It’s been a busy Fall and we’ve embarked on a couple of new collaborations that I am very excited about! Details to come soon! I’m also going to be speaking later this week at the MuseumNext Forecast conference with my longtime co-conspirators Hillary Spencer, and Jennifer Foley. We’ll be talking disruption, and It should be good!

I’m currently seven hours into being stuck in LaGuardia, watching the snow fall outside (it was a 12 hour delay in total!). I was in New York City for the weekend to deliver the capstone address for the Exhibition & Experience Design program at SUNY/Fashion Institute of Technology. In addition to being greatly honored to speak, it was remarkable to see the work that this year‘s cohort of students had produced. Deeply thoughtful, beautifully realized, and really interesting! I get so much energy from the next generation of our colleagues!

These are my remarks to the class of 2025.

Two Queries and Three Advices for Emerging Experience Designers

Good evening everyone. My name is Ed Rodley and it's my honor to say to few words tonight before we begin the celebratory part of the evening. When Brenda asked me if I would be interested in speaking, I thought to myself, "what the heck do I have to say to people entering the profession in 2026?" They say the past is another country, but looking back at the start of my own career, it feels almost like another planet.

When I started my professional career in the 1980s, people smoked at their desks, in the offices and pretty much everywhere else back of house except the elevators – that was apparently gross. When I started, the patriarchy was alive and well, and my female colleagues had to work hard harder and longer than I did, all the while dealing with the casual yet overt sexism that was just part of the air we breathed. When I started, people who ate lunch at their desks were looked askance at by everyone, because only a sociopath would do that. When I started, Friday Happy Hour was an almost religious event and knocking off work an hour early on Friday in order to take up a collection, buy booze, and get back in time for 5 o'clock for drinking (and smoking) was considered perfectly normal.

Given how much the ground has shifted under us in the intervening 40 years I don't know how much of my experience is applicable, so instead I'd like to offer you five ideas that you may find useful. Quakers call these kinds of statements Advices and Queries, and I have two Queries and three Advices for you to consider as you look down your own roads.

Query 1) What does evolution require of us to help the institutions we love?

My first query is: What does evolution require of us to help the institutions we love?

You may have noticed that the world is kind of a mess these days. And it has been for several years. A lot of the old certainties and things that seemed like bedrock turn out to actually be pretty uncertain and very brittle. In the cultural sector in general and in museums in particular, this has led to a lot of hand wringing and opinion pieces about how things have to change.

Even before the pandemic, museums were kind of a mess. I remember in 2019 thinking about what a terrible year 2019 was. You may recall that it was the year ICOM tried and failed to promulgate a new definition of the word “museum.” The fact that 2020 and the succeeding years have been even worse doesn't negate the fact that we've been stuck for a while.

In 2020, in my happier moments, I naïvely speculated that perhaps the pandemic was just the cure to break the status quo enough that the museum sector would embrace the opportunity to shake off a lot of its inherited practices, and evolve. As Arundhati Roy wrote about the pandemic, “Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.” I believed that at the time and still believe now that she was correct, and I was saddened by how quickly the sector labored to get back to 2019.

From my current position as a consultant and contractor to museums, it feels like the gap between intention and action has never been wider. So my query to you is really a personal one.  What does evolution require of each and every one of us?

• What are the mindsets, skills, and tools you uniquely bring to bear as experience designers that so many organizations need?

• What new things will you be willing to champion?

• What received wisdoms will you be resolute enough to question?

• What traditions will you be willing to hold up and say "does this still serve our needs or is it time to let this go?"

That's a lot to ask, and it may not even be fair to ask so much, and yet the need is so great. We are smack in the middle of a mess with no clear path out of it. But the only way out is to decide to try. To break with tradition and decide to design ways of being in the world that are fit for the current moment, not the last century.

And this leads me to my first advice.

Advice 1) Recognize that the opposite of tradition is design.

Every time I come to New York City, I'm reminded that we live in a world of our ancestors’ designs. We work in their cities, we walk down their streets and live in their houses. We live with that design inheritance, both good and bad. I recognize that may sound a little bit ironic coming from somebody from Boston, but it's always easier to see places that aren't home with fresh eyes.

So my first advice is: Recognize that the opposite of tradition is design, and as designers you have an integral role to play in helping museums imagine ways out of the morass we find ourselves in.

• You all really understand the difference between hearing what a client says they want versus discovering what they actually need.

• You can look at a problem statement and see multiple versions of potential solutions that might be worthwhile to pursue, rather than getting stuck in the paralyzing cycle of "what if we’re wrong?"

• You understand the nature of dilemmas and the impossibility of solving for all the variables when it comes to making things for people.

• And you understand the importance of taking an idea, and knocking together a prototype to test it.

All of these things are going to be essential skills the next generation of museum professionals are going to need and you have them in spades.

Advice 2) Remember that everything is a designable surface.

You’ve spent your time here learning how experiences are made—from storefronts to runways to museums, from digital layers to physical ones. FIT has taught you something most people never realize: almost nothing people experience in the built environment is accidental. It is all the result of design and labor. Which leads to my second advice: Remember that everything is a designable surface.

When I heard the Finnish experience designer Johanna Koljonen speak these words in 2016, they went right through me like a spear. That simple statement let me see the true breath of the playing field that an experience designer had that an exhibit developer didn't. Not only did it inform the projects I was working on, but it gave me the freedom to think, "I don't care if the rest of my meetings suck. My meetings can be different!" It transformed my practice. And it really drove home how much of a responsibility designers have.

Because if everything is a designable surface, then deciding not to design something is itself a design decision. You are in essence saying, “This is fine. I could design something different, but I choose not to." Obviously, you can't design every aspect of everything every time and still hope to get any work done, but knowing that that is a lever you can operate and that you have the agency to push that is an incredibly powerful tool.

Which leads me to my third advice.

Advice #3) Understand that it’s not what you know, but what you are willing to learn that will make your career

One thing I wish someone had told me when I started in museums was that it’s not what you know, but what you are willing to learn that will make or break you as a professional.

When I started, I thought that the 20th century model of learning still applied, where you went to school, you learned stuff, and that carried you through your career until you retired. Only I watched some of the most senior people in my department - people with long, deep resumes of accomplishments - transform themselves from legends into pariahs, the folks you tried hard to work around to get something done, precisely because they weren't willing to learn, or they thought that the pile of knowledge they'd accumulated should be sufficient. And by the time they retired, most people didn't even know that they'd once been heroes. They'd become the people everybody hoped would retire soon. And I realized I didn't want to become one of those guys.

Being ok with not knowing, but being willing to learn is kinda scary, like those anxiety dreams where you're at work and you've forgotten to wear pants, or like standing up in front of several hundred of your peers and sharing your deeply held feelings of unworthiness. But scary shouldn't hold you back.

I've gotten very good at telling myself "Not knowing is scary, always. Now get over it and do it anyway." And I really believe that mindset is like a mental muscle; the more you exercise it, the better it gets, and the more you can do with it. That realization has become a cornerstone of my professional practice, and is largely responsible for me being where I am now, which is a place where I often don't know what is the right thing to do and have to figure it out as I go along. And that's OK.

Query 2) How will you be a good ancestor?

Which leads us to my final query, which is one that was laid on me early in my career and took me many years to really understand. I had the great good fortune to have an incredible mentor as my first boss. She was interested in her staff, not merely as vehicles for accomplishing work, but rather as resources which could be improved and expanded upon. She was always on the lookout for new opportunities for her staff to stretch themselves, try new things, learn new skills.

She was also of that generation of women would start working in museums when their career ladder consisted of working in personnel or accounting or being somebody's secretary. She had clawed her way into middle management, mainly through sheer willpower. And though she was very good natured, she never forgot what she had to do, and made clear to me that it was part of my job to do better by the next generation.

It wasn't until many years later I heard Richard Josey speak the sentence. “How will you be a good ancestor? " that I could neatly sum it up in one sentence, but it's a question I have lived with for a very long time.

FIT has taught you to respect your materials— and in experience design those include not only what you build with, but also include time, labor, attention, and bodies. I’d add one thing to that list of things to keep in mind, and that is your posterity. That can manifest in any number of ways.

• It can be software that is actually commented, so other people can read your code and know what you was trying to accomplish.

• It can be a project that has documentation so that your successors can understand what decisions were made and why.

• It could be an interactive that has a manual that lists all the parts and how the thing goes together.

It's bigger than that, though.

• Being a good ancestor can mean, recognizing that designing that wall to perfectly fit that one particular monitor you've picked might not be the best solution since we know all monitors fail eventually, and all manufacturers love to change the size of their monitors by a couple of millimeters from year to year.

• Being a good ancestor can be being mindful of the fact that a lot of your work is gonna end up in a dumpster and designing it in such a way that bits can be reused.

• And being a good ancestor can mean recognizing your power and wielding it when you see someone behaving badly.

The list goes on…

You won’t get this right every time. None of us do. Good ancestors aren’t saints. They’re just people who notice the downstream effects of their actions early enough to adjust them and then actually adjust them. Good ancestors respect themselves, their colleagues, and their audiences and carry that respect forward into the work, even when no one is grading them anymore.

Posterity won’t remember your capstone or your GPA. It will remember what your work made possible: who it did (and didn't) invite in to have that experience. And the more you are able to sit with that question “How will I be a good ancestor?" the more likely you will be to actually be one.

Thank you, and congratulations, graduates!

That’s it for this year! If you’re not already subscribed, we’ll be announcing some exciting new work in the next TEA newsletter. Hit us up to stay up to date!

Happy Holidays!