Welcome. In this Episode:
Experiencing Design Through a Pandemic
Tuning in to Creativity
ITP Futures
Studio Visit with Hugues Sweeney of ThinkWell Studio, Montréal
Notable Projects: Tarek Atoui, Luminex LA, Concerts for One, Dialogue with Time
Experiencing Design Through a Pandemic
A quick note: What’s in a name? A lot. l use “Experience Design” to refer to the field of design that incorporates spatial, interactive and physical. This definition is debatable — and we’ll make sure that we have an honest conversation about the bounding conditions of “Experience Design” in upcoming episodes.
Congratulations! You made it here, to now (c. Q1 2021)! The present time has many of us sliding back and forth between where we started a couple of years ago, and “the other side” of a wormhole.
This particular moment in the continuum feels like a good one to evaluate what lies ahead of us, and how we craft it. We are over a year into our attempt to navigate the pandemic's obstacle course. It’s not an overstatement to say it has been an exercise in applying all the skills of Experience Design to the real world.
Many of us have had conversations related to this sentiment. In this first episode of CreativeStack, I asked some friends for their thoughts on our roles as Experience Designers in guiding or driving the world around us now.
We make Experiences. Should we be guiding the world?
Perhaps for the first time in our history we are all trying to solve the same problem, together. But this problem is not the virus. We are trying to solve the problem of being human in the midst of enormous challenges. We have been tasked to think about how “life” can resume, and what this resumption of “life” looks like.
People around the globe reacted (and continue to react) to the pandemic on different timelines, with different resources, in different landscapes, with different concerns, points of reference, and beliefs. If we look deeper at these seemingly different concerns, they could (mostly) be sorted into some common buckets: income, rent, healthcare, workplace mechanics, relationships, etc. We sort of dealt with a suite of common scenarios. So what can we learn from this year of diverse reactions, and are there patterns we can take away to enhance our practice?
One may ask even why Experience Designers need to concern themselves with the state of the world at all. David Bianciardi, founder and Principal at AV&C, put it this way to me:
“Tell me one other discipline that exists as an understood discipline today that can actually answer the question that people have about how we are going to go back to work together? How are we going to go back outside together? How are we going to go back inside together? We are the only people that are actually set up to answer this question.”
Design doesn’t always need a roadmap to the future
Throughout the pandemic we have had the challenge of producing, making and delivering under entirely unstable circumstances.
Experience Design work is traditionally very much rooted in the physical. Ideas come from our interactions at whiteboards, on foam-core and in-person reviews. Our end objective is often to build for physical, tangible engagement in physical, tangible spaces. By moving most of our practices online we have had to change so much in our day-to-day workflows. This is not just about design studios, of course. It has affected every part of our ecosystem, from the schools that are educating the next generation, all the way to the final clients who are deploying the experiences.
In speaking with friends in the industry I was surprised that many project schedules and deliverables were only slightly derailed in spite of everything. Even when delayed, many were still kept constantly busy pushing design reviews and refining our processes. The underlying challenge is that although designers themselves were being deeply affected by the toll of the pandemic, their creative output itself had to stay high.
We were designing for future experiences while the immediate future was completely in flux. How did we manage to handle an uncertain future and uncertain design challenges?
Experience Design provides an escape from reality
I asked De Angela Duff, Industry Professor in Integrated Digital Media (IDM) at NYU Tandon and Associate Vice Provost at NYU, how her students were faring. I have personally found academia to be a good litmus test for what’s happening in industry. They are often playing with technologies ahead of studio deployment, and studios obviously hire based on the experiences and experimentation that students or professors have engaged in.
De Angela gave me a perspective that many in our field may appreciate: “For me personally, creativity has always been my escape from reality... through music, art, design, photography... literature. But it's been hard for some of my students and what I've told them to do is that they need to cling to their creativity... like their life depended on it because it does, you know?” She expounded further, “You could literally go into your own creative world... and create your own magic and this time can be one of passion, curiosity, and of making things... of actually developing a creative body of work.”
To be clear, I don’t mean to imply that Experience Designers have all the answers. I suggest that Experience Design is in a strong position to provide references for almost everyone else, because we work at the intersection of everyone else.
To frame this a bit differently, adapting to a changing environment, whether that’s work, or school or creative, has strong parallels to the changes we need to implement in the client-facing “Experiential Environments.”
Experience Design adapts to the circumstance
This past year has provided some perhaps unexpected insights about work. Many organizational processes we were told would never work were revised overnight.
De Angela Duff mentioned that universities and academics who had in the past pushed back against online classes switched literally overnight to an all-video model. More importantly there's now an acceptance that we'll have hybrid, if not primarily online, models going forward.
Kerem Alper, co-founder of ATÖLYE, mentioned to me how ATÖLYE has had to rethink their work process to have minimal in-person intervention. Their in-house physical-design team designed and deployed their Dubai office while all being remote, due to Covid lockdown restrictions. They were forced to go from sketch, to management, to construction of their office build with almost no face-to-face meetings. And most importantly without diminishing the quality of the final designed output.
Most of you probably have a similar anecdote, and have normalized it. Just think how unusual this was only 15 months ago!
We have all been pushed, to steal a phrase from Apple, to Think Different. This often (invariably?) comes with the friction of resistance to change. But isn’t it also an incredible opportunity for us to redefine things that we have all complained for a long time as being broken? Could our pre-Covid angst about work-life-balance and culture have a healthier outcome through remote work and better scheduling?
Experience Designers may be your salve (and salvation)
Museums (which contributed so much by going online), music, art and film kept humanity sane all of last year. 2020 was a near perfect demonstration of the amalgamation of technology and art. Without technology we would not have been able to experience most of that art.
We have all benefited from the incredibly varied online experiments that cultural institutions tested out. Kudos to them all for trying and failing and succeeding and continuing. Making it all happen was an army of producers and coders, the Experience Design Gnomes. This made all the difference in the world!
I will probably be accused of being delusional, but I’m starting to think the pandemic might be an unexpected blessing. It is a call to action to make Experience Design more relevant to a wider audience.
I’ll go back to what I started with:
We make Experiences. So shouldn’t we be the ones at the forefront guiding the world?
I would love to hear your ideas, criticisms and observations so we can have a real conversation about how we make this happen — the new tools we need to build, redesigning the workplace, discussions about who is missing from the table, and more.
— Sundar Raman
Tuning in to Creativity
Years ago I read a business book called, The E-Myth Revisited. The book starts off with the story of Sarah, who loves baking pies. Sarah's friends all tell her that she's so good at baking pies that she should start her own pie business. Sarah listens to her friends, starts that pie business, and works herself into exhaustion.
When I founded Patten Studio 15 years ago, I registered for an LLC without thinking too much about what the studio's business model would be or how I would grow the company (or what I should name the company). I knew that I had a passion for coming up with new ideas at the intersection of interactive design and technology. I loved the craft of building prototypes of those ideas, and putting them out into the world. But as my business took off, my daily work started to diverge from the hands-on prototyping I was passionate about. I began to realize that I was working myself into exhaustion.
I came to understand that it was critical for both the success of the studio and my own happiness that I rediscover the passion that had led me to creating interactive work in the first place. I decided to set aside time each week to make things for myself, with no concern for timelines or client requirements. The work became fun again. I was able to focus completely on the process of bringing ideas out of my head and into physical form.
The first thing I made was a robot that drew pictures on a huge roll of paper hanging from a wall in my apartment. I wrote software that took all the text messages my girlfriend and I had ever sent to one another, removed any names, removed any dirty words, and then instructed the robot to draw those texts on the paper to reveal a 12 foot wide image of an eye. The robot took days to draw the final image, during which I did my best to sleep through the whirring noises of the stepper motors moving the pen over the wall. I thought of this as a fun, personal project, but after it was done, concepts about robots drawing pictures of people snuck into proposals we sent to clients. This in turn led to deeper exploration at the studio of new things we can do with industrial robots in the realm of interactive experiences.
About six months into the pandemic, around the time of the 2020 election, I went through a brief prepper phase. I live in New York City and wanted to be prepared for the worst, but really this was an excuse for me to get into ham radio. I dug an old shortwave radio my dad had given me out of storage. When I plugged it in, all I heard was static. Never one to pass up an opportunity to buy a new gadget, I decided to make an investment. In addition to food, batteries, and moist towelettes, FEMA recommends that you keep a radio in a Basic Disaster Supplies Kit. Clearly, my family desperately needed this radio. At the beginning I was mostly focused on listening to propaganda stations from other countries. Countries like North Korea and Cuba use shortwave radio as a way to share their official perspective with anyone around the world who’s willing to listen. Apparently, I was one of those people.
A radio can allow you to speak with someone on the other side of the world, without using the internet, using less electricity than a light bulb. Within a few days I was listening to broadcasts in languages that I previously hadn't known existed. There was just one flaw. My antenna had a tuning knob that had to be adjusted every time I wanted to tune the radio to a different frequency. The antenna was clamped to the air-conditioner mount outside the bedroom window of my apartment, so this meant keeping the window open so I could continuously reach outside to turn the knob. In the winter this got old quickly.
Of course, the only reasonable thing to do was build a motorized remote control for the antenna so that I could tune the radio using a knob on my desk. I grabbed some leftover motor controllers from the studio and set to work. I relished the search for the perfect knobs and buttons, the perfect materials and surface finishes, the perfect microcontroller, the perfect software architecture, and so on. This was going to take as long as it needed to, and that felt wonderful. I decided to motorize the knob on the remote control to deliver haptic feedback. This way, I could feel through the remote control if the wheel on the antenna had reached the end of its range and the knob couldn't turn any further.
This idea — haptic feedback in a control wheel — actually wasn’t a new one. It was something I had been curious to explore, but for whatever reason hadn’t gotten around to building. I was thrilled to finally have an opportunity to make it. Some unexpected benefits appeared. I added a few features to the motor controllers that we now use for robotics applications at the studio. And I’m sure it's only a matter of time before this remote control design, originally created to tune my radio antenna, is repurposed for an official studio project.
This remote control is, and may always be, very much a work in progress. But it fanned the spark of my imagination. Strangely, a few months after I bought the radio and started listening to Radio Habana Cuba’s take on U.S. foreign policy, the studio began receiving requests for proposals from companies that wanted us to design artworks promoting technology powered by... radio waves. It doesn’t always work out like that. But the point is that exploration and play can pay unexpected dividends, and returning to the root of your passion may teach you something new.
ITP Futures
Auto-Generated TV Show Mashups
Join me on a journey 10 years in the future to the end-of-semester student show at NYU’s graduate level Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). The end-of-semester shows at various “at the intersection of arts and technology” institutions are always a great little culture sample of which technologies are making an impact in the zeitgeist of creative technology.
In the past, you could mark tree rings of each year of these shows by what technology was currently in vogue. There was a year or two of Microsoft Kinects in every corner, the era of VR experiments, AR toys, machine learning, etc. If we take a look at some tools and technologies on the horizon back in 2021, we can trace them to some of the common projects at this current show in 2031.
The previous advancements, rises in accessibility, and popularization of things like deepfakes, image analysis, AI voice generation, style transfer, GPT-3, narrative analysis and overall more context awareness have created a new form of media mashup at this ITP Future 2031 show. Large bodies of moving images created in the last century are being chewed on by algorithms to create entirely new TV genres and movie abstractions. Easy tools and the accessibility of media have made these new narratives a hot topic.
Instead of mixing and generating single images or large bodies of text, students and artists have moved on to generating whole fake TV shows and movies. New dialogue and characters have been deepfaked into familiar settings — shots and colors reused. These student experiments are interesting, occasionally hilarious, sometimes profound. They feel fresh and overdone at the same time.
Completely new episodes of Jeopardy generated from hundreds of hours of training on Alex Trebek. Seinfeld episodes generated in the narrative style and tone of Law and Order. That Game of Thrones ending everyone actually wanted, but in the style of a Kurosawa film (for some reason). Sitcoms from the 1970s considered offensive by modern standards have been remixed with new dialogue, characters and settings as a commentary on the advancement of societal standards. Someone took the entire MTV Cribs series and did a style transfer with Andy Warhol’s Salvador Dali film, and ended up with bedazzled Dali giving a tour of his seemingly infinite surrealist mansion.
One thing never changes at these end-of-semester shows: The newest technology obsession alone isn’t what makes the truly successful pieces resonate. The projects that stick with people are the quiet ones that have something to say, not the ones that are pushing the technology to the front.
Studio Visit: ThinkWell Studio, Montréal
Name: Hugues Sweeney
Title: President
Company: Thinkwell Studio Montréal
Best place to see your work: On our website, of course, and this summer for the rebirth of Niagara Falls Power Station.
Inspiration or information source you’re currently obsessed with:
All my days start with the Quartz newsletter. And each day ends by reading an article or two on the mobile platform. I love their approach. Very open, eyes all over the planet at all times, but very grounded at the same time. Focus on international affairs, business, environment and tech with a progressive mindset. Their model remains a major reference point for me for all my projects. From the beginning, they positioned the medium as an API from which all platforms flow — rather than the other way around, which is what we tend to do, to start with one particular platform and deploy the other forms afterwards.
What is taking up most of your time these days?
HR HR HR HR HR! Hiring, onboarding, coaching, developing talent, reviewing, redesigning the structure, redefining roles and responsibilities... We are a young-old company. Thinkwell Studio Montreal is the acquisition of an independent studio that was led by its founder, Roger Parent, since its birth 20 years ago. We are now part of a multinational company with offices in five countries. And we are going through a period of tremendous growth and transformation. In one year, we have doubled capacity.
But growth is as intense and risky as decline! You have to be able to adapt constantly. Right now, we are rewriting our core values, the team’s protocol for collaboration. It is the staff who write them, not the management. We need to unify teams around a clear and strong set of values to ensure their commitment in turbulent environments — sales going up or down, changing customer needs, confinement, deconfinement and reconfinement, etc.
What were you working on before you became distracted by this Q&A?
I am an early riser because I like to work at first light. And I like to protect my evenings and weekends as much as possible to be with my family, so I prefer to start my days as early as possible. But this morning, for some reason I don't know, my five-year-old son Octave decided that he was starting his day at the same time as me. And that he is not happy with the breakfast I made for him. So I don't know if it was this Q&A that distracted me or the other way around!
Is there a person or expert you’re seeking at the moment who might find you through this newsletter?
Any player involved in an atypical and large-scale real estate development project. We've been involved in fairly defined segments, such as entertainment or culture. But what we're interested in is redefining spaces in the broadest and most inclusive sense possible. And we're seeing an emerging vision of the experience of work, community and cities from a number of real estate developers that is very inspiring to us. And these large, multi-use projects will profoundly change the way we interact with each other and experience the spaces of tomorrow.
The pandemic has accelerated the relevance and scope of these projects. Take the workplace or conferences, for example. We talk a lot about hybrid presence, online and in situ; what does that mean? How are we going to design and live these journeys in these mixed spaces? It's both a huge potential and a vertiginous divide. We have an opportunity here to amplify the relationships between people, their interactions in spaces — and there is also the risk of magnifying the existing fractures.
Is there a role that doesn’t exist yet in your field which you’re sure will evolve in the next five years?
I studied philosophy, and it is probably the experience that serves me the most in my daily life — professional, social and personal. Some corporations have developed programs to host a "philosopher in residence." I don't know what has come of it. But I certainly think we're going to have more and more ethics challenges. We are an engagement industry, and the further we go, the more the line between the private and public sphere is going to blur. Just looking at how our work life has intruded into our intimate spaces over the last year, and we're not going back. It's always good to have a wild card at the table. It may not be a philosopher, but it's certainly a role that's not directly related to what we do, but will contribute to the challenges we face from an unexpected angle.
What impossible thing does every client seem to ask for?
Several things come to mind, and it's an easy trap to fall into. If a client wants to work with us, it's because they want something that is impossible for them to achieve. That's the magic! I believe that when you can create a space for quality collaboration, feedback and camaraderie, anything is possible. The path is the destination, the collaborative framework is part of the deal. Our job is to identify that impossible thing. To seek it out, ask the right questions, frame it, name it. And then let the solutions emerge. Business solutions, creative solutions, engagement solutions, tech solutions.
What is that dream project goal that’s always just over the horizon that keeps you coming back to work every day?
From a project point of view, it is to produce wonderment. There is a word that doesn't translate very well into English, “émerveillement.” Sowing in people the capacity to open up, to provoke a feeling of transcendence, that there is something greater than oneself. It's a sentiment, sure, but it opens up a space that is more than a "wow." It can be a building, a light, a piece of history, an element of reflection. Going beyond yourself.
What project would you want to work on that had global impact, and why?
I don't know what form it would take or who we would do it with, but if you look at it from an impact point of view, it would have something to do with mobility. In order to create a tipping point effect with the climate challenges, we need to prioritize anything related to transport. I think our strength as a digital creative industry is our ability to think about people's journeys and their engagement over time and spaces through the creative application of technology. At the heart of mobility is people and their need and desire to interact with each other. People connect online and across geographies. How can we contribute to the global challenges of mobility?
Notable Projects
Remember when you found out about cool projects and exhibits and approaches by connecting with people? Well that’s what this section is supposed to be about. Things that have inspired us to think about new approaches, beyond just Googling for “cool new interactive thing!” Send us your Notable Projects as well, and we’ll share them out. The only requirement is that they should be have been deployed and in production in the last few months.
Tarek Atoui, Cycles in 11
Tarek Atoui’s Cycles in 11 at the Sharjah Art Foundation made want to start buying transducers in bulk, stick them on every surface to make into a soundboard! I kinda think that’s what happened when Tarek got into making instruments from every real-world object he got his hands on!
Tarek’s work skates the surface that connects art, design and technology. The pieces are beautiful. The sound generated by the “instruments” is mesmerizing. And I could not help but think about the craft of each individual piece, and how much frustration he probably worked through in getting the circuits just right.
Videos of his work are here and here (and lots of other places).
LUMINEX LA
We were ecstatic to see (even at a great distance) the power of public art connecting community in wide open spaces for LUMINEX LA. When these works lit up the city, glimmers of hope warmed our souls.
One-on-one Concerts, and Dialogue With Time
Shirin Brueckner, co-founder and Partner at Atelier-Brueckner, shared her thoughts on some projects that made an impact on her recently. During the summer of 2020 a number of orchestras around the world performed for individuals, in a “Concert for One”. It was written about in the New York Times and Goodnet. Shirin made me aware of this project and mentioned the powerfulness (and uncomfortableness) of becoming the center of attention, and how we often don’t want to be there. It’s interesting that in Experience Design we often aspire to personalize the engagement, and make the visitor feel like they *are* the center of attention.
Shirin also told me about Dialogue With Time, an Atelier Brueckner project from 2015, about aging. It was crafted as a discussion around a table with elderly people you've never met before. The elderly “guides” (all over 70 years old) provide their context and experience to conversation topics raised by visitors — a child talking about the “samll moments in their life”, or “a 16 year old girl and she talks about for being the first time in love”, and so on.
The overlap with the Concert-for-one is perhaps the emotional attention, though they approach the idea from very different perspectives.
Outro
This has been Episode One of Creative Stack.
As we said in our welcome, it’s meant to be a conversation. We want your comments and feedback and suggestions. We are building this to be a voice for the Experience Design community. Please reach out if you have a topic in mind we should cover, and especially if you would like to contribute.
Thanks so much for tuning in, and catch you soon!
Credits
Thanks to Janice M. Cho for the CreativeStack logo and design direction.