2024 SEGD Exhibition + Experience Design - Wednesday Pre-Event Tour | Society for Experiential Graphic Design

Event Details

Join us for an exclusive peek into the Building Stories exhibit at the National Building Museum! This optional tour is available on the afternoon of Wednesday, June 19. This tour requires separate registration. Transportation to and from the tour is on your own. Space is limited and on a first-come-first-serve basis. Tour participants will receive an email with tour details before the event. After the tour, head over to Bar Spero at 250 Massachusetts Ave NW Suite 155, Washington, DC 20001 for an informal gathering. This casual meet up is not officially sponsored by SEGD, but it provides an opportunity for us to connect with each other!

Building Stories brings kids and adults alike on an immersive exploration of the world of architecture, engineering, construction, and design found in the pages of children's books. Geared toward an intergenerational audience, with special attention paid to children in grades K-3 and their parents and caregivers.

Curated by the nation's leading expert on children's literature, Leonard Marcus, Building Stories is the first national exhibition to call attention to the built environment's role as an important, and often overlooked, character in children's literature. By activating these stories and their built worlds, and the early foundations for how we begin to understand our surroundings, Building Stories allows visitors to investigate the role the built environment plays in our own lives and communities—and how we can be agents of change for its more sustainable, equitable future.

The exhibition encourages visitors to interact with familiar classics and new favorites through hands-on activities, media installations, sketching, reading, and building stories of their own. Award-winning author/illustrators David Macaulay and Oliver Jeffers have collaborated on this exhibition to create original environments that will offer insight into their creative processes and engage visitors to better understand the worlds created in books and encourage their role in making a better world.

Speakers

Cathy Frankel

Deputy Director of Interpretive Content at National Building Museum

Daniel Meyers

Founding Principal at plus & greater than

Traci Sym

Founding Principal at plus & greater than

Cathy Crane Frankel is the Deputy Director of Interpretive Content at the National Building Museum leading the exhibitions, collections and education & engagement teams. Since 2000 she has provided leadership overseeing the development and presentation of exhibitions including Hot to Cold: BIG’s Odyssey of Architectural Adaptation, Evicted, and Building Stories. She conceived of and directed the staff in the development and execution of the Museum’s popular summer installations including the attendance record-breaking BEACH installation. She is currently working on the Future Cities initiative that includes exhibitions and programs culminating in a long-term exhibition in 2026. As an executive staff member, she is an active participant in developing the vision, strategy, and budgets for the institution.

Daniel Meyers is an architect working at the creative edges of the profession. He is intent on interweaving cultural and physical contexts to create spaces and experiences of lasting symbolic significance—and deep utility—for people of all ages, backgrounds, and beliefs. Daniel has served as a Creative Director for exhibition design, digital design, and advertising agencies, a history that has positioned him to better understand both the cultural context of built work and the dynamic nature of communities that the work serves. As an architect, Daniel has led interdisciplinary teams to create groundbreaking projects for leading cultural, commercial, and private clients across the world. He teaches and lectures on architecture and experience design in the US and Europe, and has published widely on topics related to his practice. Daniel is an honorably discharged veteran of the United States Navy.

Traci is an award-winning experience designer, founding principal, and the narrative and choreographic heart of Plus And Greater Than. She began her academic and professional career in the performing arts, and has brought her extensive theater experience to bear in shaping the foundation of Plus And Greater Than’s exhibition design practice. Traci’s approach centers on harnessing the power of emotional response and a multiplicity of encounters between the audience and the exhibit. Her work is committed to creating perspectives, experiences, narrative arcs, and interactions between object and audience that feel at once familiar and provocative, surprising and reassuring.

Prior to founding Plus And Greater Than, she led the experience design and media practice at Skylab Architecture and served as the Experience Design Director at Second Story Interactive Studios. She has directed the development of significant permanent exhibitions across North America, including the Natural History Museum at LA County and the Denver Botanic Garden and the National Building Museum.