How Jake Barton Creates Museum Magic
His key to designing interactive displays around the world? Never stepping out of his own time zone.
I f you’ve had an eye-opening experience at a museum lately, chances are high that you’re familiar with Jake Barton’s work. He and his firm, Local Projects, have rethought visitor experiences everywhere from the Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum and the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York to the Cleveland Museum of Art and the ARoS Art Museum in Denmark. The often-playful exhibition designs incorporate interactive touch screens and apps to let visitors explore collections on their own terms, whether it’s by drawing their own wallpaper to be projected onto the walls of the museum or browsing art collections by facial expression.
In the museum world, which is still struggling to figure out how to integrate new tech in a way that’s not clunky or gimmicky, Local Projects manages to make technology feel seamlessly at home in — and even essential to — its exhibitions. Barton, a National Design Award winner, creates “some of the most exciting work on the planet,” as MuseumNext puts it, creating experiences that make even familiar museum collections feel thrilling to explore.
Now, the designer is working on new projects all across the world, including an as-of-yet announced archaeology museum in London, the sustainable fashion institute Fashion for Good in Amsterdam, and the Equal Justice Initiative’s forthcoming African-American history museum in Montgomery, Alabama.
Barton spoke with Magenta about staying creative when you’re on the road, resisting the siren call of the smartphone, and how his job has changed since he became a boss.
The morning
It depends on just whether I’ve been traveling or not, but in general, I’m up by 6. I will check my phone just to make sure that nothing has gone awry, but I try to start with something a little more inspirational. Like this morning, I’m reading this book called Hitchcock/Truffaut. Just reading that for, like, 10, 20, 30 minutes will remind me that there’s a bigger, longer-term world of inspiration out there besides just the daily news cycle or the churn around individual projects. I basically spend my first two, three hours trying to not look at my phone.
Bracketing the news
I don’t want to be known for the fact that I spent the Trump years checking my phone. I try to force myself to only look at the news maximum once a day. And then I look at [The New York Times] and then the News app from Apple, and then also Fox News — all at once, so at least I’m getting a much larger media perspective. It’s generally either late at night or when I’m on a plane.
Never change time zones
There are a lot of flights. I have a lot of U.S. clients, and then Amsterdam and London as well. I would say, 1000% for me, the secret is that I try very, very hard not to change the time zone for my physical body. Meaning, when I go to the West Coast, I actively try to go to bed at the same time, which is right around 9:30 or 10 East Coast time. Same thing with London or Amsterdam. I don’t even attempt to change time zones whatsoever. I’m typically up at 2 in the morning West Coast time, and then I’ll just start working and reading. I also do the seven- to ten-minute workout religiously, so if I’m on the West Coast, I’ll be doing that at, like, 3 in the morning. And similarly, I’ll start to really shut down if meetings run until 4 p.m. or 5 p.m. I don’t go out to dinner; I go right to bed. I think it’s just a matter of focusing on the scheduling.
Staying on schedule
For the most part, my schedule is pre-defined down to half-hour increments. I always have what I call “office hours,” which means I’m just sitting at my desk and people can ask me questions. That’s a sort of release valve for the project managers at the studio. I’ll start and end my day with an hour or half-an-hour pocket of just being around, finishing up stuff, writing emails, etc. And then the rest of the time it’s just review-meeting-presentation, review-meeting-presentation.
When things go well, I can do that all day long. It’s great, it’s fun. Who doesn’t want to show amazing stuff to clients? What goes awry is when something’s been miscommunicated, some budget’s off. I spend a lot of time just problem solving.
Home front
Around 6:30 p.m., I’m on my bicycle home from the studio in Lower Manhattan to Harlem. Home for dinner with the family. I try not to do this, but sometimes I’ll clear out my inbox at night, and that’s where I’ll have a little bit of concerted time to sort of just slim down the correspondence, rethink about where things are, and then hit the ground running the next day.
The benefits of parenthood
When things are going well, I love work, and I could work 12, 14 hours every day. So I imagine if I didn’t have children, in theory, I could be more completely absorbed by work. On the other hand, having children — for me, in particular — is wildly creative because it gives me all this access to all these other worlds. I would just never look up from my desk if I didn’t have kids. I design museum exhibitions and brand experiences that engage a wealth of different populations outside of myself, so it’s incredibly beneficial. It’s really, really helpful to watch how children play and to understand that their appetite for experiences is radically different than your own.
The not-so-fun stuff
You go into these creative practices and you’re, like, “Weee! I want to be creative!” But unless you’re highly specialized, the higher up you get, the less design you do. That’s the nature of it. Even the most talented designer needs to reckon with, “How many hours do we have? What does the client actually want? How do we actually make this thing a reality?” That’s the deal. You can draw an amazing sketch as an architect, but if you don’t understand HVAC systems, you’re never going to deliver on the vision that you want.
Running a client services agency — that’s everything from managing teams to writing a scope of works to setting procedures — all of that stuff, without it we wouldn’t exist, but it can be quite onerous. All that stuff is arguably the job; that’s the job I do. Creative stuff — that’s the fun by-product that exists because I’ve done all the work around running the company.
Riding the market
There is something that is very formative about the market in which you produce your work. Sometimes you do very well because you have incredible tailwinds, and sometimes you just can’t stop losing because of headwinds. Sometimes that doesn’t have as much to do with you as it does with the market.
And that is the life of a client-services creative career. You’re not a novelist, you don’t just need a typewriter to produce your work. So much of your work is at the mercy of different clients and what’s going on. We won a massive project, spent an enormous amount of time on it, and just as we were signing the contract, the CEO stepped down. The new CEO came in and killed the whole project. That’s just how it works.
Smashing blocks with self-critique
We have people here who have very, very, very high standards and are interested in injecting them into projects and saying, “Can’t we do better than this? We don’t have anything better than this to come up with?” And that is super valuable.
I actually just had a talk about one project with two of my senior leaders, like, “This project is going to be rocky in a bunch of places, and as I try to close the door on ideas, always feel free to be, like, ‘No, we actually have to hold this to a higher standard.’” That’s so important. If you aren’t able to look at your stuff and be critical of your own solutions, it’s never going to be all that good. You have to be aggressively self-critical — just keep pushing forward until you get a really good idea. Then you prototype it and make sure that it is actually good.
Ask abstract questions
I used to be very impatient with a lot of early conversations as the sort of pre-design activity. And now I recognize more and more just how critical they are to shaping the work itself and to generating new ideas. That’s partially why I spend a lot of time developing these deeper strategy sequences in advance of a project design, like, “What’s the story we’re telling? What is the change we’re trying to create? Who’s the audience?” All of these highly abstract conversations can, in theory, just be a lot of talking, but in reality, they develop a foundation so that when you get into the design you know much more what the actual target is. Having those conversations can really help to focus the studio’s own enthusiasm around the things that we think are cool and transport them in terms of what the client really wants in the world.
Sustaining creativity
I try to force myself to consider creative endeavors outside of my own. You know, Hitchcock’s career flamed out three different times. That’s how prolific he was. He had three different points where his career just completely went off the rails, and he was sort of untouchable as a director.
Someone like Bob Dylan, I’ve spent a lot of different time looking at all the different chapters of his career and all the different ways he’s both the same and very, very different. He has constantly built styles that have become iconic and then undercut them, only to evolve into another style — sometimes stronger, sometimes weaker. I think there’s a really big lesson there for creative people.
There are some careers that are defined by writing the same poem over and over, writing the same novel over and over, as they try to perfect their approach to this handful of themes. Other people are driven by restless innovation and exploration. All the people I’m inspired by have had massive swings and massive failures, and have really been defined not again by their highs or their lows, but the sustained exploration of their talent within a larger effort to be creative. To me, that’s the key. You can make one thing, and you can get lucky and have a good idea, but it’s about making a sustained approach to generating things that are meaningful and engaging. That’s much harder.
