Eric Bailey

You may not have heard much about Eric Bailey, but there’s a pretty good chance that you’ve encountered his work out in the world. As the VP of experience design at Zillow, he brings over 20 years of strategic thinking, imagining, and making to revolutionize the process of buying or selling your home.

Our conversation began with Eric discussing how he builds culture and maintains joy on his team, and he spoke broadly about what he calls “the limitless possibilities of UX design.” He also talked about growing up in Ohio, being around for the early days of the Organization of Black Designers and Project Osmosis (which he co-founded), building his brand Properganda, and he gave the secret for how he’s maintained his authenticity throughout this career. According to Eric, anyone can look within and fulfill their potential through design — and he’s absolutely right!

Transcript

Full Transcript

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

Eric Bailey:
Well, my name’s Eric Bailey, and I’m a design lead. I lead a team of designers at a company called Zillow, and I’m also a graphic artist.

Maurice Cherry:
How has the year been going for you so far?

Eric Bailey:
It’s been going really well, not without its surprises. I think the big lesson in the last year and a half has been just be flexible, you know?

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Eric Bailey:
And be open to change. And so I would say that’s the one thing I’ve really learned is just be ready to expect the unexpected given the pandemic and given just changes in life that we can’t control. So be flexible and be ready also to take advantage of opportunities as they come up. But in general, me and my family, we’ve stayed healthy so we’re really, thankful for that. And yeah, and just really working through the different ways now that we interact with friends and family and also the way we work has changed shape for us. And so, yeah, I would say lots of silver linings for us.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice.

Eric Bailey:
Yeah, I got to spend lots of time with family, really meaningful, deep time, things that we would probably never be able to do or have in any normal circumstances, so I have no complaints.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I mean, this past year and a half, I mean, I guess really coming up on two years now that I think about it, it has been transformative in many ways. I feel like that’s the most apolitical way that I can state that. It has been very transformative. It has changed all of us in many different ways that I think we will still be unpacking hopefully years after this time has passed. There has definitely been a general shift in the collective consciousness that I don’t think we’re going to just snap back from.

Eric Bailey:
That’s right. That’s right.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Eric Bailey:
Yeah. Yeah, it’s a great way to describe it, is just transformation in every aspect of life. And so, yeah, it makes you realize that you have to become, I guess, a being of transformation, right? You have to be able to change yourself too so that you can adapt. So, yeah, adaptation has been, I think, that keyword for me.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. It’s the only thing constant in the world, change.

Eric Bailey:
That’s right. That’s what it is. Right.

Maurice Cherry:
Let’s talk about the work that you’re doing at Zillow where you are a VP of UX. How are things been going during the pandemic with the team?

Eric Bailey:
Yeah, no, they’ve gone well. The pandemic created a big threat to human beings and our way of life, but also to business. And so, there were some real questions about how Zillow as a company or the real estate industry, in general, was going to fare. I think that because the company, Zillow that is, is really part of the technology frontier around real estate, automating processes, consolidating processes, Zillow actually did relatively or very well during the time. There was lots of activity, lots of engagement with the business, one, because now people are doing so much online, and then, two, because they’re starting to think about how the pandemic might shape where they live and how they live. And so, that was a boom to the business.

Eric Bailey:
I would say to the design team and I think the workforce, we really took seriously the taking on remote work as the de facto way we approach our day-to-day. And that was a big shift. That was something that was, I think, we entered with real interest and did deep research with the workforce to get a sense of where their sensibilities were. The overwhelming majority felt like remote or having at least the option to work remotely was preferred. And so, we’ve done everything we can to really put in place processes and tools and even aspects of our culture structured around remote work and asynchronous work. And so it’s really interesting. I think, great, lots of benefits, obviously, right? Now we can work with folks from many markets, many regions. We have really now diverse teams when it comes to that. Obviously, people don’t have to commute as much. So lots of benefits there. But there were some trade-offs too.

Maurice Cherry:
What sort of trade-offs?

Eric Bailey:
I’ve been at Zillow for about three years, and I was a part of the team that was localized into an office, and now I’m part of a team that is distributed and virtual. And so, having experienced both, I would say one huge benefit of being in a physical space with folks is really the kinds of bonds you can build. I think that, eventually, we will need to, even with a remote workforce, we will need to create time together. We’ll be making plans for team offsites or onsites, I guess, and team meetings and really strategic moments for us to get together and collaborate. And that will be around problem-solving, but also mostly it’ll be around just building relationship and community with our team. So being in the same place just really does allow people to really get to know each other, I think, in a way that it’s difficult to do online.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. How many people are on your team?

Eric Bailey:
I have about 22 people on my team. I lead what we call an experience area. And that experience area is called buy, sell, and transact. We’re focused on creating end-to-end experiences that support someone’s ability to buy a home from Zillow, Zillow sells homes, to sell their home to Zillow, and the transactions necessary to make that happen. So all the way through closing. And so I lead a team of product designers, essentially, that focus on that. And then I partner with research, user experience research, and content strategy. We partner to create those experiences.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. It’s interesting. I guess, over the past maybe year or so, I’ve talked to other design leads, and it’s really interesting to see how content strategy has… or really content in general, written word has become more of the design process to the point where they’re considered designers or they sit on a design team in that way.

Eric Bailey:
That’s right. Yeah. Well, hence the word strategy in there, right? So not just writers, but these are folks that are creating strategies for basically touching and building bridges with customers, particularly when we are creating experiences that are either unprecedented or our customer base is unaware of, right? Most people know Zillow because of your ability to dream and shop, you come and look at homes, and you look at your neighbor’s home and how much they pay for it and things like that. But then there are all these other services. Well, you can actually sell us your home, or you can actually buy a home from us. These are things that less of our customers are aware of. And so, to really reach out to them and connect with them, we really need to be strategic about the way we communicate. And that’s more and more of an imperative for our business.

Maurice Cherry:
Have there been any particular insights aside from just, I think, team makeup and asynchronous work and stuff? Are there any particular insights that have arose over the past year now that the team is distributed?

Eric Bailey:
Yeah. Well, one, remote work for some companies is old hat, but for Zillow, a company that’s, I think, we’re 6,000-plus, a large company like ours, I think we’re still navigating how you build culture, how you sustain culture. I think the company has a really strong and rich set of cultural values, and it’s very good at holding one another accountable and living up to those values. But then there’s sort of the unspoken things. In a virtual world, I think maintaining the joy of your experiences is something that requires a real attention and real intention. And so, our design team has spent a lot of time, especially our design leaders have spent a lot of time really trying to be creative about, “Well, how do we keep our team engaged? How do we have fun at what we do in lieu of having a space where you can improvise, right?” And so, we’ve really been experimenting and there’s still lots of work to do there. But sometimes it’s important just for us to get together and have fun.

Eric Bailey:
The amount of effort and energy that actually goes into architecting those is pretty large. That’s, I think, a big insight for us.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I didn’t know Zillow was that big. 6,000 people?

Eric Bailey:
Yeah, don’t quote me on the exact numbers. But yeah, we’re-

Maurice Cherry:
In the thousands.

Eric Bailey:
Yeah. And that’s because we’ve grown from this online platform to now a broad range of services and products. We’re a lender, so we offer mortgages. We have rental experiences and services for landlords and for renters. So just a really now a broad range of experiences around the home. And so in that, lots of different service providers under one umbrella.

Maurice Cherry:
I know a lot of people have been moving or downsizing or just changing up how they’re living because of the past year and a half or so with the pandemic. It’s interesting. How has Zillow helped to facilitate that outside of, I guess, what it’s for, which is real estate buying, selling, and searching? I don’t know, I guess I’m wondering, are there any particular ways that Zillow has helped out during this time in that process?

Eric Bailey:
For its employees or for just in the world?

Maurice Cherry:
For the world, yeah. For the world.

Eric Bailey:
Yeah. That’s a great question. Well, there’s definitely this migration, right? The economists talk about this migration from urban centers and across state lines. Many folks now are not bound to a specific region to make a living, there’s an influx of movement of folks that are moving to other states. Some are moving back to the states they came from, right? They would’ve been centralizing in Silicon Valley and in Seattle, but now maybe they’re going back to the Midwest or maybe they’re going back South. So huge migration there that is, obviously, an opportunity for Zillow.

Eric Bailey:
But also there’s this multi-generational trend, right? We have now families that are thinking about, “Well, I should probably live closer to home or maybe even with my parents or even grandparents.” So there’s also an influx of folks coming together and actually buying homes or bringing families under one roof. So really interesting market trends. We have internal folks that look at this, but those have been some of the big macro trends that I think are really interesting. And then obviously just doing everything remote, the fact that you can now actually sell your home online, you can purchase a home completely online or almost. There are a number of companies also they’re springing up around this capability. But yeah, the future of buying a home and finding a home is going to change dramatically over the next five to 10 years.

Eric Bailey:
It could be very similar to something like trading in your car, right? You drive into the dealership with one car, you leave with a loan and a new car, and you’ve left your old car. It’s all just one stop where you were doing that, you’re solving that problem for yourself and you’re focused on that thing that you want to buy. That should be the experience of buying a home, and eventually, it will.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow. What does a typical day look like for you?

Eric Bailey:
Typical day…

Maurice Cherry:
Does that exist?

Eric Bailey:
No. Well, yeah, right, no day is typical. It’s interesting. I think for me and my team, there are a few things. One, we work really hard to try to package our meeting times to a very specific timeframe. So between the hours of 10:00 and 14:00 are when we try to make sure that our hours… this is when we have core meetings. One, it’s to accommodate for multiple time zones. But it’s also to make sure that the other times outside of that are considered flexible and should be focused on getting the work done. And so, that’s a practice that we are all trying to employ and adhere to, or live up to.

Eric Bailey:
On a day to day, there’s probably logging in in the morning, attending some meetings. There would either be team meetings. There might be critiques for the design team. They’re usually planning meetings, some meetings that are about the work that we’re going to do in the future. And then there’s usually heads down working time. And yeah, I think some of the meetings if you’re getting together with a team you might be working on a project, you might be in a sprint, so you’re working at some point in the sprint process like you’re ideating or maybe brainstorming. And so, we’ll be doing some sort of remote activities, collaborative exercises to arrive at some outcomes there with teams. There’d be multifunctional teams, so product managers, designers, engineers, even folks from marketing, and obviously content and research. But yeah, now it’s mostly online, whether it’s collaborative or heads downtime. I think that’s how I’d sum it up.

Maurice Cherry:
You mentioned earlier about the challenge with building culture and maintaining joy. How have you been able to do that with your team specifically?

Eric Bailey:
I think I have two teams. I see myself as a part of a group of peers. I partner with other product managers and engineers and folks that are cross-functional. And so, I do what I can to create somewhat of a culture there. And then I have my working team, my team of designers and design managers. But in terms of design and design managers, some important things are maintaining my one-on-one. So I have weekly one-on-ones with all my direct reports. I have two team… They’re not critiques, they’re really focused on having the team share their work at earlier stages to get coaching. So it’s less about giving direction and telling someone to make it blue instead of agreeing and more focused on changing the arc of their thinking. So pressure testing their strategy and the questions they’re asking and the answers they’re coming up with. So those, I would say, are two review meetings where leaders are giving feedback to the design team.

Eric Bailey:
And then there are monthly meetings. We have a team monthly meeting. We’ve opened that up as open format to make it… We let folks from the team lead it. And so, there’ll be someone who’ll volunteer and sometimes they’re workshops. Sometimes they’re about learning. Sometimes they’re about problem-solving. Sometimes they’re about bonding or connecting, but there could be a range of things. But really the meeting is the operating system or the lever you have to create culture.

Eric Bailey:
I mentioned that other team and the other team is those cross-functional peers. And a lot of what I try to do there is really break the frame of your standard meeting format. When I’m leading meetings, I’m trying to make them interactive and make them conversations. I want them to be generative, so a lot of times I’m asking people to use the right side of their brains, folks that aren’t necessarily used to doing that. So giving them really solid provocations and asking them to think big with real big boat-like, “How might we,” statements?

Eric Bailey:
And then also done even some silly things like role play. I played Lori Greiner who’s one of the sharks from Shark Tank. We asked cross-functional teams to create concepts, and then I played a shark and evaluated the concepts, and they had to pitch those ideas to me. So even just trying to bring some humor into an otherwise what can be a, I would say, less than exciting format to computer screen.

Maurice Cherry:
Did you wear a long blonde wig too?

Eric Bailey:
I actually had a cut-out of her face. [inaudible 00:20:49]. And then actually before they came, I got them excited about it. I told them that we were going to have a guest actually, that Lori was coming. And so I’m a VP, so everyone thought, “Wait, maybe he knows her, maybe she’s coming.” They really got their pitches together for that, and of course, yeah, they got a big laugh when I came on with the mask.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. No, that’s good. I mean, that’s one of those ways that you bring joy is to just shake it up a little bit, you know?

Eric Bailey:
Yeah, and not take yourself so seriously. We can’t do that, right? We have to have fun and remember that we’re human beings.

Maurice Cherry:
I think more so than, I mean, just being human beings, we’re all human beings that are now going through this shared kind of traumatic experience. And so, I think anytime that when you’re at work, when you can let that facade down of it being so serious and just open up and be human, I think that’s what everyone just appreciates that now more than ever, I think.

Eric Bailey:
That’s right. Yeah, be authentic, your authentic self.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, when you initially booked the interview, and people that have listened to the show noticed this, that I always ask this question about what do you want people to take away from the interview? And one of the things that you had mentioned early on was that UX is a field with limitless possibilities. Of course, you’re AVP of UX at Zillow. Can you expand on that for me? How, from your perspective, is UX a field of limitless possibilities?

Eric Bailey:
For those that know me, they know I’m really into self-actualization. I really come to the realization that my purpose is to create user experiences that help people become who they hope to be. And those would be experiences that end customers or users would use, and obvious industries are healthcare, education. In this case, it’s finding a home, right, finding a home is both existential for people, but it’s also aspirational. You can change the arc of someone’s life in finding a home. And then it’s also through my teams, right, creating experiences for them that help them become the vision of who they see in the future. I develop over the years, and I can talk a little bit more about that later. So I think humans have a limitless possibility, and I think that the design field is really the perfect platform for that. It’s a perfect sort of Petri dish at least for creative people to discover who you are, who you want to be.

Eric Bailey:
That’s because of a few things. I think, one, it’s really, really broad. It’s open to so many different kinds of talents. So we mentioned content, so people that are writers, people that are researchers, that are inquisitive and empathetic, people that are artists, and people that like to make and create, and people that are builders and people that are analytical. And so it’s just so open to the array of skillsets that it’s so welcoming, I think, to so many folks left and right-brained that I think it’s an incredible career. I started out as a graphic designer, but UX really is this thing that is multidisciplinary. Yeah, I think it’s a really rich field.

Eric Bailey:
I think some of the skills that come to mind for me are there’s research, there’s synthesis, there’s storytelling, there’s facilitation, there’s interaction design, there’s service design, visual design, prototyping, right? These are all things that a user experience designer might be asked to do. And that doesn’t mean that you have to be an expert in all of them, but chances are you are going to bias us towards one or two of those, and you’re going to become an expert. You can have a team that has certain expertise in any one of these dimensions or two or three, I think is incredible.

Maurice Cherry:
It’s really been interesting how really UX has exploded as a field over the past few years. Of course, you’ve got General Assembly and you’ve got other types of boot camps and other programs that are really cranking out UX designers into the industry at the same time as the design industry has gotten more lockstep in with tech. Companies have went from being just strictly visual designed and now being more product-based. And so, the market has changed, and to that end, the workforce has changed to go along with that. So I can see how those possibilities are really there because a UX designer can be called six different things for six different companies.

Eric Bailey:
That’s right. That’s right.

Maurice Cherry:
They could be UX, they could be product, they could be-

Eric Bailey:
That’s right.

Maurice Cherry:
… like you mentioned before, content, things of that nature. And so, it’s really flexible in that way.

Eric Bailey:
It is. Yeah, it’s incredible. And like I said, it’s welcoming, right? That means it welcomes folks that are the anthropologists and ethnographers. It’s just a really diverse field. I don’t know of another one that is as diverse. One other thing it’s really important to note is there’s real symmetry between the design process and new ways or progressive ways of learning. The field of education right now is really embracing the design process. You have a question, you go out and get answers to that question. You form a hypothesis, right? You answer that question. You experiment with your solutions. You validate them, and you learn from it. That is the basis of learning, and here is a field that you can do that every single day. Every single day you are applying progressive learning, and you’re following basically this process. You’re continually learning throughout your life. And that’s one thing that I just find really fascinating is that they’re really the same thing. That’s incredible.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Now, you’ve mentioned before about being a graphic designer. To that end, I want to really go back and learn more about your origin story. Tell me about where you grew up.

Eric Bailey:
I grew up in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.

Maurice Cherry:
All right.

Eric Bailey:
Yeah. East Side.

Maurice Cherry:
We’ve got a lot of Ohio folks, specifically Cleveland, on the show. I’ve even got some family, they’re in Cleveland, they’re in Youngstown, they’re like right around that area. Yeah.

Eric Bailey:
Yes, that’s right.

Maurice Cherry:
Cleveland’s a great design city too.

Eric Bailey:
I think so, yeah, and we always represent. It’s an incredible town. Well, I grew up drawing. I loved to draw. I loved comics. I grew up creating characters and writing comic books and things like that.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh cool.

Eric Bailey:
I think my parents put me in some classes at the Cleveland Institute of Art. They have an industrial design program, so it’s the first time I saw these models of people making, basically, the cars of the future. I mean, Cleveland Institute of Art is a pretty top-notch school. It’s affiliated with the Cleveland Museum of Art, which is one of just a handful of world-renowned art museums, something that I was exposed to really early too. So, yeah, it’s a hidden gem in the Midwest, and a lot of talented people come out of Cleveland.

Maurice Cherry:
I was first there… When did I first go to Cleveland? I mean, aside from family stuff, but as a designer, the first time I remember going was in 2014. Yeah, 2014 I went. I spoke at a conference there. Damn, that was seven years ago, Jesus. But I spoke at a conference there. There’s a local studio there called Go Media, and they had this event called Weapons of Mass Creation. I don’t know if they still have the event. I don’t think they do, but every year they would have a number of different panels. It was a multi-day event. They would have live painting. They’d have break-dancing. It was a whole thing, and that’s how I really got introduced to Cleveland as a design city. I was like, “Man, this is great. This is wonderful.” And got to meet other designers from nearby, from Chicago and from Detroit and stuff like. So it was great. I want to go back to Cleveland once all this pandemic madness stuff is over. But, yeah, sounds like your parents really kind of introduced you to design and exposed you to that early on.

Eric Bailey:
Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I mean, they knew it was ordained that I was going to do something creative. I mean, I had been drawing since I was maybe two years old, and I would spend hours and fill up sketchbook after sketchbook. I just loved to be creative. Yeah, they just did what they could to expose me to different things. I didn’t want to be “a starving artist” artist. Obviously a stereotype, but I didn’t know what design was. But I applied to a graphic design program in Cincinnati when I was coming out of high school. So it’s the University of Cincinnati in graphic design in School of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning and-

Maurice Cherry:
Wow, it’s a mouthful.

Eric Bailey:
… really… Yeah, it is. DAAP is the acronym. But it was an amazing program. I think like many of my experiences, it was serendipitous. I just followed a calling, but I didn’t know what it was going to turn into. One, it was a five-year program, and two, it had a… First year was foundation, so you spend that first year with architects and industrial designers and fashion designers all doing the same thing, learning the same fundamentals. And then you break off into your expertise. And two, it had an internship program or a co-op program that wound up being six quarters in the field. So every other quarter I would-

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, nice.

Eric Bailey:
You wind up working the equivalent of a year and a half before you get out of school. And so that was an incredible experience.

Maurice Cherry:
I’m not saying this to date you, but this is-

Eric Bailey:
That’s okay, you can date me.

Maurice Cherry:
No, but I mean, this is in the early nineties, this is really prior to the advent of the personal computer and design really coming into its own through things like CorelDRAW and Photoshop and stuff like that. It sounds like, I mean, that sort of hybrid program of work plus in-class instruction was really good.

Eric Bailey:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I would say anyone looking at design programs should choose or take very seriously programs that have internships, right? Just the amount of autonomy and independence and the amount of clarity I got on what I wanted to do and what I didn’t want to do was incredible. The other thing is as part of that program you move from city to city. I worked at the National Park Service working on the publications and brochures that they use in the national parks. I worked in St. Louis at a retail doing design for retail. I worked in Dallas, Texas doing environmental graphics at an architectural firm. And then I worked at a small but cutting-edge design studio in Boston. Every quarter I was moving to a city, finding an apartment, and either living with other students or living on my own and had a full-time job. I mean, it was incredible.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow. I don’t know if there’s really any design program like that now that really put you out there as a working designer while you’re still in school in that way.

Eric Bailey:
Yeah, I think there are a handful, and they’re definitely worth you tracking down. I’ll any day hire someone from Cincinnati as an intern or full-time.

Maurice Cherry:
How was your early career post-graduation because it sounds like you’ve managed to gain a good bit of work experience while still being a student?

Eric Bailey:
Yeah. I definitely didn’t want to stay in Cincinnati. I came out of high school in ’90 and from 1995 was an undergrad. When you’re from Ohio, you do a few things. You either stay in Ohio, you move to New York, Atlanta, or Chicago. And so, I started applying to jobs in Atlanta and Chicago. I had some family in Chicago. I actually wound up a conference for The Organization of Black Designers. It was the first one, it was held in Chicago. Through that, I think I wound up landing some contract work in Chicago. So I went ahead and moved to Chicago. And then while in Chicago, I attended at a conference, and that really got me connected to a number of opportunities. But that was a really pivotal moment for me.

Maurice Cherry:
The Organization of Black Designers, wow. Revision Path and OBD kind of have a… I don’t know, I don’t want to say a history, that makes it sound contentious. But since I’ve started the show and I’ve been talking to people, the organization has definitely come up several times. I’ve tried to get David to even come on the show. But we’ve had other past folks that have been on the show, we did a whole oral history of OBD back in… Wait, when was that? 2018, I think, something like that. I mean, it’s just amazing hearing about how that organization came about it and really how many people it helped out because it’s something that I don’t think a lot of black designers even know about because it’s hard to really pin down-

Eric Bailey:
I know.

Maurice Cherry:
… that history. It’s not a story that’s like AIGA or something like that. I mean, you tell me because you were around, was OBD for the black designer back then?

Eric Bailey:
For me, I mean, one, I was probably maybe one, maybe two black students in my cohort, right? At least I would say I identified as black and that I was making it really clear I’m black. I kind of led with that. But very few in the design program in Cincinnati, very few… In all the internships, I was probably the only black person in all the internships, maybe one that I interacted with in the corporate environment. And then moving to Chicago and working at these firms, just seeing so few black designers. So this is the first time in my life I stood in a room and saw hundreds of black people that were creative that were just like me, and fashion, art, graphic, industrial design, you name it, architects. To do that for the first time is transformative. You just realize you’re not alone.

Eric Bailey:
So I think that’s what it did for me, just make me feel a sense of belonging in a way that I had never felt before and realize even if I do go back into these other spaces and I go to my nine to five at this company over here where I’m still the only black person, I know we’re out there, and I’m validated by that. I know I have a lifeline to them. I can always touch base with them. A lot of what I was doing was taking the people on that list and calling them up and saying, “Hey, I’m looking for work.” So a lot of it was pre-Linkedin, just using that network to see if you can make inroads and either get a job with them or have them refer you.

Maurice Cherry:
But right around that time, you also got involved and helped co-create something called Project Osmosis. Can you talk about that?

Eric Bailey:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, this is part of the oral history of OBD. I think I had the fortune of meeting some of the folks that after that initial conference in Chicago, there are designers there that convened themselves on a regular basis from that point on and kind of became the Chicago chapter of OBD. And that was led by Vernon Lockhart. You met with him before. He really helped coalesce a team of folks that we call ourselves OBD, Chicago, and we were representing OBD and that chapter. And so I was attracted to that group, so I joined them and had other friends that joined. And so, we got really close and just really bonded and tried to carry on the legacy of the larger org to both network, but then also to try to do some more outreach to the community and primarily to younger folks.

Eric Bailey:
And so, that outreach was through University of Illinois Chicago. We were doing programs either with students there or through local high schools, middle schools. I also did a little bit of internal visioning and journeying and we together came up with this idea of more like an outreach, like a consistent outreach to creative youth that would eventually enter the design community. And so, the idea was we know that there are creative folks out there that have this innate talent and they probably don’t see any pathway for themselves, right? They don’t see that there are these fields out there, these roads to success that they could take, and using their talent something that they could have fun and in joy every day.

Eric Bailey:
We wanted to expose more and more creative kids to these fields, to industrial design, fashion design, graphic, architecture, et cetera, and so we decided to create a program around it. There was this woman named Lisa Moran, Keith Purvis, Vernon Lockhart, Marti Parham. There’s a number of other folks, I don’t want to leave them out, but we basically came up with this idea of Project Osmosis. And that was, of course, these kids learning from the design professionals, and that was the genesis. We actually converted OBD Chicago into Osmosis. And that was its next incarnation; we were no longer OBD.

Maurice Cherry:
And shout-out to Vernon Lockhart. I mean, he is still keeping.

Eric Bailey:
Oh my gosh, yes.

Maurice Cherry:
… Project Osmosis going to this day.

Eric Bailey:
Yes.

Maurice Cherry:
To this day. Shout-out to him. Wow. So you were working for a few different design studios back then doing a lot of graphic design work. What do you remember the most about being a working designer from that time?

Eric Bailey:
It’s funny you mentioned the adoption of computers. I would say I was in my second year in college when we were using Mac computers and Adobe software. I was using those all through college and in my internships as well. And so, yeah, most of my work then going out, I would kind of… I think the first year or so I was a freelancer and I would use my network to see who’s looking for a designer, and I would join these small studios. There was a studio called Metaphor. There’s a number of others I can’t even remember right now. Pivot Design. I would just go work with them for a few months and work on mostly corporate communications and things for whatever local restaurants, whatever, doing mostly print work. But I wound up working at a small web design shop for the first time. They were working on websites, and that’s when websites and web marketing was just taking off. So this is 1997, ’96, ’97. And yeah, that’s when I started learning web design at this place called Streams Online Media. No longer around. And then I wound up joining a company called Giant Step, which was the digital arm of Leo Burnett, a larger ad agency, and so made my way into web design.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, it’s hard to overstate just how much of… There was nothing back then of web design.

Eric Bailey:
True. True.

Maurice Cherry:
There were maybe a couple of books, but even those felt like they were being written on the fly. There was just a lot of view source and figuring it out.

Eric Bailey:
Yeah, absolutely, especially when it came to digital design. Digital design, it was a gamble, right? The paradigm for designers was you’re a graphic designer. You either work at either a large graphic design agency or you work at an advertising agency. And then you eventually become a creative director, right? Your Paul Rand was the prototype for your career. But I think digital, really those larger agencies didn’t have experience in that. So it was really the small tech companies and webshops and things like that that were really starting to hire designers and do groundbreaking work.

Maurice Cherry:
Because they could move faster because they were smaller.

Eric Bailey:
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Maurice Cherry:
I remember, let’s see, ’97. I was in high school in ’97, and I remember that’s when I got my first HTML book. We had went to a… Was it a Walden Books?

Eric Bailey:
Walden, yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
It was Walden. We went to Walden Books in Montgomery. I’m from Selma, but Montgomery’s 50 miles away, so we went to Walden Books and got this big HTML book. It was orange. It was like a thousand-page book. I don’t know, back then, they had a bunch of books like this for different languages. There was one for HTML, one for ASP, different things like that. And I remember this big, huge thousand-page book, and I would carry that around with me at school. And whenever I got a chance to go to the like… We had a supercomputer lab in my high school, and we had computers in the library. Whenever I had free time, I would just go in with that book and I had a Tripod account, and I would just start trying to figure out like, “What does the blink tag do? What does the marquee tag do?” Just trying to figure out how it works. Because it’s one thing to see it in the book, but then to actually do it on the web and see how it works in real time, to me that was just such a transformative time in learning design. Because really there were no rules.

Eric Bailey:
That’s right.

Maurice Cherry:
You really could do what you wanted to do.

Eric Bailey:
Yeah. And this is also when so many of those other roles were starting to enter the field, right. You might be a graphic designer who was usually doing comps and mock-ups and doing layout for, let’s say, posters or books or write other corporate communications that was like a… we’ll say layout, but then there were people who were technologists, right? There were people who are anthropologists who were becoming information architects. And so yeah, just sociologists and cognitive psychologists. So that now as a designer, you’re starting to interact with these people. They’re also people with backgrounds in motion design and film design, and so they were starting to come together at these companies. And so that was really interesting, was just now interfacing with such a range of creative people, whereas as a graphic designer you might interact with a photographer and maybe an illustrator. But yeah, really interesting.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I would say for of those of us, like designers that are probably 40 and up, to really see how the entire design community has changed from those early days in the nineties to now, it’s been really inspiring to see just how much things have changed.

Eric Bailey:
Yeah, absolutely. That is why I also say that UX or user experience is such an amazing field is just because it is really on the cusp of that Moore’s Law of continual transformation and change. It’s almost as if design is becoming something new, and UX is sort of, I think, on the forefront of that. So the fact that it’s, yeah, it’s constantly growing and changing it’s really exciting. It has a continual frontier, right? There’s a continual green field in front of it.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Now even with all the design work that you’ve done over the years, you also have your own side business, side project that you do that’s called Properganda. How did that come about?

Eric Bailey:
That’s a great question and great timing for that question because what we’re talking about right now, this moment for me was a time when I stopped doing that kind of work. So when I was an undergrad, I kind of… Really short story here, when I was an undergrad, I did really well my first year, my second year in school I started to get really just uninspired and really had a hard time understanding how… I was this black kid. I’m pretty much the only one in my program, there’s one every year in the program. Really felt isolated. How is Gestalt psychology and semiotics, and how are these things… Will they have anything to do with me, all these Western theories and things?

Eric Bailey:
And so, I even had a professor approach me and say… I had a really hard end-of-year review, and he pulled me aside and said, “I look around the city, and I see so many black folks basically. But then I look in the program and you’re really the only one. I would think that you would want to essentially represent your race… or represent your race better.” One, he was not black so I had no [inaudible 00:47:33].

Maurice Cherry:
Of course.

Eric Bailey:
[crosstalk 00:47:33].

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, that’s pretty wild to say. Yeah.

Eric Bailey:
I mean, it was a jaw-dropping moment for me. And from that point on, I was singed by that, like really burnt by that. But we had a project shortly after that where we had to take a word and manipulate it and have it mean something else, a typographic study. Something clicked at me and for some reason, I chose the word Thanksgiving. I started playing with the letters in the word.

Eric Bailey:
I started with red letters, and I changed one letter to white and another letter to white and another one and then started making the red letters disappear, and it started to simulate population. I started thinking about the reds and the whites and how whites move in and reds start dying off. And at the end I added, I just added an E to both words and wound up with the words take and give. And there was white take and red give at the end. So it was really just repeating the word Thanksgiving and changing the color of one letter each row. So the statement was obviously about colonization, about gentrification… well, not gentrification but genocide essentially and the Holocaust, American colonization, and was through a typographic study. And that was the first time I realized, “Oh, I can use the tools they’re teaching me to make the statements I want to make.”

Eric Bailey:
And from that point on, it took off for me. I really loved visual pun. I really loved to use really simple graphics to make a really hard-hitting statement. And so the rest of my career there in undergrad was really making really cutting, really socially critical statements in my work. And that was my way of pushing back on that professor and basically on my cohort.

Eric Bailey:
It was really liberating for me. That’s what got me excited about design, was that I can use this craft to make a statement. Most designers, you’re meant to be objective, you’re not meant to make a statement. You’re meant to channel, right? This was my ability to communicate. So of course, I graduated. I went into the workforce, entered corporate America, and I stopped doing that kind of work. And that was around the time we talked about when I moved to Chicago and started working in health. So fast forward probably 15 years, I was working at a startup. I was a lead of design and really uninspired. I was really unhappy. I was burnt-out. For those years, I knew that I was not fully self-expressed.

Eric Bailey:
One night, I took out some of the old pieces that I worked on. The first one I took out was Thanksgiving, and I just updated it. I redesigned it, refined it. And that was really me getting in touch with that old self through the craft of just reworking those pieces. I picked up another one and started reworking and kind of updating it. And then from there, I started making new pieces, and they were usually some critical statements. An obvious, easy target is social media. That’s one that I have a love/hate relationship with. So started making lots of pieces around social media and its impact on us.

Eric Bailey:
That was it. I just was creating for the sake of creating, and it really breathed life back into me. I was up until 3, 4, 5 o’clock in the morning, multiple nights just not being able to stop creating. That was kind of the genesis and coming back to that idea of Properganda. I had come up with that nomenclature in the nineties, and so I decided to bring it back and say, “Okay, I’m going to build something around this.” So Properganda it was.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, Properganda, I like that because, of course, back then, proper was part of slang back then saying something was proper. I’m curious, have you heard of the book Visual Puns in Design?

Eric Bailey:
Eli Kince.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Yeah.

Eric Bailey:
Yes, yes. Yeah. Tell me, how’s that top of mind for you?

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, God, a few years ago, I was really seeking out design books by black designers.

Eric Bailey:
Wow. Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
I got his book. Saki Mafundikwa has a book called Afrikan Alphabets that is super hard to find, and I managed to get that. And yeah, that’s how I first found out about it.

Eric Bailey:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that’s my jam. When someone can use the visual image to break expectation or to change perception and change meaning, I just think it’s so brilliant. He’s actually a University of Cincinnati alumni.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, okay.

Eric Bailey:
Yeah, so he went to my school, he went through my same program, and he probably had that same instructor. Yeah, I love that sort of compendium of work that he collected there. I actually reached out to him maybe a few years ago when I picked Properganda back up. I was compelled to reach out and try to meet him. I think we chatted for a little bit through email. But, yeah, that’s so interesting you bring that up because that’s a really, I think, a great north star for me. Really impressed with this brother who, who was from my neck of the woods, basically,

Maurice Cherry:
I’m going to try to get him on the show. I reached out to him a few years ago too, and I think we were trying to get something going but he was busy at the time. So I’m going to try to pick that back up because that is a really good book. And for folks that are listening, you may be able to find it on eBay or Etsy. Because I don’t even know if it’s still in print, but I know that there are some copies of it floating around if you’re trying to find it.

Eric Bailey:
Yes. Yes.

Maurice Cherry:
So it sounds like having Properganda as that side project really helped fulfill you as a creative, even as you did your regular nine to five work.

Eric Bailey:
Yeah. I mean, I think it was I became really aware that my full-time work was not enough for me to be fully self-expressed and be fully self-actualized, and it was only going to be through doing that work that I would be my whole self. So from that point, it’s been a great ride. I mean, it’s hard. Like I said, I was compelled to do all that work. So I created a lot of work and lots of hours. I’m a full-time parent and have a full-time job. And so to do this as well, it’s a commitment. But yeah, it’s a part of me that has to be expressed otherwise I’m not fully myself.

Eric Bailey:
A lot of it is really not only just I have to create, I want to have that experience of creating. Because as a design leader and a manager, I create so little nowadays, right? I create success through teams, and my design is really people and their careers. And so then it’s like, “Well, but I still want to make things.” And so this gives me ability to do that. I call myself and this work the armchair activist, the person who walks through life, knowing that things aren’t quite right and just knowing something… It’s that whole matrix, right? You know that things aren’t right, but they need that tipping point. They need something to say, “Hey, look,” like nudge them and say, “You should be questioning this phone that you’re staring at for 10 hours a day. You should be questioning the things that you’re consuming. You should just think critically about your own behavior and how these things shape your behavior. So that what that’s based on.

Maurice Cherry:
There’s a designer I had on the show a few years back, his name is Andre Hueston Mack. He is a designer who had some experience in the financial industry but then later became world-class sommelier and now has his own brand of wines. They’re called Mouton Noir or Black Sheep Wines. His design, I don’t want to say it’s something similar to what you’re doing, but he also does these visual pun sort of designs as well. His design studio is called the Get Fraiche Cru, but fresh is spelled F-R-A-I-C-H-E like creme fraiche, and then cru is C-R-U, as in a vineyard because he does the wine. Actually, for people that are listening and for you too as well, if you all want to go to Bon Appetit’s YouTube channel, I know that that has had its own controversy, but if you go to Bon Appetit’s YouTube channel, he’s done a series of videos where he talks about wine and stuff so you can get to see his personality and stuff like that. But if folks want to check him out, I think he’s episode like… I want to say 313 or something like that, Andre Mack. It’s in the 310s from what I remember. I tend to remember pretty well who does what when. It’s a weird quirk, but if folks want to take that episode out, 313, it’s pretty good.

Eric Bailey:
Thank you for sharing that.

Maurice Cherry:
So between Properganda and the work that you do with Zillow and everything, and even, I guess, throughout your career, how have you worked to stay your authentic self?

Eric Bailey:
Well, I think Properganda is part of my authentic self, so even manifesting that. One, acknowledging it, “Hey, I need to pay attention to this aspect of my personality, and two, I need to feed it, and I need to make it public and build it around it.” Acknowledging that in myself, and I think that’s advice I would give to everyone, listening. I do a lot of internal listening. I usually do visioning exercises at least once every two years. And that’s to check in with myself on, “Okay, what experiences you want to be having and what skills do you want to be developing?” And so, Properganda is a manifestation of that. It’s like that happened in order for me to be whole.

Eric Bailey:
I think at work, a lot of it is around… Working from home was a milestone, something that I wanted to achieve. I just had the good fortune of things making that the case. For me, going into an office, commuting for three hours a day or four hours a day is not sustainable even though I’ve done it for 15 years. And so, having a better integration of home and life because home is the authentic me, so integrating that, that puzzle piece has fall fallen into place but that’s been important.

Eric Bailey:
I think also you talked a little bit about the last two years and not just the pandemic, but all of this sort of… I don’t call it social up upheaval, but it was just folks tired and pushing and being vocal. Whether it’s the protest or the election or whatever, but they’re the real issues about equity in our country and race. Those issues now have become part of the discourse at work and/or on in day to day. Now people are talking about things that they would rarely talk about or in spaces that they would rarely talk about. And so that is really important to maintain that. Now if I’m at work, we will talk about being a black designer or a black design leader or being a black male or a black woman or a black trans person, all of the diaspora and all of the issues that go with that, those are now part and parcel of the things that we talk about in work in our daily lives.

Eric Bailey:
So being authentic to that and putting words to that is really essential. I think I spent many years compartmentalize my blackness from work. And so, now that’s what part of being my authentic self and bringing that authentic self to work is that we can talk about aspects of my identity, other people can talk about aspects of their identity, and then we can talk about these things that go along with that. One thing is also working on things that are relevant to my own interests. Zillow is really pushing to create a social impact agenda and initiatives that are focused on changing paradigms in the housing industry and the fact that housing is kind of key center point around inequity, especially in [inaudible 01:00:47] communities. So being able to participate in work and help steer work, that’s focused on creating social impact, like doing that also is a part of my full-time job. It’s not just about paying the bills but being able to move certain boulders that are important to me in my life and then also being more and more myself. Those are the things I really push for, if that makes sense.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Do you feel satisfied creatively these days?

Eric Bailey:
I do. I do. I think my biggest challenge right now is probably I want to do so much more and there’s just so little time. The last year was tough because the kids were home during the day, so we were working and we were parenting. And so by the end of the day, it’s just like, “I’m done like toast.” And so, there wasn’t a lot of bandwidth to do other things. Now the only thing that limits me in terms of my happiness with being creatively expressed is just time. But I now have the things that I know I love to do. And so, yeah, I would say the answer is yes.

Maurice Cherry:
What do you want the next chapter of your life to be like? Where do you see yourself in the next few years? What kind of work do you want to be doing, projects, stuff like that?

Eric Bailey:
I think in the future I want to work to live, not live to work. And so that means that I want to work smarter not harder. I want to work on things that I’m really good at and do that with ease. And then I want to be able to take advantage of the benefits of my accumulated knowledge and expertise. So if I’ve worked for 25-plus years, I should be able to take the foot off the gas. And so, to be honest with you, it’s less about what new kinds of work I want to do and more about the balance I want to strike between work and life. I want to do less of busy work and logistics and administration and less churn and more generative and creative, and then also connecting with my family. I know that doesn’t directly answer your question, but, yeah, that’s the goal.

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

Eric Bailey:
They can find me on LinkedIn, so Eric Bailey. I think you’ll share some links there. I’m Properganda1, the number one, on Instagram, and then propergandadesign.com is a website for Properganda. Yeah, and there’s zillow.com. So you can obviously connect with Zillow and all the great things we have there for folks that are looking for a home, whether they’re renting or buying. And let’s see. Yeah, I think that’s not a huge digital footprint, but those are the things I keep it to.

Maurice Cherry:
All right, sounds good. Well, Eric Bailey, I want to thank you just so much for coming on the show. Thank you for, I mean one, sharing your story about how you really have become a designer and have made your way up in your career, but also really sharing how you’ve been able to balance these parts of yourself, whether it’s doing Properganda on the side, whether you’re building your teams. It sounds like you’re continually striving to have that sense of balance among the creative and the professional and the personal aspects of your life. And I think that’s something that all of us listening can really learn from. So thank you so much for coming on the show, I appreciate it.

Eric Bailey:
Maurice, my pleasure. Thank you. I’m really honored, yeah, just to be a part of a illustrious cohort of interviews, so thank you so much.

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

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Bekah Marcum

I first heard of Bekah Marcum when I talked with Tim Allen a few weeks ago, and I’m so glad I had the chance to connect with her for this interview! Along with being a product designer for Zillow, Bekah is a community organizer and the founder of Black Designers of Seattle.

We talked about how she’s adjusting to working from home and self-isolation due to the coronavirus pandemic, and she shared the differences and similarities working at Zillow versus her previous role as an art director at Amazon. Bekah also spoke about growing up between the United States and Brazil, attending college in Washington DC and getting into design, and adjusting to life in Seattle and attending graduate school. Bekah is all about building authentic community, and I can’t wait to see how her work makes an impact in the world!

Transcript

Full Transcript

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

Bekah Marcum:
I am Bekah Marcum. I am a product designer at Zillow currently and also the community organizer for the Black Designers of Seattle Network.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. Talk to me about working at Zillow. What’s a regular day like for you there?

Bekah Marcum:
Totally. It was a little bit more different than the environment that I’d been in before. It’s hyper, hyper collaborative in a lot of ways, so whether I’m working straight up with another designer or if I’m really collaborating with my content strategist and PM partners, everyone’s in the same space here in the same building, same floor together, so it’s a lot of walking around and chatting with people. But essentially, a day in of a designer at Zillow is, you get in, you have a fantastic view of the water in Seattle and then whether it’s going to a stand-up or any of those other type meetings, you grab a project. You might have some design critiques throughout the day with partners or other leadership. And, honestly, really just start collaborating on some pretty fun projects.

Maurice Cherry:
Now I have to couch this in our current reality of when we’re recording this for people that are listening, we’re recording this on March 19th and you mentioned at Zillow the view and it’s hyper collaborative and you’re working together. Seattle is, or at least you know a couple of weeks ago was one of the big hotspots for COVID-19. I’m pretty sure as other cities have taken suit with this now they’re forcing people to work from home, to socially isolate themselves. What is the vibe like in the city right now?

Bekah Marcum:
It’s been pretty weird. I think especially Zillow because although we do have people who work remotely, it’s not really a remote culture. And so it’s been a complete change from seeing each other and being in the office every day with each other to having to change everything into a online experience. So it’s definitely been crazy that restaurants and bars and other places were closed down. They’re only doing takeout right now. For us, we’ve been, along with a lot of the other tech companies in the area like Facebook and Amazon, we’ve all been working remotely for the last two, two and a half weeks. And so it’s definitely been, I think there’s a level of just stress that is definitely permeating everyone. We’re in such a lucky position to be able to work from home. But you have people who are small business owners here, you have people who can’t work from home and almost like the collective worry for our community has definitely been present.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. How are you feeling with all this going on?

Bekah Marcum:
I feel that I was super lucky. I live a little bit outside the city. So for me, I have a yard I can just go out and escape to without having to worry about social distancing. There’s a bunch of stress again, from the small business owners and community. For me, I am so addicted to coffee and so I’ve made best friends with a lot of the different coffee shops and restaurants in the area and the baristas and so, just worrying about them and worrying about how this is going to affect not only the individuals but then also the small companies economically. For me, I was used to working remotely before in a prior job and so I had a space ready to flip the switch in that way. But it’s definitely taken a lot of, or I’ll just say it’s definitely been a transition into trying to work remote with all the stresses that are added onto it.

Maurice Cherry:
How has the team handling it, coming from this very hyper-collaborative environment and now being distanced in this way? How are they handling it?

Bekah Marcum:
I think a lot of people are handling it pretty well. We have a massive amount of Slack channels over random things. The other day we were sending weird childhood photos to each other just to bring some of that community online. In in other ways, I think it’s been really great to see the team give each other a lot of grace because other folks… I don’t have kids, but a lot of people are at home with their young children. Zillow is a very family-oriented company and we’ve had many a kid come and do a cameo. Sometimes it was someone’s puppy and so it’s been fun to almost see each other in their home environments. But even my husband, who’s over at Amazon, one of their senior leadership sent out an email that just said, “You know what, guys? We’ll be fine. Let’s just make sure that we give each other grace in this time because we know things might take longer because there’s so much other stuff happening, so let’s just be patient with each other and just get through it together.”

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I definitely think that grace is needed for many of the reasons that you mentioned, going from working in an office to suddenly having to work from home and also not really being able to leave the house. That’s a big, drastic change for a lot of people that shakes up their routine, it affects them mentally, it affects the output of work that they’re able to do. So it’s good that the companies are empathetic enough to say, “We know this is a tough situation.” Not being completely hands off, but certainly exhibiting some grace in what is a very stressful time.

Bekah Marcum:
Totally. Yeah, it’s definitely been very, very nice to feel like we have that type of support and understanding.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. What sorts of projects are you working on at Zillow?

Bekah Marcum:
Totally. I work in the growth and acquisition space for a product called Zillow Offers. Zillow Offers is essentially only really available in a few different cities right now, but it’s a new product to Zillow and it’s a program where we’ll actually buy houses from customers and then also sell them. The goal, the overarching goal in Zillow, is to help movers get to where they want to be. However, we can make that process easier for them, let’s do it. The whole premise of our program is that you don’t have to do any home showings, you don’t have to do repairs, you can essentially just pack up and leave. Some of our customers have given a lot of feedback where people who, some of them might have been in the military, some were moving for a job and they just really needed to get to the next place sooner. By not having to go through that whole traditional selling process, it removed all those different barriers for them and they were able to move faster. That’s essentially my product that I work on.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. Prior to Zillow, I know you mentioned your husband working at Amazon, but you worked there as well.

Bekah Marcum:
I did. I was at Amazon for four years or right around four years, first as a contractor the first few months and then I went in as a designer, then left as an art director. Funny thing, my husband came in a few years after I did and when he was interviewing I was like, “Hey hon, why does it say that your hiring manager is on the same floor as me?” And he’s like, “Oh, don’t worry, I’ll be on a different floor.” And we ended up being on two very different teams but being on the same floor for about six months. So we’re also pretty used to working in a similar space together.

Maurice Cherry:
What’s it like working at Zillow and how is it different from Amazon? Zillow is more of a startup, I would imagine. And Amazon is this big corporate behemoth.

Bekah Marcum:
It’s very different. The cultures, if you even look at the leadership principles of the two companies, they’re very, very different. It shows up starkly. For Amazon, it was this huge, huge, huge company and sometimes you may not feel like you have full ownership over a certain product. I guess scope is a big thing for Zillow Offers. I essentially own a whole section of the product and so what I decide, what I really work and help to create just goes up and is the entire thing versus a small piece of it.

Bekah Marcum:
Another thing is Zillow… If you’re talking about workplace things, Zillow is much more of a nine to five and so there is a great work balance there. It’s been listed on different lists as a top place to work for families. I was really weirded out that people left their computers on their desks and went away for the evening. I felt like the first times I did that I was like, “Oh, I’ll hide it in my little desk drawer.” And people were like, “No, you just leave it.” Have that work-life balance versus different times for Amazon it was very dependent on the manager that you had, on the project you were working on. So it definitely had a lot more creeping as far as your off time.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. That work-life balance is… I’ve found certainly as I’ve gotten older it’s more and more important to be able to really have that split and that separation and it feels like now, to go back, unfortunately, to talking about the coronavirus, I feel like everyone’s work-life balance is thrown off now.

Bekah Marcum:
Oh, absolutely.

Maurice Cherry:
So it’s a weird thing because it’s now all in the same place and you don’t really have a way to separate it. I’ve found a way to try to separate it. I told you before you started recording, I’ve been working from home since 2008 so I kind of have a pretty good way of compartmentalizing it. But then you just have all the added stress about everything that’s happening outside of your home and you’re like, “Oh, how do I focus? How do I try to concentrate on the task at hand?” So it’s, yeah, it’s…

Bekah Marcum:
Totally, I feel like, yes. Right. At home, you have the dirty dishes, you have the laundry that hasn’t been folded in a week. Or at least I do. You have the animals and everything else. For my husband and I, it’s like, “All right, who’s going to use the office for a meeting. If you’re having a meeting out there and I’m having a meeting in here, how are we keeping the animals quiet?” It’s a whole collection of stuff also. I find it super hard because it’ll get to 5:00, 6:00 and I’m like, all right, when am I actually going to close my computer because I’m not at work and I don’t have to leave work on time to be able to hit the commute right and get home. You’re already home. So I definitely have had to, for my own sanity, just shut everything down. Put “do not disturb” on my Slack so that after a certain time in the evening, I’m just not getting those messages.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, that’s the best way to do it. Just shut it all down and physically try to go somewhere else, a different place, a different spot. That really does help out.

Bekah Marcum:
As long as you’re in your home because there’s still social distancing.

Maurice Cherry:
Exactly. So where did you grow up?

Bekah Marcum:
I actually grew up in two very different places. My parents had a nonprofit that really focused on just community good. And so I was born in California and spent the first nine years fully there. But then I ended up going back and forth to Brazil for a month or two out of the year when I was nine. And then when I was 16 I actually moved permanently there for the last two years of high school. So, for me, my childhood was very much made up of two very different places, very different cultures.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow. High school in Brazil, what was that like?

Bekah Marcum:
Oh, goodness. It was very interesting. When I first moved down there, I homeschooled for the first year because it’s very like a transitional year. Senior year I went to a high school that my mom taught at. For me, it was really, really interesting because my parents again were in the nonprofit space. And so my whole life there was working with kids in the slums. Some of my best friends were ex-street kids. That was what I was used to. But then when my mom started working at the high school because she’s a teacher, my sister and I went there for free. I think my graduating class was 17 people and those kids were essentially the richest kids of the area because I went to a “international” or American school. And so for me it also felt like I was straddling two very different worlds when I went to school, then when I went to the afterschool program that I would help run with my parents in the evening. So it was definitely a very, very interesting, interesting experience.

Maurice Cherry:
When you graduated high school, did you move back to the States or did you stay in Brazil for a while?

Bekah Marcum:
I pretty much went straight back to the States. I ended up going to DC for school, so I….

Bekah Marcum:
… dates. I ended up going to DC for school, so I was at American university for undergrad where I studied film and anthropology. Essentially I wanted to find a way to tell a story, but then I also wanted to tell it correctly and know how to do the research in order to portray it in the most unbiased way possible. And so I did that double major. So I was in DC for that and then stayed about a year after I graduated, and that’s when I eventually moved to Seattle.

Maurice Cherry:
Now I’m curious about the storytelling. Being someone that was going between two different countries growing up, were you kind of exposed to a lot of art and design that made you want to go into doing film?

Bekah Marcum:
So it actually wasn’t really the art, it was just the stories of the people who I met. I just fell in love with hearing different people’s stories and hearing the way that they saw the world. And so I think straddling those two very different socioeconomic classes made it so that I realized that the other one just had no idea how the other one lived. And I think especially in Brazil, that stratification is so great and also exists not only socioeconomically, but also racially. And so for me, I just wanted to kind of tell a story to demystify and de-other a whole group of the population.

Bekah Marcum:
And so it was actually a project I did it my senior year in high school where in art class we had to do a video project, where we’d film it, we’d edit, it and do all this other stuff. And so it was a group thing, but I asked the teacher if I could just do a solo project. And I ended up going and featuring one of … Essentially he was kind of like a sibling at that point. I’d met him the first year I’d gone to Brazil when I was nine, he was 10 or 11, and we’ve basically been friends since then. And he had been a street kid or lived on the streets from the time he was six to nine, by himself with other kids his age. And then he ended up at this home for ex-street kids.

Bekah Marcum:
And so for me I was like, “You know what, I just really want to tell this story. I just really want to tell where he came from, the amazing trajectory and this amazing change that he’s actually brought to his life.” He started in the slums and living on the streets when he was so young, but now he had been a part of a college prep program. There was so much, and it was just such an amazing story.

Bekah Marcum:
So I took my really, really crappy little point-and-shoot camera and I went and I just interviewed him. We went to the favela where he grew up, and he brought us to his mom’s house, and we met a siblings, he showed us where he had actually lived essentially in front of a shop, where he slept at night for the three years he was on streets.

Bekah Marcum:
He told stories over … He is kind of a hardcore-looking kid. He has this Nike scar, it looks like a Nike symbol on the side of his cheek. It’s huge. So he looked pretty hardcore. And when you actually talk to him you realize that no, he only got that from falling out of a tree when he was playing. And the only thing he actually stole ever was a Hershey’s bar, but he felt so guilty that he actually left money for them later on. So someone looking at him might think and really stereotype him in a certain space. But then the real story was just totally and completely different.

Bekah Marcum:
So that’s one thing I really, really loved. And I actually showed it at a little coffee house presentation thing with parents and stuff when I was in high school. And for me I was terrified because I was really showing this group of the richest people in the city, I was essentially throwing the socioeconomic differences and the racial differences in their face. But then it showed, I was in a cold sweat. But then afterwards people started coming up to me and they were like, “How can we help? How can we do things for him?”

Bekah Marcum:
And so it actually ended up helping him raise money for an English language trip over the summer in the US. And so it definitely made a huge impact even though it was really bad video, the audio was terrible. But the story really came forward and I just saw the impact that this could have.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow. That’s quite a story. Do you still keep in contact with that kid?

Bekah Marcum:
I do. I do, yes. He’s definitely one of those folks who just became very much like siblings. And so now he’s living in Brazil again, him and a few others. It’s been really great to see how they kind of grew up and then are helping people who are in a similar situation. And so another person who I knew around the same time, all that he does is really go to the streets and really try to build relationships with other kids who live on the streets, or in the favelas, to essentially try and be a catalyst for some change in their lives.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. So let’s go back to the time when you’re leaving American university and you’re about to head out to Washington. Was that a big change in terms of time? Or did you have a few design gigs between there, before you made the move?

Bekah Marcum:
So in DC, I didn’t get into design until a lot later on. I think it was the last two or three quarters of school. I essentially realized that if I was going to be some starving documentary filmmaker, I’d have to learn how to make my own poster. And so I took a design class, ended up really liking it, and then went from there. So at first I was able to mix it up with some of the storytelling internships I had. I had actually ended up doing a small animation and putting it up for, it was some type of awards thing at my school and actually won Best in New Media. And the prize of that was an internship at a design company.

Bekah Marcum:
So that was my first kind of design gig was me in a small basement making a lot of different illustrations for one of the Smithsonian’s. And so I don’t even think they actually ended up using it, I think they went a totally different direction after I left. But that was, I think for me a great experience. Just learning from the designers there, but then also learning a new program. I basically tried to do as many kind of small contracting stuff or freelance gigs. It was very nice having parents who were in the nonprofit sector because they always needed marketing work. So a lot of the early things I had was just making some marketing materials or teaching materials for them. So that definitely gave me a lot of practice.

Bekah Marcum:
And then for me it was a lot of, because I really didn’t know what a good designer was, especially what a good junior designer was, I really was just looking at different people’s portfolios online. I was going on Design Inspiration and also Pinterest, trying to find designs I really liked. And so I just gave myself projects that I could just try and emulate the style or something of, just to try and build that portfolio out.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s a really good idea. I tell people that a lot in terms of how do they find some kind of project or thing to work on that lets them do a lot of different skills. I’ll tell people, “You kind of have to make it yourself. A lot of those opportunities don’t just come to you pre-made. So if there’s something that you’re really passionate about, turn that into a project and work on it. And let that be the thing that you help kind of build your skills up for.”

Bekah Marcum:
Yeah, totally. For my parents, they would want, I don’t know, a presentation slide. And I was like, “You know what, it might be better as an animated video.” So I would just work through animation skills and learn animation while making them a video. Or I know there was a big wave of popularity for minimalist movie posters and stuff. And so I was like, “You know what, what are my favorite movie posters? Or what are my favorite movies? Let me just make a few posters for these different TV shows. How would I take this concept and then do it in my style? Or really, anything else.”

Bekah Marcum:
So it definitely helped to build that out. And people actually loved seeing all these little passion projects when I first got started. So at first I was worried that it wasn’t showing professional work, but people really, really tended to enjoy just seeing that I had that excitement for what I was doing and the passion to actually just go off and do it on my own.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, absolutely. Those are skills that employers, and I would say even people that just want to work with you on a collaborative basis, they want to see that passion. Because honestly the skills are, I hate to say transferable, but they kind of are. There’s a lot of people that can work in Photoshop or Sketch or what have you and make something that looks really nice, but is this something they’re passionate about? Or are they kind of just an adequate set of hands that are able to put something together?

Bekah Marcum:
No, totally. Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
So we’ve had a couple of people on the show who have moved to Seattle, and they’ve often talked about the “Seattle Freeze”. Which for those that are listening it’s kind of this, I don’t know, I guess you could call it a-

Bekah Marcum:
Constant social distancing?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, constant social distancing. We’ll say that. When you first moved to Washington, did you experience any of that?

Bekah Marcum:
Oh, totally, totally. I’m from California where you just call someone up when you’re on the way to their house. Or like, “Hey, let’s go grab something to eat right now.” And then in Brazil it’s a very kind of warm culture, you’re always hugging people, doing kisses on the cheek, all that stuff. And then in DC there’s still that environment if you’re heading to the Southeast where there are mostly black people. And so people are always talking to each other in the grocery stores and everything else. And then you come here and it’s like crickets.

Bekah Marcum:
It was definitely hard in the beginning just trying to break into a field that I had no idea how to break into while also trying to deal with, what is networking? How is everything not awkward? Also, how do I actually build both connections and friendships in a place that is known for being very cold? So I would say that Seattle has been practicing for the social distancing for awhile, I swear. In some ways we’re a little ahead of the curve on that.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, you did a recent interview with another podcast called Designer&Designer, and you were talking about your experiences working as a black designer, working on designing things, but often being the only one. I can only imagine, one, you’re coming to this new city where people may not be super hospitable, and then you’re also working in a place where you’re the only black person there or the only minority there. What did that feel like in those first few, I guess months or so when you were in Seattle? Did you feel like you had a community that you could turn to?

Bekah Marcum:
Honestly, no. For my husband and I, we moved to Seattle without really knowing anyone. And so it was a very, very isolating experience. And also to add insult to injury, I was freelancing when I first came here and still trying to build that portfolio and find a job. Because we were able to move with his job, but I was still looking one.

Bekah Marcum:
And so it was absolutely isolating. I would go to networking events and there would be no one who looked like me there. I would go to like open houses at different design firms or anything else, and I would be the only me in the space. And I would like to say that that changed a lot. But throughout the first job I got as a marketing assistant or a production designer to the time that I spent at Amazon, I had not worked with another black designer in that entire time.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow. And this was the impetus behind you starting Black Designers of Seattle?

Bekah Marcum:
Yes, in a lot of ways. So as a designer I kind of had always heard of the other elusive black designer somewhere in the company. There was always another one, you just didn’t know them. “I know that they’re out there somewhere.” But then I ended up getting promoted to art director, and then I started looking around, and I was like, “Wait a second. Where are the other black art directors?” And no one really knew where they were. And so I did some digging and I was like, all right. I was able to find one other black designer in the entire company.

Bekah Marcum:
And so I think I started to realize at that point that the thing that I was experiencing wasn’t just my story, but it was evidence of a larger trend. And so from there, before starting the group, I actually had only known two black designers. One of them was my little brother, and so he barely counts. And so I essentially just started to reach out to other black designers that I knew or could find technically, within the company. I was like, “All right, I think there’s a few of us because I’ve heard about you, but I’m actually going to make the effort and reach out now.” And then I just started doing that on the larger, LinkedIn scale, going through many pages of designers in Seattle being the filter and trying to find other folks in other companies.

Maurice Cherry:
See, I’m so glad you mentioned LinkedIn. Because people will often ask me how I find people for Revision Path, and they’re always surprised when I tell them I look on LinkedIn first.

Bekah Marcum:
Oh yeah, totally.

Maurice Cherry:
I go look at someone’s connections and look at their connections, and try to find who I think might be a good fit or who might be a good guest and reach out to them. People sleep on LinkedIn … I’ve long since the deactivated Facebook, LinkedIn is kind of where I am now these days in terms of social stuff. But how is the group going so far?

Bekah Marcum:
It has been insane. It’s grown so much. Like I mentioned, at first it was just me. I had a Google Sheet of all the different bios of people I was finding who are black designers in the city. So I just called it my “black designers black book”. And so I’ve essentially just been reaching out to people. It’s like, “You know what? We just need to have a happy hour.” So a year and a quarter ago or so, I just reached out to 35 people that I was able to-

Bekah Marcum:
… they just reached out to 35 people that I was able to find. I was lik, “Hey, I’m Bekah, we’re going to meet up. Let’s all meet up at this date, this time, this place.” And I was expecting for it to only be me and one other black designer that I had gotten to know over the course of me finding people. But then 25-ish people showed up and all of us were shocked. All of us were like, “Wait, there is this many black designers in Seattle? Period. What?”

Bekah Marcum:
And so, that was amazing. And then, since then we’re actually, so we have a LinkedIn group and I think we’re around 75 strong at this point.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. Congratulations.

Bekah Marcum:
Yeah, thank you. It’s definitely been a very crazy, exciting thing to actually start to find and build that community.

Maurice Cherry:
Have you heard of the Bay Area Black Designers group?

Bekah Marcum:
I have. I have. I’ve actually been really bad and not reached out too much to them, but it’s definitely on my to do list, maybe with all this extra time.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. So I know the woman who started it, Kat Vellos, she’s been here on the show before, and then also Kendall House, who is, I think he now heads up the group, but he’s also been on the show as well. And just recently, I’d say maybe a few weeks ago, we had Fonz Morris, who’s a growth design lead at Coursera, who also spoke really super passionately about the group and how helpful it was and everything.

Maurice Cherry:
But I’ve also spoken to some Seattle designers who honestly spoke super highly of you.

Bekah Marcum:
Oh, wait. What?

Maurice Cherry:
Just a few weeks ago we had Tim Allen on the show who’s VP of design at Airbnb, and then Timothy Bard Levins, who’s at Microsoft was like, “Oh, you’ve got to be interviewing and talking to Bekah. Oh, my God.” So the work that you’re doing is definitely being seen by people and being congratulated out there in the community. So that’s great.

Bekah Marcum:
Oh, that’s funny. Well, okay, funny story abut Tim. He’s actually now at Facebook, and between that, between Microsoft and Facebook, he was at Zillow. So he actually was the one who pulled me over to Zillow.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh really?

Bekah Marcum:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Look at that. Small world.

Bekah Marcum:
It’s a very small world.

Maurice Cherry:
So, how long has the group been going on now?

Bekah Marcum:
Just about a year and three months, honestly. So it’s been the first year we were really focusing on just getting each other together and having sporadic happy hours. We had one big event the first year, and then this year we’re focusing on how we can actually start to bring some order to the madness and have consistent events. But yeah, we’re definitely still in infancy.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow. I know there’s a group in Seattle, you may have heard of it, called HERE Seattle. Have you heard of them?

Bekah Marcum:
I don’t think I have. I do not think I have.

Maurice Cherry:
So HERE Seattle is a, I guess it’s more geared towards tech, I’m not 100% sure, but I know that four guys run it. Seth Stell, Todd, Todd Bennings and two other people who I can’t recall, but I know that they do something not necessarily similar to what you’re doing with Black Designers of Seattle because you’re focusing more on design. I think for them they focus more on DNI and tech in general. And so, design sometimes ends up being a subset of that, but that might be a group worth reaching out to connect with, HERE Seattle.

Bekah Marcum:
Totally. Yeah, it’s been a really amazing, I feel this year I’ve really started to connect with other groups like that. There’s a few other ones who are doing similar things and so, as we are upping our cadence on events, it’s been fun to see who we can partner with, who have similar initiatives, and then also how we can then go back and reach out to the community.

Bekah Marcum:
There’s a few arts-based organizations that work with K through 12 schools in the area, and so it’s, how can we actually come together as a community, as a group, and then start to help out these other organizations as they do stuff?

Maurice Cherry:
I really want to make it back up there to Seattle one of these days.

Bekah Marcum:
You should.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, hey, once this global pandemic thing blows over.

Bekah Marcum:
Don’t come now. I will not come and see you.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I do want to try to make it back up there. I was talking to some people at AIGA Seattle, right before all of this COVID-19 stuff broke out about possibly coming up there and doing a live show. But I feel like now everything is canceled until further notice.

Bekah Marcum:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
In the future I definitely do want to make it back up there. I’ve been to Seattle only once. I was in college, and this is actually a funny story. So I was in college studying math and my junior year was when 91-1 happened, and when that happened I had zero prospects lined up for jobs because the scholarship program that I was in, I was interning at NASA.

Maurice Cherry:
And so, I was thinking as soon as I graduate I’m going to go work for a NASA facility and that’s what life is going to be. But then 9-11 happened, they pulled the funding from the program and now all of a sudden it’s my junior year of college. I have no job prospects lined up.

Maurice Cherry:
So I started worming my way into these different interview books, which different departments would have books that you could sign up for, put your resume in and you would interview with certain companies, but it has to apply to whatever your major was. And for math they didn’t have that. They were just lik, “Oh, you should go to graduate school.” And I’m like, “I don’t really want to go to grad school right now. I’ve been going to school for 15 years in a row. I don’t really want to continue to do that.”

Maurice Cherry:
And they’re like, “Oh well, I don’t know what to tell you.” So I snuck my way into the computer science department, got in good with people there and managed to get into an interview book there. And I did an interview at Microsoft, and I remember that being, they talk about these techie interviews always being something that throw you for a loop? Like Google, I think at one point in time there was a rumor about there being this infamous one question, one interview question that they asked you.

Bekah Marcum:
Oh gosh.

Maurice Cherry:
And when I interviewed with Microsoft, they did that. So I remember, Oh God, I don’t know if she’s still there. I remember her name was Chesca. That’s all I remember is that her name was Chesca. And we did the interview and she asked me only one question which was, “How would you design an alarm clock for a blind person?”

Bekah Marcum:
Oh my goodness. Tim asked me the same question.

Maurice Cherry:
Are you serious? Wow, okay. Wow, that’s a big coincidence. But yeah, she asked me that question and I’m like, “Huh.”, and she slides over a piece of paper and a pen. Just talk through it. Talk through how you would do it, and keep it mind, this is, what year was this? This was 2001, maybe 2002 I think. It was 202 because it was right before I graduated.

Maurice Cherry:
So this was 2002 and I’m like, “Oh my God.” This is way before Siri and Alexa, and what have you. So I’m trying to think about voice this and you could do the commands, and all this stuff. And I write it out, sketch it out and she’s recording all this and so she’s like, “Oh, okay, thank you so much for coming in. We’ll be back to you.”

Maurice Cherry:
I’m like, “Wait, is that it? That was the only question?”, but I did get an interview at Microsoft based off that question. So they flew me up to Seattle.

Bekah Marcum:
Wow.

Maurice Cherry:
And I remember the way that they did it was this almost like a game show. You did the first interview and if you passed the first interview, you went to the second one, and then the second to the third, third to the fourth, or whatever. And it was all day.

Bekah Marcum:
Yeah, totally.

Maurice Cherry:
Maybe nine a.m. to seven p.m., or something. And I was losing steam somewhere in the sixth interview. I remember they were asking me about Notepad and how would you change Notepad if you were someone that wrote in a language that went right to left instead of left to right. And I don’t know what my answer was, but it clearly was not the right answer because I didn’t make it to the next interview.

Bekah Marcum:
Oh no. Oh no. Yes. Oh my goodness. Yeah. Tech interviews are definitely, they’re very legendary as far as being an incredibly long day. So I’ve done interviews at, I went through the process at Facebook, I was at Amazon, Zillow, and it was all pretty much the same in a lot of ways. But with Amazon I was actually, after I contracted, I was thinking that my team who I was contracting with wasn’t going to hire full time.

Bekah Marcum:
So I actually started talking to another team at Amazon, and so they decided to put me through the loop, and then my team found out, I was like, “Hey, just FYI. They’ll reach out to you to see about my performance and stuff.” And so, they actually hurried up their hiring process, then joined my loop. So I was actually interviewing with two different teams on the same day in the same room. And so, that just made my interview process even longer. I think I had seven back-to-back interviews or something crazy.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh wow.

Bekah Marcum:
It was so much information too, the portfolio review at the beginning. It was, in the same way, a very, very long day.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow. I didn’t know that that interview question is something that was still being thrown around in that way. That’s wild.

Bekah Marcum:
Yeah. Yeah. Tim actually, when I went over to Zillow, he handled the white boarding and product thinking session, or part of the interview. And he did ask me, he was like, “You need to,” I think he added complexity. He’s like, “All right, you need to design an alarm clock for a blind person that only has one button.” And so, I couldn’t do boys, I couldn’t do, oh there’s a tactile interface. It was supposed to be an analog alarm clock.

Bekah Marcum:
So part of the beginning of that conversation was like, “Wait, what? It’s just an old one that you your grandparents would have with red numbers.” And he’s like, “Yes.” And then, I had to essentially just whiteboard that out. But I find it so hilarious that you also got that.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, and I’m trying to remember how I answered the question. I think I was saying something about eye tracking because the person is… No wait, no wait, not eye tracking, because the person is blind. I said something about doing a lot of voice prompts. I remember that.

Maurice Cherry:
Something about voice prompts and being able to talk through how this would go. So you’d have to have some conversation flow chart of how to set the clock and all this stuff, and then maybe it would have some type of a haptic feedback because you would be able to touch it.

Maurice Cherry:
So maybe not necessarily braille but a series of vibrations or something like that to let you know that commands are being done properly, or things like that. And this was so long ago up here. I mean they liked it, but it wasn’t enough for me to actually get a job there.

Maurice Cherry:
But that was years and years ago, 2002. I also interviewed for Real Player that year.

Bekah Marcum:
Okay.

Maurice Cherry:
And no one uses Real Player anymore. So that let’s you know how far back that was.

Bekah Marcum:
Oh, I love that they’re using it 18 years later though. Or at least Tim is using 13 years.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow.

Bekah Marcum:
So much later.

Maurice Cherry:
So now you’re also in grad school, is that right? At the University of Washington?

Bekah Marcum:
Yes I am.

Maurice Cherry:
How’s that going?

Bekah Marcum:
It is going well. I actually took this quarter off just to, there was a lot of changes at work so I decided to really try and focus in on that. And so, it’s been going really well. I essentially went back to grad school because I saw the lack of black designers and I was like, “All right, can I not only build a community but also do some research to actually find out why that’s the case.”

Bekah Marcum:
And so, I also was thinking that people are also a lot more willing to open up to someone as a grad student, if I’m a grad student versus, “Hey, I’m an art director at Amazon asking you these questions.” And so, I was also very aware of my own positioning, actually going to folks in different companies and asking what their experience was.

Bekah Marcum:
Being a student definitely helped me maintain a certain level of, I know. They just weren’t scared of me, and so, but also it gave me that space to do that research, and then to start exploring things, and then also have it not directly associated with my day-to-day job.

Bekah Marcum:
So it’s gone great. For one of the first projects that I did was a quick and dirty research over why there is no black designers, where they are. And then, I was actually like, “Okay, if there’s no black designers, whether it’s because of culture, socioeconomics, just our racial history here in the US, what can we actually do to start to change that and change that story?”

Bekah Marcum:
And so, part of that solution was building a community, because I feel like there’s a lot of people who were super excited about giving back to the community as far as like, “Oh, I went to go volunteer for an arts-based organization.” or, “Oh, I want to go be a mentor for folks.”, but people don’t know where to go for it.

Bekah Marcum:
And so, my thinking was, if I build a community then I’ll bring a lot of passions into a certain space and from there, people can then organize and start to have these larger conversations. And so, really the first event that I ended up doing over at Amazon last August was a direct result of some of the research and solutioning that I did as part of one of those classes.

Maurice Cherry:
Hmm. That’s interesting that the work that you’re doing with Black Designers of Seattle in a way came out of the research that you’re doing at grad school.

Bekah Marcum:
Yeah, no, it definitely, definitely did. I mean, that was the whole reason I wanted to go back. I think a lot of times I just wanted the accountability of actually doing the research and the actually having time set aside to really focus on this design, and diversity and inclusion, and so really going to school, having classes. I would essentially pick to really fit a need that I saw in my own journey as I explore diversity in design, and all that stuff.

Bekah Marcum:
And so, as I went I was like, “All right, this will really be good for this, that will be good for that.” And so, I really tried to pair up what I needed in the real world with the classes I was taking so those projects and those outputs from those classes would be immediately applicable.

Maurice Cherry:
Hmm. Can you talk a little bit about, I guess some of your research? I’m curious to know what you do have found from researching the lack of black designers in the industry.

Bekah Marcum:
Totally. So a big part of what I was doing was just trying to capture and just hear the stories of current black designers, and then how they got to design-

Bekah Marcum:
Stories of current black designers and then how they got to design and all that stuff, and so a lot of designers I found didn’t go to school for design. And that pretty much corresponded with a lot of my research where a huge percentage of African Americans, blacks in the US, when they go to college, right now in our generation, they’re first generation. And so their parents didn’t go to college, and so if you have 40% of those folks were in college, they’re probably not going to go for an arts degree. If their parents, their community are really sacrificing to get them to college, they’re not like, “Oh, yeah, I’m going to go for an arts degree.” It was like I’m going for finance or business or something along those lines because there’s the larger kind of view of design is that a business degree will get you where you want to go economically.

Bekah Marcum:
Whereas, like an arts degree historically, it’s like, “Oh, you’re doing an arts degree, so you’re going to wait tables or something.” When I even went to film school, I got some side eyes from some people be like, oh, really? Are you sure you want to go to film school? Really? You’re not going to make any money. But it’s the perception of design just even within our community can be so different. Whereas now, because I did get an arts degree and then I am also in the position I am now, I’ll go home, and then I’ve aunts, uncles who are like, “Oh, my gosh, you should really talk to your little cousin who draws abstractly because like they could be a designer, too.” So their perception of success has definitely changed just by seeing someone go through it.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I always will say on here you can’t be what you don’t see. So being able to kind of see someone else that looks like you in a position like that really makes such a big difference in knowing whether or not this is something that you can actually do for yourself. So yeah, I feel where you’re coming from. Tell me, what lessons did you learn this past year? How do you feel you’ve grown and improved?

Bekah Marcum:
I feel like even though I started a community of black designers, I feel like I didn’t really realize the benefits of it. And right now just seeing how there’s subgroups that have come off of the Black Designers of Seattle community, I think I’ve seen and really just loved and been built up by a huge group of people. Even in this social distancing time, I was just texting a group of folks who I’ve met through the Black Designers of Seattle network because on Monday we’re all going to get together and drink wine over FaceTime. And so, it’s just I think the importance of community is one thing I’ve really realized, and also it doesn’t take much to have an impact. You just got to do something. You just have to give life whatever, just like something to work with.

Bekah Marcum:
When I first started the community, I was like I can’t organize a bunch of stuff but I can tell people to show up at a restaurant or at a bar where I’ll make a reservation. And so that was, honestly, the bare minimum that anyone could really do, and that small thing had a huge impact. And so I think just doing something has really been big. Even when I was first trying to get into design, I was so paralyzed by the amount that had to be done. But just by doing little things like finding a design I really liked then emulating it, I was able to take small steps into the place that I wanted to be.

Bekah Marcum:
I guess other than that I was at Amazon for four years, and I’ve been at Zillow for around, I think, six or seven months now. And I have definitely just enjoyed being in a different space, learning fully different things, kind of being out of my element. I think I’ve kind of forgotten, because I was on the same team for about four years, what that was like. But I definitely see huge benefits because of it. So I think that was more a reminder.

Maurice Cherry:
What do you spend time on when you’re not working?

Bekah Marcum:
Yeah, my husband and I, we actually recently bought a Sprinter van that we’re tricking out. It’s kind of like pit my ride for vans, to make it more adventure vanny. So I’m like, not only the only one, sometimes of my being black at work, not so much anymore at Zillow, but I’m also the only black chick in the forest usually. So I do a lot of rock climbing, mountain biking, camping and all that stuff. And so right now, we’ve been using the time that we would normally be commuting just trying to build out our van. So a bed’s going in there, a kitchen’s going in there, well, bathroom’s going in there. And so we’ve just been doing a lot of woodworking and all that stuff to get that together.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. That sounds like a really cool project to work on.

Bekah Marcum:
It’s really fun because being a digital designer, I can build out like a CAD model of what I want the van to be, what I want a small house project to be. But then actually getting wood, getting metal, whatever else and actually just physically building it is a whole other level of fun.

Maurice Cherry:
And also with everything that’s happening now, great timing.

Bekah Marcum:
I know, right?

Maurice Cherry:
Great timing because… I mean it’s one thing to be socially distanced in your own home, but if you have a van now that you can at least kind of go around to other places, get some fresh air and stuff, that’s a benefit.

Bekah Marcum:
Yeah, I know. It definitely is. It’s a little kind of rugged RV is what it essentially will be. And so there’s a lot of places where it’s like, well, we have a full kitchen. We don’t need to go say hi to anyone. I can get my coffee here, my lunch here, everything else. So we’ve definitely been scoping out different state parks, national parks in the area and trying to find what’s open. Because it’s like, oh, yeah we could go to, I don’t know, Yosemite and social distance or something and just be in our own space. We wouldn’t drive that far because that’s 18 hours. But being able to have or feel like that freedom is possible, it’s been nice.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. So one of the kind of ongoing themes that we have here on Revision Path for this year is equitable futures. I got this idea, actually, last year. I went to a conference at Harvard called Black and Design, and one of the sort of things that they were talking about a lot was black people in the future. Where do we see ourselves, et cetera? We’re coming up on 2020 that’s a very kind of big futuristic year as people think about that with pop culture, et cetera. So how are you helping to build a more equitable future through the work that you’re doing?

Bekah Marcum:
I think a big thing facing Black Designers of Seattle, or just in general, is awareness. And so a lot of, in building community, is just increasing that awareness both of each other, but then also have different jobs. It’s been really great to be able to connect someone who is just trying to get into design, or they’re super young just out of college trying to find a mentor, and connect them with someone who is very established in that field. And to build that relationship there, to start kind of helping each other get to the places that we want to be. So I think just providing opportunity is a big part of what I’ve been focusing on.

Bekah Marcum:
But then also a lot of my role with the group has not only been the community organizing, but also the event organizing. And that’s been mostly on kind of the community plus allies or community plus conspirators is what I like to call it, where we not only have the Black Designers of Seattle community, but we also have other folks from the diversity inclusion space and then also the wider community in some ways. And so I think just having discussions around being the only black designer and all that stuff in that space is super, super important. So I think just having that discussion on a larger level and just building awareness of this is a problem. If you only have one black designer, that is an issue. You should be focusing on having a diverse workplace, not just racially but age-wise, socioeconomically, everything. And so I think just creating spaces for those conversations to happen is one of the other ways I’m trying to help contribute to more equitable future.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. Well, it’s 2025. Where do you see yourself in the next five years?

Bekah Marcum:
Oh, that’s so hard. There’s a lot. I’m not sure. I feel like so much of my life has… If you asked me five years ago where I would see myself now, it’s so completely different. It’s so very different, and I’ve just been really enjoying that journey. I really hope that five years in the future our community is not just larger, but it also has greater impact. I hope that I’m in a place where I’m able to see the community be a space where people are going to find mentors or mentees, and finding different ways to get involved with schools and stuff, or just having awesome conversation.

Bekah Marcum:
I think for me, personally, I don’t know. I definitely love being a designer. I don’t think I want to be a manager, so that’s definitely not in there. But just having a larger scope on projects and just really being able to have a position where I’m able to strategically really kind of look at the future of a project would be super exciting. And hopefully, by then my van is done and I’m just traveling around in some ways working from the van from a lot of awesome locations.

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

Bekah Marcum:
Totally. So my website is rebeccamarkham.com, and I’m on LinkedIn, Instagram@Bec’s. Yeah. And also there’s a Black Designers of Seattle group, both on Facebook and LinkedIn. It’s just Black Designers of Seattle, so it should be super searchable.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. Well, Becca Markham, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show. When I first heard about you, it was, actually, I mentioned this during the designer and designer interview, I first heard about you when I heard about the group, and I was like, I got to have her on the show because I feel like there’s more of a story there. And so getting to learn more about how you grew up and the work that you’re doing right now. And even with the work that you’re doing through the group that you started at Black Designers of Seattle, there’s two things that really stick out to me. One is that building authentic community is something that is super important for you, but I think also just super important for all of us. But also really kind of owning your identity is what has made you such a unique person and has made you someone that people are kind of flocking to.

Maurice Cherry:
So I really applaud the work that you’re doing behind BDS. If there’s anything that I can do or anything that Revision Path can do, definitely let us know. This is more of the kind of community stuff that we really need to see. I mean, even in the midst of coronavirus, take us from online to offline, but being able to foster that community is something that’s really important, and I’m glad that you’re really kind of able to shepherd the cause. So thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Bekah Marcum:
Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.


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