DAAPX 2024

SPEAKER: Welcome to the 2024 edition of DAAPX. I probably said DAAPworks instead of DAAPX in this sentence. The annual alumni conference. And I know-- it's great to see so many of you in the room. Welcome to all of you who are joining virtually. Others will be wandering in and out over the course of the afternoon. As always, we've got a really great lineup. And I was just saying this is one of the highlights of my year. Just because I just get a reaffirmation of the value of a DAAP education, al

l of the wonderful directions that it can take you in this world. This year we've got, maybe, the widest ever spectrum of students in terms of graduating years. I think we've got a span of 56 years, from the most recent to the two to the oldest of the presenters today. And also just the diversity of practices. I mean, we've got a range from really established leaders in the field who are paragons of sustained innovative practice. And on the other hand, we've got the young up and coming creatives

that are showing us the possibilities for the future of our professions. And I'm really heartened by both of these. I want to thank Ellen and the alumni association for, again, organizing this. I know that a lot of work goes into to the preparation and the selection. And I don't want to stand between you and one minute of this. So I will pass to our emcee for the day Brian Trainer. [APPLAUSE] BRIAN TRAINER: I thought we talked about him giving me walk up music. And I was going to come down like

Rocky, but my knees aren't participating. Hello, everyone. I'm Brian Trainer. I'm your emcee for today. I'm a DAAP alumnus, award winning race car driver, award winning clogger, and president of the Board of the Lebanon Theater Company in Lebanon, Ohio. And I only mentioned that because we have a show tonight. And I'm in it. So come see that. I was part of the inaugural DAAPX in 2019. And I'm thrilled to be back to introduce our speakers and help keep the day moving. And I'm even more thrilled

to be here to experience DAAPX with you, both online and in person. So that's why I'm going to stay in front of the microphone so that we have a really good hybrid experience. So, so much of the work that DAAP alumni do has a profound impact on human experience. And DAAPX is our opportunity to celebrate our collective accomplishments. All of these presentations were self submitted last fall as part of the annual RFP process. And we're very excited to learn more about each. To lay the groundwork,

we're going to have five presentations back to back. Then we're going to take a short break. And then we'll do the second set of five presentations. So thank you for everyone for being with us today. And we're going to get started. So first up is Scott Shall, BSARC '98. He's presenting "Building at the edge-- reconstructing design practice within improvised settlements." And I'm also, I should mention, A mispronouncer of names. So Scott, if I'm saying your name wrong-- he's going to be online h

ere. Scott Shall, RA, is an associate professor of architecture at Lawrence Technological University, founding principal of the architectural practice, houm, it might be houm. He can tell us. And the founding director of the International Design Clinic, a registered nonprofit that realizes socially responsive creative action with communities in need around the world. Since founding the IDC in 2006, Shall has worked through this organization to complete over two dozen projects on five continents.

Shall's work in this area has been disseminated both nationally and internationally through publications, presentations, and exhibitions. Scott is joining us virtually today as he has a double header. After presenting at DAAPX, he will be presenting at the national conference of the Beginning Design Student. So glad he could join us today and kick off the day. Scott, are you ready. SCOTT SHALL: I believe so. BRIAN TRAINER: Scott, the audience is yours. SCOTT SHALL: Thank you. And thank you for

the generous introduction. There are not many pronunciations to be correct to be quite honest. There is perhaps one thing. I recently received word that I've been promoted to full professor. So there movement from associate professor to full professor. [APPLAUSE] And it is pronounced houm. Houm was, I recently established to leverage digital tools such as generative design and digital fabrication tools to bring down the environmental and financial cost of housing. And we're currently building th

ree houms based on that premise. I'd encourage you to go to the website and check that out. I am going to now go to my slide show though because I'm painfully aware that my face is likely 30 feet tall. So let's move away from that. I will say that I wish I was there in person. As mentioned, I am double booked today. But I am just giddy to be here as a proud alumnus of the program, the architecture program of DAAP and of the University of Cincinnati. So this is who I am. You can see there are som

e ways that you might be able to learn some more about my work with houm. And then today, I will be speaking at length about the international design clinic. And let us start with the fact that in , 1950 only 86 cities in the world held over a million people. Today there are over 500. By 2030, there will be more than 650. Although some of this growth will occur within large cities, most will happen within second tier cities of developing countries, resulting in the production of improvised settl

ements at a scale yet unseen. In my work, I have found that to meet the challenges and opportunities presented by this emerging world of rusted metal and blue plastic tarp, the designer must trade the rigid hierarchies embedded within patronage based practice for more inclusive and heterarchical practices. They must abandon the linear research, then design, then fabricate, then use routine for approaches that overlap these activities in new ways. From this place, a project site is more about per

sistent conditions than physical geography. Size is earned not bestowed. And that small is OK. The use is not fixed but will often emerge as new users re-imagine, re-inhabit, or reconstruct the work. And that the permanence of architecture is negotiated not guaranteed. To illustrate how I come to believe these tenants and how they manifest in my efforts, I will share a small selection of creative works that I've had the pleasure of completing with the residents of extralegal communities around t

he world. These projects were completed in cooperation with myriad partners including the International Design Clinic, a registered non-profit established in 2006 so that I might co-create much needed creative work with communities in need around the world. Since its establishment, I have, as mentioned, through the IDC completed over two dozen projects on five continents. One such project was in Mumbai, India. Now, this work centered on a wonderful Indian non-profit called Mumbai Mobile Creches

that ran schools on the construction sites of India. They did so because in India, it's often the practice of construction workers to bring their entire families on to the construction sites during construction. They create these improvised settlements that are surrounding the construction. And then when the condo is finished and wealthier families move in, they are kicked off the site, of course, and moved to the next construction site. The children live on that construction site, creating a di

straction for the parents and a danger to themselves. And so this group runs-- goes to the people running the construction site. And says, we'll run a school if you give us space. And often, the answer is yes. It has benefits to all parties. And Mumbai Mobile Creches has had incredible success over the past couple of decades. They have now people teaching with them that were a part of their program 10, 20 years ago. They also have graduated people that have become lawyers and helped them in that

capacity. A wonderful group reversing a cycle of inequity, which is really what we focus on. Now, to start this work, we first began by empowering those who knew the situation best to share their perspective. We asked children at the school to draw their school. We arm them with disposable cameras and ask them to photograph some of their favorite things. We interviewed teachers. We observed the school day. We set up time lapse cameras to document movement patterns, anything we could do to under

stand daily life within the creche. Now from this, we came to understand that the most important issues facing these schools, at least to those working within them, had little to do with the architecture, at least as traditionally described, not architecture as a whole but more focused on individual aspects. This allowed us to start to create small works to address water-based illness, as you can see in the $0.99 water filtration device at the top, or sanitary places for evacuation, or small pla

yscapes that the kids would have jurisdiction over and create little nooks for reading, or sleeping, or play. An opportunity they didn't have within the borrowed landscape that they normally inhabited. Now, the big lesson of this project is the architectural componentry and effects reign supreme, not the architecture. That it was a mandate for the admission of the impermanence of the architecture itself, something that would, actually, every two years be knocked down because the families moved o

ff the construction site. And the transferability of things like lesson plans, furniture, items, other items of education. In fact, as an architect, it was my job in this project to remove as much of the pressure of the architecture itself that would be demolished and push it to things that could be transferred site to site. Things that Mumbai Mobile Creches continues to use. Another such project started as a one-year partnership in Bolivia between the IDC and a group that ran arts-based educati

onal program for kids living on the streets, including Lustrabota, as you see here, Shoe-Shine Boy. They wanted us to help them expand their programming from their traditional Sunday festivals to something that could impact the kids throughout the week and provide arts-based education throughout the week. Now to understand how we might approach this, we gathered the perspectives from everyone. We hired Lustrabota, to spend the day with us, to tell us their stories, how they worked and lived. We

used arts activities to understand the lives of the kids attending the events, use time lapses to understand movement patterns, once again, within the city. Charted every instance of marketplace within the city of La Paz. You could see me in the fedora doing exactly that in the corner. Whether it was legal or illegal, it could be someone that just set out a blue plastic tarp and was selling he-man toys, an actual instance, or someone that had a shop that was much more permanent. Now from this, w

e began to understand that any new architectural or educational program would need to be fit within the rigors of the lives of the children, who do not have time to take a 45-minute bus ride across town to attend school for seven hours and then another bus ride home. They had to work. Their families were depending on it for food. So we started very small, with a series of about 20 postcards, each of which offered a simple lesson related to arts programming and education. We subsequently printed

thousands of these cards and started to distribute them, letting kids take them at these festivals. We observed which were popular and which the kids didn't actually care about at all, to try to understand what topics within arts based education actually meant the most to the children and how we could communicate these cards with color versus not color, the content. As these things circulate, and the kids started to train them like pokemon cards. There might be an instance up here somewhere of a

card. I didn't put it in here, apologies. We took note. And the things that demanded their attention the things that they thought were important, we grew. You can see a couple instances here of a card. There's a picture there of a Lustrabota looking through a little experimental device that began to explain how the eye worked. You could see kids playing drums made with reclaimed PVC. A woman looking at something else that was talking about cameras. These were all topics that, through our experi

ments, became pretty important. The most important one though was music, probably deeply embedded within the culture. And this gave birth to very large embodiments such as you see here based on the vending carts of the area. Now, these could be installed throughout and were installed throughout the different places of market. Places that we had previously mapped, where they would open up and the kids would begin to use this to instruct their own lessons, to create games, which allowed our partne

rs who worked on an all volunteer army basis to actually allow one volunteer to serve as three or four of these carts, expanding their reach. Because all volunteers are free, they're incredibly valuable. Now, something interesting happened. Although we focused on this one group and we were intending to stay there one year, word got out about what we were doing. And so we were approached by another group that ran theater programming in the informal settlement of El Alto, on the rim of the city. W

e were approached by a group that provided opportunities for folks who did handicrafts to market their wares to other countries, where they could actually get paid a decent rate for them. A group that helped to provide educational on the culinary-- educational opportunities in the culinary arts for kids who are working the streets. And as these new partners came to us through the work, the work caused an expansion of our efforts. We ended up staying in Bolivia for 5 years, continuing to work wit

h these groups, continuing to generate work that still reverberates within the communities. The third project was completed in partnership with Mural Arts of Philadelphia, a nonprofit that installed murals across Philadelphia for decades, an amazing group. Now, they were interested in the IDC using our unique methodology to help them to build a garden outdoor classroom around a recently completed mural on building high school, which you can see here. Now, we were immediately inspired by the fenc

ing surrounding this school, the black fence you see at the bottom there. The reason we were inspired is this is a public space. This is a public school, but yet the school found it necessary to erect a very large fence around this public space to keep people off the property because previously they were doing activities that the school didn't necessarily approve of. And we found this irony of a public space being so well protected to be an inspirational moment for us. And wondered how fencing m

ight become a thing that would draw people to the school rather than repel them. We also realized that the school was surrounded by vacant lots. And so we started looking at these vacant lots to try to find undervalued materials that could furnish an accessible medium for our response. The budget for the project was very, very modest, as you might imagine. And so we looked at these vacant lots. And we noticed they were filled with broken bits of concrete, weeds, scraps of wood, and of course fen

cing. To undercover utility with these materials, we adopted the approach of the bricoleur, conducting acts of hand-on experimentation using common tools and locally accessible methods. From this, we developed a number of innovations including an approach to use common fence piping and 90 degree angles to create a more complex geometry that provided greater structural integrity and programmatic elasticity. You can see that at work in the final project here. Again, all of these are 90 degree angl

es. You just change the plane of rotation so as to allow for greater strength within the piping. The final work provided all of the required spaces using undervalued materials and common tools. Every ounce of wood you see here was donated by the community or found within a vacant lot. Every bit of scrap that you see in this was given to us by projects and demolitions in the area. We locally harvested them. More importantly, the final work successfully translated the fence typology from an elemen

t of exclusion to one of inclusion. From an element that repel to one that welcomed. After completion of this project, the surrounding community approached the school to ask if they could use this formerly privatized public space to hold community events. They volunteered to help maintain the garden that would grow on these fence posts. The whole thing became this kind of greenery or to expand the work itself. Now, the big lesson in this project is the bricolage basis, I think, and the ability p

otentially of not relying on prescribed material types, but allowing hands-on experimentation to breathe new life into materials that were presumed not to have much use at all. And there's a transmissibility of these practices that went on to inspire a lot of the IDC's future work, including this project in Africa. We took a team, a small team of 11 students, faculty, and professionals with backgrounds in architecture, design, and engineering. And we worked in partnership with community members

and created, over time, an event and maker space. Now this space was constructed entirely from scavenged materials using only common tools and methods. The final project-- let's see, which you can see here under construction. The final project was completed in less than 7 days on a budget of $1,500, using almost entirely reclaimed materials. It has since reverberated throughout the community. Now, this work was the product of an intensely collaborative creative address, based upon persistent eme

rging situations undervalued and indigenous resources. By so basing the work, our design team allowed it to align itself with the motivation, means, and methods of those in the community, ensuring that they would be empowered and well positioned to possess and evolve the offered work long after we have left. For our partners, who live and work within post-apartheid communities of great need, the rootedness and humble frugality of this project is not a nicety but an essential attribute, for it is

only through working within such limits that these works are able to shift from tantalizing one-offs to a physical and inspirational foundation through which our community partners might realize new works for years to come without our help. This is the final project. And since its completion, the tectonic approaches developed through this $1,500 makerspace have since been used in other projects by the community, allowing them to develop new schools, clinics, homes, and other works using primari

ly reclaimed materials at a fraction of the cost. This work has served an empowering function, allowing our partners to develop much needed work for less time, money, and support than previously possible. And to do it without any external support whatsoever. Now the big lessons here are the propagation of empowering approaches within architecture, approaches not necessarily manifest in the final physical form as an object but in the processes by which it was made. The tectonics that might emerge

from it. And the creative new life breathed into these reclaimed materials, common tools, and local processes. The centrality of found and scavenged materials is hard to be overstated, but it doesn't-- it's not exclusive. It's not monopoly. Anything undervalued could suffice. But the invention of shareable tactics, things that could be easily transferred from person to person, it's hard to overstate the importance of that. Now, the most exciting part of this work is that it is propagating. Show

n here is a residence designed by a member of the community based on the techniques I shared with you a moment ago. I was in the US when this happened. I had absolutely no role in this project. This is simply the architecture inspiring new architectures, more sustainable architectures, more affordable architectures of use to the community in a way that they describe and they create. And it's that kind of propagation seen in this project, another school, done after the first project. It's that ki

nd of propagation that if we're interested in creating a more sustainable future with the residents of extralegal settlements, it has to have that empowering function. We have to change our practice in order to serve those that need our services most I don't believe this work is done. And I'm excited to keep at it. There's much yet to understand. But after almost two decades, I find these glimmers of hope uplifting, uplifting to myself and uplifting to the field that I've given myself to studyin

g. And I'm excited to see what this might mean for the future. I thank you for giving me 10 minutes to share this work with you. And a privilege to be a part of this thing. Thanks. [APPLAUSE] BRIAN TRAINER: Scott, thank you very much. Good luck with your next presentation. I'm going to give you a catchphrase. Making the sustainable attainable. You can copyright that because it rhymes. As a consultant, we get to charge more for things that rhymes or anything that starts with the same letter. So t

here you go. Thank you very much. Thank you, Scott. Our next presenter and our first in-person presenter is Kyle Campbell, 2012 MARCH. His presentation is named-- I hope it's "Motz HQ". It might be Motz, but I knew some Motz's. Global Company, Community, Commitment. Kyle is a critical thinker with a thorough understanding of Champlin's design process and is primarily focused on creating spaces for worship and community-based clients that are artful, functioning, and uplifting. A strong believer

in the power of story, Kyle strives to understand his clients at a deep level to ensure design reflects their narrative. His dedication to each client and project allows him to enjoy the fact that his work can positively impact countless lives. With his passion for research, Kyle leads Champlin's research and innovation committee and works directly with student co-ops to create an engaging place to work. He is also a graduate of the Cincinnati AIA Vision program and the Cincinnati ArtsWave Board

way Bound program. In is free time, Kyle coaches his kids soccer team. He was on the phone trying to find some people for tonight because some people were sick. So if you've got any girls that play soccer, talk to Kyle. Serves as the board of directors for the Art Academy of Cincinnati and the Friends of Music Hall. Please welcome, Kyle. [APPLAUSE] KYLE CAMPBELL: Thank you. Thank you, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here. So I'm an architect. And I believe that as architects, we're really storyt

ellers. And I think that when we are at our best, the stories are our client stories and not our own. And so we're never really the author of the work, in the best situation. We're just the narrator. And I'm here to tell a story about this client which is Motz. So it's not Motz applesauce. It's Motz HQ. So this is a company that focuses on high performance athletic fields, which in and of itself is not my field of study, but I get to be a storyteller. So I worked with this client to help them un

derstand. And since I am telling a story and since I'm an architect, architecture is my medium. And the characters of my story are things like stone, wood, glass, and steel. So because it's a story, I'm going to start with chapter 1, which is humble beginnings. So this company started in 1977 with one guy and a lawn mower. And they quickly grew into a company that occupied a renovated church building which is actually across the street. You can see the gable of the roof of what was their headqua

rters here. And so this was us walking the site before we ever did the interview or got the job. And we were wondering why would this global company want to take advantage of using this abandoned, nearly torn-down, decrepit warehouse to be their new headquarters? And so we started really diving into the story to understand why. And so we looked at things like their purpose, what their mission was. And we realized that they are a company all about transformation, about transforming existing lives

, about moving people to better lives. That's their mission statement. So from understanding their story to then translating that language, we understood that there was purpose behind buying an abandoned warehouse. They could have gone anywhere. They could have built anything from the ground up. They had the means to do it, but again, they're all about transformation. And so we began translating their story into a language that we could understand as architects and that they could understand as

our client. Chapter 2, becoming rooted. So they were growing and getting rooted in their society-- in their community of Newtown, Ohio, in the same way we wanted to do that. Again, this is all before the interview, before we had the job. This is research about the client. And so really diving into who they were, their culture, understanding the adjectives that describe who they are. Transforming that into activators or words that could help us begin to make that bridge between their story and a

narrative that we could design that is their story. And then finally going into a design approach. And through all of that, we discovered a company that is really interested in making a mark. But again, they're very humble. And so the mark they wanted to make was not flashy. And it wasn't big. And it wasn't bold or anything that was what we might consider high design. So we landed on this concept of a furrow. So they work in the ground. They work in the earth, but a furrow is a mark, nonetheless

. And it is the place where seeds are planted, where ideas germinate, and where innovation happens. And so that was a driving force behind us to take to the interview. And at the interview, we approached them with this singular image. And again, this image was not one that was the solution. So in 1989, they made the shift to high performance fields from lawn maintenance, which was obviously a large shift. And so what that told us is that they're always a company who's looking to think outside th

e box. And so we approached them with the interview for the job with this image to say, this is a thought provoker. It's a conversation starter. After all, we didn't know them. We hadn't even met them yet. We met their CFO who walked us through the building during the RFP process. And so when we came to the interview with this as a way to just engage in a conversation with them, it was an invitation for them to think bigger about office planning. So they were doing this during COVID when everybo

dy was shut down. That's when they approached us to build a new headquarters, which as we all know is a fantastic time to build a new headquarters when everybody is remote. So there was an opportunity to think bigger about office planning, to plan bolder and not think about office design in the conventional way, but to look at different opportunities and then finally to organize better. So about two thirds of their staff are field workers, people that are out building fields and constructing the

m, but they come back to the office for touch points. And they always, up to that point, had felt like outsiders within the company and not necessarily part of the community. And so we wanted to change that. Moving on to producing fruit, the next chapter of the story. Shortly after that switch to high performance fields, they gained global recognition very, very quickly. So they went-- in 1996, they did the fields for the Atlanta Olympics. They picked up the Bengals, various super bowls. Sydney,

2000, Beijing. And now, pretty much any field that you've played on or experienced is likely a Motz field or touched by Motz. And so with this global recognition, that fueled their desire to really think differently and bigger about things while remaining humble. This background image looks like every architect's dream. It's just an endless floating plane, but this is the reality of poor construction. So that abandoned building, when we did structural analysis, the CMU walls were not even reinf

orced to the minimum standard. There were no reinforcing at all in the building. They were crumbling. They were falling apart, but again, Joe Motz didn't want to tear out anything that wasn't necessary to tear out. So we were left with steel and a roof structure that caused us to think about design differently. For them, materials, and showing time, and how the world evolves around them was very important. And so they wanted to think about how things like wood would weather, how their materials

would weather. And so we experimented with different rendering tools that show the timing effects of weathering on their materials and how they show a story amongst themselves. It's a very deep building with not a lot of natural light. Of course when it's a floating plane, it is a lot of natural light, but it was going to have walls at some point. And so we did a lot of analysis about sunlight and how we can bring light into their space because after all, they're a company that works outside. An

d so how do you keep people connected to the outside through this process. And then for us, it was an opportunity to do some experimental visualization to help them understand, what is the mood and tone? And what do people feel? And how do you create feeling and emotion with renderings and storytelling visualization? Chapter 5. There aren't 20 chapters. There's only seven. So we're almost done. Chapter 5 is sowing seed. So as Motz continue to serve their community and really get involved with mo

ving people to better lives, they were motivated highly by sustainability. And so in 2009, they created this really big important shift in sustainability because everybody thinks of artificial turf as essentially terrible for the environment. And it's all stuff that gets thrown away and wasted. And so Motz created these two products called environmental or Envirofill and Safeshell, which are made from natural materials that can be ground up, reused, and recycled in their next fields at 100% recy

cled content. And so that innovative thinking and sowing seed about the future really drove our design process as well. So as we started working collaboratively with specialty contractors in both wood and steel, we discovered that there's-- working as Motz does with innovative people, you have the opportunity to take things that are mundane like work in construction drawings. And those can end up telling beautiful stories about how things come together. And so these drawings that look just as mu

ch artistic as they are, construction documents became part of the construction set and how we start to talk about the story of construction and how things are built in a way that can be beautiful even among the things that are mundane. Chapter 6, gathering harvest. So that brings us to 2021. They earned Evergreen certification, which if you don't know, look it up. I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about it, but it is a challenging certification to earn. It's about overall sustainabil

ity and growth for a firm. And this brings us to when they approached us to talk about this project. So for them, gathering harvest meant this idea of reuniting community because, again, their staff was all remote. They wanted to bring community back within the employees. They wanted to restore community within their neighborhoods and the people that live and work around them. And they wanted to restore the notion of community with humanity amongst the global isolation of the pandemic. And so fo

r us, the harvest that we gathered obviously was taking this client through a process of understanding their story and helping to narrate their story in space, to create a spatial narrative of who they are and how they connect people to each other and back out to the communities in which they serve. The final chapter, my favorite chapter. I'm calling it returning to earth. So this project was completed in 2023. And for us it was, in many ways, a returning to earth from this really far out alien,

anti-human concept of distancing, isolation, and caution. And so they were very, very thrilled to have a place that people could call home. And I'm going to break the single one rule of presenting and actually read from the screen, because this quote is important. So this is from their CEO Zach Burns. And he said, "The space we created has allowed for more advantages than simply bringing the team back together. We have opened our space for our customers to use for meetings and gatherings. Truly

a win-win, they get to have a productive work session and a collaborative inspiring environment. And we get to deepen our relationships with our valued customers. Another is the adjacent property we gifted, a brand new synthetic turf field to a local community church. Motz's purpose is moving people to better lives, in addition to showcasing our most recent technologies right outside our front door. This means that now we can look out the window every day and see our purpose in action, 100 chil

dren playing on the field. The lesson, we see in this story is that the best way we found to bring our team back together in person was to create a space that exemplified and embodied our values. We built a space that invites a culture that people want to be a part of. The rest is falling into place, our place." And so this was an article that was about their reopening of their new headquarters. And what's interesting to me is-- the powerful thing is that there's no mention of Champlin Architect

ure in this. And to an architect's ego, that can look like a slap in the face, but if we are at our best and our stories are truly about our clients, then something like this is a profound triumph, in my opinion, because it is-- they should tell their story. The building should be about them. It should be their story. And when a client takes complete ownership over a project that we design for them and they think of it as theirs, as their culture, as their people, then I believe that we have suc

ceeded in the highest degree possible. And I think that's a really beautiful story. And who knows, maybe this story will inspire other stories as we all work together in the great human narrative. And that is it. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] BRIAN TRAINER: Nice job, Kyle. KYLE CAMPBELL: Thank you. BRIAN TRAINER: Thank you very much. KYLE CAMPBELL: Still beat 10 minutes. BRIAN TRAINER: Yeah. As an award winning race car driver, excellent time. That's right. Yeah, thank you. I like that. If you tell a go

od story, people see themselves in it. And the more people take ownership of that story-- I think that was very well done. Thank you, Kyle. Our next presenter, Ron Paul Baum, class of '71, BSARC, is doing a presentation called "Arts and crafts continuum-- emerging creative land use project". Ron Paul Baum is the designer and facilitator of the Arts and Crafts Continuum, a creative land use project and topic of his talk. Throughout his career, Ron's work has centered on the intersection of art, a

ctivism, and placemaking, beginning with his work as a housing specialist in the Walnut Hills neighborhood in Cincinnati, to serving the Sammamish Valley Alliance manager-- hi, you thought you'd get me with Sammamish, didn't you, Ron? Guess what, I worked for Bonmarché. I know where that is. Sammamish Valley Alliance manager and founding the Windows Art Gallery in Seattle Washington. Our next presenter is Ron Paul Baum. Ron, the audience is yours. ROB PAUL BAUM: Thank you very much. I'm going to

get my screen started here. I'm very glad to join you all here, supporting this timely creative process. Learning the plight of industrial revolution workers, anticipating the plight of artificial intelligence revolution workers. Magnetic Blackness, brushes by an almost silent critical analysis interacts and transforms to address deep and wide poverty and war. Objectively abstract modernist woodblock, carefully carved with a very sharp pocket knife under the eye of John Petersen. Seductively su

bjective post-modernist woodblock, carefully reconsidered as cellular growth at the dawn of a silent spring. William Morris writes in prints, a conscientious objection to the plight of industrial revolution workers in the heart of the British empire. We are stardust. We are golden, billion year old carbon caught in the devil's bargain. Ernst Abbe and Carl Zeiss organized their optical works into the world's first cooperative perpetual purpose trust. Herman Schneider designs UC Cooperative Educat

ion and influences 1930s Bauhaus. William Morris and friends great Red House and inspire the English arts and crafts movement. Danny Ransohoff's "Over the Rhine poverty" lecture inspires alternative military service as Walnut Hills Housing advisor. Cincinnati cooperative education plan inspires Antioch Cooperative Education plan. Highlander school trains 1930s labor union organizers in 1950s civil rights organizers. How many roads must a man walk down? Freire and Horton together answer, we make

the road by walking. Creatively sharing housing, scrounging meals, living artfully, happily fighting war peacefully. Conscientious objection to militarism and materialism, carefully reconsidered as conscientious, co-creative, cooperation. Form follows function, paradoxically reconsidered as function follows form. A new day, a new way, a new eyes to see the dawn now witness the quickness with which we get along. An architect is one member of a family of 500 back to the land homesteaders. Home of

the red idea bubble people from the group machinery sketch on acres of bountiful, sustainable, green and wild mother nature. Hearth, porch, and door, living, kitchen, and dining, in back porch steps to get ourselves back to the garden. Space capsule home with stadium center stage, surfaced with 500 individual, privacy meditation pods facing out into nature. Imagine the creative life of a young apprentice with equitable access to these affordable resources. What conditions would allow art to emer

ge gracefully, joyfully, dramatically, perpetually? How might an arts and crafts continuum plan work today on debt free land? By adjusting only a very few fundamental economic principles. A perpetual purpose stewardship equitable community emerges from a profitable, real estate property rental business, allowing creativity to grow naturally from the quality of life. What are these arts and crafts continuum principles? Prohibit debt. Community property must be perpetually free and clear. Communit

y capital must be retained in perpetuity by prohibiting sale. Recirculate profit, transition from sole proprietorship maintenance and improvement to collaborative stewardship. Encourage equitable trade, affordable fees, and income generation for stewards. Support apprenticeships, stewardships, and creative cooperation. And the beautiful inspirational outcomes? Without inflationary debt burden, user fees become increasingly attractive. Without sales, transaction expenses, the system becomes progr

essively affordable. Recycled profits to maintenance and improvements make resources more desirable. Diverse gatherings of stewards begin managing and maintaining resources artistically. Co-operative stewardship and apprenticeship opportunities build a positive and creative alternative. Steward sharing enjoying the advantages of cooperation continue gifting and growing the arts and crafts continuum. Quotes from the-- quotes and images from the arts and crafts stewardship tool library informing t

he creation and continuation of collaborative apprenticeships. The past is not dead. It is living in us and will be alive in the future, which we are now helping to make. The teacher is, of course, an artist, what the educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the students to become themselves. Instead of thinking that you put the pieces together that will add up to a whole, I think you have to start with the premise that they're all ready together. And you try to keep from destroying

life by segmenting it over organizing it and dehumanizing it. Our guiding principle was that design is neither an intellectual nor a material affair, but simply an integral part of the stuff of life necessary for everyone in a civilized society. I do not want art for a few any more than education for a few or freedom for a few. I give institutions, and structures, and traditions all the respect that I think they deserve. They have to earn it by serving people. Nothing will change until we change

, until we throw off our dependence and act for ourselves. The true secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life. Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity. Words are often as important as experience because words make experience last. Those who refuse to share their knowledge with other people are making a great mistake because we need it all. Knowledge emerges only through invention and reinvention, through the restless, impatient,

continuing, hopeful inquiry. Human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other. Three elements go to make up an idea. First, its intrinsic quality and feeling. Secondly, the energy with which it affects other ideas and energy, which is infinite in the here and nowness of immediate sensation. Finite and relative in the recency of the past. And thirdly, the tendency of an idea to bring along other ideas with it. The entire universe is perfused with signs. If it is not composed

exclusively of signs, a whole range of possibilities, a continuum. We sincerely need your questions. Please experience windowsart.com as part of a continuing conversation. Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE] BRIAN TRAINER: Ron thank you very much. I don't know if it was your intent, but for a while there that felt like a meditation. And I was into it, but I liked it. That was pretty relaxing. I could listen to that on a loop every night and feel inspired, but it sounded to me like the best way for

art to thrive is to mitigate the burden of finance. I don't know. I might be oversimplifying some of what you were saying, but I thought that was fascinating. So thank you Ron Paul. Our next presenter is Joe Walsh, 2015, BSDE, with a presentation, "Drawing leads the way". Joe Walsh is an artist who works in comics, illustration, animation, and design. He recently received an individual excellence award from the Ohio arts council for his animation work on "Why we walk", an award winning documenta

ry that has screened at over 25 film festivals worldwide. Some of Joe's past work includes updating the iconic sign for Cincinnati's Shake it Records, with 8 painted portraits, and self-publishing two books of drawings, "14 Days of Drawing" and "River Road". Joe is currently-- "14 Days of Drawing" and "River Road". Here we go. Thanks. Joe is currently working on his first comic, "The Shifting Ground". Joe is also one-half of Take a Moment Studio, an ongoing collaboration with John Flannery of Cr

yptogram. Take a Moment Studio creates one of a kind posters by combining screen prints with hand-drawn illustration. Please welcome to the stage, Joe Walsh. [APPLAUSE] There you go. JOE WALSH: Thank you. I forgot how much of my presentation I spoiled in the intro, but my name is Joe Walsh, graduated in 2015 from graphic design, but I'm mainly here to talk about drawing. Starting with as we all did. I drew all the time as a kid. And I had two artistic parents and an older sister. So I was given

lots of media to take in. And if you asked my parents, I was happy to sit there and read those books and draw. And I had to be pulled away to do much else, which is still pretty much the case. This is a circular story of how I went out into the world and came back basically to this place. As a kid, after my-- some of my-- the influence that we're coming from my family, I had all that, but I started to develop my own interests at this place, Shake It Records. I don't know if you've all been there

. It's on north side. And I went there for music, but I quickly discovered that they had this amazing comics section. And shout out to this guy named Joe Kuth, who puts that all together. He changed my life without ever knowing me until recently. But anyway, I discovered a lot of cartoonists who turned out to be a lot of my favorite artists like Carol Tyler, and Dan Clowes, and Justin Green, who actually did the sign for Shake it Records and often would display his work there. Anyway, we'll come

back to him later. Here's proof that I spend all my money there. Still to this day, these are all comics for the most part. And we'll come back to that later too. My teenage years, I did a lot of artworks projects. So I worked on many of the murals around town. This is my favorite one that I worked on. It still looks great to this day, somehow. Then I went to DAAP. A lot more things happened, but I wanted to get to the later work. So I went to DAAP, but I went in with this feeling of basically

wanting to be an artist but knowing that DAAP was a good place to go. So I went in with that mindset. And I did struggle against concepts like the one Kyle was talking about earlier of good design being invisible. And that you're not really-- that you're a problem solver and not a artist in that way. It's more about getting through the airport without realizing you didn't get lost and that sort of thing, which I love and I appreciate to this day, but I did struggle against it as someone who like

s to draw and express themselves that way. I made all my projects in DAAP into drawing projects. Like an infographic project became an animated music video, things of that nature. And I really enjoyed that struggle of finding my way. But of course, I learned a lot of great things about type and design and just ways to communicate your visual beyond just the drawing in the middle of a sketchbook page or that sort of thing, sorry. But the other thing that's great about my time at DAAP is the inter

nships. I got to live in San Francisco, in New York and try out jobs that I may have just gotten right out of school and not known any better, you know what I mean. So I got to try out jobs in architecture and sustainability. And I also worked for this guy, who's a mysterious artist who doesn't show his face. And this guy's name is Kenzo. And he has a company called Kenzo Digital Immersive that does these kind of tech, art immersive experiences, some of which you can see here. There's one-- that

's LeBron James and one of them. And works for companies like Samsung, and Bacardi, and whatnot. And I just wanted to mention him up front because I still work for him to this day. And he's a great relationship that I developed through my time at DAAP, but it's different than a lot of what I'll be showing you. So this is an observation deck in a new skyscraper in New York, which we worked on pitching together. And it's like a kaleidoscopic-- kaleidoscope in the sky. It's like 58 floors up, looki

ng over Manhattan. But anyway, so I just want to bring him up early because I'm not going to really talk about him again, but he is somebody that I still work with to this day. So fresh out of college, I started to do freelance design work. I would always incorporate animation and texture whenever I could. And these are just some album covers I did for friends bands. I did, early on in my career, I submitted a design to the 20th Anniversary cover of "Infinite Jest", which is my favorite book at

the time and a post-modern gigantic classic of over 1,000 pages about addiction, and media, and all this stuff. It's a great book. I'd recommend to anyone. But it was a crazy first project out of school because I submitted. And then six months later, they told me I won. But I wanted to bring it up also because it starts my chafing with clients because it shows-- the thing on the left is what I submitted and won the contest with. And the thing on the right is what was printed after we made a few

changes. But once again, drawing leads the way. We got the drawing maintained, the main central image. I'm still very proud to be a part of the lineage of that book, but it did-- it should have been a red flag, anyway. Then I settled into being a freelance designer and illustrator. I took comfort in the term designer as a catchall that allowed you to do this large range of creative projects under the guise of professionalism and legitimacy that artists doesn't quite give you out in the world. Bu

t as you can see, I still did everything by hand. These are some just examples of projects I enjoyed. You don't see a lot of fonts working in my work. I also started peddling my wares. So I would-- as a creative outlet and as a just different outlet for my work and for money as well, I started to sell things at craft fairs and art book fairs. I made some hyper specific Cincinnati pins such as the 'Touchdown, Jesus" sculpture, when it was struck by lightning. And the Camp Washington salt dome, th

ings like that. But I got really-- started to get really into print and that old school version of design, I guess, essentially. And while chafing against the constant struggles of working as an independent person, working with client facing, I did a lot of teaching people how to treat a designer, taking it straight to the face. I always wanted to have these projects that were just about drawing and reason to center that again. So I did this book, which is a book of-- my idea was visual eavesdro

pping, so like going to places every day for two weeks in the time when I didn't have a car and drawing people in those spaces. So just drawing straight with pen, no pre-sketching. I did cheat by going to some seated events. It's a little easier to draw people at those. This is a much later project, but I wanted to show it in this part because it doesn't fit anywhere else. This is a recent book of drawings I did with a friend named Evan Verrilli. The both of us drew from the east to west towards

each other on River Road and past and created this double sided book of observational drawings of the city. Anyway, so in the-- you'll notice that the client work goes away. And it's more-- my focus became more about how do I just draw all the time. And through that, putting that out into the world, I met people such as John Flannery, who can't quite tell how tall he is in this, but you can in the next. He's a very tall local screen printer and designer himself. And we started a project called

Take A Moment Studios, which you can see on the right, the process. It's a two-man collaboration, where John does a layer of screen printing through a paper mask so he can cut a new image every time. And then he hands that off to me. And I do a lay of drawing. And we just do these afternoon, evening long sessions where we make as many posters as we can. Started as an art for all idea meets a way for us to go to the gym creatively or whatever and just work quickly, work large. There's ink drying

on the screen. So you have to-- you can see his height there. So you have to keep it moving. And we've given out thousands of these posters over the years. At one point, we had a residency at the Contemporary Art Center, which was like a dream because we were there twice a week for four hours each time. And just whoever came out of that elevator was our collaborators and whatever. And it's something I still do to this day. And I love it. Some of my favorite work. Shout out to John. OK, so these

are just some other examples of illustrations and design work that I'm proud of from this time. But I'm definitely, at this time, we'll say we're at 2018, 2019. At this point, I am drowning in word of mouth recommendations of new work to be done. And it's all something I already agreed to a year ago. And now it's coming up. And I'm just really struggling with that whole thing. As anyone in the room a freelancer, you'll know that it's have to do all the jobs. Quick, quick side note. This is a rec

ent project that I still do some of this stuff, but I was proud of this work for Colette, which is a great new restaurant in town. So in 2020, I declared I'm an artist now. And this was mainly a semantics thing for me to feel better, but it was also the beginning of a shift towards just going all in on personal projects and whatnot. But like I just mentioned, I was always had committed to something years ago. And something that I was committed to that I was excited about was this film, "Why we w

alk". And this was an example of me wanting to do animation. So I wanted to-- I'd always done animated loops and things like this for clients and put it in there whenever I could, but this was a chance to really tell a story with it. These are just flashes of various different scenes. But it's a film about walking and about these three guys here who started a walking crew in Cincinnati. They came from-- one guy came from the Congo. One guy escaped a Civil War in Ethiopia as a kid, but they all c

entered on Cincinnati. And it's about their story. And there's more to it, but I'm going to move on. But like I said in the intro, it was shown at a bunch of film festivals. And it was recently purchased for distribution. So it should be more widely available soon, which I'm very excited about. OK, so somewhere along those ways, I met Justin Green, the guy who did that Shake It sign that was the carnival ride into all my interests as a kid. And he's an underground comics legend, moved here later

in life and became a sign painting legend, essentially. Any cool hand painted sign in town was probably Justin. We met on this project. I don't feel like there's much time to talk about it. So I'm going to move on, but through my work with him, I was reconnected with-- as you can see, the old school ways of just using the dip pen, illustrating. I was reconnected with comics as a tangible thing to do. And he also bequeathed slowly the Shake It Records sign job on me, which was a dream. And I did

these eight new portraits, which you can see here were installed. And we did a whole refresh of the sign. And this was the peak of, I don't know, Cincinnati client-based freelance work for me. I almost felt like I can move now. Once I did this. I didn't move. This is like-- it's hard. I don't know if I conveyed it well enough, but this is a culmination of a lot of my interests in life. And it's really an honor that I was able to work on this. Unfortunately, before it was even fully installed, J

ustin Green passed away. And it's a shame that he wasn't around to see it, but it was an honor that he let me do that. Anyway, so it's through Shake It, through Justin, through not wanting to do client work as much. I started to work on this project called "The Shifting Ground", which is a comic book that I'm currently working on. I've got some imagery here of it. And it's something that I'm definitely using my design knowledge I learned from DAAP in the color separations and the page designs. A

nd I think it's the best stuff I've ever done. It's the only-- I don't know if other designers feel this way, but there's the negative side of the design invisible. And even being an Illustrator for other people's projects you start to feel like, I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know what I'm saying. I don't know if this is creative. And this has been a chance to actually tell a story for the first time of my own. And it gets pretty intense. And so these are some intense ones, but I'm sure t

here's some goofs in there too. I'm going to read this because I got here. I'm probably past 10 minutes now, but "How strange it is to be alive during your own lifetime and legacy or lack thereof. To be working on the early work that will influence the later work, Looney Toons anvil dangling above. It just has to truly not matter if anyone cares. It's a dance with life itself, or god, or whatever." Anyway, there's also a subplot that happens in the gym steam room. And that one is just based on t

he actual flagrant things that people do in the steam room such as burn sage while doing hundreds of sit ups and making loud breathing noises. But anyway, all circling back around. This is me now. I put my art out of the art hole and hopefully you like it. And it circles back. As an adult, I draw all the time. And yeah, thank you. [APPLAUSE] BRIAN TRAINER: I think that's the best ending of a presentation ever. And yeah. Thank you, Joe. It was interesting to say-- I don't know how many other peop

le have experienced that. But one of the things that DAAPX brings out is what you thought you were going to school for, sometimes that passion pulls you back. And you wind up doing the thing that you wanted to do in the first place or you go in a completely different direction that surprised you, but you find your joy that way. Our fifth presentation for the morning before we take our break Valerie Allen, class of '75, BFA, and Armin Mersmann with their presentation, "Time to inspire-- create an

d grow". Valerie Allen received her BFA from University of Cincinnati. She is a lecturer for Golden Artist Colors, co-founder of the Podcast "Art Ladders-- The Creative Climb," curator, mentor, and Mastrius Art Community and art educator. Valerie has exhibited nationally, including the Chicago Biennial, New American Drawing Santa Fe, National Collage Society, New England, and Cite Brooklyn New York. In 2022, Valerie received the Great Lakes Bay all area artist award for her role as a visual arti

st and community leader. Armin Mersmann is well known for his intense, naturalistic, graphite drawings, but also works in photography and digital art. His artistic interests have become more experimental in recent years, with more attention placed on the surfaces of the artwork. He has won major awards throughout the United States. Mersmann is a curator and art educator. He is co-founder of "Art Ladders-- The Creative Climb" podcast and mentor for Mastrius Art Community. Please welcome Valerie a

nd Armin. [APPLAUSE] Thank you. Welcome. Good to see you. VALERIE ALLEN: Well, here we are. And I want to welcome you to "Art Ladders-- The Creative Climb". We're a visual arts podcast for artists and art lovers. And we are 68 episodes strong right now. And we've been doing this since 2021. I'd like you to take a look at our palette of colors that we operate under. We're operating under connection, community, and commitment. Our episodes range from subjects such as the healing power of art to ti

me management for artists. And we actually had Cal Cullen in the room for one of our podcast episodes on collaboration and community. It's episode 36 when you go back and listen to our podcast. We're going to start with a couple of excerpts from our top 10 episodes of our list. And this is a British artist Sally Hurst. Sally Hurst is a very energetic and very generous artist in explaining her process. She's very big on Instagram, lots of followers. And here, you're going to hear her talking abou

t her process in her art. [VIDEO PLAYBACK] - It's become increasingly abstract over the last few years, but it's still very much based on reality. So I still go out and take lots of photographs. I still do lots of drawing. I still explore all of the visual aspects of what I'm doing. And then I just grab the bits that I want to take a bit further. And I do that in lots of ways, either literally grabbing and zooming in with a small viewfinder on a small area, and abstracting, and taking away thing

s I find interesting or chopping up and combining different pieces. But the route is always-- they're always from the same place. They're always from the sketchbooks. They're always from a realistic-- a point of view really. And then it's about exploring different media. And I love playing with media. So I do printmaking. And I do painting. And I paint on my prints. And I cut up my paintings. And I'll put the painting through the press. And everything just gets reworked and reworked, this kind o

f cross-pollination of different techniques and different media. And the prominent thing is, well, what if? What if I did that? So curiosity is 100%. [END PLAYBACK] ARMIN MERSMANN: Next, we have a friend, a mentor, and a former teacher, Larry Butcher. He's going to talk about his early years of being an art professor. [VIDEO PLAYBACK] - My painting class had 12 people in it. By the end of the semester, I only had three. Those three I sat down and I critiqued them. And I said, I'm going to give y

ou all As all three of you for surviving, but really only one of you is worth an A. Anyway, they laughed. And then Charles took me aside. And he says, Larry, where are you? I thought, well, maybe this is some kind of zen question, "where are you?" Well, I'm right here. I'm right here right now. He says that's right. You are at Delta College. You are not at Cranbrook Academy of Art. These are people who are not graduate students. They are students who are coming with varying degrees of abilities

and backgrounds. And you need to teach each one of them because they all paid the same amount of money to come and be in your class. That was the huge whack in the face of who I needed to be as a teacher. And so what really changed for me was, know your students. So I would do lessons that they would reveal themselves in. And then I would use them to pry more out of them. And over the years of teaching, I decided the best I could say I am is that I'm a gatekeeper. A gateway to their new artistic

life. And I can give them every tool possible for them to know themselves so they can walk through that gate and be them be themselves. And that if I do the fundamentals right-- it's a community college, if I lay the foundation right, they can build anything they want. And so with that in mind, that's how I taught. And I knew that they were out of there with as many-- depending on their own abilities. But if they would do the lessons and involve themselves in that community that would happen wi

th my classes, because that mattered, that I could build a community where they knew each other, as they would critique each other because they would share materials with each other or they would all be comrades in a common struggle of a tough lesson. But that community would make them strong enough that could they could do what they needed to do, even if they never took any more classes. And then the other thing with the community college is I would have, in a classroom, an 18-year-old, a 20-ye

ar-old, a 30-year-old, a 40-year-old. Oldest student was 80. And I almost blew it with her, asking this benign question because she's 80. Well what were you doing a year ago? She says, oh, I was in Micronesia with the Peace Corps. VALERIE ALLEN: Yeah. This podcast that we've been working on since 2021 it started out as coffee conversations in our kitchen. And Armin and I would talk for hours. And I was the abstract artist in the group. ARMIN MERSMANN: And I was the realist. VALERIE ALLEN: You we

re the realist. And we'd argue back and forth. And we took that-- ARMIN MERSMANN: We never argued. We heavily discussed. VALERIE ALLEN: Yeah, we took that show on the road and started doing these crazy talks and how two creatives work as a couple. And we landed on this. So this particular episode is in our top 10. And it's a conversation that he and I have together. And it's called "Hold the vision, trust the process". These situations, these zoom meetings that we have with the interviewees and

with ourselves, none of us think we're going on video. So the last one's crazy. So I grabbed those little sound bites for you today but here we go. [VIDEO PLAYBACK] VALERIE: On how to put yourself first as an artist. You go. ARMIN: When you put yourself first as an artist-- I say this to all my students, have a place to do art. Have a sanctuary. That's not always practical. When I was in my 20s, we lived in a trailer. And I had a corner that was my sanctuary. But have that sanctuary where you do

n't have to deal with kids, and dogs, and husbands, and wives, and all those kinds of things. And let yourself-- let yourself fantasize about your art and your vision. That's the first thing I say. And also, have a vision, not that you want to be an artist but have the vision that you are an artist. VALERIE: Excellent. ARMIN: Right? VALERIE: Yes. ARMIN: That doesn't mean everything is going to be hanging in the louver. What I'm saying is what you create is unique. You said that in the beginning.

Everybody did this unique painting. So you don't-- there is no magic line when all of a sudden you're an artist. VALERIE: No. No, there isn't. ARMIN: I don't remember that. OK, I was 31. VALERIE: Then you came out. ARMIN: And I also became an artist. I still, sometimes, that word sticks in my throat when they say, what do you do? I'm an artist. That's my own problems, but there is no magic time when you are or are not an artist. It's a word you can't define. That's like love. You can't define i

t. You can write wonderful poetry about it. VALERIE: Yeah, yeah. ARMIN: So think of yourself as an artist. Don't try to become what your teacher is doing. If you have a good teacher, they're going to help you become what you are. VALERIE: What you do. Yes, they're bringing out the best in you. ARMIN: They have to understand you. They want to see where you're going and what you think. And they help you a lot. That's the way I look at it as a teacher and as an artist. There's days I feel like I'm

a hell of an artist. There's days that I'm like, I feel the world all the time. VALERIE: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. That imposter that creeps up. ARMIN: We've talked about that. VALERIE: We have. It bears repeating. ARMIN: And what about you? VALERIE: And tips that I treasure, what you do as an artist for artists, I say and you basically said it, love yourself. You are doing important work. Students of art, artists, mid-career, advanced artists, you are giving so much to this world that it's hard to ev

en put a value number on it. The world needs artists. We need people that think creatively. We need people to bring things into existence that have never been here before. It gives me chills to think about all the wonderful artworks that have come before in history that we now pay homage to. And it definitely gives me chills. So self love. You are doing something wonderful for this world. So that is my huge tip to an artist. You are jumping off the cliffs. You are hang gliding over all this terr

itory. You are the daredevils. ARMIN: Yes. [END PLAYBACK] VALERIE ALLEN: OK, so we hope you listen to our podcast. We're out there on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. We're very passionate about these episodes. And yeah, we're on Instagram, Facebook. You can find us. Armin. ARMIN MERSMANN: Yes, thank you for listening. And stay curious. Stay creative. And I'll be seeing you on our podcast. So thank you so much. VALERIE ALLEN: Thank you. [APPLAUSE] BRIAN TRAINER: See, this way, it gets done right. Don

't let them touch it. That's perfect. There we go. Thank you. Thank you, Valerie and Armin. I don't know if Joe had listened to your podcast before, but he already thinks of himself as an artist. I like how those linked up. Our next presenter is virtual presenter. We're going to welcome Hal Apple, class of '82, BSDE. I'm so curious about this. The title of his presentation is called, "Women seriously?" Hal Apple is an expert in branding design and improving workflow experiences. He ran a success

ful design practice before working at Disney, Amgen, and other companies, where he partnered with colleagues in around 50 countries. He is a caregiver for his wife-physician and edits designs and publishes the books she authors. And as you will learn from his talk, he's inspired by her work. Outside of his professional life, Hal enjoys growing lemon trees, volunteering, studying, writing, and nurturing close friendships. We welcome Hal and his video presentation. Hal, the audience is yours. [APP

LAUSE] HAL APPLE: Hi, welcome everyone. And thanks, Brian. Yes, my presentation is entirely by video. So it's going to be on time. And it's provocative, hopefully. So I welcome further conversation if any of you would like to talk to me about the presentation. The best way is to reach me through LinkedIn. So Dan, you want to go ahead and run the video? [VIDEO PLAYBACK] - Women, seriously? Hi, I'm Hal apple. I grew up in Columbus, Indiana. Influenced by branding from Paul Rand, architects like Ed

ward Larrabee Barnes, I. M. Pei, Harry Weese, sculpture by Henry Moore, and protection by Fire Station 4, thanks to Robert Venturi. Me and my small hometown were influenced by dozens of architects and artists over a period of 40 years. And none of the commissions ever went to women. I studied design at the University of Cincinnati. Later, I went on to design the happiest rooms on Earth and learned much about life saving medical treatments. Recently, I designed a book, "Forgive to Live", written

by my doctor and my wife. Medical school taught doctors about human anatomy and physiology by using a male body as the standard and norm. Entire organ systems study primarily by referencing the male body. The female body was introduced as having the different reproduction system, as if women have aberrant organs. This book changed my life and like most of our projects, where we hope that they might influence others. How do we measure success? Is it by, A, how many awards do we win. B, the design

brief was fulfilled. C, the project was on time and on budget. Or is it, D, nobody died from a result of the project? Except that women are much more likely to die in a car crash than men. In fact, all crash test dummies used by the DOT up until 2012 were based on the male physique. And then they introduced a 4 foot 11 inch female crash test dummy. That's the fifth percentile of all women. As my dad would say, that's a Mickey Mouse idea. Good idea. Let's try testing with Mickey. Yeah, come on.

Get out of there. Can we take women, seriously, please. Let's design better seating. 5 foot 4 is the average height of a woman in the US, not 5'9", which seems to be about the average height of the person that we design our chairs for. And then we have, "shrink it and pink it". It's a common design solution described by the author of, "Invisible Women" and by Karen Korellis Reuther, a designer, former Nike executive, and Harvard fellow. Karen notes that military boots are cause of injury for man

y women serving our country. The military simply shrinks the boots that were designed for men and make them fit for women. Do we treat our own colleagues fairly? About half of all graphic designers are women. Great. But about 89% of all creative directors are men. And as one female designer said, "it is the female creative directors who have helped to shape, not only my career but who I am." Fashion designers who are women earn on average $20,000 less per year than men. What about fine art? Well

, sales of female artists represent just 2% of the entire fine art market. And of this 2%, 40% is done by only five women. At Oxford University, Dr. Renee Adams is widely recognized as a global expert in finance and management and the emerging financial impact of gender bias. She gave a remarkable research presentation at the art Students League of New York. And her team analyzed 1.9 million paintings auctioned and sold. The women's paintings sold for about 40% less than men's. Paintings done by

women are valued less, particularly among people who are well educated, wealthy, and well versed in art. That's most surprising. It's not a coincidence to me that most people buying art, museums included, her research shows purchase art that is primarily produced by men. Let's head over to industrial design. About 19% of industrial designers are women in the US, but only 11% of the leadership positions are held by women. Oh, in architecture, well about half of those who graduate from architectu

ral programs are women, but only 15% of all licensed architects are women. What happened to all of the other women? Is there a problem here we need to solve? I was taught in design school that every design project is actually a problem to solve. And us men, we love to hear about a problem to solve, but men first we need to understand that our confidence is not equal to competence. I've been thinking about maybe five things that we could do. One is redesign our creative briefs. One author writes

that we can reframe our problems by diversifying the framers. The emerging field of customer insights changed much of how we do our work. Why can't we do the same with our work, by asking colleagues or people beyond our own disciplines to randomly review our creative briefs and even our proposals by using their standards not ours. The second thing we can do is redesign how we hire, promote, and retain staff. Years ago when I owned my own design firm, I chose not to promote Charlaine from office

manager into business development and the client services role. Instead, I chose Chuck. I used the wrong standard of measurement because I was looking for the most qualified. So chuck was fired after three months because I used the wrong standard of measurement. Here's what I used. Experience and industry reputation, well-spoken and confident in performing the job, how quickly will they be successful in the role, and proven ability to write design briefs. A better standard of measurement is hiri

ng the most valuable person. These are the criteria I should have used. Humble. Humble in attitude. Passion. Charlaine was our office manager and passionate about the new opportunity. Chuck was passionate about coffee breaks. Problem solving abilities, works well with staff and clients. Clients and staff love Charlaine. We can redesign how we handle our staff. Let me introduce Charrisse Johnston. Charrisse is former chair of the American Society of Interior Designers and now has a practice based

in cape town South Africa and Los Angeles. Charrisse wrote to me about her experiences in taking on new roles and design. She wrote, "I had to expend so much energy to hold my position without being walked over, albeit perhaps not intentionally by clients, as well as by my peers, subconsultants, and even my own team members. I can't tell you how many times men have tried to talk over me, appropriate my ideas as their own, and question my knowledge, and undermine my authority." Charrisse has a p

ath forward. If we take women seriously, provide opportunities, and the training, and respect they deserve, otherwise our projects are not fulfilling their full potential. And we're overlooking a huge talent pool. The third thing we can do is design better teams. Dr. Anita Woolley is professor at Carnegie Mellon University and an expert in collective intelligence. And her research demonstrates that teams who are the most effective with high levels of outcome are teams that are collectively intel

ligent, with a majority of team members being women. Turns out, the more women on the team, the better. In other words, we can't have too many women on our teams. Number four, design better discussions. Try recording a meeting and read the transcript and see, who should have been in the meeting, who contributed, how, when, why did people contribute? Is someone talking over you? Hold up a sign. It works. Have fun with things. Whatever vision you have, a few things need to change first. Number one

, about 70% to 85% of public relations jobs are held by women, paid less than men. About 70% of HR jobs are held by women, paid less than men. 90% of Fortune 500 companies have CEOs who are men, paid more than anybody. So to summarize, it's men who make decisions which get a company in trouble. And the women who are hired to clean up the mess. [END PLAYBACK] [APPLAUSE] BRIAN TRAINER: Hal, thank you very much for that. Don't know if you're still there. But yeah, when I saw the title, "Women, seri

ously", I was like, this could go one of two ways. I'm glad you went the nice way. And to be fair, I've read two books that profoundly influenced my experience as a man in this world. One was "Invisible Women", which you referenced, which is a fantastic book. The other one was, "Are you there, God? It's me, Margaret" by Judy Blume. I was in fourth grade. I wasn't ready, but it helped. It was good to know. So thank you, Hal, very much. HAL APLLE: Welcome. BRIAN TRAINER: That's right. And Dan is u

p in the booth. Is that the Dan you're talking to reach out to if they want to talk to you? HAL APLLE: They can reach out to me through LinkedIn. BRIAN TRAINER: Perfect. Thank you, Hal, very much. Awesome. Our next presenter is Alex Pesta, class of '02, with the BARC and a presentation titled, "Building a culture of experience". Alex is a partner at City Architecture, an architecture and planning firm practicing in Cleveland, Ohio. Under his direction, the firm actively seeks out projects and in

itiatives that can rebuild neighborhoods or reactivate urban cores. Above all, he is charged to create space with purpose, City Architecture's core mission. This is most evident in his leadership and co-authoring for a choice neighborhoods implementation grant, where his work directly resulted in $45 million of HUD funding. One of five in the country that launches over 500 million of investment to rebuild a public housing campus into a connected, mixed-income community, where his firm's designs

are currently under construction. He takes great pride in the relationships he has fostered with his team, clients, and the communities where he works. He also managed to pass enough tests, there are more letters after his name than are in it. So there's that too. Please, welcome to the stage, Alex Pesta. [APPLAUSE] ALEX PESTA: Welcome. I don't want to eat up too much into my 10 minutes. I'm a little bit into my feelings today. So if I get a little bit emotional, please bear with me. My morning

started off sitting in the back of an orientation in UC tour with my daughter. And so it's very trippy to be here, where it all started, sharing that experience with Sophia, and having her in the audience today. Above and beyond all, I'm a dad and a husband. All right, so I want to just put that out there. I'm going to talk a little bit about our work at City Architecture, our work in our communities, and with the folks that we are pleasurable to do that work with. History is very much part of o

ur culture. It is very much part of our architectural firm. However, I don't want to spend too much time talking about the history. I want to talk more about what we're doing right now and where we are headed. And I want to plant that seed of where we are headed and showing that through how that has evolved over the time. One of the things that I share with my team, very often, is that windshields are bigger than rearview mirrors. And I really believe that there is a reason for that. I am also a

n aspiring race car driver. I need to talk to you. But there are a reason that is. So talking about where we've been, where we are today, and where we're going. And just to cut to it, where we want to go is we want to change the narrative around what it means to practice planning and architecture. And we want to be the firm of choice when folks think about where they want to work, when clients think about who they want to work with, when communities are looking for help, we want us to be on the

top of their list. So I also take you back a little bit. When I was in fifth grade, when I was 9 years old, I told my fifth grade teacher that I was going to be an architect, maybe because I had a slight crush on Mrs. Malone, but I really wanted to be an architect. And so this really started this journey about who I was and what I was going to be. I came to DAAP. Met my lovely wife here, who is one of those 15% registered architects. So shout out to Tara. She did it all. And really fell in love

with place through my experience that was kind of afforded me through DAAP, through a travel quarter, and really got to see how people connect with place and really how that really was more important to me than what the thing looked like. And it really started this lifelong journey on designing for experience. From there-- oops. From there, I was honored. I was asked. I was threatened to become a partner at City Architecture when the firm was 25 years old. I was not 25 at that time. I am 25 in t

his picture. I have only worked at City Architecture my entire career. And I'm standing next to what would be one of my partners many, many years past the time that this photograph was taken. And I share that with you because at 25, I think, as all designers, we think we know what we're going to do. We have an idea of what a career path is going to be. We have the idea of the type of work that we're going to do. And it all changes. And we have to approach it that way and understand that way. And

in many ways, City Architecture was experiencing that as a 25-year-old firm. We were moving from a sole proprietorship, who was the founding partner, also a DAAP alum, who was an amazing mentor to me. But the culture within the company was one way. It was a singular way. And we were put in a position. And we were given the opportunity to swing that pendulum from my way to our way. And it was really fulfilling to work on the recalibration of how the firm does work in real time. So that collabora

tion, the fact that we were working together, we got to test what our way was in real time with real projects. Brian mentioned the create space with purpose. This became our rallying cry. This is what we do every single day. This is what gets me out of bed. Our office is very collaborative in nature. It's one big open space. You'll see on the conference room door, it's one of our core values, which is connect. Those conference rooms are open to the public. This is a neighborhood group that uses

our office as a home base to have merchant meetings, resident meetings. This is a street captains meeting with our work in the partnership with the folks that live in Woodhill. It was very important for us to pull back the curtain on what it means to be an architect or a planner because the folks that we are lucky to work with, especially the youth when we have youth engagement outreach, a lot of those folks don't know what architecture is. I was blessed, at 9 years old, to know what that was. A

nd I think part of our calling is to introduce that. So I'm going to go very quickly through some of our work, reframing it back to that create space with purpose. So obviously, we create, the creation of space. This is in Sandusky, Ohio. This was a 274 car parking lot that was on the water, for all of you waterfront parking enthusiasts in the room. This was there. I thought that it was going to be a really fun project and easy to move through the public space. However, I found out that people r

eally do love to park in Sandusky. And I think we met all of the parking enthusiasts that live in the city of Sandusky. The other thing that happens with folks at my firm is we practice with a little bit of a chip on our shoulder. So if we hear, hey, that's a bad idea. We're going to push back a little bit to understand why folks think that it's a bad idea. And when we got to with Jackson Street Pier in Sandusky is it was a fear of change. And it was a fear of losing something that folks identif

ied as their own. And what we recognize is that the more conversations that we had in the public space, the better the design got, the better the outcome came. And a beautiful moment for us was when we presented the final design to the review board, folks showed up with t-shirts that were printed to support the initiative. And it was really meaningful to see that the initiative became more than the design. It became more than the thing. It became something that could galvanize the community. Fol

ks were talking to each other about that thing, but then they were also meeting about, hey, what do you love about Sandusky? What brought you here? What do you do for business? Who are your kids? How do we know each other? And yes, the space is fantastic. So it did get built, by the way. It did win a handful of awards, including a great place in the state of Ohio through the American Planning Association. And it is programmed very often. And in all of our materials that we share, we're not the t

ypical architecture firm that shows a photograph of the space with nobody in it, because who gives a shit. That's not how spaces are meant to be used. So yes, this works. All of those things aside. This is the best part of this work for me and our team is that folks go to Jackson Street Pier. They share an experience. They might run into somebody that they haven't seen in years or they might meet somebody that they had no idea existed on the planet. And that is really, really fulfilling as a pra

ctitioner to think that the folks in this photograph didn't know that the other ones existed before they shared that experience on the pier. Space, what I will tell you this, I don't want to unpack this one too much, is that space, I think, DAAP, most design schools do a phenomenal job of having to design or helping us figure out how to design physical space. Our jobs as leaders is to find where the metaphorical spaces are and create that. It's there as important if not more important. Find whic

h voices are typically excluded from process. Identify the voices that might need help amplifying. And be part of that ally, be part of that room. That's what we do every single day. Like one of the previous presenters, I draw everything. Our community engagement process is messy at best. And the way that we explain that is have fun trying to create a relationship without getting a couple folks upset at you. That's just how it works. So the width piece of this is really, really important and pro

bably the most important part of our work. We know that this works because of the way that our community engagement has changed. So part of that pendulum swing was not so much fixating on what the final design was but getting out into the community and talking with folks and sharing the experiences of what it means to design together And actually handing somebody a pen and say, let's design this together. Let's figure out what a park looks like in your community, or what it looks like for where

you want to live, or creating game boards for residents to show off what they know and collect information. And so understanding that we can change the narrative around community engagement there was really empowering. And it was a really critical moment for us. Going back to Sandusky, it also gave us the confidence to say, hey, it's not just the four or five people that happened to speak the loudest that are going to be able to control this process. It's inviting more voices into the narrative

because the project gets a lot better that way. It makes a lot of people uncomfortable. But that's also one of the best parts of this job. So I have built a program with one of my colleagues that's called "With Leadership". So we take that same approach, understanding that if we are working on a specific initiative, we only have influence over that one initiative. But if we can get into the city halls, if we can get into the council chambers, if we can get into the boardrooms and teach folks how

to listen and think about things as a design problem rather than a CEO or CFO, it really can change the policies of which, as an architect, I find myself fighting almost every single day, meaning the policies of zoning that are exclusionary by design or systematic racism that's just also all the way through the zoning codes. How can we get to the policies to change the way that this work is done? I know that this works because at the firm, we've developed a series of lunch and learns, where we

teach and learn from ourselves. So each one of these are sessions that I've done and I've created with our team. I call it the speaker series. And what we do is we just share. And I will tell you, just be ready to hear amazing things when you ask a team of 20 plus creatives. Hey, what do you consider yourself an expert on? Because it's probably not architecture. But it's amazing what you can learn from someone if you listen. And so bringing that approach into all of that work. Finally, what I'll

end is with purpose. These are the best days at work, having these types of conversations. And I get to do it every single day with an amazing team that doesn't look like the typical architecture and planning firm. And we do that very intentionally. These folks are allies for the neighborhoods in which we work with. They are advocates and executioners of absolutely fantastic design. We have fun in our work. It doesn't have to feel like a punishment to come to our work. So the last thought that

I would leave you with is whatever your purpose is, whether if you knew it when you were 9 years old or if you're still trying to figure it out, if you're designing a new storefront, if you're designing new signage, if you're designing a graphics package, if you're directing a firm, whatever it is, is to deploy that purpose in a way that it is of service with others. And I truly, truly believe we can change the world when we do that together, absolutely can do that. So I started with I wanted to

talk about the future and where we're going. The God's honest truth is I don't know. And I would be lying to you if I knew exactly what we were going to do next, but what I do know is the spaces that we're invited into, we are going to show up in force. The spaces that we're not invited into, we're still probably going to show up in force because that's where the spaces are that need us the most. And just thank you for the opportunity to share our story with the group. Thank you to my team at C

ity Architecture. And thank you to everybody at DAAP. [APPLAUSE] BRIAN TRAINER: Nicely done. ALEX PESTA: Thank you. BRIAN TRAINER: Thank you, Alex. I can't believe you swear in front of your kid. ALEX PESTA: I don't think she knows. BRIAN TRAINER: Sorry, that was a joke. Thank you for that. Yeah, I'm going to find you later. We're going to talk race cars. But yeah, that was inspirational. Our next speaker is the first person I met coming in today, Matthew Spoleti. He's our class of '23. So when

we were talking about the range from before, this is last year. There you go. With BSDE. His presentation is entitled, "Empathizing with apathy". Matthew Spoleti is a recent alumni, graduating in 2023 with a BS in Communication Design. Be it through annual charity events like Swag Fest, you got me, I'm hooked already, safety awareness campaigns like Show Tools, or helping marginalized groups at UC through his work on identity inclusion with Lisa Barlow, Matthew is constantly looking for ways to

improve the community around him through design. Please welcome to the stage, Matthew Spoleti. MATTHEW SPOLETI: All right, so yes. I'm Matthew Spoleti. I am a 2023 DAAP graduate. I am one of those people who does not know what they're doing yet. So bear with me here. But I think as designers and people who are interested in design, empathy is something that we hear a lot about. And it's probably something that we're all a bit tired of hearing about. So what is empathy? Empathy is, was a big focu

s during my time at DAAP. And it was this focus on, how do we create designs that really consider the needs of the users? And how do we make things that have more intention, and better the community, and better the users at the end of the day? It's why it's called communication design now and not graphic design. And why I still have to tell my dad that I'm not a communications major because anyone can open up these programs, but not everyone can sit through 10 rounds of user testing. But at the

end of the day, sometimes design can even invoke empathy from the users. But enough about empathy. Let's go back to me, the reason we're all here. Can't spell empathy without me. I love music. I'm a deejay and a performer in the area. I love live music. I love going to support my friends. I love meeting new people. I love the culture that surrounds live music. And I love house shows so much. And for those who are unaware, house shows are just house parties that also feature live music in some ca

pacity. So be it DJing or be it live bands performing. It's just a strong part of the last few years of my life. And it's been so important to me. But since these are being thrown by college students, there are obviously a lot of issues and a lot of safety precautions that get swept under the rug. So during my time in DAAP, for my capstone, I wanted to create something that could remedy some of these issues and have an impact on the community that had done so much for me. And that would be somet

hing that would be so easy to do with a patient, open minded, and an audience that was willing to help those around them. Unfortunately, as mentioned, this is drunk college students. So they are notoriously annoyed, pretty apathetic, and have the mental capacity of a five-year-old. Luckily for me though, I was working with the people hosting house shows. So it's a bit different. They're just lazy, a little bit less apathetic because it is their house at the end of the day. So they don't want it

getting trashed, but they are still drunk. But luckily, they are invincible. They will never have any problems. And they will never die. So I had that going for me. But someone at their house will have a problem, eventually. And so I needed to think about, OK, how do we design something for these people? I have no idea. I don't know, usually, when you're designing something, it's with the intent of people wanting to use the design or you're designing something in a way where they will be intenti

onally using it in some capacity. But this was not the case. Fortunately for me though, this was a project that I chose because I was well immersed in the community. And these were people that I cared about, people that were smarter than me. People that had been doing this for a lot longer. So I went to them and I asked them, how can I help you? What can I do for you? So clearly, the problem would not be as big of an issue if the solution was easy. There were a lot of things that they had shown

me, that they had talked to me about. Interviewing them gave me so much good information, and pointed me in the direction of other people who knew more and people who had tried things that I hadn't considered, and resources that I had never heard about. And they helped me send out surveys that I got even more diverse experiences, and more people involved in this project, and more ideas. And with all of this information, everyone was telling me, OK, you have to actually do something now. There wa

s a clear evidence that people really cared about this and that people wanted something to be done. So now that I had all this research and this information, it was time to do the fun part, do the designing part, the part that we all love a little more. So how do you design something for this group of people? I also have no idea how to do that. So I decided to just jump in and meet them where they're at and walk a mile in their shoes. So this is my guide on how to design drunk. It is a step by s

tep guide. You might want to take notes. This is probably something that you haven't experienced before. So probably going to be practicing this as of tomorrow. Step one, you're going to want to buy a bunch of cheap beer. I prefer Miller Highlife, but anything light in the name, too-- Bud Light, Coors Light, any of that works too. Then you're going to want to drink it. We're not just looking at it. We are walking a mile in their shoes. We're going to get drunk. And then we're going to make some

really questionable designs. They will be things that when you sober up, you will not remember making. But that's OK because the last step here is to feed your children to the wolves. You want to show these designs to your friends, who will be sober when they are reviewing them. And they will have a lot to say. This is something that I've struggled with. And I think my time at DAAP has really helped me get over it because my designs are usually perfect. And there's never anything wrong with them

. So it's hard for me to take criticism. But it's so important to go to those people that your designs will be impacting and really ask them because at the end of the day, design should be a collaborative process. It should be that you are just acting as the hands. Let them be the brains. They're the ones experiencing it. They're the ones who know more than you. So after taking my designs to a group of lazy, drunk, and generally apathetic people, a.k.a. my friends, I realized that there were som

e things that I had to do differently with my system here. So my modular poster series that had scalable type at different sizes that could tear down got simplified. Oh, OK. Amber alert. We'll take a second here. It became this set of print materials that were a bunch of different sizes for people to be able to pick from. My visually interesting and unique design style became more of an intentional eyesore. And my contained print only, easily digestible project got expanded to be a social awaren

ess campaign. So breaking down those pivots one at a time. The first hurdle I had to overcome was people's laziness. It was a big day in studio for me when I realized that my set of three posters that were super high level conceptual would make a lot more sense as 26 print materials. Thank you, Marcus, for that. That was a very long night that night. But it's very important-- it was very important step for me to take because people didn't want-- if people don't want to interact with your designs

, you shouldn't be forcing them to do so. Don't give people more excuses than what they already have. It became a lot easier for people to just be able to look at a bunch of print materials and pick, OK, do I want the big one? Do I want the small one? What information do I want to be showing at my house? What issues am I facing at my personal house show? I even went all the way down to business card size, which could be handed out so they could be the arbiter of that information at these shows.

And then people could take this information and extend it beyond just the life of the house show. I had to step back a lot and ask people as well, where were those issues? Where were people able to make those excuses and to not want to interact with it or just be able to step away? And I had to address those issues. So one of those issues was cost. These are college students. And we're talking about safety resources. They're not going to want to pay for it if they already don't want it in the fi

rst place. So I had to think about, how could I get the cost as low as possible so that I could be giving these resources out for free? And so that's what I did. I was able to get the cost low enough that I had these pop-up events where I was handing out these safety resources for free. And people would just come and take what they needed. And if you can't show up to one of those events, I made them high contrast black and white, and all the printable sizes that you can print around campus with

resources, and how to download the stuff you need to print on campus, and where you can go on campus to print. So I really, really had a focus on minimizing those excuses for people. Probably also wondering, by now, about the design style having these white borders in some spots. That was to remedy the fact that people would be printing these on any printers. And I wanted to make sure they look good on any printer. So I designed them with these margins in mind, knowing that they wouldn't be able

to print full bleeds and they would still be able to look good. Next issue was dealing with people being drunk. Drunk people don't want to read. And that's something I had to remind myself a lot, as I was increasing the font size yet again and removing another line of text that I thought was super important to the project. But if people don't want to read, don't make them. Sure, a visually interesting unique design style is interesting and engaging, but sexual assault, as large as you can possi

bly put it overflowing on an 18 by 24 inch poster is going to catch people's attention a lot more. I had to remind myself a lot that good design doesn't necessarily mean pretty design. Like for this project, it didn't make a lot of sense to be making something that would be going on Pinterest. It made a lot more sense to be something that people would stop and say, oh, shit. What is that? And so that's just something I had to really keep in mind and something that, at the end of the day, you hav

e to really consider your audience and what your goals are with your project. The last problem I had to face was people's natural apathy. So I did what I could. And I met them where they go to be empathetic and where they go to get away from that apathy. And that's Instagram. Sure, I'm posting how to be a better feminist ally on my Instagram story because I want to know and I and I care about that, but I also want people to know that I care about that. So by extending this project to a digital c

ampaign, I was able to spread the reach a lot further. And this allowed people to-- who may not even be involved in the house show scene to learn about how to be safer in these environments and to post it on their stories and to share it with other people. And then more people are getting involved. And more people are able to hear about these resources and put them at their house shows. And I was able to make posts that were video posts too. So I could make a video with a local band member. And

he could reach his audience. And I could make tangential posts about how to print on campus and all sorts of other things that I couldn't necessarily include in those printed materials. So I had two semesters and a-- I got to clear this amber alert. I had two semesters and a goal to create a tool that could help this scene that had done so much for me. And after a concerning number of all nighters, countless trips back to the drawing board, a few too many drunk designing sessions, and endless pa

ges of feedback from my peers, that was some of the most helpful feedback I've ever received, I was able to go to house shows and see my resources being used by people actually there. At the beginning of this project, I had no idea how to make a drunk 18-year-old college student care about what to do if someone at his neighbor's house show was potentially overdosing. But by the end, I realized it's the same thing you have to do for any design project. You have to go to the people who your design

will be affecting and ask them thank you. [APPLAUSE] BRIAN TRAINER: Matthew, that was profound and hilarious but on very touchy subject too. So well done. Nice balance. And it doesn't have to be pretty to be good. I like that. There was something-- I know I'm paraphrasing terribly. I think Jonas Salk the inventor of the polio vaccine said, you don't perseverate on the answer. Find the right questions and the answer will reveal itself. So your, I don't know thing vibes with that pretty well. So

thank you. Thank you, Matthew. Our next presenter is Megan Mays, class of 2008, BSDE, with a presentation, "Agile revolution-- embracing product gems for simplicity and success." Megan has worked in product design and development for almost 20 years. She began in the fashion industry as a designer for Oshkosh B'gosh. I wore those. Abercrombie and Totes. I didn't wear that. Totes, Isotoner, before transitioning to work on SaaS-- is it SaaS? SaaS product development. Thank you. Megan has a passion

for building great products that people love. Please welcome to the stage, Megan Mays. [APPLAUSE] MEGAN MAYS: Hi, everybody. Thank you for having me. I'm really excited about the opportunity to be here. I just love DAAP. And I love hearing everyone. So feeling very inspired. Just quickly, I thought I'd share a little bit about my background, kind of interesting. So I say I've gone from soft goods to software. So a little bit of a journey, but started here in DAAP. Graduated in '08. Right away s

tarted working in cold weather accessories. Just some highlights from my career so far. And a lot of problems, I've solved along the way, I've found that sort of my reoccurring theme as I apply to new places and continue to move into different areas of product design and development. We were the first group to take the Smart Touch glove to market. If you remember back then, when you go to pump gas or use an ATM, you actually had to take your gloves off to use the touch screen. So tech wasn't rea

lly up to par yet with the accessories we were wearing. So that was just a cool highlight from my time there. I moved into software development, really focused on real estate tech, which is interesting. There's a lot of that. And it's constantly a growing field, but a lot of cool things along the way. I've launched an AI assistant into the market. I've won a W3 award for best business app. And I'm currently working in CRM, which is customer relationship management. So it's all about your contact

s, and building relationships, and nurturing relationships, still in the real estate space. So today I thought I'd talk a little bit about, what is agile? What does that mean? How is it applied? Agile is spicy, if you can be spicy in product development. It's spicy. You could ask 100 people, what does agile mean to you? And you would get 100 different answers, which I love. It's a great topic for debate and discussion. But what I think is great to remember about it and applied across all of our

professions, it's a mindset. It's about understanding, collaborating, learning, staying flexible. All with in mind trying to achieve high performing results. I love working on an agile team today. They can deliver instant, intimate, frictionless value at scale, which is a very powerful statement. And people who practition, practitioners of agile mindsets focus on innovating and delivering, I would say, more steady value to customers at a rapid response. And they're able to shift. So it's an inte

resting thing when you look at the marketplace, and SaaS products, and how customers and all these things can shift. And you need to be flexible with that in your product development. And typically, teams work in two week sprints. I'm not the biggest fan of a sprint time box, but it is typical across agile teams, which will come into play a little bit later. This although not a cute example, it is a powerful slide. I use this-- this is old. It's a year old. And things are blurred out, obviously,

for confidentiality reasons, but it was a product I worked on about a year ago. And I like using this type of slide when I'm communicating with stakeholders, so people within a company. Just to illustrate, roadmapping is hard. Product development is hard. As a product manager, I can be sometimes spinning 8 to 9 plates at one time of features, development, stuff that's in testing, stuff that's in sprint, under development with our engineers, getting ready to launch, or also in R&D, so features a

nd ideas that we're shaping as a product and engineering team. So there's always a lot happening, but I like to use this slide to really illustrate a question that I was asking myself a lot, staring at this every two weeks when I would cover, here's what we have going on. Here's what's coming up. Here's what we're ready to release to the business and to the stakeholders. I asked myself, almost every time we met, how often is value actually being delivered to the users of this product? So as you'

ll see on my blurry sample, some of these line items are features that maybe would take a week or two, maybe a couple sprints, but some could take four sprints. Some could take six months to develop, depending on the initiatives of the company or the feature that we're trying to build and release. So for me, it was really important to look at this timeline. In the mind of a user of an application, are they seeing that we're delivering constant value to them? There's always this crave for more wi

th our audience in most apps today, where they want to be able to know that you're actually constantly providing them value and constantly thinking about innovation. So as any designer, or product manager, or product person, I started to think about the problem. So this was the problem statement that I came up with, our roadmap was full, as you can see, a lot going on. We were aligned with the business and the strategic objectives, which is always a big piece that you want to make sure you have

covered on your roadmap and your planning. But customers weren't seeing delivery. They weren't seeing these improvements. They weren't seeing enhancements due to a lot of big initiatives, which I think is a pretty common problem. So the question that my team and I were asking ourselves is, was there a way to inject some big impact features with small development timelines into our existing plans? We didn't want to disrupt the roadmap. We had committed to these line items, to the business, to the

executives to deliver these things in a certain amount of time. And so we came up with the gems, which is a really fun way to look at a new framework. I think gems are amazing because they can be applied really across any discipline. The idea behind calling it a product gem is because my team and I were literally mining through data, product feedback, customer testimonials, ideas I had written down while using products of ways to improve them. So we came up with this set of rules. So these were

our three must haves to be a product gem. It must be a low effort add, achievable in one sprint, so not a lot of time can be invested to not disrupt the commitments we had made to the business on our roadmap and our deliverables. Number two was it had to bring delight or value to the user. So it had to be something they liked using. It had to be something that they were awed by, that little sparkly thing that got their attention in the product to make them happy using the product. And number th

ree, must have simple requirements and acceptance criteria. I have written thousands of user stories that are just way too long and that should never be introduced to a developer. So it really needed to be simple, a few sentences to really capture what we were trying to do in the product to make it delight the user. So this was our product framework. And I wanted to walk you through just one example of one that we actually implemented, just to give you a better idea visually of what that actuall

y means. So we called this "add a contact anywhere". And remember, I was working on CRMs at this point. So a software application that's fully dedicated to managing relationships between a user and their contact system. So we had some really great feedback. We were mining for gems. We were finding all this actual user pain points. And this just was a great one that fit into this category. So the user said, I need an easier way to add a new contact, especially when I'm on the phone and I don't wa

nt to click around to find it. So they're on the phone-- again, we're talking about real estate agents. They're mobile. They're meeting a lot of people. And they want to get someone into their database quickly. The product that we had in front of them had a three click process to adding a contact, which you would think is close to the number one thing they're doing in our system. So we thought about this. We had this great pain point. We had this functionality already in our product. So we just

leveraged it. So we took existing functionality. We surfaced it in a new way, not to distract from the way they already know, in a new way. And it took less than a few days to implement. So no impact to our roadmap. We weren't swaying from any of the deliverables. We could keep our commitments to the business. And the great thing, the outcome of this, we had an end-product like notification pop-up when we released new things that we would push out to users. And when we release this feature, agai

n, a little tiny gem, we saw an increase of 98% satisfaction just in engaging with that little pop up. People were like, oh, awesome. This is amazing. This has solved a huge pain point. I thought this was just funny because it's really hard to see. CRMs have a lot of information, but this is before and after. Can you tell the difference? Probably not, but that's OK. Gems are in no way needed to be big or small. Visually, there's no requirement around that, but here it is, this tiny little icon.

And we put this everywhere. So this is the add a contact icon. We put it on every screen within the application. So no longer was it buried under a left side nav, with a series of clicks. It was everywhere. So no matter what the user was doing in the product, they could now add a contact at any time. So it saved them a lot of time, a lot of energy. They didn't have to go find it. The perfect product gem. This is not my product gem, but I thought this was probably more memorable than an add a con

tact icon in a CRM. So I'll close with just, I thought, a fascinating story. This is quite old, probably over a decade old, but it's called the 300 million button. And I think this is such a great example of a potential gem. I don't work on this team, but there was a very famous e-commerce company. And we've all experienced this today, which is why I love this. They revolutionized the way that the checkout experience is. So they originally had a button in their checkout flow. And it said don't h

ave an account, click here to register. And it terrified everybody. So there was this huge barrier for conversion. Nobody wanted to make an account. They didn't want to have to put their information in or commit to something. So they had all this customers abandoning, and people having multiple logins, multiple passwords. And they made a really simple change, a UX change. They changed the language on their button, which I've seen this everywhere. So they were definitely the trend starters. They

changed the register button to Continue as guest, which is now on every online e-commerce site. And it was staggering. So with this tiny simple language change on a button, 45% increase in sales, an additional $15 million their first month and $300 million within a year. So they had all these barriers lifted for users now being able to completely move through, which I think is just amazing. And in conclusion, just a reminder, small changes can have big impact. Delivering incremental value alongs

ide larger initiatives, I think, is a great way to go. And I encourage everyone just to find creative ways to consistently deliver value to your users. Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE] Thank you so much. BRIAN TRAINER: Sometimes it's the simple things that have the big impact. Thank you, Megan, very much. Our final presenter of the evening-- if Matthew was our newest graduate, this was one of our earlier graduates, Don Jacobs, class of 1967, on a case study for winery tasting room. Jacobs graduat

ed in 1967 from UC and started his career in the offices of SOM in San Francisco. He started designing homes at the Sea Ranch in 1969 and moved there to full time in 1970, after receiving his architectural license. Jacobs is the recipient of dozens of awards for his professional work and dedication to community service. While at the Sea Ranch, he was an active member of the volunteer fire department for 14 years. He served as design committee chairman from 1974 to '78. Jacobs has designed over 1

00 custom homes there and won 27 local and national awards. In 2008, Jacobs and his wife Julie Brinkerhoff-Jacobs were inducted into the Building Industry Association's hall of fame. Jacobs received his fellowship in the AIA in 2009. 2018 brought his award from UC School of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning as alumnus of the year. In 2022, Jacobs received the distinguished-- excuse me, distinguished architect award from the Sea Ranch Association for his body of work at the Sea Ranch. Pleas

e welcome to the stage, Don Jacobs. [APPLAUSE] Thank you. Let me get you started here. DON JACOBS: Greetings, everyone. It is an honor to be here. Wow, what great presentations. I hope I can-- mine will live up to it. And by the way, I should say, before I start the presentation, that I'm the same age as President Biden. So if I stumble or forget something, don't worry about it. I'll probably remember it later. So with that, let's look at what does this beautiful oak tree, 80 feet in diameter an

d about 150 years old, oldest thing on the site we're talking about, the Casino Mine Ranch, a bottle of wine, and this four acre pond all have in common. Well, these are the things I was presented with when I was first taken on the site by the client. And this was my inspiration. It sat above the pond by itself. And I just kept thinking, how can I work this into the design because it's such a strategic location. The program was pretty straightforward, about a 3,000 square foot tasting room. The

location, this is not Napa or Sonoma, by the way. This is a much more rural, agricultural area in the foothills of the Sierra, also known as the gold countries where it was discovered by the 49ers, not far away, about an hour's drive east of Sacramento, called the Shenandoah Valley. There are about 30 wineries in the valley. And the architectural style could best be described as rustic. My client has been producing for about 10 or 12 years, a very sophisticated wines. So he wanted a more sophist

icated building, tasting room to accommodate people making reservations for-- taste the wine. Here is the site. I apologize to those virtually watching because I know my marker won't show up. But the pond is obvious. The tree sits just above it, that I had the earlier picture of. So you can see it's in a strategic location. Now, it looks flat, but it's not because from the water, just above the water is a flat area where we made the event lawn. And then it slowly rises up in an S-shape in the la

nd to a plateau, where the tree sits. So that all worked very well and was my second inspiration. So once I started spending time on the site, taking all these things into consideration, I realized that I had to have the building embrace that tree some way. So I put the entry next to the tree. And then I started doing more drawings, more sketches. Here we have the 10 feet of glass, 60-feet long that opens to a grand terrace. And I used this S-shape of the land to reflect in the ceiling. This is

a wall, 10-feet high, rammed earth wall, 2-feet wide, 60-feet long, goes from the outside of the entry through the building and separates the wine tasting area here in the grand terrace from the other functions. A floor plan, you can see the angled wall. This was interesting because I was-- in order to do what I wanted to do inside and outside, I was struggling with whether that should be 10 degrees, 15 degrees, 20 degrees. And I went to a AIA conference in Scottsdale. And I think for the fifth

time, we went to Taliesin West. The guide said, well, Frank Lloyd Wright only used 15 degrees. So I had my answer. And it worked. It did what I wanted it to do. I should say also, on the rammed earth wall, that the client-- that was my attempt at what the client wanted which was one of the few really requirements was to work the color of the soil into the design because the soil is decomposed granite, lots of rocks on the site. It goes from a brownish colored, chocolate, milk chocolate to a dark

, rustic, reddish brown color. So how does an architect work those colors into the design? Well, that was one of the challenges. Now for the landscape architect, that was easy because they could just place rocks around, which they did. And I should say, the truth be known here, the landscape architect was my wife's firm Lifescapes International. She just retired from controlling that firm a few months ago, but they're a great team to work with. We managed to work out the driveways, the entry, th

e parking, and all of that. And you have to remember, when you're designing in a vineyard, the vineyard manager doesn't want anything on the land other than the vines. So every time you put something down, you're taking away from what he wants there. So that was a compromise, but envisioning the project being in the vineyard was, again, one of the inspirations. And I have to say a word about models. I don't think a designer can learn more about their design than when they're building a model. 3D

renderings are wonderful. They do everything they're supposed to do. But when you've got your hands into it, and you can hold it up, and cut it, and make adjustments, thank goodness, while I was here, I learned how to build models. And I still love doing it. And I noticed, in visiting the studios yesterday, that art has expanded and grown. And there's a lot of people doing very creative models here, which is great to see because I'm a firm believer in them. Being a sole proprietor, not having a

large firm like I used to, I had to do everything like checking shop drawings. Well, think about it. You're entrusting your design to a draftsman in a steel manufacturing plant to interpret it into something that will work when it's out there in the field. Scary. So probably eight different times I had to go back to the shop with the drawings. No, this doesn't work. What about this? What about that? And I was literally sweating bullets when this steel went up, hoping it would all be in the righ

t place. And fortunately, it was. But it's also a great experience, as an architect, to watch this phase of the construction. At least it is for me. Construction shot, the tree in its winter mode. I refer to this as the Tim Burton mode because it looks like something he would come up with. It's still a beautiful tree even in that mode. Here's one, a shot taken from inside the tasting room looking out to the grand terrace, which is mud now, and onto the pond, and the trees surrounding it. The pon

d has a resident egret, a resident heron, Canadian geese fly in and out. There's a resident duck population. It's a beautiful thing to watch. And here's the end product. The tree on the left. The entry on the right. The landscaping. This is about 9 months after-- excuse me, the project was completed. Now inside, here's how I handled the colors. And if anybody is ever considering a rammed earth wall, please contact me because I've done a lot of research. And most of what you see on the internet i

s not true at all. It doesn't work that way. Believe me. It's not inexpensive. It's not something that can be done by inexperienced labor. Anyway, I could go on and on, but I won't. So this is almost a rammed earth wall, but these are the colors in the soil outside. Now, one of the things I was happy to be able to do and surprise the owner because he didn't realize it until I did it, until it was finished is that on the right-hand side, where the-- you walk up to the receptionist here. And the w

ine tasting is by reservation. And you check in. And you are looking through the building, to the fire, and the fireplace at the pizza oven that's cooking your pizza to go with the wine that you're about to taste. I didn't like the idea of the dome shape. I didn't think it was going to-- I thought it would distract from everything else. So I just wrapped the pizza oven in Corten steel. That was my answer to handling that. A shot from the grand terrace looking back at the tree in the interior. An

d one of my favorite shots. Finally my inspiration framing the tasting room and the entry thank you. [APPLAUSE] BRIAN TRAINER: I like the Corbusier glasses too. It goes with the vibe. That's nice. Thank you, Don, for that inspiring project to close us out. And thank you for your presentation. I'd like to-- this has been another great DAAPX. Thank you everyone for coming. I'd like to do a special thank you to some people behind the scenes. Thank you, Don up in the-- Dan up in the booth. Thank you

very much. Thank you for Ellen and your team for putting this all together. And if you would, one more round of applause for all of our guest speakers today. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] Thanks everyone for coming. I'm looking forward to what happens next year. Thank you for joining us. You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here. Bye.