We are Evan Saddler and Zach Manzi, co-directors of a musical group called Conduit, and we are currently designing three performances for millennial audiences in Miami. Our theory is that utilizing tools and methods of design thinking, a creative approach to problem solving rooted in audience empathy, will allow us to make strategic choices in designing the experiences through the eyes of our audience members. You can read more about our project in our first post. This project is funded by Knight Foundation, and we are in residence at University of Miami Frost School of Music.
Creating new spaces for music
A couple weeks ago, Zach spent some time in the Bay Area with two people who have been behind some of the most innovative programs in the performing arts, with great success in engaging younger audiences. They have worked closely with IDEO and Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (“the d.school”), the two places where design thinking originated, and have been influenced by the approach in their own work.
Part I: An evening at the opera, without the house
Sean Waugh is the Artistic Planning Manager at San Francisco Opera. He has been the leading force behind a series of pop-up performances produced by the Opera that targets a younger audience, in the Millennial age-range, with opera experiences presented in non-traditional venues and adventurous formats. Sean has no shortage of energy for pursuing innovation, and he’s gotten behind design thinking by partnering with IDEO and the d.school to produce the earliest pop-ups, one of which was called Barely Opera. The impact of design thinking has been felt all over San Francisco and Silicon Valley, with American tech companies being among the most design-centric companies in the world. Sean’s successful efforts to merge the best of design and the best of music make him one of our major role models in our project. We had a few questions for Sean.
Q: Why should we bring opera outside of the opera house?
A: “The opera house is an institution that has so many barriers to just getting people in the door. It’s everything — the fact that it’s often a hundred-year-old building, the fact that it’s grand and intimidating, the fact that as soon as you walk in you feel like you’re in this very traditionally white institution. Those spaces are not places that are going to last forever, especially as our nation’s demographics change. That’s the only way we are going to build for the future, is by taking it outside of its confined sanctuary.
“All of the user research we did with IDEO points to that — “The space is not for me. My people are not here. I need a map in order to navigate the space.” That couldn’t be more true, and most of it is tied to the physical space itself. We need to get away from the notion that in order to engage with opera, you need to come to an opera house. We often look at subscribers or donors as being the people who are loyal to the opera, but I think we can get someone to the same level of loyalty without them ever stepping foot in the opera house. That is the biggest group of people we can reach.
“What if we think about loyalty as being measured via brand positivity, the same way we think about a sports team in a major city? Here in San Francisco, for example, everyone loves the San Francisco Giants. When the Giants win a World Series, the city goes crazy! People go crazy, I’ve seen people around me go crazy, and so I go crazy. I don’t know anything about sports, and I typically could care less about a baseball team, but because it is a brand that has such positive connection to the identity of being a San Franciscan and being someone who takes pride in their city, it is able to capture that effect. So if tomorrow, perish the thought, AT&T Park was to burn down, would I want it to be rebuilt? Yes. But can we say the same thing about the opera house? Would people really care?”
Q: How have you measured success in these pop-ups?
A: “I’m personally not measuring success by whether or not they come to a mainstage performance at the opera house. I measure it based on whether or not they are walking away saying, wow, I now associate San Francisco Opera with something that maybe is kind of cool! They may not be willing to make that huge leap to invest in a 4-hour opera in a foreign language and sitting in seats in formal-wear, but they now think that opera is maybe something that can be for them and maybe their people. And I think that’s huge. So how do we actually measure that? Measuring their overall positivity associated with their experience, the positivity of recommending that experience to other people like them.”
Q: Who is your greatest inspiration right now?
A: “The people that influence me the most are my husband and his friends — they are all either entrepreneurs or CEOs or thought leaders, so I’m constantly inspired by them. They all take a disruptive approach and are incredibly mission-driven individuals. My husband’s best friend is the CEO of a major national organization that is trying to diversify and create opportunities for LatinX and black developers called Code2040. By 2040 they want to see that the demographics of our country reflect the demographics of organizations and our workforce. Her work is inspirational to me and I have learned so much from her, especially in how I approach empathy. My husband’s network is just filled with disruptive thinkers and I’m constantly immersed in that, so I just eat it up. What I love about them is that they challenge my assumptions — “Why do you think that? Why are you believing that this is the only way this can happen?”
Reflecting on Sean’s perspective
Sean makes a really important point about space, one that is helping us consider our priorities in this project. It’s an inevitable reality to feel totally alienated in a space that you feel isn’t meant for you. As a result of Sean’s words, we are starting to think about how we can put ourselves in positions to feel uncomfortable in a space we feel doesn’t belong to us. This is actually a concept that came up in a certification course through IDEO U we are taking as part of our project — the most important and fundamental part of the design thinking process is empathy, but that’s often the part of the creative process in which we spend the least amount of time. Because musicians grow up in performance spaces like concert halls, opera houses, and other theaters, we become accustomed to spending time in those spaces. This is unfortunately not the case for many people, and can get in the way of their experience connecting with music. We are realizing more and more just how big of a deal the physical environment is in engaging new audiences.
Part II: Getting out of the old box…and into the new
Richard Lonsdorf recently graduated from the Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB) after ten years with the San Francisco Symphony (SFS), where he was Associate Director of Artistic Planning. Richard spent much of the latter half of his career with SFS behind the scenes of SoundBox, the nightclub-like venue where SFS musicians perform chamber music for audiences of millennial-ish folks who appreciate the relaxed nature of a late-night club experience. A ticket to SoundBox has become one of the hottest in town, with shows selling out day-of on a regular basis. Combining his experience with SoundBox, studies at Stanford GSB and the d.school, and a tirelessly creative spirit, Richard is adventuring into the world of designing audience experiences with projects coming up in LA and elsewhere. Since we first connected with Richard, we knew he was another individual who would serve as a huge role model in this project.
Richard and one of his former colleagues from SFS, Chief Marketing Director Russell Kelban, gave a presentation at the 2015 Tessitura Learning & Community Conference about SoundBox in its early stages. Russell describes SoundBox as being “designed to help the symphony tackle some key challenges by breaking some traditional, longstanding rules.” They had three key goals when starting out.
- Attract a younger, more diversified, audience to classical music (under 35, more ethnically diverse, more variation in household income)
- Increase the profile and exposure of the SFS musicians
- Enhance and expand the SFS brand, while upholding artistic excellence
They took over a rehearsal space that was shared with the San Francisco Opera. With the vision of Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas, buy-in from key stakeholders, and a willingness of musicians to interpret their existing contracts to take part in experimental performances, SoundBox (SB) began to take shape.
Interestingly, one of their priorities was for SB to maintain a distinct brand from SFS. At Davies Hall, home of the SFS, performances are called concerts, of course, but at SB, they are called shows. Davies calls their guests “patrons” and SB calls theirs “fans.” Davies handed out paper programs and SB was all digital. The list of important distinguishing experiential factors goes on. Their tagline became, “A new place for people who love music.”
- Sound system — Meyer Constellation acoustic system to turn a rather dead space into a flexible acoustic environment
- Layout — flexible staging and seating (300 seating and 200 standing) to create a “permissive and flexible environment”
- Ambiance — multiple video screens in various sizes (style the place to be engaging), lighting design
- Ticket pricing — $25 flat fee, no tiering, craft cocktail bar and food
- Social — two 20-min intermissions, mobile devices allowed and encouraged for the sake of sharing on social media
And for the performances themselves:
- Format — five programs per season at 2 performances each, start time of 9PM (doors open at 8PM), 6–8 pieces, three acts of 20 min each
- Staging — mixed ensemble sizes, constantly shifting performance locations
- Styling — a guest curator acts as host and guide, programs include multimedia enhancement and visual art installations
- Repertoire — eclectic and unpredictable
The online surveys showed impressive results:
- Over 50% of fans return
- One-third are under 35 years of age
- 50% make under $100k/year (and keep in mind SF is one of the most expensive places to live)
- Word-of-mouth was the biggest way to hear about SB
- Reason for coming back: music/program, ticket price, date/time
- Reasons for satisfaction: quality of performance, sound/acoustics, ambiance, multiple stages
- 86% planning to attend future shows
SB staff took audience feedback and used it to fuel changes for the next program, which is very true to the iterative nature of the design thinking approach. They had a few long term goals: take what they learned in SB and apply it to improving the experience in Davies Hall, find a sustainable funding model (we noticed on their website that they now have VIP pricing options), connect the SFS and SB brands, expand into a longer season, and continue to experiment with every aspect of the experience.
As a follow-up, we asked Richard about how things changed, both for SB and him personally, after the talk in 2015.
Q: What was the biggest change in SoundBox from the time you gave the 2015 presentation and when you left for Stanford in 2017?
A: “The biggest change that SoundBox went through from the time of the Tessitura talk to the time that I left (Summer 2017) was that the long-term goal of connecting the brands and changing the symphony hall experience kind of fell apart. Many influential leaders in the organization didn’t see SoundBox as a source of new solutions for Davies Symphony Hall, so the focus became on making SoundBox sustainable in and of itself, which is REALLY hard to do. It also resulted in reducing the number of overall performances rather than expanding them, which is too bad. It’s become one of the greatest projects in classical music that practically nobody gets to see. It’s almost a donor event now, in my opinion.
“What I can say is that at least the Symphony has become braver in experimenting with more intentionally thematic and narrative programming in SoundBox, which I have to imagine will start to rub off on subscription programs from time to time. But the grand glorious goal of using SoundBox’s more engaging programming style didn’t really take off at the rest of the SFS. There is too much cumbersome machinery required to keep the subscription season running and service the requirements of the orchestra’s contract, and these obligations don’t allow most of the staff the mental space to think in an aspirational way. I’m finding this is not a challenge unique to the SFS among orchestras.”
Q: What is your biggest takeaway from studying at Stanford’s Design School while you were there?
A: “I’m convinced that if more processes were run with elements of design thinking, creative ideas would be able to surface more readily. The reason is not because people would come up with more creative solutions generally, but actually because more people within the organization would understand where the solutions came from, why they were connected to the customer you’re serving, and how they address the problem you’re solving.
“I think it’s a great way to get board members and donors involved as well, to see how their money is being used. I have been advocating recently for every arts organization to cultivate some kind of “R&D budget,” but with extreme transparency about how the experiments are being conducted and lots of reporting about feedback from audiences and other important stakeholders. I think it would get everyone excited about building a future for the organization!”
Q: Who or what is your greatest inspiration right now?
A: “I’m very inspired by the “themed entertainment” world. This is the loose association of creative professionals who shape physical spaces to support strong narratives, whether that’s in a theme park (the heart of this industry), museum, retail space, concert hall or other attraction. The reason they inspire me is that everyone thinks in a very holistic and interdisciplinary way about how to communicate with an audience. They want every aspect of an experience to engage with intent and fulfills some element of the story being told. It’s completely antithetical to how classical music organizations run, and to me it feels sexy, radical and compelling!
“I’m looking forward to making more connections in this industry now that I live in LA. I think we have a lot to learn from it.”
Reflecting on Richard’s perspective
Richard makes an important point about where innovation can be stifled. The promise of SB to be iterative in the beginning proved to flatline as time went on, when the SFS ended up not implementing SB as an experimental ground to change the concert hall experience. SB now exists as a cool kind of experience for younger audiences, but as it becomes less sustainable as an independent entity, it appears as though it could become more exclusive. Given the VIP pricing, which ranges from $350 for a single show and $1000 for a series, it seems as though the exclusivity is already kicking in. All of this being said, the original idea of SB to be a new space and experimental ground came from a very creative and empathetic mindset, which is a great start.
Next steps
We’re asking two major questions:
- How can we make our audiences feel like our performance spaces are made for them? New spaces for the performing arts are being opened all over the world. Two promising openings in Spring 2019 include The Shed in NYC and Octave 9 in Seattle. Hopefully these spaces will take an empathetic approach to engaging more diverse audiences.
- How can we embrace innovation as a continuous process? It seems that in order to be successfully implemented, an approach like design thinking must be understood and embraced by all senior leadership within an organization. In addition to the practice of iteration and reevaluation, the design thinking process requires a commitment to incremental risks and willingness to take steps into the unknown. This will realistically require more financial support for projects in the early stages, the most pivotal period in which to be experimental, similar to a fund that was just established at New World Symphony.
––––
Co-founded by clarinetist Zach Manzi and percussionist Evan Saddler, Conduit is a musical group focused on creating alternative performing arts experiences. Learn more about them and their project here.
