Media strategy for experiential spaces.
Media and technology are usually the last real decision made about a space — chosen after the architecture is set, judged by how impressive they look rather than what they're supposed to do. I work earlier than that: on the strategy that decides whether media belongs in a space at all, and what it's actually there to accomplish.
The problem
Most experiential spaces treat media as a finishing layer. The building gets designed, the program gets set, the budget gets allocated — and then, somewhere late in the process, someone asks what should go on the screens. Technology gets chosen for how new or immersive it looks, installed, and left to age. It photographs well at launch and gets harder to explain a year later, when no one remembers why it’s there, who’s supposed to maintain it, or what it was meant to do for the business.
That’s a strategy failure dressed up as a design choice. Media in a physical space is not decoration — it’s a set of decisions about content, cost, staffing, and upkeep that has to work alongside architecture and operations for years, not just on opening day. Skip that thinking early and you end up with technology that’s impressive in a walkthrough and a liability in year three: expensive to run, unclear who owns it, disconnected from why people came to the space in the first place.
The alternative is treating media as a strategic layer from the start — planned alongside the architecture and the business model, not applied on top of them. That means asking what a space is actually trying to do for the people who move through it and the organization that runs it, before asking what technology could do it. That’s the work.
Where it comes from
That way of thinking comes from three decades at the intersection of creative and technical work — from early experiential installations to leading media strategy today.