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Episode Transcript

Charlie Melcher:

Hi, I'm Charlie Melcher, founder and director of the Future of StoryTelling, and I'd like to welcome you back to the FoST Podcast. My guest today is Jake Barton, founder and principal of Local Projects, a New York City-based design firm that works with museums, brands, and public spaces. Jake and his talented team create innovative and participatory installations that focus on storytelling and engaging audiences through emotion and technology. Their boundary-breaking projects span the globe, from the National September 11th Memorial and Museum in New York City to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, from Brian Stevenson's Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama to the London Mithraeum. Their work is not only extremely popular with the public, as evident by the visitation numbers, but also critically acclaimed and recognized by their peers.

Local Projects has won over a hundred major design awards, including all of the most distinguished. And just last month, they swept the Fast Company's Innovation By Design Awards, winning Best Design in North America for its work on the Greenwood Rising Museum in Tulsa, and the Enduring Design Award for its work for the Hyde Park Barracks Museum in Sydney, Australia, and the Overall Award for Design Company of the Year in 2021.

Jake has been a friend for years, since he spoke at the first FoST Summit. He's a deep thinker and a passionate maker who firmly believes in the importance of preserving history and bringing it to life through the transformative power of storytelling. He's a pioneer at incorporating new technologies, but he always does so in a way that will create emotional and transformative learning, rather than gimmicks or selfie farms. It's my distinct honor to welcome to the FoST Podcast one of the world's best storytellers working the field of experience design, Jake Barton.

Jake Barton, I'm so honored to have you on the Future of StoryTelling Podcast. Thanks for being here.

Jake Barton:

Thrilled to be here. Thanks so much for having me, Charlie.

Charlie Melcher:

Well, I wanted to start by just congratulating you on this impressive Innovation by Design Award from Fast Company. The Design Company of the Year, that is just so impressive. I'm so excited for you. Congratulations.

Jake Barton:

That's super generous. I really appreciate it. I will say, and you probably have some resonance of this as well, as somebody who started a company and, at a very young age for the company, we landed the 9/11 Memorial Museum, as well as the Cooper Hewitt. We sort of were able to sort of rocket on the scene by positing ourselves as the intersection of things that were innovative, as well as meaningful.

It's particularly meaningful to win Design Firm of the Year award, 20 years in. It's actually... it's kind of hard to be in that level for are that long. And I mean, I think that, that's part of what we're most proud of, is not necessarily just that we've won this award, but that we've won it by being on the sort of second, third, or fourth reinvention of how we make work, the type of work that we make, and the way that we approach the work. But in this case, I think we've sort of followed new instincts and pathways and approaches, still about the intersection of things that are innovative and meaningful. But it's led us to all sorts of unexpected spots, and one of them is this award. So, we really appreciate that.

Charlie Melcher:

Well, so specifically in granting this award, they referenced this project you did for Greenwood Rising. Can you tell us a little bit about that and what the story is you're telling with that project?

Jake Barton:

For sure. So, Greenwood Rising is the official outcome of the Centennial Race Massacre Commission, which is an official, mostly government, group of folks, including the Governor, the Lieutenant Governor, as well as state senators, inside of Oklahoma. And they came together understanding that the centennial anniversary was coming up of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. And in fact, specific to that commission, was calling it a race massacre, as opposed to a race riot, which was how it had been talked about for generations, previously. And they decided to do so with a number of interventions. But first and foremost, with Greenwood Rising, which is essentially a Black Wall Street history center, which tells the story, not just of the massacre itself, the worst piece of domestic terrorism up until 9/11. And arguably not just worse in terms of numbers, but worse because it wasn't just tolerated or witnessed by citizens and by the government, but actually perpetrated by them.

But in this case, the idea was to not just focus exclusively on the massacre, but to tell the much larger story of the amazing and inspirational roots of Greenwood, of this African American, highly innovative, and highly successful entrepreneurial neighborhood, so-called, Black Wall Street. And then also, the sort of destruction of it through the massacre, but also the reemergence. It's a little known, but Greenwood was actually built back much better after the massacre itself. So, it has this incredible story of resilience, story of persistence, and story, frankly, of black brilliance that allowed it to flourish.

For us in terms of the museum experience, is a sort of latent argument that the past isn't passed at all. It's interwoven into our present, and frankly, it points its way towards the future. And there's an amazing James Baldwin quote about exactly that idea that we use as a guiding light for the overall experience, where we're telling stories of the past, but always with these resonances and echoes into our present and into our future.

Charlie Melcher:

And I know that there were some unique challenges with this project because when you have a massacre like that and entire neighborhoods are burnt down, there weren't a lot of artifacts. I mean, what were the challenges of telling this story when there wasn't materials or objects or resources to draw from?

Jake Barton:

Yeah, so there's a whole sort of meta history about what we collect, what we remember, why we gather certain objects or stories, or writings, or oral histories, and what we leave by the wayside. And in this case, there's an amazing story that the director of Greenwood Rising tells. He had studied a historically black college and coincidentally, had studied a ton about the Tulsa Race Massacre in school and moved to Tulsa, following his business career. Was walking around Greenwood as a young man, and a local sort of took notice and started chatting him up. And he said, "Oh, well, I'm looking to certain hallmarks in the original Tulsa Race Massacre." And the person looked at him and said, "Well, what massacre are you talking about? What... I don't understand."

And there was a wholesale amnesia that was put upon Greenwood, and put upon Tulsa, and put upon Oklahoma and the nation around these sort of rampages of white supremacy. It's more complicated than just a suppression of the history. It also has to do with the coping mechanisms of trauma from within the African American community itself.

And so, trying to make a museum that both is authentic and accurate and truthful, that is larger than just the massacre that doesn't define Greenwood just as its victimization status, but honors and celebrates its incredible innovation and ingenuity and resilience, is its own feat. And then also, frankly, trying to create an experience that is, by design in some ways, a lightning rod for a lot of the current controversies that would surround both Greenwood as well as African American communities as a whole part of, I think, the civic role of a museum like this. It's similar when we did the 9/11 Museum. Enormous amounts of controversy swirled around the site of the Memorial and the museum, and still does today. But arguably, that's the job of telling a very, very challenging, a traumatic story, is to become an epicenter for very difficult conversations. And certainly, with Greenwood Rising, we had quite a few of those as well.

Charlie Melcher:

So this is not just about identifying a history that had been actively suppressed. You used the word, "Amnesia," but I mean, I think it was more aggressive than that, right? There was a real effort to expunge this history, but that it plays a role in terms of the dialogue for the community today. I mean, what is the hope for how it's going be of use for people today and tomorrow?

Jake Barton:

It plays directly within that role of the suppression of memory. In the '90s, the state of Oklahoma had an official commission to study the question of reparations, and the state itself came forward with a five point that said, "First and foremost, reparations are due. And here's all the different ways." Some being cash reparations, some being investment, some being educational opportunities, some being storytelling, here's all the different things that we need to do as a state to take responsibility for the harm that was done by our representatives. And the stories atrocious; the actual police force of Tulsa armed its own citizens, specifically sending them into Greenwood. Furthermore, there were literal bombs that were dropped onto this neighborhood by one of the few airplanes actually in the area. So, the state comes forward in the '90s, and says, "We owe these debts to be paid," not shockingly for the reddest of red states in the union, as has often been pointed out when I'm in Oklahoma, they never paid anything.

And, one of the reasons is there's a fair amount of doubt or unknowing out this event. And so, first and foremost, between honoring the victims, between lifting up the memories of the innovators, and amazing trailblazers who created Greenwood, there's also this role of setting a foundational argument for reparations from the state, from the party that actually owes, to the parties who were destroyed. And I think, that's the main thrust for Greenwood Rising, which is to say, yes, it's a museum, yes, it's a story space, but it's a place where a true and deep story can be told to honor and to memorialize, but also to activate the question around reparations.

Charlie Melcher:

I read somewhere, and I loved this quote, so I'm going to give it back to you that you said, "The destruction of memory is its own form of Holocaust."

Jake Barton:

Correct. The act of taking the stories of what occurred, twisting and suppressing, burying is a way to control whole populations, and whole forms of our communities. And so, the act of destruction of that memory played a direct role in how Greenwood was able to have to be forced to rebuild itself, as opposed to make that argument for reparations.

And so, I think, and certainly what we've experienced is that having a space that can tell a whole truth, the complete truth, that can bear witness to that destruction, and that can ultimately create this, not just historic fact, but also emotional connection for visitors is a whole other dimension to this, where it's one thing to know the facts of what happened, it's another thing to literally, and this is at the heart of our museum experience, it's an experience where you listen to the original survivors tell what it was like to watch neighbors come and destroy your home, to loot your house, to rob your family. Even as you have to sit and watch your father beg for mercy to no avail, and that something about the details and the explicit way that you listen to the pain, and twists in someone's voice as they describe these memories to you, and they describe how their entire childhood was robbed from them, right? The ability to have that direct emotional relationship, I think, is also transformational for people who go through it. And it makes a deeper level of connection. And again, a level of argument towards the act of repairing.

Charlie Melcher:

I know that Local Projects has worked on other projects that have racial justice at their core. I mean, specifically, I think of the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. Do you feel that these projects can really help our country face its history of slavery, prejudice, racism, and can they contribute to a path forward?

Jake Barton:

I think, it's a really complicated question, because it's very hard to see, or even sometimes to acknowledge progress because you feel like you're going to be undermining the critical steps that need to be taken in the future. I'd be lying if I didn't say that I was proud of the work, and that I was anticipating, and hopeful that these projects are able to make progress, but I'd also be lying if I had said in 2021, that it's clear exactly what that means and how that would be measured, because there is so much turmoil right now, and disclarity.

But I do feel like we're in a sort of pivot moment, that the narrative, and Brian Stevenson, again, who created the Legacy Museum, talked a lot about this, that the Civil Rights narrative of the past makes it feel like, first of all, the whole thing went very quickly and without a lot of effort, and that it was ultimately successful, and as he said on a number of occasions, he's like, for clients that he deals with, it didn't necessarily have such a happy ending. And that's the bigger challenge, is again, how to chart that pathway forward. And I think trailblazers like certainly Brian Stevenson, but a range of other amazing individuals who are pushing things forward, are helping to advance these arguments. I don't think right now we have a clear paradigm of exactly where we should all be going, and I think that's unnerving on a number of levels for our nation. But on the other hand, I do feel like there's an incredible amount of energy that's going these issues, and I look forward to seeing them advance.

Charlie Melcher:

One of the things I find so amazing Jake, about what you've been doing with Local Projects is that you're working in a medium, right, like exhibit design museums, that takes years. I mean, this is not for the faint of heart. These projects are probably a minimum of two years, and sometimes, 5, 6, 7, I don't know, long ti long scale. And yet, you seem to be constantly of the moment, in the cultural discourse, like somehow, you're ending up at the right spot, at the right time, where the museum or the exhibit design can have a real relevance to the discussion that we're having more broadly as a society. And is that just luck, or how have you managed to do that?

Jake Barton:

I mean, I think that, as a studio, we've been really lucky, and we try hard to pick our projects, and also our techniques and approaches, in ways that are forward looking. And I love the fact that you framed it around meaning, because that's exactly how we think about our projects; that they need to be both innovative, new, fresh, unique, special, singular, even, but that they have to be relevant, meaningful, not just informative, but at their best, transformational. And so, we triangulate between the things that we can put forward, the things that our clients and collaborators want, but then also what we feel that the project can do, that can be productive within our world. And so, whether it is Greenwood Rising, which tells a story again about the past but points very, very concretely and assertively into the present and future, or even a much on its surface, not even on its surface, but is much more fun in the true sense of it like a project like Planet Word, which is a museum of linguistics. There's a ton of... And this is my own bias, but I see everything as political. There's a ton of very, very political material inside Planet Word, but you'd never know it because the entire thing is focused on joy and on celebration and on wonder and amazement. But the fact that it is able to weave in a way that feels effortless, that definitely wasn't effortless, but feels effortless, a huge range of very, very diverse and inclusive voices on so many different levels.

I overheard at the opening, funnily enough, two African American women who were talking to each other. And I couldn't help but overhear and then intervene, but they were saying, "Hey, did you read Snowy Day when you were a kid?" She's like, "Oh, I totally did. It's so funny that it's in a library because I always noticed that the books that my family read to me weren't ever in libraries. They were all these African American authors and they just weren't in the library at the time." And the other woman said, "Yeah, it's kind of funny, like being here. This is what a library should feel like, but I just never had it when I was a kid." And that is our 1000% best case scenario if you're Planet Word, right. That it is celebratory, that it's joyous, but that it has that level of inclusivity into it.

So that it's disarming in a way. And it's a very, very different posture obviously than Greenwood Rising. Instead Planet Word is filled with all these generous and amazing stories of people just talking about their own lives from their own heart. And so many of them are unfamiliar that it is really a sort of walkthrough current day humanity, which has a huge amount of political overtones because we've built the library or the music space with all of that inclusivity built into it. And yet it doesn't come at you like a red light that's blaring. Instead it's just an amazing way to hear all of these different voices. And no matter who you are, most of those voices are very different from you.

Charlie Melcher:

I am really interested to ask you to share a little more about the technology at Planet Word, because I think there's a lot of really subtle and complicated technology that you use. Can you give a couple of your favorite examples?

Jake Barton:

Yeah, for sure. So it's by design the world's first voice recognition museum. And it's powered all through the human voice, not just, and I say this with love, not just a gimmick, right? It's not just a gizmo. It's not just a press release that Wired or Engadget can tweet about, oh, that's a cool idea, right? It's a museum you can talk to that listens to you. Okay, that's a captivating concept. More importantly, it is rooted in the foundational goal mission, frankly of Planet Word, which is to make people aware of their own words. Ultimately the founder Ann Friedman, who's amazing decided to create this museum of words and language around the fact that strong awareness and use of literacy is foundational to our democracy. Ultimately it's not about telling people words are important. It's about putting it in their own bodies, their own throats, their literal own use of language.

So the fact that the museum is powered by the visitor's voice, not the museum's voice, but by the visitor's actions that it's a holy and fundamentally participatory space where you learn about music by singing karaoke. You learn about creating descriptive language by literally painting by words. You learn about onomatopoeia by making all sorts of different noises in almost a sort of orchestral fashion, right? We definitely get people who take pictures of. We definitely get people who are like, "Wow, I've never seen anything like that before." And yet because it advances your connection to words, and also most of all, your agency, it's underscoring the largest message of the museum, which is humans have words which is our magical superpower.

It's literally what has set our species apart. It's not the opposable thumb. It's not tools. It's words. That's it. That's the whole secret to our species. Use them very wisely. They are incredibly powerful, and they can shatter individuals in whole nations or countries or peoples, or they can also knit people together and elevate individuals. And so we have a lot of that messaging, not explicit, but implicit in all the ways that people are able to celebrate words and language as well as inclusivity, as well as all the different voices that you come upon throughout the museum.

Charlie Melcher:

Jake, first of all, it's so fun to think about there being karaoke it at the museum, right? That's not the normal expectation. And that points to something that, again, I'm really fascinated about what you all do, which is traditionally, museums are not thought of as cool and contemporary. It's not the medium that we think is going to compete with social media and Netflix and gaming. And yet you approach it in a way that's kind of reinventing it, that's trying to think about how to make it immersive and participatory and user-generated and empowering, embodied in all these ways that actually takes something that could be kind of stale and stuffy and dusty and old world. And you're transforming it into something that actually kids would want to go to, and parents would want to go to and could really compete for attention with a world that's filled with compelling, shiny objects.

Jake Barton:

We've flipped within our lifetimes of moving from a society of information scarcity to the overwhelming glut of information. And now time is what's scarce. Attention is what's scarce. Focus is what's scarce. Which points to the fact that you do need experiences that are meaningful, that have knowledge and information at their core, as well as authenticity. But the competition isn't a library or isn't another museum. A competition is an Xbox, or people's phones, or screens that are right in front of them, or Instagram or frankly, Snapchat, which has cornered the market on young people's attention spans because they're really, really good, arguably too good.

So if you want to make an experience that's going to have impact, that first and foremost needs to be appealing enough that people want to go there. We want people to take pictures of Greenwood Rising and say, "You've got to come here. This is unlike any other museum in the world." And same thing with Planet Word. That said, once they go there, we need to deliver. And that's where again, it needs to be both innovative and meaningful. If it's just a gimmick, it's like a trade show, and it'll just fade very quickly.

Charlie Melcher:

What I want to also dig a little bit deeper on is this issue of using technology and being open to adopting new technologies. So Planet Word, you're using natural language processing, AI. I know that you had that pen at the Cooper Hewitt Museum, the design museum, which was tracking, and you could collect things as you went through. And you've always been looking to in a meaningful way and again, not a gimmick, but to figure out how to use the technologies to help serve the information and emotional experience that you're trying to communicate. But I think that there's a funny conflict or tension between using new technologies in institutions that are meant to stand the test of time. Museums are meant to be there for decades and decades. I have boxes of old tech that didn't last more than a year to, before it was useless and put out to the garage. So how do you manage that when you're trying to use those new technologies, but you're also trying to create an experience that's going to be around for a long time?

Jake Barton:

The first thing is if you focus on storytelling, emotion and meaning, the aging aspect of it will take care of itself. And we've had some experiences that we killed ourselves to create that got ripped out 18 months later and it broke my heart, and we've had other experiences, and this just happened today with I met up with a friend and his friend overheard me and said, "Wait a minute, you did the Cooper Hewitt? That's crazy, my kid's obsessed with that. I'm not complaining but literally we had to get a membership to that stupid museum because my kid, all they wanted to do was be in that wallpaper room just drawing over and over again."

So, if you make something that focuses on those delight and emotion, it will continue to age well and people will conserve and preserve that experience for the future. And there's nothing that will guarantee any type of longevity, whether it's a piece of technology or whether it's a piece or architecture like being actually useful and beloved by its audience.

In parallel to that, we as a studio have focused on both meaning and innovation, which is not easy because you have to constantly reinvent yourself. But as it turns out, it's not the worst aesthetic philosophy or business model, which has been summed up with that idea of the innovator's dilemma, that if you're constantly undermining your own best achievements with what comes next, you put in a fair amount of short pain for long-term endurance.

I personally have had to now accept that our work kind of sits between architecture and theater in terms of its longevity. It's definitely not a building, I don't think anybody will be seeing our stuff in a century, and that's okay, I'm comfortable with that. On the other hand, it is with some sadness. I've seen experiences that we've designed come and go. But that's the price you pay for having some type of an impact over a number of decades.

Charlie Melcher:

Having been in this space for 20 years or coming on 20 years now, how do you see the world of museum design, exhibit design transforming or changing? The world has changed so much in 20 years, think about the impact of technology. How's that influenced the work that you do and just as a whole the field?

Jake Barton:

I think museums will continue at pace. And I think that the general transformation I've seen in my life and career is that they've moved from being about objects to being for people. And I think that there's a lot more work to be done frankly to make museums as engaging as video games, or as engaging as Netflix series, or as engaging as just your phone in and of itself. Because museums offer the chance for people to be collected in a civic space together which in a country as messy and unformed as America I find to be a civic duty, if not requirement.

This is just my soap boxer bite sense of it, but America's about the fight, right? America's about the conflict and the challenges between different people's. It has been from the beginning. The definition of what is America has been this constant churn and burn cycle. And that makes something like a museum so incredibly valuable because it's there to draw people together who are different, who have an interest or an awareness of each other, but outside of arguably sporting events, or maybe the military, there are just not that many institutions in America whose goal or aspiration it is to bring together people and to gather them around a topic or a center of interest. That's to me the value that a museum truly can bring. It can transform individuals, it can gather all these different people together with an explosion of connection that might be just momentary, but that also might point to the ways in which we can knit ourselves together better in the future.

Charlie Melcher:

I just want to say thank you for the incredible work you do as a storyteller, as an experiential storyteller in terms of helping to bring communities together, and can't wait to go visit some of these together. Thank you my friend.

Jake Barton:

Awesome, awesome.

Charlie Melcher:

Appreciate you being here.

Jake Barton:

Thank you as well. Thank you again for having me.

Charlie Melcher:

I'd like to thank Jake Barton for being on the podcast with me today. The video we made with him back when he spoke at the FoST Summit is still one of my all time favorites. It's entitled, "Story Us," and you can find a link to it in the episode's description, along with a full transcript of our conversation. Thank you for listening to the FoST podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, we'd really appreciate it if you'd subscribe and tell a friend about it.

FoST also produces a monthly newsletter and if you're a storyteller of any kind, it's really worth reading. It's free, so check it out by visiting our website at fost.org under the content tab, where you'll also find a wealth of other great content. The FoST podcast is produced by Melcher Media in collaboration with our talented production partner Charts & Leisure. I hope we'll see you again in a couple of weeks for another deep dive into the world of storytelling. Until then, please be safe, stay strong, and story on.