--and switch over the presentations-- So thank you so much for that introduction, thank you to Care.

com, and to excuse me, fantastic-- So I want to open with a simple question: How many people feel like sometimes their lives are like Times Square? And I mean in a very particular way. Not just in the fact that there is so much going on and that life is rushing forward at such an incredible pace, I mean specifically the actual number of screens that youre looking right here at. Nielsen developed a report where they saw that Americans are looking at screens for over nine hours a day. And this is all Americans, all ages, different screens depending on the actual demographic, but the reality is that most of our waking hours are spent looking a screens. This is the age of distraction its been well noted and well document and I think that all of us sort of perceive the ever moving, and energizing, and accelerating pace of our daily lives in the communications and the connectivity that we actually are offered creates this endless cycle of moving and back and forth in the communications itself. But what we find interesting at Local Projects about this condition about this Times Square condition, is when you actually look at what people are doing with media, this is actually what people are doing right? People are use media. So there is a very interesting symbiotic relationship its not that we are these hapless victims of all these tweets and all these pieces of content that are rushing back and forth for us. Its the fact that we are actually utilizing it to move forward to connect to communicate to project ourselves into our world. So Im going to share a couple of projects and some of the techniques that we use to actually deal with this age of distraction itself. And Im going to do both in the form of some of the projects were moving forward and then at the end Im going to share two personal anecdotes in terms of how the company that Ive founded has actually evolved itself. So the first technique I want to talk about is storytelling in and of itself. And so storytelling is obviously is and an

embedded part of our human experience its the kernel of our understanding both of ourselves and of our relationship to other people, its how we understand ourselves, our identity both personally and then also as a group, as a nation, as a world, encompasses everything from the bigness of religions to the smallness of the intimacy of the moments that you have with everyone you share your life with. And thats actually what Story Corps is about. Story Corps is a project that we were the interaction designers for Dave Isay the founder, commanded the design team to develop a project that would be not dissimilar from the WPA oral historys project. And the idea is simple, you go into the sound proof booth which were be located in public spaces you interview a neighbor, a relative for 45 minutes, you leave with a copy of the interview and then a copy goes into the Library of Congress. So its essentially a way to make a massive oral histories project documenting the entire nation, one conversation at a time. We have over 28,000 interviews that have been recorded. And then individual ones are actually edited theyre played on the side of the sound booths, theyre played on the radio, they are streamed on the web therere in compilation book there a wide range of different places you can experience these individual narratives. And it took a long time for us to actually explain and I actually made these motion graphics to explain it that this was a project about many, many people gathering together to actually share their stories. So this ability to have a moment inside the booth where you can ask your grandfather the question that you were never actually able to them. Or you can raise issues with your father or with you mother or sibling or son or daughter in ways that a normal hustle and bustle day doesnt actually offer you it a lot of what story corps is actually about. So Im going to play a couple quick clips for you but you can actually go online to storycorps.org and hear all of these in their entirety.

We took off and as we were ascending, before we had leveled off, our level off point was 45,000 feet. So before we had leveled off Pedro began leaving us. And the beauty about it is that I believe there is something after life, you could see it in Pedro.

See the thing of it is I always feel guilty when I say I love you to you and I say it so often. I say it to remind you that as dumpy as I am its coming from me. Its like hearing a beautiful song from a busted up old radio and its nice of to keep the around the house.

So this is the ring that my father gave to my mother and we can leave it there. And he saved up and he purchased this and he proposed to my mother with this, and so I thought that I would give it to you so that he could be with us for this also. So Im going to share a mic with you right now Debora, wheres the right finger. Debora, will you please marry me? Yes of course. I love you. So kids this is how your mother and I got married: in a booth in Grand Central Station. With my fathers ring. My grandfather was a cab driver for 40 years, used to pick people up here every day. So it seems right.

I once heard, actually in doing research for this presentation, I heard a blogger describe Story Corps as a conspiracy to make America cry [Laughter] every Friday morning. And a lot of it is because it is these intimate moments that Story Corps is allowing people to actually generate. Right? You have this incredible privilege to be part of this moment of intimacy and really what the booth is doing is giving an excuse for that interpersonal time between different members of families and friendships and loves. And thats a really powerful thing to actually offer and give that platform over to people and open it up for them so theres no constraints there arent specific questions you have to ask theres no template you need to fill out. Its really just that its an elevational space something that asks more of the participants and gives them the opportunity to fulfill those moments. Another part of the project thats interesting is the fact that we developed it with some level of improvisation. Meaning we had a really crazy idea from the beginning this idea of a stealth project that would get people talking to each other. And so the next technique I want to talk about is prototyping. Obviously this moment of acceleration of change of transitions which is both about new generations coming into our work force and also about new technologies that are giving over new techniques and new opportunities to all of us. It requires a certain amount of experimentation, and its been well documented but clearly the companies, the firms, the individuals and the companies, that dont adept are going to be left behind. So I want to share with you prototyping which is one of the core techniques that we used at Local Projects. This is a project that we developed for the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia. Called Its Your Story, its a simple story booth not unlike Story Corps. Where people go into the booth and record answers to specific questions about America, about freedom, about civil liberties, about culture, about religion. And when you go into the

booth itself, youre basically guided through the experience by a couple whos very very funny, they are the stars of oldjewstellingjokes.com I dont know if youve been to that site but its amazing. So they tell a bunch of jokes and they get people sort of relaxed in telling their stories and then those stories go online and we spent a long time developing this project because we recognized it was an evolutionary step beyond Story Corps. But the key to our ability to basically partner with our clients and develop new ideas is the prototyping process. Meaning we dont just have an idea we actually test it we build it in full scale to every last inch. We build the software we build the hardware. This is all in our studio so you get a sense of the type resolution that were dealing with. Its rough Right? it clearly an experiment clearly things will go wrong, clearly things will break. And thats actually quite the message that we give to clients when we bring them in to test the prototypes, we say to them we dont want you to approve this we want you to criticize this, we want you to improve upon our mistakes, we want you to make this better. And so when we bring in our clients and this is actually shots from when they were looking at it. We have them kick the tires we have them move through it, they are testing things, they are moving through things. You can actually see, just to go back you even notice talking about the age of extraction so watch the fellow on the right as he makes his way from here ok hes got his blackberries out, right? Ok by now hes already checking his email. [Laughter] Ok so here it is you cant even get people to pay attention even youre building stuff for them and so part of what we do within the prototyping process is literally make these things in full scale specifically to capture attention. Ill tell you a little bit about our work on the 9/11 memorial museum, but it has been invaluable to built these physical prototypes for 9/11 specifically around this idea of focus, it has got different parties with very different and very extreme points of view to the same physical

space to focus on the same thing and that creates a moment for negotiation, for mediation, compromise, for collaboration, these thing are actual opportunities to build consensus around new solutions. You can see in this point, this is another piece that be developed for the same museum, you get this level of resolution here that eventually turns into this final piece, right? So it also helps with aesthetic concerns, it helps with design choices, but really its the act of actually gathering people around, in this case something physical that really helps to make it something thats real. This is the last prototype that Ill show. Its very dark I apologize but its for a smart table. We built this in about two weeks while we were pitching a project for the city, the official NYC information center. The original idea was that you could drop these brochures onto a smart table and build a guide book to New York City. At this point, this is about maybe 4 or 5 years ago, we were a lot smaller a as firm but it really wasnt until the CFO of the company saw this prototype with his own eyes that he gave us the project. This is the final project itself. So there are the smart tables and a lot of the ideas did evolve but again if you are a maverick, if you are a thinker outside the box, as we like to fancy ourselves and essentially like to pitch ourselves to our clients, its always much much better to show rather than to say. And so prototyping is a key component of that. We have lots of crazy ideas and we like to talk to our clients about them but most importantly we like to say to them you dont need to take our word for it, we dont want you to take our word for it we are going to build this, you are doing to come over youre going to kick the tires if you dont like it were going to scrap it and start over again. And so the prototyping process actually really helped to build both that trust with people who have questions about what youre capable of doing but it also helps us actually refine the work that were doing itself and prove it to ourselves. So for everyone out there who has ideas that they think are sort of

untenable or difficult to get through an organization, some version of a prototype, a test an experiment, something small something that could scale to something thats large is certainly the way we have been able tackle and sort of push the envelope on lot of different opportunities. Another big strategy that we use is just spectacle just to put it out there in the age of distraction trying to get people to pay attention is no harder than giving them a target to pay attention to, something super crazy something over the top. In this case its a project we did called the Miners Story Project for the Flandrau Science Center in Arizona. The last generation of underground miners is actually starting to move on from this world and so to augment an incredibly rich minerals and gems collection we actually built this trailer built like a vintage trailer but made from scratch out of actual sheets of copper, these holes in the side of it are cut with lasers and they actually produce sound out of them, so the oral histories that we capture inside actually play on the outside of the booth. This is what it looks like when its parked so they set it up for small exhibitions and they go out to communities and this as you can imagine gets just an intense amount of attention. So the project is really set up just to get attention for itself, which then gathers people to it, which then gathers stories, which then produces more information and more understanding of this project itself, so its a whole cycle around the idea of spectacle. And it think thats important to remember which is that there is a point of competition within everyones attention span and we need to meet that challenge. This is another piece I think I would put into that bucket. This is a project we call Dream of Freedom also for The History Museum in Philadelphia. These are all these bent sheets of Corian telling stories of immigrants and the big bulge of immigration in the early portion of the 20th century. So all these sheet of these curved Corian, you can actually project the different letters that people are writing back and forth on top of them. But you get a sense here, right? Of

just how a film can actually turn into a media sculpture which again is something that quite literally within the actual course of the museum stops people in their track. Its something that in the midst of their kids and their tugging on you and you late and you hungry its like whoa what is that. And if you can get that sort of open mouth moment where people are you know sort of gazing at your project and not quite understanding what this thing is, I mean thats a moment when you have people and you sort of hold them for a moments attention span. In this case there are different stories, five different immigrants telling their stories, not necessarily of what happened to them in America but what drove them out of Eastern Europe to actually come here. So the last piece I want to talk about is focus. And so focus is obviously very much at the heart of these different pieces but I wanted to tie it to the work we are doing for 9/11 and specifically around 9/11, because... these are the two memorial fountains and the museum is there in the center and then attaches to underground. But the key I think to focus is finding the commonality, at least when youre dealing with groups, finding the commonality between the members of that group and that something that 9/11 in very much about. This is the opening gallery itself where were playing different stories of peoples own 9/11 stories. So you get the sense, when youre looking at the actual gallery itself, you get the sense of the moment of 9/11 meaning the first voice that you hear when you go into the museum is a voice not unlike your own talking about their own experiences on 9/11. So you wont hear a curator you wont hear sort of an overview of 9/11 in the big picture, youll hear individual people and those people are actually being captured here this is a story booth that we built at the preview site just adjacent to the world trade center, I encourage you to go down there its open right now. Its the simplest story booth that weve ever made you basically locate yourself on a map, it happens in 6 different languages, and we encourage to speak in their own language and their just telling the

story of that day, their sharing their own experience of what happened on 9/11 and its incredible both the individual moments but also the commonalities that everybody shares. So Im going to play a quick clip of what the actual gallery itself looks like and this is again the sort of introductory to the museum. --Plays clip of 9/11 museum gallery And so you get a sense here of that common experience. Its estimated that one third of the world watched 9/11 live. Another third knew about it within the first 24 hours. So it really was this unprecedented moment within history. Its also estimated that its the most documented event in human history just by nature of when it happened and the tools that were available at that moment and so to capture some of those experiences and to gather them for the museum, we created this website for the eighth anniversary called make history, did a worldwide call for individual photos, videos, stories. We had a very particular way actually of showing the photos where we would take these street view images of the present and overlap them with the images of the past so you get this double vision between the past and the present. For the ninth anniversary we took this same paradigm and applied it to an iphone application called explore 9/11 where people could literally walk the streets of lower Manhattan, take a tour of all these individual photos that were donated to the project itself and then also individual oral histories so you were actually standing at the spot where history was made having someone story told directly into your ears and experiencing it directly. From there you can actually see here we were actually telling these individual stories. You can put together various searches based on where exactly you are standing which creates this augmented reality moment. So you can call up history exactly where you are standing. And I think for me this idea of focus is really about finding those commonalities between different individual themselves. So these are some of the

pieces of media that actually got donated to the project itself this is obviously a piece of landing gear from flight 11. This is a picture that we always knew existed but we didnt have until this project launch this is a commercial flight being downed a LaGuardia. This is from the Manhattan bridge a daily rout for many new Yorkers. And then this is an incredible artifact and the story here is that this artifact, which is essentially this crushed fire truck, is actually going to be one of the center pieces of the museum and its something that the museum itself knows intimately. But whats interesting is we didnt actually have a picture of it in Staten Island until the New Jersey National Guard soldier actually uploaded it. Its an interesting moment for the museum, right? Because here we are feeling very much the weight of the world on our shoulders the fact that were stewarding this story, this narrative for the nation, for the world to be able to share it and suddenly something that we know so intimately is being shown in a whole new context by a complete stranger its this incredible moment of surprise and of understanding of the depth of what we were trying to and the reality that our small piece of the story is literally just a microscopic slice of this massive piece of experience that so many people share together. And so weve really taken this to heart and actually reverse engineered inside of the museum many many more moments for people to share their own stories and not just their stories also their understanding of 9/11 to reflect literally upon the meaning of 9/11 and also to document how that reflection evolves over time itself. So the museum open in 2012 were very excited to have you then and the memorial opens this 2011. Im going to actually switch gears now into just two last anecdotes. cause I know that al lot of people here are focused so much on the work place of the future and on actually how to meet this age of distraction headlong and actually create moments of success I think for all these

different teams together. So I wanted to just share two different stories that I think at least I hold sort of close to me whenever Im making choices about our studio and how we evolve. The first is the story of an employee. So this is when I was actually starting out I was 22 and I got a job at the worlds largest museum exhibit design firm and I was very excited and I worked incredibly hard they used to refer to me some days as the energizer bunny they referred to me as the kid lots of times they started calling me the hammer because I was so so hard working and It actually came to be that by the time I was 26 or 27 a competition came In for a large NGO and a visitor center associated with them. Everyone was so busy and I literally heard the principle say oh just give it to the kid, see what happens hell put something together and if it happens its great. Entered this competitions, amazingly I actually won the competition through the firm itself, it was great. And so here I was I was like mid late 20s running this job it was kind of crazy and unprecedented and we came up with this idea for a video booth within the project, this was remember mid 90s-late 90s I mean nobody knew anything about user generated content so it was a whole new world but it was just a really exciting idea like lets ask the visitors, in this case it was about childrens rights, lets ask kids what they think and then well cut that together and put it inside the exhibit. It was very exciting and the client was really into it and I was really into it was like this whole new burgeoning you could see like this is the work that we do now. So we had all these ideas and Ill never forget I was tinkering and working late at night and the principle of the firm walked in it was unbelievable. I was like whats going on and hes like oh I came up to see what youre doing I heard your doing some crazy things. Sort of walked him through and I said heres where the cases and you know its very architectural and heres where the photos and stories etc. And I was like at the end we have this video booth and people are going to go in and tell their own story. And Ill never forget it was this sort of

watershed moment here I was sharing with essentially my mentor that this new innovative idea and he looked at me and his face tuned from sort of like excitement to befoundment and he said what the hell do we care what visitors have to say. I was like totally knocked back and I sort of back pedaled and I said well its exciting for these reasons etc and the clients interested and we ended up building in despite him not understanding what I was seeing as this sort of historic shift and not surprisingly I decided around that time to actually you know leave and start my k=own practice. Ok so Ill tell you another story. I have an employee whos working very very hard and shes super smart super talented. And when we hired her we put her on this project for Sea World. And with Sea World we were tracking turtles in real time globally so we had these GPS on the back of their shells and as they come up for air we can basically tract them. And its this unbelievable project where you visualizing their pathways all the way from the Yucatan to Japan and back. I mean its just like totally incredible. And shes straight out of grad school I dont think she actually worked much in-between undergrad and grad. And shes totally into it and shes like pulling long hours and doing incredible stuff but is start to notice during our reviews a little bit of resistance, right? So you have this moment where Im like well you know I think we have too many things here and we should start to cut it down and my director of interaction or something is like yeah we should cut this to here and she starts sort of arguing and sort of giving a little push back and were not a big studio were like 30 odd people and Im sort of surprised about this Im like well you know I was started going back and forth and I started noticing that its a pattern every time that we have these reviews shes like giving me push back shes giving me attitude I hear from the director of interaction design that at one point because I was essentially starting to get a little, a little peeved right? Like Im trying to improve this, that she

was like having a really hard time and going back and forth. And so I sort of recognized this moment for our studio right? I mean were not a big place and I didnt name it Jake Barton Design for a very specific reason because: I wanted it to be a collaborative environment. And yet here I have someone whos completely resistant to the Principles own insights into the work itself. So we talked about it you know should we get rid of her? Shes like tough to deal with doesnt get along well with people but shes really brilliant, difficult, brilliant, difficult, ok. So we sit down for a review, I call her in Im like look you know we need to talk and our studio is very open everyone sits and this big glass table together we have one and conference room, I sort of take her in. sit down, she immediately starts to cry and Im feeling horrible Im just like what am I going to do. So I said to her look I know you working incredibly hard, I know you are super talented. But I want to make two things really really clear. The first thing is one of the major mission goals of this studio is to maximize creativity for everybody. And I think that youre taking great advantage of that and I never ever ever want anything that I say to lead you in any other direction besides maximizing that creativity, right? Always always always be the most creative, pitch the craziest most interesting things within this studio or anywhere within your life. However, I do want to point out that when Im giving you advice it might be good to heed some of it. I have a couple years on you, I actually have a pretty good track record when Im building this stuff so when Im telling you very specific things I want you to take a moment and integrate them into your work. On the other hand, again, see point A. I do not want to in any way constrain your creativity. So this is what I want you to do, if I tell you to do something, yes I want you to do it. Thats right you actually have to take my advice and integrate it into your work. On the other hand if you think my advice is foolhardy or shallow or poorly considered, I invite you not only do I invite you I demand that you exceed my options. Make me look bad in

front of my staff, make better work than me, and embarrass me with something thats so incredibly compelling and so incredibly cool theres no question we would go with your way over my way. And she was sort of struck back she just couldnt believe that she was hearing that. I said you know on all occasions, and I mean that, I dont mean just at the beginning or in the middle or in a specific side meeting, no, I want you to exceed me, its really really important that you do that. And part of that is my understanding of my original experience where here I was coming up with what I thought was a really interesting idea and actually you know as weve all experienced the ground is shifted underneath our feet. And the movement to integrating peoples stories has really become so common place that now it would seem crazy if you were to say, well what do you care what visitors have to say? Whether its a museum or a company. I mean that relationship is the paramount relationship of our time. And so here I am dealing with the sort of mirror image of myself and all I can do over and over again is to encourage them to exceed me. And its my job to set up the actual constraints, the frame work by which thats possible, and thats the big challenge for all of us. And so with that I will thank you very much.