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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