Eric Thompson

You’re in for a great conversation this week with creative technologist Eric Thompson. Eric staked his claim in the Atlanta tech space through his entrepreneurial work through Georgia Tech, and is now helping support the next generation of makers and creators through his work at Spelman College.

We talked a lot about the Spelman Innovation Lab and how it functions as a third place, and Eric shared his journey from construction and mechanical engineering in New Jersey to studying user experience and human computer interaction in Atlanta. He also spoke about the thriving tech scene here, working with his partner on a food startup called Eat Unrestricted, and the lessons he’s learned along the way.

This conversation is packed with deep insights, and I love how Eric is pushing the boundaries of innovation of creativity!

Interview Transcript

Maurice Cherry:

All right, so tell us who you are and what you do.

Eric Thompson:

Hi. Yes, I’m Eric Thompson. I’m the assistant director of the Spelman College Innovation Lab. And I’m the co-director of the Blackstone Launchpad at Spelman College. I’m also a strategic advisor for my partner’s business, Eat Unrestricted, where we make vegan cheddar cheese sauce. And I’m also an entrepreneur and innovator in my own right.

Maurice Cherry:

That’s a lot. That’s a mouthful.

Eric Thompson:

Yeah. A couple things there, for sure.

Maurice Cherry:

How did last semester go at Spelman?

Eric Thompson:

It went really good. It was a whirlwind. We ran a ton of programming in the Innovation Lab last semester, including one of our signature programs from last semester was our HBCU Game Jam spearheaded by J.C. Holmes. Basically, we had a hackathon where I think we had like 23 HBCU schools sent teams to the AUC and built games over a 24-hour period. They used everything from RPG Maker to Unity to put together concepts, games, functional games over that time period. And we had a competition at the end, and it was really empowering just seeing what these students could create in such a short amount of time. Everything from story and game theory into 3D and 2D assets and putting the mechanics together in the game engines. It was really impressive. So game development is one of the verticals that we’ve developed in Innovation Lab that came out of the pandemic because we needed something that students could innovate and create with that wasn’t an in person maker space. So that was one of the things. And then, you know, entrepreneurship has grown quite a bit at Spelman over the past few years as well. You know, I’m the advisor for the Entrepreneurs Club and our Blackstone Launchpad. We took some students to Battle of the Brains in Austin during SXSW. We had our Spel-preneur competition. We have been kicking off with the Center for Black Entrepreneurship, which is a collaboration between Morehouse and Spelman to kind of bolster all the entrepreneurship programming and ecosystem and get our students beyond just the four walls of the schools and into the community, into the broader entrepreneurship ecosystem. Just our standard kind of situation at the Innovation Lab where we have students making everything from future fashion to eco-friendly packaging for cosmetic products and students who are graphic designers and animators and everything under the sun. We’re kind of like a one stop shop. That’s…one stop shop is like the worst thing you can say as a designer, but we’re the one stop shop for creative and innovative entrepreneurial endeavors on campus, and we try to make sure that everybody feels at home in the space. So workshops relating to everything from laser-cut business cards to building your own interactive robots, to working with emerging AI tools to further your artistic filmmaking animation journeys. So we do a lot.

Maurice Cherry:

Wow, that is a lot!

Eric Thompson:

It was an exhausting semester.

Maurice Cherry:

I mean, I feel like I have like a dozen questions that I want to ask just from that. But I’m curious really about the game jam. I mean, 23 HBCUs sent teams to Spelman. Was that the first time Spelman had done a Game Jam?

Eric Thompson:

Yeah, this was the first time the program was run. So this was kind of like the brainchild of J.C. Holmes, Dr. Volcy, and basically it’s an event to kind of build the profile of what HBCUs are doing in these spaces. I think so often when people talk about gaming and HBCUs, it defaults to eSports. And don’t get me wrong, especially in a place like Georgia where the entertainment industry is such a big part of the local economy, eSsports is a huge opportunity space for students, right? But we also want to make sure that our students are on the creative side of the funnel here, actually developing the games, developing the assets, writing the stories. And that’s something that we’ve been focused on in the Innovation Lab is kind of building students up as creators, upskilling them, writing code, learning how to do 3D modeling, learning…. We even have a game theory class, you know? We have a professor who’s a lifelong D&D DM and teaching game theory to students so that they understand what really are the core components of a good game — of a good interactive story. This is what the game jam was kind of raising the profile for. And we have several classes also associated with this vertical. So we have a game design class. We have a class called interactive storytelling. We have creative coding. Students use p5.JS to create interactive games and stories and experiences of all sorts. And then, like I said, the game theory class. We have a mixed reality club, which kind of works with anything from Unity to RPG Maker throughout the semester. And we have research students who work on projects that involve virtual reality training, mixed reality, even projects, you know, some of these students work on collaborative projects with other departments like literature and the creative writing department, and even experiences to tell the history of Spelman and so on, right? So we have projects with Georgia Tech. It ranges, but all things in this space, Unity being a very central software to a lot of what we do in these. So that’s a big push right now in the Innovation Lab. And it fits in because, like I said, Georgia is very big into these creative industries, whether it be video games…but even, I mean, on the film side, the skills are very transferable from what we’re already doing, right? So that’s something that personally over this summer, I’m kind of putting together a framework for what that might look like of getting some of these same students who are doing this work in Unity, who are learning how to create these stories, who are developing these assets, how to get them more involved in the film industry locally as well. So that’s something we’re working on as well.

Maurice Cherry:

I have to say this as a Morehouse alum, it does not surprise me that Spelman is like light years ahead. I don’t know if I could even say light years ahead of Morehouse, because I don’t really know what they’re doing at Morehouse, but I just know…I remember when I was a student in, yikes, 1999, Spelman was it. Spelman had the Sun Microsystems computers. I think we had some also as well. But we took all our programming classes at Spelman. I came in the summer as part of the Project S,P.A.C.E. program, which I don’t even know if Morehouse still has that. But I think Spelman had it, too. It might have been called something different, but it’s when if you’re a STEM major, you can intern at two NASA facilities for two summers. And then afterwards, I think the goal is like, oh, you could go and work for NASA. Unfortunately for us, this happened right before 9/11, so that did not happen for me. But we took all our programming classes at Spelman, and Spelman had, like, the decked out computer lab, and I was just like, “why don’t we have this at Morehouse?” It was like, going to Spelman, and it was the future, and then we would come back to Morehouse, and it’s like the projects in Good Times, Like, what is happening?

Eric Thompson:

I don’t know. I can’t speak to it exactly. A lot of students do come into the Innovation Lab, and especially Morehouse students, the way I have the Innovation Lab structured, it’s supposed to be like chairs, like the bar. Everybody knows it’s a third place. That’s how I organize it.

Maurice Cherry:

Right, okay.

Eric Thompson:

I want it to be a place where students feel welcome and like, they want to be rather than they’re just there for a class. Right. But Morehouse students always come in. They’re like, “yo, Spelman’s always got the stuff.”

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah.

Eric Thompson:

“How do y’all have this space and we don’t?” But I have some really great colleagues over at Morehouse, obviously, Tiffany Bussey over at MIEC, the Morehouse Innovation Entrepreneurship Center, but also Brian [Lawrence, Ph.D.], who was running the Morehouse MakerSpace, they have put in a tremendous amount of effort to rebuilding their makerspace on campus. So I think that that should be ramping up this coming semester. I think they just opened at the end of last semester.

Maurice Cherry:

Okay.

Eric Thompson:

And they’ve come and talked with us, folks from their makerspace, who even some of their students are our regulars. Right? And they’re taking a lot of notes and applying some of those same things to how they’re building out their space, because traditionally, their makerspace was really focused on STEM engineering students. And, you know, as I just mentioned, the Spelman Innovation Lab functions like a third space where students of all disciplines can come in and feel like they can just hang out and have discussions at our big table, where we host our informal Innovation Lab podcast that’s never recorded but always involves good conversations. So they’re building out the capabilities over there. And I think that’s important because we want to kind of decentralize out some of the things that we do out of the space and let some of the best practices that have worked for us go other places, even if they have to be adapted to different populations.

Maurice Cherry:

See, I didn’t even know Morehouse had a makerspace. So you put me onto something there.

Eric Thompson:

Yes. The Morehouse Maker Exploration Lab. I want to say that’s what it’s called. But yeah, it’s coming on. It’s coming along. They’ve had it, but they’re really trying to revamp it and rejuvenate it now. So I think that’s good. I think it’s important.

Maurice Cherry:

Okay, so you mentioned the Innovation Lab being this third place, and I absolutely love that concept, especially now as we’re sort of emerging out of this pandemic, and I think we’ve seen a general erosion of third spaces. Why did Spelman decide to create this kind of lab?

Eric Thompson:

The initial motivation, and to be frank, I wasn’t there at the very beginning when it first came online, but it’s taken many iterations because it’s moved. Like, this is the fourth location. It’s going to be moving again soon to our new building. Okay, but the initial motivation was that interdisciplinary work is important. It was even eight years ago, it was kind of apparent that the world where a student kind of gets one career and stays in that career their whole life and retires, that is not the reality for everybody anymore. Students, especially at a liberal arts college, are already encouraged to have a broad exposure to a variety of different areas. Dr. Volcy and his colleagues in the art department and some of the STEM departments, I guess they felt like it was necessary to create the space where maker could come together and work on interdisciplinary projects no matter what their background is. I feel like it should be a natural occurrence at a liberal arts school right, where broad collaboration is already encouraged. Well, why not apply that to making and technology and innovation? So I think that was a lot of the initial, you know, obviously personalities involved are a big part of the initial kind of mandate.

So Jerry, he’s obviously a creator, a maker, he’s a Georgia Tech PhD and worked at Bell Labs. And so this was his natural playground, being able to take some of the stuff, know, starts and stops in the classroom, but take it out of the classroom and make it a place that students can do it in a co, curricular fashion. Yeah, I think that was a lot of the initial then, you know, when President Mary Schmidt Campbell became president of the college, that just kind of got boosted, like turbocharged, because she’s coming from running the NYU Tisch School of the Arts and working with the ITP program over at NYU. So she’s seeing that, okay, we have kind of this nascent innovation collective starting. Let’s just put more effort into growing that, because in her mind, that’s also the future. Art, technology, STEAM. It just makes sense. It’s where things are going. So that was also a big help. And so she just retired last year, so she was a great advocate for our space as we tried to grow it over the years.

Maurice Cherry:

I mean, I think it’s really great to see this type of expansion on curriculum, and even this expansion on just, like, interdisciplinary space for students at HBCUs. And I mean, I’m pulling from my own personal experience here. I mean, when I came in in ’99, I was a dual degree major. I was computer science/computer engineering. And the only reason — well, it was two reasons. The first reason was because I wanted to be like Dwayne Wayne from A Different World. That was the first reason. But the second reason was because I had already started learning — or teaching myself, I should say teaching myself — HTML in high school. So by the time I got to college, I already knew how to make a web page. In 1999, I remember making the first Project S.P.A.C.E. website for the scholarship program. And in my mind, because I didn’t know, I mean, I was 18, I’m like, “oh yeah, you do web design on a computer, so why not study computer science?” Thinking that it was just like a direct path to take. And I remember my advisor at the time, Dr. Jones, who’s passed on now, but I remember him saying, “if this is what you want to do, you should probably change your major because the Internet is a fad. This isn’t going to be around. If this is what you want to do, you should probably not look at computer science because that’s not what we do here.” But at the time, it was like programming and Assembly. It was doing a lot of, I guess you could call it hardcore computer science work, but it was doing work on SGI boxes and Java and all that sort of stuff.

Eric Thompson:

And I’m guessing this is like right after [the] dotcom crash, right?

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, this is like the Fall of ’99. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the Fall as in the autumn, not “the fall,” you know what I mean? But it’s in 1999 and I did I change my major that next semester in 2000 to Math because I was like, I do really like web design, but if I’m not going to be able to pursue it in any sort of fashion, then why am I sitting in this class trying to learn C++? This is not going to get me any closer to where I want to go. Not that Math did either, but I liked Math better and I had more credits and I was like, I did the math. I literally did the math and was like, “oh, I could graduate like a semester early if I just switch over to Math.” So I did and I did, but I wish that that kind of stuff was around then. Although that was really just, I think, a consequence of the fact that the Internet and technology was still in such a nascent space that you couldn’t have this type of environment to learn unless you went to a more specialized school.

Eric Thompson:

And that may be also a big part of it. Right? Just kind of a realization that especially right now, I mean, it’s very apparent, but where students are going is changing so much. And maybe those were lessons learned, seeing that maybe that was something that the folks at Morehouse say, like, “yo, this was a missed opportunity. We could have been ahead of the game on this. We had the infrastructure to be ahead of the game on this.” There was like a secret VR research lab that was heavy in existence in the 90s at [Clark-Atlanta University]. They were doing work in VR, basically the equivalent of VR training and metaverse in the late 90s…mid and late 90s. And their lab spaces are still there, but it just hasn’t been touched. But I was just saying the schools might have looked at this and been like, “hey, these are missed opportunities, and it might be helpful to have an engine on campus that is not just a space for innovation for the students, but also kind of a driver of thinking differently about where our students are going for faculty and staff on campus.”

So for instance, like the Innovation Lab, it’s not purely a student-facing space. It is open to staff and faculty and we actively encourage staff and faculty to come and participate. And one of the advantages is that we have staff and faculty that are experts in their own fields, but maybe not experts in everybody else’s field, and there’s an idea exchange among them. And then we also the people who are staffing the Innovation Lab can suggest trends and things that are informative to staff and faculty on campus. What ends up happening is the third place effect doubles, not just for students, but for faculty. And the students sometimes jog ideas to the faculty, and the faculty jog ideas to the students outside of the typical classroom context where it’s a respectful but still more kind of peer-facing relationship where ideas are exchanged at the big table. And overall, the hope is that this brings people up to what’s going on in the world. And this has been more very apparent now with the AI stuff or even the mixed reality stuff, because we have, for instance, that same physics professor that teaches our game theory class is using Unity to teach. He’s putting together modules in Unity that will demonstrate and teach physics to students. He had never worked in Unity before. Not only is now he exposed to this game creation engine, but he’ll probably expose his students to it as they’re learning physics. So it becomes an engine of staying up to date with the latest actions on campus. So I think that’s also kind of, it’s kind of an indirect but very important effect of why these kind of spaces are necessary on campuses. Because obviously campuses are always centers of innovation, but internally even a campus can become stagnant in its approach to education and academia. And I think more than ever we need to be considerate of how technology and how cultural shifts are changing the way we teach or the way we have to teach.

Maurice Cherry:

I went to Morehouse in the late 90s and early 2000s, so I know about a stagnant…I know about what it is to be on kind of a stagnant college campus with respect to that sort of stuff. So I think it’s fascinating that this place is also somewhere that staff and faculty can be a part of. So now it’s almost like this forum where there’s this exchange of ideas, and it’s facilitated by the technology and stuff that’s in there. That’s fascinating.

Eric Thompson:

Yes, that’s how I like it. That’s what I’ve always wanted, that space. I’ve always enjoyed those spaces the most. Those are spaces that inspire me. In undergrad, we kind of had it a little bit when I was at Rowan. We had a space where it was a machine shop and a projects lab for the mechanical engineers. But it just felt like a community. We had a small class. It was only like, thirty of us. We in there making our stuff, figuring out our problems. “Hey, I don’t know why this isn’t working.” “Here, let me show you.” “Maybe re-cut this lever arm, right?” Playing music, sharing memes. It was informal, but it was good. I’ve always enjoyed those places. I feel like those are places that inspire me the most, and those are places where I’ll spend the most time.

Maurice Cherry:

There’s more stuff that I really want to touch on about the lab. But since you mentioned Rowan, let’s kind of shift the conversation and learn more about you. So tell me about where you grew up.

Eric Thompson:

Yeah, so I grew up in New Jersey, central Jersey, down the street from Rutgers University, actually. Piscataway. I grew up near a college town, but it was a great place to grow up. I always describe, like when people ask you, like, describe your neighborhood growing up. I always say, like, imagine Alabama. But like, if you put Alabama in New Jersey. But Alabama in New Jersey in the middle of like Ahmedabad, India.

Maurice Cherry:

Okay.

Eric Thompson:

My neighborhood was like…it was a suburbanizing, formerly rural Black neighborhood surrounded by a lot of Indian enclaves.

Maurice Cherry:

Interesting.

Eric Thompson:

It was a very diverse ethnically and socioeconomic town, which I thought was really cool growing up. We all went to the same high school, so it created, like, I feel like there was a lot of equity there. Yeah, and it’s right next to Rutgers University, which is also, like, a super diverse university. So, kind of, it puts your worldview, even in high school, you know, but even like growing up, I was always interested in inventing since I was young. I wanted to be an inventor. So I guess this is like, my keystone. It’s just like, creating. [I] wanted to create and make things. And so even in high school, I took electricity and electronics class, which was a vocational technology class because it was teaching students how to become, like, electricians. But the professor, the teacher, who was one of my favorite teachers, he really taught a lot of electrical theory as well, like, stuff that most electrical engineers wouldn’t learn until freshman, sophomore year of college. And so it was interesting because the class was like a weird mix of students who were really hands on vo-tech students and then honors AP Physics type students in the same class. So I took that class for three years, and then I did orchestra my fourth year. And then that was…did I sum up K-12 real quick there?

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, I mean, it sounds like you definitely had an early interest in tech. I mean, I feel like you would have to end up going to study mechanical engineering, which is what you did at Rowan.

Eric Thompson:

Yes, and it’s funny. I was talking with Jerry, my colleague the other day. We were talking about like, yeah, I did mechanical enginering. We both did mechanical engineering. He was like, “yeah, mechanical engineering is like the liberal arts of engineering field.” I was like, “exactly. That’s why I did it.”

Maurice Cherry:

I was like, how so? How is it the liberal arts of engineering?

Eric Thompson:

Yeah, like, mechanical engineering is the broadest of the engineering fields…of the four major engineering fields, right? There’s electrical, computer, right? Chemical, mechanical, and civil engineering. Mechanical engineers have to learn a little bit of all those other engineering fields, whereas you won’t normally expect electrical or chemical engineers to learn mechanical design. Mechanical engineers have to learn electrical design. So we really touch on a lot of different subjects. More so. I mean, in my opinion, more so than, like, a chemical engineer, right? So mechanical engineers really can diversify into any engineering field kind of more easily than I think any other things or doing other things, like managerial positions and so on. So basically, I was trying to decide between whether I would do electrical or mechanical engineering because obviously I had this big pre kind of exposure to electrical engineering work via those classes, and I loved robotics and so on, but I was like, I can do robotics with mechanical engineering. And being, as I’ve always been, a person with a ton of different ideas and interests, I always pick the fields that give me the broadest array of options as far as stuff to do. I picked mechanical engineering. I was like, yeah, this will give me the most options of things I could go into. I like keeping as many options on the table for me as possible. I’ve always leaned into that jack-of-all-trades title, even. Like, I remember doing that on my college essays back in the day, and my mom was like, you know that’s not a good thing. Right? When people say jack-of-all-trades, they usually mean, like, master of none.

Maurice Cherry:

That’s the other half of that. Yeah.

Eric Thompson:

And after that point, I was like, I always thought this was, like, a good thing. I thought people liked jack-of-all-trades. And she was like, no, that’s not really what it means. It’s usually meant disparagingly, but I think that’s changing now. Obviously. I think people are going the opposite direction of that right now. So I think maybe I was ahead of the game on that.

Maurice Cherry:

It’s funny you mentioned the jack-of-all-trades thing because I’ve gotten that as well. Actually, one of the first writing gigs I had online, that was my like, we all had different handles that we would have, and mine was “jack-of-all-trades” or something like that. But that phrase about jack-of-all-trades, master of none, that’s not even the full phrase. Like the full phrase is “a jack-of-all-trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.”

Eric Thompson:

Ah, the secret truth comes out!

Maurice Cherry:

So being a generalist helps to have all that sort of broad body of knowledge as opposed to being specialized to maybe one particular thing.

Eric Thompson:

Yeah, exactly. And I think it goes in cycles, too. I feel like for a long time, yeah, it was valuable to be a specialist. And I remember going into college and going even up until grad school, people were still preaching specialization. It makes it easier to find jobs. It just makes it easier for you to navigate your career path. Specialization. But like I said, I think that’s going back the cycle is going back the other way right now, going deeper. I just feel like humans naturally tend to be generalists. We’re trained out of generalizing, but I think we naturally tend to be generalists, right? Because we’re multifaceted individuals who have lots of different interests to explore. I think that’s the natural state of things. We’re kind of trained to ignore those and focus, and that has its place, but I don’t think it’s always the optimal course. So anyway, but that’s why I chose mechanical engineering. This will let me continue not making decisions.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah. Now, after you graduated, you stayed in Jersey for a while. You worked as an engineer. What ended up bringing you to Atlanta?

Eric Thompson:

I started working at a construction outfit as a capital projects engineer, which after I stopped working there, I realized this is basically the closest thing you get to R&D in the construction industry. You’re basically the skunk works for that construction firm. So I got to work on all their newest cranes that they were building out, like equipment projects and so on. You know, be innovative. And it was cool. I think I just felt like because while I was doing that, I was still at home playing with Arduinos and trying to build up products and so on. And so I always kind of felt like I was probably going to go back to grad school to do something like super innovative, cutting edge technology related, even though, you know, after having a six month stint on twelve hour night shifts.

Maurice Cherry:

Ooh, that’s rough.

Eric Thompson:

It was longer than six months, actually. Twelve hour night shifts. Yeah. That was also a motivating factor to do something different than what I was doing. So I still really am prideful about some of the innovative work I did as a capital products engineer. Working on some of these really famous cranes and rebuilding them. But it just wasn’t, like, my passion as far as I didn’t want to be pigeonholed into just doing that. So I decided I wanted to go to grad schools. And I applied to four or five, and I applied to mechanical engineering PhD programs, which I wasn’t really excited about them because knowing me, right? PhD is like the ultimate pigeonhole. Like, focus on one thing. And I was like, oh, no. And then there were other programs like ITP at NYU and Georgia Tech’s HCI program. The MIT Media Lab. And I tried to get into Media Lab, didn’t get in. And I was looking at similar programs like the Georgia Tech program. And I was on a forum like, somebody said, oh, this is kind of similar to Media Lab. They were like, you know, if you want to do, like, user experience, like, UX. I didn’t even know what user experience was at that point, right? Because I remember even searching for jobs at that time, I was like, I know what I want to like, I have a feeling, like, product development. Every time I would search product development, it would always be like the job descriptions on Indeed will always come back as, like, UX and wireframes. I’m like, what is this actually? Mechanical engineer? I’m like building things with wire and frames. I was like, what is this thing? I just was like, I don’t know what this is. I don’t think this is what I’m supposed to do.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah.

Eric Thompson:

And so I got into these PhD programs. I think it was CMU and Virginia Tech. But, like, I remember looking at some of the projects coming out of the Georgia Tech program, the HCI program, particularly, like, their interactive products lab, but just projects in general. I was like, these things seem cool. I’ll do that. I’m going to do that master’s degree. And then I could always go into a PhD afterwards if I want. But I was like, these projects look cool. They were speaking to me; the work. I didn’t really know anything about HCI or UX at all, but the projects coming out of the space were like, things that I felt like, that’s the type of stuff I want to make. So I decided kind of to come down to Atlanta and Georgia Tech. It was kind of on a coin flip type of whim. I was like, let me give this a try and see how it goes. That’s kind of how I ended up down here.

Maurice Cherry:

Okay. I mean, I think you came down here at a time when in terms of just, like, the tech and the startup industry and things like, I mean shit was popping down here by the time you came. And you’re at Georgia Tech. Georgia Tech has the ATDC, which is the Atlanta…I forget what the acronym is for. Something Technical Development Center, but yes, technology development.

Eric Thompson:

Center, something like that. Yeah, like, the oldest accelerator in the country. Like I said, I had only ever been to, like, through the airport before. I was very much like a Northeastern kid playing in the area between New York, Philly and DC. That was kind of my comfort zone. So I didn’t know I knew very little about Atlanta when I came down here. But my kind of personality is, like, whenever I go somewhere, I really try to be in that city. I want to know more about it and get involved quickly. So I came to the HCI program, and immediately I was like, this is very different from engineering school, right? There are people who are, like, artists. People coming from journalism and psychology and computer science. These are all my classmates now. And that was refreshing. I was like, this is cool because art and engineering was so separate in my experience. And to be in that space where having all these people together in these classes was really cool. And I was learning stuff that I hadn’t learned before. Like the first class that they teach you, that they have you learn in Georgia Tech HCI is like, user research methods, which is basically like a psychology class. And I never took any psychology in engineering school. And so it was just new information, new personalities, people, a lot of international students. So that was nice. Nice change of pace. Kind of reminded me more of the environment I grew up in at home. And so I learned a lot of things in that program, and it was really fun. I had a really great time in grad school. And at the same time, like you said, Atlanta around 2016, 2017, things were really apparently starting to pop off. You felt like there was an energy.

Maurice Cherry:

Absolutely.

Eric Thompson:

I was like, I came here, I was like, I didn’t feel this up in the Northeast. Things were really moving. And I remember one of the turning points for me being me attending, because I was at Georgia Tech and HCI program is in Tech Square. And I remember going to events at Tech Square Labs back in the day. Do you remember Tech Square labs?

Maurice Cherry:

I do, yeah.

Eric Thompson:

Being in a space where I was like, all these are Black innovators, I was like, this is something I’ve never been a part of before. This is cool. Yeah, this is cool. Because just by circumstance, it’s not that I haven’t met Black innovators before. One of my best favorite professors in undergrad was a Black innovator. But it was just like, the amount and the culture that came with it. As I mentioned before, I love those spaces that are kind of lit and innovative, right? And I was like, this is lit and innovative. I was like, this is what I want. This is it. So for me, that almost kind of sold the city on me. I was like, this is a place I need to be. It feels like a small town, but it has big city opportunities. It feels like a place where my ideas would be encouraged. I could go and try and pursue them in Real. And so, yeah, I kind of started getting involved. That was my first foray into the know, hanging out over there, going to Startup Battle.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah.

Eric Thompson:

All the CreateX at Georgia Tech. That was kind of the start for me. So, yeah, that was what really kind of sold Atlanta to me to a point where when it came to the end of grad school and most of my peers were going to New York or the West Coast, right? I could have gone home and made a lot of money and saved some money, too, going back to Jersey. But I was like, I feel like I need to be over, you know, I feel like I need to be here for what’s going on and be a part of this. That’s why I decided to stay. And it wasn’t always the easiest path, but I just felt know, it was what I wanted to do.

Maurice Cherry:

Tech Square Labs, co-founded by Morehouse grad Dr. Paul Judge. Yep.

Eric Thompson:

Yeah, there was a lot of people that I work with regularly or more now that I let them know, you know, that event that you put on six years ago or whatever, that was a big part of me staying around in Atlanta. So it just goes to show that you never know who you’re influencing when you do these things because I feel like that encouraged me to stay and then also be a value add to the ecosystem.

Maurice Cherry:

No, the whole just like…I mean, Atlanta itself already has this really rich history of — I’m loathe to use the term “Black excellence” — but I feel like that kind of does apply with Atlanta because, I mean, one, you have this very rich history of entrepreneurship, but also like a super rich history of political activism, civic engagement, et cetera. You can see Black people at every level of social strata in Atlanta and it feels normal. It feels to a Black person, it feels right. It feels like this is a place where you could come and really make some kind of dream that you might have come true, which is probably why a lot of people move here, which is probably why now it’s getting so expensive here. But certainly back then that energy was so palpable. Well, no, but I mean, that energy was so palpable, particularly in tech and within and around Georgia Tech, Tech Square Labs, et cetera, there were so many startups popping up and things of that nature. And for me, who had been like, I’ve been doing startup work here since 2008, it was just so great to see the city feel like it was finally starting to come into its own as a place that was not Silicon Valley, was not. Because, you know, I can tell you, for a long time, people did not look at Atlanta as any kind of a tech city. I mean, there was Georgia Tech, but they didn’t look at Atlanta, the city as a whole, as like a place where we want know, start a business here or we want to open an office here. They just thought, I don’t know, we were all down here barefoot, blowing on brown jugs or something like that. They just did not look at Atlanta as a city for innovation, a city for that kind of stuff. And it has grown, I want to say, gradually. And I think a lot of that is because of the infrastructure that a lot of Black people have created here, as well as just like an influx of honestly, an influx of money from tourism has really helped a lot as well to just kind of bring people here in general and then to see what opportunities are available is another thing. I talked to so many folks who just not moved here on a whim, but they came here, and then all of a sudden they’re doing something else or they found another lane or avenue to venture into that might have been different from what they did back home. But because of the ecosystem here, they’re able to kind of branch into something new and be successful doing that.

Eric Thompson:

Right. It’s a wonderfully diverse economy, and I think that has helped it so much because it attracts a lot of talent. So people come here for work or for school like myself, because of certain hallmark industries. But then what’s changed is the culture is keeping people here more so it’s making it once people come, they see this is — “I see Eric down there. He seems like he’s thriving. He’s living, you know? I came to visit him. Oh, I didn’t know it was like this. Now I want to be down here too.” Right? So it’s a domino effect when you have something like that. But that kind of goes back to my point, is the things that made it work and made it accelerate so fast. Pre-pandemic was a lot of grassroots ecosystem development, people doing the work on the ground to create these programs. So I feel like we have to keep that in mind, that that’s a big part of what makes the place feel real and feel good. Like, tonight is one of my favorite events in the city. I haven’t been to it since before the pandemic, but have you heard of Controllerise?

Maurice Cherry:

No, what’s that?

Eric Thompson:

Controllerise is this event. There’s a couple of offshoots now, but before the pandemic, it was like this event. And one of the first events where it was like, hey, you’re into anime, you’re into video games, you’re into lo-fi hip-hop, you’re into freestyling and DJ culture, you’re into art. Come to this get together. Monday nights. And it’s grown. It’s huge now, but it was this place where I met a lot of people there did networking there. It was another third place where people come hang out, they play games, they get drinks and food. They have every video game set up on the side that you can imagine.

Maurice Cherry:

Wow.

Eric Thompson:

And that was kind of part of it. That was another thing. I was like, this is a place, I used to go there and network. This is the networking events that I like to go to. People freestyling, dancing. A lot of technologists would go there and hang out. So you would always inevitably run into somebody who you could collab with or give you some advice.

Maurice Cherry:

Wow. I’m looking it up now. Controller. It’s like controller, like a game controller? Controllerise, yeah.

Eric Thompson:

Wow. Yeah, it’s real cool. It’s a really cool vibe. Happens at Monday Night Garage. But it started out small. Started out as a small thing. A couple of video games, some lo-fi hip-hop, food and drinks, maybe a vendor or two. And it’s kind of grown into this force to the point where there’s a lot of offshoots of it. Now there’s like, Trap Sushi. There’s an event called a LAG because people realize this is like Black nerd heaven.

Maurice Cherry:

You said it started at Monday Night Garage?

Eric Thompson:

It started…no, it actually started years ago. It started back, maybe 2017. 2018?

Maurice Cherry:

Okay.

Eric Thompson:

At like smaller restaurants. They eventually settled at this place called the Deep End, which used to be across the street from Ponce City Market and they were there for a while and then that place closed and they moved to Monday Night Garage. And now the event is so big that it takes up the whole gGarage. I mean, I don’t know. I haven’t been since the pandemic. They just started again for the first time in like two and a half years.

Maurice Cherry:

Oh, wow. Monday Night Garage is literally right around the corner from me.

Eric Thompson:

Oh, nice.

Maurice Cherry:

I had no idea. Wow. I’m going to have to check it out. Wow.

Eric Thompson:

Yeah, it’s super cool, man. It’s a really cool spot. Really cool vibe. The people who founded it, like I said, it started off very grassroots and now it’s just kind of this very unique cultural force that’s like it’s very unique to Atlanta. I would bring people there from out of town and they were like, yeah, I’ve never even seen anything like this outside of maybe in like…Spider-verse.

Maurice Cherry:

Oh man, don’t tell me that. Now I definitely got to check it out. Wow, that is amazing. So to kind of, I guess move things a little bit forward because you’re talking about startups. In 2018, you started a startup called Walimu, which is around eSports tech, and now you’re also part of another startup now called Eat Unrestricted. First tell me about Walimu and tell me about how you may be able to use lessons from that with Eat Unrestricted.

Eric Thompson:

So Walimu was kind of like my, you know, I was in grad school and I was creating in ways that I had never really thought to before, right? A lot of my creative work was based on inventions like physical products, right? But being in an HCI program, I was learning really more about human-centered principles and I was also away from home and my cooking skills have always been okay. I oftentimes would call my mom while I was cooking on the phone and I would have her on WhatsApp video or whatever and be like, “yo, can you walk me through?” And basically she would take the video and let me ask “hey, let me see what you’re doing. I’ll add this much, stop, okay, put another piece in this and that,” and kind of walk me through on video through these processes, and same thing if I was doing something and I needed my pop’s help and he could come on video and help me out. “Oh, water heater, let me take a look at this.” And I was know, not everybody has these resources, this ability for live help. People will go on YouTube or forums or Reddit or whatever, right? But not everybody can have somebody who they can talk to in live to coach them through whatever they’re trying to figure out in the moment and ask their specific questions and get encouragement, right?

So that was kind of like what the idea was born from. So I was like, this would be a live help marketplace. A marketplace where people can kind of get that mom or dad kind of type of assistance, whether they’re trying to change a tire or they’re braiding their hair for the first time. And so I was really into that idea. And I applied to CreateX and I applied to Ascend 2020, which was being run by Morehouse Innovation Entrepreneurship Center. And so this was my first real foray into entrepreneurship and it wasn’t physical product based. I was like, this is a really compelling problem, I feel like. So I started doing that startup. But something they told me during the process of building this startup is that I needed to focus my marketplace on one particular topic area.

And so back to Controllerise. I was going to that pretty frequently and so I kind of was just like, that’s why I was doing customer discovery a lot too. I was just kind of out in the field, lots of strangers, I was just asking people if I could interview them. It kind of ended up focusing on eSports coaching. I was like, “oh, you know what, let me focus on eSports coaching for this marketplace.” eSports was starting to kind of get some momentum, so people were really into it. It was a trendy topic. And so I started doing eSports coaching workshops with some of these eSports houses around town. Like there’s a Black-owned one 404 eSports up in Doraville. Another Black-owned one was Versus Realm or eSports Arena. So I started doing eSports coaching sessions for kids. And it was like a marketplace. And I was building a new website for people to book coaches on the platform. Basically the idea was that, hey, you can train with actual coaches and get better at the games that will allow you to become competitive in leagues or win competitions or even get scholarships, which was like a new thing, like schools are giving away eSports scholarships, right? eSports was a sanctioned sport in high school. This is all in 2018, 2019, so it was still very new that all this was out there.

So I was doing these things around town, but like around the…it was growing, but growing slowly. I think it was kind of maybe ahead of its time in a lot of ways. And once kind of the pandemic hit and I kind of got into developer snags with developing the new website, momentum for it kind of shifted. And I think a large part of that was that not momentum, just momentum on the side of things, taking their time to finish, like the website. When I made the switch from this platform that was built around helping people with whatever their needs were to eSports, I think a little bit of the passion went out of it. Not because I’m not a gamer. I do like playing video games. I’m a big fan of Civilization, okay? I love Super Smash Brothers, but it’s not my passion per se. I met people, even people who I would call my friends now in that world, in that ecosystem, and you can tell when they talk about video games, their whole soul lights up. And that wasn’t it for me. And I felt like I just wasn’t passionate about the topic area. Coaching kids in eSports wasn’t what really lit me up versus the original idea where I was kind of just helping people in a really human to human connection way, figuring out things that they may not have been taught by parents or people who are like mentors. So momentum for that kind of slowed down and then the pandemic hit and it really slowed down.

And the biggest lesson I learned, I guess, about entrepreneurship is that you really got to trust your gut. At the end of the day, a lot of it is risk taking, right? You can do customer discovery and you can minimize risk as much as you want, but I think at the end of the day, you can’t predict the future. And if you feel strongly about something in your gut, you kind of have to go with it and live with the results of that decision. That’s kind of like a deeper lesson that listen to your mentors, listen to advice, take it in, but then listen to yourself and make a decision. At the end of the day. It’s hard to teach that, but people are always there’s always going to be a million people who can give you advice. I remember somebody even told me that that concept that I was pitching was obviated. I was like, really? Because I don’t see anybody else doing it. They were really like, no, you shouldn’t do this. And I was like, especially later in the pandemic. I feel like if I stuck with that original idea, this would have been perfect timing for it.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah.

Eric Thompson:

So that was kind of like a hard lesson. The other lessons I think you learn from entrepreneur. There’s a lot of intangibles. Doing entrepreneurship is like one of those things where three months in, six months in, you’re like you don’t even realize it, but you could teach a class.

Maurice Cherry:

Oh, yeah.

Eric Thompson:

You’re, like, giving people advice, and you’re like, “whoa, where did that come from?” I wouldn’t have known to give this it’s like a business degree, but on the slick, you’re learning all these things that you wouldn’t have thought you were going to learn, and then all of a sudden, you can teach people how to be entrepreneurs all of a sudden, just based on the mistakes or the things that you picked up in the process. So it’s hard to say a lot of specifics, but the deepest thing is that gut decision making aspect. Yeah, but there’s so many things that I learned, I couldn’t list them all. It’s just I try to be a good advisor to my partner for Eat Unrestricted, who is my significant other, and we didn’t start dating immediately, but we had met for the first time doing interviews for CreateX at Georgia Tech.

Maurice Cherry:

Oh, wow.

Eric Thompson:

Yeah, we were both there waiting for our interviews. And we like introduced…like, what are you, tell me about your company. And so that’s how we met. And so she’s really passionate about food and food inclusivity. That’s something we kind of connected on. And we were both working on different projects during the pandemic and decided to help out. Help out as much as I can with the unrestricted that’s going on. Wow. Three years now.

Maurice Cherry:

Wow. And how’s it been? I mean, I looked at the Instagram, and I can see, like, you’re at farmers’ markets, and I think even you got some students at Spelman to taste test and everything. How’s it been going?

Eric Thompson:

So, yeah, it’s been going good. Basically, the food industry is harder than technology, I think, personally. Oh, I think it’s harder because it’s the ultimate tangible product. It doesn’t just have to…you make it, and that’s it. It has to taste good, and it has to commit with people emotionally. And so it comes with all the emotional struggles that a digital product consumer would go through with a digital product and all the overheads that come with an actual physical product that you make in a factory. So it’s capital intensive, so it’s really hard. But we’ve grown steadily over the three years, so that’s been a positive sign that people like the product. Everybody who tastes it really enjoys it. And so, yeah, we go to farmers’ markets. We’re in stores, independent grocers all over the country. A couple here in Atlanta, of course, where we started out. Right. But we have stores in L.A., New York, Philadelphia that carry our product. And right now, talking about doing a lot of things, we’re kind of very similar. We both overtax our schedules. Basically, my partner, she works on Eat Unrestricted, but she’s also a product manager at GTRI.

Maurice Cherry:

Okay.

Eric Thompson:

And she’s getting her MBA.

Maurice Cherry:

Wow.

Eric Thompson:

We realized that we can’t keep cooking the cheese in the kitchen, not our kitchens at home, but in our shared kitchen. Making this product is very time intensive and energy intensive. So we’re like, in the process of switching to an outside manufacturer and making the product in bulk so that we can kind of just streamline our whole supply chain and provide like…you’d be able to basically by streamlining our supply chain, we can probably get larger accounts to buy our product. So that’s kind of where we’re at right now and what we’re trying to grow into. But things like the brand turned out really good. Shout out to Veritas for doing our branding. Like, it looks really professional, and so we feel like we’re moving in a really good direction right now.

Maurice Cherry:

Nice.

Eric Thompson:

So, yeah, that’s the story of Eat Unrestricted, currently.

Maurice Cherry:

Now I’m curious how you balance all of this entrepreneurial work with the work that you do at Spelman, because it sounds like the work that you’re doing with the Innovation Lab — we didn’t even really talk about the Blackstone Launchpad — but all this work that you’re doing and then you’re also doing these entrepreneurial efforts outside of, like, how do you keep all of that in some level of balance?

Eric Thompson:

Yeah. Very difficult. There’s no way around that one. Life balancing is very difficult for the both of us. We just try to do our best to practice self care and just kind of run our own race because it’s a marathon, not really a race. So that helps the most, I think, right now, trying to keep mental and physical health as best as we possibly can, work on that from time to time, rest, take rest, and then not worry about beating anybody to completion or to a certain milestone because that’s just going to ramp up the anxiety levels too much. As far as the balance with my job, I find it has always actually been super symbiotic. So me coming into my position at Spelman with entrepreneur experience, I’ve been able to really help a lot with the growth of the entrepreneur programs at Spelman. Before I came, Sonya Rush had started Spelpreneur, and it had been going on for maybe a year or two, but outside of that, there was nothing for entrepreneur really on campus. Then we started getting some classes. One of some of my students in Innovation Labs started the then, you know, I was part of the committee for kind of helping figure out how to get the center for black entrepreneurship off the ground. We have an entrepreneurship minor now, now co directing the Blackstone Launchpad, which basically helps boost some of the entrepreneur stuff on campus, including what we have in the Innovation Lab, our fellowships for each of our verticals. So we have a game development fellowship, we have a maker fellowship, and then we have an entrepreneurship fellowship. And so we basically pay students to work on their own projects.

Maurice Cherry:

Wow.

Eric Thompson:

Yeah, so it’s a pretty cool program. So we run that program. So basically, entrepreneurship has taken off. And one of the benefits of the personnel in the Innovation Lab, the team that I work with, is that we all bring our personal connections and networks and knowledge of the ecosystem to the students. So I think it’s been very beneficial to the students. It kind of was always destined to be this kind of symbiotic thing, because, like I mentioned before, a lot of the events that really first sold me on Atlanta, I look at some of the shirts I got from those events. Morehouse Innovation Entrepreneur Center was one of the sponsoring presenters of those events. When I started working at Spelman, right? I was transitioning; I was working as a service designer prior to that, or right after. Around that same time, I was working on Walimu, and I was in a pre-accelerator called Ascend 2020, which was meeting at the Morehouse Leadership Center. So I was, like, going there weekly for meetups with the cohort, and then all of a sudden, I’m working across the street. So it all kind of worked out symbiotically. And so I think the stuff that I do on the side as far as entrepreneurship, has always felt like it’s been kind of a natural benefit to what I do for work and vice versa. The things that I learn at work and the connections…sometimes the connections that I make through Spelman are beneficial to entrepreneurship endeavors. So it works out really well. I think it should be kind of a model to how I personally think we should encourage more faculty to be entrepreneur on the AUC campuses. I think it only benefits the college personally. That could be debated, but I think it definitely is a big benefit to the schools.

Maurice Cherry:

I feel like you have a lot of advice to give. I’m sure you probably give a lot of advice to students. It’s clear you have done a plethora of things projects, studying engineering, now doing the Innovation Lab, et cetera. What advice would you give to somebody that’s like hearing your story and they want to sort of follow in your footsteps, like, maybe they, too, are a jack-of-all-trades and being told that they’re a master of none? What would you tell them to kind of keep them motivated?

Eric Thompson:

I think, man, for motivation wise, I think one of the biggest motivating factors is just that. It seems just like that’s how the trends of our economy and our ecosystem are leading to valuing people who can be flexible into different roles. So for a person, I guess starting out is even though for me, I talked about not wanting to be pigeonholed and this and that, right? But part of being a jack-of-all-trades is being open to picking up all these different experiences. My girlfriend jokes about this to me, but when I was growing up with my dad, my dad worked and had a construction company and one of the things we did was we built out or helped renovate food manufacturing plants. So that was like one of my core memories. Growing up, it’s like working in these manufacturing plants that make some of our favorite foods and being like, this is dirty, I’m never going to work here again. I never want to be in this situation, working in the roofs of these warehouses. And now I’m helping my girlfriend make food. Manufacture food. I’ve learned so much about the food industry from the manufacturer standpoint, distribution, lead times. It’s a whole ecosystem. It’s a whole thing. Now that’s knowledge in my banks that I can share with somebody else or I can apply it to consulting or whatever, right? I have that tangible knowledge and time experience because I’ve been working with Erm restricted that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. Right. I never thought I would be making cheese at 2:00 a.m. In the morning and the next day have to go in and critique a student’s painting and then help somebody with Python code.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah.

Eric Thompson:

That’s part of what gets you these experiences, right? You’re just being open to all these different worlds. So my advice with them would be be open to these weird directions that life could take you. Make sure you document where you’ve been and build networks wherever you go, because that also allows you to be a connector and to be that person at the nexus of all these different silos that can connect people who never probably would have been connected before. I consider myself like a nexus because I play in academia, but a lot of my friends are still heavily into the design world, whether it’s service design or the local IxDA, right? So you get to play in a lot of different worlds. So it’s just really about being open to different experiences and then leveraging the connections and the knowledge that you’ve gotten from all these different experiences to create new connections and new things. I think that’s really my advice to anybody who’s interested in following, I guess, my path.

Maurice Cherry:

Where do you see yourself in the next five years? What do you want the next chapter of your story to be?

Eric Thompson:

Oh, Maurice, I’m trying to figure that out, man. I’m trying to figure that out. So I’m working on a company called IO Toys and I feel like this is my first self-driven entrepreneur endeavor since Walimu. I’m excited about it because I think it’s more at the core of what I like making, which is, like, crazy, interactive, cutting edge technology. So I’m working on this one product that I’m trying to do, haptic feedback for holograms. That’s something that I’m really excited about. And so I want to announce it and then maybe, I don’t know, try to get into some accelerators or I’m not really sure how I want to run this business. I just know that I do. I have these ideas and I want to put them out there and see where they go. I’m always going to have new ideas, but this is one of the, I think, the most core to my passion. I want to pursue and see where it goes. So right now, the way I’m kind of organizing my mental plan is I’m going to see where this IO Toys thing goes, and then after that, I might just try to get into consulting or something like that, something simple. Because I think one of the things, like, with the person with as many ideas as I have, you can always be working on something new. So you could do that forever, but it can get tiring, too.

Maurice Cherry:

Yes.

Eric Thompson:

If we’re being real about it. Right. There is a limited amount of energy that you can really put into every idea that you have. So right now, I think I’m going to put my energy into seeing where this goes, and then after that, I might try to simplify a little bit while still doing things that I like. Yeah, I’m excited about this. I did a logo for it that I think came out really good. Let me paraphrase, I have never been a good visual designer, good user researcher. I think I’m good at designing customer journeys. I think I’m good at designing concepts, strategies. Visually, though. Nah. My best user interfaces that I designed were the ones that I screenshotted other user interfaces into sketch and picked them apart and made my own. And those were mid at best. But I did a logo for IoToys that I’m pretty proud of. I did incorporate somebody else’s design work. I mean, I redid it and made it my own, but I’m going to cite them in the logo. Somebody off of Dribbble, but I incorporate some of the elements that they used into the logo. I’m really proud of it. I think it’s, like, one of my best logos that I’ve ever designed.

Maurice Cherry:

Nice.

Eric Thompson:

So I’m excited. I’m excited about this.

Maurice Cherry:

Nice.

Eric Thompson:

We’ll see where that goes. That’ll be the next step. And then obviously see how Eat Unrestricted goes.

Maurice Cherry:

Got you.

Eric Thompson:

And then seeing how the Innovation Lab. See how all the other…a lot of irons in the fire.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, I was just about to say that. See how the other irons in the fire will keep going.

Eric Thompson:

Yeah. And I bought a house, so I’m like, that’s a whole monster in and of itself, man.

Maurice Cherry:

Nice! Congratulations.

Eric Thompson:

Thank you. Lots of juggling going on right now. It’s cool. I definitely had an exciting time in the city.

Maurice Cherry:

Well, just to wrap things up here, where can our audience find out more information about you, about your work and everything? Where can they find that online?

Eric Thompson:

I would say I’m active on LinkedIn, so I try to document the stuff I do there. It just becomes kind of a repository for me at this point of the stuff that I do. So if I ever forget, I can just go back and look through my posts. Pretty active on LinkedIn. The Spelman Innovation Lab Instagram is @SpelmanIL. So I post what we do in the lab there. I try to document a lot of the work so that people have a really good idea of the feels of the lab and the vibe and so on. My personal website is pericthompson.myportfolio.com, and you can get to that from my LinkedIn as well. Yeah, I mean, I have a personal Instagram, but it’s more casual. It’s @et.llamacasa. So [E-T]-L-L-A-M-A-C-A-S-A. So those are the channels that you can find me. That’s pretty much where I mostly post all my stuff. I think that’s it. And then @EatUnrestricted is the company, the vegan cheese company.

Maurice Cherry:

All right, I’ll make sure that we put all those links and everything in the show notes. But Eric Thompson, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show. I know we had first met, like, back in 2019 doing I did a podcasting workshop, a two day workshop at Spelman through the Innovation Lab once. It’s great to catch up with you again, but then I didn’t know that your story was so rich, I guess is kind of the best way to put it. Like, you’ve done so much stuff. I feel like you’re like an idea factory. Like, there’s also just a lot of things that you can do, but just the fact that you’re also in a position where you’re giving back to not just the students at Spelman, but also to just the entire Spelman community, staff, faculty, and then continuing to do stuff here in the city. These are the kind of success stories I think more people really need to hear about, especially from people like us that are like jack-of-all-trades. You’ve managed to take all of your disparate interests and form them into this career and life, and it all is working for you. And so for me, that’s super inspiring, and I hope for people that are listening that it’s inspiring as well. So thank you for coming on the show, man. I appreciate it.

Eric Thompson:

Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure being here. And yeah, keep doing what you’re doing. This podcast is great, you know, we appreciate that.

Sponsored by Brevity & Wit

Brevity & Wit

Brevity & Wit is a strategy and design firm committed to designing a more inclusive and equitable world. They are always looking to expand their roster of freelance design consultants in the U.S., particularly brand strategists, copywriters, graphic designers and Web developers.

If you know how to deliver excellent creative work reliably, and enjoy the autonomy of a virtual-based, freelance life (with no non-competes), check them out at brevityandwit.com.

André Elijah

Virtual reality used to be a science fiction trope in the 90s, but now, virtual reality is actual reality! Take it from this week’s guest: the one and only André Elijah. His work building games and doing marketing projects as an immersive director is sought after by brands and celebrities worldwide, including Google, Meta, Snap, Drake, and Beyoncé. And that’s not all!

Our conversation began with a slight nerd-out moment about VR Troopers — shout-out to Michael Hollander! — and then André gave a rundown about AR, VR, the metaverse, and the ins and outs of immersive experiences. He also shared a bit of his origin story as a child actor, Ryerson University grad, and becoming one of the first people in Canada to use RED cameras (which are now a worldwide industry standard). André also gave some great advice for people looking to get into the immersive space.

There’s more than one way to success, and André proves that you don’t have to chase VC funding to do it!

Transcript

Full Transcript

Maurice Cherry:
All right. So, tell us who you are and what you do.

André Elijah:
My name is André Elijah and I’m an immersive director working in augmented reality and virtual reality.

Maurice Cherry:
How has the year been going for you so far? I can hear from in the background that you probably have started off this year with a pretty big announcement.

André Elijah:
Yeah, my twins are born in January. So yeah, I guess you can hear them in the background. I’ve got noise canceling headphones on.

Maurice Cherry:
No, no, no. You’re you’re all good. Congratulations.

André Elijah:
Thanks, dude. Yeah. It’s been a bit of a shift, but no, it’s been good. It’s been good.

Maurice Cherry:
How has it been juggling work and family? Are you sort of finding that balance now?

André Elijah:
No, it requires a really good partner that can take care of things on the home front while I work maniacally at all hours of the day and night.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, let’s jump into that work a little bit. You have a studio, André Elijah Immersive, and you just recently celebrated your five year anniversary. Congratulations on that.

André Elijah:
Thank you, sir.

Maurice Cherry:
Tell me more about it.

André Elijah:
It’s basically a studio where we build everything we want to see in the world. There’s multiple parts to the company. We’re building games. We see games as the major catalyst to enable these new mediums and platforms. And so we want to be there and kind of build the content that we think will sell units and sell headsets and make this augmented reality and virtual reality future pervasive. And then on the flip side, we also work with a number of agencies and brands doing marketing projects, ad campaigns, that sort of thing, building interactive elements of that, or activations, augmented reality activations, metaverse activations, all kinds of stuff. So we’re constantly busy, probably a little bit too busy, some would say, but no complaints. This year’s been absolutely mental. I think I’m really lucky in that I was able to survive this long in this industry.

André Elijah:
A lot of people thought that VR in particular was going to pop off multiple times already and it didn’t and really kind of found its footing during the pandemic. There’s a lot of things that came together. Everything from Oculus Quest 2 or I guess now Meta Quest 2. Everyone being at home with the pandemic and needing something to do, the rise of VR fitness was really another thing that popped off and helped sell headsets and find a user base. And so all these things coalescing at the same time allowed for me to still be here and be in business all these years later. Definitely one of the lucky ones in that regard.

Maurice Cherry:
VR as a technology, I feel like has been trying to pop off since at least, I guess at least the ’90s, right, the mid ’90s.

André Elijah:
Yeah, that’s correct.

Maurice Cherry:
It has tried to gain some footing. The first, and this is probably weird, but the first thing I think of when I think of VR is VR Troopers. That really horrible, horrible show.

André Elijah:
That show. Yeah. In the ’90s it was basically a riff off of the Power Rangers because there was the three VR Troopers. I remember that. There was a TV station called the New VR and they carried VR troopers. Yeah, it was a station based at a Barrie, Ontario.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh wow. So, interesting thing. Do you remember the black guy that was on there that played JB?

André Elijah:
Yes.

Maurice Cherry:
He works in gaming. I’ve had him on the show before.

André Elijah:
What?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, yeah.

André Elijah:
That is wild.

Maurice Cherry:
He told me all the behind the scenes. That show is so chopped up. It’s like the video form of, I don’t know, scrapple or something. It’s like a whole bunch of stuff taken from different shows that they cobbled together and it’s wild. It’s not even from one show. It’s from five different shows that they put together to make that show because they have different outfits in VR grid versus when they’re fighting the monsters. And it’s so funny. There’s a video on YouTube, if you want to check it out. There’s a video where the cast got drunk and did a voiceover of one of the episodes. It’s so funny. It’s so funny.

André Elijah:
That is awesome. This makes me really happy to hear, I’m not going to lie. It’s funny because no one knows what the hell VR Troopers is. You can mention Power Rangers and everyone knows that. Occasionally you can mention Masked Rider and people will get that because it’s just Kamen Rider. You mention VR Troopers, no one ever knows what the hell you’re talking about. So, you made me really happy right now.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. But to go back to my earlier point, VR has really tried to pop off since then. You had Nintendo with the failed Virtual Boy. You even had video games that had virtual or virtual in it, like Virtual Fighter. There’s been all these attempts to try to make virtual reality really a big thing. And it seems like, as you said now-

André Elijah:
Even the Metal Gear Solid VR missions. And I think it was Metal Gear Solid 2. It was all these simulated missions that were, quote unquote, in VR.

Maurice Cherry:
But even now, as you said, there’s been this perfect storm of I guess the pandemic and the technology becoming at a enough of a consumer price point where it’s starting to become commonplace now.

André Elijah:
Yep. Hundred percent.

Maurice Cherry:
So with your studio, what does a typical day look like for you?

André Elijah:
I don’t really think there is a typical day. It’s everything. So, right now we’ve got multiple VR games in production. One is kind of midway-ish. One is at the tail end and we’re about to go into certification. We’re working on a number of augmented reality projects and advertising campaigns and things like that. So, every day is kind of a mishmash of touching base with my team to see where things are at, play testing our products and projects and giving some feedback there, investigating new technology that we might be called to use in a campaign of some sort or an activation, pitching projects that we ultimately want to build and do. It’s a mishmash. Every day starts early and it goes late, but there’s really no set formula, just whatever we get time to do.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Now we’re talking about VR virtual reality, which again I’m pretty sure most of the audience knows about. But I also just kind of want to level set the conversation because there’s a lot of terms when we talk about these immersive experiences that get thrown around, like AR, XR, the metaverse. Can you give us a couple of definitions of terms that are widely used in this space?

André Elijah:
Yeah. The three that I use are AR, VR, and regrettably metaverse because those are three biggest ones. XR I throw out the window because that just opens up its own can of worms. So, augmented reality is basically digital information overlaid on top of the physical world. So, whether that’s virtual screens that exist in your room, virtual pets that exist in your space and navigate your space that you interact with, things like that. Virtual reality is an entirely virtual space. So, you put on a headset. There is no pass through. You’re not seeing the real world. You are immersed in a fully virtual world with virtual interactions and virtual environments.

André Elijah:
And then we’ve got metaverse, which is basically a think ready player one basically networked experiences with other people in a virtual space. Doesn’t necessarily have to be in VR. You could make a case that Fortnite is a metaverse of its own with the way that people are able to express themselves with various designs and skins and way you can customize yourself. And you’re communicating with people and you have shared tasks and goals or you can just hang out remotely together. I think that’s the perfect example of a metaverse. And so those are really the three that I try and stick to because otherwise you get way too in the weeds with all the different terminology and you lose people.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Why do you regrettably say metaverse?

André Elijah:
Ever since Zuckerberg changed the company’s name, Facebook’s name to Meta, everyone’s been jumping on the metaverse bandwagon. I think in some ways it’s good that we have a shared language finally because if you’ve been working in this space for years, the terminology got pretty hardcore. You had AR, you had VR, you have XR. And then there’s a whole debate online as to what the hell XR even stands for and where the origins of it come from. That’s literally a Twitter battle every other day. And then we’ve got spatial computing, which Magically tried to use to differentiate themselves. And we have Microsoft with Mixed Reality.

André Elijah:
And so there’s all these terms and everyone has their own branded version of the same thing, which made having that common language difficult. So, here’s Zuckerberg blowing $10 billion a year, whatever to make the dream happening. Renames the company Meta in the spirit of the metaverse. And so everyone now is using metaverse for everything. But I just think if you’re building this content, you’re building real time content with networked interactions and expressiveness and personalization, all of things like that. Now we have everyone saying that Web 3 projects are all the metaverse. You buy an NFT and it’s for the metaverse, even though you can’t use that content anywhere else. I saw an article the other day about an audio metaverse and it’s like-

Maurice Cherry:
Oh God.

André Elijah:
Everyone is just… If you do a Google search every day, it’s just nothing but metaverse this metaverse that. And most of it’s bullshit. If people are selling you stuff that will be used in the metaverse, 99% of it can’t be used anywhere because there’s no interoperability with any of the platforms. So it’s kind of disingenuous I find when people use the term metaverse. I think it’s great because it grounds the conversation to a degree. And if anyone with real understanding will know that we’re talking about networked multi-user experiences that are digital. But for the most part, I think it’s become a bit of a hype train thing and I’m waiting for it to die off again.

Maurice Cherry:
It sounds like Meta, Facebook, whatever, they muddied the waters a bit by calling what they’re doing the metaverse because right after that, everyone of course is asking, “Well, what is the metaverse?” But they’re associating the metaverse with Meta and think that everything metaverse related has to do with Meta the company.

André Elijah:
Yeah, that’s true. But I was watching an interview this morning on the Breakfast Club with Charlemagne, and DJ Envy, and Angel Yee. And they had a Ja Rule on there and he was talking about how he’s building a Madison Square Garden for the metaverse. And I’m like, dude, what now? And so then he said two things later, he had said that he was building inside of the platform called the Sandbox, which is a crypto platform. But one Web 3 real time product isn’t the metaverse. He needs a certain level of interoperability between the different platforms and we need to be able to jump to and from them easily before I would ever consider it to be the metaverse. But it’s common parlance now. It’s to the point where 46 year old rappers are dropping the metaverse now in interviews.

Maurice Cherry:
Right. It’s funny. At work where I’m at now, we just released a print magazine and our next issue that we’re doing the theme for it is Web 3. It’s geared towards product communities. And so I’m trying to find what that intersection is going to be between Web 3 and product communities and stuff. But we were initially going to call it metaverse because of that kind of large encompassing, I guess, general definition of it as so many people jump on the bandwagon. But I think narrowing it to Web 3 hopefully will help with that. But I wanted to get those definitions because I think that along with NFTs and DAOs and all that stuff gets thrown in together and people just get confused and I almost feel like that’s on purpose.

André Elijah:
Yeah. I think the running joke right now is if you want to raise a bunch of money, maybe not right now because things are on a downturn, but certainly a couple months ago, if you wanted to raise money, you just say Web 3, metaverse, and DAO and a pitch deck and all of a sudden you’re valued at $50 million. And I was even thinking about doing some stuff in the crypto space and I talked to a couple investors. And honestly, dude, I didn’t have anything solid. It was pretty shaky. The idea that I had and the investors were like, “Yeah, your company, if you started right now, it’s valued at $25 million. I can help you raise $5 million tomorrow.” And it’s like, “Say what? Dude, I don’t even have a deck. I don’t have a company. What are you talking about?”

André Elijah:
I felt a little bit dirty having those conversations. I’m like, you know what, I’m just going to keep on doing this VR AR thing for a minute and just ride this out. But that was the thing. You throw enough of those terms around in a deck and you got a really big valuation and chances are Andreessen Horowitz is going to jump in and value it at a billion dollars, which is those things that was happening. So, it’s interesting.

Maurice Cherry:
So, I was going to ask this question. I’ll still ask it, but I can’t help but notice in your profile picture you have these Snapchat, AR Spectacles. And that’s one way that people can experience these immersive experiences. You also mentioned Meta Quest 2. Are there other ways that people can start to get a sense of what these immersive experiences are about?

André Elijah:
Yeah. So in the case of the spectacles, those are very much developer only or creator only, as Snap’s terminology would be. So, there’s only a handful of people in the world, maybe 600-700 people in the world that have Spectacles right now. They’re early. They’re very cool. I love using them, but they’re really for us to figure out what the capabilities in a lightweight headset need to be for augmented reality to be real and to go mainstream. So, there’s a lot of dialogue between people like myself and Snap to eek out the most performance and have an understanding of how we want to use these things in the first place. I think in the coming years they’ll hit mainstream and you’ll be able to buy them. But right now those glasses are very much for developers to spell out what the future is going to be like.

André Elijah:
In terms of what can you use today to get a sense of what all the stuff is going to be like, Snapchat is huge when it comes to AR. There’s hundreds of millions of active users right now using AR multiple times a day. So, a lot of the marketing projects that my team engages on are all Snap based just because they have a high number of users, the retention is really high, and people just love using the platform. And so my team has built projects for Direct TV and AT&T and Google and probably some others that I can’t even think of right now all on Snap.

André Elijah:
And typically when we get a request for breaking down the project, it always starts off with, “We’re going to target every platform. We’re going to do Spark AR and we’re going to do Web AR so you can hit the stuff in a web browser. And we’re going to do Snap and maybe even a dedicated app.” And two weeks into any of these processes, they’re like, “We’re just going to go to use Snap because they have the highest amount of users, the highest amount of retention, and the capabilities of the platform are dope. So, I think if you want to experience AR right now, Snap is probably the way to go on your phone.

André Elijah:
And if you want to experience virtual reality, Meta Quest 2 is basically the best headset you can get, best platform you can get. It’s a few hundred bucks. You can go to Amazon or Best Buy and pick them up and bring them home. And it’s honestly the best experience that you can get right now all in one standalone headset. You don’t need a computer, which I think VR was really held back for a while by the fact that you needed a gaming computer for the longest time to be able to drive these things. And so here we have a standalone device that’s basically Android phone on your face. And you get really compelling content. You get, if you want to work on your fitness, you got Supernatural, which is probably the best workout app ever. And I’m really into it for the boxing. We’ve got, if you’re into shooters, they’ve remade Resident Evil 4 in VR and it’s only available on the Quest and it’s probably the best VR game I’ve played next to Half-Life: Alyx.

André Elijah:
And so you’ve got all these games that are being able to run in a standalone form factor. And then if you want some of those PC only experiences, then you can connect with a cable or even wirelessly to your PC and have it be a PC headset as well. So I think if you want to get into AR, it’s going to be Snapchat on your phone for the time being. And if you wanted to get into VR, then it’s going to be Meta Quest. And even with the Quest, they’re enabling augmented reality and mixed reality experiences now, too. It’s black and white pass through, but all your content is color. It’s really compelling. It’s really compelling.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow. I have a client that bought me, well, actually I had requested him to get me a Meta Quest 2 instead of paying me a deposit, it’s still in my closet. I haven’t broken it out yet. I need to give a spin.

André Elijah:
Yeah. Well if you open it up, which you need to, we can play together and you can add me and I will onboard you. That’s a promise.

Maurice Cherry:
No, you mentioned-

André Elijah:
[crosstalk 00:19:12].

Maurice Cherry:
All right. You mentioned these earlier clients that you’ve worked with. You said Snap, you mentioned just for some of the others I’m looking at your website here, Uber, Sony, Drake, Beyonce. When you’re working with these brands, are you seeing any specific trends when it comes to the type of immersive experiences they want to create?

André Elijah:
Early days VR was very much driven by hype. So, you basically wanted to have a very basic project. Keep in mind the capabilities when this wave of VR was popping off a few years ago, five years ago, the capabilities weren’t really as fleshed out as they are now. So it was basically you could look around in a headset. If you were lucky, you had motion track controllers. But you’re still tethered to a PC that wasn’t very powerful, especially when it was driving a stereoscopic two views at 90 frames per second. So, you were.

André Elijah:
Limited in what you could do. And early days it was basically let’s build this thing, attach a celeb or a big brand to it, and get press. And so basically you were building projects just to get press because there really was no market to make money. So, you were getting paid to build the experiences and your metric was how many views and how many articles did you get? And I think that did a lot of harm to the industry because weren’t creating anything really of value that stood the test of time. People weren’t getting much utility out of it and it hurt the space. And that’s why when I say I’m one of the lucky ones that’s still around, I mean 90% of my peers have died off in this industry to go to adjacent industries or something completely different because there just was no way to make money in VR for the longest time until the last couple years with the advent of the Quest and Quest 2.

André Elijah:
So, I think now we’re at a point where we have enough data and we have enough users that we can make a go of this, if you do it right, and really create value for people, whether it’s through an entertaining experience, like a game, or something that provides utility, like a workout app that actually helps people with fitness. Maybe it’s a meditation app that helps with people’s personal wellness and that sort of thing. So, I think we’re at a point now where we’re trying to identify what are the opportunities to create value for people? As opposed to what’s this flashy headline that I can get with a celeb or a big brand attached just for shits and giggles? And it’s a very different way of working. That’s why I pitch a lot of projects because I don’t necessarily have all these clients coming to me. But it’s like, “Hey, I see an opportunity because I’m working with the platform. I have some insight as to the numbers or percentage splits of who’s engaged in what kind of content. And I see an opportunity here if we do it right.”

André Elijah:
And I think that’s the key thing is doing it right because you don’t want shovelware. You don’t want to announce something that never gets out the door and you ultimately don’t want to fail the platform. As much shit as they take, Meta’s done a really great job in building a platform that succeeds for the developers and that you know that if you manage to get to that store and they push you in front of their audience, you’ll live to fight another day. You won’t have to close up shop, you can pay your mortgage, everything is good.

André Elijah:
And I think part of that responsibility is creating content that stands the test of time, that shows up and does well for its audience. And ultimately, I say this every time we take on a project, we got to come correct. I don’t want to build a thing that we ship on day one and we forget about it. I don’t want to ship something that people forget about. It’s like come correct, create value for the platform, create value for the users, and then identify the next opportunity, and rinse and repeat. But the key thing is to come correct.

Maurice Cherry:
I’m glad that you mentioned shovelware because first of all, that immediately took my mind back to late ’90s, early 2000s when companies were just starting to get on the internet. And they were making just trash just to say that they had some sort of presence, like Pepsi world or something like that. Where you go and it’s like, “Oh, you can view our latest commercial.” Why would I want to view a commercial? It wasn’t any sort of intent behind it, I guess, outside of it being just another commercial, another ad. But I think that was also because brands then, this was such a new technology and a new space, they didn’t know how to operate within it. I would imagine now with the metaverse, maybe companies are a little smarter about the type of experiences that they want to have, maybe, possibly, not really.

André Elijah:
I don’t want to anyone under the bus, but no. There’s group chats with people and we see the latest headlines every now and then from the Verge or Engadget and we trade it around. We say, “Why does this even exist?” There’s a lot of that going around still. That’s kind of the nature of the beast to a degree. You got these huge multi-billion dollar companies that are trying to create platforms and they want some big names attached and the people that have access to those big names. It’s the traditional agency model in a lot of ways where agencies aren’t really run by creative people. There’s a million levels of abstraction involved and everyone takes a meeting on every little thing and it’s designed by committee and none of it is breathtaking. None of it is new. None of it’s innovative. And the end product hurts.

André Elijah:
So, I think a lot of these projects and products that come out that are associated with a big agency and a big brand, you can probably guess that it’s not going to be the greatest thing ever. But if you have a really small, nimble team, that’s dope at what they do and they’ve studied the space and they’ve worked at it, they’ve put in those hours, and they get a hold of something valuable, like a brand or IP, then they’re going to knock it out of the park. That’s been the game with everything from the internet to we saw what happened in last year with the NFTs and Web 3 and all this stuff. Did we really need a Matrix Avatar project that’s basically just a rebranded version of Unreal’s Meta Humans? No, I don’t think we needed that. So I think, VR, AR none of it’s really all that different. I think you just need the indies kind of lay the groundwork for everyone else to follow. And you just make sure that the indies get their flowers and they get their paycheck so they can live another day.

Maurice Cherry:
That makes a lot of sense. That makes a lot of sense because what you are seeing are a lot of small studios and independent developers trying to stake their claim. And now the larger brands are kind of trying to rush in. And now that they see that, oh, this is something that I think we can be a part of in some way, now they want to try to rush in and get a piece of it. So, that makes sense. But some of these considerations you’re talking about, there’s so much to think about with, quote unquote, the metaverse there’s virtual wellbeing, there’s economics around NFTs and stuff, there’s intellectual property. How do you factor in these other types of considerations within your work? Do you think about that stuff?

André Elijah:
No, I try and limit the scope of what I do to exclude all that or else I wouldn’t get anything done all day. Our business right now on the games front, we’ve got a couple original games that we’re working on and we’ve become the master’s of porting games. So, we have access to the IP. We don’t have to worry about any of that. So, we’re in a good spot there. And then when it comes to the agency side, obviously we’re working with the brands and agencies. So IP again, isn’t really a concern for us because they’re coming to us and saying, “Use our name and do this thing.” So, I think the way I’ve tackled this, we kind of get around all of that. I don’t think I have, as well as the studio’s doing, I don’t think I have enough dollars for all the lawyers that would be involved with everything you’re mentioning.

Maurice Cherry:
That makes sense. Let the big companies sort that out. That’s what they’re paying for, right?

André Elijah:
Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I love that you’ve got this portion on your site with rejected projects. Why did you decide to show those?

André Elijah:
Yeah, so it’s weird, man. So, a lot of what people do when they’re indie is build products and projects and prototype things. But if you take a look at their portfolios, they only have the finished projects, the sexy ones, the ones that shipped. And you never know about what happened in those three months or four months between them shipping stuff. You never know what the backstory is. You don’t know the genesis of so many of these things. And I found myself for a while not shipping projects and doing a lot of prototyping and having a lot of discussions. And I just wanted an avenue to show it off and put it up as in a way that’s like, “Hey, this is not final. It’s not shipping. It’s not representing anyone. But these are the things that we’re thinking about. These are the conversations that we’re having behind closed doors.” The people that we’re talking to are probably people that you would want to want a product from or at least the conversation with to figure out what this would look like.”

André Elijah:
And ultimately I just said one day, “Fuck it. I’m just going to post all of this stuff sitting on all of these decks and all of these ideas and all these email threads and conversations that I’ve had. Why shouldn’t people know about it? They’re not secret.” I did the work to come up with the idea and get it in front of the right people and pitch them. So, maybe people should know that I’m not just kind of sitting around playing Fortnite all day, but I’m not shipping stuff, but I’m actually trying to get things done. I’m trying to build alignment behind the scenes with big brands and stuff. And so just kind of decided one day I got enough material, let’s do it.

André Elijah:
And to be fair, I’m probably showing only a 10th of the rejected pitches that are pretty decent. Just a matter of I need to find the time to throw all that stuff up. So I think we’ve got, what do we have in there, dude? We’ve got some People stuff. We’ve got Title and RocNation who I was talking to for a while about doing some stuff. I think we got Dead Menace in there. So, there’s enough cool ideas and content in there that it just kind of made sense to put it out there and say, “Hey, yeah, I know all these people.” And if we have something strong, I can take an idea back to them as well. And maybe we’ll do something in the future.

Maurice Cherry:
And it’s probably also just a learning experience, hopefully, for people that are like, “Oh, we just got pitched on a similar project. Maybe we don’t do it this way, or something like that. So it’s kind of a learning tool.

André Elijah:
Yeah. A hundred percent

Maurice Cherry:
Now as these immersive technologies become more readily available, now we’ve got, like you said, Snap Spectacles, we got Meta Quest 2. I’m sure there are going to be more peripherals that come down the line in the years to come. What do you think is going to set each experience apart as these technologies become more readily available?

André Elijah:
I think part of it is understanding the tech and how to make it work and understand the limitations and polish everything that you do. Like I said before, you got to come correct. So when we’re creating these different experiences, some of them are games and some of them are applications, mixed reality applications that add a layer of utility on top of your physical space, your home or whatever. I think user experience is really important. Onboarding users that have never touched a headset before is really important. Letting them feel comfortable and getting them to a point of comfort where they can share with their friends, “Hey, put on this headset and try this thing out.” We need to stop getting away from these high end technologies because this kind of tinkerer space or this hardcore technology space and realize that it’s for everyone. So I think polish and onboarding and taking the ego out of it is really important to grow that adoption.

Maurice Cherry:
Now we’ve talked a lot about your work. We’ve talked for the past 30 minutes about your work. Let’s kind of switch back to the real world. Let’s learn more about Andre Elijah, the person, the man. Tell me about where you grew up.

André Elijah:
Yeah. I grew up in Toronto, middle class family, parents working their asses off to give me a future. Initially wanted to be a child actor and got into that for a little bit. And that kind of kicked off my whole film industry thing. So, did a lot of auditions, was in some commercials and couple small movies and that sort of thing growing up. And really loved the energy of being on set really loved being creative with people. So, that I think set the tone for the rest of my career and seeing how people collaborated and worked under really stressful situations on a set to create something really, really dope.

André Elijah:
And grew out of that a little bit. Just the auditions were a lot with everything I had going on at school. I had a lot of extracurriculars and bands and drama and all that sort of stuff. Kind of aged out and then there was an opportunity when I was in, I think grade eight, seven or eight to do what was called an options program and I sucked at sports. So, it was basically an opportunity to do more creative things. So on top of doing debate, there was an opportunity to be part of the film club. And that piqued my interest immediately. My first time shooting and editing, it was a… My first camera that I used was a Canon and GL1 camera, which is a 3CCD or three chip semi-pro camera from Canon. And my first edit suite was I think Final Cut 3 on a Power Mac G4 with mini DV capture deck and external monitors and all that sort of stuff. So I started, they threw me in the deep end and I got to play with the pro stuff first.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow.

André Elijah:
It was probably seven or eight years before I ever touched iMovie. After I started in Final Cut, I found that whole process of shooting projects and editing them and taking them through post production really, really interesting and fascinating. And I picked it up quick. That just kind of became my thing. And I was always a geek and loved playing with computers. So, the fact that I could create the stuff that people would watch and enjoy while geeking out on these really hardcore computers was a dream from true.

André Elijah:
A lot of the older students, I was grade seventh, grade eight and a lot of the older students that were in grade 11, 12 when they graduated, they went off to work in the big leagues. We had some guys that went off to New York and worked on the Sam Raimi Spider-Man films. We had a couple guys go off to work at visual effects houses. We had some that went off to China and worked in documentary films there. And so I guess they all kind of took me under their wing and I got to see life through their eyes for a while and they onboard me to their projects. So, I was this young kid that was getting really shitty duties on their projects, but it was dope. And eventually I got good at editing. So I became an editor, freelance editor while I was still in high school and all that.

André Elijah:
I ended up working with Radio Television Hong Kong. I was editing some of their documentaries and a buddy of mine that I worked with in the corporate world, we were both moonlighting in the film industry. He ended up going to the American Film Institute. He became a directing fellow there and I edited the three short films that got him accepted into the American Film Institute. So, that kind of set me up. And then I worked at my first agency ever I worked at as a video editor initially cutting together demo reels for them and content for their clients. And then they turned me into a flash developer before flash got killed off by Apple, Steve Jobs, and one letter. They turned me more into a dev than anyone else. And let me see what happened when you press a button and something bounces on a screen. They did that. And I think in a big way kind of set me up to where I’m at now.

Maurice Cherry:
So, you got introduced into tech at a early age, but through media. I think that’s pretty cool.

André Elijah:
Yeah. I really just always love the creative process and being able to geek out to pull that process together. It’s been a lot of fun. It’s been a lot of fun. You see a lot of stuff and yeah, I think the common thread in my career though has been being on the cutting edge of technology. So whether it was the film and using janky ass versions of Final Cut Pro on these ridiculously powerful computers. I did a stint at Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. So, I was a systems analyst for them working on some hardcore service stuff. Years later, after film and agency stuff, working in AR and VR, again, cutting edge of technology. So, I think that’s always been kind of the constant in my life and in my career.

Maurice Cherry:
And now you went to Ryerson University, which I think by the time this interview comes out, people know it’s now Toronto Metropolitan University. But you majored in fine and studio arts as part of their new media program there.

André Elijah:
That’s correct.

Maurice Cherry:
What was your time like there?

André Elijah:
It wasn’t great. I went to Ryerson because the founder of my first agency, he was actually in the first batch of new media graduates at Ryerson. That guy has always been my hero and I love him to death. Shout to Spencer Saunders. I wanted to be like him, so I went to Ryerson and hopped into the new media program over there. And it was very different than when he went to school. I was one of those people, man, I like doing stuff. I don’t really like the theory of things. I like getting my hands dirty. It just didn’t click for me, which is fine. Maybe it clicked for some others, but I like getting my hands dirty. I like building stuff. I like doing the work.

André Elijah:
So, sitting in a class and watching someone code on a projector doesn’t really teach me that much. Hearing about a VHS fine artwork from 20 years prior when we’re doing stuff online didn’t really connect with me. It’s just one of those things. I think that’s been another constant in my life too. I just like doing, I don’t really like the instruction. I Just like getting my hands dirty with the code and seeing how things react when I change things around. So, Ryerson wasn’t really my bag.

André Elijah:
First couple years, I think I was in school full time. And then the last couple years I was working down the street at Canada Pension while I was doing my classes. So, Canada Pension was really cool. They let me slip off to class when I needed to for an hour or two here and then go back to work. So, I start my day early. I’d end it kind of later in the day, probably five, six o’clock. And skip out for, instead of taking lunches or whatever, I’d just go to class. So, at least my last couple years I had real work that I was doing to kind of balance it all out.

André Elijah:
But yeah, go get your degree. That’s the thing that gives you credibility I guess. But I can honestly say, at this point in my career, I don’t think I’ve ever looked back at Ryerson and been like, wow, they set me up for this or everything that I did there led to this. God, no. It was me just kind of downloading Unreal Engine when they announced Unreal Engine 4 and being able to play with those content examples and build my own stuff that really kind of got me here.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s interesting. I have I guess similar experiences to when I was in college. I would imagine that college is still set up this way where your first two years you’re just slammed with classes because you have to take your humanities and all the general stuff before you can really get into your major. And then once you get into your major, there’s not so many classes hopefully. So, you have more time just outside of school to do things. My first year at Morehouse I was ready to go. I was like I don’t know if this is what I want to do. And I stuck it out because eventually I did have part-time jobs. I actually started working in the computer science lab at Morehouse and that’s how I got into, not necessarily how I got into technology. I was into it before then. But I got to spend so much time in the computer lab teaching myself HTML, basic JavaScript, et cetera, reverse engineering webpages, figuring that stuff out on my own that had nothing to do with what I was actually learning in my major courses.

Maurice Cherry:
And so I think if I look back at my time, similar to what you’re saying, I don’t know if I would really recommend it. I could say, “Oh, I went to Morehouse.” And that means something to people in the world. To me, eh, it was okay. It was all right. I got my degree. I got out, no debt. I can say that proudly.

André Elijah:
Key part, right? You got out, you survived, you did it.

Maurice Cherry:
We had our graduation outside. They normally have the graduations outside and it stormed on my graduation, lightning hitting electronics stormed. And I’m sitting there in my cap and gown drenched because the person next to me had an umbrella and he wouldn’t let me get under the umbrella because he’s like, “I don’t know who you are. Our last names just happened to be together in the alphabet. Get away from me.” Yeah, I get what you’re saying.

André Elijah:
At least you went to you graduation though. I skipped mine. So yeah, that tells you everything.

Maurice Cherry:
So after Ryerson, you started out as a freelancer. You were working as a production artist. You were doing a lot of post production work. Was that kind of where the education for you really set in, doing the work?

André Elijah:
Yeah. But even what I was doing half the time there was no template for, there was no real learning other than doing it. So, I was fortunate enough that I got my hands on the first couple RED cameras that ever landed in Canada. So, for the people that don’t know-

Maurice Cherry:
Oh wow.

André Elijah:
Yeah. So that was a big deal. But for people who don’t know, the RED camera was really the first 4K digital camera that film productions could get their hands on. So, it’s from a company called RED and Peter Jackson was the first director that would create a project with them. And it was a short film that he created specifically for the company. And since then, they basically redefined Hollywood and they’re kind of the norm now. And if you watch videos from any of the big YouTubers, like MKBHD, or iJustine, or Jonathan Morrison, any of these people, they all have REDs.

André Elijah:
And back in the day, REDs used to cost as much as a house. So the guy that went off to be a directing fellow at American Film Institute and someone else that I was working with, they both happened to get REDs at launch because they could spend as much as a house on a camera and they were directors. They didn’t want to know how these things worked. They didn’t need to know. So me kind of being the post-production guy and ultimately becoming an onset workflow person, I learned how the camera worked. I learned how to get the footage off the cards, transcode it.

André Elijah:
I could see a camera shooting and know whether or not it was going to die. And in the early days reliability wasn’t that great. And I just became the guy that knew how these damn things worked. And so I was consulting a lot on RED productions. Known as the RED whisperer because I just knew everything about them. I figured it out on the fly. There was no real support network for these things. No one had them. So, we just had to figure it out by the seat of our pants on a really expensive production on set. And so worked with those cameras for years.

André Elijah:
And then that’s kind of what led into me working with Beyonce. So, we were shooting a commercial, a real estate commercial, completely unrelated in New York City. And on the last day of the shoot, I got a message from the director of the Beyonce project saying we’ve got 10 REDs on the floor at a place called Off Hollywood and we don’t know how to set them up. And my partner and I went over there and we got all the cameras on the same firmware version. We set them up so they could do multi-cam shoots. And we got them all up and running at the facility or at the location, which was Roseland Ballroom in New York City, which I think is closed now. And we got those things up and running for four nights and in a day basically.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow.

André Elijah:
For a live via satellite, quote unquote, live via satellite segment for the Michael Jackson tribute concert. We got through that shoot and it was the first 10 RED multicam shoot ever. And we did it for Beyonce and that just kind of we hacked that together. It wasn’t supposed to work and it did. So all of this stuff, it’s you learn by doing. You learn by throwing yourself into really uncomfortable situations and just saying, “Fuck it, let’s just figure it out.” So, that’s kind of led me from thing to thing and it hasn’t failed me yet.

Maurice Cherry:
Now you founded a studio back then, Last Step Studios. And based on what I’ve heard, your current studio evolved out of that over the course of a weekend. How did that happen?

André Elijah:
Yeah, I’ve had multiple studios. I guess, multiple studios under different names. And I keep on using up all the cool names. That’s why it’s Andre Elijah Immersive now because I just can’t come up with any more cool names that should be the name of a company. So in that company, I founded it with another student from Ryerson and we wanted to make video games. And on day one we realized, oh, crap, video games are very expensive to make, very expensive. And we don’t have money because we’re broke students. And so we pivoted immediately to doing architectural visualization work using real time engines. And so it was initially Unreal Engine.

André Elijah:
The work that we were creating in Unreal, it looked cool, it was realistic looking, and we could change material on couches and on walls and stuff. And that impressed some people, but they ultimately came to us for more traditional rendering work or dollhouse renderings and some static renderings, that sort of thing, because game engines was so new to the real estate market. It didn’t really get a lot of pickup. Ultimately, I think we wanted to do different things.

André Elijah:
I saw the demo of the HoloLens. I think it was at E3 where they showed off the Minecraft demo in AR. And I thought that was really kind of awe inspiring. And I wanted to try my hand at making something like that. I didn’t have the computers to do it. I didn’t have the know how to do it. I just wanted to do it. And at the same time, the Oculus Kickstarter had popped off and VR was trying to find its footing with Palmer at the helm. And there was something new and sexy and crazy about it that I really wanted to be part of. And it just reminded me of the same energy of so many other things that I chased over the years, whether it was doing the post production stuff in Final Cut or I was getting hands on time with the RED.

André Elijah:
It was just kind of new and unexplored and I wanted in. And I saw it. I saw it pretty clearly in my head what it could be. And I just figured I had a chance. So, literally two founders kind of going in different directions and we dissolved the company over a weekend. And by Monday my new company was spun up and I started trying to land that kind of work. And so tried to figure out ways to differentiate myself from everyone else. And I didn’t really know what to do. And I had never 3D modeled in my life. I was the engine guy, my old co-founder was the modeler.

André Elijah:
And I figured, you know what, if I’m going to do anything, I’m just going to go build Drake’s house and see what happens. And so I learned to 3D model and I built out Drake’s house, which I think was I don’t remember now. I think it’s 25,000 square feet or something ridiculous like that, his new house. The floor plans have leaked on the BBC. And so I had the floor plans and I built it out. I made a website for it, sent it out to a couple places, a couple media outlets. It wasn’t anything… I didn’t do a full court press for it or anything.

André Elijah:
And all of a sudden everyone picked up this goddamn house and there were stories everywhere. Teen Vogue picked it up and the Verge or Polygon picked it up, everyone. And I got millions of views in record time. And everyone started hitting me up, platforms and technology companies and other brands. And they’re like, “What are you going to do with this thing? Can you do product placement in this house? Can we roll it out to our platform?” Et cetera. And it took on a life of its own for a while there, trying to figure out what it could be.

André Elijah:
And that kind of gave me the legitimacy in a weird way. It was a horrible project technically. My computers were really weak, so I couldn’t render shadows properly. Couldn’t render post processing. My processors were too weak so I couldn’t even bake the shadows. It was God awful. But again, you have a big name, like Drake, who he’s huge now, but he was big then. You take his name and then you add on something crazy like VR and all of a sudden that’s the perfect combination there for some headlines.

André Elijah:
And so from there, I got a bunch of companies and agencies reaching out to me to do some work and then created the first new home sales suite in real estate for Canada off the back of that. And it actually happened to be for Drake’s agency, the agency that represented him for a bunch of stuff and worked with him for a bunch of stuff. They hit me up to do the first new home sales suite in Canada using VR. And so we rolled that out and prospective home buyers actually went into VR in the sales office and checked out their future homes. And so we rolled those out. And I did some stuff out of Miami. And then all of a sudden I’m doing VR for real estate. The thing that I was intending to do with my old co-founder I’m now doing on my own. And from there other companies started reaching, startups started reaching out to me saying, “Can you prototype ideas of ours? Because we don’t have the talent in house.” So, that was a stepping stone.

André Elijah:
And then suddenly bigger companies are more amenable to me working on their stuff or they’re reaching out. Pretty gradual growth until a couple years ago. Epic Games gave me a MegaGrant for an educational project that I’ve been working on called Innocence in the Fire. And that was the first major co-sign that I ever got. And they were really great. And so as soon as I announced, “Hey guys, I got an Epic MegaGrant.” Bam, life went into overdrive and Snap took me in and has been really supportive. And they keep on shining a light on me with different profiles and different features at their conferences and stuff. And then now I’m working with Meta. I’m working with some other companies. So, it’s been, the last couple years have kind of everything’s gone into overdrive, which I really love and appreciate. But yeah, it took a minute and some craftiness to get in position for that in the first place.

Maurice Cherry:
It sounds like things really kind of snowballed after that. I think it was Drizzy Manor, that was what you called it, right?

André Elijah:
Yep, exactly. Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Things kind of just snowballed after that. And now you’re also on the AR, VR program advisory board at Vancouver Film School. How has that experience been for you in a way entering back into education? Although not as a student this time, of course.

André Elijah:
Here, we’ve got a school that has some really amazing graduates. We’ve got Neill Blomkamp went there. End of story, Neill Blomkamp, it’s done, it’s a lock. We’ve got this really amazing traditional film school that wants to explore new media and a new platform. And they’ve really crafted amazing programs and talent to foster that growth. So, initially there was a buddy of mine that was teaching there. He had me just give a guest lecture. The students were really into it. They asked really great questions. And I was honestly impressed because I think certainly myself and my peers weren’t solid students like they were when we were younger. Just talking to the staff and the program coordinator, I was like, “Wow, this is legit. And let’s figure it out.” They just kept on calling me back to give talks.

André Elijah:
And for the project that ended up getting the Epic MegaGrant, we actually used some of the students for their thesis project. We let them build a prototype of the game. The work was really great. And so just in conversations of how do you teach the next wave of people how to get into the space and teach them to prepare for the future. That just kind of became the onboarding to bring me in as advisor for the program. And it’s been great. They take our ideas seriously. The students that they have are amazing.

André Elijah:
The talent they have teaching, they’re all practicing professionals. It’s not those who can’t teach. It’s like that’s not the situation here. They’re all professionals in the space. They’re all people I work with in the space doing really dope shit. And so the students are really lucky. I wish all these teachers were at Ryerson when I was there because maybe I’d take something from it. But no, it’s been a really great experience working with the school and seeing the impact that it’s had on these students and seeing where they land after they graduate has been really dope.

Maurice Cherry:
Now you’ve been quoted as saying that your biggest goal for the future is to set the standard for interactive and immersive education. Where does the passion for that goal come from?

André Elijah:
I went to private school when I was a kid and the best we had were VHS’s and DVDs that were horribly boring. And I think that if you’re paying that much in tuition, maybe there should be a better learning experience there. And I think with the accessibility of the Meta Quest or Snap on your phone, the level of access to content has never been more amazing and higher. And I think that if we, instead of doing shooty, shooty games all the time, we tried to engage people in new concepts and ideas and reinforce learnings, I think we’d be further along. So, I just think ultimately that if we were to use all these skills to build something dope, maybe the future has a chance, particularly around climate education.

André Elijah:
We keep on putting people into videos of this is a polar bear dying or this is the world on fire and it hasn’t really made enough of an impact. You just kind of see the trajectory that the world is on. It’s not great. So, I think that if we were to engage people more and actually show them the effects of their actions in a digital environment or in a simulation, that maybe it’ll hit different. The study’s have proven that if you experience things in VR, your retention is way higher. You understand concepts way more clearly in VR. And I think that if we were to use that for some good, maybe the world would be on a better path. So, that’s just one of my weird altruistic things. But I’m hoping that by making these games that are mainstream and onboard more users and get more people there, there’s a viable path to creating really dope immersive content for education. And then maybe we can turn this world around in a decade from now. That’s the hope anyway.

Maurice Cherry:
Now your career to date, as you’ve described it just in this interview, has been extremely prolific. Who are some of the people that have really helped you out over the years, whether there’s been mentors, peers, anyone?

André Elijah:
Everyone, man. I think this whole industry. I would say the immersive industry is more open and friendly and awesome than any other industry I’ve been part of. I think at the heart of it, we’re all a bunch of misfits trying to find our way and trying to lock in and create the future that we all want. And so it’s been ultimately way more collaborative than any other industry I’ve been part of. So, it doesn’t really matter if it’s a major executive at a company that’s doing immersive stuff or it’s a lowly developer that specializes in some weird thing. The whole industry has been really collaborative and really cool. And there’s you basically check your ego at the door. So, to single anyone out would be kind of weird because I’ve literally gone up to the top execs at Meta, formerly Facebook, and been like, “Hey, I really want a meeting with so and so.” And then they send a message and the next day I get a meeting with that person.

André Elijah:
It’s just one of these things. I think VR and AR, I don’t think anyone that’s in it, really in it isn’t a geek. I think we all identify with each other in really profound ways. And so there’s a level of humility involved in the industry that’s been really great. You see inside of industry Slacks and Discord groups and everything. We’re all sharing information. We’re all sharing learnings. We’re all helping refine each other’s pitches and play testing each other’s games and applications. And as much as it’s Andre Elijah Immersive, there’s a lot of people on my team and there’s a lot of people not on my team that have helped out and helped to get us where we are now. So, it’s really one of those things, it takes a village to raise a kid. So, I think we’re no different

Maurice Cherry:
If there’s somebody that’s out there that’s been listening to this and they want to follow in your footsteps, whether it’s I would imagine just getting into this world of AR and VR, what advice would you give them?

André Elijah:
I would say just do it. I don’t want to sound flippant with that, but this is one of those industries where it doesn’t take a whole lot to be able to get in and start building. When I worked in film years ago, you needed more than a Handycam to have a good looking image. You needed more than just iMovie to have a really solid edit and final delivery. You need the color correcting and all that sort of stuff. And so you have all the software and hardware considerations and all that. With AR and VR, you need a not so powerful computer and a $300 headset and you’re off to the races. Game engines are free. Unity and Unreal are free. They have lots of example projects and tutorials online that you can follow to find your footing and start building, but you don’t need a powerful computer because these headsets are all running mobile parts.

André Elijah:
So, you’re not pushing for photorealism for these projects. So I think for under a grand ultimately you can be set up and you can start building. And so I think that removes a lot of the barriers and a lot of the excuses as to why you can’t get into it. So, I would say literally just Google some of your favorite games and how to rebuild some of those mechanics. There’s literally YouTube channels that just show you in Unreal or in Unity how to build mechanics from games that we all play and like. Learning about the interaction systems and how to set up a project and how to compile. This is all stuff that’s available at your fingertips. So I think more than ever in this industry you want to do it. You can just go ahead and do it. You don’t need to ask for permission. There’s no one gate keeping any crazy hardware or software. You can literally just start.

Maurice Cherry:
What do you think you would’ve went into if you didn’t get into this field?

André Elijah:
I asked myself that a lot. For a while I wanted to be an entertainment and intellectual property lawyer. And for a while I wanted to be a robotics engineer. And for a while I also wanted to be a professional jazz trumpet player. I played trumpet for a number of years.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice.

André Elijah:
It was going to be one of those three things.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. So given how fast all of this is progressing, the technology and everything, where do you see yourself in the next five years? What do you want to be doing?

André Elijah:
I’m going to be shipping a number of games in the next two to three years and then probably go investor. My team members know that I can maintain this pace for a couple more years. They’re all young. They got a lot longer to go and I want to be the first check in on their companies when they go ahead and do their own thing. And I tell them all the time, “I need you guys to bang out these games on these projects and we’re going to do them together. And you’re going to have them to your name and it’s going to be great. And then you’re going to go out and you’re going to do your own thing and you’re going to stomp all over me and it’ll be fun. I just want to be the one to fund you.” So, I really want to be the ones that open some doors for them once they’re done with my stuff and just help the next generation I think.

André Elijah:
I think there’s been this whole thing since early web days, and then you saw the shift to the app store and everything and all these tech companies, there’s a certain progression. And you need to go get your Tech Crunch articles and your press and go get your venture capital and all this sort of stuff. And I think there’s other ways to do that. I think if you’re really good at shipping products and projects that connect with people, there’s a different way forward. And so I just want to impart my wisdom on these people and I know a lot of people and look at my rejected section, I know a lot of people. So if there’s a way for me to open some doors and connect some dots for folks, then I think that’s the position I want to be in a couple years. And not necessarily shipping a project for a brand every month, month and a half and deal with these crazy ass hours. I’m getting old.

Maurice Cherry:
And you got kids!

André Elijah:
And I got kids! I got to watch them grow up and do after school activities with them when they’re older and stuff. So yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Well just to wrap things up here, where can our audience find out more information about you and your work and everything online?

André Elijah:
Yeah. My website is www.andreelijah.com. And my Twitter is @andreelijah. So if you want some industry hot takes, that’s probably the place to go. And then yeah, my website, that’s where the portfolio lies. And if you want to know the work that we’ve done or the stuff we pitched and rejected section, it’s all there.

Maurice Cherry:
Sounds good. Well, Andre Elijah, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show. Just hearing this, I don’t know, almost this whirlwind of activity that you’ve got going on, not just with what you’re doing now with the studio, but what you plan to do in the future and really how you’ve had this passion to do this for such a long time. I think it really points to the fact that while these technologies, VR for instance, have taken a long time to get off the ground, there’s been this constant steady push by people like you to really push things into the, not just the mainstream, but to the next level to create experiences that in the future we’ll be talking about for years and years to come. So, thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

André Elijah:
I appreciate you, dude. Thanks for having me. It was a lot of fun.

Sponsored by Hover

Hover

Building your online brand has never been more important and that begins with your domain name. Show the online community who you are and what you’re passionate about with Hover. With over 400+ domain name extensions to choose from, including all the classics and fun niche extensions, Hover is the only domain provider we use and trust.

Ready to get your own domain name? Go to hover.com/revisionpath and get 10% off your first purchase.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington

Our back to school theme continues this week with a conversation with Dr. Christina N. Harrington. I first met Dr. Harrington as a contributor to the first volume of RECOGNIZE, and now she’s an assistant professor in the HCI Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and the director of their Equity and Health Innovations Design Research Lab! Impressive!

After a brief pandemic check-in, Dr. Harrington talked about some of the design research work she’s doing at Carnegie Mellon, and spoke about how her past teaching experiences helped prepare her for this opportunity. We also talked about how she got into design via engineering, the utility of design Ph.Ds, and some of her latest obsessions. I’m glad we have educators like Dr. Harrington who can expand the concepts of design for the next generation!

Transcript

Full Transcript

Maurice Cherry:
All right. So tell us who you are and what you do.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
All right. I am Christina Harrington. I am a Southern, black, queer creative technologist. I have backgrounds in both engineering and design. I’m a tinkerer. I’m a crafter. I’m an inquisitive, how does this work, inside mechanics, logic type person. Right now I am in the space of higher education academia. I’m an assistant professor at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
And I teach at that intersection of design and HCI, where we think about people and what people need when they engage with technology, why people engage with technology the ways that they do, the ways that technology can better support black and brown folks, folks that may not have the infrastructure to interact with the newest or coolest tech or gadgets or whatever, but that could really benefit from tech being ubiquitous in their everyday lives. I’m a writer a little bit, in terms of talking about design and figuring out ways to have these conversations about design outside of the walls of academia.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Speaking of writing, you were one of the first people that we published on Revision Path when we did our recognized design anthology back in 2019?

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
2019. Yeah.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
Yeah. You scared me with that one. It’s crazy because going through school, it was almost like you were told you can either be really good at math and science, or you can do the humanity side of things. And I always wanted to write, because I just felt like sometimes expressing ideas is just as equally powerful through text as it is through sketching something.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
When I saw that Revision Path call, I was like, I’m just going to jump out there and see what happens. And I was super, super, super nervous, which is crazy because I had done like a whole dissertation and conference preceding papers and journal articles, but I was like, I really, really, really want to get into this anthology. And I really want to do writing that has a little bit more of my voice and a little bit less of like academic, technical jargon. Very, I don’t know, polished speech. It was really, really cool. Thank you for that opportunity.

Maurice Cherry:
No, thank you for submitting it. Unfortunately we had to, I don’t know if I mentioned this on the show, but I certainly had wrote about it. Unfortunately, I kind of took a hiatus from Recognize this year. The pandemic really did a number on, honestly like the number of people that were submitting, which sort of made sense. I mean, folks were just trying to survive out here. They weren’t thinking about trying to write stuff.

Maurice Cherry:
But then the things that we would get, people just wouldn’t write to the prompt. They’d write what they wanted to write. To give you an example, the year that we did the first anthology, and the theme was space, a lot of people wrote about Nipsey Hussle. I’m not super familiar with Nipsey Hussle. I don’t know if there’s like a space theme in his rap or anything, but I was like, why are so many people writing stuff about Nipsey Hussle. This has nothing to do with space. Or maybe it does, I don’t know.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
Is that the year he passed?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, that was the year he passed.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I mean, I imagine that might be part of it. I don’t know anything about Nipsey Hussle either.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. If people are listening and want to clue me in, please do, because I was like, why am I getting all these … It wasn’t just that people were writing poems, people were submitting artwork. And I’m like, “No, I just need an essay, I don’t need something in Photoshop. I don’t need to see something you painted. Thank you, I guess.” I plan to bring Recognize back at some point in the future. I just think right now, probably the timing’s not great for it, but hopefully in the future, with more support, I’ll try to get it back out there.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
That’s one of the things about thinking about how we stretch design. Saying that you got so many people that we’re submitting artwork and Photoshop, and it’s like, designers are afraid to write sometimes. I’ve literally heard running jokes, designers, engineers, computer science folks that are like, “I’m an engineer or I’m a computer scientist, I don’t write.” And it’s like, “Wait, wait, wait, how do you communicate what you’ve done? Or how do you communicate your ideas behind what you’ve built or what you’re envisioning?” There’s so much space for that, yet folks shy away from it so, so much.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. It’s certainly something that I was trying to put forth through Recognize, is to have more people just write because it helps you, like you said, formalize your ideas. If you’re an entrepreneur, it helps with writing better proposals, writing better proofs, just communication in general, it tends to be really helpful. I mean, we even had a writer, actually a couple episodes ago, had our first writer on the show. I think in his background, he called himself a verbal designer, which I thought was really interesting.

Maurice Cherry:
He’s a writer, and we talked all about how writing is, at least nowadays’s, such a crucial part of the design process. It was good just to have someone who’s a writer come on and really talk about like, yeah, I’m a writer and this is how I work within design teams and on design projects and giving feedback to designers about what they could do to either strengthen their writing or improve their writing, or even see the importance of writing in the whole design process.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
Yeah. Definitely. Definitely.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I mean, aside from the new appointment, how’s the year been going? What’s been on your mind?

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
The year has been transformational and also kind of like, you feel like you’re sludging through mud at the same time. I think the world is like a really crazy place right now. I don’t know if it’s like, oh, all of these things are going on, and 2020, 2021 is like this unprecedented time in life. Or if it’s like, no, the world’s always kind of been crazy, but as you get older, you have more of a connection to why.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
Politics have always been wild in the United States, but for some of us, it’s not until we get older that you start to really see how like, oh, the ways that we’re voting are impacting like, I don’t have healthcare. I can’t go to the doctor and take care of myself. I can’t do the things with my body as a person who identifies as a woman in the United States that I want to, because of the state that I live in.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I think that all of those things on top of a global health pandemic are happening at the same time. I’m like, am I becoming an empath in my old age that it just … I literally have days where I’m like, “I can’t today.” Because everything feels so heavy and it feels pointless to be writing a journal article or to be writing a conference paper. And these are things that I like to do, but there are some day ease lately where I’m just, I don’t have the motivation.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I’ve been seeing a lot of memes and all of these articles that are talking about how black women in particular are just like, we are collectively burnt out. And I think it goes to earlier, the question you asked about the things that have happened in the last year in terms of really intensified racial moments. And it’s like, we dealt with a couple of months of white people coming out of the cracks of the sidewalk, asking us how we’re doing and apologizing for things. I don’t even know you. All of that contributes to this like just community exhaustion, I’m kind of feeling, from a lot of my friends and a lot of folks.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
So on the one hand with this new job and with this new role, it’s really exciting. It’s a blessing to be here. My career in terms of academia has shot through the roof to places I don’t think I ever would’ve imagined, but I am very tired. I’m very tired with just holding all of the emotions of what’s happening in the world.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I think that’s been a general sort of feeling that I’ve gotten from talking with a lot of black creatives, just a lot of black friends of mine. It’s been like, we’re just tired. It’s like a lasagna of fatigue. There’s tiredness of just like, you being a black person in this country, and then on top of that, whatever other identities you have on top of that, whether you are queer or trans or what have you. Then on top of that, just like this whole pandemic and coronavirus and these variants. And then on top of that, there’s the government like forcefully pushing people back out into the world like, no more masks mandates, get back out there. Even the whole, and I don’t mean to get super political, but the insurrection was this year. So much has happened.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
Time is so warped right now. Time is so warped right now. There’s no concept of time because it feels like things are back to back. And it also feels like there’s so many intertwined struggles that you can’t parse out something to say, this is what’s upsetting me, because everything’s connected.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I think that when we think about the moments that we had the uprisings that we had last summer, and it’s like, you’re mad about that. You’re angry about that, because collectively, black lives have been proven over and over again to be disposable in this country. But then at the same time, within those conversations, we have to talk about how black, queer and trans people are treated when they also too are part of those black lives. And what does it mean to have to have those conversations among other black folks who are telling you, we can’t talk about that right now. Don’t be divisive right now.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
And watch the number of black trans women being killed continue to rise. Watch people not mention the names of the black trans men or the gender non-binary folks who have also been murdered at the hands of the state and police. Watch folks not want to talk about the rates of homelessness and just all of these things. And it’s like, whew, you can’t touch on one part of it without feeling that thread and the whole sweater unraveling. So, yeah, it’s a different type of … I think I ask my social media once every two weeks, what’s the word for past exhausted? What happens after you’re exhausted? What is that called?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I don’t know. I feel like we’re all at some point trying to persevere through whatever that state might be called, but it’s there. Now, we’ve jumped in like both feet in this discussion. I do want to bring it back to your work and what you’re doing. You mentioned your assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon at the HCI Institute. Can you talk about what that is and what you’ll be teaching?

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
Yeah. So the HCI Institute, it’s kind of like a dream job for me. It’s like this collection of, they joke like a collection of almost misfits of people across computer science, human-computer interaction, design, folks that are interested in that intersection of people and technology, technology and environment, people and environment, and anything that has to do with the ways that we interact with the digital world is kind of that area of human-computer interaction.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I think what’s so dope about the HCI Institute at Carnegie Mellon is it’s one of the few, if not the only spaces designated purely to human-computer interaction degrees. You could study human-computer interaction in schools of computing, sometimes in schools of design within the United States, but to find a space where they’re like, we know exactly what this is. It’s kind of thus become like the leading institution for how HCI is thought about. To be at the place where it’s kind of like, this is … Some of the work that’s come out of this institute, this university, is what we’ve based other research on, is definitely cool for me.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I think a little larger than that, being at Carnegie Mellon, where they also have a really high ranked school of design. And folks that work across that so seamlessly, because they do go hand in hand. I think that that’s just, it’s really, really, really exciting for me. And a lot of what I’ll be teaching is everything from foundational courses and introduction to user experience design or human-computer interaction. I like to say that I’m a methods girl. I love design research methods. Or engaging with students around how they learn about the people that they’re designing with or for. How they engage people in design and all of that is like design methods.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
You could go your traditional research route of just doing an interview, or you could be doing like card sorting, or role playing, or artifact analysis. Like all of these really cool things that designers have in their tool belt. I will be teaching any one of those things, but also hopefully introducing courses that consider design equity and design justice and thinking about design where design has not been talked about.

Maurice Cherry:
I first got exposed to HCI, wow, I’m dating myself. This was 20 years ago. Oh, my God! It was 20 years ago. I was an intern at Marshall Space Flight Center, right outside of Huntsville, Alabama. It’s normal, Alabama’s a city. I remember my mentor at the time, he was studying HCI, as it related to like haptic interfaces. And it was so funny because he was like, “In the future, we’ll have like a computer that’s just like the size of a sheet of paper.” Basically he was talking about a tablet.

Maurice Cherry:
And this was, my God, this was 2000, 2001, something like that. But talking about like learning how we interact with haptic interfaces. I think it was still very new at the time. I mean, I find that a lot of innovation that tends to happen sometimes through NASA, eventually trickles into consumer stuff. Because that was also where I saw my first 3D printer, was back then, because they print the nose cone of the space shuttle is made out of this substance called Marco. It burns up on reentry when the space shuttles reenter the atmosphere. They print that out every time. They literally like print it out, a big machine, and replace the nose cone every time. And I was like, “Oh wow!” I was like, “So you’re printing in 3D.” I mean, that was what? 1920 at the time. It blew my mind, like you’re printing in 3D.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
It still blows my mind. I didn’t know that. Definitely learned something. HCI has been around for a while. I mean, definitely since the late nineties, just from like the academic texts that I’m familiar with. Actually let’s say, I can think of papers in the mid to late nineties that have talked about human-computer interaction because the minute we started talking about computers, we had to talk about how folks are interacting with computers. And I think initially that was done in like the human factor space. Thinking about work and cognition and like mental load and task load and what it takes for a computer to remember chunks of information and memory and how that is likened to the human brain and then what the person can be expected to be able to do and task and stuff like that.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
And then human computer interaction came along. And then somewhere down the road, design kind of like attached itself in a very particular way, because we started talking about, how do we develop the tools that we’re either building computers with? How do we develop the code? How do we create the housing of the computers? We’re talking about new phones and we’re talking about new tablets or iPods. When Apple came along and started doing that so, so, so, so well, and not to say that this was the initiation of it, but it’s always my go-to example because Apple is just kind of like the Mecca of design for me, when you’re talking about technology consumer products. Then I really think folks started having conversations about the way things looked in the technology space. And the way things were experienced in the technology space. I think it’s a cool place to be, in terms of like the work that I do.

Maurice Cherry:
And now with HCI, are you focusing on hardware software or both?

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
Neither.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, okay.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I am the anti-technologist technologist. I’m focused on how we think about everyday technologies in people’s lives. I am not necessarily trying to design the software of the phone and I’m not necessarily trying to design the casing of the phone, but I’m trying to think about how the phone can be used as a tool for health information, for folks who might not have access to medical professionals on a consistent basis.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I’m the researcher that’s trying to consider, well, in what ways can we embed public displays? How can we get community health information out there for people who don’t have wifi in the home or computers at home, such that they’re not behind … When we think about the pandemic and how out a lot of that information that was coming out from the CDC, I was seeing it on Twitter. I was seeing it on Instagram. You’re getting alerts. Like the CDC just made this update, here are the places where you can get tested and things like that. How do we get that information to people who aren’t so heavily reliant on their phone? And do we do that through computers and public libraries? Do we do that through health kiosks that are at the Walgreens or the CVS? That’s the level at which I’m thinking about technology?

Maurice Cherry:
Actually, that makes a lot more sense too, to think about it in that way. I think it’s because now, I mean just thinking about haptic interfaces and everything like that, I mean, everything that we utilize with technology, it feels like it’s through some sort of a touch interface or an audio interface or something like that. Thinking about how it works within the context of our lives and spreading information and stuff like that is really crucial.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s a good point that you mentioned about with the CDC stuff, because my folks are in rural Alabama. Basically I was passing the information to them on the telephone because they don’t have an internet connection. They don’t have a computer, so they’re not going to get that information in the way that it’s going out, especially because, one, they’re in the rural south, but two, broadband is not everywhere in this country. So it’s not a public utility in that way, like the plain old telephone services.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
Yeah. And unfortunately, the reason I focus on digital access and design equity is because is I’ve been the poem and the quote like, [inaudible 00:24:30] on the moon. Like we’re trying to get information to our folks in rural areas, but we have communities that are literally shipping off to Mars to escape the realities of what’s happening down here. And it’s like, there’s such gap. There’s such an imbalance in the ways that technology is utilized between certain communities.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
So it’s like at some point we have to say, hey guys, we can’t keep building new, new, new, new, new, while we have communities that are still like, wait, what’s a Google Home? What’s Alexa? Oh, I could use that to track my doctor’s appointment? Like, what? That gap, that dissonance is something that I feel like I’m always going to have an area where my work is needed because we have folks that are so focused on creating these technologies for the year 2032, and we are still trying to get some folks caught up to the year 2005.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. A lot of those futurist innovations really just like, they just completely blow by a lot of communities. I mean, even with smart speakers, I think I got my mom a smart speaker, I don’t know, a while ago, probably back in the early 2010s or whatever, when they first started coming out, and Alexa couldn’t recognize her. Couldn’t recognize her accent. So it’s like, well, that’s not good. She ended up giving it to me. I don’t even still have it anymore.

Maurice Cherry:
But to that point, like, yeah, you’ve got these other interfaces and stuff like that. The tech tends to be so focused on the next big innovations when like there’s still so many issues right now that need solving. And I don’t know if it’s because these are not like flashy, sexy news making issues that need to be solved, but it’s a huge chasm between the work that needs to be done and the work that’s being done.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
It’s also why you don’t have a whole lot of people focusing on it, because it’s not sexy, innovative work. I get hit with the same question, oh, do you do hardware? Do you do software? Are you in AI? Are you in machine learning? Are you in VR? And it’s like, I’m in this space of information because folks are still trying to understand the full features of what your phone can do, to support your everyday living. To jump to, here’s a headset that can make it seem like you’re pumping ice cream at McDonald’s in Kansas. It’s like, okay, that’s cool, but we’ve skipped a whole area for certain folks. Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. That reminds me of what I saw on, I think it was maybe last week or this week, I think, with Good Morning America Facebook debuting these virtual reality work rooms. And like everybody’s got on a $300 VR headset to meet in a virtual space to have meetings. I’m like, this is the most ridiculous shit I have ever seen in my whole life. I mean, it’s one thing that we can’t get together because of the pandemic, where like now I have to buy a $300 peripheral just so we can sit in second life and talk about status updates? It’s ridiculous. You’re also heading up the Equity and Health Innovations Design Research Lab. Talk to me about what that is and like what some of the projects are that are coming out of the lab.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
Yeah. I mean, the EHI lab is literally just that. I came through both my masters and my PhD in heavy lab cultures. I was involved in the research in ergonomics and design research lab at North Carolina state. And then I worked with the Human Factors and Aging Lab at Georgia Tech. Becoming a faculty, literally the first thing I wanted, and I don’t know why I was so obsessed, but I was like, “I need a lab.”

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I want a lab where I can curate projects, but not just for namesake or ownership of a space, but more so, one of the things I’ve really been trying to do is kind of like kick open the doors of academic research to the communities that we sit in. So I wanted something where communities know like, okay, if we’re trying to do something, if we’re trying to build something, we can come here and collaborate and build and work and voice concerns or discuss some of the things that we’re trying to do.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
Most all of my work is community-based participatory design. What I call CBPD, which stems off of community-based participatory action research that you’ll find in public health sectors, where it’s like letting the community define the need, define the project, define the scope of what we’re doing, which in academia sometimes means flipping on its head, what the project outcomes are. How can we do a design research project and put something in the hands of community before we ever publish a paper or present at a conference or do a poster or whatever? And that means creating zines.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
One of the projects that we’ve been working on for almost a year now is the creation and the development of a speculative design toolkit for communities to be able to brainstorm without the leadership of a formal design researcher or a professor or academic PI or whatever you want to call it, to say, we want to brainstorm our own solution to this thing that we’ve been working on, whether it be re-imagining what to do with an abandoned building on a particular block, or we’re trying to get safety cameras put in at the basketball court, so that parents feel safe. So that with their kids being out there late, or we’re trying to get broadband access in a particular neighborhood, how can we think about that through a design lens? How can we brainstorm that? How can we iterate on what solutions might look like?

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
So we’ve been developing this toolkit that we’ve been calling Building Utopia, and we’ve been working with community design practitioners who do just exactly that type of work. So, Jen Roberts, from the Colored Girls Liberation Lab. An amazing, brilliant end day who works with Black Womxn Flourish Collective, which you may or may not be familiar with. They’re one of the co-founders of that with Denise Shanté Brown. And they and Jen have been collaborating with my lab on the development of this toolkit, and we’ve been testing it and refining it and hoping to launch it maybe sometime this year, early next year.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I told myself that I wanted to do projects that I cared about. So what are the projects that matter to black and brown folks? I think what you mentioned about your mom is actually a really great example because that’s another one of the big projects I’ve been doing is looking at health information seeking with voice assistance for black elders. And how do we meet the needs of them being able to ask health-related questions of these devices that right now, for all intents and purposes, don’t want to understand our voices, our accents, our dialects, the words that we use that may not be formal language. And so that’s another one of the projects that’s coming out of my lab at the moment.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
And we’ve been looking at, how do we redefine more ideal conversational assistance? How do we define what the conversational dynamic black elders want to see looks like? And we’ve been doing that in a very community-based participatory manner. I kind of let the work that I’m doing lead me, like doing this project, and when you hear enough, people say one thing and it’s like, okay, here’s that defines what the next project is. When the toolkit literally came out of us exploring speculative design with folks that are like, yeah, this is all well and good, but what are we doing when the academic researchers are gone? And the students have finished whatever project and studio classes are over, and we’re still trying to think through some of these things?

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
And it’s like, oh, well, what if we worked collaboratively with folks to develop a toolkit that is kind of like a resource for folks to do that work without the need of having to engage with universities or industry designers? So, yeah, that’s kind of what the EHI lab is about. And the things that I’m open to doing is really just closing that gap that I was mentioning earlier between the ways design has been used in communities of privilege and of fluency. And the ways that design can impact communities that are not defined in that way.

Maurice Cherry:
As you’ve been going through these things with the lab, it’s interesting that you said that the problems or the things that you all are working on, kind of uncover themselves as you start talking to people, as you start using the things that are coming out of the lab more. It’s almost, I don’t know, self-generating in a way. Like you’re finding new ideas as you get out there and talk with other people. I mean, I think that’s a good thing. That’s how labs are. Labs are for experimentation.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
Yeah, definitely.

Maurice Cherry:
And now, prior to this, you were teaching at DePaul University in Chicago for a number of years. When you look back at that time, what do you think you learned that really prepared you for what you’re doing now?

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
Several things. Definitely I think DePaul, being one of the few formal schools of design that had a PhD, that also was open and starting to define design in this very like social good, social impact way. DePaul, A, I’d say is known very well for like games design, graphic design. And then you had folks that were also starting to define this sector of like Dr. Sheena Erete’s lab, the technology for social good and this area of social impact.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I think it was a great home for me to start off and define my own research interests and my own research agenda, and how I was going to maneuver through some of these projects in an academic space. And I think Chicago was a really great city to do that because Chicago is kind of like this very, I don’t want to say social impact, when you’re talking about things outside of academia. But Chicago has this movement activist, equity driven lens just inherent throughout a lot of the work being done in the city. So I think engaging with outside organizations and then seeing how other faculty were engaging with the city and different organizers and community partners is definitely something that rubbed off on me.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
And then I think DePaul as a university, being a place where you really get to harness teaching students. I’ve been in this research thing since I started my master’s program. But teaching is very rarely something they teach you how to do. Like how do you effectively develop course objectives and evaluate students in ways that’s not just throwing a 300 question exam at them? And I think I was able to learn a lot of that at DePaul.

Maurice Cherry:
I want to go general, like more into your background, because you have an extensive educational background and everything. Let’s start from the beginning. You mentioned at the top of the show that you’re Southern. Where did you grow up?

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I am from Fayetteville, North Carolina, born and raised. At some point my parents moved to Richmond, Virginia. And then when my parents split, my mom’s side of the family and my dad’s was still back in North Carolina, but we had the closest relationship with my mom’s side. We literally were in Fayetteville whenever she was not on the clock at work, because that’s where her support system was. So North Carolina is very ingrained in me, but I did a lot of my schooling during the week in Richmond, Virginia.

Maurice Cherry:
Were you exposed to a lot of tech and design growing up?

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
What I would consider the tech and design that I know now, no. I went to the math and science center. I was one of those kids in middle school, I went to the math and science center in middle school. I forget how I got into that. I was always a tinkerer, even in like my younger elementary school days. I was always trying to take things apart, put things together, build things from scratch. I remember one year when I had the concept of like what a birthday is and you get people a gift. I tried to build my mom these shoes by taking one of her pair of shoes and tracing it on paper and then foam. And then the stuffing of the foam that comes out of like a packing box.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I’m trying to build up these layers so I could build her a more comfortable pair of shoes, because she was always working. Because design hadn’t really reached a lot of high schools and middle schools, it was like, okay, you’re doing that, so you’re supposed to be an engineer. There was no concept of like, you’re supposed to be a designer. I never heard the word design or like designer. I literally was told you’re good at math and science, you’re tinkering, go be an engineer.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I remember telling my high school guidance counselor. I was clearly doing well. And I was in gifted honors classes, and this, that, and the third. So I’m like, “Okay, I’m going to go to college. Here’s where I’m applying.” He’s like, “What do you want to do?” And I was like, “I want to build electronics. I want to create electronics.” And he was like, “Oh, go to school for electrical engineering.” And then my uncle was an electrical engineer that graduated from North Carolina A&T.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I went to college for electrical engineering, and it wasn’t until I did a summer bridge program at Virginia Tech, that’s no longer there, but it used to be called Aspire, but it was for incoming black, Latinx. And I believe at that time, even Asian students to take these summer courses at Virginia Tech, the summer before you started your fall semester as a way to promote retention, because minority students had low numbers of finishing in these degrees at institutions like Virginia Tech.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I did this program. And so you then came into the fall semester of your freshman year with this cohort of folks. I became really close with some of the guys, because it was mainly guys. And I think it was like maybe six girls out of like 40 students. But I remember two of my guy friends that did that program with me. They were mechanical engineering students. They were getting a minor in this thing called industrial design. And I was like, “Boy, one day, I’m going to go to class with y’all.”

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I went to one of their industrial design classes. I think it was Mitzi Vernon teaching design research at Virginia Tech. And I like fell in love with it. I was like, “What is this thing?” And I literally left that class and I went into the College of Architecture’s front desk office, and I was like, “How do I sign up for this minor? I want to do this too.” And then I went to my undergraduate advisor and was like, “Okay, now how can I make my senior thesis integrate industrial design?”

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I changed my whole senior thesis to like, instead of just electrical engineering project, it became designing a sensor and designing a hardware of the sensor that could detect vehicles that were coming at joggers and bikers at a certain speed for like safety. I’ve always been about like safety and designing for impairments and things like that. I just fell in love with design, taking this design research class and then taking this sketching classes. I forget the other classes that were needed for the minor.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
And as I moved through that minor and then going back to get my master’s in industrial design, I realized that like, that’s where I want it to be, because engineering, and this is no slight to the engineers, but I just felt like engineering put me in a cubicle where I didn’t get to talk to people. And I didn’t get to understand people the ways that I wanted to. And design was like, okay, you’re designing the thing. You’re also thinking about the core guts of the thing, but you’re also understanding the person that’s going to be interacting with the thing.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
And the period between when I graduated from undergrad and before I started my masters, I worked at Motorola as an RF systems engineer. I was sitting in a cube, eight, nine hours a day, designing radio packages for the government. I never talked to anybody. I never went out. And I hated it. So when I went back to get my master’s in industrial design, it felt like some clouds are opening up. So I was like, oh, this is where I want to be. And the further I explored that, the better I defined like exactly what design meant to me and also realized how limited a lot of folks are in being exposed to design, because I could have been doing that the whole time.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I think an interesting kind of trend that I’m seeing here that is what you’re continuing in your work is that you have the idea that in terms of going into your education, you knew that you were good at these things, but you only had a very limited view of what that could look like, which in turn ended up being engineering. I empathize with that too, because like when I went into school, I wanted to do web design. This was in like late 90s, early two 2000s, and I remember my computer science … Well, no, first of all, I was told, “Oh, you should go into computer science, to design a website.”

Maurice Cherry:
And at the time I enrolled in this computer science, computer engineering dual degree program, you do three years at Morehouse. You do two years at Georgia Tech. You get out with a master’s and a bachelor’s. And I was telling my advisor, I wanted to design websites, and he just laughed in my face. “The internet is a fad. This is what you want to do? We don’t do that here.” I switched my major and went into math because Morehouse doesn’t have a design program. I do think about now how different my career might have been if I ended up going into more of that design route.

Maurice Cherry:
I’m bringing this up because what it sounds like for you is that you started out doing this engineering and then as you learn more information and saw these other paths that were open, that then shifted you more towards design. So like it’s that thing about access and I guess equity in some respect, but just access to knowing that this is an option that you can take.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
Yeah. I mean, definitely. I think hearing your story fuels that point of, how often are young black and brown students being pushed towards these degrees or this area? You don’t necessarily have to have a degree to be a designer. I think design is like a skillset. Design is also a way of thinking that a lot of people inherently have or what we all inherently have, it’s just whether or not we express ourselves in that way. I wonder how we are exposing like black and brown kids to exploring that as a potential thing to do to harness your creativity or to make a living or whatever it is you want to do out of life.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
And it’s not a lie. I think that there’s so many reasons why design is an expensive, especially like a master’s or a PhD in design, it’s an expensive area because design proper doesn’t fall under a lot of the NSF and the fellowships that are going to pay your way. Oftentimes people that are going back and getting post-baccalaureate degrees in design are paying out of pocket or loans. That’s already going to curate a particular type of folk that’s able to do that, and not feel financial stress.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
And then I think now people have more of an understanding and a vocabulary around design. But 10 or 15 years ago, when you say, I want to be a designer and it’s was like, well, are you going to make any money doing that? And I think black and brown students are oftentimes limited in having that as a constraint when they come out. If they go to school, it’s like, I got to pick a major that I’m going to do a job that makes money. We’re not always afforded the opportunity to say, I want to do this thing regardless of what the return of investment is going to be.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
And so all of these things contribute to, we push, in the past at least, our communities have been pushed to do certain things, to study certain things, and design has not been one of them. And so then it becomes this like elite thing that people think I can’t do design. [inaudible 00:46:38] doesn’t think in that way. And it’s like, if you had a problem at home this morning and you no longer have it because you figured something, you created some type of work around, or you Jimmy rigged your door to no longer creak. Or you’re trying to go in and out of your bedroom to get watermelon in night, like whatever, you’re doing design.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
And it’s reframing how we think about what design is and how people think about what they can do with design. I think we’re starting to see that more now. You have designed this trickled out throughout so many sectors. You have literal government agencies that are now wanting to hire people talking about design, to address city infrastructure problems. To address urban planning problems. All of these things, there’s so much value now. And people considering design as a lens to just think through things. It might not even have to be about problems. It can just be about the process of ingenuity and creativity. But I think for my generation at least, that’s just such a new thing, because when I was coming out of K through 12, people were not talking about [inaudible 00:47:54].

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. And I’m going to just put this out here and folks can quote me on that. I attribute a lot of that, I think, new thinking around how folks approached design to the fact that the people that are talking about design, like you look at just the general makeup, has gotten a lot more diverse than it has been in previous years, because you’ve got more black and brown people, more queer people, et cetera, bringing their perspectives, which are a mix of education and lived experience into what design is, that it’s helping for a lot of people to expand what the definition of design looks like.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, I remember in like the two thousands, I mean, I was out of college. I was like early in my career and everything about design, at least around like web stuff, because it was still pretty early. It was just all about web stuff. What’s the latest framework. And it wasn’t about, how are we solving problems? Like UX wasn’t really a … I want to say UX wasn’t a thing. It certainly wasn’t as prevalent as it is now. People did UX stuff, but it was not as, I think, known or accepted, I want to say, as being like a hardcore frontend person or backend person or something like that.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, I mean, it’s amazing the titles that you see, the type of work that you’re able to do in design that is, in large part, I think there’s just more diverse people are out there talking about it, sharing their experiences and really showing other people how design is not just something that’s done like on a computer or with a pen and paper or something like that.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
But even to your point, those tools have also helped to break down the barriers to design. One of the reasons I love what people on social media and the ways, I don’t know if you saw like, it was like a couple of years ago, and someone created a movie poster, like coming soon for Set It Off 2. And it was so real that I got upset, because I was like, no, leave, Set It Off alone. We do not need a Set It Off 2. There’s nothing you can do with that. I think it had Teyana Taylor on the cover and somebody else, but it was because someone got in Photoshop and was so sick with Photoshop, that they created this thing that looked like it came out of somebody’s media company. Like it was actually happening.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
We’ve gotten so sick with our Photoshop and illustrator and just our creative skills because of these digital tools, that you have so many people that you don’t need the four year degree to be like, I’m an illustrator. I’m a designer. I create flyers. I do the promotion for this restaurant. You know what I mean? I help this photographer clean up their prints. There’s so many different ways to do it now because of digital tools.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
And I think that that’s the dope thing about design, because we’ve now started to see it literally infiltrate corners where folks never would have thought about doing that type of thing. And again, like I said, that then starts to bleed back into one of designs origins of political propaganda, because now I can literally build a career doing the social media promotion for Elizabeth Warren, or I can literally build a career doing a design for Black Lives Matter direct action.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I think now when you’re seeing organizations and collective designers protests and design justice network and all of these people that are coming to use design as a lens with all of these different mindsets and backgrounds like, oh, I studied social work, but I now lean heavily into design for ways to really communicate my work and to get things out there and to make change. It’s like, that’s what design to me is and how it should have been talked about for all of this time.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
Design, it’s not just this insular, oh, I am in design studio for eight hours a day, studying at this university. And I have this portfolio of these very specific pieces, and now I’m a designer. Design is so many different things, so many different people coming to the table or literally the streets and moving in so many different ways. And I think that all of these things have built for us to get to this moment. I just think that that’s so, it’s dope. It’s dope, where we’ve been able to get it.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, absolutely. And one thing that I have to mention, you shouted out some of your peers earlier, Dr. Dori Tunstall Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel. Raja Schaar is a doctor also, right? I know I’ve heard her name. I don’t recall if she’s a doctor or not.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
Raja’s not a doctor. But Raja is actually one of my academic mentors, because Raja was teaching at Georgia Tech when I was a student there and gave me my first teaching gig. I always have to shout that out. Raja is the first person that let me teach the class, when I was like, please somebody, let me teach. I need to know how to teach for what I want to do. Raja let me do that.

Maurice Cherry:
What is it like being a black woman at the top level of design education in this way?

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
That’s an interesting question, because I don’t think I’ve ever thought about it like that. The design PhD in general in the United States is not widespread. We’re still trying to figure out what’s the utility of it. Like why do you need a design PhD? In the United States, you get a master’s, that’s the terminal degree you can teach. You can go into industry. You don’t even need a master’s to have your own firm or your own consulting, whatever. Well, you can teach in certain design programs.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
Having a design PhD is, in my perspective, literally because Lesley-Ann, Dori and myself, we all do a particular level of writing and research and getting grants and things like that, to move in the ways that some of the other sciences do. I think about it less than the framework of like, oh, I’m one of the few black women that has a PhD in design.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
Although I think that if I stopped and thought about it, that is kind of like, oh, that’s … Whoa! I’ve thought myself as another black woman academic. Still few. Still few and far between. Like if you looked at my department right now, it’s not like, oh, I’m the only black woman with a PhD in design. I’m the only black woman in my department. Differentiating myself in that way is not something I oftentimes think about, but I do hope, and I do see, coming on the horizon, if not already here, maybe not myself. It’s just because I don’t always put myself in that equation. It’s kind of like an imposter syndrome thing, but I definitely see where the Doris and the Lesley-Anns are shifting design.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
And I think last year was a moment to put that on grand scale, because more people were coming to them, but their work was already at that nexus of like, y’all, the way Lesley-Ann thinks about design, the way Dori is talking about design, what Dori is doing at OCAD and bringing in all of these black faculty and design. And even Raja, I don’t think a PhD really matters, because Raja is one of the people that is … I mean, you want to talk design, to me, the first person I’m going to mention is Raja Schaar. I think it’s more so the impact that they’re going to have in the field of design because of the types of work that they do, not necessarily because they have PhDs, but I guess they’re probably synonymous or maybe I don’t know.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, we spoke about this a bit before we started recording and I really want to talk about it more now. Last year, a lot of organizations and companies really stepped out there to talk about how they support black folks across a number of different fields, design included. And we talk about sort of what it looked like to have that influx of interest and support. Do you still see that support now, a year later?

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
Yeah, like I said, I don’t, but I also am not particularly looking for it, because I don’t think anybody was naive to what that moment was. As I mentioned, there were literally foundations that came and were like, we want to put you on an advisory board so that we can start to think about the equity within our products and our projects. They were also, again, throwing out the same names that I mentioned, you, Lesley-Ann and Dori and Raja. I haven’t heard from them. I couldn’t tell you what’s going on with that project.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
It’s one of those things where it’s like take from it what you needed to take from it and continue with the work. Don’t let that be the sole motivation for the work. Don’t let the die down of that make you feel like the work is any less important or necessary. Because for a lot of us, we’ve been talking about these things and we’ve been doing this type of work, way before anybody was slapping our faces on flyers or panels or whatever. And we will be long after folks no longer care we are. And I think that that’s what energizes me. I think about like a Chris Rudd, who has been talking about anti-racism and design. That’s the whole reason that he ever started working in design. And how in the moment of what happened last summer, I’m sure he like other folks, folks became really familiar with who he was and was speaking on panels and this, that, and the third.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
But he’s been doing that. He’s been doing that work. He’s been so invested in the community in the south side of Chicago. That is his whole lens to design is equity and anti-racism and workers’ rights and thinking about design from a lens of, what would a less racist Chicago look like? What would more equitable Bronzeville corridor look like? He’s been defining those things. I hope that the moment of last year doesn’t overshadow the fact that folks have been talking about these things.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
A lot of the organizers with designers protests, Brian Lee has been doing this area of design. A lot of folks just came to know him in the moment of what happened summer of 2020, but he’s been organizing in this way. He’s been talking about design in this way. To me, I didn’t really even see the companies as much as I saw my friends and colleagues and people that I knew from afar and looked up to, kind of pushed into people knowing their work as people should.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
The companies and all of the organizations and all that, all that was like kind of noise that I knew would fall off anyway. That was never my focus. It’s more like, okay, great. Now we have folks knowing the name of Chris Rudd, of Brian Lee, of Dori Tunstall. That’s kind of what came out of that moment for me. I don’t even really think about the fact that in 2021, those organizations or whoever, are not still knocking down, at least my door, I don’t know about other folks. And the folks that I’m mentioning, they’re still doing the work. They haven’t stopped doing the work because whoever is no longer showcasing 31 days of black on their social media page or whatever, they’re still doing the work.

Maurice Cherry:
To piggyback off of your response there, you’re a hundred percent right. I think what last summer did is that it did help to, I think, amplify a lot of the work that those of us have been out there doing. It sucks though, that that support hasn’t been continued or sustained. Like you can very much tell it was just like a, in some respects, kind of like a flash in the pan kind of thing.

Maurice Cherry:
I’ll share the anecdote, I won’t name the company, but I’ll share the anecdote that I share with you before we started recording, that there was a certain, very large pharmaceutical company that I spoke at last year. That definitely was like, yeah, we really want to help out and do this, that, and the third and whatever. It had just becomes sort of very clear, because they were asking like, is this going to be like a continued thing? Do you think that there’ll be more support out there that people know about this?

Maurice Cherry:
And I’m like, “Ask me next year.” Because right now, I mean, for those of us, like I said, I have been doing this for a while. We’ve seen these kind of like spikes of support that come along as it relates to, it could be a societal issue or it could be an industry issue or something like that. And you get that little spike. That’s great when it happens. If you can sustain that, that’s even better. But a lot of that support I know of from last year did sort of just like dry up. Or the company got selective amnesia about what they said or what they promised. It’s been all sorts of stuff. It is what it is. How can the listeners get more involved in the research areas that you’re a part of?

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I think a lot of the organizations that I mentioned. I mean, I think that there’s always going to be like that shameless, you want to do a PhD, come to death row type comment of like, come work with the kid. You could definitely do that. I also know that academia is not the only avenue to do this work. I even push some of my students to be a part of design justice network, be a part of do the check-ins with designers protest.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I think that a lot of the collectives that I’ve come to learn about, when we did the Denise and Designer project, which it started before the pandemic even hit, but we weren’t able to put things out until I think like late last summer. It kind of overlapped with, we were talking a lot about this area of design and then it was like, oh, the timing just kind of coincided of us starting to put out the zine and the website and highlighting folks on social media.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I think following the Denise and Designer project on Instagram and some of the folks that we highlighted, like looking into their work, looking into the collectives that either they lead or that they’re a part of, or some of the projects they’re doing on their own, I think that there are so many ways now, as we talked about equity and design justice is becoming more widespread. There’s so many ways to get involved. I think that people can tap into any one of those.

Maurice Cherry:
What do you think you would’ve done if you hadn’t went into academia?

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
Real answer, I wanted to go to culinary school. I wanted to go to culinary school. I wanted to do a bunch of different things when I was a kid. I don’t know if that’s like some sagitarious type stuff. But there was the point in time, pre 1998 when I was like, I’m going to be the first girl in the NBA. And then there was, I want to go to culinary school. Cooking was so sexy to me. I don’t know why I just thought I wanted to cook. And then I think when I got to undergrad and I was grounded a little bit more, and even then barely, because I remember end of my sophomore year under my freshman year, calling my mom and being like my, “I hate electrical engineering. I hate it here. I want to get my degree in Africana Studies and be a writer or something.”

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
And my mom being, “No, you’re not [inaudible 01:04:08].” I wanted to do so many things and it was like engineering oddly was my safety net, because I was smart in math and science. It could have been a number of different things. And it still might be a number of different things, because I don’t believe that we are fixed to what we do in terms of our productivity or making money in this light. I don’t think we have to be fixed to that.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I still might end up opening a smoothie shop and being the old black lesbian in the neighborhood that’s just making smoothies and minding her business on the porch. That’s just my character and how I see the world of just wanting to do what feels good and what makes sense in the moment. I think this past year has showed me that I don’t want to die working myself to death and stressing over a job. So what that looks like in the next 15, 20 years is very up in the air.

Maurice Cherry:
Woo! You hit me with like a shot to the heart with that one. Woo! I know exactly what you mean when you say that. Stress will kill you. And if you happen to be black, if you happen to be anything else on top of that, it’s a lot out here. I don’t blame you. I think a lot of people are starting to come to their … I won’t want to say come to their senses, because that implies some form of like brainwashing. But I think a lot of people are realizing like, to be quite blunt, fuck these jobs.

Maurice Cherry:
The work is always going to be there. I think I had to come to terms with that a few years ago myself, when I really saw that I was really overworking myself. The work will always be there. I may not. Someone else can easily sub in for whatever, but like I don’t want to burn myself out trying to … You don’t get a medal for being a workaholic.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
Yep. I think last year I was talking to a friend about this. I mean last year literally showed us whose job was essential and whose wasn’t. And the ways that we need to let go of some of that internal guilt of taking rest, of taking time off, of going on vacation. I know at least like black, queer, trans, non-binary folk in the academia and the academy, we tend to carry that. Like, I got to work harder to get where other people are, and so, no days off. I also have the invisible labor of holding space for all of the students who don’t see themselves typically on campus and all of these things. And it’s like, we also tend to statistically die younger because of it, and not last, and still not get tenured.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I think the last year has taught me, I’m going to rest. I am going to take time. I’m going to take vacations where I’m not touching my laptop. I think as burnt out as I was starting to feel with academia, one of the beautiful things that I quickly realized coming into CMU, there’s a faculty by the name of Jessica Hammer in the HCI Institute, who is all about that. Making sure that you’re working efficiently, such that you can unplug and take care of yourself and have that balance.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
And I think that that’s just the place that I’m kind of in, because we watched the world go topsy-turvy, and a lot of us didn’t know how to put down productivity. We didn’t know how to not be defined by that. It was kind of sad and a little scary, watching folks scramble to do what felt like normal, but what felt like normal was work, at least in the context of the U.S.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Shout out to the Nap Ministry. I first heard about them last year. I think it might have been right around the summer of last year. Shout out to the Nap Ministry, rest is resistance. Absolutely.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
Shout out to the Nap Ministry, shout out to Pleasure Activism, shout out to any messaging that is just like, take care of you. We have to be reminded of that. I think Denise is a great example in the way that they’re operating Black Womxn Flourish is like, hey y’all, we’re taking a break in a couple of weeks. And I’m like, that is like such a symbol, but I’ve never thought to just be like, no, it’s not a holiday, but I’m just going to go to the lake for a couple of days and not answer my email, and y’all will be okay. We know the jobs that are essential now. We know what we need to literally survive as a society. More than likely my journal article isn’t part of that, so I can take a break. I can take a nap.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I love it. I love it. What are you obsessed with at the moment?

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
So many things from Real Housewives of Potomac, do not shame me, but I love them. I’m obsessed with that. I am upset with, in terms of design, like this concept of futuring and speculative design, but through a lens of Afrofuturism. I’m obsessed with the concept of like, there are black people in the future. I think it’s become ingrained in everything I see and everything I do, from like TV shows. I like a lot of like sci-fi and those psychological thrillers or like those, the world has ended as we know it and now it’s 2442 and here’s what civilization looks like. You watch those shows and you’re like, wait, so in 2442 there’s no black people? In the casting call, you don’t even think to put one mixed girl, nothing?

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
And it’s like that concept of like us, the longevity and what our futures looks like has become something that I’m super obsessed with. I’m obsessed with art, of course. I think that that’s what attracted me to design because I was introduced to design as like this mesh of engineering and visual art. So the visual art is always going to be something that like aesthetically … Like I love collecting art in my home. I love going to museums and learning the history of, especially like political art, what people were trying to say through their art. I’m obsessed with my travel bucket list. That is part of my selfish Americanism of like, when am I going to be able to just roam the world again and feel safe? Safe to the extent of being like black masculine presenting queer woman on this earth, as safe as we feel anyway.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I will admit this, but if you see me in person, I’m not going to want to engage in it in person. I’m not a LeBron hater, but I follow his career. So I’m slightly obsessed with how long is this man going to play in the NBA? It’s not even like a Vince Carter. Like where Vince was like, he’s old. He might go in for like five minutes and do a dunk and then you can see him kind of limping off the court and he’s done. LeBron is still playing as like the centerpiece of the team, going into what? 35, 36. So I’m kind of obsessed with like what that moment is going to be when he … Is that going to come? I mean, he’s conditioned his body so well, and I think he’s obsessed with proving to people that he can still do it. As an avid basketball fan, I’m kind of obsessed with seeing how long he goes.

Maurice Cherry:
Where do you see yourself in the next five years? What kind of work do you want to be doing?

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
I think I’ll still be doing similar work. I mean, I have great interest in doing more like civic technology fellowships, where I’m taking a year and focusing on a project that sits outside of the academic institution, like the walls of the academic institution or consulting with folks that are thinking about larger scale problems. I think that that’s the next direction that I feel like I want to go in at some point. I don’t know what capacity that’s going to look like. Because like I said, I tend to let the work lead me, but I would love to do some type of fellowship that was focused on like a larger scale problem that was dealing with digital access or design equity somewhere.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, just to wrap things up here, where can our audience find out more about you and about your work online?

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
So my personal website, christinaharrington.me, although it’s not, I mean, that flashy, it’s somewhat updated of like my travel and where I’m speaking, my research project, the papers that I’ve published and things like that. You can always follow me on Twitter @adapperprof. I’m always ranting about academia, design, The Real Housewives of Potomac, rest, productivity. I have pages on LinkedIn and stuff like that. I don’t use them as much, but I’d say that those are the two places.

Maurice Cherry:
All right. Sounds good. Well, Christina Harrington, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show. I know when we first met, actually it was a few years ago, we met at black and design, which they are having again this year. So I think by the time this episode comes out, people will start hearing some of the advertisements around the events. That’ll be happening in October, again, virtually this year.

Maurice Cherry:
It was just so good to talk with you and to learn about the work that you’re doing around design equity, your new role at Carnegie Mellon. I just feel like we’re going to hear so much more from you in these coming years about the work that you’re doing, because it’s really super important. I think now that so much of our world has been driven online because of the pandemic in terms of interactions and just general socialization that a lot of the work you’re doing around design equity and stuff like that is going to be super important. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Dr. Christina N. Harrington:
Thank you so much for having me. This is really exciting.

Sponsored by Adobe MAX

Adobe MAX Logo

Support for Revision Path comes from Adobe MAX.

Adobe MAX is the annual global creativity conference and it’s going online this year — October 26th through the 28th. This is sure to be a creative experience like no other. Plus, it’s all free. Yep – 100% free!

With over 25 hours of keynotes, luminary speakers, breakout sessions, workshops, musical performances and even a few celebrity appearances, it’s going to be one-stop shopping for your inspiration, goals and creative tune-ups.

Did I mention it’s free?

Explore over 300 sessions across 11 tracks, hear from amazing speakers and learn new creative skills…all totally free and online this October.

To register, head to max.adobe.com.

Sponsored by Black in Design 2021 Conference

Black in Design Logo

On the weekend of October 8-10th, join the Harvard Graduate School of Design virtually for the Black in Design 2021 Conference!

This year’s theme, Black Matter, is a celebration of Black space and creativity from the magical to the mundane. Our speakers, performers, and panelists will bring nuance to the trope of Black excellence and acknowledge the urgent political, spatial, and ecological crises facing Black communities across the diaspora. You don’t want to miss out on this weekend of learning, community, and connection!

Visit them online at blackmatter.tv to learn more and be a part of the event.

Sponsored by Brevity & Wit

Brevity & Wit

Brevity & Wit is a strategy and design firm committed to designing a more inclusive and equitable world.

We accomplish this through graphic design, presentations and workshops around I-D-E-A: inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility.

If you’re curious to learn how to combine a passion for I-D-E-A with design, check us out at brevityandwit.com.

Brevity & Wit — creative excellence without the grind.

Donald Burlock

2020 has been one hell of a year. What if you could go into 2021 being superhuman? Then you should meet Donald Burlock, Jr.! By day, he serves as the creative technologist lead for the physical experience design team at Capital One. But by night, he’s the author of the brand new book Superhuman by Design: Keys to Unlocking Your Creativity for Life-Changing Results.

We started off talking about his work at Capital One, and from there Donald talked about his time working as an entrepreneur, growing up in the Midwest, and his times studying at Kettering and Georgia Tech. He also spoke on the inspiration behind his book, and shared how he’s helping to build an equitable future through unlocking people’s creativity. If you need a boost, then I hope this interview gets you inspired to take action!

Happy Holidays!

The best way I can describe Ari Melenciano is that she is a renaissance talent. As an artist, researcher, and creative technologist, Ari is always finding new ways to express herself, speak to social issues, and find ways to use her art to enhance the lives of everyday people.

Ari talked about her residency at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, which helped her create Afrotectopia, a multi-day new media arts, culture and technology festival. She also spoke about growing up around art and music, including how technology ended up being the catalyst for the work she does now. I don’t want to spoil this great conversation too much — we were both coming off of this year’s Black in Design Conference, and I think you’ll really feel the spirit and energy that both of us still had from the event! Ari is out here doing important and vital work, and this episode captures that perfectly. Thank you Ari for showing us a vision of an equitable future!

Facebook Design is a proud sponsor of Revision Path. The Facebook Design community is designing for human needs at unprecedented scale. Across Facebook’s family of apps and new product platforms, multi-disciplinary teams come together to create, build and shape communication experiences in service of the essential, universal human need for connection. To learn more, please visit facebook.design.

This episode is brought to you by Abstract: design workflow management for modern design teams.

Spend less time searching for design files and tracking down feedback, and spend more time focusing on innovation and collaboration.

Like Glitch, but for designers, Abstract is your team’s version-controlled source of truth for design work. With Abstract, you can version design files, present work, request reviews, collect feedback, and give developers direct access to all specs—all from one place.

Sign your team up for a free, 30-day trial today by heading over to www.abstract.com.


Revision Path is a Glitch Media Network podcast, and is produced by Maurice Cherry and edited by Brittani Brown.