Welcome to Local Projects' editorial series exploring the role of listening in impact-driven innovation.
Starting from our field of expertise in experience design, we're reaching out into new industries and sectors to understand how leaders listen to new audiences and measure impact.
Through interviews, panel conversations, and more, we’ll explore how leaders listen, disrupt the status quo, and make meaningful change.
Moderator: Amanda White, Director of Content, Local Projects
Stephanie Mehta, CEO of Fast Company and Inc Magazine
Mia Tramz, Emmy Award-Winning Producer, Former Director of Innovation at TIME
L’Rai Arthur-Mensah, Project Director, Local Projects
Nico Guillin, Creative Director, rejoined Local Projects in 2023 to continue his lifelong passion for telling social justice stories in the cultural space, after serving as our head of Physical Design until 2018.
From his upbringing in Paris to his first role as the Brooklyn Museum’s sole exhibition
designer in the early 90s, Nico has been at the forefront of the experience design industry.
We got to sit down with Nico to learn more about his unique point of view shaped by a lifelong love affair with museums and a 30-year career in exhibition design.
We were delighted to join our clients and friends at Pride Live to celebrate Pride 2023 this year. In the midst of coordinating a massive weekend concert for Stonewall Day starring Christina Aguilera, Pride Live also took another big step in activating the
forthcoming Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center in the form of a vibrant window showcase sporting a pledge to support today's LGTBQ+ community and generations to come.
Jake shares the latest museum innovations in his Keynote speech "The Museum as Lightning Rod: Innovation & Invitation" at the American Alliance of Museum's first in-person annual meeting in two years. The talk features five Museum-specific superpowers that can feed innovation.
30 minutes in, Jake shares a few projects that get to the heart of our LISTENERS series. We share how we "listen differently" - whether NYTimes popups that meet readers in their own neighborhoods, helping the Denver Museum of Nature and Science engage community in co-creation, or allowing visitors to shop for changes to their own behavior that can help reduce carbon emissions at the Fashion for Good Centre.
Stephen joined Local Projects in 2021, and has made a big impact on our studio through his thoughtful approach to a wide range of complex design challenges. Stephen is hardly new to the world of immersive experience design - his artwork has been shown at the MoMA, Whitney Museum of American Art, the New Museum in New York. His large-scale, software-driven experiences have appeared everywhere from
the San Francisco Symphony to IBM's headquarters, to future-focused retail shops in New York, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Singapore for Nike, SK-II and others.
Learn a little more about Stephen, including his fascinating early work in music and sound installations that inspired a career at the intersection of space and sensorial magic.
Check out our conversation creator of HBO's Watchmen Damon Lindelof (Lost, The Leftovers) and lead writer Cord Jefferson (Station 11, The Good Place, Master of None) for a chat with Greenwood Rising museum director Phil Armstrong, and the Local Projects team.
Throughout the conversation, we investigate how both the museum design and Watchmen teams engaged the Tulsa community in reckoning with a tragedy that was deliberately hidden from history books.
Creative Director and Director of Creative Technology shares how we give visitors the tools to build narrative themselves through an exploration of the context and rules that drove a story into being.
In this continuation of our conversation, LP’s most tenured Creative Director Eric Mika explores how we can rediscover the lost meaning of objects that express their function through their form, shares the technologies he thinks hold the most untapped potential, and gives us a sneak peek into the studio’s latest work with IBM.
What new solutions and ideas will move cultural institutions towards a more inclusive future? To give some guidance on how cultural institutions should navigate these crucial questions, we invited leaders from the Museum of the City of New York, the Museum of Science and Industry, and LaPlaca Cohen to join us in conversation. Check out key takeaways and the recorded panel session.
Welcome to Listeners, where we’ll share the many ways in which the art of listening has made us into better experience and exhibit designers. Let’s kick things off with a look at how we tap into visitors' emotions: by using immersive visual design and digital media to activate visitors’ five senses, and by bringing them face-to-face with historic and contemporary figures.
