anabelle’s blog 08

Jake Barton is the Founder and Chief Creative Officer at Local Projects (I’m a local projects fan, so I was pleasantly surprised to see him on the index of speakers). He received his Bachelor’s from Northwestern University for Performance Studies and his Masters’ from New York University in Interactive Technology. Barton has been a pioneer in immersive experience and HCI/UX since 2000. His firm, Local Projects, is a media design studio responsible for award winning projects like the 9/11 Memorial and Museum and the Eisenhower Presidential Memorial. One work that I particularly admire is Greenwood Rising, which is an exhibit on the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. It’s one of Local Project’s more recent works, so it’s cool to see how his 2015 lecture content has remained consistent to his original visions, yet also expanded with the introduction of new technology and tools in the present. In his 2015 Eyeo Festival presentation, he mainly spoke about the 9-11 Memorial Museum and the types of experiences and emotions he wanted to evoke through it. He discussed how to present, hold, and distirbute memories through museums and how he tried to involve the audience in the exhibit as well. You can see this in the Greenwood Rising exhibit, which uses XR technology to force the audience to become physically involved to reveal the story of the Tulsa Massacre. One thing I enjoyed about Barton’s presenting skills is how he manages to fly through numerous projects and concepts while still keeping things clear and linear. Even though he breaks from his lecture with an aside about memes, I could still tell that there was a purpose to the tangent and did not feel like the lecture’s flow was broken. His charisma and sociability compel the audience to sit through his 50 minute lecture painlessly, and demonstrates the importance of embedding your personality into your work to make others care about it.