The Winter of Our Disconnect
This time last year, I was on a plane to New York. I had lunches with new clients and cocktails with old friends. I took my whole team out to a restaurant where we ate guacamole from a shared bowl. A shared bowl! Where we collectively dipped chips with glove-less hands and put them in mask-less mouths at a big table with lots of margaritas and even more laughter.
Was that really only a year ago?
Sometimes, it seems like we’re all about to wake up from some long, shared dream. One where we used toilet paper as currency and shut down all the bars (and not in the I’m-22-and-can-stay-up-all-night fun way).
Other times, I am smacked in the face by the terrifying reality of it all. When I see someone without a mask at the grocery store, I hightail it out of the aisle, fearing for my two-year-old son, my aging parents, and myself.
It all seems surreal — and it doesn’t help that I access most of my reality through a screen. The choppy video of my friend’s baby doesn’t begin to compare to the feeling of holding him. My nephew’s online graduation managed to be even worse than spending hours sitting on a hard chair in the sun, listening to an increasingly meaningless stream of names. And the virtual Passover dinner my family attempted? Only slightly better than wandering the desert for 40 years.
We have a challenge in front of us. For those experiences that will remain virtual for the foreseeable future, and for experiences that will be altered by new safety measures for years to come.
There are no easy solutions here. From educators to restaurateurs, from health care workers to business owners… nearly everyone is trying to figure out how we can safely connect again.
As the founder and CEO of a creative agency, solving for this challenge has been my north star over the last few months. Faculty’s core is spatial storytelling. Companies tap us to build things like large-scale innovation centers to tell their brand stories, bespoke brand activations where touch and sound enhance experiences, and immersive live storytelling productions that bring audiences to places otherwise unknown. In other words, Faculty creates experiences in which the physical space is an essential part of the story.
So where does that leave us now?
Recent events have reminded me that space was only ever half of the equation. The other half, the more essential component, was the human element. From the beginning, our goal was to create spaces where people were invited to explore and play and learn — allowing themselves to become active participants in the space around them. Experiences designed for actual people, regardless of whether that space was virtual, physical, or something in between.
Over the last few years, conferences have been a huge part of our business. But now that everything’s gone virtual, how can we continue to create authentic experiences when so much of the essence of conferences was about making connections with people IRL? At the last conference I went to, I had drinks with a fellow business owner who challenged the way I thought about management. I bumped into an old friend I had lost touch with. And while I stood in line for a latte, I met a woman who became both a fast friend and a valued client. It seems like an insurmountable task to bring those random, chance moments online in an authentic way. So we’ve been asking ourselves: is it possible to make a conference more than a parade of livestream talking heads where the first fifteen minutes are stalled by technical difficulties? If we want to keep our sanity, we’re going to have to figure it out.
I’ve been talking to my friend Jay about this for weeks. He heads up innovation at the digital agency Modus. Our explorations started with the premise that the flexibility and variability in our virtual spaces might actually be beneficial. That rather than trying to replace the physical experience of a conference with tech bells and whistles, we can use tech as the foundation and bring in moments of magic through surprising physical elements. For us, it was vital to not only recreate the sense of belonging and anticipation that you feel when you first walk through the doors of a conference; we had to make these emotions more visceral. We had to build the first touchpoint even earlier, and extend the connectivity well past the event. We had to design tools that lean into the technology while celebrating the need for tactile connectivity during this unprecedented time.
We can use this approach anywhere, even somewhere like a museum — a place where you’re meant to aimlessly wander through the hushed exhibits, share a moment with a stranger in appreciation for a singular object, and discover things new and unexpected. The painter Mark Rothko recommended that viewers stand a mere 18 inches away from his works, “perhaps to dominate the viewer’s field of vision and thus create a feeling of contemplation and transcendence.” You simply can’t recreate that feeling on a laptop or phone screen. So what can you do when you can’t lose yourself in a painting as Rothko intended?
Maybe, you expand the very concept of art. The Immersive Van Gogh exhibit in Toronto uses scale and sound to overwhelm viewers, projecting and animating Van Gogh’s work on walls, floors, and ceilings. Right now, it’s accessible by car. It makes me wonder what other solutions spatial storytelling can reveal. Thoughtful spatial design that activates multiple senses may offer a new kind of experience with art, no matter the vehicle that gets you there.
Sitting in a movie theater and devouring overly-buttered popcorn. Seeing Hamilton on Broadway, in real life, as opposed to in the living room (which was amazing by the way, it just wasn’t…the same). Shopping for that perfect dress in a favorite boutique. Live sports, concerts, vacations — and on and on and on. With everything we’re missing comes another space for innovation. If we purposefully design for the most human parts of us, we can find ways to stay connected during this great disconnect. We can even push ourselves beyond what we’ve come to know and expect from our pre-Covid world.
People are still seeking experiences. They’re still looking to connect. They are still trying to find moments of human-sized joy in this ever-evolving, apocalyptic-feeling narrative we have found ourselves in. So let’s create something truly accessible, safe, and engaging. Something that isn’t just a temporary solution in response to this moment in time, but rather something that lasts well past the pandemic. Something that brings us together and carries us into the future, one truly human experience at a time.
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