Conveying a Sense of Place

Today, most of our touchpoints with the world occur through computer screens, apps, and devices. How, then, do we convey authenticity and capture the essence of what we are trying to say about who we are when creating these digital experiences for others? Especially if we are not an individual but instead an organization, a brand, or a physical place?

For many of the clients I've worked with over the past 25 years, capturing the essence of a place was critical. My clients have largely been colleges and universities, museums, cultural organizations, and "spaces" where people seek to engage to have certain experiences.

When I worked with Yale University*, our primary objective was to convey an authentic sense of place. Yale takes great pride in gathering, preserving, and sharing significant cultural and historical items. Wandering the campus, you see and feel this generosity everywhere, from the items on display at The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library to the dynamic, collaborative living and learning environments.

Cabinet of Curiosities

Conveying these aspects of the environment required developing strategies that were uniquely Yale and would empower their internal teams throughout their communications efforts. One of our brainstorming sessions with the Yale team led us to the concept of the Cabinet of Curiosities.

Cabinets of curiosities also known as wonder-rooms were encyclopedic collections of objects whose categorical boundaries were, in Renaissance Europe, yet to be defined. Although more rudimentary collections had preceded them, the classic cabinets of curiosities emerged in the sixteenth century. The term cabinet originally described a room rather than a piece of furniture. Modern terminology would categorize the objects included as belonging to natural history (sometimes faked), geology, ethnography, archaeology, religious or historical relics, works of art (including cabinet paintings), and antiquities.

This initial idea was developed into a website feature that allowed Yale to present an endless stream of new acquisitions (which it always makes available to the community), collection highlights, interesting discoveries, and deeper dives into the unique aspects of Yale. Users can explore or choose to randomly shuffle the curiosities, further conveying the sense of exploration, learning, and engagement that Yale is known for. This feature was one of my favorite parts of the site, and still is today.

Feature area of Yale.edu's homepage, "A closer look for the curious."

Overall design and usability are important in any interactive digital production, and the user experience must be engaging and welcoming, ensuring it validates assumptions while also offering new points of connection and meaning.

In a 2022 study, researchers found a consistent positive effect of website visual design on website evaluation variables through a sequential mediation by usability and pleasure.

The results identify a serial causal path from visual design to website evaluation, mediated by a 'usability-to-pleasure' sequence, as the underlying mechanism.

Moreover, usability affects website evaluation outcomes only through pleasure, not directly.

Feeling pleasure on a website is similar to what we feel when engaging in anything positive, exciting, or that connects us. For the purposes of establishing or re-establishing a bond between an individual and an organization or place, the website and all communications, in any format, must reinforce the positive qualities and values inherent in that organization's brand or identity.

The Art of Looking and Feeling

Determining the characteristics and elements that define and convey an identity, a brand, or a place, and then creating innovative and engaging ways for viewers to interact with those elements, is a wonderful challenge with endless opportunities for exploration, creativity, and impact.

Understanding how these goals can be achieved, or should be pursued strategically, is derived in large part from my experience as an artist. In painting, I'm tapping into something unique to my own experience — using pigment, solvents, brushes and canvas to create a connection with others. Some elemental yet indescribable feeling is transferred from me, to the canvas, and then to the viewer.

I'm conveying what it feels like to be "me" as I'm experiencing the subject of the painting. This is most evident in plein-air painting, where the viewer experiences what the artist was seeing and feeling while the artist was looking, reacting, and creating.

Prosecco Valley, Italy, Gouache on Paper, Tracey Halvorsen 2019

It is hard to explain why paintings created from photographs don't convey the same way as plein-air works do. Still, I suspect the secrets have more to do with how we record things in the present moment versus after the fact, and with our direct experiences versus abstracted representations of those experiences.

This is where my art practice informs my client services practice. I will not work with a client if they aren't aligned on the importance of spending time within their organization or at their location, if our objectives are to capture, translate, and communicate these essential components to their audiences.

Conveying a sense of place through a digital experience requires careful consideration and strategy in how we move through the engagement. If we want to encourage people to form a pleasurable and motivating connection, we must consider the past, present, and future states of what the audience is seeking, and there is no substitute for the real thing. We should do our best to take as many of those seats as possible.

How We Keep Experiences

As trust and confidence build, so does the depth of the experience and connection. We often default to simulation efforts to capture the atmosphere or ambiance of a location. How many websites have you seen that start with grand aerial drone videos, only to be flanked by lots of words that speak more to the organization's internal transactional structures than to making deeper connections with visitors? Every house has a front door, but each one feels unique depending on who lives there, what objects adorn the spaces, what spices are in the kitchen, and what the auditory experiences are — a sensory soup that compiles into a record of what that home feels like. That feeling becomes the reality recorded in an individual's mind.

Places help define us, and they are the canvases on which we paint our personal stories. They are more than buildings that house people and things, or pretty courtyards and quads within which humans gather. When we experience places that impact us, we often look for ways to retain that connection and carry a little of that encounter with us on our individual journeys.

Whether to show affiliation or belonging, convey pride or enthusiasm, or act as our own charms or amulets we carry with us to keep us on the course we've set out upon — we have a human need to deepen and solidify our connections with places. This explains why we see so many shops in airports carrying trinkets and t-shirts promoting that location's highlights, offering the departing visitor one last chance to take a physical keepsake with them.

Beyond airport souvenir shops, location-based branding for merchandise, or bumper stickers to announce our affiliations to other drivers on the road, we find our own ways to tap into and retain certain aspects of a moment.

Joan Mitchell exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art.

When I went to view the Joan Mitchell exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art, I made a point of going twice (and I wish I could have gone many more!) The first time, I listened to the accompanying audio experience they provided on their app (which was fantastic and helped transport me into the world of Mitchell's creative and painterly brilliance).

Then I went back a second time and listened to my own soundtrack, a compilation of pieces by Miles Davis and John Coltrane, which I often play when I am painting in my studio. I did this to create a connection for myself that I could hopefully tap back into, where the music conjured the feelings I was experiencing while looking at her jaw-droppingly beautiful and powerful paintings. This was my attempt to capture and carry with me some essence of what I was feeling as I was looking at her paintings.

I think humans do this subconsciously all the time, like picking up a rock on a hike to take back home and set on your window ledge. A memento to try to preserve that connection to the experience and feeling of the place. But that rock has a story for you to tell someone else, a story about your experience of the place, and stories of other's experiences are a powerful way to communicate a feeling more so than pictures, videos or generalized descriptions.

The spaces we create for ourselves and others to experience are a deeply held human need. Solving the challenge of conveying a sense of place is an endless field for creative exploration and experimentation, and I believe it attracts the unique creative minds of those who seek these complex endeavors, in part, due to their own desire to design and develop unique experiences of reality…to create new spaces. So far, nothing can mimic all that we experience in our physical lives. Still, I love seeing and experiencing the ways artists (from musicians to writers to designers) translate and interpret these experiences into so many wonderful new ways to engage.

*My work with Yale University was conducted while I was leading my prior agency, Fastspot, and included contributions from team members at both Fastspot and Yale.