Podcasts about esi design

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT When an announcement came out about the experiential work being planned for the new Terminal One at New York's JFK Airport, I was familiar with some of the parties involved but not the one guiding it all - a design consultancy called Arup. I clicked over to LinkedIn and was surprised to learn this wasn't some little boutique company, but a multinational firm with more than 10,000 people. Arup describes itself as a collective of designers, consultants and experts working across 140 countries. One of the intriguing aspects of the company is that while it has teams very much focused on the creative process, it also has large teams focused on wildly different aspects of projects, like structural engineering and water conservation. I had a great chat with Gideon D'Arcangelo, a Principal at Arup who is running the JFK project and came over to Arup after many years at the much-respected creative tech firm ESI Design. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Gideon, thank you for joining me. I think the first thing to do is tell me about your company.  Gideon D'Arcangelo: Dave, it's great to talk with you. Gideon D'Arcangelo, I joined Arup five years ago. I just reached my five-year anniversary of joining. Arup is a global design and engineering firm, 20,000 people strong, with over 90 offices. So, we work at a global scale. We're really joined up globally, and we do all aspects of design. We are a very multidisciplinary firm. We started out as structural engineers. We are a firm that has major projects with the Sydney Opera House and the Center Pompidou.  Arup is a cooperative. It became a cooperative in the 1970s, and so we have members that work globally, and we pride ourselves on our interdisciplinary design and practice something called Total Design, which is the more integrated, the more different disciplines working together, the better the outcomes in the built environment. Our main focus is on sustainable development, and in fact, the United Nations' sustainable development goals are our mission statement for the company and we feel that we can really move the needle since we touched so many projects in the built environment globally, every year, we can really move the needle in that direction.  Interesting. So, I'm curious about the sustainable development part of it. Is that a pivot that the company has made seeing where things are going, or is that kind of always been in the DNA or has been for some time?  Gideon D'Arcangelo: I'm really happy to say that sustainable development has always been in the DNA. Arup's been a leader in this place and has been leading in these concepts of sustainable development for 30+ years, if not longer. There are certain professionals here, Joe De Silva, for example, in the UK, who have been leading in sustainable design and development thinking for over 30 years, and really, we are happy to see that the sustainable advice practice that we have as the world is caught up to really understanding that this is a priority and a necessity. So not a pivot at all. In fact, something that we're just really happy to see is that everyone is focusing on it and prioritizing it as much as the firm is. I was recently at a conference in Europe about digital signage. One of the major discussion points was what they coined as green signage and the whole idea of sustainability. I led a number of panels, one focused on the North American market, and I told the audience and confirmed it with the North American panelists. While green signage is a big deal, and there's a lot of discussion around sustainability in Europe and other parts of the world, it's barely on the radar in the US and Canada, perhaps to a lesser degree, with a notable exception, maybe very large corporations, but most businesses really aren't talking about it yet. Gideon D'Arcangelo: I think that's right that America tends to be and in Canada, North America tends to be a bit behind on this, and you get the leadership from Europe, from the UK, other parts of the world, I think, because resources are more constrained over there, frankly, and they're getting to understand the limitations of resources. They're better than we do here yet, but everyone has come to terms with that quickly. So we tend to learn a lot from what's happening in Europe and bring it to the Americas because we know it's what's coming next.  Yeah. Some of the European guys were saying just about any RFP or tender that you get that's right up top, they want to know about your sustainability point of view and practices as well. One of the American guys said that in the last three years, we've never seen it in a tender; it's not even stipulated.  Gideon D'Arcangelo: Yeah, it'll get there. It'll get there. It reminds me just of a project that I did at ESI back in 2015 for PNC Bank. PNC Bank, you may know, has just been a leader in the sustainable development of their real estate fleet for years, and there was a wonderful man named Gary Salson at the time, who was the director of real estate and commissioned the PNC Tower in downtown Pittsburgh, which at the time was the greenest sky riser and among the top 5 greenest sky rises on earth really pushed the envelope in terms of green design of a building. I was at ESI at the time, and we were commissioned to create a digital display component, the sculpture component is part of the lobby experience. That was intended to give the building a voice and have it talk about how it was using resources or how it was saving resources really ahead of its time, fantastic project, and for that, we had to design our own canvas, our own display, because we couldn't put a big energy hog in the building to tell the story of the building. It was an interesting design challenge.  So you were at ESI for a whole bunch of years, right?  Gideon D'Arcangelo: I was at ESI for 24 years, so yeah, a long time. That's where I grew up in my career.  Fantastic experience. What was your role there by the time you moved on?  Gideon D'Arcangelo: I was in the organization's leadership by the time I moved on. I also led our business development and marketing. In the end, there, I became a multidisciplinary creative director on some of our projects, for example, leading the design lead on this PNC Beacon Project. I joined the firm as a UX designer. We called it an interactive media designer in the mid-90s when I joined the firm.  Almost pre-digital.  Gideon D'Arcangelo: Yeah, it was right at the cusp of all that stuff, and ESI was always leading edge in that regard, and we had a team of people that did interactive design when there were very few people in New York City at least the very few firms doing that at the time. So that's how I grew up doing UX/UI designs for Museum interfaces. I was always into working in the built environment, creating some interesting museums and corporate programs. But over time, being there as long as I could, I was able to move into the position of design lead, where I could speak to the different disciplines required to deliver these experiences. So we have physical designers, technology designers, hardware folks, software designers in both front and backend software design, visual design, graphic design, both static and motion, and content people as well as writers who are in practice. Directing that whole team together, is how you get these comprehensive experiences, and so that was what I was doing at ESI by the end of my career.  And it's the kind of company that while it's substantially in that particular space, in comparison to a rep or those kinds of companies quite small and you would have been contracted into projects like PNC and so on, as opposed to leading them versus I assume now with the rep that you guys are largely leading these projects.  Gideon D'Arcangelo: That's right. It's a different dynamic. When I moved to Arup, it was really about making a jump in scale and so from working in a 50-person boutique pioneering innovative firm in New York for a couple of decades, going to a global firm that's operating at a whole different level of scale, really excited me, and I thought this was a really interesting place to experience design because it was being recognized in the marketplace in different ways. Various architecture firms were building up their experience in design practices. Arup was really interesting to me because it's primarily an engineering firm and so brings the deep technical acumen that no architecture firm could really bring to the table. So, I was attracted to a firm like Arup that could push into the next generation of experience design at much larger scales than we've ever seen it before.  So would you be competing for jobs with the populaces of the world in Gensler, or are they a different element of it?  Gideon D'Arcangelo: Again, it all just depends on the context. We work with the populace. We work with Gensler all the time in various capacities on very big projects. There are ways to carve out scope for an Arup alongside our partners like populace and Gensler. In some cases, we might find ourselves going up against each other for a certain piece of scope. All you know is that just happens in the course of business, depending on the client's situation and the way the scope has been described.  I'm guessing massive projects, but, at the end of the day, it's still a fairly small community, like the folks that at Populous and Gensler are some of the other companies?  Gideon D'Arcangelo: Yeah, for sure. It's a tightly-knit world. We have a lot of respect for each other and we cross paths a lot at various, professional crossroads and conferences, that sort of thing.  So how was it to go from a company where you knew what everybody else was doing, and you're of the same mindset to ending up in meetings with civil engineers and people who were experts in water treatment facilities and so on?  Gideon D'Arcangelo: Yeah, great question. I think that it was, first of all, exhilarating and inspiring, and invigorating. All of those things were really great. They were a catalyst for my thinking and what I wanted to do with my practice. I feel that the real part of being a good experience designer is being a good integrator of disciplines and being able to speak the language of multiple disciplines really fluently and so even at ESI, five different disciplines, it was not unusual, but a special mix of different expertise that were brought together. You had hardware people, you had people that knew about onsite construction and physical constructability, but you had people working on UX and UI design, and you had to be able to speak all those different languages, and dropped into Arup, suddenly 50 other languages to learn quickly, and, to really get, but there were many people that were interested in working with these integrated projects. So we have a fantastic lighting design here. We have acousticians of the highest order. We have fantastic AV designers but also even on the engineering side, we'll bring in folks that are working on urban planning. It was really interesting for me to find which folks resonated with what we were talking about. Actually, we did a project in Providence, Rhode Island, where Arup, led the master plan for what was called the unified vision for Downtown Providence. It was one of the early projects that I did here, supporting one of my colleagues in the Boston office, where we took an experienced design approach to planning how to renovate and reinvigorate Downtown, and for that, we were working on a larger scale than I'd ever worked before. It was a whole Downtown district. We're putting experience design interventions into this plan, but we're also looking at the engineering of the site and how to make it ready for public use in a variety of ways. So we worked both on the front end and on the back end, and all the infrastructure was as much a part of our design as the front-end experience pieces. That's what I was looking to do when I came here, and in fact, we did that, and it was a really interesting part of the design. It was so fascinating. We realized after a while that, after our Flood Modelers from the water team took a look at this and saw that the site was really going to be compromised in 50 years. We started to come up with a different design, building bridges, rather than digging tunnels, and a variety of things were done to actually shape the architecture of the site to anticipate the next 100 years and so I was like, that's the kind of thing we can do at Arup with this really highly integrated set of disciplines all under one roof.  Yeah, and that integration, I assume, is absolutely essential that you cannot operate in silos.  Gideon D'Arcangelo: Exactly, and I think that's been my skill, Dave, over the years: I'm a horizontally oriented person, and I'm a good interlocutor or translator. I can quickly pick up a language enough to understand what's critical in that one group and, make sure that constraint maybe is understood by another group that can't quite see it, and that's how I think you get to highly integrated design and make sure basically keep people talking to each other and keep working with each other, because every organization fights with silos because it's just the nature of larger organizations. It can be deadly if that happens, though, right?  Gideon D'Arcangelo: Exactly. It's mission-critical, So Arup is, I think, smart in the fact that we have people that cut across as well, like myself, and I'm not the only one who cut across as well as we have deep expertise in our disciplines.  You can go into an engineering meeting and not be bored to tears or completely confused by what's going on. Gideon D'Arcangelo: No, It's fascinating. It was just wonderful, always intellectually stimulating, and a really, really amazing group of talent here.  I have to say Arup came on my radar because of a post I wrote several weeks ago about JFK and one of the new terminals. I saw that your company was involved in that. Even though you're huge, I'm old and stupid, and I was completely unaware that you guys existed. That was intriguing to me. What were you doing there? And is that a typical project?  Gideon D'Arcangelo: That is a project that I am leading so I can really give you a good view into that, and I think it's an expression of all the things we have just been talking about the integration of multiple parts of a project that might in the past have been thought about as disparate or separate, and since the middle of 2022, Arup has been leading what the client calls the Art Branding and Digital Experience program of JFK New Terminal One and it came about because the Terminal has aspirations to be in the top terminals in the world when it opens in 2026, and it's known that these elements: a proper art program, a proper branding and storytelling program, and digital experience installations are all part of creating a true 21st-century Airport Terminal, and also, this is part of the larger context of the overall upgrade that's happening to all 3 of New York's airports, LaGuardia, JFK and Newark, and some of those new terminals are already online. You may have seen what happened at LaGuardia Terminal B was fantastic, right? I'm a lifelong New Yorker, so I'm benefiting from this.  Arup was deeply involved with Delta LaGuardia Terminal C. In fact, I did some work on that and Newark Terminal A just came online, so a lot of great stuff is happening from here. It's a good time for that, and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is leading that effort to really upgrade. And so as part of that, there's a real demand for this art branding and digital experience piece and the idea was that while the architect was making the base building, and Gensler is the base building architect, a fantastic team from Gensler is leading that, the client was looking for one team to give a very integrated passenger experience for you of what that layer was that storytelling and a sense of placemaking was going to be on the architecture and that was going to be delivered through art branding as they called it and digital experience, and so we took on that role at the time, and so we've been leading the vision for that layer and for that storytelling and placemaking piece. Since we started in 2022, we've gone through the strategy and design phases, and as you can imagine, 2026 isn't that far away. We're starting to move from design into production, and it was really key for that to make a strong narrative of what it meant to be coming into the New York airport and what's great about new Terminal One, Dave is, it's the only international terminal at JFK. People who are going to foreign lands are coming from foreign countries. So it's that kind of population coming through, and we had to create an experience really could only happen in New York. It couldn't be that this airport felt like something that was in Orlando or some other place it had to be for people coming from, coming, or New Yorkers departing or coming that it had to be something that could only happen in New York, and it's good that I'm a native New Yorker and I've lived here my whole life. I have a good sense of that. I like to think and we were really helping craft that narrative. We then put together a team to work with us, and so we brought onto our team, Eddie Opara from Pentagram is leading the branding effort. We brought on a wonderful art curator team called CultureCore, who we've worked with in the past, at Arup that is leading the art curation, and then Arup is leading the digital experience design aspect of that, creating a whole set of digital canvases that are integrated into the architecture and a real media architecture style way throughout the terminal experience, both on departures and arrivals, and then a company that you know about we brought on, just last year after about a year into the process we brought Gentilhomme out of Montreal to develop the digital content for those digital canvases. We have a really amazing team that we're working with.  Another cool part of this project is that the client asked us to collaborate with the advertising partner for the terminal, Clear Channel to have this art branding and digital experience program complement what they were doing and work hand in glove, like one experience. I'm happy that our client had the vision to do that, and the teams worked really well together to make something that was really passenger-centric and focused on what passengers needed every step of the way so that they worked together. It's they don't, there's no cacophony or competing for eyeballs and imagery. Instead, they work together because we work together and crafted the program.  How practically would that work in terms of, when you say they're working together, the digital at a home and the experiential art pieces?  Gideon D'Arcangelo: Yeah, there are many examples of that. Simply, we would work through each space and say, where are some of the high-value places where Clear Channel will do what they were doing and take that area, and then right next to that, we might put something that brings you into a New York sense of place, creating a moment, and so we went area by area and again, working together, it was going to really compose it together, I would say, and saying, hey, this area is good for that, and that area is good for that, and so one program came out of that. So that's what I mean.  Okay. So it means you're not running into conflicts around things like sight lines and you can design this in a way that makes sense as opposed to designing a terminal and designing where the experiential digital pieces go and then Chird Channel comes in and say, okay, what's left? Where can I put stuff?  Gideon D'Arcangelo: Exactly, because you know, everyone's important in this program and we did it. What's cool about it, I think, was we took a human-centric or passenger-centric approach to make those decisions and just thought, how can we make a great experience for passengers, and meet all the needs of the advertising program, meet all the needs of the experience design program, and keep it all organized that way. I'm just always curious how companies such as yours invest a lot of time and have a lot of deep conversations with their customers. How do you define experience? Because when I think of an airport, my idea of experience is perhaps different from some others. I'm intrigued by the big experiential art things and LED video walls and so on, because that's what I do. But for me, a great experience is wayfinding and status boards to tell me, “Am I late?” “Am I early?” “Where do I go?” All those sorts of things.  Gideon D'Arcangelo: Those are also critical foundational parts of a quality experience. So that's a great question. I just gave a talk last week to an aviation group, and that's one of the things I said is wayfinding is the foundation of passenger experience design.  It's boring, but it's incredibly important.  Gideon D'Arcangelo: It's critical, and for a geek like myself, it's not even boring and it's just so key, and it's not easy, and it's always being innovated, and in fact, there's a lot of innovation happening with digital in wayfinding now that we're quite involved in, actually, not so much on New Terminal 1 project, but other airport terminals and other places.  The functional experience design has to be right, and that's critical things. I'll just use an aviation example in a terminal. It's crystal clear where you need to go. It's crystal clear how much time it's going to take you and how much time you may have. You might want features on a mobile device that help you understand how you can get on tethered from your gate and roam and shop and eat and do a variety of things before you get on your plane. Those are key, and then there's the more ambient placemaking, sense of place environmental work also.  In this case, what we're doing with the New Terminal 1 is really that second category: creating that sense of place, telling that story, doing something that's all only in New York and doing that through a variety of means. It is that a whole other program is, in fact, happening for New Terminal 1 and one of the things I didn't mention. We also looked really hard at the wayfinding program to make sure that everything we were doing built off of that, too. There's a whole other because you have to pay attention to that functional side. We do work, though, in other environments where our team will get into the functional side as well as the ambient environmental side, because they really need to work together as one.  I guess it changes with every project, but I'm curious, most typically, where does your team start and stop? Or where does Arup start and stop on a typical project? Or is there no such thing as typical?  Gideon D'Arcangelo: There's no such thing as typical, but of course, that's a broad answer because every project is really interesting and unique. No, but we start early. We're a whole life cycle company and we work with our clients that way because we are strategists. Still, we're also builders wearing hard hats on site, making sure that everything got installed according to the strategy and the design, and the big movement right now, in my opinion, Dave, what's happening in the built environment world is the shift from design and construction into operations is getting increasingly smoothed over and thought through in a different way. So, a building was finished, and then people moved in, and there were various tasks like adding other things. “Add” is a term from air operational readiness that air airports used to shift from construction into operations because it has to work on day one; you can't take a few days to get it right. It has to work the moment it opens, you open the door. So there's a whole process, and Arup has that team. We can bring that to our clients as well, because our understanding of the design and construction process and the commissioning process at the very end, as it shifts into operations, gives us expertise in a way to make that as smooth as possible. But beyond that, there is a whole movement of using the tools, the digital tools that you create and design and construction as models that then can be brought through into operations and putting sensors into the building and putting a variety of things into the design of the building, so as you move out of design and construction, you have a digital model of the building that you can help use to operate and maintain and work with facilities management and other teams that are helping that building to operate more efficiently once it's opened. So, the long answer to your question is that we really will start when there's a blank sheet of paper with our clients and help strategize what needs even to happen all the way through. Of course design is our main bread and butter. Of course, we stay on during construction to oversee construction to ensure it's delivered as designed and then increasingly into operations in that whole life cycle. I'm guessing that when your career started, digital was something that was perhaps added on, thought about later in the game, and I'm wondering now, is the visual digital components of big projects are now fundamental to the overall thinking?  Like it's not something that's added on later. They're talking about it right from inception.  Gideon D'Arcangelo: Definitely. It's a good insight, and I've seen that over the course of my now 30-year career to see the shift in that where initially we would have to work hard to convince the clients, even to consider some of these things, and then over time, about 10 years in, you started to see them showing up in a variety of ways and then increasingly they just become, as you say, just part of the program and assumed part of the program. But there's still such a long way to go on that front. And I've always thought that this idea of digital and physical being separate is a design problem of our age.  In a hundred years' time, people will just see that we got through that design problem and just digital permeates everything you do because it's, why wouldn't it? It's a smart way to go, and it's an innovation and human ingenuity and history. So right now there's a lot of work for bringing the digital mindset into every aspect of life, and particularly into the built environment. The built environment has been slow to pick up on this. So construction is really now in this kind of really exciting phase, the virtual design and construction where these digital tools are coming in and taking off, but there's a long way to go. I like to think of Arup as a leader in digital-physical integration, that's a task of our day, digital-physical integration. It's not like digital something off on the side, but then you do it at the end or do it in a box. Instead, you think of it from the very beginning and build it into every aspect of how you design, deliver, and operate the project.  Yeah. I think it's exciting that we're getting very close to a level that LED displays, both physical ones and ones that are embedded in glass, and things like that can now be thought about as building materials that you can use as a wall. Is it necessarily going to be mahogany or travertine tile or whatever. It can be like LEDs that can be changeable when as much as they need to be changeable.  Gideon D'Arcangelo: Absolutely. I worked with Michael Schneider when he was at ESI, with me. We often talked about that as we talked about media architecture as that was an emerging term in the field. One of the things I really am grateful for working with ESI was the idea that media wasn't something that you attach to an environment in creating an interactive environment, you actually were working with this audio-visual material as you say, that becomes part of the architecture, and what's interesting about that though is then the client for that gets confusing because if you're putting in travertine or mahogany, you're talking to one side of the client, the design and construction folks. As soon as you put a dynamic piece of media in, who are you talking to? You're talking to that same client who's responsible for building that space. But suddenly you're also talking to the director of communications and the director of marketing and the storytelling people of the company. And that was something that I've always seen about this field. You needed to be able to talk to storytellers. That would be your CMOs, your directors of communications, your chief communication officers, as much as you could talk to the the head of real estate, that's building something. Where it worked well, you got leadership from both sides on the client that really understood what you were doing. As you put this material into the building, there's still the question of what it's doing. What story is it telling? Who's maintaining it over time? What's the content strategy? And that's what made it really exciting because it's different from putting a static tile on the wall. As soon as you put a media, an LED tile on the wall, it has a whole different governance aspect to it that is very modern, and I think now it is becoming standard. People expect that in their buildings.  All right. That was terrific. I know a lot more about Arup than I certainly did half an hour ago, and I suspect it'll be the same for a lot of listeners. Gideon D'Arcangelo: That's great. Thank you, Dave.  I appreciate your time.  Gideon D'Arcangelo: Likewise. Great to talk with you.

Sound is one of the most important parts of how people perceive their surroundings – and yet it's usually left out of the design experience. It's time for buildings to have a soundtrack, according to Layne Braunstein, Leader, Creative, at ESI Design, an NBBJ studio. In this session, Braunstein, who has created multisensory experiences for brands like Google, Sonos, and Microsoft, will explore how new technologies are making it possible for buildings and spaces to harness the power of sound to create feelings of calm, excitement, or nostalgia, increase productivity and well-being, and even create hyper-personalized experiences that respond directly to your current mood.

Gideon D'Arcangelo is a man of many ambitions. His main interests include the integration of virtual and physical worlds, working toward the design integration of physical, media, systems, graphic & content to ultimately create holistic experiences.  He joined Arup's New York office in 2019 where he is a Principal and serves as the Americas Digital Services Portfolio Leader  and a designer of interactive and immersive environments. He has been the VP of Strategy and Communications at ESI Design. He has worked on the Hall of Human Life at the Boston Museum of Science, and the Institute for War and Peace Reporting's web platform the Reuters Sign at Three Times Square, and the on-island and on-line ancestor search at Ellis Island Ellis Island Heritage experience.  Another focus has been the intersection of new technology and musical experience. He is currently a contributing producer for WNYC's Studio 360. From 2005-2008, he produced the series Listening In on “Weekend America.” In the 1990s, he worked with ethnomusicologist-folklorist Alan Lomax on the Global Jukebox, an illustrated database of world song and dance styles.  I met Gideon when he was a youngster, living in upstate New York in the 1970s where his family was based. His father, painter Allan D'Arcangelo – briefly as well-known as Andy Warhol - and mom Sylvia were close friends of my mentor and artistic collaborator, poet Jerome Rothenberg and his anthropologist wife, Diane. Gideon and I were more in touch after his time at University of Chicago and continue through to the present. His interweaving of creative and social threads, his easy and evergrowing technological learning is a driver of this constellation. Aside from the magic Gideon has brought to his own designs he has kept his father's extraordinary art legacy alive.  Playlist of audio samples A Future Harvest • Charlie Morrow Ein Feuer Aus Licht Und Liebe • Die Welttraumforscher vs Klangwart  Hamanamah • Klangwart Water & Ocean • Charlie Morrow Salmiana • Marc Sloan Insurrection Oratorio 1 • Charlie Morrow & Bread & Puppet Theatre O Yeh Charlie Echomix • Charlie Morrow & b/art Leave With You • 2XM Thalys bells + lobby & elevator & hotel ambience + mall muzak + distant trains + crickets + radio signals

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT New Jersey-based Diversified has grown into one of the world's largest AV integration companies, and certainly among the most active in digital signage. The company was started almost 30 years ago by Fred D'Alessandro, who just recently announced he was shifting his role in Diversified to make way for a new CEO. He's still going to be very much involved, but says former Unisys executive Eric Hutto is now very much in charge of the company. The two of them kindly set aside some time recently to talk about that big news, and what's ahead for Diversified. Among many things, we get into the steady convergence of AV and IT. Fred also relates a story I'd not heard before, about how and why Diversified got started, which funnily  traces to a job he didn't want at the Home Shopping Network. Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS TRANSCRIPT Fred and Eric, thank you for joining me. Fred, congratulations on your decision to slow down and Eric, welcome to pro AV! Eric Hutto: Thank you.  Fred D'Alessandro: Thank you. I don't know about slowing down, but thank you.  Is this a transition that's about to happen or it's been underway for a while and you're now just talking about it? Fred D'Alessandro: No, it's been under way and it has happened. So yeah, Eric is the new Diversified CEO and I couldn't be happier to have him on the team. Absolutely great move by us, and I'll say it by myself as well.  You finally did something right!  Fred D'Alessandro: Exactly, only took 29 years.  So why now?  Fred D'Alessandro: A lot of good reasons. I've been blessed to start Diversified in 1993, really as a startup, it's a garage story and to have the opportunity to lead it for 29 years, create a $1 billion organization, I think the first ever in our industry, which is, absolutely exciting and just a real honor, we have an army of industry expertise in the organization. But what the organization doesn't have is somebody with Eric's leadership at this level, when you're trying to build an organization that has a clear path to being a multi-billion dollar organization. So from,the strategy, from the vision, from the operations, how to, I would say, continue to exceed our client's expectations and our employees development, it's the right time and it's the right team and the right place. So yeah, thrilled.  Coming out of COVID, we're financially sound. So now's the time.  So this is not just you deciding, you know what, I want to go down to Boca Raton and lawn bowling? Fred D'Alessandro: No, I'm a young 63 year old, so I have a lot of energy. But you know what I feel why my value at this point in time for the organization can be used in other areas. I think strategic accounts and clients that I've known for years, employee mentorship, development, things that, again, I know that I'm really good at and I know Eric's really good at taking a financially sound organization, and I've said this in the past it's not so much about how big we are, it's just really continuing to be the best as we get bigger, and that's really important.  To me, as a founder, again it's about being unselfish and doing what's right for our customers, doing what's right for our employees, and Eric is the right guy to do that for us. So I'm excited.  So sometimes when a company is founded by a particular person who's still there and when they maybe not step aside, but step back into another role, it could be a bit of a balancing act to say, “No, you need to go talk to Eric about that.” How are you going to work that out?  Fred D'Alessandro: Yeah look, there's no ego in this organization.  I've met people there. Fred D'Alessandro: There's no ego at the leadership level, let's say that and I will be the first to say that, I am here in a different role, I've made that very clear over the past week to all the employees and that Eric is going to make the decisions on the strategy, the operating model, so the vision is going forward. I'm going to help him as a chairman of our Diversified board of directors. So from that perspective, I'll listen to Eric, I'll challenge him. But at the end of the day, he's going to make those decisions. And if somebody comes to me, I'm pointing them to Eric. I said this again and again last week, I am very content with the role and making the decision to do this, and really to bring Eric on. We're fortunate to just think sometimes you need luck, and hard work brings that, but yeah, Eric's are going to be great for this role and I really feel he's going to take us to the next level and take our clients to the next level. Was there somebody you knew or was this kind of a headhunter thing?  Fred D'Alessandro: So we did a search. Fortunately, the timing worked out so it happened rather quickly. I've spent the last month with Eric, spending a couple of days here and there just to get to know the person and to see how Eric would fit in the organization, and like I said, in many ways, I felt like his skills and tone were similar to mine, but his expertise and where he's been through his career, it's hard to beat. Like I said, it was a pretty easy decision on my part at the end of the day, after spending, like I said, the last month with Eric.  It's interesting. The pro AV community, particularly people like Gary Kayye, have been going on and on for some time now about how pro AV and IT are converging and pro AV people need to be thinking about this. So to bring somebody on as CEO who comes from pure IT services seems a really sharp move and something that had to be done in a lot of ways.  Fred D'Alessandro: I would agree with you. I think it is converging. It's been converging, it is more an IT managed services play in a lot of ways. And again, Eric's expertise is spot on, and we have, like I said, we have an army of AV knowledge and expertise. There's no shortage of that at Diversified. Now it's just bringing that all together with everything else that's happening and training.  Eric, you come from Unisys IT services and consulting and so on. I'm curious from your background, were you hearing the same thing, but on the flip side that IT people need to be more aware of video delivery and AV in general, in terms of their overall practice?  Eric Hutto: Yeah, I think, the pandemic simply heightened it. We all got sent home. So if you think about the audio video, quality of calls and the ability to keep things running right, it is a bit different now and I think that forced people to get more educated, appreciate more of the components that go into it versus just servers and storage in clouds and I think it has merged the IT industry over 30 years and has just been completely collapsing all the stacks of technology, and now its technology product gets out and it gets software updated and it lasts for lot longer than it used to because it can be updated. And I think that's where we're headed with this, I think of it as experiential experiences that we're going to be having in these environments. We're going to have to come together. The morning show can't be broadcast in the afternoon because you went down because of your cloud or your server or you were hacked. So I do think it is the natural progression to take all the sophistication that Fred and team have built around how to create a great experience in a stadium. But now we move just beyond that, to what's coming into the stadium, and how do we keep that under control? Because bandwidth and those things affect the quality of the experience. I think of Diversified in deployment integration, traditional pro AV roles, but I know you also do services. Do you see Diversified getting more and more into the services and consulting side of the business?  Eric Hutto: Absolutely. Where we're headed with this digital world, It's all about design thinking. Now I do think that one thing that is core to Diversified that I've seen already is the ability to sit down and really design and layout to an outcome. Where we do that is in big, large, complex things. Not to say that we don't do that in Google Rooms and so forth. Now that's going to have to get a bit more sophisticated, right? As we bring cloud, bring security, bring software-defined networks into the conversation.  I think I was reading the other day just to get up to speed on what's happening in the business. They say that by 2030, there'll be another $10 billion invested in stadiums. So they're not standing still. It's not a place of slowness. It's speeding up, but it's going to speed up in a software platform as a service model, and people are going to be able to really track and see what's happening almost at the seat level, if you can imagine that at, in a stadium, when they're having a concert of what and how they move sound around. I think it's going to be all software and it is going to be really important. I come at this from the angle of digital signage. So that's always what I'm thinking about and less so about some of the more traditional sides of IT and AV collaboration and that sort of thing. I've always thought of Diversified in the sense of the last decade or so as among the big integrators, the one that by far was paying the most attention to and most active in digital signage. Fred, do you still see it that way or the other guy is coming on and realizing, “Hey, we need to do more in this area”? Fred D'Alessandro: No, I would agree. I think, look, it's still a key business unit for us that drives a lot of value to our customers, and I think continuing to innovate. That is most important, especially in these kinds of markets. So large network deployments, content creation is an experiential piece to what that digital signage is going to do for the eyeballs that are looking at it. So it continues to really be a focus for us and it is growing. Coming out of the pandemic, we have large opportunities to grow even bigger in that area. One of your main competitors now has an experience design group for, big, wow factor, corporate office, campuses and things like that. You guys have always worked with the Gensler's and the ESI Design, that sort of thing, and stayed in your lane. Is it important to do what you're good at, but let the experienced people do what they're good at as opposed to compete with them?  Fred D'Alessandro: Look, that's always been my philosophy. Best in class, usually at the end of the day wins the day. When you're trying to create that total solution and you don't quite have the best people on your staff, it's usually not a good outcome for the client and that's what it's really about.  What is what's best for the client? I think our approach is the best.  The IT services business, and I guess to some degree, the AV services business has grown because you have enterprise level customers of all different stripes and sizes. I gather, saying, “We want to do what we're good at. So can you guys take this other stuff on for us?” Are you seeing that and seeing growth in that area of being turnkey for a lot of these kinds of projects?  Fred D'Alessandro: It  usually goes in cycles, but I do think that clients are realizing, especially on a global scale to have a single partner that could provide various solution sets that we have, and I think Diversified is the only company in the world, honestly, that has the portfolio of offerings, and then it's managing for the clients, all these different technology platforms and services and we've seen a tremendous uptick in that requirement and the ask of clients, the technology, even though a user base often feels easier to use, the behind the scenes, the back end and all that stuff, it's complicated, and so many customers don't have the staff that can actually operate or maintain the technology. So that's a big growth area for us, for sure.  Eric Hutto: One of the things that I've learned over 16 years in IT services is that it is a relationship, and that relationship is trusted and you don't get to be a trusted partner advisor if you're making decisions that are oriented towards yourself, and I think Fred's right, it's always been outcome-based, and I do think that it gets hard to be the best at every single component of the solution, because it's so complicated these days. There's so many things that you have to consider.  I absolutely would and I have always leveraged specialty partnerships where they bring it. Even Apple doesn't necessarily do all their own gooey work for their applications and what we interface with because they're very good at what they do, and I do think that's exactly how we'll look at this going forward. Will we need to have some knowledge, onsite with us that understand cloud or security? Absolutely, you always want that, but we'll use strong partnerships in areas where people are really specialized to get the best outcome for the client.  Yeah. It would be difficult for you guys to hire on the level of creative to compete with the guys who you instead partner with?  Eric Hutto: Right, and that talent wants a place to grow, and we're not a creative company by core, even though it's something that we can do.  Yeah, you go into the kitchen to have your lunch and you end up talking to somebody who's a sales engineer and you can talk about football or baseball or whatever, but not so much about the core discipline. Fred D'Alessandro: Yeah, and we're a company of scale. So again, you can't have one person that understands it and believe that you have an end to end solution, which is quite the story in many cases.  Eric Hutto: Yeah, and just the IT industry skills are going to evolve in our company. If you go back 15 years, you had storage people and server people and network people. You don't really have that as much anymore. They're still out there, but it's all converged and so integrated that we all have different types of enterprise, and I would imagine it will evolve as this stuff converges, as things merge, as we get more platform oriented software that helps us extend our services and capabilities of the people who will need, will grow into a different skill set. Security has been obviously a huge component of IT services. Fred, have you started to see that becoming a demand on the AV side as well?  Fred D'Alessandro: It absolutely is a demand. As all the AV equipment, digital signage players have touched the network, it is absolutely a vulnerable point for IT. So yes, the bottom line is it's been going on and it's just every day gets more and more.y scrutinized and restricted. So you have to have that skill.  French. You mentioned that 29 years ago, this was a garage story. I don't think I've ever heard that, how the company got started?  Fred D'Alessandro: I'm a broadcast engineer by trade. I was working in the New York, New Jersey area for the station I worked for, I was blessed to be able to work in many different departments. So I got a well-rounded education for my first seven years of employment there and the home shopping network purchased our TV station when they started up, and it was a decision between going to work for the home shopping network and I'd taken a shot at going out there in the world and doing it on your own, and that's literally what happened.  I was like, “Let's go. Let's try to make something happen,” and yeah, and so again, we went everywhere up to 300 television towers, replacing antennas to studios. So yeah, absolutely whatever dirty work we could get, we did.  Wow, I had not heard of the home shopping network thing. I was like, do I want to spend the next 10 years sticking an ice pick in my eyes or move on? Fred D'Alessandro: So that's why I say, things happen for a reason. I'm a true believer in that.  So today what's the scale of the company? You're much more than just a US company now and there's a lot of bodies, much more so even than 10 years ago.  Fred D'Alessandro: Now, our revenue is around a billion dollars. We have around 2,700+ employees worldwide. We have 52 offices, 35 of those are in the US, the rest are overseas. All our offices are sales, integration, and service. So they're not just sales offices. We build and service out of those locations, and about 80% of our revenue is out of the US and about 20% is currently overseas and growing and our latest international operation opened up in Bangalore, India and it is really exciting.  That's a big road trip! Fred D'Alessandro: Yes, it is. But when I look at all the players in the industry, what I'll say is by far Diversified has invested the most internally to be a global organization. We use partners but our goal is really to be our own entity and work through the rest of the world, and provide our customers with a consistent and standard experience.  Have you been going to other countries because you see North America as somewhat capped out or crowded in terms of competition versus other markets, or is it just that there's a lot of growth potential in India?  Fred D'Alessandro: The view of this and the strategy has always been to be where our customers are. So it really had nothing to do with North America being saturated and there's no more business. There's a lot of business here going forward, but those customers that we work with and touch our global customers.  So if you want to service them the right way and the best you need to be where they are and so that's been our strategy today.  Is that a demand, when you're working, as you say, with a global customer, like a Fortune 100 kind of company where they want to roll in multiple countries and in the old days, you'd have to say we can do it here, and we'll see who we can find to do this in France and see if we can find to do this in Japan and so on? Fred D'Alessandro: Yeah we want to make it easy for them to do business Diversified. So that's a saying that we've had in a company a long time: make it easy for our customers to do business with us, and so being able to work and have established entities in these various countries, you're able to buy in the country, you're able to transact in the country for them, and you just avoid a lot of the inefficiencies that you get when you're trying to do things from just the US.  Eric Hutto: Just like a lot of companies in IT, you get taken to places by clients, right? So you have to be able to operate where their clients took you. Over time, I think as Fred alluded to, we're going to have our competencies and our direct associates, if you will, but there'll be markets that we're choosing to be in because we see the growth in versus we got taken there by client, but we will always have the ability through partnerships and other relationships to service a client wherever they need to be. I think that's the balance of, direct labor, indirect labor, having more of a variable bottle. It allows you to stay extremely nimble and flexible, but at the same time where you have decided to be in a market, that is where your associates are.  Has most of the growth that you've seen both domestically and internationally being through acquisition, or are you going into some markets and just opening up as Diversified and starting to hire and do sales? Fred D'Alessandro: I would say all our expansion has been strategic. We've absolutely never just gone in and said, we hope there's business there and that we're going to sell. So I think Eric's point is very true, you look at what opportunities are in the country, and who our global clients are and where they are. So when you put those two together, you have a really large opportunity.  Eric Hutto: In my initial, what solid 14 days, Fred, what I have seen in talking with, and I've talked to surprisingly, quite a few people. That's just how I work and learn, I start at the frontline and work backwards. We are growing a lot and mainly from relationships we have because we're tried and true, and we've always done great quality work.  So I see a lot of organic growth really in this year, Fred, I would say because we've learned how to, really get in with a client and understand the problems and solve them and they continue to consume more from us, and as our portfolio expands and we're able to do other things besides just to your point earlier about integration and putting things in, we just continue to create a stickiness with our clients and create the value.  Where do you guys see the opportunity over the next couple of years as we get out of this mess with COVID? Fred D'Alessandro: What I'll say is, I see a tremendous amount of opportunity with, like you said, returning to work is one, which obviously is the collaboration and that piece of it. I think when you look at how digital signage, how media, how IT are all stitching together these disparate technologies into one experience, for, I think our customers, their employees, their customers, is what is really exciting and the opportunity that I think with the pandemic brought a lot of new thinking into our organization about how we can help our customers, not just during a pandemic, but long after and make what we design, what we create, what we install and maintain more valuable than it was in the past. So there's a big opportunity in all these stitching together.  Did you learn things out of the pandemic as well?  I saw a lot of investments, a lot of marketing of products that were pandemic-specific like thermal sensors, temperature scanners, alternatives to touch screens and so on, and while there was a lot of noise around it, I didn't see a lot of commercial take-up of them.  Fred D'Alessandro: Yeah, I would agree. I think that at the end of the day, some of those were needed at the time, but, I don't think there's a future for a lot of these products. As I said, when you think to the core of what companies need to do, their employees need to collaborate. Those types of tools I think, we'll continue to add value.  When you think about streaming and media and virtual events, those will, I think, continue. So there are a number of things that I think the new workplace and a workforce will embrace, and I think it will add efficiency and it will be a better outcome for all. Eric Hutto: It also gives us a chance to help companies rethink their work environment. Because even when I was at Unisys, we didn't have everybody coming back to the office yet, but as they start to come back, what kind of office is it, right? And really what people need is collaborative spaces where they can come, engage, connect, get things done, and then move on.  But I think that's a huge opportunity for us to, again, help them think through the design of what it is they want to achieve with their associate base when they do come back.  A lot of what I've seen around the workplace has been so focused on the front of house, so to speak, the white collar areas, the offices, and not that much about the production floors, the warehouses and all those sorts of things. Have you seen more understanding of that as an opportunity and a need?  Fred D'Alessandro: We see a lot of digital signage, IP TV opportunities in the warehouse workplaces, because corporate communications is key.  I mean we have Rachel on the phone here with us, but I think that's one of the things that you learned, especially during a pandemic of how important communication is. So I think companies going forward will need to step up their game, to make sure that everybody is connected because everybody is now always in the office or in the warehouse these days. So it's important, but that's where I see digital signage, corporate communications, IP TV really being the leader and that's what we do really well. That's an area we've been doing extremely well in.  So just the last question, what's been the reception around the industry to the news that you're taking on a different role and Eric stepping in? Fred D'Alessandro: Well, from my perspective I'll say, look, everybody's congratulated me.  Are they saying, “Oh, thank God”? Fred D'Alessandro: Exactly, to some degree. People are happy that I'm not going anywhere that I'm still around. But again, as I've made clear, Eric has the football now and I'm here to support him and I'm here to support the organization and our clients. So yeah, it's been really positive, very rewarding. I'm humbled by a lot of the emails and phone calls.  Well, congratulations to both of you and a pleasure chatting with you.  Eric Hutto: Thanks, I appreciate it.  Fred D'Alessandro: Thank you. 

A master at creating interactive, immersive experiences—Edwin Schlossberg joins to talk about his artwork and the 40th anniversary of his firm, ESI Design.

Dr. Kat Schrier is an Associate Professor, Director of the Play Innovation Lab, and Director of the Games and Emerging Media program at Marist College. She is the author of We the Gamers: How Games Teach Ethics & Civics, published by Oxford University Press (2021), and Knowledge Games, published by Johns Hopkins University Press (2016). She has previously edited two book series, Ethics and Game Design and Learning, Education, & Games. She was a Belfer Fellow with the ADL's Center for Technology & Society, and she is co-PI for a Templeton Grant on designing VR games for empathy. Prior to joining the Marist College faculty, she worked as a media producer at Scholastic, Nickelodeon, BrainPOP, and ESI Design. She has a doctorate from Columbia University, a master's from MIT, and a bachelor's from Amherst College.Connecting with KatKat's Website - https://www.karenschrier.comQuotes From This Episode"Even Fornite, Among Us, Minecraft, are games where you're managing your resources, communicating with others, and you might be building stories...and these are games where people are really practicing civic discourse.""I think the big takeaway is that we are learning when we play games. We are learning through play. It doesn't matter if it's specifically an educational game, or it's a game that is like Minecraft or Fortnite.""I think that games are really helping us to practice ethics, ethical thinking, and ethical decision making."Resources Mentioned in This EpisodeQuandaryFable IIIFallout 3Pandemic (board game)Among UsMinecraftFortniteMission USInternational Game Developers AssociationWe the People on Netflix.Publications by KatWe the Gamers: How Games Teach Ethics & CivicsDesigning OurselvesKnowledge GamesAbout The International Leadership Association (ILA)The ILA was created in 1999 to bring together professionals with a keen interest in the study, practice, and teaching of leadership. Connect with Scott AllenWebsite

ESI Design an NBBJ Studio has done it again with an extraordinary Public Art Installation called the Chromaphone. This public art installation turns the plaza at 101 North Brand in downtown Glendale CA into a fun engaging destination and its visitors into musicians. The clocktower is outfitted with a display that is 63' high and 12' feet wide, but there is a load of technology that went into curating this experience at 101 North Brand. On today's episode, Chris Niederer and Aaron Mack both of ESI Design an NBBJ Studio drop by my CrashPad to tell us all about what all went into the creation of the Chromaphone!Check out this cool video that highlights all the Chromaphone brings to the city of Glendale: https://esidesign.com/work/101-north-brand-boulevard/ 

Kirsten Nelson talks with three guests with varying perspectives on human factors in workplace experience design: Rachael Harris, Production Manager; Mary Franck, Creative Director with ESI Design, an NBBJ Studio and Mark Coxon, Sales Director of Technology with Tangram Interiors.

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED - DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT I have been working with both AVIXA and invidis for most of the year on a series of monthly roundtables, called Digital Signage Power Hours. They’ve all been great, but the one we did recently on experiential media in real estate was particularly good … because of the people who kindly provided their time. We had David Niles, who created and still works on the Comcast Experience, one of the earliest and still one of the best projects out there involving LED in real estate.   We also had Amahl Hazelton, one of the big thinkers at the famed experiential creative agency Moment Factory. Cybelle Jones, CEO of SEGD, was on, as was Jeremy Koleib, whose Consumer Experience Group works with property companies on big LED projects. And we had Emily Webster, the Senior VP of Creative at New York’s ESI Design, which is behind some of the best experiential real estate you’ll see in real estate. We could have chatted for hours, but we had 50 minutes. Listen, learn and hopefully enjoy. Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS  

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED - DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT I was kinda sorta off last week and did not record a new interview, but I have this audio track from a recent online event that's well worth sharing. The pandemic shifted InfoComm 2020 from Las Vegas to online last month, and one of many educational sessions held at InfoComm Connected was about experiential design. I was the host, and my guest was Michael Schneider of the giant global design firm Gensler. I've known Michael for a few years, first at ESI Design and now at the New York City offices of Gensler, where he runs the Media Architecture team. The session was called Designing Contact-Free Building Experiences, and was a chat about how the global health care crisis is forcing a re-think of using and navigating public and commercial building spaces. Where much of the experience in big buildings lately has been about Wow Factor, health safety and utility are now in the mix. The session was a video call, with a chat recorded ahead of time and then live Q&A. About 20 minutes in, you will hear the tech jump in with a few questions. I'll have a fresh podcast, with transcription, next week. Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

Kirsten is joined by Wiena Lin of Public Good Labs; Mary Franck of ESI Design and Daniel White, Senior Experiential Media Producer to examine of how we can expand storytelling through transmedia design — telling stories using multiple mediums and reflecting multiple voices.

The Statue of Liberty National Monument is an instantly recognizable symbol of freedom, and in May of this year, the new Statue of Liberty Museum opened its doors to the public for the first time. More than 4 million people visit the site each year, and now each guest can experience Lady Liberty as an immersive theater, artifact gallery and interactive kiosk exhibit thanks to the team at ESI Design. On this episode, the 50th for Digital Signage Stories, we’re joined by ESI Design’s Emily Webster as well as Float 4’s Alex Simionescu and Diversified’s Carol Feeley-Vario to discuss the collaborative installation behind the AV experience at the new Statue of Liberty Museum.

Dr. Karen Schrier is an Associate Professor and Founding Director of the Games & Emerging Media program at Marist College. She is also the director of the Play Innovation Lab. Prior to Marist College, she spent over a decade producing websites, apps, and games at Scholastic, Nickelodeon, BrainPOP, PBS/Channel 13, ESI Design and SparkNotes/Barnes & Noble. Dr. Schrier has authored or edited over 80 scholarly publications and educational materials. She is the editor of the book series, Learning, Education & Games, published by ETC Press (Carnegie Mellon), co-author of a UNESCO whitepaper on empathy and games, and co-editor of two books on games and ethics. Her latest book, Knowledge Games: How Playing Games Can Help Solve Problems, Create Insight, and Make Change, was published in 2016 by Johns Hopkins University Press and has been covered by Forbes, New Scientist, and Times Higher Education. Dr. Schrier has co-created many digital properties, such as Awesome Upstander, an anti-bullying mobile game and the Daytime Emmy-nominated Mission US: For Crown or Colony? For the 2018-2019 year, she worked as a Belfer Fellow with the ADL’s Center for Technology & Society. She holds a doctorate from Columbia University, a master’s degree from MIT, and a bachelor’s degree from Amherst College.

The 900 Michigan Shops mall has been around since 1989, with luxury brands filling the large space in the middle of Chicago's Magnificent Mile. The team at 900 Michigan Shops wanted to add new and inviting technology that would bring the building into the digital age without sacrificing the original structure. Partnering with ESI Design led to an extravagant deployment featuring 190 feet of LED within the building’s ceiling, illuminating fixtures at the portal entrance and more. On this episode of Digital Signage Stories, ESI Design’s Creative AV Technologist Andrew Lazarow joins host Alesia Hendley live from Central Park of the DSE 2019 show floor to share how the company approached designing for this unique retail space. For more case study information about this APEX Award-nominated project from ESI Design, click here. In addition, check out the video below the podcast recording for a closer look at this rollout.

515 North State Street was designed in the 1990s by Pritzker Prize–winning Japanese architect Kenzo Tange, who topped the building with a four-story “sky-window” that became a defining element of the Chicago skyline. The building features bold, angular architecture and a striking lobby, but lacked warmth, intimacy and the wow-factor that attracts tenants, so a digital media installation was commissioned by Beacon Capital Partners. ESI Design was one of the companies chosen to collaborate on this lobby renovation, and their solution utilizes custom software to create abstract color compositions on an LED wall that actually mimic and reflect on the happenings of daily life just outside in Chicago’s bustling River North neighborhood. The result, entitled Canvas, is a perfect mixture of digital signage technology and contemporary art.  On this episode, ESI Design’s Head of Media Architecture Emily Webster joins us to share the design experience behind the digital signage story of Canvas at 515 North State Street in Chicago. For more case study information about this APEX-Award nominated project, click here.

  Downtown Washington, D.C.'s Terrell Place is an office and retail complex named after civil rights activist Mary Church Terrell, a founding member of the NAACP, who led the protest against segregation at Hecht’s lunch counter in the 1950s.Building owners, Beacon Capital asked ESI Design to transform the disjointed lobby, which is comprised of three connected components, including the former Hecht’s department store.ESI’s designers unified the space by treating it as a single canvas.Installing large-scale diffused LED displays with reactive media on the lobby walls and corridor portals created a sense of connection across the building’s common areas. The content is activated by passersby via an infrared camera system. The resulting scenes ebb and flow with the pedestrian traffic inside the lobby.At 80 feet wide x 13 feet high, the largest media wall is visible from the street through the oversize windows that were once the display windows of the department store.I spoke with Michael Luck Schneider, Senior Creative Technology Designer at ESI Design about this visually stunning installation and it's details, including ambient sound.   Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS 

Erin Reilly is Research Director for Project New Media Literacies, a past CMS project now housed at the University of Southern California. Karen Schrier, a CMS grad, is the Director of Interactive Media and Technology at ESI Design and a part-time doctoral student at Columbia University in games and learning. Sangita Shresthova is a Czech/Nepali international development specialist, filmmaker, media scholar, and dancer, who currently manages Henry Jenkins new project on participatory culture and civic engagement at USC. Pilar Lacasa is a researcher at Alcalá University in Spain. She also works on a project for Electronic Arts in Spain about how to use commercial games in education. Mitch Resnick is Professor of Learning Research at the MIT Media Laboratory. He develops new technologies that engage children in creative learning experiences and is a principal investigator with the MIT Center for Future Civic Media, a CMS-partnered project.