Episode 2: Groundwork, Discovery, Foundations
We discover ourselves, initiate new ideas, figure out what this thing is that we do, and ponder proper planning
In this episode:
(5 mins) Creative Prompts: Why Is The Deer On The Tree by Akiko Yamashita
(5 mins) Someday Projects: TV Telescope by Blair Neal
(5 mins) A Conversation with Catherine Devine, Business Strategy Leader - Libraries & Museums, Microsoft by Sundar Raman
(15 mins) The Path to Peak Laziness by Sundar Raman
Why is the Deer on the Tree?
I think I found my life’s work! Through a public art project that I did in April.
I made a giant forest projection mapping in the middle of downtown Los Angeles. The title of the artwork is called “Forest Perception - if a tree talks in a forest, does anyone listen?” It was projected on two opposing ends of a building, one side was looking down the canopy, and the other side looking up from below the root network.
(Photo by Koury Angelo)
Carmen Zella, a director of NOW Art LA Foundation, approached me to join LUMINEX, a group exhibition to bring positivity to the public especially after the tough year of 2020. I was thrilled to show my work along with amazing artists Refik Anadol, Nancy Baker Cahill, Sarah Rara, Carole Kim and Luciana Abait. I immediately started exploring what it is that I can bring back to the community.
My grandfather was a very special person to me. He devoted all of his life to creating forests after seeing the burned empty fields left by World War II. For him, planting trees and understanding the whole ecosystem was his life’s work. He always said protecting roots and planting different species together to keep the biodiversity are vital. Also, people think roots go deep, but he was opposed to the idea, in fact he studied a lot of roots which were rather shallow and wide. It is so interesting that recent study reveals trees communicate through the roots sometimes with the help of fungi networks called mycelium.
My artistic goal was to make viewers feel like being a part of the forest community by visualizing the unseen world. Since this project was for Los Angeles, I wanted to create my imaginative California native primary forest, taking a lot of inspiration from Sierra Nevada forests. Isn’t it exciting to imagine an oak tree and a pine tree are sending food and water to each other through their roots? All the animals and birds also contribute to the forest, as if the whole forest is the one creature itself.
I was not 100% sure if people would stick around for my three-minute ‘digital’ forest animation. However, a lot of people started sitting in the parking lot and were really enjoying just being there with their family and friends, almost like a picnic at a park, but in the concrete jungle in downtown LA. As they watched the animation, they saw new things. Especially on the roots side, the see-through ground confused people’s perception. I was asked ‘Why is the deer on the tree?’
Though my digital forest will never be better than the real one, I felt the power of public art and visualization. This is my life’s work to keep planting the seeds through my artwork, bringing people together to imagine a better future with more green! My grandfather insisted that planting trees should be easy and fun and could be done by kids. I want to carry on his vision in my own way, creating artwork and planting trees.
For those interested in the original animation, Forest Perception’s first NFT is now available on MakersPlace!
Someday Projects - TV Telescope
We’re always so close to our screens these days, with laptops, phones and VR headsets. When sucked into a screen, you often feel far away and isolated from the action of life. I’ve been thinking about a project that would flip that sensation around by adding an excessive amount of space between a viewer and the screen, giving us a chance to reconsider our relationship to the visual display.
I’ve been calling this idea the “TV Telescope,” and it’s on my list of Someday Projects that I hope might inspire collaboration or completion somehow. TV Telescope needs a better name, but the concept is that of a semi-permanent installation involving a TV in one location, and a telescope pointed at it from thousands of feet away. This would ideally be set up in a quiet spot, like a forest or large field, and the TV would only be viewable from the telescope. Visitors would be able to sit down, look through the telescope, and see the screen filling the viewfinder. The audio would also be piped into the viewer’s spot, but the screen content is still to be determined.
I like this idea of using optics to create an unnecessarily long distance from a screen that is normally so close. The concept is also in the name — the Greek prefix tele- means "far off, at a distance", and television means you're watching something broadcast from far away anyway, so why not lean into that and demonstrate it with some physical distance.
There is also something to this being a solo activity for people to almost voyeuristically watch TV from hundreds or thousands of feet away on their own. Millions of us watch TV alone — the added physical distance gets at the feeling of being so far away from the action and life of the world around you and shows how unimportant screens are sometimes.
The fact that this would be all optics based is important. A similar execution could be done with a remote camera and live video feed, but it wouldn't have the same feeling as something that relies on just real world optics.
A Conversation with Catherine Devine
Catherine Devine is Business Strategy Leader - Libraries & Museums, at Microsoft. She was formerly Chief Digital Officer at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Catherine and I had wonderful and in-depth conversation about Experience Design. Following is a transcript teaser, edited for clarity. Read the full transcript here. Catherine is @cmdevine on Twitter and LinkedIn.
—Sundar Raman
CreativeStack: What is Experience Design for you?
Catherine Devine: When you build an app, a website, an extended reality solution, there's a user experience piece.
Maybe 10 years ago, we started to recognize that being focused on a single channel was crazy because people don't exist in one channel. And I think that has become even more so.
As a general rule (there may be some museum exceptions), it's almost impossible to get museums to get beyond just talking about a single channel right now, whether that’s the website, app, the extended reality experience, the podcast, the audio tour, whatever.
It’s hard to get people to think about how to bring all those things together.
In my definition, I don't think about what's digital and physical. Just start with what's the right experience for what the person is trying to achieve. What's the holistic experience, regardless of channel.
What are you trying to achieve and then how do you get there?
CreativeStack: On the vendor side everyone's trying to push as far as possible. Clients, on the other hand, are trying to stay safe so they don’t get blamed for spending on something that does not work. Do you think there’s some friction in that relationship?
Catherine Devine: People's propensity to stick with what they know just amazes me. I realize that's the human condition, but it's hard for me, because I'm not that way. You just have to recognize that most people are.
The same is true of museums. They have to work out how to continually evolve instead of spending so much energy protecting the way they've done it.
Back to your question on this “vendor tension”. One problem is just systemic — people thinking in channels because of that organizational structure.
The second one is that the experiences that are consumer-facing are done by studios, and they get a lot of press. It's good for the studio, it's good for the museum, et cetera.
But it reinforces this idea that the one-off, super-expensive thing is digital. And of course it's so much more. So the problem is a combination of those things, and a general lack of digital literacy. When I say digital literacy, I mean understanding what technology can do, and how you can use it. Which is beyond thinking in terms of coding solutions.
Coding is not enough. Coding is what we used to do in the ’80s and ’90s. That's how we ended up with these terrible interfaces that only programmers can come up with, with all due respect.
There’s this binary idea of either I understand code and I therefore understand technology, or I’m scared of technology. There seems to be no middle ground.
Technology is about understanding what the possibilities are conceptually, rather than the actual implementation of technology.
Read More: There is much more that Catherine shared about her role at Microsoft, about how user experience is considered when building technologies like the Hololens, spatial sensors, and even the upcoming Microsoft Mesh! Read the full transcript here.
The Path to Peak Laziness
Larry Wall, creator of the PERL programming language, stated the Three Virtues of a great programmer as Laziness, Impatience and Hubris. Laziness, defined as “going to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure,” is a fundamental virtue of any Experience Design project. Hubris and Impatience just come with the territory!
For much of my career I have grappled with how to first estimate, then keep projects on track towards delivery. That is hard enough with singular projects, but layering on the elements of Experience Design often feels like multiple simultaneous projects competing for attention and creating chaos. Chaos is the opposite of laziness. So, how can we beat chaos by being lazy?
Let’s make this a principle, since every best-practice has one. Here’s The Lazy Principle for Experience Design:
Successful Experience Design projects require synchronized laziness
Which could alternately be stated as “Successful projects require everyone to strive to minimize overall energy expenditure.”
This article lays out “The Path To Peak Laziness,” which includes the steps to execute The Lazy Principle. At best it's a foundation for solving chaotic projects, at worst it’s a conversation starter about best practices. Let’s jump in.
The Path to Peak Laziness: A foundation for successful Experience Design
Every Experience Design project should have the following:
Vision - A clear creative vision keeps everyone on the same experience destination.
Project Management - Well-defined project management policies and procedures keeps the team’s functioning on track.
Tooling - Consistent, simple and flexible collaboration tools are required for coherent execution.
These may sound pretty obvious. However, far too many projects do not institute them. Getting these correct results in a significant reduction of overall energy expenditure, and this is how we get to Peak Laziness.
Experience Design requires different disciplines to work together seamlessly. Successfully coordinating construction teams, interior architecture, audiovisual orchestration, custom application design, facilities management, and both client and vendor personalities requires some kind of magic. That magic comes from a well implemented combination of vision, project management and tooling.
The devil, as they say, is in the details. What exactly does a “well implemented combination” really mean? It’s all very well to say “have a clear vision.” But, just because the project has a powerpoint with the mission statement, does that mean the team knows what they’re striving for?
It is important to keep in mind that vision, project management and tooling are aspects that overlap and complement each other. It’s easier to explain this from the bottom up.
#1: Tooling
Tooling refers to the combination of content organization, solutions for collaboration and the infrastructure on which everything runs. Coherent execution of a project relies on these being well implemented for team workflows.
Folder Structure
Projects start as a set of folders containing content. A clear folder structure that everyone can understand and utilize right from the start is crucial. The structure helps everyone to know how to think about a project, but also to find things easily. Don’t start by asking people to start from scratch. Here’s a simple folder structure that should work for most projects, and their purpose should be self-evident:
Admin - All Project Management and organizational materials
Legal - Contracts, NDAs, license agreements,
Design - All things related to the creative vision and design to be implemented
Technology - AV, IT and development materials
Media - All in-process media and digital assets that is considered for the final implementation
Physical Design - Architecture and 3D materials
Construction - Fabrication, fitout and any construction materials
Operations - Facilities, engineering, maintenance and building operations content
Marketing - Marketing, communications, and branding related materials
Vendor Submissions - A repository of all things received from vendors
Every folder must have a README.txt file which explains what the folder contains, and a quick introduction to its use. At a bare minimum I always recommend the following:
README.txt - An introduction to this folder, and the materials it contains
_TEMPLATES - Document templates for this discipline or area
_ARCHIVE - For old content to avoid muddying up the current work
Each discipline may have more specific structural needs, and their own practices.
Tools
Every project should define the tools that will be used for collaboration. It’s helpful to start with a set of functional requirements, then select the product. How do we:
Collaborate on and share all types of documents, with the ability to control access and audit usage? Use Google Workspace or Confluence
Communicate instantly without the overhead of email? Use Slack or MSTeams
Diagram collaboratively? Use Miro
Design and share interfaces in real-time? Use Figma
Manage tasks, schedules, dependencies and deliverables for multiple distributed teams and projects? Use Teamwork Projects
Templates for Tools
In order to make it easy to onboard a team, every tool should have well defined templates. Yes, this takes time to set up, but it is invaluable in the long term. Give your team a leg up by making the tool easy to use from day one!
Design and Branding often define “style-guides” and “design templates” to keep everyone on consistent project identity. The analogous “organization style-guide” is often forgotten (if ever defined at all).
What does an “Organization Style Guide” look like? At a minimum it should include a “Project Bible” with predefined sections, standard scenarios and operating procedures, and pre-created example diagramming templates, such as sequence diagrams, swimlanes and schedules.
It is crucial that every tool has a quick onboarding “Getting Started.” For example, although all project management tools generally work the same way, each has its own idiosyncrasies. The document helps everyone know how the tool should be used within this project.
The absence of a shared understanding creates confusion that is often hidden until well into the project’s implementation. This will likely have a critical impact on project delivery.
Infrastructure
Experience Design often leverages a range of technologies including software applications, audiovisual (AV) and environmental systems all working together. They are often implemented in “smart” environments, which have active technical components that work alongside other bespoke software solutions.
Historically the AV, IT, Facility Engineering and Exhibition Technologies were treated independently. This leads to inconsistent and often conflicting understandings of different systems and their impacts. Today, technology systems need to be considered holistically. This means comprehensively addressing the following aspects for all technology areas:
Provisioning & Deployment
Testing & Commissioning
Monitoring & Management
The software product world has solved these problems effectively in the last few years, in a way that benefits experience design environments as well. Modern tools for systems orchestration readily help every technology-enabled environment. The specific tools are always evolving, but I ask a set of questions to identify relevant products. How can we:
orchestrate multiple systems using a web-based solution? Use Jenkins.
script and automate as much as possible? Use Ansible
monitor continuously? Use Prometheus
manage all my devices effectively? Use ManageEngine’s suite of tools
I’ll leave the detailed description of these tools to their respective websites. Tools evolve, so it is important to define the underlying requirement.
#2: Project Management
Everyone should be on the same page about how the Project is Managed
Experience Design projects involve lots of different disciplines that all need to work in harmony. A well defined and well managed project management process is crucial for team-members to know how the project is progressing, and what their individual responsibilities are.
There are dozens of great project management tools out there. The critical factor is to ensure that the solution integrates smoothly and easily with the project’s outcomes, and the selected collaboration tools.
Though obvious, this is worth stating: Project Management is not the goal!
Too many projects fail (and mediocre implementations are also failures) because someone forgot that the goal of project management is to provide transparency, accountability and responsibility to every team-member. Project management is not about reporting. It’s about providing a way for everyone to have clarity on their own and everyone else’s deliverables.
My current solution preference is Teamwork Projects, which I have found to be flexible and easy to use. Atlassian’s Confluence and Atlassian’s suite of supporting tools are another great alternative. Irrespective of which tool is used, it is critical that they are set up to allow team members to start working consistently with the least amount of onboarding.
The aforementioned Project Handbook should document common scenarios and use-cases, so that every team member knows how the tool is to be used on this project.
Don’t assume anything! Everyone comes from a different background in Experience Design. Every studio works differently. Every producer and project manager has different ideas.
Always keep this as a living document (like a Google Doc or Notion) so that anyone can update it or raise questions in the same place.
It’s unfortunate, but great project management is thankless. In fact when done right it’s invisible. And most people are used to poor project management. However, with great project management you can get to great success without realizing it.
#3: Vision
Everyone should live and breathe the Creative Vision
Experience Design is ultimately about guiding visitors to an emotional state. In order to get the visitor there, everyone on the team should also be there. Every team member, irrespective of discipline, must understand and be able to articulate the end state.
Too many projects end up with a less-than-stellar experience because not everyone was rowing in the same direction. When everyone works in synchronization, when all disciplines are collaborating with the other to deliver to the same end objective, the results are nothing short of magical!
How exactly does one retain that level of synchronized vision?
First, the vision must be well articulated in a simple way, and shared with the whole team. Usually the creative vision itself is not an issue, since the design is what the project is about. However, these design objectives are very often not shared with the rest of the team. Creative is done independently of development and operations.
Each discipline engages with the vision in their own way. For example, the Facilities Engineering and Operations teams will define engagement with the end visitor differently than the AV or IT teams. However these are just different aspects of the same elephant.
Everyone on the project should be able to see the big picture of the final creative vision. By the same token each discipline’s vision, whether that be 3D design, how the technology will work, or how operations will be performed, should also be apparent to everyone.
How exactly should this be done? Create the Project Vision Deck, similar to the creative deck, but include all the relevant disciplines.
A fragmented project vision ends up in a fragmented implementation. I hate to say it but this is the value of the corporate “mission statement”. Every project has a mission. Define it and make everyone repeat it!
With Peak Laziness, You Too Can Succeed!
Today’s technical solutions are complex systems, with many components that have to interconnect seamlessly. Experience Design relies on a chain of different technologies, systems and disciplines to deliver engaging results. To successfully deliver those results requires adherence to a set of structures and processes.
Experience Design’s best practices start with reducing overall energy expenditure, or adherence to The Lazy Principle. And successful delivery follows the Path to Peak Laziness.
Would love to hear about and learn from your processes. Please leave your feedback in the comments or email us.
Outro
This has been Episode Two of CreativeStack, thoughts on Groundwork, Discovery and Foundations. We each have our own steps for discovery and our project initiation process, and hopefully we prompted you to think about yours. We would love to know your best practices, so please share, either in the comments or by emailing us.
Thanks so much for joining us. Catch you soon.