Hot Coffee with Adriana Valdez Young
Adriana Valdez Young is a force of nature.Vibrant, driven, passionate leader of graduate program of interaction design at the School of Visual Arts,NY.But also a thinker, a visionary, a researcher and a great mother.Just recently I found out about Adriana’s role in conception of a secret mall apartment within Providence Place Mall and how she lived in this apartment with her eight friends. Now that this story was turned into a film I had to ask some questions and share the responses that reflect so well our ambiguous,multifaceted realities.
Nina: Imagine you are in your favorite coffee or tea spot. Where is it? What are you drinking? What are the three things you see right now?
Adriana: We are in the back garden of Pamenar — an open-air coffee shop I recently discovered in the Kensington Market neighborhood of Toronto. It doesn’t have a sign, but you will recognize it when you look up and see a painting of delicately lined black and white buildings, with a vibrant turquoise street filled with bustling people in all colors suspended above an open glass garage door. Walk to the back garden past the parted red curtains and you’ll be on a raised platform punctuated by apple and cherry trees. I always drink cortados with oat milk because they are small and strong, like me.
Pamenar,Toronto. Photo courtesy of Adriana Valdez Young.
Nina: Please tell me more about the idea behind the film "Secret Mall Apartment.” What prompted this film? Why do you think it is relevant today?
Adriana:“Secret Mall Apartment” is a documentary by the Brooklyn-based filmmaker, Jeremy Workman. It starts with a whim I had in 2004 to live inside my local shopping mall, framing it as a new “nature” or our future wilderness. I was born in a family of new Americans and shopping was the main way we manifested our American identities and dreams. I have always been fascinated by the big American shopping mall as both a mystical dream machine and a soulless monstrosity. I was in a close-knit group of friends, all artists and RISD grads (I studied history just up the hill at Brown). While they were steeped in sculpture and installation projects, I tagged along until I thought of something that they wanted to be part of. I decided to live in the Providence Place Mall for one week, not as performance art, but as something fun to do that was in stark contrast to the more serious work I was doing at the time running a school for undocumented immigrant families. The four of us made rules for the week. We could each only bring $20, an emergency blanket, a sketchbook, and one digital camera that we shared. Much of the movie is cut from about 24 hours of footage from that tiny camera and from there, Workman zooms out to weave a fantastical tale that is both personal—delving into friendships, commitment, breakups—and political—questioning privilege, gentrification, and the right to the city.
Photo courtesy of Adriana Valdez Young.
I think it’s relevant today for two very different reasons: 1) it reflects our broken relationship with consumption and the harnessing of our environment for extraction that ultimately eats our communities, and
2) we all want to remember what life was like before smartphones — when we had the time and attention span to dream, scheme, and simply hang out without closely monitoring what other people thought of us or how people would react to our pictures and stories. The irony is that in the mid 2000s it was extremely rare for people to be taking pictures of themselves, yet my partner at the time, Michael Townsend, was obsessed with videoing extensively mundane moments of our lives and as part of his own relationship to his everyday life as an ongoing art project.
Photo courtesy of Adriana Valdez Young.
Nina: Could you please elaborate on your part of this story in the creation of this film. How did you come across the idea of living inside the shopping mall?
Adriana: I wanted to live in the mall initially because I wanted to enact an ad campaign I heard on the radio. It featured a mother who was ecstatic over the Providence Place Mall’s prospect of making her life so convenient that she wished she could live there. Providence Place Mall was the biggest construction project in the City’s history. Its 1.4 million square-foot body loomed menacingly over the rest of downtown and acted like an impermeable fortress between the more affluent and historically marginalized parts of the City. I wanted to embody how the dream of ceaseless consumption is actually a nightmare. I lived there for four days with breaks for air in the parking lot, but without leaving the official property lines of the mall (that was our rule!). There was a group of four of us originally, and we found a 750-square-foot abandoned space buried in the belly of the mall that we decided to develop into a luxury condominium. This was to be a mirror to the rampant destruction of historic mill buildings in the surrounding areas that were being converted to higher-end residences and chain stores. You’ll have to see the movie to find out the rest of what unfolded over the subsequent four years! I will tell you that it gets weird, obsessive and there’s a lot more questionable domesticity as “performance art” that transpires.
Photo courtesy of Adriana Valdez Young.
Nina: As a person and an educator who is deeply immersed in product design and experience design, where do you think current technological changes will take us? Are we likely to live an extremely well-designed, soulless, life?
Adriana: I think we’re actually going in the opposite direction, away from soulless living and what my son calls “white voids with modern furniture” in response to the luxury condo ads he sees around New York City. For the past few years, I've been seeing a trend towards more consideration, thoughtfulness, and diversity of perspectives in design, driven by a desire to make products more inclusive and accessible. Pre-pandemic, as a design researcher working in both the start-up space and with corporate clients, I found myself having to constantly “sell” research or collaboration with communities as a critical step in the design process – not just a nice-to-have or luxury. But with the pandemic and rise of the Black Lives Matter Movement, suddenly companies were being held accountable to higher standards and social responsibilities.
For the first time, household brands were coming to me and asking if I could organize co-design workshops to better understand things like the evolving needs of people transitioning, BIPOC essential workers, first-generation Americans, new moms, etc. Whereas the focus had previously been solely on income and geography, suddenly there was more nuance in companies’ approaches to consumers as complex and diverse beings, not simply “users.” This shift towards more deeply understanding and collaborating with people will naturally produce both more responsive and responsible designs that are less extractive and exclusive. At the graduate program that I lead at School of Visual Arts (SVA) in NYC — the MFA in Interaction Design — we introduced the first, ever one-year course in inclusive design at the masters level in the U.S. and I’m already seeing how the next generation of designers is practicing inclusion not as a novel method, but as simply part of being a good designer. One of the student’s projects to co-design video games with blind gamers was recently featured as part of a wave of conscientious design emerging from the graduate programs at SVA.
Still from Secret Mall Apartment. Photo courtesy of Adriana Valdez Young.
Nina: Could you please name the top 3 best designed experiences or products you have encountered recently. Could they also be called objects of contemporary art if we were to use this last term loosely?
Adriana: I was recently in Japan with my family and fell in love with the sound design that is included in so many everyday experiences. At the ATM at 7-Eleven, when you strike a chunky keyboard button it plays a melodic piano note. The Tokyo subway emits a comforting bird chirp when kids swipe their cards. And stores play special songs to alert customers if it starts raining and a lullaby 10 minutes before it closes to encourage people to head to the cashier or head home. Sound is a very powerful element for more inclusive, environmental design.
A new product I’m in love with is Poetry Camera, a collaboration between designers and technologists, Kelin Carolyn Zhang and Ryan Mather. It’s a polaroid-like camera that takes a picture and uses AI to translate the image into an eloquent poem. We hosted them at SVA a couple of weeks ago and my students had the opportunity to assemble the electronics and customize their own poetry cameras with AI prompts designed to evoke varying poetry styles and in multiple languages. For me, this is the perfect mix of technical and design rigor with whimsy and play, all while rendering more accessible and transparent how complex interactions of the digital and physical worlds actually work.
Lastly, I think ritual in experience design is very powerful and taps into our primal wish to be part of a larger continuum of culture and stories over time. My son and I recently took part in a Vajradaka Burning Offering at our Buddhist center in Brooklyn. There were about 40 people and we each wrote down bad habits and any negatives we wanted to purify. Then we circled a fire in the back garden, chanting a special mantra to a drum as each person took a turn at tossing their paper into the fire and flicking black sesame seeds that had been in the shape of a scorpion into the open flames. It felt wonderful. And it’s a good example of not needing to have a logical or clear reason behind what you’re doing, but instead, just trusting that it’s good and something is working. Nina, you’re the expert, so you tell me if any or all of this is contemporary art! I think so.
Photo courtesy of Adriana Valdez Young.