Throughout August, The Society for Experiential Graphic Design (SEGD) will bring together multidisciplinary designers from around the world for the first comprehensive and virtual multi-day event dedicated to exhibition and experience design. This four-week series, entitled How Soon Is Now? Designing Change, focuses on the current state of museum design processes and practices, and will examine how designers, storytellers and artists create experiences in the physical and virtual realms for audiences of varied backgrounds, ethnicities, abilities, and ages.
How Soon Is Now? Designing Change kicks off Tuesday, August 3 and runs each Tuesday and Thursday through August 27th. “This is an opportunity to elevate the experience design profession and spark conversations around the most pressing issues of our generation,” says event chairperson Joel Krieger, Chief Creative Officer of Second Story, a network of experiential design studios that work across cultures and brands to tell their clients’ stories. “We are asking designers to boldly talk about their personal and professional experiences of using design as a tool for transformation.”
Each week, a distinct prompt sets the tenor for virtual keynote addresses, guided workshops, moderated panel discussions, film screenings, break out conversations, museum tours, and “Design Improvs.”
• Week One: How do we break our unconscious biases?
• Week Two: How do we design experiences that tell whole truths?
• Week Three: How do we steward a sustainable future?
• Week Four: How do create context for the past and redirect the future?
Among the line-up of twenty-plus thought leaders and designers from around the world, including several SEGD global design award winners, are:
Joe Marianek, designer, educator, and partner in Small Stuff whose work focus on cultural and social impact, and winner of the SEGD 2020 GDA Best of Show;
Designer Ayse Birsel, principal of human-centered design and innovation firm Birsel + Seck, and author of Design the Life You Love;
Barry Pousman, Light Shed’s award-winning creative producer, head of Cinema for Social Change, and former Chief Digital Strategist at the UN;
Aki Carpenter, Creative Director with Ralph Appelbaum Associates and co-founder of Ripple Effect, a New Orleans-based water literacy education program;
L’Rai Arthur-Mensah, a Senior Project Manager with Local Projects and a partner on Onward Pop Up Museum;
Jason Bruges of London-based Jason Bruges Studio, a pioneer in interactive spaces that blend architecture, art, and interactive design;
Monica Coghlan, architect with Studio Joseph and lead designer for several Cooper Hewitt exhibitions;
Marco Rašić, creative director of Croatia-based Rašić+Vrabec and Red Dot Award winner;
Andy Chen, writer, designer, and partner at Isometric Studio, creators of immersive and ethnographic exhibitions; and
Kenneth Lacovara, author and paleontologist, founding dean of Rowan University’s School of Earth & Environment, and TED alumni.
As part of SEGD’s Experience + Exhibition month, SEGD offers Film Focus screening Shield + Spear, a feature documentary about post-apartheid South Africa, on Wednesday August 12, 6pm EST. On Thursday August 13, SEGD’s Cybelle Jones will moderate a conversation with South African musician, activist, and featured artist Xander Ferreira, and Openbox’s Founder Marquise Stillwell and Executive Producer. They will consider South Africa’s civil history as a lens for examining the current state of race relations in the United States, as well as the power that art and design have to effect change.
VIP virtual museum tours will give attendees inside views of several highly anticipated exhibitions and interactive installations, including: The United States Olympic and Paralympic Museum, UN Live – The Museum of the United Nations, and London’s Science Museum newest exhibition on Medicine from the Henry Wellcome and the Science Museum Group Collection.
How Soon Is Now? Designing Change is a month-long investigation that will provide the foundation and fodder for a design manifesto and call to action to be shared broadly through the design community. SEGD has commissioned Chicago-based spoken word artist and poet Harold Green III to deliver the manifesto in a live performance on August 27, a day prior to the 57th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s March on Washington.
Each week’s prompt provides the basis for “Design Improvs,” design challenges to connect design students and SEGD’s forty-two chapters worldwide. Resulting solutions to the design queries will be shared in real time via SEGD’s social media channel. SEGD members, event participants, and the interested public can connect and engage with one another and vote for their favorites.
The agenda was specially developed for designers, curators, technology integrators, fabricators, design faculty, and students interested in elevating their education and practice through community. “Given the gravity of everything happening across the globe right now – politically, socially, culturally, and economically – we believe we can move these difficult conversations forward and begin to establish pathways to change,” says SEGD CEO Cybelle Jones.
The logotype and motion graphics for this event were created by London-based designer and SEGD board member Lucy Holmes of Holmes Studio, a world leader in the design of direction and information schemes.
E+E Ticket Options
To purchase tickets for the Shield + Spear screening and discussion, one week of event programming or the full series, go to https://segd.org/workshop/2020-exhibition-and-experience-design.
E+E Sponsors
Presenting sponsors for this series are Color-Ad, fabricators of signage and innovative exhibitions, and CREO Industrial Arts providing custom fabrication for the built environment. SEGD’s Film Focus featuring screening and discussion of Shield + Spear is sponsored by Rainier Industries.
About SEGD
SEGD (the Society for Experiential Graphic Design) is the multidisciplinary, global community of professionals who create experiences that connect people to place. Find out more at www.segd.org.
