In this week’s episode of the PolicyViz Podcast, I speak with Braden Crooks, co-founder of Designing the We, about their project Undesign the Redline, an interactive exhibit that explores the history and lasting impact of redlining in the U.S. Braden shares how his background in landscape architecture and urban design led him to develop this project, which combines research, storytelling, and community engagement. He discusses the importance of making history tangible through physical exhibits, the role of public participation in shaping the narrative, and the upcoming digital expansion of the project. We also discuss how organizations can bring Undesign the Redline to their communities, using it as a tool for education, dialogue, and activism.
Resources
Check out Braden’s work and Designing the We on their website.
Guest Bio
Braden Crooks is a founding partner at Designing the We, a social impact design studio operating in community-driven social and economic development. The dtW team designs programs, policies and enterprises that grow local communities and global networks dealing with deep crises, from the history of Redlining to the future of work. He is on the board of The New York State Sustainable Business Council, and has served as the president of the board of Sure We Can: a non-profit collective for canners, who are those who make their living by redeeming cans and bottles for five cents. Braden graduated from the innovative program MS Design and Urban Ecologies at Parsons the New School for Design in May 2014 with honors, taught ecological thinking in urban issues at Parsons and produced a live audience webseires about New York. He is an RSA Fellow.
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Transcript
00:02.24
Jon
Hey, Braden, good to see you again. Welcome to the show, how are ya?
00:06.38
Braden Crooks
I’m doing really well. Thank you. Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.
00:09.92
Jon
Yeah, um I’m excited to chat. We ah met late last year in DC where I um came across your Undesigned the Redline project, which we’re going to talk about in detail and was just fascinated about it. And and I’m excited to learn more about the work you and your team do at designing the Wii. So maybe we could start with your background a little bit and then and then your team and and how this Redline project came to be.
00:35.47
Braden Crooks
Yeah, sure. Well, um you know, my career, I actually started out in landscape architecture um and kind of this design background.
00:41.50
Jon
Yeah.
00:45.32
Braden Crooks
And um shortly after getting my undergraduage undergraduate degree in landscape architecture, I got into environmental advocacy. So I was doing that and, you know, we were talking a lot about not just, you know, actually we were, this was in Pennsylvania,
01:03.11
Braden Crooks
So we were there was anti-fracking movement. There was a bunch of different movements. But I was particularly interested in kind of, you know we want these local thriving sustainable places where you know we can really all come together.
01:15.72
Braden Crooks
And I wanted to focus more on that. And it brought me to New York. um And that’s where my co-founder and I met was actually at Parsons in a really interesting program.
01:27.13
Jon
Hmm.
01:28.89
Braden Crooks
It’s a design program, but it’s a master’s of science. It’s called design and urban ecologies. And um so it’s a social sciences program, but it integrates a lot of the designers come coming from the design profession um as well as social scientists, people coming from that space and kind of intermingles that. And, um you know, I think that that’s developed for me a really unique perspective and and kind of set of skills.
01:57.40
Jon
Yeah.
01:57.88
Braden Crooks
um And it led directly to the work with Undesign the Red Line and both unpacking the history of redlining, but really doing it in a way that is thoughtful about um the outcomes and really affecting change. You know, I think about, I had a mentor and professor, Dr. Mindy Fullilove, whose work is really seminal in the space. If you haven’t read the book, for example, Root Shock, which she, I think just hit 20 years,
02:27.09
Braden Crooks
really important book on about not only redlining but forced displacement and the effects of urban policy on people’s lives and health. um But one of the things that we talked about and she she introduced to me was the idea of what but we call situation analysis.
02:45.04
Braden Crooks
And it’s just an approach towards looking at these things that um leads to to understand the situation, you know, the situation um and create clarity around that.
02:52.11
Jon
Mm hmm.
02:57.09
Jon
Great.
02:57.18
Braden Crooks
um and and the situation leading you into what to do. i mean if you so the The key measure of whether or not you understand the situation of like ah of a place or as an event is that you kind of it tells you a bit what you need to do about it.
03:09.17
Jon
Hmm.
03:13.26
Braden Crooks
and so That was always a big piece of when we’re telling the story of redlining, when we’re telling the story of urban policy, that at the end you get a sense of well what do we need to do that comes out of that story.
03:26.28
Jon
Right.
03:26.84
Braden Crooks
and um And that’s a little different, I think, than a lot of researchers and social scientists who are very focused kind of on the trees and a little bit less the forest in that sense.
03:35.64
Jon
Yeah, yeah, for sure. And the project we’ll we’ll talk about in detail in a moment, I think, tries to get to that sort of forest part for people who are maybe not as familiar with the details of redlining and the impacts of redlining around the country. um i want I want to talk about the project, obviously, in detail in a moment. but So you and your your partner come together, ah your your your co-partner, and um so they have a background in design. You have a background in landscape architecture. How do you and others, I would guess, work together and sort of on the data side, on the storytelling side, on the design side? I mean, how do all those pieces sort of fall into place?
04:19.64
Braden Crooks
Well, you know, we had we had been doing this as our graduate school research for years and then very quickly, actually, we.
04:25.90
Jon
Hmm.
04:30.70
Braden Crooks
were invited to bring it into an exhibit format and in took all this years of work and then kind of distilled it pretty quickly.
04:33.66
Jon
Ah, okay.
04:37.88
Jon
Yeah.
04:39.26
Braden Crooks
I mean, we had been doing, i ah you know, had been doing some work around timelines in and and really thinking through sort of a pedagogical approach towards creating a timeline that is less focused on um dates and and kind of this very linear
04:41.76
Jon
Mm hmm.
04:59.08
Jon
Yeah.
05:00.17
Braden Crooks
um or, you know, kind of bop, bop, bop. I don’t know.
05:04.31
Jon
Right.
05:04.70
Braden Crooks
this This rhythm of a timeline which to doing something that’s more about the flows of how one thing affects the next and how one thing leads to another, less concerned about are the things arranged exactly date by date or are the things arranged in such a way that you get a sense of how people are reacting, how are people responding to
05:04.83
Jon
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
05:12.41
Jon
he Right.
05:19.32
Jon
yeah
05:24.37
Jon
Yeah.
05:26.10
Braden Crooks
an event and then that leading to the next era, that leading to the next set of events. And that that follows through with the policy.
05:32.18
Jon
Right.
05:34.25
Braden Crooks
Often the policy is sort of responding to the crisis in the moment without necessarily zooming out to say, how is this part of a much deeper history?
05:43.73
Jon
Yeah.
05:43.94
Braden Crooks
And for that reason, a lot of the things, one of the key lessons that comes out of our timeline and really looking at this history in general was a lot of the crises of one era come out of what are quote unquote solutions of an era prior.
05:56.21
Braden Crooks
And you know that that that storytelling of kind of that movement forward and that flow forward as opposed to the dots, more like the lines between the dots, connecting the dots, is the key piece, I think, in making it compelling.
06:07.93
Jon
Yeah.
06:11.51
Jon
Yeah, that’s really interesting. ah ah Kind of different way to think about time, right? Like you have a busy week this week and next week is kind of a slow quiet week.
06:19.66
Braden Crooks
Hmm.
06:20.65
Jon
They’re equally spaced, but the the work is very different those two weeks, yeah.
06:23.20
Braden Crooks
Yeah.
06:25.17
Jon
um So ah i’ve i put I’ll put links to that the project on on your site on the um the show notes so people can take a look. But for those who are just listening,
06:36.47
Jon
ah Can you describe the the final project for folks?
06:42.66
Braden Crooks
Yeah, sure. Well, I mean, the project’s called Undesign the Red Line. And so really the premise is red the redlining is a key way in which um really structurally racist policies, inequality gets designed into cities, places, systems.
07:03.13
Braden Crooks
um And it’s never been undone. and Although we’ve so said you know redlining is illegal, I mean, it certainly still happens in many ways, but um it’s the legacy of it’s still here and we’ve never really undone the legacy. And so that’s kind of where we start from. And with redlining, not only because it’s an enormously consequential policy in practice from the federal policy down to you know local banks and all kinds of actors,
07:33.08
Braden Crooks
um But because it’s also such a accessible visual way for people to enter into this conversation.
07:41.97
Jon
Yeah.
07:42.70
Braden Crooks
um It’s very simple, you know, the original Hulk maps are very simple. They have four colors, you know, and they zone out different neighborhoods. And then right there in the area descriptions is language like hazardous infiltration, Negro infiltration.
08:01.71
Jon
yeah
08:02.03
Braden Crooks
ah Basically saying they’re hazardous people in America and we need to know where are they, where are they infiltrating those, where are they invading. And that becomes synonymous with real estate values, access to loans, bank branch locations, insurance rates. right So we you you immediately start to understand how we produced a geography of inequality in America.
08:26.06
Braden Crooks
through that visual maps. And you know one of the interesting things about that as a visualization is you know the FHA, the Federal Housing Administration, was definitely the most impactful red liners from the federal standpoint.
08:39.85
Braden Crooks
They did have their own maps. They’re not the whole maps, which we are the most you know iconic ones, simply because those are the ones that we have.
08:46.13
Jon
Yeah.
08:48.95
Braden Crooks
and I always say they’re the best visual example that we have of redlining. They’re not necessarily the most impactful, but that’s okay.
08:52.88
Jon
Right.
08:55.20
Braden Crooks
there You still get what redlining is looking at these maps. and um you know go Just going back to this this comment before about you know how you tell a story is you know There’s a lot of back and forth in the research community about what the impact of Hulk actually was and what these maps really were and what FHA did.
09:15.93
Braden Crooks
And that’s a lot of granularity that is very interesting for us as researchers. But as ah as a lay person who’s just being introduced to it, it’s sort of like, yes, this is a great visual example and there are other things happen.
09:27.37
Jon
Yeah, yeah.
09:27.79
Braden Crooks
And here’s what the overall idea is because That, I think that, you know, when you’re communicating to the public, you really want to be like, OK, what’s the real idea that I’m trying to say and not to trip over myself with a lot of that, even though one thing you’ll notice about our exhibit is that there’s a lot of there’s a lot in there.
09:46.24
Jon
Yeah, right.
09:46.76
Braden Crooks
almost an overwhelming experience. It’s almost designed to be a bit overwhelming because of the history is overwhelming, but you can kind of go through the top line.
09:54.57
Jon
Mm hmm.
09:55.29
Braden Crooks
You can go through somewhere in the middle and then you can get into the really fine text, you know, and and people can engage in it in different ways that way.
09:59.97
Jon
Yeah.
10:03.42
Jon
It’s interesting the way you you you describe it, because it’s not just the content. and and the implications of that content, but also the way you engage with it, because it’s these, I don’t know what, like six foot high panels that are kind of, um they’re not quite in the, it’s not quite like a total circle, but they’re, they’re rounded.
10:17.72
Braden Crooks
It’s Evan.
10:24.23
Jon
So you’re sort of immersed into the physical story.
10:24.61
Braden Crooks
here
10:28.03
Braden Crooks
yeah
10:29.12
Jon
um And was that, was that a conscious, did that, with well, I guess two questions.
10:29.19
Braden Crooks
Yeah.
10:34.37
Jon
Was that a conscious, decision and it was that the design in the original exhibit or did it evolve over time?
10:42.93
Braden Crooks
Well, I’ll say that the exhibit is kind of arranged differently for different spaces all the time.
10:47.66
Jon
Okay.
10:48.69
Braden Crooks
But um you know we we fit it into all kinds of spaces as part of the intent. It can go as many places as we can bring it. But um but the scale of it was important always important and always there.
11:00.87
Jon
Mm hmm.
11:02.52
Braden Crooks
you know The timeline is 14, 16 feet. um you know it’s bigger than you. And um and I think that that has always worked not only because we want to deliver as ah like a lot of granular information and we literally fill that whole space, but um also ah as a way to imprint on people kind of the scale of this history.
11:08.76
Jon
Yeah.
11:16.03
Jon
Great.
11:28.99
Braden Crooks
um And you know it’s almost impossible for certainly you know spending even an hour with it to read everything, to see everything. um but that’s okay.
11:42.12
Braden Crooks
The idea really is to pull back and say, look at this huge history, look at all these different things that were happening, not only things that connected to redlining because we go through urban renewal, we go through planned shrinkage, all these policies, mass incarceration, you know all these policies that kind of end up actually being part of the same web of of responses, but also what people are pushing back.
11:46.79
Jon
Mhm.
12:04.77
Jon
Mhm.
12:05.47
Braden Crooks
you know There is a lot, I wanna just say that right off the bat, that
12:06.39
Jon
Mhm.
12:08.91
Braden Crooks
the stories of people ah having alternative visions of changing this course of history, of organizing, all that is always, always there and anywhere we bring it around the country.
12:18.51
Jon
Mm hmm.
12:21.63
Braden Crooks
ah Because we do we do a process of localizing this history when we bring it somewhere new. And and I can talk more about that, but you know always, always, always, there’s so many local stories on both sides of the timeline, which is the bottom up and the top down.
12:29.24
Jon
Yeah.
12:35.75
Jon
Right. so there’s so So I want to talk about that. There’s sort of two pieces that I i find particularly interesting. One is the localization. And I’m curious how you all do that work. And then also the physical interactivity that people are encouraged to do with the project. It is not, um again, for those who haven’t seen it, it is not just these 14 foot by six foot panels you know across this big thing that that you just read and stand there and then move on to the next thing, there is this participatory ah element to it.
13:12.26
Jon
So can you talk about that participatory piece? And then and then I am curious about how you um work with communities or localities when you bring it, when you’re invited to to bring it in.
13:20.88
Braden Crooks
Yeah. yeah Yeah, the exhibit is really intentionally interactive because um it’s inviting people to tell their own personal stories. It’s ah um what’s you know we have like what’s missing from the timeline or did is something you disagree with. um ah ah Is there something that you think is really important that people don’t know? Allow people to add that. There’s a space to add that to the timeline and a couple other places in the exhibit.
13:50.52
Braden Crooks
And um that has been always one of the most fascinating parts of the exhibit, especially it fills up with people’s comments and stories.
13:57.97
Jon
Yeah.
13:58.32
Braden Crooks
and um And, you know, and it could be simply as simple as, you know, I never knew this and I’m really shocked to really end up the personal stories that people share.
14:11.13
Braden Crooks
and um And that’s very intentional because, yes, we have collected a lot of information here, but we’re not just coming in to tell people the story and be like, that’s it. It’s actually there. Everyone shows up to the exhibit with something.
14:27.06
Braden Crooks
something that they have that we don’t know. I always say, you know, I’m always learning and this is a process of learning for me and for you and we’re learning together and let’s learn about it together.
14:38.06
Jon
Right.
14:39.90
Braden Crooks
And just that’s really the ethos of the project in general. um It’s not to create a division between, you know, quote unquote expert and people because people live this.
14:50.15
Braden Crooks
I mean, everyone has lived this and whether they really even recognized it or not,
14:50.76
Jon
Yeah.
14:56.41
Braden Crooks
necessarily their lives have been touched by it. And and so hopefully through the history and then through the exhibit, we’re able to kind of evoke that sense of, oh, wow, I can find see myself, I can see my own family history, you know, whether or not I was on one side of the red line or the other um and start to tell those stories and start to put the pieces together for themselves.
15:17.73
Jon
Great. Has there been any um participation from folks that you have that sort of like lit a but light bulb for you and said we should incorporate some aspect of that back into the main exhibit?
15:31.14
Braden Crooks
We have actually done that a few times where we have um kind of re-edited the exhibit um to include, ah but like we’ll go through cards and and include things.
15:32.65
Jon
Yeah.
15:36.67
Jon
Mm.
15:43.79
Braden Crooks
um We have done that, you know, ah occasionally for the kind of the national layer of the exhibit and then there’s a localized layer and we’ve done that.
15:50.56
Jon
Yeah.
15:52.08
Braden Crooks
And also with the um the last section of the exhibit section five is we just call the undesigned section, which is kind of ideas of what to do.
16:01.04
Jon
Yeah.
16:01.39
Braden Crooks
And um that section we kind of totally rearranged based on these kind of inputs that we were getting from people on kind of ideas and what they were sharing. And um and so, you know, that’s always a dynamic and living part of it.
16:16.49
Braden Crooks
I would love to do more of that. I wish that we could do it all the time because it’s, um you know, it is really dynamic.
16:18.27
Jon
Yeah. yeah
16:22.94
Braden Crooks
but You know, we do we we like to, you know, get that both in terms of writing and now we’re doing some more with recording people’s stories and getting video and and audio and that kind of thing.
16:33.31
Jon
e
16:35.84
Braden Crooks
And it’s just it’s just it’s a life’s work, even down to the level of a block locally to tell that story.
16:41.75
Jon
Right. Right. Do you have, uh, is there a, is there a big closet somewhere with, with people, everybody’s like written comments that you, that you all save.
16:52.08
Braden Crooks
um Well, there are many closets because we like to ah let folks who are local hosts hold on to all of that.
17:00.56
Jon
Oh, okay.
17:01.56
Braden Crooks
so And I can talk a little bit.
17:01.89
Jon
Yeah.
17:03.28
Braden Crooks
you know we we’re’ We’re invited to bring it. We’re always just, someone invites us to bring the exhibit.
17:07.55
Jon
yeah
17:08.08
Braden Crooks
We work with them to you know get resources together. And we also um ah bring together a community advisor group. around the exhibit.
17:18.40
Braden Crooks
And those that could be just neighbors who’ve lived the history. We’ve had elected officials, certainly researchers and others, um community organizers, people working in this space to say, yeah, what are the local stories and local history that we want to see reflected in this exhibit?
17:34.11
Braden Crooks
I always say it’s just example stories because
17:34.42
Jon
Yeah. Yeah. yeah
17:37.18
Braden Crooks
telling all telling them all is impossible and in this short you know project. But you know it’s it’s really finding examples, either or you know one from each neighborhood, or sometimes we base it around a theme.
17:51.07
Braden Crooks
And we just talk for months. you know We meet and talk through the history, talk through the local stories, and really think about the question of what happened?
17:59.17
Jon
Hmm.
18:01.96
Braden Crooks
How did this place become this place?
18:04.37
Jon
Hmm.
18:04.88
Braden Crooks
um and what stories rise to the surface that really explain that story and bring us from the past to the present. You know, we always try and think about even things like the redlining maps, they’re not an artifact of the past. They really bring us to where we are now. And so when we look through the history together, that’s the conversation that we have.
18:25.52
Jon
And when when a locality, let’s say a community center or a library calls you up and says we are interested in hosting this exhibit in our in our space.
18:37.49
Jon
when you start engaging with them, is that part of the initial discussion where you say, we’re not we don’t just you know ship this over to you and just install it, and then we walk away, that there is this entire process that precedes the actual exhibition itself?
18:57.88
Braden Crooks
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that’s very, that’s very much so a part of what we do. Now we’ve done pop-ups of it where we just bring it and we pop it up.
19:04.94
Jon
Yeah.
19:05.40
Braden Crooks
Sure, but really when the the real project is actually everything that comes before, during, and after because we bring that group together. And one, it’s a lot for any group to take on in many ways because, um I mean, i would I always say it’s a little bit choose your own adventure because we’ve had some groups just bring the exhibit and have let people engage with it. And that’s been very successful. And then we’ve had others who really bring bells and whistles to it and they do a bunch of programming and
19:33.68
Jon
e
19:34.23
Braden Crooks
with our community advisory group, oftentimes it involves different organizations and they might say, we’re gonna do a panel talk or a movie night, or we’re gonna do a tour of the neighborhood. and And they use it as a platform. And part of the reason why we, not only to collect the research and to collect the stories, but also really to build relationships around the exhibit.
19:53.63
Jon
Yeah.
19:54.12
Braden Crooks
and and leverage it in a way that people start organizing with the exhibit and really take it on as their own.
19:57.28
Jon
Mm hmm.
20:01.38
Braden Crooks
And so for that reason, it has a life of its own in every place. It’s not just ours. It’s really the we when we say we’re designing the rewrite is they are the we as well.
20:11.05
Jon
Right.
20:11.33
Braden Crooks
And that’s been the success of the project because we’ve seen so much come out of this exhibit in every place. It really, as I said, it has a life of its own.
20:20.51
Jon
Yeah.
20:21.17
Braden Crooks
And there’s been very intentional campaigns using the exhibit. There’s been really things that emerged that no one expected, um you know from really small stuff to really big stuff.
20:32.83
Jon
And so I’m i’m curious about the the physical nature of it. I mean, We’re in a kind of digital first world. I can imagine any data visualization, storytelling, news organization, any sort of firm like that saying, and um and many have, we’re going to tell the story of red binding and it’s going to be this big scrolly telling piece.
20:54.31
Jon
And, you know, maybe there’s some comments and stuff like that.
20:55.06
Braden Crooks
yeah
20:57.78
Jon
Did you ever, when you were first starting out, did you have those discussions about we could do this big digital piece, but we want to do this physical interactive in person?
21:10.87
Braden Crooks
Well, you know we I always say like we we want to do high touch, not just high tech.
21:17.66
Jon
Yeah.
21:17.89
Braden Crooks
um And the physical the physicality of the exhibit helps one bring people around it, physically bring people around it.
21:30.53
Braden Crooks
And kind of it’s an ah it becomes an event. It’s like something that’s happening in time and playing space. like That type of programming that I was mentioning that people have done, where they bring together people to have panels, they bring in events.
21:45.83
Jon
Yeah.
21:46.64
Braden Crooks
I mean, you can do that at any time, right? But having the physicality of the exhibit, it it kind of becomes a gathering point and a platform in a way that it wouldn’t be if it wasn’t physical.
21:49.66
Jon
Yeah. Yeah.
21:59.99
Braden Crooks
and And it’s sort of like something that’s there that people can go see. Now, I will tell you that we are at the end stages right now of also developing a companion web app.
22:10.90
Braden Crooks
for this exhibit which is very exciting and I’m really happy about because it’s going to allow people for example to interact in whole new ways like they can go in their neighborhood and take a video of ah a lot and say here’s what used to be here right and and that can show up in the exhibit and then whole new way so that’s really exciting but that being said I always think of it as a companion in a way because it it it um
22:23.96
Jon
Yeah.
22:28.74
Jon
Yeah.
22:36.80
Braden Crooks
You know, it it feeds in, both of these things can feed into each other. I wouldn’t say, I don’t want to say that one is better or but but you know than the other necessarily, but I think that we’ve we’ve lost a little bit this idea that the physicality of ah of an object in space that people can go to and gather around and then be in the same space with each other experiencing it, um it can’t be replicated online.
22:40.91
Jon
Sure.
22:59.66
Jon
Yes. No, I think that’s right. And then and then there are people where they’ve never the exhibit doesn’t come to their town or city or wherever they live and so now they would have that opportunity to to interact with it which is which is which is really exciting.
23:17.95
Jon
um I think there are probably lots of people, well, I hope there’s lots of people listening to this who are on that digital first side and hearing you and saying, I could imagine my project working in a similar way in a physical space.
23:33.28
Jon
And I’m curious about um the the building and the fabrication of it. I mean, you and I have talked before and you know you’ve told me how it’s not like
23:40.98
Braden Crooks
Yeah.
23:43.67
Jon
you know, it’s not like building a rocket ship, right? You don’t need a huge amount of this, but can you talk a little bit about not just what the fabrication is, but but what led to those decisions to have it built in such a way where, yeah, you could show up in Little Town, library of Little Town, such and such, and they could have it in there and their lobby.
23:46.73
Braden Crooks
No.
24:04.71
Braden Crooks
Yeah, yeah. Well, first of all, it started off that way because we didn’t have any money.
24:09.64
Jon
yeah
24:10.87
Braden Crooks
So we we bootstrapped the project at the beginning.
24:13.60
Jon
Oh.
24:14.11
Braden Crooks
And, um you know, it had to be we made it ourselves, you know, literally.
24:19.26
Jon
Hmm.
24:21.38
Braden Crooks
And, um and, you know, now we, we It’s more or less manufactured at a print shop, but most it’s such that most print shops and any in any given city can produce it. um They have to order the material we printed on a honeycomb-type cardboard, and it’s very rigid. It’s very lightweight. It’s easy. One person can move. There’s seven-foot big boards, but you can carry it around if you need to.
24:47.98
Jon
Yeah.
24:48.34
Braden Crooks
and um They’re there’re such that you know we can produce them.
24:52.47
Jon
Sure.
24:53.37
Braden Crooks
and No, I mean, you know it costs money, certainly, but it’s not um it’s not this huge bells and whistles exhibit. I mean, in some ways, you know we can create a bells and whistles exhibit that can go in a major museum, but this is a project that you know it’s been in church basements and community centers, and it’s also been in city halls, and it’s very beautiful, and it and it is um and it looks great.
25:17.30
Braden Crooks
It’s just that you know we try our best to make it at least somewhat accessible. um And, you know, I think that that’s always been, ah that’s been one of the reasons why it’s been as successful as it is.
25:23.41
Jon
Right.
25:30.86
Braden Crooks
It’s not like, you know, you have to put multiple six figures down to to get it in there, which a lot of a lot of exhibits are that and more.
25:37.29
Jon
Right. Right.
25:41.32
Jon
Yeah.
25:41.54
Braden Crooks
And this is a little bit more of an organizing tool. And that’s kind of how we’ve always wanted it to be.
25:45.87
Jon
Mm hmm.
25:46.68
Braden Crooks
is It’s an organizing tool. It’s meant to get people organized and get people activated.
25:52.17
Jon
Hmm.
25:52.29
Braden Crooks
And in order to do that, it needed to go in a lot of different places.
25:56.54
Jon
Yeah. when So you have this combination of research and design um and and construction, I guess. But um I’m sure there are also people listening to this who are on the research side of the world, and they’re probably doing interesting work and thinking, like, I would love to bring my project two people, right?
26:18.57
Braden Crooks
Yeah.
26:19.04
Jon
um Bring it to life. And so if, if you were giving um advice to a researcher who had an interesting project, and they want to say, I want to do something similar to bring this project to life in a real space, like what would your, what would your recommendations be or or suggestions be for folks to think in that kind of way?
26:42.92
Braden Crooks
Well, I mean, for one, I think that they should work with someone with a design background and a storytelling background and and kind of, you know, it’s OK not to have those skills.
26:53.93
Braden Crooks
But, you know, for example, we know how to work Adobe, you know, graphic design program.
26:57.99
Jon
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
27:01.01
Braden Crooks
And that is that is a whole technical skill set that’s, you know, if you’re focused elsewhere, it’s a difficult one to learn.
27:05.97
Jon
Yeah.
27:09.36
Braden Crooks
um So I do think you know there is some of that. I think that what what the key piece to get to nail with your research is to say, you know why does this matter to people? ah How has this affected and changed their life? And start from there and work your way back down into the details. um And you know tell a story that you can really feel like you can back up and then prioritize the story.
27:38.58
Braden Crooks
So you know you can always back it up, but you don’t let too much you know get in the way of really telling a compelling story. um And and that can be that can be really hard to do, especially if you’re in the weeds on research where you’ve spent a lot you know years looking through it.
27:55.55
Braden Crooks
and yeah you know And so, I mean, I literally will try and tell it, I love to talk about it with family or friends or people that are not engaged in it at all, and just try and quickly tell them what it is that we’re doing.
27:55.96
Jon
Yeah, yeah.
28:08.04
Jon
yeah
28:08.49
Braden Crooks
And that’s, if you’ve ever, you know I’m sure many listeners have tried to do that and failed.
28:14.30
Jon
yeah
28:15.12
Braden Crooks
And um that’s always when you learn, okay, i really I really need to figure out what it is I’m trying to say. um And and there are there’s a lot of methodology behind that and people that will help you do that.
28:27.19
Jon
Yeah. And the other thing I wanted to ask was on the, on the kind of the qualitative community building side, because I think there are a lot of people, I mean, i at least especially early in my career, put myself in this bucket of a more quantitative researcher, right? And it’s really easy to like, look at the Hulk maps and grab the, the, the, you know, census tract data, just, you know, go through and analyze it. And so for people who are,
28:54.13
Jon
more in that quantitative nature, like what would, but want to be more involved with communities and and do something like this? Like what would your recommendation be to like build these, as you mentioned, build these relationships with communities and community groups and, um you you know, and and build a community advisory board and those sorts of things?
29:14.33
Braden Crooks
Yeah, I mean, one, I think you have to find the right partners. So, you know, we’re invited and then we’ve often like brought people together um with that.
29:25.91
Braden Crooks
with a core partner or with a number of partners who have you know that those relationships. And really, we think about how do we help them build their relationships with the community, with each other, um and you know and and focus on the relationships themselves.
29:33.34
Jon
Mm hmm.
29:44.87
Braden Crooks
And then usually the the content comes out of that.
29:46.22
Jon
Hmm.
29:48.80
Braden Crooks
You know, a lot of the research that we’re doing is historic in nature, you know, looking at the history, what happened, what are the policies, what are the decisions, what are the events, as much as data and sort of the kind of taking the temperature of where things are now or looking at the evolution of that information over time.
30:09.63
Braden Crooks
But a lot of the time, some of the most interesting things that have come out of it is kind of the putting some pieces together to be like, oh, wow, this is a bigger story than we thought it was. And an example of that, we were in Winston-Salem, and we were looking at the era in the early 70s in Winston-Salem, which was the era of desegregation there. And um although a lot of the narrative, obviously, that we would tell and ought to tell about desegregation of that being a positive thing.
30:41.65
Braden Crooks
You know, the powers that be in Winston-Salem at the time were the same segregationists um that had been running the town for a long time.
30:45.78
Jon
Mm hmm.
30:50.08
Braden Crooks
And they were the ones running desegregation. And one of the things that, the ways that they approached that was really to dismantle black institutions. For example, there was a black hospital and a white hospital in Winston-Salem.
31:02.94
Braden Crooks
And guess which one they closed and said, yeah, now, you know, we close the black hospital and say, now you can go, to the White Hospital, isn’t that great? But there was hundreds of Black doctors, Black pharmacists, you know Black nurses, right?
31:16.74
Jon
Yeah.
31:17.79
Braden Crooks
This was a huge anchor institution for that neighborhood that was helping fuel the economic and social life of that neighborhood. And it wasn’t, oh, white folks are now going to start going and patronizing that hospital. No, that’s not what happened. Similarly, they did this with high schools. They did this with a busing company. and There were two busing. There was a black busing and a white busing and they merged them, but they really just dissolved the black busing.
31:43.86
Braden Crooks
a company which was one of the most successful in the country. So what we started to piece together was actually that, in a sense, the era of desegregation was sort of weaponized against the black community by a lot of the powers that be. And and that bigger narrative suddenly was an aha moment. It was taking these individual stories, one person might be researching health and hospitals, one of the boss saying, et cetera, and starting to zoom out and say, wow, look what happened.
32:11.40
Braden Crooks
And then you see the impact that that had in combination with things like redlining, urban and renewal, cutting of public services to black neighborhoods in Winston-Salem was really devastating.
32:22.97
Jon
Mm.
32:23.66
Braden Crooks
and um But that was like a new narrative that came out of looking at the Hall of the Research together to really say, wait a minute, this moment that we sort of celebrate was actually a moment that
32:30.62
Jon
Right.
32:36.84
Braden Crooks
a lot of the crises that were coming out of redlining were retrenched and re, you know, yeah.
32:41.59
Jon
Yeah. Huh. Um, so it’s a really interesting project. Um, Braden, I appreciate you coming on the show. I want to ask how can people find you in your team? What does it take, uh, not financially, but, but what does it take to sort of invite you all to come out and, and open the exhibit for for folks that are like, Hey, we should have these folks in our library or in our building or wherever.
33:12.86
Braden Crooks
Well, for one, I’ll say we really think it should go everywhere. So reach out. um you know we and and um Just reach out to us. you know We have designingthewee.com.
33:24.11
Braden Crooks
I’m Braden at designingthewee.com. and um and I’m happy to have a conversation. yeah It always just starts with folks reaching out and we have a conversation and and um you know we we put the pieces together.
33:37.66
Braden Crooks
and That that’s that’s so can be a process and sometimes it happens quickly and sometimes slowly and we’ll work with you to make it happen. We’ve done it so many times.
33:45.37
Jon
Mm hmm.
33:45.79
Braden Crooks
you know This project is nearing 10 years old.
33:48.61
Jon
Oh, wow.
33:49.06
Braden Crooks
So, um it’s been to over two dozen cities. We pretty much know how to work it out so we can help you do that.
33:55.24
Jon
Yeah. Yeah.
33:57.38
Braden Crooks
And, um you know, there’s always something new, but that’s that’s why we’re always on the learning curve. But, um but you know, just reach out. I mean, and and we’re happy to connect you with people who have done it, to hear from them, you know, anything like that.
34:12.47
Braden Crooks
You know, there’s a whole network of people out there.
34:12.52
Jon
Terrific. Yeah. Well, that’s terrific. And um I’m looking forward to the digital version as well and to play around with that. And ah this is great. So um thanks so much for coming on the show. Great to chat again. And yeah, I really appreciate it.
34:27.03
Braden Crooks
ah Thanks for having me. It’s a fascinating conversation.
