They need to listen to the consultants, to the people with experience. Oftentimes, if it’s a very large institution, some of our clients, it’s the first time ever doing this. We need to collaborate with them. They need to also trust and collaborate with us.
I think. Brenda we need a whole other podcast about getting a client to trust you and how do you do that because it is a real skill, and there’s a real effort, and sometimes you win, and sometimes you don’t.
Brenda: Oh, we are going to get a lot of caller comments for this one.
Alex: Yeah, we actually had experience with a client. It was Platov Airport, when client had a vision on how the airport needs to be designed, and in a design brief, they said that they want to have a flat roof. And when we started with the first design ideas, we realized that it’s a box shape and all we do is just skinning that box. It’s just like a facade design. It’s not, we’re not designing a building, and we, I don’t remember why, but for some reason we decided to ignore the client’s vision. And we came up with the arched roof like a bridge going from the front to the apron where the airplanes are. So, the idea was a sky bridge, and we thought that at least if we don’t win the competition, at least we have something that we will not feel ashamed of. You know, we can be proud of our concept. And when client saw all 11 proposals, all the other architects, they were following the brief, and they did a flat roof, and our building was the only one different, completely different. And then clients thought, hmm, do we really want to have a flat roof? And we won the competition.
Brenda: I would just imagine that at some point you have to determine, and it’s great in a way if it can come up in the bid, will you be able to collaborate with your client if right out of the gate the ask is unreasonable or completely lacking in vision? So, if the client was not amenable to the change that you had proposed, I can well imagine that you still, you know, dodged a bullet, perhaps because, you know, you could have won the competition but been utterly miserable or never been able to really, truly collaborate, to work together. And, you know, a successful collaboration is essential for a successful project, I think.
Alex
I even had experience when client, with some residential projects, that a client had an initial idea from done by other architect and they would approach us and say, look, we like the areas, the plan, but we don’t like the facade and architects don’t want to change their facade. They said it’s their vision, and they just refused to, to do anything. So we have the experience when clients approach us and asking to redesign someone’s design. It’s an interesting experience, I must say.
Brenda: Now, I’d love to get just a slight shift of perspective on this and ask you, Alex, what do our listeners need to know about working with an architect?
Alex: Well, I think it’s like with any design team, when you need to collaborate with different parties, it’s just respect each other opinions, but mind your vision as well. It’s probably like playing in a music band. If band is playing jazz and you’re trying to play country, then it won’t fit with the rest of the band, and you will be just kicked off. All members of the team, they play different music instruments, but at the end it sounds like a proper jazz. So working with architects is just not to push your ego and not to allow for architects to push their ego first. It’s, it’s respect at the end, I think.
Abby: Yeah, I love that analogy to playing in a band. I think that’s exactly how it feels. Everybody has the different competencies, experiences and job to do, and they all have to work and respect each other and know those boundaries.
I have a quick question about, you know, I think you’re a unique architect, Alex, because of your history, like you did structural and civil engineering, so when we’ve got all this technical equipment, we’ve got tons of screens, we’ve all our watchout, all our hardware and, you know, often it’s forgotten and it’s, oh, you just need this amount of space, but you’re always planning and making space for us. So can you talk a little bit about your background and how it really helps make sure that the boring stuff is remembered from a structural engineering perspective?
Alex: Yes, I started structural and civil engineering first. I got my diploma, and I realized that it’s not really what I want to do. It’s a bit boring, and I was looking for something more creative, and architecture was the closest sort of thing, and it blends quite well. On all my projects, I do structural design, all the technical areas, they actually come from experience. But at the later stages when structural engineers, mechanical electrical engineers joining the team, it’s always a fight. They need a room, they need a space to run the ducts. And at the design stage, I sort of can predict where it’s going to be and how it’s going to be run just at the concept level, you know, I’m not an expert, but I have a general idea how it works, so that’s how it works from my, for me.
Abby: It’s fantastic from our perspective because we don’t walk in during a build and see a bunch of ducts that weren’t supposed to be there but now have to be there because nobody’s thought about it. So I think having that skill and that expertise really sort of fulfills that gray area between us and you that often is sort of left and forgotten about and really enables us to really design and build what we say we’re going to design and build. There’s no bait and switch. There’s no changing. There’s no large structural problems that come up that mean we only have to have one bathroom just to bring it around to bathrooms again.
Alex: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think it’s down to client. If they want at the concept stage, they can invite structural, and they can invite mechanical electrical engineers just to do a concept on structure and mechanical and electrical. It helps a lot and the end.
Abby: And then, when you think about the future in your work, what are you excited about?
Alex: New countries. I think exploring new cultures is interesting, and learning from those cultures and designing something that we never experienced before is quite interesting. So yeah, that’s I think, the future I see for Buro Bitus.
Abby: Do you have any solid advice for young architects?
Alex: It’s not an easy job, I would say. We do lots of concepts, we do lots of competition, and I think we maybe are one out of ten, one out of 20. So, so many efforts and thoughts and designs, they are never going to be implemented, never going to be realized. So it’s a hard thing to do and be prepared that you’re not going to be you’re not going to win on every level. That can demotivate, I must say, but if you’re prepared for that, then go for it.
Abby:
Why did you like being an architect then, Alex?
Alex: It’s very exciting. I must say. It’s like a message to future. You leave something behind. You’re not going to live that long, but your building’s going to live, and people are going to use them. It’s an extremely nice feeling. It just gives a warmth inside, and it gives a strength to carry on.
Abby: Thank you so much for joining us today. I hope at the very least you all look at bathroom design and museums in a different way, and at most, the architects listening will recommend to their clients to bring in the experience design team at the beginning, not after the building has been designed.
Brenda: Hear, Hear.
Abby: So thank you, Alex, so much for joining us.
Brenda: Thank you, Alex.
Alex: Thank you.
[Music]
Abby: Now we’re going to do a double take where we focus on things we heard, read, and saw in the media that a noteworthy and we want to punctuate.
Brenda: So, Abby, it is not just us who are obsessed with, as you call it, the loo. July 29th, the American Alliance of Museums put out on their blog The Best Museum Bathrooms, According to Museum People, and I highly recommend this read. So in this blog, you’ll read through if it’s the Smith College Museum of Art or if it is the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, you will read about a number of different bathrooms that are designed by artists, and that include things such as objects from museum collections.
Abby: Oh, I love that.
Brenda: At the Mariners Museum and Park, they have panels in their stalls that explain bathroom elements on ships and about how to use the bathroom at sea. Who doesn’t want to do that?
Abby: That’s fantastic.
Brenda: It is fantastic.
Abby: It’s like putting you in the position of being at sea. I never thought about what it would be like to go the bathroom.
Brenda: At the Glore Psychiatric Museum, according to Ann Bennett, they are “nightmare inducing bathrooms, but in a good way.” They are artworks that, according to Sara Elizabeth Wilson, they are “awesome, but the clown and optical illusion bathrooms are the best.” I think I should just leave it at clown and let all of our listeners imagine for themselves what they would encounter in that particular bathroom.
Abby: There’s a very interactive bathroom at the Denver Art Museum, which sings ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’ while you’re washing your hands. And I think if you can get them all activated at the same time, they’ll sort of sing in this canon, so you can obviously spend a lot of time in the bathroom playing along with that. That was developed by Denver artist Jim Green, who’s also known for a laughing escalator at the Colorado Convention Center. So again, talking about sound and how you can use sound to interact.
Brenda: I just, I have to conclude my appreciation for bathrooms. Actually, this one is not in this particular article, but this is my favorite bathroom experience – this is like True Confessions time, my favorite bathroom experience – was at the Boston Children’s Museum, where they had inside the bathroom displays of scat, as they put it, of different animals. So, you know what scat is, right? Do they? They don’t say that in in the UK. Oh gosh. Poop. They had displays of animal poop. So, talk about being topical and on theme in every environment, talk about extending the experience in the story.
Abby: I love it. So I think overall our point is the devil’s in the details. And if you’re designing an experience, you have to design the whole experience. There shouldn’t be a blind spot.
Brenda: Hear, hear.
Abby: So I hope that our listeners will do a double take at least next time they’re sitting in the bathroom of a museum and really decide, is this a good experience or not?
Brenda: Don’t miss an opportunity. The bathroom is not an interstitial space, although interstitial spaces are critical. Every stairwell counts, every hallway matters. Definitely use the bathroom. People are captive audiences, folks. Make good use of it.
Abby: Tell your story. Thank you, everybody.
Brenda: Thank you.
[Music]
Producer: Matters of Experience is produced by Lorem Ipsum Corp. Please tune in next week for another conversation. Thank you all for listening.
Judy Rand’s Visitors Bill of Rights
[Music]
Abby: Hello and welcome to Matters of Experience. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: And I am Brenda Cowan.
Abby: The title of our show – Where’s the Bathroom? – may seem odd, but in our work the bathroom is an excellent subject to represent the difference of opinion, and let’s call it, that we experienced designers have with architects. I think it’s a good place to start exploring the sometimes tumultuous relationship we have with each other. Brenda, I’m referring to the stereotype that the architect thinks people come to see the building, and we think they come to visit the content.
Brenda: Well, with our special guest today, we’re certainly going to get the very important architectural perspective so that maybe we can battle the stereotype. But, as regards what the visitor is coming for, I think that they come for both the architecture and the designed experience. We can’t separate the two, which is why I think in my experience, like yours as well, Abby, it’s difficult to understand why it is that the two are often separated when the process is underway. One cannot work well without the other.
Abby: Yep, completely. And I’m looking forward to today’s podcast discussion because I’m very proud to introduce Alex Bitus. Alex, hello.
Alex: Hello.
Abby: Alex is the founder of Buro Bitus, an award-winning international architecture and urban design firm that values cooperation, not competition, and ideas, not egos. Buro Bitus is 100% employee owned and very proud of it. Alex trained as a structural and civil engineer as well as an architect, and his early days were spent working closely with British architects Tony Kettle and Will Alsop.
Brenda: Alex, I’m going to kick it off with the title of this podcast, Where’s the Bathroom, and why the bathroom is illustrative of the battle between the architect and the design firm, and also why it’s indicative to a visitor as to the thoroughness and care of the design and the architecture of the building. Alex, what does a bathroom mean to you?
Alex: Well, in my opinion, the bathroom is the most important room in the building, and when I visit any public buildings, I’m trying to make sure I visit bathroom, just to see. In my opinion, it’s an indicator of the quality of work, and personally, I’ve had lots of experience designing bathrooms, and at Buro Bitus we put a lot of efforts in designing bathrooms.
We designed Platov Airport, and we spent lots of time designing the bathroom in that airport, and a few years later, we were doing another airport, and I went on the web to search, sort of I would say, common trends about modern design. And when I typed modern bathroom airport design, I swear, a quarter of the results that Google threw back at me was that bathroom we designed at Platov Airport. I would never imagine that so many people would take a picture of a bathroom and post it on the web.
Abby: Look at that. It’s not just this obsessed with bathroom, it’s the users, too. I’m so happy about that. Well, I have many bathroom, or as I’ve been known to call it, loo stories. My most relevant to this conversation is when we are brought on midway through the design of a building and not at the very beginning. And a really prominent architectural firm had provided us with client-approved designs for a five story building, which is about 10,000 square meters, and it had one bathroom, I kid you not. Not one per floor, just one bathroom. We had to have several meetings to explain the importance of more than one bathroom. Clearly, none of these people ever needed to use the loo.
Brenda: Or have children.
Abby: Exactly. Because what I feel some architects forget is that we’re creating an experience and it has to be a comfortable experience. In the case of museums or, as you mentioned, retail experiences, which means things have to be practical. Nobody really wants to be dragging that child along who’s desperate to go to the bathroom up three flights of stairs only to have to stand in a really long line.
So I also really enjoy themed bathrooms, and one of the toilets stalls I’d like to highlight is there’s five stalls at Liberty Market in Gilbert, Arizona, where each stall, Brenda, reflects the individual contributions that go into running that restaurant. So each one’s like designed by a member of the staff and has things like a unique playlist and unique artifacts and photos.
So, for example, the co-owner and chef there, David Traynor’s stall has recipes, photos of his creations, and dangling cooking tools. I love this because it’s not just design. It tells you a story while you sit.
Brenda: This is so mind-boggling. I am so creating a playlist for my bathroom at home. I’ve got to tell you, you know, Judy Rand, museum great, created the Visitor Bill of Rights back in the 1990s. And the right for a visitor to be comfortable is a top item. Nothing has changed since then, and yet the right to have this level of comfort is still a question, which I find mind-boggling. Alex, what are your thoughts about the rights for visitors to have comfort as a top priority? How is it that you’re thinking about things like site, and, pardon the pun, visitor flow?
Alex: Yes, one of the key drivers that we consider is the visitor’s comfort. We do lots of airport design, and air travel for some people is a stressful situation. What we find that calm, sort of calm environment can be created by lighting and natural materials. We tend to provide a comfort, visual comfort and actually, it works. It works, I must say, I’m reading lots of reviews on the web, and people are happy with the environment.
Flow, I believe it needs to be predicted. It shouldn’t be a maze. We tend to do a predicted experience, predicted flow, so people do not get lost, they know where they are going, and high ceilings, big rooms, they tend to help. Yeah. We always consider that in our design.
Abby: Oh, that’s interesting you mention high ceilings. So you’re saying that high ceilings make people feel more comfortable than lower, more, sort of cozy ceilings?
Alex: Lower ceilings tend to provide sort of tension and – well, that’s how I feel.
Abby: Yeah. Yeah.
Alex: High ceiling gives more air. You can put a sign that’s easier to observe from a distance. So if space allows, if design allows, we would have a high ceiling, definitely.
Abby: Let’s talk about the visitor flow in the Arctic Museum that we worked on.
Alex: Yes, I think you were the first to come up with the idea of the museum. And I believe that at that point, you didn’t have any information about the site. In your vision, you had sort of five areas, and those five areas supposed to be five different floors in the building. And when I saw the site, it’s actually a thin, narrow site that the building with five stories or six stories, it actually wouldn’t fit with the surrounding.
So I was trying to find a way to make it flat to fill the site as much as we can. But I also knew that there has to be another area, the common hall, where we enter, where we leave, where the restaurant is, where the auditorium is, cloakroom. So that sixth area has to be somewhere between those five areas, and as the site is thin and long, I put that area right in the middle. And I also was trying to find a way how we visit all the areas by a single floor, entering through and leaving the building through the same area, because, in my opinion, the returning experience is also experience.
A returning experience in Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan is quite interesting because it’s a spiral rotunda. You’re going up visiting all the areas, and then to return, you’re going back the same route. So I was trying to find a different solution that you shouldn’t go through the areas you visited before. So it’s a clockwise direction, but shifting the areas would allow us to visit them once and not bypass them on your way back.
Brenda: I’d love to zero in even further on the exhibition space and a real classic challenge that can oftentimes come up between the design firm and the client and the architect is on the subject of windows. So, when we have collections and when we have artifacts that need to be preserved, that sets up kind of an automatic challenge regarding planning for windows and how that could work within concept and visitor experience.
Alex, can you talk to us about how it is that you design solutions is for spaces where you have to either incorporate windows in new and unique ways or somehow convince a client and or exhibition design firm that they can’t have what they want.
Alex: Yes, in Arctic Museum, we, I think initially we had more windows and then you guys said that, no, no, no, we don’t want them. So we left them in the central core and we left them in one of the areas that you actually find a nice solution to, to include them into your experience area. But yeah, there are some buildings that by nature has to be without windows like a retail mall.
With one of the retail malls, we found a quite interesting solution by wrapping the facade with a tensile fabric. It’s a folded fabric. It represents ballerina skirt, and it was the main idea because it was in a city and the city was famous for its ballet, and it looks fantastic, even without windows. So, buildings without windows is possible. It’s a challenge, but it’s an interesting task to find a solution.
Abby: Well, I love that solution because as you mentioned, it’s a city had a large focus on ballet, taking that narrative and using it around the building continues that story. I just think that’s like a wonderful design solution and content moment. Let’s focus on inspiration for a moment. Do you have a style, and where do you get your inspiration from for a project?
Alex: Well, I think there are a few key drivers. First is environment. I think the building needs to fit with the surrounding location. I don’t say it has to blend with it. No, it can stand on its own, but with respect to what’s surrounding it. Materials is another source of inspiration. As I mentioned earlier, the tensile fabric that we used on one of the retail malls. Historic contexts. If there is a site history. Shapes. If you’re looking to design an interesting, exciting building, then shapes of the building could be another source of inspiration.
Brenda: I’ve got to say, I’m really, really happy to hear you talk about not having this, you know, sort of signature that you just stamp on every single project, and it’s making me think of a question that I received from a student not long ago who was very, very concerned, and he pulls me aside, and he’s like, “Professor, I don’t have a style. And what am I going to do? I’m never going to get work. I don’t have a look.” And I told him, you’re doing the right thing because it’s not about you. It’s about the audience. It’s about everything. It’s about the context and the story. It’s really, really about those things. And no one should ever go into an exhibition and ask themselves about the exhibition designer. It’s our job to allow everything else to speak for itself.
I would love to hear an example, Alex, of a time when you have been able to work with a client, the experienced design company, and you all worked together really, really well. What was at the heart of the success?
Alex: Well, I think the latest project that we had with Lorem Ipsum, Arctic Museum, was a nice example of collaboration between architects, experience designers, and the client. Client is definitely one of the key factors because client never sort of pushed in terms of design. They were happy with our competence, with our experience, and they left it entirely to us.
So, maybe one of the key factors that we knew each other before starting this project, we sort of on the same wave, so we work together respecting each other opinion. And as I think the result is, is quite nice.
Abby: Yeah, I think it’s interesting that you mentioned the client, and their role is so key. They need to listen to the consultants, to the people with experience. Oftentimes, if it’s a very large institution, some of our clients, it’s the first time ever doing this. We need to collaborate with them. They need to also trust and collaborate with us.
I think. Brenda we need a whole other podcast about getting a client to trust you and how do you do that because it is a real skill, and there’s a real effort, and sometimes you win, and sometimes you don’t.
Brenda: Oh, we are going to get a lot of caller comments for this one.
Alex: Yeah, we actually had experience with a client. It was Platov Airport, when client had a vision on how the airport needs to be designed, and in a design brief, they said that they want to have a flat roof. And when we started with the first design ideas, we realized that it’s a box shape and all we do is just skinning that box. It’s just like a facade design. It’s not, we’re not designing a building, and we, I don’t remember why, but for some reason we decided to ignore the client’s vision. And we came up with the arched roof like a bridge going from the front to the apron where the airplanes are. So, the idea was a sky bridge, and we thought that at least if we don’t win the competition, at least we have something that we will not feel ashamed of. You know, we can be proud of our concept. And when client saw all 11 proposals, all the other architects, they were following the brief, and they did a flat roof, and our building was the only one different, completely different. And then clients thought, hmm, do we really want to have a flat roof? And we won the competition.
Brenda: I would just imagine that at some point you have to determine, and it’s great in a way if it can come up in the bid, will you be able to collaborate with your client if right out of the gate the ask is unreasonable or completely lacking in vision? So, if the client was not amenable to the change that you had proposed, I can well imagine that you still, you know, dodged a bullet, perhaps because, you know, you could have won the competition but been utterly miserable or never been able to really, truly collaborate, to work together. And, you know, a successful collaboration is essential for a successful project, I think.
Alex
I even had experience when client, with some residential projects, that a client had an initial idea from done by other architect and they would approach us and say, look, we like the areas, the plan, but we don’t like the facade and architects don’t want to change their facade. They said it’s their vision, and they just refused to, to do anything. So we have the experience when clients approach us and asking to redesign someone’s design. It’s an interesting experience, I must say.
Brenda: Now, I’d love to get just a slight shift of perspective on this and ask you, Alex, what do our listeners need to know about working with an architect?
Alex: Well, I think it’s like with any design team, when you need to collaborate with different parties, it’s just respect each other opinions, but mind your vision as well. It’s probably like playing in a music band. If band is playing jazz and you’re trying to play country, then it won’t fit with the rest of the band, and you will be just kicked off. All members of the team, they play different music instruments, but at the end it sounds like a proper jazz. So working with architects is just not to push your ego and not to allow for architects to push their ego first. It’s, it’s respect at the end, I think.
Abby: Yeah, I love that analogy to playing in a band. I think that’s exactly how it feels. Everybody has the different competencies, experiences and job to do, and they all have to work and respect each other and know those boundaries.
I have a quick question about, you know, I think you’re a unique architect, Alex, because of your history, like you did structural and civil engineering, so when we’ve got all this technical equipment, we’ve got tons of screens, we’ve all our watchout, all our hardware and, you know, often it’s forgotten and it’s, oh, you just need this amount of space, but you’re always planning and making space for us. So can you talk a little bit about your background and how it really helps make sure that the boring stuff is remembered from a structural engineering perspective?
Alex: Yes, I started structural and civil engineering first. I got my diploma, and I realized that it’s not really what I want to do. It’s a bit boring, and I was looking for something more creative, and architecture was the closest sort of thing, and it blends quite well. On all my projects, I do structural design, all the technical areas, they actually come from experience. But at the later stages when structural engineers, mechanical electrical engineers joining the team, it’s always a fight. They need a room, they need a space to run the ducts. And at the design stage, I sort of can predict where it’s going to be and how it’s going to be run just at the concept level, you know, I’m not an expert, but I have a general idea how it works, so that’s how it works from my, for me.
Abby: It’s fantastic from our perspective because we don’t walk in during a build and see a bunch of ducts that weren’t supposed to be there but now have to be there because nobody’s thought about it. So I think having that skill and that expertise really sort of fulfills that gray area between us and you that often is sort of left and forgotten about and really enables us to really design and build what we say we’re going to design and build. There’s no bait and switch. There’s no changing. There’s no large structural problems that come up that mean we only have to have one bathroom just to bring it around to bathrooms again.
Alex: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think it’s down to client. If they want at the concept stage, they can invite structural, and they can invite mechanical electrical engineers just to do a concept on structure and mechanical and electrical. It helps a lot and the end.
Abby: And then, when you think about the future in your work, what are you excited about?
Alex: New countries. I think exploring new cultures is interesting, and learning from those cultures and designing something that we never experienced before is quite interesting. So yeah, that’s I think, the future I see for Buro Bitus.
Abby: Do you have any solid advice for young architects?
Alex: It’s not an easy job, I would say. We do lots of concepts, we do lots of competition, and I think we maybe are one out of ten, one out of 20. So, so many efforts and thoughts and designs, they are never going to be implemented, never going to be realized. So it’s a hard thing to do and be prepared that you’re not going to be you’re not going to win on every level. That can demotivate, I must say, but if you’re prepared for that, then go for it.
Abby:
Why did you like being an architect then, Alex?
Alex: It’s very exciting. I must say. It’s like a message to future. You leave something behind. You’re not going to live that long, but your building’s going to live, and people are going to use them. It’s an extremely nice feeling. It just gives a warmth inside, and it gives a strength to carry on.
Abby: Thank you so much for joining us today. I hope at the very least you all look at bathroom design and museums in a different way, and at most, the architects listening will recommend to their clients to bring in the experience design team at the beginning, not after the building has been designed.
Brenda: Hear, Hear.
Abby: So thank you, Alex, so much for joining us.
Brenda: Thank you, Alex.
Alex: Thank you.
[Music]
Abby: Now we’re going to do a double take where we focus on things we heard, read, and saw in the media that a noteworthy and we want to punctuate.
Brenda: So, Abby, it is not just us who are obsessed with, as you call it, the loo. July 29th, the American Alliance of Museums put out on their blog The Best Museum Bathrooms, According to Museum People, and I highly recommend this read. So in this blog, you’ll read through if it’s the Smith College Museum of Art or if it is the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, you will read about a number of different bathrooms that are designed by artists, and that include things such as objects from museum collections.
Abby: Oh, I love that.
Brenda: At the Mariners Museum and Park, they have panels in their stalls that explain bathroom elements on ships and about how to use the bathroom at sea. Who doesn’t want to do that?
Abby: That’s fantastic.
Brenda: It is fantastic.
Abby: It’s like putting you in the position of being at sea. I never thought about what it would be like to go the bathroom.
Brenda: At the Glore Psychiatric Museum, according to Ann Bennett, they are “nightmare inducing bathrooms, but in a good way.” They are artworks that, according to Sara Elizabeth Wilson, they are “awesome, but the clown and optical illusion bathrooms are the best.” I think I should just leave it at clown and let all of our listeners imagine for themselves what they would encounter in that particular bathroom.
Abby: There’s a very interactive bathroom at the Denver Art Museum, which sings ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’ while you’re washing your hands. And I think if you can get them all activated at the same time, they’ll sort of sing in this canon, so you can obviously spend a lot of time in the bathroom playing along with that. That was developed by Denver artist Jim Green, who’s also known for a laughing escalator at the Colorado Convention Center. So again, talking about sound and how you can use sound to interact.
Brenda: I just, I have to conclude my appreciation for bathrooms. Actually, this one is not in this particular article, but this is my favorite bathroom experience – this is like True Confessions time, my favorite bathroom experience – was at the Boston Children’s Museum, where they had inside the bathroom displays of scat, as they put it, of different animals. So, you know what scat is, right? Do they? They don’t say that in in the UK. Oh gosh. Poop. They had displays of animal poop. So, talk about being topical and on theme in every environment, talk about extending the experience in the story.
Abby: I love it. So I think overall our point is the devil’s in the details. And if you’re designing an experience, you have to design the whole experience. There shouldn’t be a blind spot.
Brenda: Hear, hear.
Abby: So I hope that our listeners will do a double take at least next time they’re sitting in the bathroom of a museum and really decide, is this a good experience or not?
Brenda: Don’t miss an opportunity. The bathroom is not an interstitial space, although interstitial spaces are critical. Every stairwell counts, every hallway matters. Definitely use the bathroom. People are captive audiences, folks. Make good use of it.
Abby: Tell your story. Thank you, everybody.
Brenda: Thank you.
[Music]
Producer: Matters of Experience is produced by Lorem Ipsum Corp. Please tune in next week for another conversation. Thank you all for listening.
Where's the Bathroom? with Alex Bitus
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Museums with Monica O. Montgomery
Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum – Lorem Ipsum Corp
La Jornada and Queens Museum Cultural Food Pantry
[Music]
Abby: Hello and welcome to Matters of Experience. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: And I’m Brenda Cowan.
Abby: Today on the show, we are focusing on diversity, equity, and inclusion, specifically in museums – what it means, how to do it right, and why it’s still important.
Brenda: Abby, this is a topic that’s near and dear to my heart, which is why I’m so excited to be able to welcome Monica O. Montgomery to the show today. Monica, you are the director of Community Engagement & Programs for Historic Germantown. That’s in northwest Philadelphia. And there, you work at the nexus of culture, community, and creativity, all through a lens of equity.
I’m also excited to add that Monica is contributing a chapter on this subject to a book titled The Flourishing Museum. And this I’m co-editing with museum scholar Kiersten Latham. Monica, hello and thank you for chatting with us today.
Monica: Hi. Thank you so much for having me. It’s good to be here.
Abby: So, we’re glad you can join us, Monica. Can you tell us what was your path to where you are today?
Monica: Well, I originally was working as a teacher, teaching early childhood education, pre-K. And while I was teaching, this year was the year where Trayvon Martin was ruthlessly murdered by George Zimmerman. And that incident really rocked the nation and brought up a lot of angst and anxiety for adults, but also for children, who are sponges, right.
They’re hearing everything that’s going on, things are being whispered and said, but not necessarily to them. And so the kids in my class would ask me questions and say, you know, are we safe? Or can people shoot us if we eat Skittles or if we wear a hoodie? Is that a bad thing? So they were asking these like really heavy questions that no one prepares you for when you go into education.
So I decided to help my children process through their emotions to create a curriculum around community care and Black Lives Matter and help them understand what was happening in the world. We did a lot of service learning. We did activities where we made Mother’s Day cards for Trayvon Martin’s mom, and we talked about prejudice and what’s the root of it.
And at the end of that school year, everyone was feeling much better. We had done all sorts of good things for the community around us and had a better understanding and a better handle on our emotions. But as a result of that, the principal called me in my office on the last day of school and said that she didn’t hire me to be an activist. She hired me to be a teacher and that I was not welcome and my ideas and approaches weren’t welcome, and she fired me.
And it’s from being fired as a preschool teacher that led me into this path of museums and seeking to infuse museum spaces with social justice and equity. So that is how I got my start.
Abby: Did you try to explain to the principal how what you were doing was educating your students and empowering them for the future, and enabling them to understand more of who they are and where they come from? Which, isn’t that what a teacher supposed to do?
Monica: One would think that, yes, I did. I did try to explain that. I had parents that were happy with what we did and wrote testimonials, but ultimately, this is a charter school system, and it is their discretion on whether to invite teachers back. There was no union, so I didn’t have much recourse. But I am happy to say even though I miss the classroom, it was great to be able to realize even if I can’t talk about social justice in a classroom, where can I do that? And that space is a museum where informal learning happens, where socialization and contextualization happens, and I decided to bring that ethos to the museum spaces, so it all worked out in the end.
Brenda: You know, Monica, one of the things that I really appreciated about what you just said was when you were referring to your work as a teacher and referring to the students as your children. It’s reminding me of a project that I just did with my kids who happened to be graduate students, but they are my kids and I think, God help me the day that I don’t think of them like that.
But we were doing a project working with a photographer activist who works with juveniles in the justice system. And I remember day one, he came and he met with my students and we kickstarted, you know, what turned into a museum exhibition project relating to these young people in the justice system.
And he said, here’s what you need to know. These are our kids. And he said, they’re not kids in juvenile, they’re not kids in, you know, the justice system, they’re not, you know, incarcerated. He says they’re our kids, and that’s how you’re going to refer to them. And I just thought, here is a human being who really gets it.
Monica: There’s a term called mother work. You know, what is the work of mother work? How do we bring mother work to our professional spaces? You know, whether that’s to nurture or to convene or to be the cheerleader in the company. And certainly being an educator, especially for little ones, is a form of mother work. And I’m proud to have had that identity, to have done that career, and then to take it forward in a new way.
Abby: You mentioned you were a teacher, and they decided to fire you. They didn’t like what you were doing. They didn’t feel it was education. Tell us a little bit about how you landed on the sector you’re in and the museums.
Monica: So coming from being a teacher and caring a lot about what was happening in society with current events and social issues and wanting to find a place where these discussions can happen, I realized that the place where my students came alive the most was on field trips to museums, and I thought, what if a museum could be a vehicle, not just for art, history, culture, science, media, but what if a social justice message can be carried through a museum experience?
And so in going into the museum field, I had to start from the very bottom, worked my way up from unpaid intern to per diem educator, up the ranks through many gigs and many institutions, and to a point where people wanted to hear what I had to say and I was able to become a keynote speaker, a curator, and executive director, and many of the other titles I’ve held.
And so in that process, I was able to prototype my idea, my belief that a museum has to serve society and can talk about social justice issues. I got to try that out at the institutions I worked with, and curate exhibits and have festivals and events to this and prove, like proof of concept, that this is valid, that this is good, it’s real, and that the audiences want this.
So in that decades-long journey from unpaid intern to museum leader, I’ve been able to show through the course of 50 different exhibits and festivals that social justice has a place in museum spaces.
Brenda: Monica, you talk about how social responsibility in museums is an everyday piece of business. It’s an everyday affair. And I’m curious if you could tell us about any uphill battles or anything that’s challenging in the work that you’re currently doing that would help our listeners understand the complexities of DE&I work.
Monica: Sure. So diversity, equity, and inclusion is the work of people and the work of drawing out common threads and consensus among people. And some people represent institutions. Some people represent neighborhoods. Some people have very particular perspectives. And in my current work with Historic Germantown, we are doing a deep dive into community engagement as the primary lens of our DEI work.
And so the Northwest section of Philadelphia has many different neighborhoods. And within those neighborhoods our historic sites and museums are located. So we have 18 museums and history sites as part of our consortium, and we realize that we can’t use a one size fits all treatment, and for us to understand how we could be a resource as a museum to the community, we need to ask them, and what does that look like?
So we are engaging on a campaign of survey work and outreach by doing good old-fashioned things like a lemonade stand. You know, here’s a lemonade. Will you take the survey? Give us your feedback. We’re going to have digital touchpoints. We’re going to be asking people through focus groups and one on one what it is that they need, what are they seeking? What is their perception of us?
And as we do that survey work, we’re using the results, along with our general interpretive content, to create customized community engagement plans for the 18 different neighborhoods where our 18 museums are located. So that means whether the neighborhood is affluent or low income, whether it’s full of multilingual persons and or native-born English speakers or any variety or facet of diversity, we have to engage meaningfully and fully and create a plan for how the museum can be socially responsive, how the museum can reach out to their neighbors, how they can overcome challenges and legacies in the past where they haven’t been so inclusive to now focus on that. And it’s going to be a fraught process. I am diving in and looking forward to it because I love the work of people and the messiness of humanity, but I know that already there are folks who are kind of doubtful, like, oh, you all are coming to the neighborhood now. What is it you want? We don’t necessarily want to tell you everything we’re thinking, but yet we still have to show up. We still have to ask. We still have to be earnest and forthright and have integrity in our dealings. And we can’t say, oh, this is too hard. We’re going to go back in the office and lock the door and see you again next festival season, but rather we have to be present. And so myself and a fleet of community engagement coordinators, unpaid interns, and other staff and volunteers are about to go out in the community and stand outside and hear what people need and want from us. And that is one example of a way that we are enacting DEI.
Brenda: And in response, I’m wondering how do you identify the communities that you need to reach? What does that look like? How do you do that outreach and identify the people that you need to really be engaging with?
Monica: So we’re looking through a few different parameters. We’re looking geographically, that is all households, businesses, residents and citizens in a ten block radius of each of our museum historic sites. We’re also going to be looking at census data and working with other human outreach organizations, you know, people that do human services work, whether that be social work, or mutual aid, or giving out pantry items, groceries, food boxes. And then we’re also going to be looking at the school systems and the educators and the students and what it is that that audience needs.
And hopefully, through that combination, that multifaceted approach, we can then draw out, here is who is in the community, here is what they say they would like, and not just to take that back and then, again, shut the door and never come back outside, but then to be responsive in how we plan things. So to take that feedback and create a model of shared authority where we’re taking what has been said, revealing this to the museum leadership, and putting everyone in conversation together so that they can start to change, right, plan and pivot based on that feedback.
So maybe that looks like there is a new festival or holiday celebrated. Maybe that looks like local residents want yoga or they want to do something that is a leisure activity or a recreation activity that’s not currently happening. How that can happen. Maybe local residents are upset. Maybe there’s something happening that they don’t like and the museum and its leadership and its board need to know that and be aware of that and be able to pause and pivot and say, oh, we don’t want to offend our neighbors. And ultimately, what can it look like that neighbors again become stewards of the museum, are invited to the board, are invited to committees, are invited to positions of power, even to work in the space so that our neighbors become those who are leading these spaces.
Abby: What happens if we look at a museum like the Met, for example, a large establishment, a huge tourist attraction. It had about 4.5 million visitors in 2007, and ten years later, that was up to 7 million. When you think about these larger museums, do they really need to engage their local community? Do they have that responsibility or even fiscal need, really?
Monica: They definitely should focus on their communities. Everyone should, and everyone can, and it’s not only for smaller spaces, but it is the work of the industry, the work of our sector. Large museums have a lot of hurdles to overcome because oftentimes, they are seen as places that are just for tourists or that are inaccessible. There is a term that’s coined by a museum scholar named Nina Simon out of California. She’s written some great books, one of those being The Art of Relevance. And she talks about something called threshold fear, where people are nervous, anxious, scared to come in the door of a museum or to go in a museum because they think it’s not for them or they think that it’s too expensive or they won’t have accessibility considerations.
Whatever it is, there’s a perception that is stopping them from a visit. Oftentimes those people are locals, so we have to go above and beyond, especially as leaders of larger spaces, to make sure that our audiences feel welcome, that they know that they belong, they know they can get their needs met, and that all of what is happening is being considered for the everyday local as well as the tourists.
And the Met is also in a process of remedy, right, as most large museums are, reconsidering their internal structures, the diversity initiatives, as well as what they put out to the world. I’m happy to share that recently they had a project where they created an Afrofuturist period room called Before Yesterday We Could Fly that featured textiles and furniture and artwork of different contemporary Afrofuturist artists. And this is interpreting the history and the legacy of Seneca Village, which was a black colony in what is current day Central Park, where many black persons who were escaping enslavement went to live and ultimately, the city decided it needed to be torn down to make way for the park. And so they got rid of it and there was a lot of other human rights abuses there.
But it’s great to see that they are embracing that story, imagining new narratives, and meeting the needs of those who are interested in Africa, African-Americans, and this type of art and history. So I’m excited to see how the Met and other large institutions can challenge themselves to be better stewards and socially responsive.
Abby: And Monica, it’s interesting you bring up that whole notion that there is a large group of people that don’t identify with the actual architecture and museum buildings. Because we recently worked on a project for the Smithsonian, where our goal was to reach a broader audience than usually enter the doors of a museum. Because these older institutions are often in these very formidable buildings that are not very inviting to many communities.
And we really wanted to bring the museum on the streets where the people were. And so we created an app called Doorways Into Open Access, where you load a portal on your cell phone, so it’s accessible, free to everybody. Anybody with a cell phone could use this app and walk around and experience artifacts from the Smithsonian’s collection.
So it’s interesting you mention that. I completely agree that a lot of the buildings really are exclusionary, and trying to find lots of different ways using different technology to break down these physical boundaries, to bring more people into museums and more people to experience these amazing stories is really important.
Brenda: Monica, I’d like to ask you about the term community care that you use in your work and community care with specific actions related to engagement and advocacy. Can you tell us what community care looks like for you practically?
Monica: So community care is a term that has existed probably since time began, and I’m using it in a way that applies to museum spaces, and I define it as a museum practice that honors our humanity, centering advocacy, empathy, and social responsibility. Community care embraces partnerships, programs, visitors, our community, and ourselves. I first began speaking about this in 2017 at the MuseumNext Conference and have since tried to canonize this term.
And to me, it looks like many of the things we’re seeing museums do now. So, for instance, beyond the exhibits, museums are really turning into a hub of humanitarian activity. There are museums like the Queens Museum that have what’s called a cultural food pantry. They give out food and free access to the arts, to anyone who needs it, anyone who wants it, starting during the pandemic, continuing today.
There are museums that have really pivoted towards making much of their offerings digital. Museums that are taking a stand on social issues, standing in solidarity against wars, right, or in solidarity with persons who are marginalized and affected. There are some museums that are employing docents, particularly there’s a museum that used to be a penitentiary that are creating a docent track of people who were court involved and formerly incarcerated. So taking those who have been in jail, who have suffered through that criminal justice system and training them to be docents, to tell a story about law enforcement, historic penitentiaries and ways that we can evolve today.
And so many other spaces. When I think of Bryan Stevenson’s museum, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, how they interpret the legacy of lynching. That is a somber space but a necessary space. So when we think of social justice in museums and community care in museums, it’s not so far-fetched to believe that a museum can be a space that helps, a space that heals, and a space that offers people a platform for whatever they are trying to champion. And that’s what I’m excited to see happening more and more. There’s a groundswell of that happening today.
Brenda: Monica, I really appreciated you referring to museums as increasingly hubs of humanitarian activity. You know, when I think about your work, I, you know, I’m going back to 1909. I think about John Cotton Dana, him saying that good museums fit the museum to what the community needs. And I just think, thank goodness you and other folks are doing the great work of keeping that essential idea alive and thriving, and I’m curious about content. When you work with communities and museums, are you listening for content or themes that the museum needs to put on their agenda or particular ways in which a story should be told to meet the community needs?
Monica: So any time you’re doing the work of outreach, it’s good to try to record everything because you never know what could come up later and how it can be shaped and molded for a variety of uses. So, the curator in me, when I hear people talking about their neighborhood histories, public histories, personal stories, I think of exhibits that can go on the wall. The DEI consultant and practitioner in me is thinking about, okay, we might need to release a statement or have a special task force or a truth and reconciliation commission around themes that are coming up. The community engager in me just wants to talk and wants people to feel comfortable talking and sharing and not feeling surveilled. So I’m just encouraging a spirit of open discussion and exchange.
And then, you know, the other hats I wear have other agendas, certainly, but I am always excited when someone shares something, right? Like right now, I’m creating an exhibit about Juneteenth in Philadelphia and the area that we’re in, Germantown, Philadelphia is one of the first parts of the city to celebrate Juneteenth before it was ever made a federal holiday, before it was even popular. I’m excited to tell that story, but not just to tell it institutionally, but to tell it through the eyes and the accounting and the oral histories of people. Right? So there’s always different ways we can take themes and content and put it on these different tracks.
Abby: When we’re thinking about content, Monica, some of the museums that we design for have already sort of a very specific mission. They have artifacts in their permanent collection that they want to have on display to support that story. What we try to do is, as we’ve been talking about today, bring in the local community. My question is, when you know the story you’re going to tell, and you’re working with a design group that could be from somewhere else, how does the community itself get interpreted into the design? How do they work with the designers, and how do the designers work with the community?
Monica: That’s an interesting question. I feel like there’s probably many different approaches. I’m not sure quite how design firms work with communities. Sometimes it is through, you know, focus groups and open houses and town halls. Sometimes it’s more discreet, one-on-one or small group experiences. But I do think that is an important part of the process that can’t be skipped because when people in the community know that something has been put up and they haven’t been informed or consulted or involved, there is a resentment, there is a lingering mistrust.
And certainly, people feel like, oh, well, this happened, but I didn’t know about it, and no one asked me. And I’m not going to patronize this. I’m not going to support this because this was done without me. Right. And there’s a saying in movement activists circles, nothing about us, without us, so it’s really important to include community voices. However that comes forth in the ways that, you know, a project can.
Abby: So we did a museum up in the Arctic Circle. And it’s interesting you mentioned how important all the details are to the local community and how they will definitely call you out if anything’s wrong. And in that particular project, it was a lot about the local community, their history, their art, their culture, and a lot about their way of life.
And so we consulted with them completely. I would say we shared 50/50 on the content that we were creating, and there was a video that we were making all about their cooking and the unique foods that they use and make. And there’s a fish up there in the Arctic. We couldn’t find this fish because it’s only available during a short season. Our prop master found a fish that looked to the naked eye almost identical to this fish. And it was really Monika, like, almost identical. So we shot this fish. It’s beautifully frozen, and you just sort of slice it, and it curls up, and we put it in the video, and we showed it to the community, and immediately they just said, that’s not the right fish. And we were like, we can’t get it right now. It’s not the season. We have to shoot this video now. So we ultimately had to keep the fish out, but you are 100% right in terms of you can’t fake it.
Monica: Agree, and there is a saying that, you know, who speaks for whom in a museum. Half of the contention in museum spaces is that one person’s art culture or, you know, foodways is being elevated on a pedestal, but oftentimes the people who are curating that experience are not from that culture. And so there is a whole process by which people feel left out, marginalized, silenced, and erased when their culture is being put on display, but they were not consulted.
Similarly to, if you have a house or a place that you live and let’s say 100 years in the future, they want to build a house museum to honor you and they take what they saw in a few pictures and they think about, oh, what did they put on Facebook, let me look at their Facebook memories, let me look at a few different things and they try to recreate what your house looks like in this house museum, but they get it all wrong because they only have shadowy glimpses of what your life was like through very select mediums and never consulted you or your descendants. And so the house museum ends up looking like someone else’s house, and it wasn’t your house. And I reference the movie Interstellar, that’s what happened at the end, the character came back, and they did a house museum, and it was like not like what his house looked like. All of that to say, there just has to be authenticity in the process.
Brenda: The design process is often thought of as being this kind of closed-door kind of thing, where maybe you open the door for a few minutes, have a chat with your target audiences or the community, and then the door is closed again, and all of the big secret work happens where presto, a big exhibition pops out at the end.
And that’s really not how it should work. And there are amazing people and companies out there that are doing work where communities are at the table, really knuckling through the development of concepts and themes and really developing the story to create listening exhibitions. That means that every perspective possible is listened to as well as shared. Thinking about exhibition creators, Monica, what kind of advice can you give to folks in the creative disciplines who are creating exhibitions and striving to embrace diversity, equity, and inclusion in their work?
Monica: I think number one is to always have an interactive element where people can leave their feedback, their views, where they can make their mark on that exhibition. In curating Futures, I realized that we were showing some really great work, speculative technologies, historical artifacts, art commissions, but there was nowhere for the visitor to have an outlet. And so I conceived of a space simply called the Action Center, which is a simple feedback wall, but with one main prompt; how can we create a hopeful future?
And I wanted people to be able to gather and write out and read each other’s sentiments about what we can do to create a hopeful future. And people from all different ages and walks of life were invited to write on these feedback cards, these colorful postcards on the wall. So all of that to say, feedback mechanisms are super important.
Give people that outlet to express and create in whatever ways they can and to really, I guess, assumption test your exhibit, your experience, you know, as oftentimes their exhibit advisors or, you know, evaluators who can go through and give a first, second pass, give feedback, let people experience your space in small doses and small groups and get their feedback and tweak based on that.
Don’t get it all shiny and new and perfect and thinking, okay, we are done. And then people come through and are not having the kind of experience that they could have because you never actually gave them a chance to give that feedback. So assumption test at all points. I think those are some good things to keep in mind.
Abby: And I think one of the things when I listen to you talking about museums and what they need to be is that basically at our heart, humans need to communicate with one another, and we do this through stories which we share. And museums need to be less about a monologue and much more about a dialog with the visitors, and to also be a place where you can leave your mark when you walk away, and you feel like you’ve made a difference as a visitor. Monica, it’s been amazing to have you with us on Matters of Experience today. Thank you so much for joining us.
Monica: All right. Enjoy your weekend, all. Take care.
Brenda: You too, enjoy. Thank you, take care.
Abby: Thank you.
[Music]
Producer: Matters of Experience is produced by Lorem Ipsum Corp. Please tune in next week for another conversation. Thank you all for listening.
Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum – Lorem Ipsum Corp
La Jornada and Queens Museum Cultural Food Pantry
[Music]
Abby: Hello and welcome to Matters of Experience. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: And I’m Brenda Cowan.
Abby: Today on the show, we are focusing on diversity, equity, and inclusion, specifically in museums – what it means, how to do it right, and why it’s still important.
Brenda: Abby, this is a topic that’s near and dear to my heart, which is why I’m so excited to be able to welcome Monica O. Montgomery to the show today. Monica, you are the director of Community Engagement & Programs for Historic Germantown. That’s in northwest Philadelphia. And there, you work at the nexus of culture, community, and creativity, all through a lens of equity.
I’m also excited to add that Monica is contributing a chapter on this subject to a book titled The Flourishing Museum. And this I’m co-editing with museum scholar Kiersten Latham. Monica, hello and thank you for chatting with us today.
Monica: Hi. Thank you so much for having me. It’s good to be here.
Abby: So, we’re glad you can join us, Monica. Can you tell us what was your path to where you are today?
Monica: Well, I originally was working as a teacher, teaching early childhood education, pre-K. And while I was teaching, this year was the year where Trayvon Martin was ruthlessly murdered by George Zimmerman. And that incident really rocked the nation and brought up a lot of angst and anxiety for adults, but also for children, who are sponges, right.
They’re hearing everything that’s going on, things are being whispered and said, but not necessarily to them. And so the kids in my class would ask me questions and say, you know, are we safe? Or can people shoot us if we eat Skittles or if we wear a hoodie? Is that a bad thing? So they were asking these like really heavy questions that no one prepares you for when you go into education.
So I decided to help my children process through their emotions to create a curriculum around community care and Black Lives Matter and help them understand what was happening in the world. We did a lot of service learning. We did activities where we made Mother’s Day cards for Trayvon Martin’s mom, and we talked about prejudice and what’s the root of it.
And at the end of that school year, everyone was feeling much better. We had done all sorts of good things for the community around us and had a better understanding and a better handle on our emotions. But as a result of that, the principal called me in my office on the last day of school and said that she didn’t hire me to be an activist. She hired me to be a teacher and that I was not welcome and my ideas and approaches weren’t welcome, and she fired me.
And it’s from being fired as a preschool teacher that led me into this path of museums and seeking to infuse museum spaces with social justice and equity. So that is how I got my start.
Abby: Did you try to explain to the principal how what you were doing was educating your students and empowering them for the future, and enabling them to understand more of who they are and where they come from? Which, isn’t that what a teacher supposed to do?
Monica: One would think that, yes, I did. I did try to explain that. I had parents that were happy with what we did and wrote testimonials, but ultimately, this is a charter school system, and it is their discretion on whether to invite teachers back. There was no union, so I didn’t have much recourse. But I am happy to say even though I miss the classroom, it was great to be able to realize even if I can’t talk about social justice in a classroom, where can I do that? And that space is a museum where informal learning happens, where socialization and contextualization happens, and I decided to bring that ethos to the museum spaces, so it all worked out in the end.
Brenda: You know, Monica, one of the things that I really appreciated about what you just said was when you were referring to your work as a teacher and referring to the students as your children. It’s reminding me of a project that I just did with my kids who happened to be graduate students, but they are my kids and I think, God help me the day that I don’t think of them like that.
But we were doing a project working with a photographer activist who works with juveniles in the justice system. And I remember day one, he came and he met with my students and we kickstarted, you know, what turned into a museum exhibition project relating to these young people in the justice system.
And he said, here’s what you need to know. These are our kids. And he said, they’re not kids in juvenile, they’re not kids in, you know, the justice system, they’re not, you know, incarcerated. He says they’re our kids, and that’s how you’re going to refer to them. And I just thought, here is a human being who really gets it.
Monica: There’s a term called mother work. You know, what is the work of mother work? How do we bring mother work to our professional spaces? You know, whether that’s to nurture or to convene or to be the cheerleader in the company. And certainly being an educator, especially for little ones, is a form of mother work. And I’m proud to have had that identity, to have done that career, and then to take it forward in a new way.
Abby: You mentioned you were a teacher, and they decided to fire you. They didn’t like what you were doing. They didn’t feel it was education. Tell us a little bit about how you landed on the sector you’re in and the museums.
Monica: So coming from being a teacher and caring a lot about what was happening in society with current events and social issues and wanting to find a place where these discussions can happen, I realized that the place where my students came alive the most was on field trips to museums, and I thought, what if a museum could be a vehicle, not just for art, history, culture, science, media, but what if a social justice message can be carried through a museum experience?
And so in going into the museum field, I had to start from the very bottom, worked my way up from unpaid intern to per diem educator, up the ranks through many gigs and many institutions, and to a point where people wanted to hear what I had to say and I was able to become a keynote speaker, a curator, and executive director, and many of the other titles I’ve held.
And so in that process, I was able to prototype my idea, my belief that a museum has to serve society and can talk about social justice issues. I got to try that out at the institutions I worked with, and curate exhibits and have festivals and events to this and prove, like proof of concept, that this is valid, that this is good, it’s real, and that the audiences want this.
So in that decades-long journey from unpaid intern to museum leader, I’ve been able to show through the course of 50 different exhibits and festivals that social justice has a place in museum spaces.
Brenda: Monica, you talk about how social responsibility in museums is an everyday piece of business. It’s an everyday affair. And I’m curious if you could tell us about any uphill battles or anything that’s challenging in the work that you’re currently doing that would help our listeners understand the complexities of DE&I work.
Monica: Sure. So diversity, equity, and inclusion is the work of people and the work of drawing out common threads and consensus among people. And some people represent institutions. Some people represent neighborhoods. Some people have very particular perspectives. And in my current work with Historic Germantown, we are doing a deep dive into community engagement as the primary lens of our DEI work.
And so the Northwest section of Philadelphia has many different neighborhoods. And within those neighborhoods our historic sites and museums are located. So we have 18 museums and history sites as part of our consortium, and we realize that we can’t use a one size fits all treatment, and for us to understand how we could be a resource as a museum to the community, we need to ask them, and what does that look like?
So we are engaging on a campaign of survey work and outreach by doing good old-fashioned things like a lemonade stand. You know, here’s a lemonade. Will you take the survey? Give us your feedback. We’re going to have digital touchpoints. We’re going to be asking people through focus groups and one on one what it is that they need, what are they seeking? What is their perception of us?
And as we do that survey work, we’re using the results, along with our general interpretive content, to create customized community engagement plans for the 18 different neighborhoods where our 18 museums are located. So that means whether the neighborhood is affluent or low income, whether it’s full of multilingual persons and or native-born English speakers or any variety or facet of diversity, we have to engage meaningfully and fully and create a plan for how the museum can be socially responsive, how the museum can reach out to their neighbors, how they can overcome challenges and legacies in the past where they haven’t been so inclusive to now focus on that. And it’s going to be a fraught process. I am diving in and looking forward to it because I love the work of people and the messiness of humanity, but I know that already there are folks who are kind of doubtful, like, oh, you all are coming to the neighborhood now. What is it you want? We don’t necessarily want to tell you everything we’re thinking, but yet we still have to show up. We still have to ask. We still have to be earnest and forthright and have integrity in our dealings. And we can’t say, oh, this is too hard. We’re going to go back in the office and lock the door and see you again next festival season, but rather we have to be present. And so myself and a fleet of community engagement coordinators, unpaid interns, and other staff and volunteers are about to go out in the community and stand outside and hear what people need and want from us. And that is one example of a way that we are enacting DEI.
Brenda: And in response, I’m wondering how do you identify the communities that you need to reach? What does that look like? How do you do that outreach and identify the people that you need to really be engaging with?
Monica: So we’re looking through a few different parameters. We’re looking geographically, that is all households, businesses, residents and citizens in a ten block radius of each of our museum historic sites. We’re also going to be looking at census data and working with other human outreach organizations, you know, people that do human services work, whether that be social work, or mutual aid, or giving out pantry items, groceries, food boxes. And then we’re also going to be looking at the school systems and the educators and the students and what it is that that audience needs.
And hopefully, through that combination, that multifaceted approach, we can then draw out, here is who is in the community, here is what they say they would like, and not just to take that back and then, again, shut the door and never come back outside, but then to be responsive in how we plan things. So to take that feedback and create a model of shared authority where we’re taking what has been said, revealing this to the museum leadership, and putting everyone in conversation together so that they can start to change, right, plan and pivot based on that feedback.
So maybe that looks like there is a new festival or holiday celebrated. Maybe that looks like local residents want yoga or they want to do something that is a leisure activity or a recreation activity that’s not currently happening. How that can happen. Maybe local residents are upset. Maybe there’s something happening that they don’t like and the museum and its leadership and its board need to know that and be aware of that and be able to pause and pivot and say, oh, we don’t want to offend our neighbors. And ultimately, what can it look like that neighbors again become stewards of the museum, are invited to the board, are invited to committees, are invited to positions of power, even to work in the space so that our neighbors become those who are leading these spaces.
Abby: What happens if we look at a museum like the Met, for example, a large establishment, a huge tourist attraction. It had about 4.5 million visitors in 2007, and ten years later, that was up to 7 million. When you think about these larger museums, do they really need to engage their local community? Do they have that responsibility or even fiscal need, really?
Monica: They definitely should focus on their communities. Everyone should, and everyone can, and it’s not only for smaller spaces, but it is the work of the industry, the work of our sector. Large museums have a lot of hurdles to overcome because oftentimes, they are seen as places that are just for tourists or that are inaccessible. There is a term that’s coined by a museum scholar named Nina Simon out of California. She’s written some great books, one of those being The Art of Relevance. And she talks about something called threshold fear, where people are nervous, anxious, scared to come in the door of a museum or to go in a museum because they think it’s not for them or they think that it’s too expensive or they won’t have accessibility considerations.
Whatever it is, there’s a perception that is stopping them from a visit. Oftentimes those people are locals, so we have to go above and beyond, especially as leaders of larger spaces, to make sure that our audiences feel welcome, that they know that they belong, they know they can get their needs met, and that all of what is happening is being considered for the everyday local as well as the tourists.
And the Met is also in a process of remedy, right, as most large museums are, reconsidering their internal structures, the diversity initiatives, as well as what they put out to the world. I’m happy to share that recently they had a project where they created an Afrofuturist period room called Before Yesterday We Could Fly that featured textiles and furniture and artwork of different contemporary Afrofuturist artists. And this is interpreting the history and the legacy of Seneca Village, which was a black colony in what is current day Central Park, where many black persons who were escaping enslavement went to live and ultimately, the city decided it needed to be torn down to make way for the park. And so they got rid of it and there was a lot of other human rights abuses there.
But it’s great to see that they are embracing that story, imagining new narratives, and meeting the needs of those who are interested in Africa, African-Americans, and this type of art and history. So I’m excited to see how the Met and other large institutions can challenge themselves to be better stewards and socially responsive.
Abby: And Monica, it’s interesting you bring up that whole notion that there is a large group of people that don’t identify with the actual architecture and museum buildings. Because we recently worked on a project for the Smithsonian, where our goal was to reach a broader audience than usually enter the doors of a museum. Because these older institutions are often in these very formidable buildings that are not very inviting to many communities.
And we really wanted to bring the museum on the streets where the people were. And so we created an app called Doorways Into Open Access, where you load a portal on your cell phone, so it’s accessible, free to everybody. Anybody with a cell phone could use this app and walk around and experience artifacts from the Smithsonian’s collection.
So it’s interesting you mention that. I completely agree that a lot of the buildings really are exclusionary, and trying to find lots of different ways using different technology to break down these physical boundaries, to bring more people into museums and more people to experience these amazing stories is really important.
Brenda: Monica, I’d like to ask you about the term community care that you use in your work and community care with specific actions related to engagement and advocacy. Can you tell us what community care looks like for you practically?
Monica: So community care is a term that has existed probably since time began, and I’m using it in a way that applies to museum spaces, and I define it as a museum practice that honors our humanity, centering advocacy, empathy, and social responsibility. Community care embraces partnerships, programs, visitors, our community, and ourselves. I first began speaking about this in 2017 at the MuseumNext Conference and have since tried to canonize this term.
And to me, it looks like many of the things we’re seeing museums do now. So, for instance, beyond the exhibits, museums are really turning into a hub of humanitarian activity. There are museums like the Queens Museum that have what’s called a cultural food pantry. They give out food and free access to the arts, to anyone who needs it, anyone who wants it, starting during the pandemic, continuing today.
There are museums that have really pivoted towards making much of their offerings digital. Museums that are taking a stand on social issues, standing in solidarity against wars, right, or in solidarity with persons who are marginalized and affected. There are some museums that are employing docents, particularly there’s a museum that used to be a penitentiary that are creating a docent track of people who were court involved and formerly incarcerated. So taking those who have been in jail, who have suffered through that criminal justice system and training them to be docents, to tell a story about law enforcement, historic penitentiaries and ways that we can evolve today.
And so many other spaces. When I think of Bryan Stevenson’s museum, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, how they interpret the legacy of lynching. That is a somber space but a necessary space. So when we think of social justice in museums and community care in museums, it’s not so far-fetched to believe that a museum can be a space that helps, a space that heals, and a space that offers people a platform for whatever they are trying to champion. And that’s what I’m excited to see happening more and more. There’s a groundswell of that happening today.
Brenda: Monica, I really appreciated you referring to museums as increasingly hubs of humanitarian activity. You know, when I think about your work, I, you know, I’m going back to 1909. I think about John Cotton Dana, him saying that good museums fit the museum to what the community needs. And I just think, thank goodness you and other folks are doing the great work of keeping that essential idea alive and thriving, and I’m curious about content. When you work with communities and museums, are you listening for content or themes that the museum needs to put on their agenda or particular ways in which a story should be told to meet the community needs?
Monica: So any time you’re doing the work of outreach, it’s good to try to record everything because you never know what could come up later and how it can be shaped and molded for a variety of uses. So, the curator in me, when I hear people talking about their neighborhood histories, public histories, personal stories, I think of exhibits that can go on the wall. The DEI consultant and practitioner in me is thinking about, okay, we might need to release a statement or have a special task force or a truth and reconciliation commission around themes that are coming up. The community engager in me just wants to talk and wants people to feel comfortable talking and sharing and not feeling surveilled. So I’m just encouraging a spirit of open discussion and exchange.
And then, you know, the other hats I wear have other agendas, certainly, but I am always excited when someone shares something, right? Like right now, I’m creating an exhibit about Juneteenth in Philadelphia and the area that we’re in, Germantown, Philadelphia is one of the first parts of the city to celebrate Juneteenth before it was ever made a federal holiday, before it was even popular. I’m excited to tell that story, but not just to tell it institutionally, but to tell it through the eyes and the accounting and the oral histories of people. Right? So there’s always different ways we can take themes and content and put it on these different tracks.
Abby: When we’re thinking about content, Monica, some of the museums that we design for have already sort of a very specific mission. They have artifacts in their permanent collection that they want to have on display to support that story. What we try to do is, as we’ve been talking about today, bring in the local community. My question is, when you know the story you’re going to tell, and you’re working with a design group that could be from somewhere else, how does the community itself get interpreted into the design? How do they work with the designers, and how do the designers work with the community?
Monica: That’s an interesting question. I feel like there’s probably many different approaches. I’m not sure quite how design firms work with communities. Sometimes it is through, you know, focus groups and open houses and town halls. Sometimes it’s more discreet, one-on-one or small group experiences. But I do think that is an important part of the process that can’t be skipped because when people in the community know that something has been put up and they haven’t been informed or consulted or involved, there is a resentment, there is a lingering mistrust.
And certainly, people feel like, oh, well, this happened, but I didn’t know about it, and no one asked me. And I’m not going to patronize this. I’m not going to support this because this was done without me. Right. And there’s a saying in movement activists circles, nothing about us, without us, so it’s really important to include community voices. However that comes forth in the ways that, you know, a project can.
Abby: So we did a museum up in the Arctic Circle. And it’s interesting you mentioned how important all the details are to the local community and how they will definitely call you out if anything’s wrong. And in that particular project, it was a lot about the local community, their history, their art, their culture, and a lot about their way of life.
And so we consulted with them completely. I would say we shared 50/50 on the content that we were creating, and there was a video that we were making all about their cooking and the unique foods that they use and make. And there’s a fish up there in the Arctic. We couldn’t find this fish because it’s only available during a short season. Our prop master found a fish that looked to the naked eye almost identical to this fish. And it was really Monika, like, almost identical. So we shot this fish. It’s beautifully frozen, and you just sort of slice it, and it curls up, and we put it in the video, and we showed it to the community, and immediately they just said, that’s not the right fish. And we were like, we can’t get it right now. It’s not the season. We have to shoot this video now. So we ultimately had to keep the fish out, but you are 100% right in terms of you can’t fake it.
Monica: Agree, and there is a saying that, you know, who speaks for whom in a museum. Half of the contention in museum spaces is that one person’s art culture or, you know, foodways is being elevated on a pedestal, but oftentimes the people who are curating that experience are not from that culture. And so there is a whole process by which people feel left out, marginalized, silenced, and erased when their culture is being put on display, but they were not consulted.
Similarly to, if you have a house or a place that you live and let’s say 100 years in the future, they want to build a house museum to honor you and they take what they saw in a few pictures and they think about, oh, what did they put on Facebook, let me look at their Facebook memories, let me look at a few different things and they try to recreate what your house looks like in this house museum, but they get it all wrong because they only have shadowy glimpses of what your life was like through very select mediums and never consulted you or your descendants. And so the house museum ends up looking like someone else’s house, and it wasn’t your house. And I reference the movie Interstellar, that’s what happened at the end, the character came back, and they did a house museum, and it was like not like what his house looked like. All of that to say, there just has to be authenticity in the process.
Brenda: The design process is often thought of as being this kind of closed-door kind of thing, where maybe you open the door for a few minutes, have a chat with your target audiences or the community, and then the door is closed again, and all of the big secret work happens where presto, a big exhibition pops out at the end.
And that’s really not how it should work. And there are amazing people and companies out there that are doing work where communities are at the table, really knuckling through the development of concepts and themes and really developing the story to create listening exhibitions. That means that every perspective possible is listened to as well as shared. Thinking about exhibition creators, Monica, what kind of advice can you give to folks in the creative disciplines who are creating exhibitions and striving to embrace diversity, equity, and inclusion in their work?
Monica: I think number one is to always have an interactive element where people can leave their feedback, their views, where they can make their mark on that exhibition. In curating Futures, I realized that we were showing some really great work, speculative technologies, historical artifacts, art commissions, but there was nowhere for the visitor to have an outlet. And so I conceived of a space simply called the Action Center, which is a simple feedback wall, but with one main prompt; how can we create a hopeful future?
And I wanted people to be able to gather and write out and read each other’s sentiments about what we can do to create a hopeful future. And people from all different ages and walks of life were invited to write on these feedback cards, these colorful postcards on the wall. So all of that to say, feedback mechanisms are super important.
Give people that outlet to express and create in whatever ways they can and to really, I guess, assumption test your exhibit, your experience, you know, as oftentimes their exhibit advisors or, you know, evaluators who can go through and give a first, second pass, give feedback, let people experience your space in small doses and small groups and get their feedback and tweak based on that.
Don’t get it all shiny and new and perfect and thinking, okay, we are done. And then people come through and are not having the kind of experience that they could have because you never actually gave them a chance to give that feedback. So assumption test at all points. I think those are some good things to keep in mind.
Abby: And I think one of the things when I listen to you talking about museums and what they need to be is that basically at our heart, humans need to communicate with one another, and we do this through stories which we share. And museums need to be less about a monologue and much more about a dialog with the visitors, and to also be a place where you can leave your mark when you walk away, and you feel like you’ve made a difference as a visitor. Monica, it’s been amazing to have you with us on Matters of Experience today. Thank you so much for joining us.
Monica: All right. Enjoy your weekend, all. Take care.
Brenda: You too, enjoy. Thank you, take care.
Abby: Thank you.
[Music]
Producer: Matters of Experience is produced by Lorem Ipsum Corp. Please tune in next week for another conversation. Thank you all for listening.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Museums with Monica O. Montgomery
Follow the Crowd with Joy Bailey-Bryant
[Music]
Abby: Hello and welcome to Matters of Experience. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: And I’m Brenda Cowan.
Abby: Today’s show is called Follow the Crowd, and it is the second part of a show focusing on diversity, equity and inclusion. And we are thrilled to be chatting with the wonderful Joy Bailey-Bryant. Joy is the president of the U.S. Office of Lord Cultural Resources and a specialist in municipal engagement around culture. A certified interpretive planner and outreach facilitator, she works with city officials, institutional leaders, and developers around the world to creatively plan cities and bring people to public institutions. Hello, Joy, and welcome.
Joy: Thank you, Abigail.
Brenda: Joy, we are so delighted to have you. To get us kickstarted, can you tell us what led you to the position that you are in today?
Joy: I worked for years in public relations, and then I found my way to a wonderful program at American University in Arts Management. And that program actually led me to the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which is a granting agency for our country. And through that process and through that work, I started to do some work with particularly African-American institutions.
I then moved on to work at Lord Cultural Resources because they were working with what became the August Wilson Cultural Center in Pittsburgh. And so that was one of my first projects working with Lord, and realization of this entire world of opportunities with consulting with different organizations, arts organizations, artists, individual artists to help them to realize their goals in creating organizations and creating public spaces that would really help to tell their stories.
Abby: So one of the things, when I look back over my career, Joy, I reflect on one of my first visits to a museum that really sticks in my mind. And we were at the Tate in London, and I was there with a school group, and we were going through the rooms, and I suddenly became fascinated by the Seagram Murals by Mark Rothko.
And I remember sort of sitting down, being surrounded by these paintings and experiencing something that I’d never felt before. It was very transcendental, and I actually sat there for over an hour while the rest of my schoolmates moved throughout the museum, and I was running a little late, so they all came back to find me, and now I reflect back on that and what large impression it actually made on me. Do you remember one of your first visits to a museum or a gallery, and how do you think it impacted you?
Joy: Absolutely. One of the things – I’m a native of Atlanta, Georgia, anybody that knows me knows that, and we have a few really excellent art spaces. And one of them is called the APEX Museum – African Panoramic Experience. And at the APEX Museum, you learn both the history of African Americans in Atlanta, as well as kind of this broader story of people of African descent.
Combined with that there’s also a large arts campus called the Woodruff Arts Center. And the Woodruff Arts Center has the High Museum of Art. It has the Alliance Theater. As I was growing up, my mom was part of this group called The Black Involved Parents, and they would take us to various and sundry shows. And I remember that there was a Faith Ringgold – it wasn’t a show – and this is so interesting because there’s a Faith Ringgold show at the New Museum that just closed here in New York.
Brenda: It’s incredible.
Joy: But there was a storytelling experience, and it was around The People Could Fly, it was Virginia Hamilton’s The People Could Fly story, and Faith Ringgold had done the illustrations for it. And the paintings, the pictures that the book showed were just so vivid and so imaginative. It captured me, captured my imagination. I wanted to see where it went. I wanted to know where it came from. I wanted to read more of the stories. I was a voracious reader, but that was the first time I had been captivated not just by words, but by pictures as well. And I heard Faith Ringgold give this talk, and she was talking about the way she draws flat. And that also, I didn’t know that was what she called it, but that’s also what really, I said, oh, my gosh, I can, you know, this doesn’t just, it doesn’t have to be real, photorealism, three dimensional. You can have flat images and still depict a story and really still captivate people. That was one of my first experiences and it was just such a full-circle moment for me. We went to the show and I was able to take my five-year-old daughter, my seven-year-old son, and they so enjoyed, they enjoyed the images, the quilts, of course. But what they really enjoyed was sitting down with the books just like I did all those years ago. It was just such a wonderful experience for me.
Brenda: What a delight to hear you talk about the Faith Ringgold show, which I was fortunate to just go see before it closed with my daughter.
Joy: Yes!
Brenda: Yes. Oh, and Faith Ringgold was an early point of entry for me, too, in my career. And I grew up in a context where, you know, museums were not for people like my family. They were for people who were well-educated. They were for people who were wealthy. And it wasn’t until I was out on my own when I started actively going to museums, really, for the first time. My question for you, Joy, is in your work, what is it that we should be aiming for when we create truly inclusive and welcoming – I like the word welcoming because I think that’s really what this is about. What are we aiming for? To create welcoming experiences where everyone can feel like they belong?
Joy: You know, you’re right. So many people do not think that museums are for them. I, along the way decided, it was a decision that I wanted to get more people who looked like me to enjoy these spaces, a lot of them public spaces that are paid for by tax dollars or certainly get grants from tax dollars. And I would ask people, I would say, oh, let’s go to X, Y and Z and see this show or let’s go do this, they’re having, such and such is having, you know, having this kind of program. Oh, well, I mean, I don’t I don’t have anything to wear. It’s the first thing you probably hear because there is this thought that you have to have a special attire on and you have to be a part of this particular crowd. And that is an indication that people don’t feel like they belong, right?
So, when you talk about, we talk about these words of inclusion, we talk about the word you just used, welcoming, people feeling like this is their space. If people feel like it’s their space, they truly belong in this space. They truly own this space. If we I mean, you know, there’s always pushing, pushing, pushing, so we’ve moved from inclusion to welcoming to belonging to owning, right? I own this space. If I own my house, I can wear whatever the hell I please in my house. So I feel the ultimate sense of ownership. These stories are mine. I should be reflected, I should have connection. Everything that is here is mine. I share that with others, and it is mine.
So I think it’s really pushing ourselves to get to the space of ownership, everyone having ownership. And this is where you get into the stance of, you know, power concedes nothing, of course, is not my quote. Power concedes nothing without a demand. And so we all have to demand that the places that we own reflect us.
Abby: So, let’s talk about ownership and how a museum can start to reflect their communities. A lot of your work centers around cultural management consulting, and you talk about process helping you go from the big idea through to final execution. Can you tell us a little bit about your process, what it is and how it really helps with the end result?
Joy: Absolutely. One of the things I’m super proud of is being able to work with people who have amazing ideas. Sometimes they have great collections, sometimes they just have really compelling stories and helping them to really think through in a methodical way what that can mean for their communities.
And I define communities in two ways. The first is your kind of communities of practice. So those are your affinity groups, people who are naturally attracted to you. You know, if you were to take something like a collection of toothbrushes, for example, you might make a safe assumption that there might be a dental community that is interested in a collection of toothbrushes, you know, but there’s also, if you have a collection of toothbrushes and you’re located, for example, in Prince George’s County, Maryland, then you want to know the people in the communities of your geography, right?
So you’ve got your communities of practice, so people who are in the dental practice who I’m assuming would be interested in this collection of toothbrushes. And then you’ve got a second community, that other community of your geography, right, so people who are walking around right outside your doors, these are the people who are going to come to your afterschool programs. These are the people who are going to come to your weekly toddler times. These are the people who are going to be your most frequent visitors because you’re accessible to them. So the important part is you’ve got to make yourself accessible for them.
So the first part of what we do when we’re figuring out this process is really to understand who those communities are. So when we are identifying your communities of practice and your geographic communities, really taking a methodical approach to looking at that and examining that and really moving forward from there and allowing those communities to tell us what they want and most importantly, what they need.
And that’s important because a lot of times people feel like I know what my community needs, and so they want to make X community do what they want X community to do. But that community is saying, actually, no, that’s not what I need, because actually because I have other obligations and therefore this is not going to work for me. So they tell us these different types of things and we’re able to then build programing. We’re able to think about what that means for exhibitions. We’re able to think about what that means for collections. We’re able to think about what that means for the types of spaces you want to have. And what’s exciting is that we’ve been able to then take that information and put dollars signs to it. Talk about how much staff are you going to need? What are those staff going to need to be doing?
All of these different types of things to build up to a business plan. And we’ve done this with so many organizations and institutions, and I talk about the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and that’s been one of the highest honors of my life, to be able to have these conversations with communities, to understand what that means for what the Smithsonian calls general museum requirements.
Abby: Joy, it’s great that you just bring up the National Museum of African American History because I know you had almost a thousand stakeholders, which sounds pretty overwhelming. What were some of those challenges, juggling all those people and voices and what was some of the positive outcomes as well?
Joy: What was really great about the process was that we were able to, in multiple cities across the country, really talk about things that previously people had just kind of said, oh, you know, we need to be talking about what happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We need to be talking about what made the civil rights movement so powerful that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed. What were the implications of enslavement, of 400 years of enslavement, on people of African descent today?
What was really powerful about that process was that we were able to have these conversations, grapple with these conversations, and really start to write down on paper what that would look like in a museum. We were not, and I say we, but I really mean Dr. Lonnie Bunch and Kinshasha Holman Conwell and many, many, many people who really led that process were not afraid to talk about, okay, where do we start?
We were present, and a part of the identification of the framework of what people said and what people said was – tell the truth. People said we need a space to celebrate. People said we need a place to commemorate. People said we need to know about agency, right? So in telling the truth, yes, you are sharing the hard stories, and in sharing the hard stories, we want to talk about the agency that people of African descent used in a lot of times, being super active in freeing ourselves. And so that was a really great opportunity.
I think when we think about what was hard, what was hard was exactly what I said. Where do you start? And making sure that you’re not daunted by the fear that you are not going to tell the right story and the understanding that the process is iterative, meaning that over the years the stories can change and that the museum can change with those stories.
Brenda: Something that’s a definite takeaway from all of this is the need for museums to be highly descriptive about their communities and the persons that they’re speaking with. I’m curious. You use the term, Joy, follow the crowd in your work. Tell me, what do you mean, what do you mean by that?
Joy: So it’s actually quite simple. Where are the people that you want to speak to? So when I talk about the communities of practice and your geographic communities, there are watering holes where, we have a client that’s using that term a lot, where are the natural places that these communities are gathering? And instead of trying to create your own watering hole, okay, you know, why don’t you save yourself some money and some heartache and go to the places that already have created themselves? They have proven themselves to be natural spaces where people gather.
We always are talking to people that are saying, I don’t know where young people of, you know, a certain age or, you know, where are young people who are college-aged or young people who are moving from this kind of, you know, I’ve just graduated from college, I’m trying to find my footing. Where are they going? Well, number one, if you want a college-aged students, go to colleges. Right. That’s the first part. Go to where the colleges are. If you want students who are particularly knowledgeable about a particular piece, you know, say you have an automotive museum. Why don’t you go to those places where those students are training?
We have this thing because we are always trying to make things fun. We would go to conferences, and we would sponsor, you know, a happy hour, right? You sponsor a happy hour, give everybody one drink ticket because you want them to be sober enough to tell you what you need to know. And, you know, 45 minutes to an hour of your time, you’re going to tell me what you want to experience in an Urban League museum, an Urban League experience.
So, by following the crowd, it really just means going to, genuinely going to where they are. And I’ll tell you something funny. A woman was speaking and she said, well, you know, it’s in truth, it’s what we’ve always done in the church tradition. You’re meeting people where they are, mentally and physically. So things like Alcoholics Anonymous, things like hosting a food pantry, things like having a closet, you know, a work closet, so that people who are going for jobs can come to your space and get clothing. And I never realized that that’s what I was doing. I did not realize until a few days ago the woman said, yeah, you know, this phrase, meet people where they are. That comes from religious practice. So I hope that I’m known as a person who brings both the bars and the religious spaces onto your podcast. I’ve been able to mention them both in one in one podcast.
Abby: So when we think about actual the design process for the exhibit itself, I’ve heard you use the term first voice before. Can you explain what this means in terms of the exhibit, the design landscape, and why it’s important?
Joy: Essentially, it’s ensuring that the people whose story is being shared are the actual voice of the story. If we’re telling an indigenous peoples story, if we’re working with indigenous peoples to tell their story that they are at the table from day one and being paid and a part of the team that is paid and that the experience of creating the exhibit is centered on them and that that table is really set by them.
You know, when I think about it, like I’m bringing process to the table, but at the end of the day, at the beginning of the day, middle and end of the day, the most important piece is actually the first voice. The first voice that we hear, the last voice that we hear and understand and listen to has to be the voice of the peoples whose story is being shared.
Abby: Within those voices, those stories, those narratives, would it be a group decision then, on which specific stories to tell because often I find when we’re designing museums, there are a ton of different directions you can go. But because of restrictions, either financial, logistics, space restrictions, you have to cut some of the stories out. So, you know, whose responsibility is that decision?
Joy: It’s always the first voice, right? Like we, you nor I as the interpretive planner or the designer, we can’t make that final decision. You know, Alice Greenwald from the 9/11 Memorial and Museum always tells the story of when she was at the national Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, that they had a massive exhibition that was of the hair; before people went into the concentration camps their hair was cut off, and the exhibition designers had gone through so much red tape and everything to get this out of the country. All the permissions had been signed, all of the different documentation that was needed had been put through. You can imagine the amount of money, effort, and time and one of the family advisory groups and committees, one of the women who was a survivor – this was many years ago, of course – said absolutely not.
And the question, of course, was what? Why? Because that might be my mother’s hair. And so the exhibition was scrapped immediately. And the story there, I mean, that’s an extreme story because it illustrates the importance of making sure that at the end of the day, if it is truly the first voice, then that is the last voice that has to be heard before it goes up.
Brenda: Wow. Joy, what kind of advice do you have for people who want to do work with diverse communities, which, by the way, everyone should be doing? But what’s your advice for folks who, for whatever reason, might just be starting out?
Joy: Great question. Okay. So first of all, listening, everybody wants to talk, but it is important to listen. There’s two things that we do when we start a program. First is to start with a land acknowledgment, because it does something for you to you to really stop and think about the heritage of the people who came before you.
And then we do what’s called meeting agreements. And one of the meeting agreements is to recognize your space of privilege, to say, okay, I’m an African-American woman who is blessed to have come from a family where my mom and dad were present. I have a college degree. I have a master’s degree. I’m able to sit in a space where people ask me questions and want to hear what I say.
It is imperative of me to be quiet and listen when people who don’t walk into the room with the privilege that I just expressed, listen when they speak, because maybe they won’t be in the spaces that I am in tomorrow, and maybe I’ll have the opportunity to say, Hey, I was just in this room with X person. Why don’t we invite them in to speak so that we can hear their stories, first voice?
Brenda: You know, I’m listening to you talk about first voice, and a translation for me is thinking about the work that I do, as a professor. And where I teach, my students are very, very diverse. And when I say diversity among my students, you know, it’s race, ethnicity, their identity, socioeconomic status. It runs the gamut. I’m endlessly in a position to have to be keenly aware that not everybody is like me. Everybody brings different perspectives, backgrounds, life experiences. And I’ll tell you something, if I ever lose sight of that, I’ve got about, you know, 40 young people who are very eager to correct me and make sure that I am back on the course.
Joy: I love that.
Brenda: Oh, boy, it’s a real privilege. And it’s also, it’s really good exercise for me, God’s honest, and I’ve got to tell you, you know, there’s never room for presumptions or assumptions. Joy, how do all of us continue to exercise this kind of inclusivity in our work, whatever that form might be?
Joy: I think, Brenda, it’s questioning ourselves and allowing ourselves to be questioned. I practice not being jealous, but I’m a little bit jealous of your experience in the classrooms because I do know that you are continuously being questioned and pressed because those students are saying, well hey, this is different from what I thought it would be. Or why is it not?
And they imagine this future or they know a future that we never could have imagined because we assume things should be a certain way. And so I think that what you are doing, you’re making yourself vulnerable, right? Like that’s that space of vulnerability and, oh my God, it’s so tiring, but really great, right? Because wow, when you look up and think about how you’ve grown, right? But it’s continuously allowing yourself to question and to be questioned.
Abby: Yeah, I completely agree with you, Joy. I think too many of us are happy within the safety of the environment we know and enjoy familiarity. I remember as a little kid, my mom came in. I was trying to go to sleep and had some big worry on my mind, and she said, Abby, life’s like a trapeze. When you’re holding on, going backwards and forwards, you’re not going anywhere. You’re truly alive the moment you let go and reach for the next bar. And that’s really stuck with me in life, that idea of really sort of questioning, pushing yourself out of that comfort zone. And I think museums really should do that for their visitors. They need to be places that make the visitor question, and as you said earlier, Joy, press them.
Our last question of today is, why do you think a visit to a museum is so memorable?
Joy: One of the things that we do need to keep in creating ownership is that kind of event opportunity. And by that, I mean excitement about being in a space that’s doing amazing things for whatever reason. And I think that the event opportunity is nothing without the connection. And the connection comes exactly through that ownership. We think about that Faith Ringgold story I told at the beginning. I was so excited about the connection of the flat drawings and then connecting to my daughter. Now, all these many years later, that is why I will remember that event. It is that connection that is most important.
Abby: Well, Joy, this really has been a joy. Your parents definitely named you accurately. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and insights with us today. It truly has been a real pleasure.
Joy: And thank you. Thank you both for doing the work that you do, and thank you for your questions. This has been such a thrill. Thank you for the conversation.
[Music]
Producer: Matters of Experience is produced by Lorem Ipsum Corp. Please tune in next week for another conversation. Thank you all for listening.
[Music]
Abby: Hello and welcome to Matters of Experience. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: And I’m Brenda Cowan.
Abby: Today’s show is called Follow the Crowd, and it is the second part of a show focusing on diversity, equity and inclusion. And we are thrilled to be chatting with the wonderful Joy Bailey-Bryant. Joy is the president of the U.S. Office of Lord Cultural Resources and a specialist in municipal engagement around culture. A certified interpretive planner and outreach facilitator, she works with city officials, institutional leaders, and developers around the world to creatively plan cities and bring people to public institutions. Hello, Joy, and welcome.
Joy: Thank you, Abigail.
Brenda: Joy, we are so delighted to have you. To get us kickstarted, can you tell us what led you to the position that you are in today?
Joy: I worked for years in public relations, and then I found my way to a wonderful program at American University in Arts Management. And that program actually led me to the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which is a granting agency for our country. And through that process and through that work, I started to do some work with particularly African-American institutions.
I then moved on to work at Lord Cultural Resources because they were working with what became the August Wilson Cultural Center in Pittsburgh. And so that was one of my first projects working with Lord, and realization of this entire world of opportunities with consulting with different organizations, arts organizations, artists, individual artists to help them to realize their goals in creating organizations and creating public spaces that would really help to tell their stories.
Abby: So one of the things, when I look back over my career, Joy, I reflect on one of my first visits to a museum that really sticks in my mind. And we were at the Tate in London, and I was there with a school group, and we were going through the rooms, and I suddenly became fascinated by the Seagram Murals by Mark Rothko.
And I remember sort of sitting down, being surrounded by these paintings and experiencing something that I’d never felt before. It was very transcendental, and I actually sat there for over an hour while the rest of my schoolmates moved throughout the museum, and I was running a little late, so they all came back to find me, and now I reflect back on that and what large impression it actually made on me. Do you remember one of your first visits to a museum or a gallery, and how do you think it impacted you?
Joy: Absolutely. One of the things – I’m a native of Atlanta, Georgia, anybody that knows me knows that, and we have a few really excellent art spaces. And one of them is called the APEX Museum – African Panoramic Experience. And at the APEX Museum, you learn both the history of African Americans in Atlanta, as well as kind of this broader story of people of African descent.
Combined with that there’s also a large arts campus called the Woodruff Arts Center. And the Woodruff Arts Center has the High Museum of Art. It has the Alliance Theater. As I was growing up, my mom was part of this group called The Black Involved Parents, and they would take us to various and sundry shows. And I remember that there was a Faith Ringgold – it wasn’t a show – and this is so interesting because there’s a Faith Ringgold show at the New Museum that just closed here in New York.
Brenda: It’s incredible.
Joy: But there was a storytelling experience, and it was around The People Could Fly, it was Virginia Hamilton’s The People Could Fly story, and Faith Ringgold had done the illustrations for it. And the paintings, the pictures that the book showed were just so vivid and so imaginative. It captured me, captured my imagination. I wanted to see where it went. I wanted to know where it came from. I wanted to read more of the stories. I was a voracious reader, but that was the first time I had been captivated not just by words, but by pictures as well. And I heard Faith Ringgold give this talk, and she was talking about the way she draws flat. And that also, I didn’t know that was what she called it, but that’s also what really, I said, oh, my gosh, I can, you know, this doesn’t just, it doesn’t have to be real, photorealism, three dimensional. You can have flat images and still depict a story and really still captivate people. That was one of my first experiences and it was just such a full-circle moment for me. We went to the show and I was able to take my five-year-old daughter, my seven-year-old son, and they so enjoyed, they enjoyed the images, the quilts, of course. But what they really enjoyed was sitting down with the books just like I did all those years ago. It was just such a wonderful experience for me.
Brenda: What a delight to hear you talk about the Faith Ringgold show, which I was fortunate to just go see before it closed with my daughter.
Joy: Yes!
Brenda: Yes. Oh, and Faith Ringgold was an early point of entry for me, too, in my career. And I grew up in a context where, you know, museums were not for people like my family. They were for people who were well-educated. They were for people who were wealthy. And it wasn’t until I was out on my own when I started actively going to museums, really, for the first time. My question for you, Joy, is in your work, what is it that we should be aiming for when we create truly inclusive and welcoming – I like the word welcoming because I think that’s really what this is about. What are we aiming for? To create welcoming experiences where everyone can feel like they belong?
Joy: You know, you’re right. So many people do not think that museums are for them. I, along the way decided, it was a decision that I wanted to get more people who looked like me to enjoy these spaces, a lot of them public spaces that are paid for by tax dollars or certainly get grants from tax dollars. And I would ask people, I would say, oh, let’s go to X, Y and Z and see this show or let’s go do this, they’re having, such and such is having, you know, having this kind of program. Oh, well, I mean, I don’t I don’t have anything to wear. It’s the first thing you probably hear because there is this thought that you have to have a special attire on and you have to be a part of this particular crowd. And that is an indication that people don’t feel like they belong, right?
So, when you talk about, we talk about these words of inclusion, we talk about the word you just used, welcoming, people feeling like this is their space. If people feel like it’s their space, they truly belong in this space. They truly own this space. If we I mean, you know, there’s always pushing, pushing, pushing, so we’ve moved from inclusion to welcoming to belonging to owning, right? I own this space. If I own my house, I can wear whatever the hell I please in my house. So I feel the ultimate sense of ownership. These stories are mine. I should be reflected, I should have connection. Everything that is here is mine. I share that with others, and it is mine.
So I think it’s really pushing ourselves to get to the space of ownership, everyone having ownership. And this is where you get into the stance of, you know, power concedes nothing, of course, is not my quote. Power concedes nothing without a demand. And so we all have to demand that the places that we own reflect us.
Abby: So, let’s talk about ownership and how a museum can start to reflect their communities. A lot of your work centers around cultural management consulting, and you talk about process helping you go from the big idea through to final execution. Can you tell us a little bit about your process, what it is and how it really helps with the end result?
Joy: Absolutely. One of the things I’m super proud of is being able to work with people who have amazing ideas. Sometimes they have great collections, sometimes they just have really compelling stories and helping them to really think through in a methodical way what that can mean for their communities.
And I define communities in two ways. The first is your kind of communities of practice. So those are your affinity groups, people who are naturally attracted to you. You know, if you were to take something like a collection of toothbrushes, for example, you might make a safe assumption that there might be a dental community that is interested in a collection of toothbrushes, you know, but there’s also, if you have a collection of toothbrushes and you’re located, for example, in Prince George’s County, Maryland, then you want to know the people in the communities of your geography, right?
So you’ve got your communities of practice, so people who are in the dental practice who I’m assuming would be interested in this collection of toothbrushes. And then you’ve got a second community, that other community of your geography, right, so people who are walking around right outside your doors, these are the people who are going to come to your afterschool programs. These are the people who are going to come to your weekly toddler times. These are the people who are going to be your most frequent visitors because you’re accessible to them. So the important part is you’ve got to make yourself accessible for them.
So the first part of what we do when we’re figuring out this process is really to understand who those communities are. So when we are identifying your communities of practice and your geographic communities, really taking a methodical approach to looking at that and examining that and really moving forward from there and allowing those communities to tell us what they want and most importantly, what they need.
And that’s important because a lot of times people feel like I know what my community needs, and so they want to make X community do what they want X community to do. But that community is saying, actually, no, that’s not what I need, because actually because I have other obligations and therefore this is not going to work for me. So they tell us these different types of things and we’re able to then build programing. We’re able to think about what that means for exhibitions. We’re able to think about what that means for collections. We’re able to think about what that means for the types of spaces you want to have. And what’s exciting is that we’ve been able to then take that information and put dollars signs to it. Talk about how much staff are you going to need? What are those staff going to need to be doing?
All of these different types of things to build up to a business plan. And we’ve done this with so many organizations and institutions, and I talk about the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and that’s been one of the highest honors of my life, to be able to have these conversations with communities, to understand what that means for what the Smithsonian calls general museum requirements.
Abby: Joy, it’s great that you just bring up the National Museum of African American History because I know you had almost a thousand stakeholders, which sounds pretty overwhelming. What were some of those challenges, juggling all those people and voices and what was some of the positive outcomes as well?
Joy: What was really great about the process was that we were able to, in multiple cities across the country, really talk about things that previously people had just kind of said, oh, you know, we need to be talking about what happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We need to be talking about what made the civil rights movement so powerful that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed. What were the implications of enslavement, of 400 years of enslavement, on people of African descent today?
What was really powerful about that process was that we were able to have these conversations, grapple with these conversations, and really start to write down on paper what that would look like in a museum. We were not, and I say we, but I really mean Dr. Lonnie Bunch and Kinshasha Holman Conwell and many, many, many people who really led that process were not afraid to talk about, okay, where do we start?
We were present, and a part of the identification of the framework of what people said and what people said was – tell the truth. People said we need a space to celebrate. People said we need a place to commemorate. People said we need to know about agency, right? So in telling the truth, yes, you are sharing the hard stories, and in sharing the hard stories, we want to talk about the agency that people of African descent used in a lot of times, being super active in freeing ourselves. And so that was a really great opportunity.
I think when we think about what was hard, what was hard was exactly what I said. Where do you start? And making sure that you’re not daunted by the fear that you are not going to tell the right story and the understanding that the process is iterative, meaning that over the years the stories can change and that the museum can change with those stories.
Brenda: Something that’s a definite takeaway from all of this is the need for museums to be highly descriptive about their communities and the persons that they’re speaking with. I’m curious. You use the term, Joy, follow the crowd in your work. Tell me, what do you mean, what do you mean by that?
Joy: So it’s actually quite simple. Where are the people that you want to speak to? So when I talk about the communities of practice and your geographic communities, there are watering holes where, we have a client that’s using that term a lot, where are the natural places that these communities are gathering? And instead of trying to create your own watering hole, okay, you know, why don’t you save yourself some money and some heartache and go to the places that already have created themselves? They have proven themselves to be natural spaces where people gather.
We always are talking to people that are saying, I don’t know where young people of, you know, a certain age or, you know, where are young people who are college-aged or young people who are moving from this kind of, you know, I’ve just graduated from college, I’m trying to find my footing. Where are they going? Well, number one, if you want a college-aged students, go to colleges. Right. That’s the first part. Go to where the colleges are. If you want students who are particularly knowledgeable about a particular piece, you know, say you have an automotive museum. Why don’t you go to those places where those students are training?
We have this thing because we are always trying to make things fun. We would go to conferences, and we would sponsor, you know, a happy hour, right? You sponsor a happy hour, give everybody one drink ticket because you want them to be sober enough to tell you what you need to know. And, you know, 45 minutes to an hour of your time, you’re going to tell me what you want to experience in an Urban League museum, an Urban League experience.
So, by following the crowd, it really just means going to, genuinely going to where they are. And I’ll tell you something funny. A woman was speaking and she said, well, you know, it’s in truth, it’s what we’ve always done in the church tradition. You’re meeting people where they are, mentally and physically. So things like Alcoholics Anonymous, things like hosting a food pantry, things like having a closet, you know, a work closet, so that people who are going for jobs can come to your space and get clothing. And I never realized that that’s what I was doing. I did not realize until a few days ago the woman said, yeah, you know, this phrase, meet people where they are. That comes from religious practice. So I hope that I’m known as a person who brings both the bars and the religious spaces onto your podcast. I’ve been able to mention them both in one in one podcast.
Abby: So when we think about actual the design process for the exhibit itself, I’ve heard you use the term first voice before. Can you explain what this means in terms of the exhibit, the design landscape, and why it’s important?
Joy: Essentially, it’s ensuring that the people whose story is being shared are the actual voice of the story. If we’re telling an indigenous peoples story, if we’re working with indigenous peoples to tell their story that they are at the table from day one and being paid and a part of the team that is paid and that the experience of creating the exhibit is centered on them and that that table is really set by them.
You know, when I think about it, like I’m bringing process to the table, but at the end of the day, at the beginning of the day, middle and end of the day, the most important piece is actually the first voice. The first voice that we hear, the last voice that we hear and understand and listen to has to be the voice of the peoples whose story is being shared.
Abby: Within those voices, those stories, those narratives, would it be a group decision then, on which specific stories to tell because often I find when we’re designing museums, there are a ton of different directions you can go. But because of restrictions, either financial, logistics, space restrictions, you have to cut some of the stories out. So, you know, whose responsibility is that decision?
Joy: It’s always the first voice, right? Like we, you nor I as the interpretive planner or the designer, we can’t make that final decision. You know, Alice Greenwald from the 9/11 Memorial and Museum always tells the story of when she was at the national Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, that they had a massive exhibition that was of the hair; before people went into the concentration camps their hair was cut off, and the exhibition designers had gone through so much red tape and everything to get this out of the country. All the permissions had been signed, all of the different documentation that was needed had been put through. You can imagine the amount of money, effort, and time and one of the family advisory groups and committees, one of the women who was a survivor – this was many years ago, of course – said absolutely not.
And the question, of course, was what? Why? Because that might be my mother’s hair. And so the exhibition was scrapped immediately. And the story there, I mean, that’s an extreme story because it illustrates the importance of making sure that at the end of the day, if it is truly the first voice, then that is the last voice that has to be heard before it goes up.
Brenda: Wow. Joy, what kind of advice do you have for people who want to do work with diverse communities, which, by the way, everyone should be doing? But what’s your advice for folks who, for whatever reason, might just be starting out?
Joy: Great question. Okay. So first of all, listening, everybody wants to talk, but it is important to listen. There’s two things that we do when we start a program. First is to start with a land acknowledgment, because it does something for you to you to really stop and think about the heritage of the people who came before you.
And then we do what’s called meeting agreements. And one of the meeting agreements is to recognize your space of privilege, to say, okay, I’m an African-American woman who is blessed to have come from a family where my mom and dad were present. I have a college degree. I have a master’s degree. I’m able to sit in a space where people ask me questions and want to hear what I say.
It is imperative of me to be quiet and listen when people who don’t walk into the room with the privilege that I just expressed, listen when they speak, because maybe they won’t be in the spaces that I am in tomorrow, and maybe I’ll have the opportunity to say, Hey, I was just in this room with X person. Why don’t we invite them in to speak so that we can hear their stories, first voice?
Brenda: You know, I’m listening to you talk about first voice, and a translation for me is thinking about the work that I do, as a professor. And where I teach, my students are very, very diverse. And when I say diversity among my students, you know, it’s race, ethnicity, their identity, socioeconomic status. It runs the gamut. I’m endlessly in a position to have to be keenly aware that not everybody is like me. Everybody brings different perspectives, backgrounds, life experiences. And I’ll tell you something, if I ever lose sight of that, I’ve got about, you know, 40 young people who are very eager to correct me and make sure that I am back on the course.
Joy: I love that.
Brenda: Oh, boy, it’s a real privilege. And it’s also, it’s really good exercise for me, God’s honest, and I’ve got to tell you, you know, there’s never room for presumptions or assumptions. Joy, how do all of us continue to exercise this kind of inclusivity in our work, whatever that form might be?
Joy: I think, Brenda, it’s questioning ourselves and allowing ourselves to be questioned. I practice not being jealous, but I’m a little bit jealous of your experience in the classrooms because I do know that you are continuously being questioned and pressed because those students are saying, well hey, this is different from what I thought it would be. Or why is it not?
And they imagine this future or they know a future that we never could have imagined because we assume things should be a certain way. And so I think that what you are doing, you’re making yourself vulnerable, right? Like that’s that space of vulnerability and, oh my God, it’s so tiring, but really great, right? Because wow, when you look up and think about how you’ve grown, right? But it’s continuously allowing yourself to question and to be questioned.
Abby: Yeah, I completely agree with you, Joy. I think too many of us are happy within the safety of the environment we know and enjoy familiarity. I remember as a little kid, my mom came in. I was trying to go to sleep and had some big worry on my mind, and she said, Abby, life’s like a trapeze. When you’re holding on, going backwards and forwards, you’re not going anywhere. You’re truly alive the moment you let go and reach for the next bar. And that’s really stuck with me in life, that idea of really sort of questioning, pushing yourself out of that comfort zone. And I think museums really should do that for their visitors. They need to be places that make the visitor question, and as you said earlier, Joy, press them.
Our last question of today is, why do you think a visit to a museum is so memorable?
Joy: One of the things that we do need to keep in creating ownership is that kind of event opportunity. And by that, I mean excitement about being in a space that’s doing amazing things for whatever reason. And I think that the event opportunity is nothing without the connection. And the connection comes exactly through that ownership. We think about that Faith Ringgold story I told at the beginning. I was so excited about the connection of the flat drawings and then connecting to my daughter. Now, all these many years later, that is why I will remember that event. It is that connection that is most important.
Abby: Well, Joy, this really has been a joy. Your parents definitely named you accurately. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and insights with us today. It truly has been a real pleasure.
Joy: And thank you. Thank you both for doing the work that you do, and thank you for your questions. This has been such a thrill. Thank you for the conversation.
[Music]
Producer: Matters of Experience is produced by Lorem Ipsum Corp. Please tune in next week for another conversation. Thank you all for listening.
Follow the Crowd with Joy Bailey-Bryant
Satisfaction as Ultimate Experience with John Falk
Institute for Learning Innovation
Why Well-Being Is at the Heart of Museum Experiences – John H. Falk
Episode produced by Anton Baptiste
[Music]
Abby: Hello and welcome to Matters of Experience. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: And I’m Brenda Cowan.
Abby: Welcome to this week’s podcast, Satisfaction as Ultimate Experience, with our guest, John Falk. John, we are excited to welcome you to the show today to discuss this very intriguing idea.
Brenda: John, you were the Executive Director for the Institute for Learning Innovation and the Sea Grant Professor Emeritus at Oregon State University. You have amassed decades of experience in leadership, audience research and practice on the subject of why and how museums and exhibitions matter. Could you tell us about your work with museums and audiences, and, well, what led you to your current role?
John: Well, first of all, thank you, Abby and Brenda, for inviting me here today, and I am delighted. So where to begin? I’ve been working for nearly 50 years to better understand why people go to places like museums, what they do there, and what value or outcomes they derive from such experience. And over those decades, I’ve worked variously at the Smithsonian Institution, Oregon State University, and for the majority of that time as executive director you mentioned, of the not-for-profit Institute for Learning Innovation. And across all these years, my goal has been to understand these issue, first and foremost through the lens of visitors themselves. What do actual users of these experiences believe is the value of their experiences? And why?
Abby: In your current work, you think museums can and should provide experiences that enhance well-being in their visitors. Let’s talk about that. In fact, you see museums as excelling at supporting well-being. So what do these experiences that help our well-being look like?
John: Well, to really answer those questions, I need to step back and explain how I came to this conclusion in the first place. So starting over 40 years ago, I began to ask people to tell me, why did you go to a museum? Do you remember going to a museum? Tell me about your experience. What do you remember? And over those 40 years, I have interviewed hundreds of people.
Three things stand out. So, first of all, virtually everyone who you ask, have you ever been to a place like a museum can recall that and say, yes, I can remember that. And that’s true whether it was days or months or even decades. And the other interesting thing is virtually everyone has something positive to say about their museum experience.
And the third thing is everyone remembers something, but virtually no one’s memories are comparable. Everyone remembers something unique and idiosyncratic. In fact, even to the point where I purposefully interviewed groups of people who had gone through the museum at the same time, and they all remember the experience, but they tell entirely different stories about what their experiences were.
So of course, various people, including me, have interpreted this data in various ways, but more recently, when I looked at it and stepped back and tried to make sense of it, I was really struck by a couple of things. And the most significant is this non-trivial reality that everyone remembers their museum experience. Most people remember virtually nothing of what they’ve done in the past, and research would suggest the only things we remember are things that are meaningful, and what is meaningful to someone are things that affect their well-being.
We’ve evolved four big categories of perceived well-being, what I have called personal, intellectual, social, and physical well-being. So let’s talk about personal well-being. As people, we derive great satisfaction from feeling a sense of amazement and wonder, from being spiritual, from feeling creative, from feeling like we have an understanding and can enhance our sense of who we are, a sense of identity. And it turns out that places like museums and exhibits are pretty good at stimulating these things.
People also work really hard at what I call their intellectual well-being. We derive great satisfaction from being able to exercise choice and control over our world, and we seek to accomplish this by being curious, by learning and understanding our world and using that information to affect future decisions as well as to make sense of what happened to us in the past. And again, museums are great places for people to do all those things.
But humans are highly social creatures, and so we have this desire to love and be loved and to show respect and be respected. And it turns out that, again, places like museums, turn out to be pretty good places for enacting those kinds of experiences.
And then, finally, not to diminish it, going back to the beginning, life evolved the ability to work really hard to make sure that it’s well-being was enhanced in terms of food, shelter, also safety, and security. If anything, events of the last couple of years with COVID would suggest we are very adverse to doing things that we think are going to make us sick or ill or going places that we think are going to make us sick or ill. The reason people historically went to museums is because they did feel safe and secure in those places.
So the specifics are unique, but you can generalize that the basic outcomes can be categorized into these four categories, and that’s really important, and that’s pretty cool.
Brenda: John, this is high praise for museums, and I love the idea that you suggest that everyone experiences or can experience the sense of awe when they go to a museum. So I just wanted to really underscore what, what I think is really very hopeful work.
There are folks who would say that well-being is, it’s intangible, it’s squidgy. But can you actually measure well-being outcomes in museum experiences?
John: So the short answer is absolutely yes. Most of the ways people are collecting well-being data these days is by asking people these generic questions about their life over the past year. What is true for health is equally true for my social situation, because, you know, today I may be feeling good because my spouse and I are getting along, but tomorrow we may have an argument, and I feel terrible about my relationship with my spouse.
These things go up and down and that’s just the way it is. That’s life. Life is always fluctuating and so our well-being is always fluctuating. So if you want to accurately measure well-being, the long and short of it is you have to say, ask a question about a specific event over a specific time period. And guess what? We can do that with museums. We can say, so when you went to the museum yesterday, or a month ago, did that experience make you feel good or bad, and in what ways? Because that’s a discrete, definable time period, and I can reflect on that and give you a reasonably valid and reliable answer. And as a consequence, we can quantitatively measure the degree to which people have well-being as a outcome of those experiences.
But the other caveat to that is well-being develops over time. It’s not instantaneous. So my perception of well-being of a museum experience changes over time because the quality of that experience depends on what happened, not just at the museum, but after the museum. So it suggests that if you wait longer, if you wait days, weeks, ideally months to ask people, their ability to say, yeah, not only did I have a good experience, but over those couple days and weeks and months since then, I’ve continued to have a positive experience. We keep talking about our museum experience and the value of that experience actually increases, and if you’re clever, which I tried to be, I found that I could actually not only measure the quality of museum experiences, I could monetize it.
And lo and behold, I could find that even though the average cost of going to a museum was on the order of tens of dollars, $10, $20, $30, the mean value that people ascribed to those experiences because of their persistence were on the order of hundreds of dollars. And if you even go further and calculate the return on investment, what you find is that the return on investment is on the order of 1,000%, which is really important and significant.
Abby: So first of all, I think our minds are blown with that type of return on investment. That is fantastic and very heartening.
Currently, your work looks at the idea that meaningful experiences are satisfying experiences, that visitors are sort of innately driven to museums to experience satisfaction as part of their well-being. How would you define this notion of satisfaction?
John: So satisfaction is immediate feedback. Well-Being is longer term feedback. So as you remember, we can’t really accurately measure well-being when people are still in the museum. We have to wait weeks and months later, but we can measure satisfaction as a proxy for well-being immediately. Satisfaction, as it turns out, is an anticipatory reaction.
Satisfaction is not really about what has happened. It’s about the anticipation of what’s to happen. And that anticipation is based on our expectations and perceptions of novelty. So, I have higher satisfaction for something if I hope that this would happen, and I have a sense that it’s about to happen, and I have even higher satisfaction if I think that what’s about to happen is really surprising and novel and is likely to exceed my expectations.
So the good news is, over the past decade or so, biologists, neuroscientists, psychologists have made a lot of progress in trying to figure out how satisfaction works and what are the important clues that help to determine whether this complex phenomenon is going on. So we can build on that information to not only understand how satisfaction acts as a precursor of well-being, but to measure it and to use this as a tool to begin to disentangle whether people are having satisfying experiences or not within the museum.
And it turns out one of the reasons this is really critically important is that satisfaction is really closely tied to a couple of really, really important things: long term memory, long term motivation and future action. Satisfied people are significantly more likely to repeat an activity than unsatisfied people, and satisfied people are significantly more likely to want to share that experience with others.
Abby: I don’t understand something, though, John. So you mentioned that there’s a lot more satisfaction before you do the thing, for example, before you eat the ice cream, than actually when you’re eating the ice cream. So how does that work with a museum visit, for example? So wouldn’t there be more satisfaction about going to see the exhibit or the experience and more potential for a lack of satisfaction during and therefore after the experience?
John: Yes and no. So actually, what my research suggests is that virtually everybody, whether they are conscious of it or not, goes to the museum with expectations of what they’re going to experience.
When I first started working in museums some 40, 50 years ago, it was estimated that something like 25 to 30% of the public went to a museum-like setting at least once a year. These days, pre-pandemic, mind you, those numbers were more like 60%. It’s really hard to bump into anybody these days who’s never been to a museum, an adult, in their life. And so even if I’m going to a museum I’ve never been to, I have some expectations of what I’m going to see and what I’m going to do. And satisfaction is deeply tied to those expectations. And so, more than anything else, I’m using the museum to fulfill those expectations, and I find that very satisfying.
Abby: To play devil’s advocate, do you think there is that expectation to answer, yes, I was satisfied because there’s that pressure to have been satisfied after you’ve visited a museum.
John: That is also there. It turns out that those are self-fulfilling prophecies and people work really hard to make those come true because there’s a cost to you and being disappointed. I’ve invested a lot of time and energy in doing this activity, and so I’m highly motivated for it to be successful, and so I’m going to bend over backwards to make it successful, and in fact, there’s evidence that people will do that, that they will ignore negative information because they want it to be successful.
You know, there’s such a thing as bad design, but people will work hard to overcome that bad design. You can make it easier for people to be satisfied. You can make it harder for people to be satisfied. But overall, most people are satisfied because they want to be satisfied.
Brenda: On the subject of design, though, people are bringing very high expectations and desires. They’re motivated in many different ways to go to a very wide variety of experience spaces these days, and we have many folks listening to the program who do work in museums of all different forms, but also branded environments and different kinds of events and spectaculars, really the world of design as we have it today.
And I’m wondering, how do you think that we can all better serve visitor satisfaction and well-being in the work that we create?
John: Yeah. So one of my favorite quotes is from the psychologist Kurt Lewin, who said, back in the fifties, there is nothing so practical as a good theory, and I want to believe this is a good theory. I want to believe that this new model of museum experiences represents a figurative Rosetta Stone. It’s a way to basically decode what’s going on in these visitor experiences.
And once decoded, professional experience creators can use this information to figure out how to create better and more satisfying, and engaging experiences. Because if we more deeply understand why people derive value and what it is about these experiences that create perceptions of value, then we can build on that information and reinforce it.
Abby: Just thinking about a satisfying experience, that must differ depending on who the person is, because I would imagine a mother with a child, for example, a young two-year-old going to a museum for something a bit different, take myself out the rut, hopefully, the kids will be quiet, they’ll see something visually that entertains them for 5 minutes. How do you think designers should work to create satisfaction in different types of visitors?
John: So, first of all, our historic use of demographics is a bankrupt way of thinking about needs and diversities, because understanding that, for example, I’m a sixty-year-old white male with a college education gives you no clue as to why I showed up that day or what my needs are. Because today I may show up by myself, and as you say, tomorrow, I show up with my grandchild, and my needs and interests would be entirely different on those two days, although my demographics would be exactly the same.
So we need to get deeper. We need to understand people’s expectations. We need to understand what is going to give people well-being on that particular day. And that’s a really tall order. But we can begin to unpack this and at least come to some initial approximations and do what in industry is called mass customization, as opposed to total customization of experience.
So I can at least create choices. I can at least attempt to create some kind of interface. The best one would be a real person who greets me at the door and tries to understand what I’m interested in today. Or you could use technology and have people answer a couple of questions on their website before you come so that you can give people suggestions on where to go and what to do.
And in some utopian future, we would meet everybody’s needs uniquely. But in the short term, we at least have to create more customized experiences. But the key ultimately, the reason these experiences are considered so valuable by so many people is because they afford choice and control.
Abby: John, yeah, I’m really happy that you mentioned people, visitors before they actually enter the building and engaging them before they engage with the museum itself. I think that is so important.
John: And I would actually go so far as to suggest the corollary of that is equally true, that we have historically defined and seemed to think that the only thing we have control over is figuratively what happens in the box when somebody comes to the exhibit. And that’s just not true. We can push those boundaries out and we can try to influence why people come and what their expectations are.
And we can influence and continue to have impact on what they do afterwards and how they value that experience. And the better we get at that, the more successful we will be at supporting people’s enhanced well-being as well. And satisfaction.
Brenda: You said something quite a while back about awe and the power of awe, and I’m listening to this idea of mass customization and the customization and the individual, which is so critical, and I keep thinking about awe and something that we know about the experience of awe that can happen in museums and happens, right, oftentimes in nature and in grand moments, as well as in quite small, intimate moments.
But we know that awe is a pro-social experience, right? We know that awe is a human unifier and that it unifies people in really powerful ways. And as you were talking, as I’ve been listening, I’ve been wondering, is there such a thing as mass well-being?
John: I mean, at some level, the answer is yeah, I mean, there’s a reason why tens of thousands of people every year go to gawk at Niagara Falls or Iguazu Falls or to look at the Grand Canyon. Those are mass awe experiences. And every year millions of people go to the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History to see the Hope Diamond, and I think there are some museums and some contexts in which we can tap into that. But those are really few and far between and exceptional experiences. The awe that most people get from museums is more of a lowercase awe than the uppercase awe of seeing Niagara Falls or the Hope Diamond.
And so those too can be shared experiences. And virtually every museum has its own version of the Hope Diamond. It’s just maybe a lowercase Hope Diamond, in the sense of a little less awe inspiring then maybe something like that. But those represent shared experiences, and I think museums can tap into that, but not to the exclusion of other kinds of experiences.
Abby: Returning back to the concept of satisfaction. It seems sort of like a low benchmark in a way. Is satisfaction enough? It provides us with a memory, it seems. But how does it influence us to action? When you think about going to museums, seeing stories, being impassioned and wanting to leave and make a difference, do something after our experience, satisfaction seems a little too comfortable.
John: Well, that’s if you trivialize satisfaction. But if you think about satisfaction as a mechanism for determining whether an experience is worth paying attention to, is memorable, is something that will be meaningful to you in your life, then if we don’t achieve that bar, which is a fairly high bar, nothing else is going to happen. You aren’t going to take further action if it wasn’t perceived as a valuable and satisfying experience.
But I would also hesitate to suggest that many professionals have rather overinflated expectations for what they can accomplish through the medium of exhibits or museum experiences. We’re talking about for any particular exhibition in a museum, this is a 15, 20, gosh, 1-hour event in somebody’s life. So what reasonably would you expect would come out of that? How many 20-minute experiences in your life have changed what you do for the rest of your life?
Well, if you’re lucky, maybe one or two of them have, but it’s really hard to script that. That’s not a reasonable expectation. It’s not. For people who are inclined to move in that direction. Going to an exhibit can be a catalyst, can reinforce and help move people in that direction. But it’s totally unlikely to dramatically change the trajectory of someone’s life.
And the fact that people hold those expectations is misguided. We should be grateful that these are memorable, long-lasting experiences. We should be grateful people feel that these experiences have value to them and enhance their well-being. But we should be humble about in what ways they do that, for what reasons they do that, and for what the outcomes of these experiences should be.
Brenda: Well, I think that measurable well-being in museums is extraordinary, and listening to you, John, it’s, it’s so hopeful. And I think of it, it feels almost like fuel. And from the designer perspective, anyway, the idea of measurable well-being, the idea of the meaningfulness of satisfaction, it can drive us to really know that what we do is purposeful. And for that, I’m really grateful. And I want to thank you very much for sharing that and sharing your work with us today. I’m also going to add in a quick plug for your most recent book. This is The Value of Museums: Enhancing Societal Well-Being. And I’ll also point out that, to our listeners, John is going to also be writing an upcoming chapter in a volume that I’m coauthoring called Flourishing in Museums.
John: Well, thank you. It’s been a pleasure to have an opportunity to chat. And hopefully what I’ve said, I’m sure is provocative and hopefully will get some people thinking.
Abby: It certainly was.
Brenda: It’s fantastic.
Abby: Yeah, thank you John.
[Music]
Producer: Matters of Experience is produced by Lorem Ipsum Corp. Please tune in next week for another conversation. Thank you all for listening.
Institute for Learning Innovation
Why Well-Being Is at the Heart of Museum Experiences – John H. Falk
Episode produced by Anton Baptiste
[Music]
Abby: Hello and welcome to Matters of Experience. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: And I’m Brenda Cowan.
Abby: Welcome to this week’s podcast, Satisfaction as Ultimate Experience, with our guest, John Falk. John, we are excited to welcome you to the show today to discuss this very intriguing idea.
Brenda: John, you were the Executive Director for the Institute for Learning Innovation and the Sea Grant Professor Emeritus at Oregon State University. You have amassed decades of experience in leadership, audience research and practice on the subject of why and how museums and exhibitions matter. Could you tell us about your work with museums and audiences, and, well, what led you to your current role?
John: Well, first of all, thank you, Abby and Brenda, for inviting me here today, and I am delighted. So where to begin? I’ve been working for nearly 50 years to better understand why people go to places like museums, what they do there, and what value or outcomes they derive from such experience. And over those decades, I’ve worked variously at the Smithsonian Institution, Oregon State University, and for the majority of that time as executive director you mentioned, of the not-for-profit Institute for Learning Innovation. And across all these years, my goal has been to understand these issue, first and foremost through the lens of visitors themselves. What do actual users of these experiences believe is the value of their experiences? And why?
Abby: In your current work, you think museums can and should provide experiences that enhance well-being in their visitors. Let’s talk about that. In fact, you see museums as excelling at supporting well-being. So what do these experiences that help our well-being look like?
John: Well, to really answer those questions, I need to step back and explain how I came to this conclusion in the first place. So starting over 40 years ago, I began to ask people to tell me, why did you go to a museum? Do you remember going to a museum? Tell me about your experience. What do you remember? And over those 40 years, I have interviewed hundreds of people.
Three things stand out. So, first of all, virtually everyone who you ask, have you ever been to a place like a museum can recall that and say, yes, I can remember that. And that’s true whether it was days or months or even decades. And the other interesting thing is virtually everyone has something positive to say about their museum experience.
And the third thing is everyone remembers something, but virtually no one’s memories are comparable. Everyone remembers something unique and idiosyncratic. In fact, even to the point where I purposefully interviewed groups of people who had gone through the museum at the same time, and they all remember the experience, but they tell entirely different stories about what their experiences were.
So of course, various people, including me, have interpreted this data in various ways, but more recently, when I looked at it and stepped back and tried to make sense of it, I was really struck by a couple of things. And the most significant is this non-trivial reality that everyone remembers their museum experience. Most people remember virtually nothing of what they’ve done in the past, and research would suggest the only things we remember are things that are meaningful, and what is meaningful to someone are things that affect their well-being.
We’ve evolved four big categories of perceived well-being, what I have called personal, intellectual, social, and physical well-being. So let’s talk about personal well-being. As people, we derive great satisfaction from feeling a sense of amazement and wonder, from being spiritual, from feeling creative, from feeling like we have an understanding and can enhance our sense of who we are, a sense of identity. And it turns out that places like museums and exhibits are pretty good at stimulating these things.
People also work really hard at what I call their intellectual well-being. We derive great satisfaction from being able to exercise choice and control over our world, and we seek to accomplish this by being curious, by learning and understanding our world and using that information to affect future decisions as well as to make sense of what happened to us in the past. And again, museums are great places for people to do all those things.
But humans are highly social creatures, and so we have this desire to love and be loved and to show respect and be respected. And it turns out that, again, places like museums, turn out to be pretty good places for enacting those kinds of experiences.
And then, finally, not to diminish it, going back to the beginning, life evolved the ability to work really hard to make sure that it’s well-being was enhanced in terms of food, shelter, also safety, and security. If anything, events of the last couple of years with COVID would suggest we are very adverse to doing things that we think are going to make us sick or ill or going places that we think are going to make us sick or ill. The reason people historically went to museums is because they did feel safe and secure in those places.
So the specifics are unique, but you can generalize that the basic outcomes can be categorized into these four categories, and that’s really important, and that’s pretty cool.
Brenda: John, this is high praise for museums, and I love the idea that you suggest that everyone experiences or can experience the sense of awe when they go to a museum. So I just wanted to really underscore what, what I think is really very hopeful work.
There are folks who would say that well-being is, it’s intangible, it’s squidgy. But can you actually measure well-being outcomes in museum experiences?
John: So the short answer is absolutely yes. Most of the ways people are collecting well-being data these days is by asking people these generic questions about their life over the past year. What is true for health is equally true for my social situation, because, you know, today I may be feeling good because my spouse and I are getting along, but tomorrow we may have an argument, and I feel terrible about my relationship with my spouse.
These things go up and down and that’s just the way it is. That’s life. Life is always fluctuating and so our well-being is always fluctuating. So if you want to accurately measure well-being, the long and short of it is you have to say, ask a question about a specific event over a specific time period. And guess what? We can do that with museums. We can say, so when you went to the museum yesterday, or a month ago, did that experience make you feel good or bad, and in what ways? Because that’s a discrete, definable time period, and I can reflect on that and give you a reasonably valid and reliable answer. And as a consequence, we can quantitatively measure the degree to which people have well-being as a outcome of those experiences.
But the other caveat to that is well-being develops over time. It’s not instantaneous. So my perception of well-being of a museum experience changes over time because the quality of that experience depends on what happened, not just at the museum, but after the museum. So it suggests that if you wait longer, if you wait days, weeks, ideally months to ask people, their ability to say, yeah, not only did I have a good experience, but over those couple days and weeks and months since then, I’ve continued to have a positive experience. We keep talking about our museum experience and the value of that experience actually increases, and if you’re clever, which I tried to be, I found that I could actually not only measure the quality of museum experiences, I could monetize it.
And lo and behold, I could find that even though the average cost of going to a museum was on the order of tens of dollars, $10, $20, $30, the mean value that people ascribed to those experiences because of their persistence were on the order of hundreds of dollars. And if you even go further and calculate the return on investment, what you find is that the return on investment is on the order of 1,000%, which is really important and significant.
Abby: So first of all, I think our minds are blown with that type of return on investment. That is fantastic and very heartening.
Currently, your work looks at the idea that meaningful experiences are satisfying experiences, that visitors are sort of innately driven to museums to experience satisfaction as part of their well-being. How would you define this notion of satisfaction?
John: So satisfaction is immediate feedback. Well-Being is longer term feedback. So as you remember, we can’t really accurately measure well-being when people are still in the museum. We have to wait weeks and months later, but we can measure satisfaction as a proxy for well-being immediately. Satisfaction, as it turns out, is an anticipatory reaction.
Satisfaction is not really about what has happened. It’s about the anticipation of what’s to happen. And that anticipation is based on our expectations and perceptions of novelty. So, I have higher satisfaction for something if I hope that this would happen, and I have a sense that it’s about to happen, and I have even higher satisfaction if I think that what’s about to happen is really surprising and novel and is likely to exceed my expectations.
So the good news is, over the past decade or so, biologists, neuroscientists, psychologists have made a lot of progress in trying to figure out how satisfaction works and what are the important clues that help to determine whether this complex phenomenon is going on. So we can build on that information to not only understand how satisfaction acts as a precursor of well-being, but to measure it and to use this as a tool to begin to disentangle whether people are having satisfying experiences or not within the museum.
And it turns out one of the reasons this is really critically important is that satisfaction is really closely tied to a couple of really, really important things: long term memory, long term motivation and future action. Satisfied people are significantly more likely to repeat an activity than unsatisfied people, and satisfied people are significantly more likely to want to share that experience with others.
Abby: I don’t understand something, though, John. So you mentioned that there’s a lot more satisfaction before you do the thing, for example, before you eat the ice cream, than actually when you’re eating the ice cream. So how does that work with a museum visit, for example? So wouldn’t there be more satisfaction about going to see the exhibit or the experience and more potential for a lack of satisfaction during and therefore after the experience?
John: Yes and no. So actually, what my research suggests is that virtually everybody, whether they are conscious of it or not, goes to the museum with expectations of what they’re going to experience.
When I first started working in museums some 40, 50 years ago, it was estimated that something like 25 to 30% of the public went to a museum-like setting at least once a year. These days, pre-pandemic, mind you, those numbers were more like 60%. It’s really hard to bump into anybody these days who’s never been to a museum, an adult, in their life. And so even if I’m going to a museum I’ve never been to, I have some expectations of what I’m going to see and what I’m going to do. And satisfaction is deeply tied to those expectations. And so, more than anything else, I’m using the museum to fulfill those expectations, and I find that very satisfying.
Abby: To play devil’s advocate, do you think there is that expectation to answer, yes, I was satisfied because there’s that pressure to have been satisfied after you’ve visited a museum.
John: That is also there. It turns out that those are self-fulfilling prophecies and people work really hard to make those come true because there’s a cost to you and being disappointed. I’ve invested a lot of time and energy in doing this activity, and so I’m highly motivated for it to be successful, and so I’m going to bend over backwards to make it successful, and in fact, there’s evidence that people will do that, that they will ignore negative information because they want it to be successful.
You know, there’s such a thing as bad design, but people will work hard to overcome that bad design. You can make it easier for people to be satisfied. You can make it harder for people to be satisfied. But overall, most people are satisfied because they want to be satisfied.
Brenda: On the subject of design, though, people are bringing very high expectations and desires. They’re motivated in many different ways to go to a very wide variety of experience spaces these days, and we have many folks listening to the program who do work in museums of all different forms, but also branded environments and different kinds of events and spectaculars, really the world of design as we have it today.
And I’m wondering, how do you think that we can all better serve visitor satisfaction and well-being in the work that we create?
John: Yeah. So one of my favorite quotes is from the psychologist Kurt Lewin, who said, back in the fifties, there is nothing so practical as a good theory, and I want to believe this is a good theory. I want to believe that this new model of museum experiences represents a figurative Rosetta Stone. It’s a way to basically decode what’s going on in these visitor experiences.
And once decoded, professional experience creators can use this information to figure out how to create better and more satisfying, and engaging experiences. Because if we more deeply understand why people derive value and what it is about these experiences that create perceptions of value, then we can build on that information and reinforce it.
Abby: Just thinking about a satisfying experience, that must differ depending on who the person is, because I would imagine a mother with a child, for example, a young two-year-old going to a museum for something a bit different, take myself out the rut, hopefully, the kids will be quiet, they’ll see something visually that entertains them for 5 minutes. How do you think designers should work to create satisfaction in different types of visitors?
John: So, first of all, our historic use of demographics is a bankrupt way of thinking about needs and diversities, because understanding that, for example, I’m a sixty-year-old white male with a college education gives you no clue as to why I showed up that day or what my needs are. Because today I may show up by myself, and as you say, tomorrow, I show up with my grandchild, and my needs and interests would be entirely different on those two days, although my demographics would be exactly the same.
So we need to get deeper. We need to understand people’s expectations. We need to understand what is going to give people well-being on that particular day. And that’s a really tall order. But we can begin to unpack this and at least come to some initial approximations and do what in industry is called mass customization, as opposed to total customization of experience.
So I can at least create choices. I can at least attempt to create some kind of interface. The best one would be a real person who greets me at the door and tries to understand what I’m interested in today. Or you could use technology and have people answer a couple of questions on their website before you come so that you can give people suggestions on where to go and what to do.
And in some utopian future, we would meet everybody’s needs uniquely. But in the short term, we at least have to create more customized experiences. But the key ultimately, the reason these experiences are considered so valuable by so many people is because they afford choice and control.
Abby: John, yeah, I’m really happy that you mentioned people, visitors before they actually enter the building and engaging them before they engage with the museum itself. I think that is so important.
John: And I would actually go so far as to suggest the corollary of that is equally true, that we have historically defined and seemed to think that the only thing we have control over is figuratively what happens in the box when somebody comes to the exhibit. And that’s just not true. We can push those boundaries out and we can try to influence why people come and what their expectations are.
And we can influence and continue to have impact on what they do afterwards and how they value that experience. And the better we get at that, the more successful we will be at supporting people’s enhanced well-being as well. And satisfaction.
Brenda: You said something quite a while back about awe and the power of awe, and I’m listening to this idea of mass customization and the customization and the individual, which is so critical, and I keep thinking about awe and something that we know about the experience of awe that can happen in museums and happens, right, oftentimes in nature and in grand moments, as well as in quite small, intimate moments.
But we know that awe is a pro-social experience, right? We know that awe is a human unifier and that it unifies people in really powerful ways. And as you were talking, as I’ve been listening, I’ve been wondering, is there such a thing as mass well-being?
John: I mean, at some level, the answer is yeah, I mean, there’s a reason why tens of thousands of people every year go to gawk at Niagara Falls or Iguazu Falls or to look at the Grand Canyon. Those are mass awe experiences. And every year millions of people go to the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History to see the Hope Diamond, and I think there are some museums and some contexts in which we can tap into that. But those are really few and far between and exceptional experiences. The awe that most people get from museums is more of a lowercase awe than the uppercase awe of seeing Niagara Falls or the Hope Diamond.
And so those too can be shared experiences. And virtually every museum has its own version of the Hope Diamond. It’s just maybe a lowercase Hope Diamond, in the sense of a little less awe inspiring then maybe something like that. But those represent shared experiences, and I think museums can tap into that, but not to the exclusion of other kinds of experiences.
Abby: Returning back to the concept of satisfaction. It seems sort of like a low benchmark in a way. Is satisfaction enough? It provides us with a memory, it seems. But how does it influence us to action? When you think about going to museums, seeing stories, being impassioned and wanting to leave and make a difference, do something after our experience, satisfaction seems a little too comfortable.
John: Well, that’s if you trivialize satisfaction. But if you think about satisfaction as a mechanism for determining whether an experience is worth paying attention to, is memorable, is something that will be meaningful to you in your life, then if we don’t achieve that bar, which is a fairly high bar, nothing else is going to happen. You aren’t going to take further action if it wasn’t perceived as a valuable and satisfying experience.
But I would also hesitate to suggest that many professionals have rather overinflated expectations for what they can accomplish through the medium of exhibits or museum experiences. We’re talking about for any particular exhibition in a museum, this is a 15, 20, gosh, 1-hour event in somebody’s life. So what reasonably would you expect would come out of that? How many 20-minute experiences in your life have changed what you do for the rest of your life?
Well, if you’re lucky, maybe one or two of them have, but it’s really hard to script that. That’s not a reasonable expectation. It’s not. For people who are inclined to move in that direction. Going to an exhibit can be a catalyst, can reinforce and help move people in that direction. But it’s totally unlikely to dramatically change the trajectory of someone’s life.
And the fact that people hold those expectations is misguided. We should be grateful that these are memorable, long-lasting experiences. We should be grateful people feel that these experiences have value to them and enhance their well-being. But we should be humble about in what ways they do that, for what reasons they do that, and for what the outcomes of these experiences should be.
Brenda: Well, I think that measurable well-being in museums is extraordinary, and listening to you, John, it’s, it’s so hopeful. And I think of it, it feels almost like fuel. And from the designer perspective, anyway, the idea of measurable well-being, the idea of the meaningfulness of satisfaction, it can drive us to really know that what we do is purposeful. And for that, I’m really grateful. And I want to thank you very much for sharing that and sharing your work with us today. I’m also going to add in a quick plug for your most recent book. This is The Value of Museums: Enhancing Societal Well-Being. And I’ll also point out that, to our listeners, John is going to also be writing an upcoming chapter in a volume that I’m coauthoring called Flourishing in Museums.
John: Well, thank you. It’s been a pleasure to have an opportunity to chat. And hopefully what I’ve said, I’m sure is provocative and hopefully will get some people thinking.
Abby: It certainly was.
Brenda: It’s fantastic.
Abby: Yeah, thank you John.
[Music]
Producer: Matters of Experience is produced by Lorem Ipsum Corp. Please tune in next week for another conversation. Thank you all for listening.
Satisfaction as Ultimate Experience with John Falk
There’s No I in Team
[Music]
Abby: Hello and welcome to Matters of Experience. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: And I am Brenda Cowan.
Abby: Brenda, I’m really looking forward to today’s podcast because it’s one of those things that seems so obvious, especially in what we do. But whenever you bring together a team or work with teams, there’s always an ego or two lurking.
Brenda: Or four or five, or, yeah.
Abby: And dealing with these personalities so that the group can work harmoniously is critical but sometimes difficult, and it can make or break a project. And I’ve seen other vendors or the client be the culprit who wants to dominate and assert themselves in meetings. So coming up with ways to handle and manage these people is necessary, and so is knowing when to throw the towel in and part ways.
The first thing that’s clear is if you want to work in the exhibition or experience design profession, you need to enjoy working with others. You have to play well. We’re not artists who work alone and then, presto, we appear with all the answers and are ready to build design set. We need designers, engineers, architects, modelers, fabricators, AV integrators. There’s a huge cast of colorful characters involved, and they all have to have patience and respect to make a project truly unbelievable.
Brenda: I couldn’t agree more that we don’t enter into this thinking that we’re fine artists. And I’ll also say that you have to have an ego in order to be in this business. But there’s a big difference between behaving poorly but having the right kind of healthy ego where you can make decisions, put out suggestions or even push back against an idea.
And oftentimes, clients kind of expect you to be like that. A client will say, okay, ready, set, go. Come up with all of the answers. And that’s not collaboration. That’s not teamwork. And the design firm’s job, I believe, is to really sort of help educate the client oftentimes anyway, not always, but often times that we are going to work together, which means that you are going to be valued and we need you to participate, and we need you not to expect us to have all of the right answers right from the gate.
Abby:
It’s really difficult to do what we do. It’s hard enough to create. It’s hard enough to work together. And egos just block it everywhere. It can’t be one person’s vision.
Brenda: I think another way of really thinking about this is the idea of knowing who you are, knowing how you individually, personally work the best. What is it that makes you really great at what you do? And then being able to allow for and recognize that in others, in a great team, everybody shines in one way or another, in one piece of the process or another.
And I come across people often who will suggest that, well, I don’t work well in the team because I’m an introvert. And listeners, let me tell you, introverts everywhere – you are essential to the process. And you can be an introvert. You can be a quiet person, you can be a shy person at the table, and with a good process, with a good team process, you will be heard, and you will be expected to participate and contribute.
Abby: And it starts at the very beginning, I think, with setting those goals and the parameters of the project, right, so establishing those solid relationships with the client, being inclusive, as you mentioned, of all stakeholders, everybody at the table from the get-go is vital. And I just can’t emphasize this enough.
Brenda: Abby, I would love to hear about some of your experiences recently during our COVID years, and how has the collaborative team process changed as a result of being in Zoom meetings and things being handled remotely more?
Abby: So, the loudest voices often dominate on Zoom, so you really need to make sure everyone’s included, and I encourage people to turn your cameras on. Seeing each other is really incredibly important, especially when your team’s remote. It’s really important to provide a platform for everybody to be able to contribute, not just the usual suspects. And it’s also the same if someone says, I have an idea, it’s probably bad, that self-deprecating –
Brenda: Oh, never start a sentence with I’m sorry and never start a statement, right, or a suggestion with –this is probably absolute rubbish.
Abby: No, no, no, no. There’s zero bad ideas. No, no bad ideas. And there’s no dumb questions. Trust me; I’ve asked them all. I can’t count the number of times someone suggests a left-of-field idea that spurs someone else’s imagination. That’s what I’ve noticed. Somebody will say something. It seems a little sort of obtuse. And then somebody else is like, Oh my goodness. And they’ve made a connection. And then you start ideating together. So you have to have patience with ideas. The aim isn’t to get to the idea fast. The aim is to have ideas and germinate and enjoy the process.
Brenda: Well, how does diversity in a team play into that?
Abby: You know, everybody has a different perspective and a different point of view, which is why it’s really important to have diversity on your team. So not only diversity in terms of background, ethnicity, religion, and gender, but also of the jobs they do. What role you have on the project really contributes to what ideas are brought to the table, and through collaboration of multiple disciplines, we really can create something truly fantastic, because our AV team, as we’re ideating something, will say, oh, you know what, you can do that, that’s been done before, but we were wondering if you wanted to project it this way or do this with it, or wouldn’t this be interesting? And suddenly, you have an idea that is owned by everybody. It’s imaginative. It’s creative. It’s new. So I really think diversity all around is hugely important, especially when we’re working on our projects.
Brenda: It’s great that there’s an ideal out there, and I wish I could say that, you know, everybody has that kind of experience. But over the years I’ve kept a running list, this is what I do in my spare time, I keep running lists of stuff that doesn’t go right. So here’s a quick list. Number one, no one is clear about who gets to make decisions, and it ends up being the loudest voice in the room or the Zoom. So we’re talking about the lack of clear roles, and that can kill any team process right from the get-go.
Here’s another one. There isn’t a real balance of contributions from everyone in the room. So that’s a lack of an inclusive process. And Abby, that’s what you were just giving this great, robust example of. Here’s another war story. Boy, you’ve never experienced this. Coworkers are emotional, unpredictable, and lack trust. So, having guidelines for how we’re going to respect each other, they need to be established and oftentimes, they’re not.
And here’s the last one. I hear this a lot from folks in industry, that during a collaborative team process, they can actually feel alone. They can feel separated out. And we have the responsibility for ourselves to step up and to insert ourselves in the process, and at the same time, if the process is not truly collaborative, you’re going to have people who are just pushed to the outskirts, and that can kill.
Abby: You mentioned a lot of things to talk about.
Brenda: That was the shortlist everybody.
Abby: Well, when you have a new team, you’re right. It’s so important to explain roles and responsibilities to the whole group. So everyone is clear who has the final say. Because that somebody, at the end of the day, has to have the final say. And since COVID being remote makes it very easy for people to not participate or multitask, it’s very hard to focus on a call when you don’t have your camera on. Again, my pet peeve. Another reason I ask everyone to turn the cameras on is because, you know, I’m a victim of this. When you camera’s off, you can be on Slack, you can be on your phone, you can be shooting off an email. But if my camera is on and I know people are looking at me, then I actually have to pay attention.
So sometimes the reason someone isn’t contributing is that the call is sort of overstaffed and some people have nothing to contribute. So making sure the people that need to be on the Zoom, for example, are the people that are on it, is very important. I’ve been in meetings where I was just like tons and tons of people, and some of them don’t know why they’re there. I don’t know why they’re there. So you have to make sure that people have a purpose. They know their purpose. We all know that purpose. That’s another key. I think it’s a common error. You know, the more, the merrier. I don’t think I believe in that.
Brenda: I couldn’t agree more that communication over Zoom is so tricky. I think that things work so much better when we can allow for nuance. And I’ve got so many thoughts about communication, so, you know, settle in, folks, get comfortable. Let’s talk about things that sometimes can be considered overkill – meeting notes. How often does somebody come up to you after a meeting, and they’ve either completely forgotten what was discussed or they’re confused by what was discussed. How often do we just simply need to have detailed meeting notes that are then distributed to a team and that these always will have action items? What an incredible difference, as well, for people feeling included when they are a part of the resultant notes and if nothing else, the action items, again, clear roles, clear responsibilities.
Brenda: Abby, how does this work in your experience?
Abby: Yes, I completely agree. Action items from a top-line perspective which say what was decided, what needs to be done by who is imperative. Otherwise, project management breaks down, and things start to fall through the cracks. I am often surprised after a meeting when a group has all listened to the same thing and come away with very different conclusions. So, these short recaps really help at least flag any differences that are interpreted in a meeting. Make your notes simple, quick, and really easy to understand. This sounds straightforward, but people also misinterpret notes. So think about what you’re writing.
Brenda: So let’s talk about the E word. Let’s talk about egos. How does a creative ego help the team process?
Abby: Creative egos are good, right? I don’t think you could aspire to create without one. But there is a real difference between a healthy ego, which allows me to genuinely appreciate my strengths and accept my imperfections, and an unhealthy ego which will tell you to stick to what’s comfortable and avoid uncertainty. It makes you have unrealistic expectations of yourself and then your team.
So an unhealthy ego is sort of rooted in fear, anxiety and often results in a designer who is reactive, defensive, or easily triggered. Can you tell that I’ve worked with some people with unhealthy egos? So I’ve worked with designers who personalize what others say and see everything as a criticism, or they feel the opposite, a sense of entitlement or grandiosity, and they’re shocked when someone discusses their work and its effectiveness.
Brenda: So when I say Abby, you know, X, Y, and Z person is going to be in your creative team and, you know this individual and this individual has what you would consider to be a healthy ego. You’re really excited because they’ve got a healthy ego. What is that person doing?
Abby: So when we’re talking, when they’re showing us their work, when we’re workshopping together, they are open to criticism. So I ask them why they did this. What was their purpose? What were they trying to achieve? What does this communicate? And then, they can defend their design decisions. And you have a very constructive conversation. It’s not just what I think. It’s not my role to insist upon them what I think. My job is to have them question what they’ve made in terms of the client’s mission, the mission of the museum, the design mission. Is it aligning with those points?
Brenda: Right. But with the goals, with the project, and this is another thing that I find fascinating. When a project does not have a very clearly articulated audience and when a project does not have clearly, clearly defined, and even differentiated sets of goals, at the end of the day, any kind of a conflict or a challenge or a debate or whatever, oftentimes can be resolved, not everybody might be pleased, but at the end of the day, it’s about the audience, right? And it’s about why are we here and what are we aiming to do?
Abby: And I think that’s key about a healthy ego. It’s not about the designer. It’s about who we’re designing for. And the flipside, like an unhealthy ego, the designer tries to defend everything they’ve done. They’re not listening. They’re not hearing you. You know, you get a very defensive, well, you know, that wasn’t what I focused on. It’s like, okay, that’s cool, but I think maybe in the next iteration you want to think about that, or you want to think about ADA compliance or children or whatever the issue is with the design. And so making sure that it is somebody who is open-minded, that’s what I mean when I say they’re not defined by their design. And so too many people define their success on if everybody’s going, bravo, we love it. Nobody’s ever said that.
Brenda: That’s what I experience all the time. I don’t know what your problem is, Abby, but you know. I think that, and part of this I’m sort of feeling at this moment a number of designer listeners going well, and then there’s the client who can be a little bit difficult, or it can be upper administration, who can be a little bit difficult, or project leadership can be a little bit difficult. And I will say this, if you’re in a situation where you’re kind of in a lower station, if you will, within the sort of hierarchy of the project, and you are having to respond to or not respond to somebody who’s in a position of greater authority than you and there’s a conflict or a mistake has been made, let’s talk about having the very difficult conversations that nobody wants to have to have. But in order to move forward or fix a mistake or address a problem, we have to approach somebody else and kind of put it out there.
Abby: Well, you know, my mom brought me up really well. Honesty is the best policy. And when you see a mistake, you let everybody know immediately. I have never had a problem with anybody telling me they’ve made a mistake. I’ve had a problem when somebody has tried to hide a mistake, it always just goes down the rabbit hole and it gets worse and worse and worse and inevitably always gets found out.
So, if I see that I’ve made a mistake, or, on behalf of my team, someone on my team has made a mistake, I explain the mistake, and I always present the solution. And I’ve found that clients are always really forgiving, they’re like, okay, great. They know you’re human, they know they’re human, and then you’ve just got to fix that mistake ASAP. But they’re never fun conversations, especially the awkward conversations I have to have with team members because you have a personal relationship with everybody, you know, you know where the heart is, you know they care about what they’re doing. But I realized that some of these conversations are necessary.
Brenda: And I think the same thing applies certainly if you are not the owner of the company, but you have to kind of have that conversation up or very often if you are the firm or the project manager, the representative of the project, and you have to have that conversation with the client. So I’m going to share a tried and true teamwork tidbit. How’s that for alliteration? And I promise you, it really works. And it’s a series of steps. And you’ve got a conflict, create that moment, as horrible as it might be. Schedule that moment, ask your colleague, your partner, whomever it is to describe to you what’s on their mind. And you’re going to actively listen and try to be very present in a state of mind. It is so hard to actively listen.
So here’s how you can make sure you do it. You’re going to pause. When you are in this particular dynamic, give it wait time, take two beats before you then paraphrase, okay, here’s what I heard you say. Okay, so on and so on and so forth. What you’re doing, this is so important, you’re slowing down, and you’re letting the colleague or the other individual know that you heard them. Sometimes that moment can even just be enough. You’re making sure that you’re not operating on your own assumptions, and that check-in makes an incredible difference. At the end of the day, you’ve all got a shared mutual purpose, and that’s ultimately what this is about, is you go through this process so that you can get to the, okay, we’ve addressed what happened, we clarified what happened, we’ve heard each other and we have accepted feelings. Mostly we have clarified what it is that now needs to happen. So getting to that, that’s your endpoint. That’s your end goal.
Abby: So, Brenda, a job done well. The client’s overjoyed and –
Brenda: Of course.
Abby: – head of the project gets all the praise. This is natural sometimes because that’s the person maybe who’s been working 24/7 with the clients, the point person, the conduit of most things. But how do you make sure that everyone feels that praise and appreciation throughout the team?
Brenda: Oh, you give it. If you’re a team leader, give appreciations. Say thank you. It makes a difference. I’m always shocked when I hear, well, I shouldn’t have to say thank you because you’re doing your job, and I’m not going to say thank you for your job. Yes, folks, if you haven’t experienced this, there are indeed actual human beings out there in the world who say things like that. I think that giving a thank you to folks at the end of any given workday, as you’re saying goodnight or goodbye or good morning or whatever it might be, say thank you. It really does go a long way. And appreciations need to be an everyday thing. Even, you just had a rough conversation with somebody, right? Say thank you. Say, look, I am, you know, this was a really rough moment that you and I just had, but I want to let you know, I appreciate you bringing this to my attention.
And certainly, when the team does something great, the project lead does get all of the praise. Project leads, follow up and not just with a verbal appreciation to everybody on the team, but write it down, put it in an email to the entire team and copy higher-ups, copy in the client, copy in whomever it is that is frankly in the highest positions of authority so that it is well recorded and known that the team, that everybody with their feet on the ground did a fantastic job. What that does is obviously it should hopefully engender really good feelings among the team, create unity, really help that shared purpose. But what it also does is it models behavior, and you will see this. You will see team members giving appreciation to each other, and you will see clients, and you will see upper admin, whomever it is that’s kind of on the, on the upper tiers of a project, you will see them offering appreciations as well.
Abby: And I think, you know, saying, hey, thanks, everybody is important, but I try to speak to individuals, and it can be for small things, things that, you know, they think you didn’t notice they did. Taking a moment to just thank them.
Brenda: Yeah. And do it up as well. I mean, tell the client, I appreciate how much you brought to the table right now, and I want to let you know, you were so clear, so descriptive, I understand where you’re coming from, and I just want to appreciate you because I know that you really listened. Always, always give appreciations up, and know that it’s not, you know, being a goody two shoes or trying to be a suck-up, if you will, or anything like that. Give genuine appreciations that are descriptive even to folks who are above you.
Abby: Yeah, because when a client’s done a great job for you, they’ve laid something out, written something that’s helped us do a good job. I want them to know, this is great. This is exactly the kind of thing we need. Thank you so much for helping us because, again, we’re all in the trenches together. I think about teamwork as I played a lot of sports growing up, a lot of team sports. I love team sports. You very quickly realize that, why you need a team around you to succeed, you know, it’s not that –
Brenda: Say it, it’s basketball. Abby is actually seven foot three, for those of you who have not met her in person, she’s a dynamo.
Abby: Very bouncy.
Brenda: Dynamo.
Abby: Jump very high. Oh, my God. Absolutely not. So being in it, being, playing sports, I think was great for me because you realize the different positions, the different skills everybody has, and that it all has to come together for success. And that’s how I think about our teams. Everybody brings something to the table which is really important, and without it, we can’t have success.
Brenda: Abby, let’s talk about something that is really part of your wheelhouse, which is making film. There’s so many similarities; there’s so much that is comparable between the process of creating a film and working and experience design in terms of processes, protocols, the structures of teams, the roles, the responsibilities. Tell me about what a great creative team process looks like in filmmaking that you think would really inform folks in our industry.
Abby: That’s a fantastic question. There is a lot of analogies with filmmaking and experience design. You’ve got the team that write the script, and often now it’s a team. And then you have the director who really is the creative vision. That’s usually our equivalent of a creative director or the lead creative on a project, and then you have everybody else under that. That can be the actors that bring it to life, but without the DP to shoot it and the way that the camera moves and how that tells the story and the lighting and the way that tells the story, exactly like in design. You have sound – just as important in exhibitions, you have the sound team and you have people that edit the story. When you’re telling a story in a museum like in a film, information and emotion has to ebb and flow. There has to be those moments of reflection.
Brenda: So when you’re talking about moment of reflection, are you talking about within the designed experience, or are you talking about is a part of the team process? Because I’m listening to this, and I know you’re talking about product, but part of what I’m thinking is how much this, I think, also applies to a great creative team process. A great team process is one that has ebbs and flows, and it has moments of intense productivity, the brainstorming, the ideation. You need to have a lot of energy. You need to have a lot of openness. You need to basically make a giant mess. A wonderful, beautiful, creative mess. And then you need to have moments of pause, moments of reflection, moments of review.
Abby: You know, when we’re working on projects that can take anywhere from two, three, four, five and counting years to complete, you have turnover of staff, and then you have sometimes people who are on them, you know, they get married, they have babies, they get divorced, like a lot of things happen. So you are right. It’s making sure to celebrate the stages and have those moments of rest and bring the team together because otherwise, everything just blurs, and then everybody burns out.
Brenda: You absolutely, I think, have to build in a moment’s reflection for the team to then look at the work that is sitting in front of them before moving forward. And I don’t care if it’s one hour in one day, but let’s talk about what we just did in that great, crazy outpouring of product, whatever the phase is. How completely insane is that, Abby, from your perspective?
Abby: The sad thing is I think it’s absolutely not insane at all. I think it’s much needed. I think the insanity is in not pausing, and it’s hard to pause. It’s really hard to pause because once you’ve accomplished something, human nature is to, we accept that immediately and we move on to the next challenge. So it’s almost about like going against yourself and saying, no, we all need to pause. But I think the key is that it can be an hour.
Brenda: Sure, sure.
Abby: Very quick brief. You have to schedule it. It’s got to go in, and you just look back and reflect on what you’ve accomplished.
Brenda: And add in some appreciations.
Abby: It’s like a wrap party. That’s how I think about it. On a film set, you finish, you finish, you have a little wrap party before you go into the next year of editing, right? So it’s taking that little wrap moment. I think it’s incredibly important and you should write a book on it. I don’t think we do it enough.
Abby: I think we should rename today’s podcast not there’s no I in team, but hit pause.
Brenda: Hit pause. I like that very much.
[Music]
Abby: So Brenda, let’s move on to our next segment, Tech Talk, where we look at any advances or trends in technology that are happening that may have a use in or in creating an experience. Today, we’re going to talk about your favorite subject, AI.
Brenda: AI.
Abby: Well, specifically, we’re going to talk about collaborating with AI, because it’s happening in a more interesting way every single day. The last month we’ve been collaborating with AI on a project, and it sort of was initially working with us as kind of spitting out these random images, and it wasn’t really working, and it wasn’t easy to understand, I mean, if it was some sort of wacky high art, maybe it was really cool. But for what we were trying to do, which was collaborate and design with AI, it wasn’t really working.
Brenda: Can I ask a question on behalf of listeners who, like me, may not be up on the absolute latest and greatest? Can you give us just a quick definition of, as you’re using it, what do you mean by artificial intelligence?
Abby: Basically, in the context of what we’re talking about, we are inputting information, and the artificial intelligence is taking what we’ve inputted and all its storage of, let’s say, for example, images, if we’re talking about collaborating on an image, it’s millions and millions and billions of images in its library and taking our direction, for want of a better word or our words, and sending us back a composited image, an image that reflects what we input.
Brenda: What is it that is just really getting you all so excited about this new tool?
Abby: I think it’s how quickly it’s learning. We’re hoping soon that it’ll be at a stage where we’ll be able to work with AI to design with us. So we don’t draw anymore. You won’t need to draw. You’ll have to be able to explain what you want and use words, and so it’s words that produce images. So it’s a very different way of working.
Brenda: How is this impacting your process? Will it help your creativity? Will it bring ideas to the table that, you know, a human being sitting at the table just wouldn’t have thought of?
Abby: I think that as long as you have a focus on an end goal of what you’re trying to do and a problem you’re trying to solve, it’s going to be really helpful. I think right now we’re just working to start to be able to collaborate in a meaningful way with AI and to get results that are not too leftfield. There is a moment when you create that you don’t know what you’re creating. It’s that inspiration. We all iterate, and so potentially with AI, maybe there’s some new outcomes.
Brenda: It’s unique.
Abby: Yeah.
Brenda: Who would you recommend work with AI or use AI as a tool?
Abby: I think our industry needs to lead and I think we need to embrace technology and everybody should have an R&D wing and be willing to spend time and money and efforts in finding out how new tools, new technology can help us tell our stories. I don’t think that we should be slaves to technology, but I think we should be aware of how they help us tell stories and also creatively think about how to tell stories in a new way.
I mean, not just take the tools and serve them up. Oh, yeah, we can use that. How can we immerse people with this technology in ways they’ve never been immersed before? And that’s on us. We in our own industry need to have this appetite and this conversation around technology, around storytelling, around design, around curation. We need to start having a voice.
What do you think? Do you think the future will be you sitting with your students, collaborating with AI?
Brenda: I mean, the answer is yes. We will be working with AI. Colleges and universities that engage in design and in specialized design like ours certainly will be increasingly engaging with AI. What that looks like, I’m not really sure, but I think that a big part of it involves engagement with companies such as yours and being able to work with, and as you were saying, you know, work with companies and work with different institutions that have R&D as a part of their modus operandi and that are experimenting with AI and playing with latest technologies.
Abby: One other thing I want to notice is already companies that could take our podcast in English and translate it with the same intonation and the same tone into different languages around the world. So I see AI as nothing to be scared of, and I think that it will enable us to create new and interesting things, and I think that it will open up the world and make it a closer place.
Brenda: Like any technology is, as long as our visitors are still driving their experience and as long as it is a very human-centered design, then we’re doing the right thing.
Abby: Thank you so much. Brenda.
Brenda: Thank you, Abby. Thank you, listeners.
[Music]
Producer: Matters of Experience is produced by Lorem Ipsum Corp. Please tune in next week for another conversation. Thank you all for listening.
[Music]
Abby: Hello and welcome to Matters of Experience. My name is Abigail Honor.
Brenda: And I am Brenda Cowan.
Abby: Brenda, I’m really looking forward to today’s podcast because it’s one of those things that seems so obvious, especially in what we do. But whenever you bring together a team or work with teams, there’s always an ego or two lurking.
Brenda: Or four or five, or, yeah.
Abby: And dealing with these personalities so that the group can work harmoniously is critical but sometimes difficult, and it can make or break a project. And I’ve seen other vendors or the client be the culprit who wants to dominate and assert themselves in meetings. So coming up with ways to handle and manage these people is necessary, and so is knowing when to throw the towel in and part ways.
The first thing that’s clear is if you want to work in the exhibition or experience design profession, you need to enjoy working with others. You have to play well. We’re not artists who work alone and then, presto, we appear with all the answers and are ready to build design set. We need designers, engineers, architects, modelers, fabricators, AV integrators. There’s a huge cast of colorful characters involved, and they all have to have patience and respect to make a project truly unbelievable.
Brenda: I couldn’t agree more that we don’t enter into this thinking that we’re fine artists. And I’ll also say that you have to have an ego in order to be in this business. But there’s a big difference between behaving poorly but having the right kind of healthy ego where you can make decisions, put out suggestions or even push back against an idea.
And oftentimes, clients kind of expect you to be like that. A client will say, okay, ready, set, go. Come up with all of the answers. And that’s not collaboration. That’s not teamwork. And the design firm’s job, I believe, is to really sort of help educate the client oftentimes anyway, not always, but often times that we are going to work together, which means that you are going to be valued and we need you to participate, and we need you not to expect us to have all of the right answers right from the gate.
Abby:
It’s really difficult to do what we do. It’s hard enough to create. It’s hard enough to work together. And egos just block it everywhere. It can’t be one person’s vision.
Brenda: I think another way of really thinking about this is the idea of knowing who you are, knowing how you individually, personally work the best. What is it that makes you really great at what you do? And then being able to allow for and recognize that in others, in a great team, everybody shines in one way or another, in one piece of the process or another.
And I come across people often who will suggest that, well, I don’t work well in the team because I’m an introvert. And listeners, let me tell you, introverts everywhere – you are essential to the process. And you can be an introvert. You can be a quiet person, you can be a shy person at the table, and with a good process, with a good team process, you will be heard, and you will be expected to participate and contribute.
Abby: And it starts at the very beginning, I think, with setting those goals and the parameters of the project, right, so establishing those solid relationships with the client, being inclusive, as you mentioned, of all stakeholders, everybody at the table from the get-go is vital. And I just can’t emphasize this enough.
Brenda: Abby, I would love to hear about some of your experiences recently during our COVID years, and how has the collaborative team process changed as a result of being in Zoom meetings and things being handled remotely more?
Abby: So, the loudest voices often dominate on Zoom, so you really need to make sure everyone’s included, and I encourage people to turn your cameras on. Seeing each other is really incredibly important, especially when your team’s remote. It’s really important to provide a platform for everybody to be able to contribute, not just the usual suspects. And it’s also the same if someone says, I have an idea, it’s probably bad, that self-deprecating –
Brenda: Oh, never start a sentence with I’m sorry and never start a statement, right, or a suggestion with –this is probably absolute rubbish.
Abby: No, no, no, no. There’s zero bad ideas. No, no bad ideas. And there’s no dumb questions. Trust me; I’ve asked them all. I can’t count the number of times someone suggests a left-of-field idea that spurs someone else’s imagination. That’s what I’ve noticed. Somebody will say something. It seems a little sort of obtuse. And then somebody else is like, Oh my goodness. And they’ve made a connection. And then you start ideating together. So you have to have patience with ideas. The aim isn’t to get to the idea fast. The aim is to have ideas and germinate and enjoy the process.
Brenda: Well, how does diversity in a team play into that?
Abby: You know, everybody has a different perspective and a different point of view, which is why it’s really important to have diversity on your team. So not only diversity in terms of background, ethnicity, religion, and gender, but also of the jobs they do. What role you have on the project really contributes to what ideas are brought to the table, and through collaboration of multiple disciplines, we really can create something truly fantastic, because our AV team, as we’re ideating something, will say, oh, you know what, you can do that, that’s been done before, but we were wondering if you wanted to project it this way or do this with it, or wouldn’t this be interesting? And suddenly, you have an idea that is owned by everybody. It’s imaginative. It’s creative. It’s new. So I really think diversity all around is hugely important, especially when we’re working on our projects.
Brenda: It’s great that there’s an ideal out there, and I wish I could say that, you know, everybody has that kind of experience. But over the years I’ve kept a running list, this is what I do in my spare time, I keep running lists of stuff that doesn’t go right. So here’s a quick list. Number one, no one is clear about who gets to make decisions, and it ends up being the loudest voice in the room or the Zoom. So we’re talking about the lack of clear roles, and that can kill any team process right from the get-go.
Here’s another one. There isn’t a real balance of contributions from everyone in the room. So that’s a lack of an inclusive process. And Abby, that’s what you were just giving this great, robust example of. Here’s another war story. Boy, you’ve never experienced this. Coworkers are emotional, unpredictable, and lack trust. So, having guidelines for how we’re going to respect each other, they need to be established and oftentimes, they’re not.
And here’s the last one. I hear this a lot from folks in industry, that during a collaborative team process, they can actually feel alone. They can feel separated out. And we have the responsibility for ourselves to step up and to insert ourselves in the process, and at the same time, if the process is not truly collaborative, you’re going to have people who are just pushed to the outskirts, and that can kill.
Abby: You mentioned a lot of things to talk about.
Brenda: That was the shortlist everybody.
Abby: Well, when you have a new team, you’re right. It’s so important to explain roles and responsibilities to the whole group. So everyone is clear who has the final say. Because that somebody, at the end of the day, has to have the final say. And since COVID being remote makes it very easy for people to not participate or multitask, it’s very hard to focus on a call when you don’t have your camera on. Again, my pet peeve. Another reason I ask everyone to turn the cameras on is because, you know, I’m a victim of this. When you camera’s off, you can be on Slack, you can be on your phone, you can be shooting off an email. But if my camera is on and I know people are looking at me, then I actually have to pay attention.
So sometimes the reason someone isn’t contributing is that the call is sort of overstaffed and some people have nothing to contribute. So making sure the people that need to be on the Zoom, for example, are the people that are on it, is very important. I’ve been in meetings where I was just like tons and tons of people, and some of them don’t know why they’re there. I don’t know why they’re there. So you have to make sure that people have a purpose. They know their purpose. We all know that purpose. That’s another key. I think it’s a common error. You know, the more, the merrier. I don’t think I believe in that.
Brenda: I couldn’t agree more that communication over Zoom is so tricky. I think that things work so much better when we can allow for nuance. And I’ve got so many thoughts about communication, so, you know, settle in, folks, get comfortable. Let’s talk about things that sometimes can be considered overkill – meeting notes. How often does somebody come up to you after a meeting, and they’ve either completely forgotten what was discussed or they’re confused by what was discussed. How often do we just simply need to have detailed meeting notes that are then distributed to a team and that these always will have action items? What an incredible difference, as well, for people feeling included when they are a part of the resultant notes and if nothing else, the action items, again, clear roles, clear responsibilities.
Brenda: Abby, how does this work in your experience?
Abby: Yes, I completely agree. Action items from a top-line perspective which say what was decided, what needs to be done by who is imperative. Otherwise, project management breaks down, and things start to fall through the cracks. I am often surprised after a meeting when a group has all listened to the same thing and come away with very different conclusions. So, these short recaps really help at least flag any differences that are interpreted in a meeting. Make your notes simple, quick, and really easy to understand. This sounds straightforward, but people also misinterpret notes. So think about what you’re writing.
Brenda: So let’s talk about the E word. Let’s talk about egos. How does a creative ego help the team process?
Abby: Creative egos are good, right? I don’t think you could aspire to create without one. But there is a real difference between a healthy ego, which allows me to genuinely appreciate my strengths and accept my imperfections, and an unhealthy ego which will tell you to stick to what’s comfortable and avoid uncertainty. It makes you have unrealistic expectations of yourself and then your team.
So an unhealthy ego is sort of rooted in fear, anxiety and often results in a designer who is reactive, defensive, or easily triggered. Can you tell that I’ve worked with some people with unhealthy egos? So I’ve worked with designers who personalize what others say and see everything as a criticism, or they feel the opposite, a sense of entitlement or grandiosity, and they’re shocked when someone discusses their work and its effectiveness.
Brenda: So when I say Abby, you know, X, Y, and Z person is going to be in your creative team and, you know this individual and this individual has what you would consider to be a healthy ego. You’re really excited because they’ve got a healthy ego. What is that person doing?
Abby: So when we’re talking, when they’re showing us their work, when we’re workshopping together, they are open to criticism. So I ask them why they did this. What was their purpose? What were they trying to achieve? What does this communicate? And then, they can defend their design decisions. And you have a very constructive conversation. It’s not just what I think. It’s not my role to insist upon them what I think. My job is to have them question what they’ve made in terms of the client’s mission, the mission of the museum, the design mission. Is it aligning with those points?
Brenda: Right. But with the goals, with the project, and this is another thing that I find fascinating. When a project does not have a very clearly articulated audience and when a project does not have clearly, clearly defined, and even differentiated sets of goals, at the end of the day, any kind of a conflict or a challenge or a debate or whatever, oftentimes can be resolved, not everybody might be pleased, but at the end of the day, it’s about the audience, right? And it’s about why are we here and what are we aiming to do?
Abby: And I think that’s key about a healthy ego. It’s not about the designer. It’s about who we’re designing for. And the flipside, like an unhealthy ego, the designer tries to defend everything they’ve done. They’re not listening. They’re not hearing you. You know, you get a very defensive, well, you know, that wasn’t what I focused on. It’s like, okay, that’s cool, but I think maybe in the next iteration you want to think about that, or you want to think about ADA compliance or children or whatever the issue is with the design. And so making sure that it is somebody who is open-minded, that’s what I mean when I say they’re not defined by their design. And so too many people define their success on if everybody’s going, bravo, we love it. Nobody’s ever said that.
Brenda: That’s what I experience all the time. I don’t know what your problem is, Abby, but you know. I think that, and part of this I’m sort of feeling at this moment a number of designer listeners going well, and then there’s the client who can be a little bit difficult, or it can be upper administration, who can be a little bit difficult, or project leadership can be a little bit difficult. And I will say this, if you’re in a situation where you’re kind of in a lower station, if you will, within the sort of hierarchy of the project, and you are having to respond to or not respond to somebody who’s in a position of greater authority than you and there’s a conflict or a mistake has been made, let’s talk about having the very difficult conversations that nobody wants to have to have. But in order to move forward or fix a mistake or address a problem, we have to approach somebody else and kind of put it out there.
Abby: Well, you know, my mom brought me up really well. Honesty is the best policy. And when you see a mistake, you let everybody know immediately. I have never had a problem with anybody telling me they’ve made a mistake. I’ve had a problem when somebody has tried to hide a mistake, it always just goes down the rabbit hole and it gets worse and worse and worse and inevitably always gets found out.
So, if I see that I’ve made a mistake, or, on behalf of my team, someone on my team has made a mistake, I explain the mistake, and I always present the solution. And I’ve found that clients are always really forgiving, they’re like, okay, great. They know you’re human, they know they’re human, and then you’ve just got to fix that mistake ASAP. But they’re never fun conversations, especially the awkward conversations I have to have with team members because you have a personal relationship with everybody, you know, you know where the heart is, you know they care about what they’re doing. But I realized that some of these conversations are necessary.
Brenda: And I think the same thing applies certainly if you are not the owner of the company, but you have to kind of have that conversation up or very often if you are the firm or the project manager, the representative of the project, and you have to have that conversation with the client. So I’m going to share a tried and true teamwork tidbit. How’s that for alliteration? And I promise you, it really works. And it’s a series of steps. And you’ve got a conflict, create that moment, as horrible as it might be. Schedule that moment, ask your colleague, your partner, whomever it is to describe to you what’s on their mind. And you’re going to actively listen and try to be very present in a state of mind. It is so hard to actively listen.
So here’s how you can make sure you do it. You’re going to pause. When you are in this particular dynamic, give it wait time, take two beats before you then paraphrase, okay, here’s what I heard you say. Okay, so on and so on and so forth. What you’re doing, this is so important, you’re slowing down, and you’re letting the colleague or the other individual know that you heard them. Sometimes that moment can even just be enough. You’re making sure that you’re not operating on your own assumptions, and that check-in makes an incredible difference. At the end of the day, you’ve all got a shared mutual purpose, and that’s ultimately what this is about, is you go through this process so that you can get to the, okay, we’ve addressed what happened, we clarified what happened, we’ve heard each other and we have accepted feelings. Mostly we have clarified what it is that now needs to happen. So getting to that, that’s your endpoint. That’s your end goal.
Abby: So, Brenda, a job done well. The client’s overjoyed and –
Brenda: Of course.
Abby: – head of the project gets all the praise. This is natural sometimes because that’s the person maybe who’s been working 24/7 with the clients, the point person, the conduit of most things. But how do you make sure that everyone feels that praise and appreciation throughout the team?
Brenda: Oh, you give it. If you’re a team leader, give appreciations. Say thank you. It makes a difference. I’m always shocked when I hear, well, I shouldn’t have to say thank you because you’re doing your job, and I’m not going to say thank you for your job. Yes, folks, if you haven’t experienced this, there are indeed actual human beings out there in the world who say things like that. I think that giving a thank you to folks at the end of any given workday, as you’re saying goodnight or goodbye or good morning or whatever it might be, say thank you. It really does go a long way. And appreciations need to be an everyday thing. Even, you just had a rough conversation with somebody, right? Say thank you. Say, look, I am, you know, this was a really rough moment that you and I just had, but I want to let you know, I appreciate you bringing this to my attention.
And certainly, when the team does something great, the project lead does get all of the praise. Project leads, follow up and not just with a verbal appreciation to everybody on the team, but write it down, put it in an email to the entire team and copy higher-ups, copy in the client, copy in whomever it is that is frankly in the highest positions of authority so that it is well recorded and known that the team, that everybody with their feet on the ground did a fantastic job. What that does is obviously it should hopefully engender really good feelings among the team, create unity, really help that shared purpose. But what it also does is it models behavior, and you will see this. You will see team members giving appreciation to each other, and you will see clients, and you will see upper admin, whomever it is that’s kind of on the, on the upper tiers of a project, you will see them offering appreciations as well.
Abby: And I think, you know, saying, hey, thanks, everybody is important, but I try to speak to individuals, and it can be for small things, things that, you know, they think you didn’t notice they did. Taking a moment to just thank them.
Brenda: Yeah. And do it up as well. I mean, tell the client, I appreciate how much you brought to the table right now, and I want to let you know, you were so clear, so descriptive, I understand where you’re coming from, and I just want to appreciate you because I know that you really listened. Always, always give appreciations up, and know that it’s not, you know, being a goody two shoes or trying to be a suck-up, if you will, or anything like that. Give genuine appreciations that are descriptive even to folks who are above you.
Abby: Yeah, because when a client’s done a great job for you, they’ve laid something out, written something that’s helped us do a good job. I want them to know, this is great. This is exactly the kind of thing we need. Thank you so much for helping us because, again, we’re all in the trenches together. I think about teamwork as I played a lot of sports growing up, a lot of team sports. I love team sports. You very quickly realize that, why you need a team around you to succeed, you know, it’s not that –
Brenda: Say it, it’s basketball. Abby is actually seven foot three, for those of you who have not met her in person, she’s a dynamo.
Abby: Very bouncy.
Brenda: Dynamo.
Abby: Jump very high. Oh, my God. Absolutely not. So being in it, being, playing sports, I think was great for me because you realize the different positions, the different skills everybody has, and that it all has to come together for success. And that’s how I think about our teams. Everybody brings something to the table which is really important, and without it, we can’t have success.
Brenda: Abby, let’s talk about something that is really part of your wheelhouse, which is making film. There’s so many similarities; there’s so much that is comparable between the process of creating a film and working and experience design in terms of processes, protocols, the structures of teams, the roles, the responsibilities. Tell me about what a great creative team process looks like in filmmaking that you think would really inform folks in our industry.
Abby: That’s a fantastic question. There is a lot of analogies with filmmaking and experience design. You’ve got the team that write the script, and often now it’s a team. And then you have the director who really is the creative vision. That’s usually our equivalent of a creative director or the lead creative on a project, and then you have everybody else under that. That can be the actors that bring it to life, but without the DP to shoot it and the way that the camera moves and how that tells the story and the lighting and the way that tells the story, exactly like in design. You have sound – just as important in exhibitions, you have the sound team and you have people that edit the story. When you’re telling a story in a museum like in a film, information and emotion has to ebb and flow. There has to be those moments of reflection.
Brenda: So when you’re talking about moment of reflection, are you talking about within the designed experience, or are you talking about is a part of the team process? Because I’m listening to this, and I know you’re talking about product, but part of what I’m thinking is how much this, I think, also applies to a great creative team process. A great team process is one that has ebbs and flows, and it has moments of intense productivity, the brainstorming, the ideation. You need to have a lot of energy. You need to have a lot of openness. You need to basically make a giant mess. A wonderful, beautiful, creative mess. And then you need to have moments of pause, moments of reflection, moments of review.
Abby: You know, when we’re working on projects that can take anywhere from two, three, four, five and counting years to complete, you have turnover of staff, and then you have sometimes people who are on them, you know, they get married, they have babies, they get divorced, like a lot of things happen. So you are right. It’s making sure to celebrate the stages and have those moments of rest and bring the team together because otherwise, everything just blurs, and then everybody burns out.
Brenda: You absolutely, I think, have to build in a moment’s reflection for the team to then look at the work that is sitting in front of them before moving forward. And I don’t care if it’s one hour in one day, but let’s talk about what we just did in that great, crazy outpouring of product, whatever the phase is. How completely insane is that, Abby, from your perspective?
Abby: The sad thing is I think it’s absolutely not insane at all. I think it’s much needed. I think the insanity is in not pausing, and it’s hard to pause. It’s really hard to pause because once you’ve accomplished something, human nature is to, we accept that immediately and we move on to the next challenge. So it’s almost about like going against yourself and saying, no, we all need to pause. But I think the key is that it can be an hour.
Brenda: Sure, sure.
Abby: Very quick brief. You have to schedule it. It’s got to go in, and you just look back and reflect on what you’ve accomplished.
Brenda: And add in some appreciations.
Abby: It’s like a wrap party. That’s how I think about it. On a film set, you finish, you finish, you have a little wrap party before you go into the next year of editing, right? So it’s taking that little wrap moment. I think it’s incredibly important and you should write a book on it. I don’t think we do it enough.
Abby: I think we should rename today’s podcast not there’s no I in team, but hit pause.
Brenda: Hit pause. I like that very much.
[Music]
Abby: So Brenda, let’s move on to our next segment, Tech Talk, where we look at any advances or trends in technology that are happening that may have a use in or in creating an experience. Today, we’re going to talk about your favorite subject, AI.
Brenda: AI.
Abby: Well, specifically, we’re going to talk about collaborating with AI, because it’s happening in a more interesting way every single day. The last month we’ve been collaborating with AI on a project, and it sort of was initially working with us as kind of spitting out these random images, and it wasn’t really working, and it wasn’t easy to understand, I mean, if it was some sort of wacky high art, maybe it was really cool. But for what we were trying to do, which was collaborate and design with AI, it wasn’t really working.
Brenda: Can I ask a question on behalf of listeners who, like me, may not be up on the absolute latest and greatest? Can you give us just a quick definition of, as you’re using it, what do you mean by artificial intelligence?
Abby: Basically, in the context of what we’re talking about, we are inputting information, and the artificial intelligence is taking what we’ve inputted and all its storage of, let’s say, for example, images, if we’re talking about collaborating on an image, it’s millions and millions and billions of images in its library and taking our direction, for want of a better word or our words, and sending us back a composited image, an image that reflects what we input.
Brenda: What is it that is just really getting you all so excited about this new tool?
Abby: I think it’s how quickly it’s learning. We’re hoping soon that it’ll be at a stage where we’ll be able to work with AI to design with us. So we don’t draw anymore. You won’t need to draw. You’ll have to be able to explain what you want and use words, and so it’s words that produce images. So it’s a very different way of working.
Brenda: How is this impacting your process? Will it help your creativity? Will it bring ideas to the table that, you know, a human being sitting at the table just wouldn’t have thought of?
Abby: I think that as long as you have a focus on an end goal of what you’re trying to do and a problem you’re trying to solve, it’s going to be really helpful. I think right now we’re just working to start to be able to collaborate in a meaningful way with AI and to get results that are not too leftfield. There is a moment when you create that you don’t know what you’re creating. It’s that inspiration. We all iterate, and so potentially with AI, maybe there’s some new outcomes.
Brenda: It’s unique.
Abby: Yeah.
Brenda: Who would you recommend work with AI or use AI as a tool?
Abby: I think our industry needs to lead and I think we need to embrace technology and everybody should have an R&D wing and be willing to spend time and money and efforts in finding out how new tools, new technology can help us tell our stories. I don’t think that we should be slaves to technology, but I think we should be aware of how they help us tell stories and also creatively think about how to tell stories in a new way.
I mean, not just take the tools and serve them up. Oh, yeah, we can use that. How can we immerse people with this technology in ways they’ve never been immersed before? And that’s on us. We in our own industry need to have this appetite and this conversation around technology, around storytelling, around design, around curation. We need to start having a voice.
What do you think? Do you think the future will be you sitting with your students, collaborating with AI?
Brenda: I mean, the answer is yes. We will be working with AI. Colleges and universities that engage in design and in specialized design like ours certainly will be increasingly engaging with AI. What that looks like, I’m not really sure, but I think that a big part of it involves engagement with companies such as yours and being able to work with, and as you were saying, you know, work with companies and work with different institutions that have R&D as a part of their modus operandi and that are experimenting with AI and playing with latest technologies.
Abby: One other thing I want to notice is already companies that could take our podcast in English and translate it with the same intonation and the same tone into different languages around the world. So I see AI as nothing to be scared of, and I think that it will enable us to create new and interesting things, and I think that it will open up the world and make it a closer place.
Brenda: Like any technology is, as long as our visitors are still driving their experience and as long as it is a very human-centered design, then we’re doing the right thing.
Abby: Thank you so much. Brenda.
Brenda: Thank you, Abby. Thank you, listeners.
[Music]
Producer: Matters of Experience is produced by Lorem Ipsum Corp. Please tune in next week for another conversation. Thank you all for listening.
There’s No I in Team
Behind the Glass with Sina Bahram
Smithsonian Guidelines for Accessible Exhibition Design
The Warhol Expands Award-Winning Technology-Based Accessibility Initiatives
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
[Music]
Abby: Hello and welcome to Matters of Experience. My name is Abigail Honor. My friends call me Abby.
Brenda: And I’m Brenda Cowan.
Abby: Welcome to this week’s podcast, Behind the Glass, with our guest Sina Bahram. Sina is an accessibility consultant, researcher, speaker, and entrepreneur. He founded Prime Access Consulting to support building a more inclusive world. Sina enjoys collaborating with both colleagues in the field and individuals of diverse professions to devise innovative and user-centered solutions to significant real-world problems. In 2012, he was recognized as a White House Champion of Change for his work, enabling users with disabilities to succeed in STEM fields. In 2021, Sina was selected to be a Mission Astroaccess Ambassador, which aims to make space and space travel accessible to all. Hello Sina.
Sina: Hi. Thanks for having me.
Brenda: Sina, we’re so delighted to have you, and just to get the ball rolling, we’re really curious to hear how it is that you ended up where you are today. How did you become an expert in inclusivity and accessibility?
Sina: I think, really, it started with a lot of lived experience. I happen to be blind and so being a blind computer scientist means that you encounter a lot of the mechanisms by which society, whether it’s education, whether it’s fun, whether it’s video games, what have you, are deeply inaccessible. Also, knowing how they got that way, because I understand coding and technology and these kinds of things, led me to believe that I had something to contribute to making it not be that way.
So throughout my undergraduate and graduate career in computer science, I kept having to invent the stuff that would allow me to succeed. And then noticing that those were also the tools and the frameworks and the systems that could be useful and amplify others in the field as well, you know, people with different abilities. And that’s how I really got into inclusive design and digital accessibility.
Abby: Tell us about one of your first visits or what it’s like or what it was like when you remember visiting a museum or an exhibition.
Sina: Yeah, I mean, this has changed a little bit over the years, but it was a lot of stuff behind glass, right? Interactives and digital systems, totally inaccessible. And so, you know, when I was going there on a school field trip, as you do, it was definitely a personalized experience. They had somebody that walked me around, a docent, you know, a visitor service, a staff member that would walk me around and, you know, try to desperately find some things that were touchable or that were in some way multi-sensory.
But there was no dedicated program, right? There was no really dedicated effort around that stuff. And so that was my first exposure to museums. And then, you know, little did I know that I would be helping build them and do so much work with them, you know, a few decades later.
Brenda: Sina, I’m curious about some of the emotional aspects of your work. I’m listening to you, and it sounds like you’re almost on some kind of a mission. What’s it feel like to do this work that you do?
Sina: Well, it’s deeply important, right? I mean, for millennia, really, since the dawn of time, we’ve had different swaths of humanity, different marginalized groups of people, whether it’s women, people of color, you know, LGBTQ, persons with disabilities, etc., all not be able to fully participate in the society that we’re building as a species. And so, I tend to be long-term optimistic, short-term pessimistic, and so I believe that we’re arcing towards a more progressive and inclusive society, but we all have a role to play in that. And I fundamentally believe that technology is an amplifier, right, is a magnifying glass, and this is not a new theory; many other folks have said this. It makes the good stuff amazing, and it makes the bad stuff really terrible.
And so I want to use tech, tech-enabled solutions, and also just clever thinking and ways of understanding systems so that we can be creative and harness that creativity, not only to make the world more accessible and inclusive, but also so that we can facilitate all of these, quite literally – you know, 1.9 billion people in the world have a disability – to get those brains working on the hard problems of our time, whether it’s climate change, whether it’s space travel, whether it is virtual reality, you know, whatever floats your boat.
And those are lots of incredible creative problem solvers that are being ignored and actively prevented from fully and equitably participating in all aspects of society.
Abby: So you just said a number which sort of probably shocked a lot of people. 1.9 billion people have a disability. What?
Sina: It’s about 20 to 25% of the world’s population. It adds up, right? And again, like sometimes it’s things that you may not consider. It’s like, oh, yeah. You know, there’s somebody with a walking difference, right? They’re not a wheelchair user, perhaps. So it’s not as visible of a disability, but all of a sudden you realize that three stairs may be okay, and six is going to be out of the question.
Right? Or imagine like just spraining your ankle. So these things come up, you know, your contact lenses are bothering you that day, so you take them out. That shouldn’t mean that you can’t then still enjoy with your kids the museum exhibits because the text is nine point font. So we can do things that make it more comfortable and inclusive for people, understanding that there’s an entire vector of human difference or spectrum that we all fall along when it comes to our abilities. And then we want to be able to honor all of those differences of ability when we’re designing and making stuff.
Abby: So overall, there is this lack of accessible exhibits. I would say, in general, it’s all to quote you behind the glass. What are some of the things designers should be thinking about when they begin designing to increase accessibility?
Sina: Sure. So there’s a couple of concepts there, right. There’s accessibility, those things that we do specifically for persons with disabilities. Right. Those who may use assistive technologies like a cane, a wheelchair, a screen reader, which is a program that reads me digital interfaces, a hearing aid, that kind of thing, that’s accessibility. Then we think about inclusive design or universal design, and they’re subtly different from one another, but inclusive design is really a methodology that considers that entire vector of human difference at the beginning. It means that, when you’re thinking of a building, let’s decouple the affordances, which is a fancy way of saying, let’s think about what we want to offer people and then figure out how we’re going to offer people that thing.
So we’re building a building, and we’ve got multiple floors, okay? So we’ve got the first floor. We’ve got the second floor. How do people get to the second floor? I mean, you could use stairs. Architects love stairs. A lot of the world’s population can’t use stairs. So we’re already excluding just with a simple, you know, drawing in a file. It costs you nothing right now to fix it.
But that decision has already been made before a shovel hits the ground that we just actively chose to exclude millions upon millions of people. So we use elevators. Then we think to ourselves all right, well, now we’ve got elevators, and we’ve got stairs, I guess we’re accessible, but then we’re segregating our audience based on ability. Now, you and I go to a museum. Let’s say I’m a wheelchair user. I don’t happen to be, but let’s say I am. And now I’m using the elevator. You’re using the stairs or rerouting to come with me in the elevator if it’s big enough.
We don’t need to do any of that, right, you could have just used a ramp and everybody could use the ramp, right, and you have the elevator for maybe somebody who is unable to, those things that we haven’t predicted in advance and also to lift up and down equipment. But we just made it inclusive, and we made the experience non-othering, right? We’re not discriminating or segregating based on ability or any other difference.
Brenda: Sina, the demands for accessibility in designed experiences and to content in a variety of ways, it’s higher than ever. And we’re talking about physical access, but also intellectual access, also emotional access. Do you think that we need to be working well beyond the established national tools for accessibility? I’m thinking of the Smithsonian Guidelines for Accessible Exhibition Design in specific. Is this the time to make substantial updates and our established benchmarks in our profession?
Sina: Yeah, I don’t think we’ve nailed that one yet.
Brenda: Any minute now.
Sina: Yeah. Any minute now, that’s right. It’s like AI, it’s always five years away. So look, my opinion on the ADA and by the ADA, I mean the Americans with Disabilities Act. It is simultaneously the most landmark, significant piece of civil rights legislation the world has ever seen. And it’s also the bare minimum you can do under federal law in this country for 30 years. It’s 1% of what you need to do.
Let’s talk about the ADA and the Smithsonian guidelines you mention. Think about the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, which is a mouthful. So let’s call it NMAAHC for short. NMAAHC has an exhibit on the Greensboro counter. Greensboro is actually a city about 45 minutes away from me in North Carolina here.
And there’s this civil rights story that’s told, these men of color sat at a lunch counter, right, they were subject to horrible abuse. This is during the, you know, the civil rights movement going on in the 20th century in the states. And this is a recreation of that counter, and there’s a touch screen exhibit in the middle. And at the end of the counter, there’s a lowered section. And that’s the wheelchair section, that’s the ADA accessible area. So what you, as the museum, are telling the black woman who rolls into your exhibition on segregation is that she needs to go to the end of the counter to experience this content on segregation. This is terrible.
This is something that’s completely unnecessary. It’s inexcusable in this day and age. And it would have cost nothing to fix. You lower the counter by a couple of inches and you remove the bolts off the stools that you’ve got in front of it. Then wheelchair users can use it. Somebody with a walker or oxygen tank, or service animal can use it.
And it’s just it’s not hard, but it takes that level of thinking, and also it takes that prioritization from upper and senior management in order to do that at the beginning. Now, that exhibition I just told you about it is ADA compliant. It’s legal. It complies with the guidelines that you mentioned. It’s not inclusive, it’s not even remotely inclusive, but it is accessible. And that’s the difference, right? That’s what we try to avoid at all costs is that delineation. We want to build things that are equitable and inclusive for everybody.
Abby: So let’s discuss the experiential quality of the experience for everyone in the essence of what we’re creating. I know sometimes the question is leveled, does the overall experience suffer when you start to fold in accessibility?
Sina: Yeah, this is a classic one, right? Like I want to do something sexy and colorful, and you know, accessibility means we have to make it all black and white and all these other things, which is just, you know, terribly untrue. The suboptimal approach and haphazard implementation of making things accessible is terrible, but the suboptimal approach to making soup is also terrible. So don’t do it badly. When you do inclusion well, then you not only enhance the number of people that can access it, but you end up making the entire experience more enriching, immersive.
We had the privilege of being on dozens and dozens of projects. Not a single one of those projects has gone by, and this has never been elicited from us, it’s never been prompted, where the engineers, the designers, the management team has not come to us basically either in the middle or the end of the project and said this, you know, they always say, oh, my God, I didn’t know any of this accessibility stuff. You know, we learned so much on the inclusive design, all of those things.
But then they say, You know what, though? The thing we didn’t expect was that this would make the project better, like full stop better, not just for a small percentage of the population, not just because of cost savings or anything like that. It’s just better. And the reason is that when we do the work of inclusive design, we ask a very simple question, and we ask this of every client we ever work with.
What is your design intent? We first have to figure out what we’re trying to do and then figure out how we’re going to do it. That sounds really easy. It’s almost reductive, but if you ask yourself those questions and force yourself to answer it, then you go, What am I trying to do? Okay, I want to have people feel like they’re in a forest.
Okay, now how are you trying to do it? Then we can talk about the fancy stuff. Projectors and audio systems and vibrotactile feedback and wind blowing on your neck and all these kinds of things when you’re making a virtual reality experience. But first, you have to ask, what are we trying to do?
Brenda: So when we’re talking about the how we’re going to do it, and I’m thinking about multi-sensory rich exhibition environments, things like smell, touch, auditory experiences, and so on. Now, some folks would argue that those are highly inclusive environments, or certainly much more so than what a more conventional passive behind-the-glass kind of environment would be. I’m really curious; what’s your take on this? Are exhibitions going far enough?
Sina: Multi-sensory is not accessible nor inclusive. Good aspects of multi-sensory and multimodal design are critical requirements of accessibility and inclusion. So it’s like the whole, you know, square versus rectangle thing, right? And so people think, okay, well, it’s multi-sensory. There’s an audio piece, and there’s a lighting piece, there’s some stuff you can touch, and there’s some stuff you can see. So we’re good, right? Like we’re, you know, we’re done, you know, like solved accessibility. Next problem. And the thing is, hold on a second, are those things linked in a redundant and strategic way? For example, does the light show reflect the emotional connotations or the gestalt of the experience that you’re experiencing auditorily? Or are they synched together so that when the sound is louder, maybe the lights are brighter?
What about the stuff that you can touch? Are you receiving the information at the right time, or are they off in a corner? What is the linking in the content with respect to these multi-sensory things? For example, we had an exhibit we worked on on fire, right, and fire safety and they were like, okay, we’re going to teach people, you know, you got to check the doorknobs if you think your house is on fire before you open it, because there could be a fire behind the door and they were going to light it up to show kids, they were going to light it up in red or blue.
And then they were asking, how do we make this accessible? It’s like, hold on back up for a second. Forget about how to make this accessible. Let’s first make this just logical and reasonable. If there’s a fire behind the door, the doorknob is going to be warm. And frankly, if it’s the middle of the night, you need to be touching it anyway. You might not have your glasses on. You just woke up, etc. You might have smoke in the house, so you should touch it and see if it’s warm. You can also color it red or green, or blue for that visual reinforcement. So once we did that, then the entire experience design changed, and all of a sudden, that’s inclusive now for everybody, but it also reflects reality.
So we got that engineering and that cool tech piece, we got the inclusivity piece, but we also got the, we actually taught people something more by thinking inclusively piece as well. So that’s, that’s how I kind of approach that sort of thing.
Abby: So when you get to build, is there a cost perspective because all this sounds sort of expensive. Have you found that it’s financially viable, or will it throw off overall costs? Because I know a lot of people often have limited budgets.
Sina: Yeah, I mean, it depends on the scope of the project. We have done projects with multitrillion dollar companies. We have done projects with nonprofits with barely one full-time staff member, and their entire annual budget is less than most people’s salary. Okay. And the difference has never been the amount of access they have to money. It has always been, universally true, it has always been the commitment to do the work. And the reason is because there’s different ways of doing the work. So you don’t have to be fancy with the door knob saying, right, they were doing a fire exhibition and a science center. They had some dollars so we could do the infrared stuff. But you can do other things as well, right?
You have the ability, for example, of writing visual descriptions yourself for the artwork. You don’t need to farm that work out. If you want to make tactile reproductions, you can spend thousands of dollars on each one like the Andy Warhol Museum did with us. Or you can just make some arts and crafts based reproductions, but that are high fidelity for, you know, 50 bucks, for 20 bucks. We’ve actually seen this done, there’s a woman at Crystal Bridges who does this kind of work, and she gets local supplies and reproduces incredible artworks, and they not only feel amazing, but they also look like the original artwork.
And so it’s really about commitment. It’s about sequencing, right? Adding captions to a video when you have, let’s say, a $15,000 video budget and the cost of captions is $45; this is a rounding error in Excel.
And then, when you start getting into large projects, there’s really no excuse. So yes, on very, very tiny projects, you may not be able to spend money, but you can always do something to make it more inclusive.
Abby: So Sina, you and I recently worked together on our project Doorways Into Open Access for the Smithsonian and Verizon, and we collaborated right from the start. You steered us around many a minefield, but let’s say a museum has money to spend on improving the accessibility of the museum design. How do they make sure they’re spending it on the right things besides hiring you, of course.
Sina: That’s very kind. I think the most important thing is to sequence your tasks. So what we don’t want to do is have people get excited about accessibility, and then they’re like, okay, we got some funding, we’re going to do this. And then, like next week, okay, everything needs to be accessible, and now all of a sudden it’s an overnight requirement.
So the real trick here is to sequence your approach to inclusivity against the tasks that you’re already committing to. You’re already agreeing as an institution to spend time, money, and people’s effort on this exhibition that’s coming out in the fall. Great. Are there a lot of videos in it? Maybe that’s the opportunity to nail down captions and sign language, and audio description in transcripts.
Are there a lot of paintings in it? Maybe that’s the opportunity to nail down your visual description practice. Are there a lot of like interactives and digital components, you’re doing some really cool tech stuff. That’s the time to get better about digital accessibility. And so, if we can sequence these tasks against already committed resources and time, we eliminate the cost conversation, but we also smooth out the level of effort conversation, so people don’t perceive this as an added thing that they were never asked to do before. And now they are because it’s just part of enhancing the workflow and their practice. That’s one aspect of it.
The other thing is sometimes there’s some really easy ones, right? So if you’ve got some dollars to spend, you know, caption your videos, right? Invest in audio description, make sure your website is WCAG or WCAG conformant. There’s some very simple things that you can exchange dollars for if you’ve got the budget, but the real trick is to make it sustainable.
Do you have somebody in the organization that’s like a chief inclusion officer, for example? Like what are the ways that you can build sustainable practices? Not just a flash in the pan is really what I would guide people to spend those resources on.
Brenda: Sina, you were mentioning the Andy Warhol project. I think you mentioned that there were touch elements, and did you do that work pre-COVID? And if so, what is the changing landscape post, or well, currently with COVID and in the post-COVID landscape look like for this work that you’ve been doing?
Sina: Well, remember, I’m a pretty evidence based guy, and so let’s talk about, you know, fomite transmission, right, which is the ability to get COVID through touch and how that pales in comparison to respiration. And so museums are taking away things that are touchable, but they’re perfectly okay with all of these humans occupying the same enclosed space. So just from a scientific perspective, I will argue that the lack of touch access is patently ridiculous.
But we can’t do much about that because it’s perception. Think about a touch object in a museum. Disinfecting it is not that big of a deal. Now, putting that aside, look at what’s happening now. So many people took down all the touch stuff, and they ripped all the things out of the gallery. And what are they doing now?
Now they going through and figuring out how to put it all back. But what did the people do that didn’t depend on a single modality? The people who had an app companion for their interactive, the people who had their content also on the website, the people who were already doing tours over Zoom, not just in-person because they cared about remote audience engagement.
Those people did way better during the pandemic. And this, again, is where we see these synergistic, these amazing benefits that come out of, that emerge out of thinking inclusively at the beginning instead of reactively to whatever the current trend or, you know, emergency is.
Abby: You’re a myth buster. I think we should add Mythbusters to your resume there. So I want to chat a little bit about some of the things that people think are going to help them when they’re starting to design for accessibility, like overlays.
Sina: Overlays, yeah. So for those who are not familiar, overlays are – what we were talking about with overlays, there’s many definitions of that word – are these accessibility overlays from various companies that will basically sell you something like this. They’ll call you up and say, listen, you install one line of code on your website – and this part is true – and you’ll be done, you’ll have our thing running on your website – and now we get to the false part – and it’ll make your website totally accessible, right? It’ll make your website compliant and conformant, and all these other false claims, and they end up making websites less accessible, not more. They end up causing a lot of problems. They give a lot of folks false hope. And so we need to be really careful in the community of just, you know, educating ourselves and telling our friends, colleagues, bosses, employees, boards that this stuff is not good. And it’s really building a pretty terrible web experience for many persons with disabilities. And it’s horrendous, and it’s really shameful.
Brenda: Sina, we all have a role to play, as you said. And I’d love to hear for all of the designers that we have listening out there, where do they go to learn more?
Sina: One of the things that we are working with various colleagues in the field on is there’s no good training on this stuff. There are some trainings, but you know, operative word being good and it’s a problem because design schools are not teaching it as much. Now, this is changing. There’s some cool stuff out of NYU. There’s some really great work being done in interdisciplinary programs where it’s not just computer science, it’s not just museum studies. It’s a combination of both. And these multidisciplinary programs are, I think, the way to go because then the thinking is already inclusive in a different way of different disciplines. And now we can think to ourselves, how do we use our skill sets for good? How do we think about all audiences at the beginning, not just in the middle or at the end of a project?
So some of that I’m seeing, you know, develop a little bit in terms of courseware, but it’s it’s really, your question is indicative of a pipelining problem that we have in this country, which is that there’s very few people that have this skill set, that think about this way, that were trained in, you know, to think about design inclusively. And I mean, I suppose that’s why we have so much work. But I, trust me, I would love to be out of it. Right. I mean, you know, running a vineyard sounds like a really cool thing to do. I’d rather go do that, right? But the world is deeply inaccessible so this is what we’re doing. And I think that as we get more and more awareness of these things, it’s going to take people participating in different ways.
So the work that we do on projects and capital builds and, you know, helping people roll out various technologies and inventing solutions, that’s one aspect of the work. But there is also what can you do if you’re a professor listening to this? What can you do if you are a student in a program? Maybe you’re a graduate student looking for a topic, right?
And there’s a lot of work to be done just academically and pedagogically in being multi-disciplinary and inclusive in all the ways we think about this, whether you’re in a music program, architecture program, museum studies, philosophy, it just it simply doesn’t matter. We need to be incorporating this way of thinking into these different disciplines so that then we’re churning out more and more humans that bring those values and also that knowledge to their first job and are advocating for that stuff.
Abby: And are there any articles that our listeners could use to learn more about this?
Sina: I wrote one for, actually, 2 for AAM, the American Alliance of Museums. One is some website accessibility tips and tricks, and that one is just some hands-on stuff. What do you do about media? What do you do about things like headings and links and all the stuff that people talk about when it comes to digital and web accessibility.
Another one is how do you procure? How do you buy stuff with inclusion at its core? How do you not triple or quadruple pay for accessibility where you hire somebody like my firm, then you hire your developers, then you pay them once to make something, then we critique it, then you pay them to fix it. This is a terrible cycle. We are just tripling the cost and this leads by the way, to that perception of accessibility being expensive.
Imagine, if you will, where your basic requirement, your acceptance criteria for the work is that it is inclusive and accessible. All of a sudden, people play ball. All of a sudden, if they want to go for that contract, they’re going to do it in a better way, and they’re going to listen to all of that advice upfront.
And we recently saw this, you know, the Obama folks released a media RFP, but they had some requirements in there. They said all of your proposals must be accessible. And guess what? It was the first RFP process I’ve ever participated in, where I could read every single proposal that was submitted. And so essentially, that’s the trick, right? Like, that one sentence that that team put into the language of the RFP all of a sudden made all think about visual descriptions and how they were laying out their documents and font faces and things like this.
So procurement is kind of boring. It’s dry. It’s the meeting you can sleep through. But it matters so much because the ways in which we spend the money are one of the most powerful things we’ve got as tools in a capitalistic society. And if we attach to that expenditure our requirements, real honest to goodness, not performa requirements around accessibility and inclusion, then we can have massive, you know, sustainable and systemic impact.
Brenda: Wow, Sina, well, I am a professor, and I can guarantee you my graduate students who are just about to enter into their thesis work are going to be very delighted to learn about you and your work and hold on to your hat because you might be getting a ton of contacts from them. We shall see. But it’s been absolutely delightful listening to you, and I want to thank you for your time and sharing your long-term optimism with us.
Abby: Yes, thank you so much, Sina. It’s always wonderful to chat, and a transcript of today’s show will be available to accompany this podcast.
Sina: Thank you so much for having me.
[Music]
Producer: Matters of Experience is produced by Lorem Ipsum Corp. Please tune in next week for another conversation. Thank you all for listening.
Smithsonian Guidelines for Accessible Exhibition Design
The Warhol Expands Award-Winning Technology-Based Accessibility Initiatives
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
[Music]
Abby: Hello and welcome to Matters of Experience. My name is Abigail Honor. My friends call me Abby.
Brenda: And I’m Brenda Cowan.
Abby: Welcome to this week’s podcast, Behind the Glass, with our guest Sina Bahram. Sina is an accessibility consultant, researcher, speaker, and entrepreneur. He founded Prime Access Consulting to support building a more inclusive world. Sina enjoys collaborating with both colleagues in the field and individuals of diverse professions to devise innovative and user-centered solutions to significant real-world problems. In 2012, he was recognized as a White House Champion of Change for his work, enabling users with disabilities to succeed in STEM fields. In 2021, Sina was selected to be a Mission Astroaccess Ambassador, which aims to make space and space travel accessible to all. Hello Sina.
Sina: Hi. Thanks for having me.
Brenda: Sina, we’re so delighted to have you, and just to get the ball rolling, we’re really curious to hear how it is that you ended up where you are today. How did you become an expert in inclusivity and accessibility?
Sina: I think, really, it started with a lot of lived experience. I happen to be blind and so being a blind computer scientist means that you encounter a lot of the mechanisms by which society, whether it’s education, whether it’s fun, whether it’s video games, what have you, are deeply inaccessible. Also, knowing how they got that way, because I understand coding and technology and these kinds of things, led me to believe that I had something to contribute to making it not be that way.
So throughout my undergraduate and graduate career in computer science, I kept having to invent the stuff that would allow me to succeed. And then noticing that those were also the tools and the frameworks and the systems that could be useful and amplify others in the field as well, you know, people with different abilities. And that’s how I really got into inclusive design and digital accessibility.
Abby: Tell us about one of your first visits or what it’s like or what it was like when you remember visiting a museum or an exhibition.
Sina: Yeah, I mean, this has changed a little bit over the years, but it was a lot of stuff behind glass, right? Interactives and digital systems, totally inaccessible. And so, you know, when I was going there on a school field trip, as you do, it was definitely a personalized experience. They had somebody that walked me around, a docent, you know, a visitor service, a staff member that would walk me around and, you know, try to desperately find some things that were touchable or that were in some way multi-sensory.
But there was no dedicated program, right? There was no really dedicated effort around that stuff. And so that was my first exposure to museums. And then, you know, little did I know that I would be helping build them and do so much work with them, you know, a few decades later.
Brenda: Sina, I’m curious about some of the emotional aspects of your work. I’m listening to you, and it sounds like you’re almost on some kind of a mission. What’s it feel like to do this work that you do?
Sina: Well, it’s deeply important, right? I mean, for millennia, really, since the dawn of time, we’ve had different swaths of humanity, different marginalized groups of people, whether it’s women, people of color, you know, LGBTQ, persons with disabilities, etc., all not be able to fully participate in the society that we’re building as a species. And so, I tend to be long-term optimistic, short-term pessimistic, and so I believe that we’re arcing towards a more progressive and inclusive society, but we all have a role to play in that. And I fundamentally believe that technology is an amplifier, right, is a magnifying glass, and this is not a new theory; many other folks have said this. It makes the good stuff amazing, and it makes the bad stuff really terrible.
And so I want to use tech, tech-enabled solutions, and also just clever thinking and ways of understanding systems so that we can be creative and harness that creativity, not only to make the world more accessible and inclusive, but also so that we can facilitate all of these, quite literally – you know, 1.9 billion people in the world have a disability – to get those brains working on the hard problems of our time, whether it’s climate change, whether it’s space travel, whether it is virtual reality, you know, whatever floats your boat.
And those are lots of incredible creative problem solvers that are being ignored and actively prevented from fully and equitably participating in all aspects of society.
Abby: So you just said a number which sort of probably shocked a lot of people. 1.9 billion people have a disability. What?
Sina: It’s about 20 to 25% of the world’s population. It adds up, right? And again, like sometimes it’s things that you may not consider. It’s like, oh, yeah. You know, there’s somebody with a walking difference, right? They’re not a wheelchair user, perhaps. So it’s not as visible of a disability, but all of a sudden you realize that three stairs may be okay, and six is going to be out of the question.
Right? Or imagine like just spraining your ankle. So these things come up, you know, your contact lenses are bothering you that day, so you take them out. That shouldn’t mean that you can’t then still enjoy with your kids the museum exhibits because the text is nine point font. So we can do things that make it more comfortable and inclusive for people, understanding that there’s an entire vector of human difference or spectrum that we all fall along when it comes to our abilities. And then we want to be able to honor all of those differences of ability when we’re designing and making stuff.
Abby: So overall, there is this lack of accessible exhibits. I would say, in general, it’s all to quote you behind the glass. What are some of the things designers should be thinking about when they begin designing to increase accessibility?
Sina: Sure. So there’s a couple of concepts there, right. There’s accessibility, those things that we do specifically for persons with disabilities. Right. Those who may use assistive technologies like a cane, a wheelchair, a screen reader, which is a program that reads me digital interfaces, a hearing aid, that kind of thing, that’s accessibility. Then we think about inclusive design or universal design, and they’re subtly different from one another, but inclusive design is really a methodology that considers that entire vector of human difference at the beginning. It means that, when you’re thinking of a building, let’s decouple the affordances, which is a fancy way of saying, let’s think about what we want to offer people and then figure out how we’re going to offer people that thing.
So we’re building a building, and we’ve got multiple floors, okay? So we’ve got the first floor. We’ve got the second floor. How do people get to the second floor? I mean, you could use stairs. Architects love stairs. A lot of the world’s population can’t use stairs. So we’re already excluding just with a simple, you know, drawing in a file. It costs you nothing right now to fix it.
But that decision has already been made before a shovel hits the ground that we just actively chose to exclude millions upon millions of people. So we use elevators. Then we think to ourselves all right, well, now we’ve got elevators, and we’ve got stairs, I guess we’re accessible, but then we’re segregating our audience based on ability. Now, you and I go to a museum. Let’s say I’m a wheelchair user. I don’t happen to be, but let’s say I am. And now I’m using the elevator. You’re using the stairs or rerouting to come with me in the elevator if it’s big enough.
We don’t need to do any of that, right, you could have just used a ramp and everybody could use the ramp, right, and you have the elevator for maybe somebody who is unable to, those things that we haven’t predicted in advance and also to lift up and down equipment. But we just made it inclusive, and we made the experience non-othering, right? We’re not discriminating or segregating based on ability or any other difference.
Brenda: Sina, the demands for accessibility in designed experiences and to content in a variety of ways, it’s higher than ever. And we’re talking about physical access, but also intellectual access, also emotional access. Do you think that we need to be working well beyond the established national tools for accessibility? I’m thinking of the Smithsonian Guidelines for Accessible Exhibition Design in specific. Is this the time to make substantial updates and our established benchmarks in our profession?
Sina: Yeah, I don’t think we’ve nailed that one yet.
Brenda: Any minute now.
Sina: Yeah. Any minute now, that’s right. It’s like AI, it’s always five years away. So look, my opinion on the ADA and by the ADA, I mean the Americans with Disabilities Act. It is simultaneously the most landmark, significant piece of civil rights legislation the world has ever seen. And it’s also the bare minimum you can do under federal law in this country for 30 years. It’s 1% of what you need to do.
Let’s talk about the ADA and the Smithsonian guidelines you mention. Think about the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, which is a mouthful. So let’s call it NMAAHC for short. NMAAHC has an exhibit on the Greensboro counter. Greensboro is actually a city about 45 minutes away from me in North Carolina here.
And there’s this civil rights story that’s told, these men of color sat at a lunch counter, right, they were subject to horrible abuse. This is during the, you know, the civil rights movement going on in the 20th century in the states. And this is a recreation of that counter, and there’s a touch screen exhibit in the middle. And at the end of the counter, there’s a lowered section. And that’s the wheelchair section, that’s the ADA accessible area. So what you, as the museum, are telling the black woman who rolls into your exhibition on segregation is that she needs to go to the end of the counter to experience this content on segregation. This is terrible.
This is something that’s completely unnecessary. It’s inexcusable in this day and age. And it would have cost nothing to fix. You lower the counter by a couple of inches and you remove the bolts off the stools that you’ve got in front of it. Then wheelchair users can use it. Somebody with a walker or oxygen tank, or service animal can use it.
And it’s just it’s not hard, but it takes that level of thinking, and also it takes that prioritization from upper and senior management in order to do that at the beginning. Now, that exhibition I just told you about it is ADA compliant. It’s legal. It complies with the guidelines that you mentioned. It’s not inclusive, it’s not even remotely inclusive, but it is accessible. And that’s the difference, right? That’s what we try to avoid at all costs is that delineation. We want to build things that are equitable and inclusive for everybody.
Abby: So let’s discuss the experiential quality of the experience for everyone in the essence of what we’re creating. I know sometimes the question is leveled, does the overall experience suffer when you start to fold in accessibility?
Sina: Yeah, this is a classic one, right? Like I want to do something sexy and colorful, and you know, accessibility means we have to make it all black and white and all these other things, which is just, you know, terribly untrue. The suboptimal approach and haphazard implementation of making things accessible is terrible, but the suboptimal approach to making soup is also terrible. So don’t do it badly. When you do inclusion well, then you not only enhance the number of people that can access it, but you end up making the entire experience more enriching, immersive.
We had the privilege of being on dozens and dozens of projects. Not a single one of those projects has gone by, and this has never been elicited from us, it’s never been prompted, where the engineers, the designers, the management team has not come to us basically either in the middle or the end of the project and said this, you know, they always say, oh, my God, I didn’t know any of this accessibility stuff. You know, we learned so much on the inclusive design, all of those things.
But then they say, You know what, though? The thing we didn’t expect was that this would make the project better, like full stop better, not just for a small percentage of the population, not just because of cost savings or anything like that. It’s just better. And the reason is that when we do the work of inclusive design, we ask a very simple question, and we ask this of every client we ever work with.
What is your design intent? We first have to figure out what we’re trying to do and then figure out how we’re going to do it. That sounds really easy. It’s almost reductive, but if you ask yourself those questions and force yourself to answer it, then you go, What am I trying to do? Okay, I want to have people feel like they’re in a forest.
Okay, now how are you trying to do it? Then we can talk about the fancy stuff. Projectors and audio systems and vibrotactile feedback and wind blowing on your neck and all these kinds of things when you’re making a virtual reality experience. But first, you have to ask, what are we trying to do?
Brenda: So when we’re talking about the how we’re going to do it, and I’m thinking about multi-sensory rich exhibition environments, things like smell, touch, auditory experiences, and so on. Now, some folks would argue that those are highly inclusive environments, or certainly much more so than what a more conventional passive behind-the-glass kind of environment would be. I’m really curious; what’s your take on this? Are exhibitions going far enough?
Sina: Multi-sensory is not accessible nor inclusive. Good aspects of multi-sensory and multimodal design are critical requirements of accessibility and inclusion. So it’s like the whole, you know, square versus rectangle thing, right? And so people think, okay, well, it’s multi-sensory. There’s an audio piece, and there’s a lighting piece, there’s some stuff you can touch, and there’s some stuff you can see. So we’re good, right? Like we’re, you know, we’re done, you know, like solved accessibility. Next problem. And the thing is, hold on a second, are those things linked in a redundant and strategic way? For example, does the light show reflect the emotional connotations or the gestalt of the experience that you’re experiencing auditorily? Or are they synched together so that when the sound is louder, maybe the lights are brighter?
What about the stuff that you can touch? Are you receiving the information at the right time, or are they off in a corner? What is the linking in the content with respect to these multi-sensory things? For example, we had an exhibit we worked on on fire, right, and fire safety and they were like, okay, we’re going to teach people, you know, you got to check the doorknobs if you think your house is on fire before you open it, because there could be a fire behind the door and they were going to light it up to show kids, they were going to light it up in red or blue.
And then they were asking, how do we make this accessible? It’s like, hold on back up for a second. Forget about how to make this accessible. Let’s first make this just logical and reasonable. If there’s a fire behind the door, the doorknob is going to be warm. And frankly, if it’s the middle of the night, you need to be touching it anyway. You might not have your glasses on. You just woke up, etc. You might have smoke in the house, so you should touch it and see if it’s warm. You can also color it red or green, or blue for that visual reinforcement. So once we did that, then the entire experience design changed, and all of a sudden, that’s inclusive now for everybody, but it also reflects reality.
So we got that engineering and that cool tech piece, we got the inclusivity piece, but we also got the, we actually taught people something more by thinking inclusively piece as well. So that’s, that’s how I kind of approach that sort of thing.
Abby: So when you get to build, is there a cost perspective because all this sounds sort of expensive. Have you found that it’s financially viable, or will it throw off overall costs? Because I know a lot of people often have limited budgets.
Sina: Yeah, I mean, it depends on the scope of the project. We have done projects with multitrillion dollar companies. We have done projects with nonprofits with barely one full-time staff member, and their entire annual budget is less than most people’s salary. Okay. And the difference has never been the amount of access they have to money. It has always been, universally true, it has always been the commitment to do the work. And the reason is because there’s different ways of doing the work. So you don’t have to be fancy with the door knob saying, right, they were doing a fire exhibition and a science center. They had some dollars so we could do the infrared stuff. But you can do other things as well, right?
You have the ability, for example, of writing visual descriptions yourself for the artwork. You don’t need to farm that work out. If you want to make tactile reproductions, you can spend thousands of dollars on each one like the Andy Warhol Museum did with us. Or you can just make some arts and crafts based reproductions, but that are high fidelity for, you know, 50 bucks, for 20 bucks. We’ve actually seen this done, there’s a woman at Crystal Bridges who does this kind of work, and she gets local supplies and reproduces incredible artworks, and they not only feel amazing, but they also look like the original artwork.
And so it’s really about commitment. It’s about sequencing, right? Adding captions to a video when you have, let’s say, a $15,000 video budget and the cost of captions is $45; this is a rounding error in Excel.
And then, when you start getting into large projects, there’s really no excuse. So yes, on very, very tiny projects, you may not be able to spend money, but you can always do something to make it more inclusive.
Abby: So Sina, you and I recently worked together on our project Doorways Into Open Access for the Smithsonian and Verizon, and we collaborated right from the start. You steered us around many a minefield, but let’s say a museum has money to spend on improving the accessibility of the museum design. How do they make sure they’re spending it on the right things besides hiring you, of course.
Sina: That’s very kind. I think the most important thing is to sequence your tasks. So what we don’t want to do is have people get excited about accessibility, and then they’re like, okay, we got some funding, we’re going to do this. And then, like next week, okay, everything needs to be accessible, and now all of a sudden it’s an overnight requirement.
So the real trick here is to sequence your approach to inclusivity against the tasks that you’re already committing to. You’re already agreeing as an institution to spend time, money, and people’s effort on this exhibition that’s coming out in the fall. Great. Are there a lot of videos in it? Maybe that’s the opportunity to nail down captions and sign language, and audio description in transcripts.
Are there a lot of paintings in it? Maybe that’s the opportunity to nail down your visual description practice. Are there a lot of like interactives and digital components, you’re doing some really cool tech stuff. That’s the time to get better about digital accessibility. And so, if we can sequence these tasks against already committed resources and time, we eliminate the cost conversation, but we also smooth out the level of effort conversation, so people don’t perceive this as an added thing that they were never asked to do before. And now they are because it’s just part of enhancing the workflow and their practice. That’s one aspect of it.
The other thing is sometimes there’s some really easy ones, right? So if you’ve got some dollars to spend, you know, caption your videos, right? Invest in audio description, make sure your website is WCAG or WCAG conformant. There’s some very simple things that you can exchange dollars for if you’ve got the budget, but the real trick is to make it sustainable.
Do you have somebody in the organization that’s like a chief inclusion officer, for example? Like what are the ways that you can build sustainable practices? Not just a flash in the pan is really what I would guide people to spend those resources on.
Brenda: Sina, you were mentioning the Andy Warhol project. I think you mentioned that there were touch elements, and did you do that work pre-COVID? And if so, what is the changing landscape post, or well, currently with COVID and in the post-COVID landscape look like for this work that you’ve been doing?
Sina: Well, remember, I’m a pretty evidence based guy, and so let’s talk about, you know, fomite transmission, right, which is the ability to get COVID through touch and how that pales in comparison to respiration. And so museums are taking away things that are touchable, but they’re perfectly okay with all of these humans occupying the same enclosed space. So just from a scientific perspective, I will argue that the lack of touch access is patently ridiculous.
But we can’t do much about that because it’s perception. Think about a touch object in a museum. Disinfecting it is not that big of a deal. Now, putting that aside, look at what’s happening now. So many people took down all the touch stuff, and they ripped all the things out of the gallery. And what are they doing now?
Now they going through and figuring out how to put it all back. But what did the people do that didn’t depend on a single modality? The people who had an app companion for their interactive, the people who had their content also on the website, the people who were already doing tours over Zoom, not just in-person because they cared about remote audience engagement.
Those people did way better during the pandemic. And this, again, is where we see these synergistic, these amazing benefits that come out of, that emerge out of thinking inclusively at the beginning instead of reactively to whatever the current trend or, you know, emergency is.
Abby: You’re a myth buster. I think we should add Mythbusters to your resume there. So I want to chat a little bit about some of the things that people think are going to help them when they’re starting to design for accessibility, like overlays.
Sina: Overlays, yeah. So for those who are not familiar, overlays are – what we were talking about with overlays, there’s many definitions of that word – are these accessibility overlays from various companies that will basically sell you something like this. They’ll call you up and say, listen, you install one line of code on your website – and this part is true – and you’ll be done, you’ll have our thing running on your website – and now we get to the false part – and it’ll make your website totally accessible, right? It’ll make your website compliant and conformant, and all these other false claims, and they end up making websites less accessible, not more. They end up causing a lot of problems. They give a lot of folks false hope. And so we need to be really careful in the community of just, you know, educating ourselves and telling our friends, colleagues, bosses, employees, boards that this stuff is not good. And it’s really building a pretty terrible web experience for many persons with disabilities. And it’s horrendous, and it’s really shameful.
Brenda: Sina, we all have a role to play, as you said. And I’d love to hear for all of the designers that we have listening out there, where do they go to learn more?
Sina: One of the things that we are working with various colleagues in the field on is there’s no good training on this stuff. There are some trainings, but you know, operative word being good and it’s a problem because design schools are not teaching it as much. Now, this is changing. There’s some cool stuff out of NYU. There’s some really great work being done in interdisciplinary programs where it’s not just computer science, it’s not just museum studies. It’s a combination of both. And these multidisciplinary programs are, I think, the way to go because then the thinking is already inclusive in a different way of different disciplines. And now we can think to ourselves, how do we use our skill sets for good? How do we think about all audiences at the beginning, not just in the middle or at the end of a project?
So some of that I’m seeing, you know, develop a little bit in terms of courseware, but it’s it’s really, your question is indicative of a pipelining problem that we have in this country, which is that there’s very few people that have this skill set, that think about this way, that were trained in, you know, to think about design inclusively. And I mean, I suppose that’s why we have so much work. But I, trust me, I would love to be out of it. Right. I mean, you know, running a vineyard sounds like a really cool thing to do. I’d rather go do that, right? But the world is deeply inaccessible so this is what we’re doing. And I think that as we get more and more awareness of these things, it’s going to take people participating in different ways.
So the work that we do on projects and capital builds and, you know, helping people roll out various technologies and inventing solutions, that’s one aspect of the work. But there is also what can you do if you’re a professor listening to this? What can you do if you are a student in a program? Maybe you’re a graduate student looking for a topic, right?
And there’s a lot of work to be done just academically and pedagogically in being multi-disciplinary and inclusive in all the ways we think about this, whether you’re in a music program, architecture program, museum studies, philosophy, it just it simply doesn’t matter. We need to be incorporating this way of thinking into these different disciplines so that then we’re churning out more and more humans that bring those values and also that knowledge to their first job and are advocating for that stuff.
Abby: And are there any articles that our listeners could use to learn more about this?
Sina: I wrote one for, actually, 2 for AAM, the American Alliance of Museums. One is some website accessibility tips and tricks, and that one is just some hands-on stuff. What do you do about media? What do you do about things like headings and links and all the stuff that people talk about when it comes to digital and web accessibility.
Another one is how do you procure? How do you buy stuff with inclusion at its core? How do you not triple or quadruple pay for accessibility where you hire somebody like my firm, then you hire your developers, then you pay them once to make something, then we critique it, then you pay them to fix it. This is a terrible cycle. We are just tripling the cost and this leads by the way, to that perception of accessibility being expensive.
Imagine, if you will, where your basic requirement, your acceptance criteria for the work is that it is inclusive and accessible. All of a sudden, people play ball. All of a sudden, if they want to go for that contract, they’re going to do it in a better way, and they’re going to listen to all of that advice upfront.
And we recently saw this, you know, the Obama folks released a media RFP, but they had some requirements in there. They said all of your proposals must be accessible. And guess what? It was the first RFP process I’ve ever participated in, where I could read every single proposal that was submitted. And so essentially, that’s the trick, right? Like, that one sentence that that team put into the language of the RFP all of a sudden made all think about visual descriptions and how they were laying out their documents and font faces and things like this.
So procurement is kind of boring. It’s dry. It’s the meeting you can sleep through. But it matters so much because the ways in which we spend the money are one of the most powerful things we’ve got as tools in a capitalistic society. And if we attach to that expenditure our requirements, real honest to goodness, not performa requirements around accessibility and inclusion, then we can have massive, you know, sustainable and systemic impact.
Brenda: Wow, Sina, well, I am a professor, and I can guarantee you my graduate students who are just about to enter into their thesis work are going to be very delighted to learn about you and your work and hold on to your hat because you might be getting a ton of contacts from them. We shall see. But it’s been absolutely delightful listening to you, and I want to thank you for your time and sharing your long-term optimism with us.
Abby: Yes, thank you so much, Sina. It’s always wonderful to chat, and a transcript of today’s show will be available to accompany this podcast.
Sina: Thank you so much for having me.
[Music]
Producer: Matters of Experience is produced by Lorem Ipsum Corp. Please tune in next week for another conversation. Thank you all for listening.
Behind the Glass with Sina Bahram
Exhibition Versus Experience
AAM Core Standards for Museums
Brooklyn Children’s Museum – NBBJ | ESI Design
Mark Rothko: The Seagram Murals – Display at Tate Britain
[Music]
Abby: Hello and welcome to Matters of Experience. My name is Abigail Honor. My friends call me Abby.
Brenda: And I’m Brenda Cowan. Abby, my friends call me Professor.
Abby: Welcome to this week’s podcast on the gigantic topic of exhibition versus experience. What are the differences, if any, and why does it matter? We’re going to look at how exhibitions were traditionally defined and how and why is this changing. I first want to acknowledge that this is a topic for about 10 hours of the show. Right, Brenda?
Brenda: Oh, yes. I teach in an M.A. degree program in exhibition and experience design. So, Abby, we can safely put it at several hundreds of hours.
Abby: So let’s talk about a museum. Museums have been around for a long, long, long time, and they’re traditionally places for collections of artifacts. And the exhibition portion is what the public gets to see, which is usually part of the collection of a museum. Recently, these exhibitions have been asked to become experiences. So what we’re here to talk about today is sort of any commonalities between exhibits and experiences and any differences between an exhibition and an experience.
Abby: The definition of an exhibition is, I quote, a public display of works of art or items of interest held in an art gallery or museum or at a trade fair. So I think we can probably all pretty much agree. That sounds like an exhibition to me. What about you, Brenda?
Brenda: Sure. Did you get that from Merriam-Webster?
Abby: I got it from Google.
Brenda: Google. Thank you, Google. I think that, sure, it’s important to have a grounding. And I know that we’re going to dive in in terms of really looking at the sort of the semantics. But one of the things that’s really, really important to me to point out is the idea that experiences are somehow new or that experience in relationship to exhibitions is new because it’s not.
If we go back to the 1970s and look at Ed Schlossberg’s work with the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, we are seeing pristine experience design. If you look at any children’s museum or science center, all of them museums, right, recognized as museums, you automatically are looking at all of the kinds of elements that we use to define experience design, immersion, kinesthetic, we’re looking at interactivity, audience-driven and I think that, you know, I began doing work in children’s museums 30 years ago, and I think that it’s kind of weird in a way to be talking so much about experience design because it kind of was, you know, do they use the expression in Britain, cut your milk teeth? I cut my milk teeth on creating, you know, children’s exhibits, which is all experience design. So I don’t know that you can really extract the two.
Abby: So way back then, 30 years ago when you were working in museums, children’s museums, did you ever use the term experience for your exhibitions? Like was it something ever synonymous with what you were doing or was it something you were doing and you didn’t realize it?
Brenda: Probably both. And look, you know, we talked endlessly about experience, but experience design was just not on trend. It wasn’t the language or the lingo that was being used. At the time, in the early nineties, when I was working in children’s museums, there was an enormous push to look at education and outcomes, and there was a tremendous amount of work that we were doing with the, at the time, it was the American Association of Museums, now the American Alliance of Museums. We were working tremendously with AAM and looking at their standards of excellence in museum exhibition, and they’re all experiential.
Abby: No, they are. I’m so happy you brought up AAM’s standards of excellence because they’ve been there for so long, and one of them for museum exhibitions said, and I quote, An exhibition is successful if it’s physically, intellectually and emotionally engaging and accessible to those who, wait for it, experience it. As we think about what an experience is today in a museum, one of the things I think they have to have is that interactivity, that communication, that conversation, whether it be physically or from an intellectual perspective.
Brenda: I think that the idea of human development is what drives, especially the early great children’s museums. We’re talking about Brooklyn Children’s Museum, Boston Children’s Museum, and well, I could go on from there, but those were really the first two. And the whole idea was to provide experiences and environments for experiences that help children grow and learn in a natural way.
But at the end of the day, the idea of interactivity and play and design is just as much for adults. Maybe it’s a generational thing. Abby I don’t know. The idea that adults play too and that interaction, kinesthetic experience, multisensory experience, engaging with objects, it’s not, it’s not just for kids anymore. It’s always been for adults. It’s just the profession is only just now, I think catching up with that.
Abby: I think things like, I totally agree, I think recently things like Roblox and other games, and so I agree. I think that the atmosphere that we’re designing in right now is a very open one to be able to incorporate play and maybe education also has sort of slowly turned more to understand that play and interaction actually helps people retain and learn.
I feel that that is where education has lagged and museums, more traditional museums have also lagged behind in terms of that. So let’s talk about experience versus exhibition. Tell us a little bit about the definition as far as the standards of excellence go.
Brenda: Sure, and I should just put out there, I really struggle to separate the two. Exhibition versus experience. I don’t think it’s a versus. I think that they really are two faces of the same coin or just two different perspectives.
Abby: I want to interject with a question then. Does that mean you think that every exhibition needs to be experiential or have an experience tied to it?
Brenda: I think that every exhibition does have an experience tied to it. I think that once you have a visitor in an environment engaging with content in, you know, in whatever way, engaging with the environment, you’ve got an experience.
It’s important for us to recognize the nature of humans and the physical, the intellectual, the emotional framework that is the human being. And every time people go into, especially into a designed environment that has been curated, that has been designed by a creative team that’s gone through all of the elements of design, I think that you are going to have engagement in those three primary ways, and I think that that’s what experience ultimately is.
It’s the human having the experience within the space. I think the great spaces have thought about that and have designed towards that and that welcome people to engage intellectually, physically, emotionally.
Abby: Right, and we’re not talking about a bad versus good experience here. We’re talking about an experience based on what the curator or the team were trying to share, the design team.
Brenda: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s also we need to make sure that we get in there, that we’re also not just talking about museums, but we’re talking about and certainly, these days, branded environments, retail environments, trade shows, expos, spectaculars. You know, we’ve got so much that is happening right now on intimate scales and on grand scales, and with innovative uses of media, all of the same defining elements apply in terms of human experience no matter what.
In any of these kinds of environments, we’re having the physical, the emotional, and the intellectual experience. And ideally, people get what they want. They feel good about what they have experienced.
Abby: I’m just thinking as we discuss that an experience and exhibition are one and the same. It’s interesting to even question what an exhibition is today. So I just visited a pop-up in the Meatpacking District yesterday. It was laid out, it looked very similar to an exhibition, but it was actually a store. The pop-up had a product in which like when you go into a traditional museum and they have artifacts, it had text panels explaining all about the product.
It had labels identifying the product and a call to action. Everything was really well designed. When you talk about messaging, it’s all on point. There was hands-on moments where you could touch things and interact. They had hair clips. You could take off, try on and there was a huge glass mirror there so you could actually look at yourself in them.
There was a lot of intention that had gone into the design of the space and the presentation of the objects, very much similar to an exhibition. They knew their target audience. Everything was totally geared to that. But in my opinion, one of the shortcomings was that it lacked what I would call cultural significance. Its aim, at the end of the day overall, was to sell me some stuff.
The satisfaction from an experience perspective was pretty low level. It wasn’t intellect actually, or very emotionally engaging, but I did have a basic interaction, and so I would call this an experience.
Brenda: I think that, you know, first of all, the expectations that you had going in clearly did not match up with what you got. And we’re going to be talking in a different episode with the brilliant John Falk, who’s going to talk about the meaning of, to him, education and exhibits and the idea of satisfaction as well. I don’t know that the whole point is necessarily to get an education and certainly not in the one that you were experiencing.
So if you were kind of expecting to learn something new that could certainly be why it just really wasn’t hitting the right marks for you. One of the people who I go back to as well and I think of is another one of these museum greats, Dan Spock. And he once gave a cool definition that exhibitions are the medium of media, written words, sound, image, moving image, performance, digital media. And he says that when an environment has all of these and yet it retains its inherent exhibit-ness, then you’ve got a great experience. You’ve got a great exhibition. And really, one of the delicious things about being in exhibition design is that you’ve got the entire candy shop, you’ve got it all, you’ve got so many tools and toys to work with.
Even exhibitions that are didactic or they’re static. There’s always a lot going on beneath the surface that you’ll hear the word numinous experience when people have encounters with objects and objects that are very evocative. People have sensory experiences in environments that are so moving to them, and it’s subjective, and again, it’s based on what their expectations are, what their motivations are, what their desires are. But experience is not always something that you can see happening is an important point to me.
So you could have gone into an exhibition that has not had a ton for you to, let’s say, play with or be super stimulated by. But you still could have a very moving experience, and you could still have what to you would be a really great experience in a designed environment.
Abby: I think back actually to when I was 12 years old in the Tate Gallery in London, surrounded by Mark Rothko’s and all my classmates. Yes, it was a fundamental moment in my life. For some reason, I stopped and paused, and I looked around and I couldn’t move for about an entire hour and I was completely transformed and transfixed, and that experience was unbelievable. I still remember the way I feel to this very day.
Nobody else in my class had that. That was just something that I had in relation to the Rothkos around me. I think it’s interesting also that we aim to create an experience for everybody to enjoy, but a lot of it depends on what a person is bringing into the space, what experiences they’ve had before, and what experiences they’re hoping to have.
Brenda: Part of how I really love thinking about this is that visitors are responsive, but they’re also drivers of their own experience because they come with expectations. And there are things that we want. We have chosen, we have self-selected to go to a particular place, to have a particular experience on some level we have gone there even if we’re a tagalong and are going there because, okay, the husband wants to go here. You bet. I will absolutely come along with you and I’d really rather be wherever.
Abby: Oh, come on. You’ve never agreed to go along with your husband.
Brenda: I always agree to go because he’s wonderful and I just can’t, just, I always want to spend time with him. I’m serious. But the point of the matter is we set ourselves up to have a certain kind of experience. And what is interesting, I think, is when an experience is designed for, being that it has multi senses, let’s say, or it’s accounting for as many different physical modalities as possible and there’s emotional aspects to it, then all of the sudden we get to be responsive and let’s say, you know, in a situation if I am a tagalong, all of a sudden I get to be responsive to an environment where I really was not very willing to give myself over. I can also direct my experience. I think that experience design is a dance. It’s a, it really is a dynamic conversation between an environment and a visitor.
Abby: That’s what I was going to add, because I was going to say I’d describe it as, I guess, contrary to a film, which is a monologue, you’re being talked to, you’re not being asked any questions. Your participation is purely to sit and absorb. And I feel like experience and experience design is all about the dialog, and it’s about that interaction, it’s about that conversation.
And that’s what really creates this immersive experience and something that’s long-lasting, something that you feel part of. I mean, how many times have I been in an amazing exhibit, and you are invited to give your point of view or your legacy, and then you feel like you’re part of that institution. So I think it operates on a really profound level when you can start to have those connections with the visitors and that really incredible experience.
So when we’re thinking about breaking down the differences between exhibitions and experiences, do experiences without driving narratives have an easier time of it? Is it harder to reach people when you have a specific story you have to tell? So the opposite of film, I guess, where a good story moves you and a film without much of a story loses you.
Looking at spectaculars as experiences, do they get away with a lot because they really don’t have to tell a beginning, a middle and an end. They just have to have people leaving, going. Wow. Wow. What was that, question mark?
Brenda: So what do you mean by getting away with a lot? What are they getting away with?
Abby: They’re getting away with being able to show you something big because scale is usually linked to these things. So it’s big scale either in terms of square footage or meterage or ginormous screens or something truly hugely immersive. And then, if you don’t have to tell a narrative, then you don’t have to worry about a direct story. You can show something fun and playful, and abstract.
It doesn’t have to have a set parameter. It doesn’t have to communicate any facts. A lot of the historical museums we work on have to convey facts. It’s part of their backbone, and they’ve got to be factually accurate. With some of these bigger spectacles, I think it’s more about being there with a crowd and sharing a common moment.
Brenda: So there’s a lot there. And the first thing I have to do is I have to respond to your super exuberant description of these big awe environments. And I’m just, I’m sorry, I’m going to get just slightly scholarly about this, but it is so exciting. There is work that has been done and it’s called small self. When you are in a place and you suddenly feel really small, it ignites something in the human animal.
It is absolutely amazing, and it is spectacular and true to the terms that is used oftentimes to describe or capture these really giant over the top events and experiences that are created these days. Part of why you love those moments and why so many people love those moments is that there is something in the feeling of the world as much larger than I or things are much larger than I that actually kind of helps us psychologically. It literally kind of grounds us, which is a very good kind of feeling. And it also makes us feel prosocial. When you’re in an environment like that, oftentimes, you know, maybe a stranger will sort of maybe lean over to you and say, Can you believe that? Yeah.
Abby: There’s a commonality of it, right? We’re all experiencing it together. You do feel one of many. And so in that most people take great comfort.
Brenda: Yeah. When I was listening to you, I was thinking about the super brilliant City Museum in St. Louis. And so, it’s lush. It’s, if you haven’t seen the space, I have to give a blanket apology to the creators of the City Museum because I am so awkwardly going to try to properly capture you in a description. But it is an artist generated museum and the entire space is recycled, repurposed, upcycled, crafted objects, environments made out of hand-sculpted materials, and the entire building includes elements of other buildings. And for all of our listeners, Abby is making a wow expression.
Abby: I am making a wow face.
Brenda: She is making a wow face, and it is well justified. So the whole institution is this artwork, and the narrative is the environment. And this is where I see this really gorgeous sort of syncopation between experience, designed environment, built environment, and story.
Abby: So did you leave with that feeling of the human interaction with this geographic area and the kind of people that were there and the kind of buildings? And when you walk away, when you think back on it and you remove the experience, what did you learn?
Brenda: I learned, I think about other people sharing the space with me. And part of that again is I want to pick up on your wow experience, that became, as per the nature of awe experiences, it became kind of like a very resonant, shared social connector. And because every single thing that you were seeing, touching, interacting with was literally a physical part of the city created by people of the city in terms of learning something, I feel like I learned about other people. I learned about myself quite a bit, I must say.
Abby: And I think at the end of the day, you know, we can argue semantics or experience versus exhibition. I think ultimately the goal is that of both is to learn a little bit more about who you are and your place in the world. So it sounds like St. Louis is a place that I need to go visit and check out that museum. It sounds incredible.
Brenda: It is.
Abby: I think about one of the major differences potentially between the exhibition and experience is you always want to get visitor participation upfront. It’s incredibly important if you want to make a successful exhibition, when you think about the location of the exhibition, the target audience, you really need that visitor participation ahead of time to make sure that what you build is for the community.
I think that is less of a concern when you’re talking about these pure experiences, some of the branded experiences, where of course they know their target audience if it’s a brand or a product. But there’s less of that conversation that goes on about what’s going to be created.
And then multiple touch points, thinking about multiple touchpoints before an exhibition opens. How is this museum or exhibition communicating to the public before the doors officially open? What’s that strategy? How could you replicate the narrative online and talk to the audience about the stories before it opens? And then when we look at the designer’s perspective, there are no differences between exhibition and experience design, I believe, in today’s world. I think what’s changed is all the tools the designer needs in order to design a great exhibition or experience.
So you’re talking about understanding media, video, interactives, you know how you design an interface, how users interact with that interface, how they sit and enjoy media or walk by and enjoy media. AR, a whole new arena. VR, another one. And then, if you add on top of that the metaverse, you have this ginormous toolbox that our designers have at their fingertips to create these unbelievable immersive exhibitions.
And then we move to curators. Curators really need to work with companies that can help them tell their story using this broader toolset. It’s really difficult for curators to keep up on what’s actually going to stick, so it takes them a long time to be persuaded, and sometimes I feel a little frustrated that you can see all the other industries that are providing these experiences and our more traditional museums haven’t got there yet.
Brenda: Well, large or small, I think that something I want to pull out something that you said earlier, which is that an element of design, I think, it’s definitely happening right now and it’s increasing is audience participation and I think of co-creation. And I see that as a very valuable and a really vital element of design that I think should be in those standards of excellence as AAM updates its work in upcoming years.
I think that co-creation, audience participation in the actual generation of experiences of the exhibition environments is critical. And related to that, I think that another element of design that is starting to really appear on the radar and being done really effectively is social action. I mean that specifically as an element of design, something that designers need to be trained in.
I know that we do social action as an element of design in our program and because our designers need to not only have that enormous tool kit that you just went through but in a sensitivity towards and a knowledge of all of the different roles that people are playing on our client teams. But social action, they need to understand the fact that whatever the kind of environment is, is a part of society. It is a part of our culture, it is a part of distinct cultures, and it’s a part of human culture. So to create these forms for experiences, but then also enable people to be prompted towards positive action.
Abby: Yeah, I totally agree. There’s nothing worse than actually going through an exhibition, being completely motivated, touched and moved, and thinking, Well, what do I do now? I’m now completely frustrated, I feel useless, and nobody’s providing me with any way to help or do something or any action items. And again, when you think of Gen-Zers, I think of them in this positive way, all that they’ve sort of brought to us is bringing into focus this idea of positive action. And I feel like they almost demanded it. They’ve grown up in a world where they want to make a difference, be given this opportunity to act and be heard. And speaking from experience with my two teenage girls, that’s what I live every day. So I think social media has a lot to do with why they are the way they are.
It’s provided this platform since they were born to find a community, a place to speak out, show their passions, and really get support in large numbers. And I think that’s what they demand from their exhibition experiences.
Brenda: Abby, we have only scratched the surface.
[Music]
Abby: So. Brenda, let’s move on to Tech Talk, where we look at any advances or trends in technology that are happening that might be useful and inspiring in creating an experience.
Brenda: Abby, I am going to just make a quick plug about TikTok and how the app, which apparently is thought of as being most popular among 13 to 21 year olds, although I’m in my fifties and I know an awful lot of folks in my age group who absolutely love TikTok, TikTok reaches over 1 billion people.
I’m mentioning TikTok because very recently I read a piece that the Carnegie Museum of Natural History has posted 12 films on TikTok, and they have been attracting over 1.5 million views, which is more people than visited all four institutions in the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh last year. And these TikTok videos are these brilliant little pieces of Tim Pearce, who is a curator at the museum. Who, folks, he tells snail jokes. That’s it. It is our beloved curator telling snail jokes, and it is reaching that number of audience. It’s absolutely amazing. So I want to put in a plug and highly recommend that museums play with TikTok. It’s your friend.
Abby: I think that’s absolutely fantastic. I just love the authentic delivery. I also wanted to give a shout-out to the Black Country Living Museum in Birmingham in the UK. They also use TikTok, especially during COVID, and they got a third of a million followers since using the platform in August. So this particular video features Grandfather giving out advice from the 1920s, you know, like all of our grandfathers do, tell us what we should and shouldn’t do. And it went viral. They even actually got on the official UK TikTok 100 chart, believe it or not.
So I think that’s kind of amazing. So they take their actors, their docents from the museum and brought them to life on TikTok in these very short little vignettes, really well produced. They’re all in costume. They’re in location at the museum, telling stories, singing songs. It’s really brought the museum visitor experience to life on TikTok. So not only did they get a global audience, but it really worked during the pandemic, which I think, you know, is a great use of social media and has really pushed social and pushed digital to the forefront of a museum’s thinking, given that, you know, we don’t know when the next pandemic may happen. Yes, I said it, ladies and gentlemen.
Brenda: Oh, Abby!
Abby: Sorry. Better to be safe than sorry, that’s what I say.
Brenda: Well, pandemic or no pandemic TikTok is certainly not going away any time soon. And the truth of the matter is, it’s just a heck of a lot of fun.
Abby: So that’s all that we’ve got for today. Thank you, everyone, for tuning in. Please send us any thoughts, suggestions.
Brenda: Tik Tok Videos.
Abby: And tune in next week.
[Music]
Producer: Matters of Experience is produced by Lorem Ipsum Corp. Please tune in next week for another conversation. Thank you all for listening.
AAM Core Standards for Museums
Brooklyn Children’s Museum – NBBJ | ESI Design
Mark Rothko: The Seagram Murals – Display at Tate Britain
[Music]
Abby: Hello and welcome to Matters of Experience. My name is Abigail Honor. My friends call me Abby.
Brenda: And I’m Brenda Cowan. Abby, my friends call me Professor.
Abby: Welcome to this week’s podcast on the gigantic topic of exhibition versus experience. What are the differences, if any, and why does it matter? We’re going to look at how exhibitions were traditionally defined and how and why is this changing. I first want to acknowledge that this is a topic for about 10 hours of the show. Right, Brenda?
Brenda: Oh, yes. I teach in an M.A. degree program in exhibition and experience design. So, Abby, we can safely put it at several hundreds of hours.
Abby: So let’s talk about a museum. Museums have been around for a long, long, long time, and they’re traditionally places for collections of artifacts. And the exhibition portion is what the public gets to see, which is usually part of the collection of a museum. Recently, these exhibitions have been asked to become experiences. So what we’re here to talk about today is sort of any commonalities between exhibits and experiences and any differences between an exhibition and an experience.
Abby: The definition of an exhibition is, I quote, a public display of works of art or items of interest held in an art gallery or museum or at a trade fair. So I think we can probably all pretty much agree. That sounds like an exhibition to me. What about you, Brenda?
Brenda: Sure. Did you get that from Merriam-Webster?
Abby: I got it from Google.
Brenda: Google. Thank you, Google. I think that, sure, it’s important to have a grounding. And I know that we’re going to dive in in terms of really looking at the sort of the semantics. But one of the things that’s really, really important to me to point out is the idea that experiences are somehow new or that experience in relationship to exhibitions is new because it’s not.
If we go back to the 1970s and look at Ed Schlossberg’s work with the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, we are seeing pristine experience design. If you look at any children’s museum or science center, all of them museums, right, recognized as museums, you automatically are looking at all of the kinds of elements that we use to define experience design, immersion, kinesthetic, we’re looking at interactivity, audience-driven and I think that, you know, I began doing work in children’s museums 30 years ago, and I think that it’s kind of weird in a way to be talking so much about experience design because it kind of was, you know, do they use the expression in Britain, cut your milk teeth? I cut my milk teeth on creating, you know, children’s exhibits, which is all experience design. So I don’t know that you can really extract the two.
Abby: So way back then, 30 years ago when you were working in museums, children’s museums, did you ever use the term experience for your exhibitions? Like was it something ever synonymous with what you were doing or was it something you were doing and you didn’t realize it?
Brenda: Probably both. And look, you know, we talked endlessly about experience, but experience design was just not on trend. It wasn’t the language or the lingo that was being used. At the time, in the early nineties, when I was working in children’s museums, there was an enormous push to look at education and outcomes, and there was a tremendous amount of work that we were doing with the, at the time, it was the American Association of Museums, now the American Alliance of Museums. We were working tremendously with AAM and looking at their standards of excellence in museum exhibition, and they’re all experiential.
Abby: No, they are. I’m so happy you brought up AAM’s standards of excellence because they’ve been there for so long, and one of them for museum exhibitions said, and I quote, An exhibition is successful if it’s physically, intellectually and emotionally engaging and accessible to those who, wait for it, experience it. As we think about what an experience is today in a museum, one of the things I think they have to have is that interactivity, that communication, that conversation, whether it be physically or from an intellectual perspective.
Brenda: I think that the idea of human development is what drives, especially the early great children’s museums. We’re talking about Brooklyn Children’s Museum, Boston Children’s Museum, and well, I could go on from there, but those were really the first two. And the whole idea was to provide experiences and environments for experiences that help children grow and learn in a natural way.
But at the end of the day, the idea of interactivity and play and design is just as much for adults. Maybe it’s a generational thing. Abby I don’t know. The idea that adults play too and that interaction, kinesthetic experience, multisensory experience, engaging with objects, it’s not, it’s not just for kids anymore. It’s always been for adults. It’s just the profession is only just now, I think catching up with that.
Abby: I think things like, I totally agree, I think recently things like Roblox and other games, and so I agree. I think that the atmosphere that we’re designing in right now is a very open one to be able to incorporate play and maybe education also has sort of slowly turned more to understand that play and interaction actually helps people retain and learn.
I feel that that is where education has lagged and museums, more traditional museums have also lagged behind in terms of that. So let’s talk about experience versus exhibition. Tell us a little bit about the definition as far as the standards of excellence go.
Brenda: Sure, and I should just put out there, I really struggle to separate the two. Exhibition versus experience. I don’t think it’s a versus. I think that they really are two faces of the same coin or just two different perspectives.
Abby: I want to interject with a question then. Does that mean you think that every exhibition needs to be experiential or have an experience tied to it?
Brenda: I think that every exhibition does have an experience tied to it. I think that once you have a visitor in an environment engaging with content in, you know, in whatever way, engaging with the environment, you’ve got an experience.
It’s important for us to recognize the nature of humans and the physical, the intellectual, the emotional framework that is the human being. And every time people go into, especially into a designed environment that has been curated, that has been designed by a creative team that’s gone through all of the elements of design, I think that you are going to have engagement in those three primary ways, and I think that that’s what experience ultimately is.
It’s the human having the experience within the space. I think the great spaces have thought about that and have designed towards that and that welcome people to engage intellectually, physically, emotionally.
Abby: Right, and we’re not talking about a bad versus good experience here. We’re talking about an experience based on what the curator or the team were trying to share, the design team.
Brenda: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s also we need to make sure that we get in there, that we’re also not just talking about museums, but we’re talking about and certainly, these days, branded environments, retail environments, trade shows, expos, spectaculars. You know, we’ve got so much that is happening right now on intimate scales and on grand scales, and with innovative uses of media, all of the same defining elements apply in terms of human experience no matter what.
In any of these kinds of environments, we’re having the physical, the emotional, and the intellectual experience. And ideally, people get what they want. They feel good about what they have experienced.
Abby: I’m just thinking as we discuss that an experience and exhibition are one and the same. It’s interesting to even question what an exhibition is today. So I just visited a pop-up in the Meatpacking District yesterday. It was laid out, it looked very similar to an exhibition, but it was actually a store. The pop-up had a product in which like when you go into a traditional museum and they have artifacts, it had text panels explaining all about the product.
It had labels identifying the product and a call to action. Everything was really well designed. When you talk about messaging, it’s all on point. There was hands-on moments where you could touch things and interact. They had hair clips. You could take off, try on and there was a huge glass mirror there so you could actually look at yourself in them.
There was a lot of intention that had gone into the design of the space and the presentation of the objects, very much similar to an exhibition. They knew their target audience. Everything was totally geared to that. But in my opinion, one of the shortcomings was that it lacked what I would call cultural significance. Its aim, at the end of the day overall, was to sell me some stuff.
The satisfaction from an experience perspective was pretty low level. It wasn’t intellect actually, or very emotionally engaging, but I did have a basic interaction, and so I would call this an experience.
Brenda: I think that, you know, first of all, the expectations that you had going in clearly did not match up with what you got. And we’re going to be talking in a different episode with the brilliant John Falk, who’s going to talk about the meaning of, to him, education and exhibits and the idea of satisfaction as well. I don’t know that the whole point is necessarily to get an education and certainly not in the one that you were experiencing.
So if you were kind of expecting to learn something new that could certainly be why it just really wasn’t hitting the right marks for you. One of the people who I go back to as well and I think of is another one of these museum greats, Dan Spock. And he once gave a cool definition that exhibitions are the medium of media, written words, sound, image, moving image, performance, digital media. And he says that when an environment has all of these and yet it retains its inherent exhibit-ness, then you’ve got a great experience. You’ve got a great exhibition. And really, one of the delicious things about being in exhibition design is that you’ve got the entire candy shop, you’ve got it all, you’ve got so many tools and toys to work with.
Even exhibitions that are didactic or they’re static. There’s always a lot going on beneath the surface that you’ll hear the word numinous experience when people have encounters with objects and objects that are very evocative. People have sensory experiences in environments that are so moving to them, and it’s subjective, and again, it’s based on what their expectations are, what their motivations are, what their desires are. But experience is not always something that you can see happening is an important point to me.
So you could have gone into an exhibition that has not had a ton for you to, let’s say, play with or be super stimulated by. But you still could have a very moving experience, and you could still have what to you would be a really great experience in a designed environment.
Abby: I think back actually to when I was 12 years old in the Tate Gallery in London, surrounded by Mark Rothko’s and all my classmates. Yes, it was a fundamental moment in my life. For some reason, I stopped and paused, and I looked around and I couldn’t move for about an entire hour and I was completely transformed and transfixed, and that experience was unbelievable. I still remember the way I feel to this very day.
Nobody else in my class had that. That was just something that I had in relation to the Rothkos around me. I think it’s interesting also that we aim to create an experience for everybody to enjoy, but a lot of it depends on what a person is bringing into the space, what experiences they’ve had before, and what experiences they’re hoping to have.
Brenda: Part of how I really love thinking about this is that visitors are responsive, but they’re also drivers of their own experience because they come with expectations. And there are things that we want. We have chosen, we have self-selected to go to a particular place, to have a particular experience on some level we have gone there even if we’re a tagalong and are going there because, okay, the husband wants to go here. You bet. I will absolutely come along with you and I’d really rather be wherever.
Abby: Oh, come on. You’ve never agreed to go along with your husband.
Brenda: I always agree to go because he’s wonderful and I just can’t, just, I always want to spend time with him. I’m serious. But the point of the matter is we set ourselves up to have a certain kind of experience. And what is interesting, I think, is when an experience is designed for, being that it has multi senses, let’s say, or it’s accounting for as many different physical modalities as possible and there’s emotional aspects to it, then all of the sudden we get to be responsive and let’s say, you know, in a situation if I am a tagalong, all of a sudden I get to be responsive to an environment where I really was not very willing to give myself over. I can also direct my experience. I think that experience design is a dance. It’s a, it really is a dynamic conversation between an environment and a visitor.
Abby: That’s what I was going to add, because I was going to say I’d describe it as, I guess, contrary to a film, which is a monologue, you’re being talked to, you’re not being asked any questions. Your participation is purely to sit and absorb. And I feel like experience and experience design is all about the dialog, and it’s about that interaction, it’s about that conversation.
And that’s what really creates this immersive experience and something that’s long-lasting, something that you feel part of. I mean, how many times have I been in an amazing exhibit, and you are invited to give your point of view or your legacy, and then you feel like you’re part of that institution. So I think it operates on a really profound level when you can start to have those connections with the visitors and that really incredible experience.
So when we’re thinking about breaking down the differences between exhibitions and experiences, do experiences without driving narratives have an easier time of it? Is it harder to reach people when you have a specific story you have to tell? So the opposite of film, I guess, where a good story moves you and a film without much of a story loses you.
Looking at spectaculars as experiences, do they get away with a lot because they really don’t have to tell a beginning, a middle and an end. They just have to have people leaving, going. Wow. Wow. What was that, question mark?
Brenda: So what do you mean by getting away with a lot? What are they getting away with?
Abby: They’re getting away with being able to show you something big because scale is usually linked to these things. So it’s big scale either in terms of square footage or meterage or ginormous screens or something truly hugely immersive. And then, if you don’t have to tell a narrative, then you don’t have to worry about a direct story. You can show something fun and playful, and abstract.
It doesn’t have to have a set parameter. It doesn’t have to communicate any facts. A lot of the historical museums we work on have to convey facts. It’s part of their backbone, and they’ve got to be factually accurate. With some of these bigger spectacles, I think it’s more about being there with a crowd and sharing a common moment.
Brenda: So there’s a lot there. And the first thing I have to do is I have to respond to your super exuberant description of these big awe environments. And I’m just, I’m sorry, I’m going to get just slightly scholarly about this, but it is so exciting. There is work that has been done and it’s called small self. When you are in a place and you suddenly feel really small, it ignites something in the human animal.
It is absolutely amazing, and it is spectacular and true to the terms that is used oftentimes to describe or capture these really giant over the top events and experiences that are created these days. Part of why you love those moments and why so many people love those moments is that there is something in the feeling of the world as much larger than I or things are much larger than I that actually kind of helps us psychologically. It literally kind of grounds us, which is a very good kind of feeling. And it also makes us feel prosocial. When you’re in an environment like that, oftentimes, you know, maybe a stranger will sort of maybe lean over to you and say, Can you believe that? Yeah.
Abby: There’s a commonality of it, right? We’re all experiencing it together. You do feel one of many. And so in that most people take great comfort.
Brenda: Yeah. When I was listening to you, I was thinking about the super brilliant City Museum in St. Louis. And so, it’s lush. It’s, if you haven’t seen the space, I have to give a blanket apology to the creators of the City Museum because I am so awkwardly going to try to properly capture you in a description. But it is an artist generated museum and the entire space is recycled, repurposed, upcycled, crafted objects, environments made out of hand-sculpted materials, and the entire building includes elements of other buildings. And for all of our listeners, Abby is making a wow expression.
Abby: I am making a wow face.
Brenda: She is making a wow face, and it is well justified. So the whole institution is this artwork, and the narrative is the environment. And this is where I see this really gorgeous sort of syncopation between experience, designed environment, built environment, and story.
Abby: So did you leave with that feeling of the human interaction with this geographic area and the kind of people that were there and the kind of buildings? And when you walk away, when you think back on it and you remove the experience, what did you learn?
Brenda: I learned, I think about other people sharing the space with me. And part of that again is I want to pick up on your wow experience, that became, as per the nature of awe experiences, it became kind of like a very resonant, shared social connector. And because every single thing that you were seeing, touching, interacting with was literally a physical part of the city created by people of the city in terms of learning something, I feel like I learned about other people. I learned about myself quite a bit, I must say.
Abby: And I think at the end of the day, you know, we can argue semantics or experience versus exhibition. I think ultimately the goal is that of both is to learn a little bit more about who you are and your place in the world. So it sounds like St. Louis is a place that I need to go visit and check out that museum. It sounds incredible.
Brenda: It is.
Abby: I think about one of the major differences potentially between the exhibition and experience is you always want to get visitor participation upfront. It’s incredibly important if you want to make a successful exhibition, when you think about the location of the exhibition, the target audience, you really need that visitor participation ahead of time to make sure that what you build is for the community.
I think that is less of a concern when you’re talking about these pure experiences, some of the branded experiences, where of course they know their target audience if it’s a brand or a product. But there’s less of that conversation that goes on about what’s going to be created.
And then multiple touch points, thinking about multiple touchpoints before an exhibition opens. How is this museum or exhibition communicating to the public before the doors officially open? What’s that strategy? How could you replicate the narrative online and talk to the audience about the stories before it opens? And then when we look at the designer’s perspective, there are no differences between exhibition and experience design, I believe, in today’s world. I think what’s changed is all the tools the designer needs in order to design a great exhibition or experience.
So you’re talking about understanding media, video, interactives, you know how you design an interface, how users interact with that interface, how they sit and enjoy media or walk by and enjoy media. AR, a whole new arena. VR, another one. And then, if you add on top of that the metaverse, you have this ginormous toolbox that our designers have at their fingertips to create these unbelievable immersive exhibitions.
And then we move to curators. Curators really need to work with companies that can help them tell their story using this broader toolset. It’s really difficult for curators to keep up on what’s actually going to stick, so it takes them a long time to be persuaded, and sometimes I feel a little frustrated that you can see all the other industries that are providing these experiences and our more traditional museums haven’t got there yet.
Brenda: Well, large or small, I think that something I want to pull out something that you said earlier, which is that an element of design, I think, it’s definitely happening right now and it’s increasing is audience participation and I think of co-creation. And I see that as a very valuable and a really vital element of design that I think should be in those standards of excellence as AAM updates its work in upcoming years.
I think that co-creation, audience participation in the actual generation of experiences of the exhibition environments is critical. And related to that, I think that another element of design that is starting to really appear on the radar and being done really effectively is social action. I mean that specifically as an element of design, something that designers need to be trained in.
I know that we do social action as an element of design in our program and because our designers need to not only have that enormous tool kit that you just went through but in a sensitivity towards and a knowledge of all of the different roles that people are playing on our client teams. But social action, they need to understand the fact that whatever the kind of environment is, is a part of society. It is a part of our culture, it is a part of distinct cultures, and it’s a part of human culture. So to create these forms for experiences, but then also enable people to be prompted towards positive action.
Abby: Yeah, I totally agree. There’s nothing worse than actually going through an exhibition, being completely motivated, touched and moved, and thinking, Well, what do I do now? I’m now completely frustrated, I feel useless, and nobody’s providing me with any way to help or do something or any action items. And again, when you think of Gen-Zers, I think of them in this positive way, all that they’ve sort of brought to us is bringing into focus this idea of positive action. And I feel like they almost demanded it. They’ve grown up in a world where they want to make a difference, be given this opportunity to act and be heard. And speaking from experience with my two teenage girls, that’s what I live every day. So I think social media has a lot to do with why they are the way they are.
It’s provided this platform since they were born to find a community, a place to speak out, show their passions, and really get support in large numbers. And I think that’s what they demand from their exhibition experiences.
Brenda: Abby, we have only scratched the surface.
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Abby: So. Brenda, let’s move on to Tech Talk, where we look at any advances or trends in technology that are happening that might be useful and inspiring in creating an experience.
Brenda: Abby, I am going to just make a quick plug about TikTok and how the app, which apparently is thought of as being most popular among 13 to 21 year olds, although I’m in my fifties and I know an awful lot of folks in my age group who absolutely love TikTok, TikTok reaches over 1 billion people.
I’m mentioning TikTok because very recently I read a piece that the Carnegie Museum of Natural History has posted 12 films on TikTok, and they have been attracting over 1.5 million views, which is more people than visited all four institutions in the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh last year. And these TikTok videos are these brilliant little pieces of Tim Pearce, who is a curator at the museum. Who, folks, he tells snail jokes. That’s it. It is our beloved curator telling snail jokes, and it is reaching that number of audience. It’s absolutely amazing. So I want to put in a plug and highly recommend that museums play with TikTok. It’s your friend.
Abby: I think that’s absolutely fantastic. I just love the authentic delivery. I also wanted to give a shout-out to the Black Country Living Museum in Birmingham in the UK. They also use TikTok, especially during COVID, and they got a third of a million followers since using the platform in August. So this particular video features Grandfather giving out advice from the 1920s, you know, like all of our grandfathers do, tell us what we should and shouldn’t do. And it went viral. They even actually got on the official UK TikTok 100 chart, believe it or not.
So I think that’s kind of amazing. So they take their actors, their docents from the museum and brought them to life on TikTok in these very short little vignettes, really well produced. They’re all in costume. They’re in location at the museum, telling stories, singing songs. It’s really brought the museum visitor experience to life on TikTok. So not only did they get a global audience, but it really worked during the pandemic, which I think, you know, is a great use of social media and has really pushed social and pushed digital to the forefront of a museum’s thinking, given that, you know, we don’t know when the next pandemic may happen. Yes, I said it, ladies and gentlemen.
Brenda: Oh, Abby!
Abby: Sorry. Better to be safe than sorry, that’s what I say.
Brenda: Well, pandemic or no pandemic TikTok is certainly not going away any time soon. And the truth of the matter is, it’s just a heck of a lot of fun.
Abby: So that’s all that we’ve got for today. Thank you, everyone, for tuning in. Please send us any thoughts, suggestions.
Brenda: Tik Tok Videos.
Abby: And tune in next week.
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Producer: Matters of Experience is produced by Lorem Ipsum Corp. Please tune in next week for another conversation. Thank you all for listening.
Exhibition Versus Experience
Meet your hosts
Abigail Honor
Abby is a founding partner at Lorem Ipsum, an experiential design agency, and has over 23 years of experience in storytelling through physical and digital design. She has crafted dynamic and inspiring narratives for global brands, companies and institutions, using cutting-edge technology to communicate compelling and thoughtful messages. Abby has won multiple design, film and directing awards such as the SEGD Honor Award, HOW International Design Award, Muse Award, to name a few, and maintains affiliation with associations including SEGD, AIGA, and the American Advertising Federation.