(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 491: IrrePLACEable
This week on the Talking Headways podcast we’re joined by Kevin Kelley, founding partner and principal at Shook Kelley. We talk about his book Irreplaceable: How to Create Extraordinary Places that Bring People Together. We discuss eliciting emotions, the debate between themes and authenticity, changing the meaning of cities, and embracing density.
You can purchase the book through our Bookshop affiliate store here.
You can listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA or find it at our hosting archive.
Below is a full AI generated unedited transcript of the episode:
Jeff Wood (40s):
Kevin Kelley, welcome to the Talking Headways podcast.
Kevin Kelley (1m 19s):
Thank you for having me. Thanks
Jeff Wood (1m 21s):
For being here. Before we get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Kevin Kelley (1m 24s):
I’m an architect, probably an atypical architect and that I’m not really obsessed with making objects, but focused on social facilitation, trying to bring people together in pro-social environments and you know, work on community bonding aspects. I do this not as a non-commercial type of focus. I really try to focus on where commerce and community meet because I believe it’s essential that business be a part of community. I don’t believe it works without some commercial aspects to it.
Jeff Wood (1m 57s):
We’ll get to that in a bit. I’m curious if you were always meant to be an architect.
Kevin Kelley (2m 1s):
You know, that’s a great question. I decided to be an architect at six years old. I had never met an architect, had none in my family, don’t know anybody that put that into my head, but I, I was very focused on how people walked in a room, how they sat down, whether they were social and getting along or antisocial someone that may have to do with my upbringing. Had a little bit of a tough childhood and I could tell by the way somebody put the keys in the door or ice cubes in a glass, whether it’d be a good night or bad night at 60 pounds. There wasn’t much I could do to tell people what to do. And in my desperate search to try to do something as all kids do, I started looking at the environment and I turned lights down low and music up and rearrange the furniture.
Kevin Kelley (2m 52s):
And by God it worked. It didn’t solve everything, but it made things better. And then I moved on from my home to my friend’s homes, to my classroom to bigger aspects. And I don’t think I realized it at the time, but I had a much more psychological and sociological approach to place and space. And when I got into college and was, you know, I was kind of an introvert. It was very quiet, at least the first half of college. But my professors were asking me a lot of questions about, you know, what was my interest. And they could tell I had a sociological bent and they said, you know, have you considered going into sociology?
Kevin Kelley (3m 32s):
And I said, you know, it’s crossed my mind, but I’d really wish architecture would get into sociology. And what I couldn’t understand was architects kept trying to take people somewhere that didn’t necessarily want to go. Glass houses and extreme penthouse objects, you know, kind of things. And I, I was like, why don’t we meet people where they’re at? Why don’t we really try to figure out if somebody’s in the truck pulls or country music or whatever, why don’t we go and understand what makes them happy and build environments that satisfy them. And I’m not sure my professors or peers like that approach initially.
Jeff Wood (4m 9s):
Sounds like you’re doing okay now. Well,
Kevin Kelley (4m 11s):
Thank you.
Jeff Wood (4m 11s):
You seem like an observant person and apparently you sit in a lot of lawn chairs outside of stores to look at what folks are doing. And so that makes sense from what you’re just telling me. I imagine some of this also seeps into your regular routines. Is there ever a time when you switch off from the observant architect?
Kevin Kelley (4m 28s):
I wish that could. And anybody that’s new that spends time with me, it’s, it’s inevitable. They’ll go, is there anything you don’t notice? And and I, I, I’m not aware that I noticed so much. I work with some psychologists for the work we do and many of them have said that I am a empath and I didn’t really know what that was 25 years ago. But it’s somebody that picks up a lot from environment and that’s both a blessing and a curse. ’cause sometimes you carry other people’s burdens too much. But I could notice slight inflections of faces. I noticed socks, I noticed cars, I noticed colors of cars and patterns of cars.
Kevin Kelley (5m 11s):
If I see five white cars in a row, I’ll, I’ll register it. And so I’m just constantly scanning, sorting, sifting my environment.
Jeff Wood (5m 20s):
One of my favorite radio lab episodes was this one about this guy named Mr. S, and I don’t know if it was actually true or not, but I think he was a Russian guy and he had this memory issue where if you saw an object, he’d remember every similar object that came before that. And so what he would do is he’d go into these huge theaters and basically have people scream stuff out for like an hour and then he could go back and tell everybody what they said after that. Wow. But in the end it got to him because eventually he, you know, saw a cat and then he saw every other cat that he’d seen in his whole life. And so it got to be too much and overwhelming. But I think that that’s kind of an interesting parallel to your empathy in the situation that you find yourself in.
Kevin Kelley (5m 57s):
My staff says sometimes to me they say, we think we could go to a presentation, take out the show you’ve put together and just put in random images of squirrels and lawn chairs and other things and you would find something around that. And I, I, it’s not so much the art of bullshit is as much as it is artifacts hold meaning to me. And I’m very interested in how objects possess meaning and what they suggest and how we as humans relate to artifacts and whether those are human artifacts or physical artifacts.
Jeff Wood (6m 33s):
Let’s chat about the book IrrePLACEable How to Create Extraordinary Places that Bring People Together You weave kind of between your experiences designing for brands and and your workflows in the book. But I’m curious how you got yourself into this interesting niche of food experience and kind of destination designs and the ideas that you come up with for folks.
Kevin Kelley (6m 50s):
You know, like most architects in school, I didn’t want to have anything to do with cash registers or sales or retail it, you know, it corrupted me and I could tell it rubbed my professor’s academic hairs the wrong way. So I stayed away from that. And I tried to understand, you know, what makes great places and everyone was obsessed with style, but I couldn’t understand why we weren’t looking at the issues of behavior. And my father and grandfather came out of the advertising industries, which is an art and it understands humanity and it understands, you know, compensation issues. And some people think of it as kind of a dark art.
Kevin Kelley (7m 30s):
But the one thing they did that was fascinating to me is they would measure the effectiveness of ads. And I thought, well, why don’t we measure the effectiveness of place and style is so subjective that behavior became the best way to me. Could we look at eye movements, dwell times, experimentation, traffic? And so I didn’t like retail initially, but I thought, you know, that’d be a good way to put a metric to design. That’s the one thing I find many designers don’t have as a metric to what works. Even if it’s the, I don’t wanna say the wrong metric, but even a anomaly metric, it’s helpful ’cause it starts putting parameters to an issue.
Kevin Kelley (8m 11s):
And so I started finding metrics and by luck I went from studying the gender differences of male and females in restaurants to grocery stores. It was my business partner Terry Shook that introduced me to grocery stores. And initially I thought, I, I don’t wanna work for a grocery store. It’s mundane, it’s ordinary. And then I thought about it a little further and I’m like, well there’s 65,000 products inside a store. So if I really wanted to prove my thesis that environment affects behavior and ultimately decision making, then I could study this inch by inch. And I thought, well, I’ll do this once or twice. But then that really led into just a whole career of studying where, how people buy, how they make decisions, how long they dwell, when they’re convivial or social and when they’re antisocial, such as say the antisocial behaviors you see at checkout lines.
Kevin Kelley (9m 8s):
And so I I became very fascinated with that and I was able to take those principles and apply them to urban districts, to orchestras, to institutional facilities. In fact, they value it more than I’d say the commercial entities because they’re lacking it so much.
Jeff Wood (9m 24s):
I feel like the book is kind of an undercover book about cities. It talks a lot about the work that you’ve done for grocery stores and obviously you, you talk about the south end a little bit later in the book and we’ll talk about that in a bit. But a lot of the ideas and themes you discuss feel like they can be a roadmap for cities as much as the stores and brands that you design for regularly.
Kevin Kelley (9m 41s):
You know, I’m so glad you see it that way Jeffrey. I, I’m so used to standing in front of boards or management groups that are comprised generally a lot of accountants, lawyers, MBAs, and we live in a world where everything is so concrete and linear and I, I was using a metric, but those industries are over metriced and it’s very hard to convince those types of groups of the power of emotions or the power of connection and community. And instead of just trying to constantly browbeat them from the outside and being considered left of center, I really wanted to try to play their game.
Kevin Kelley (10m 21s):
I wanna try to understand what they’re thinking and do that rigor as hard as I could, but then insert all these other aspects that are important to me. And human connection is the most important to me. And so yes, you’re right. I mean, and and how cities, how urban districts and how we come together as people is, is so important to me and all my colleagues and my business partner.
Jeff Wood (10m 45s):
How are you sitting cities at the moment? You know, the pandemic kind of switched things on in terms of work from home for a lot of folks. And so it’s changed this kind of monoculture of downtowns into something that people are, are frankly afraid of happening even more with the idea of a doom loop. I’m curious what your thoughts are on that move and the change that’s happening and the push to bring people back downtown as you’re trying to bring people into stores and create experiences.
Kevin Kelley (11m 12s):
Yeah, if I could back up just a tad on that ’cause it’s such a great question. Sure. I didn’t have a guidebook for developing our, our kind of approach. And so we kind of had to pioneer our own system of convening and to try to put together an alchemy of business science and design approaches to, to build a kind of robust system of place. And that’s really what I like to think of in terms of a system of place. ’cause a lot of companies lack a system. But the more I researched, just like anything, the more we worked on this more we realized that cities were defined by the ancient agora, the markets, the bizarres, not even as much the temples or religious facilities of the courthouses as the markets really defined them.
Kevin Kelley (11m 57s):
And the more I studied old world merchants, the more I realized they understood something that we don’t understand about bringing people together, about not only trading goods but also trading values and rituals and traditions and what I call the great value exchange in the book to try to get away from that term retail. What was fascinating is most of the insights we had and our recommendations, I could track back a thousand years. And what I mean by that is the way the human body moves, the way people glance at each other, the way they connect when environments really encourage and foster community and when environments turn those behaviors off. But around 2008, 2009 upwards and that was the birth of the iPhone, social media, Facebook, Twitter, we started noticing a market difference and how people behaved and it just escalated.
Kevin Kelley (12m 52s):
And we started having alarm bells internally in our firm saying, oh, this is fundamental shift in our behavior. If people make eye contact less, if their necks are cranked down all the time, these send out different signals to us. To a child, a neck cranked down says depressed, even before a child knows the word depressed, they know that their parents are suen. And so we started really noticing this behavior and so we started getting very concerned about the changing behavior and the nature of community making now add to that online shopping and our fixation with, you know, just screen time, which averages seven to eight hours a day, which is terrifying.
Kevin Kelley (13m 35s):
That’s the 105 days a year that we’re fixated to a screen and not out in public. Connecting all of that was already concerning enough. Then we hit the pandemic and then we watched, and I work with a lot of downtowns, I work with some global cities and as I mentioned urban districts, once that hit, then I saw a much more kind of long-term effect. And so while many other sectors housing, retail is doing great, believe it or not, despite the headlines many other sectors are doing well. The sector that is a super big problem are downtowns and urban districts office markets. And that is a fundamental shift in our behavior that I think is gonna take 10 years to correct and it’s going to be everyone’s problem.
Kevin Kelley (14m 21s):
There’s this kind of mentality, suburbia versus downtowns where people think, well not my problem, it’s all of our problem in terms of tax base services, what is the solution? That is one of the things we’re working on with a number of cities. And I think you have to break it down into a lot of dimensions, but in short we have to change the meaning of the city from places of production and proximity. And I think that’s what we really, they were built on the idea of being close to the resources factory and close to the, you know, other workers and movers and shakers to really places of experiences, playgrounds, which isn’t all bad.
Kevin Kelley (15m 2s):
And I think it will come back as we get more people to live there, more people to hang out there. As many other authors have described their kind of downtowns or marriage markets for young people, there’s a sense of discovery and adventure, of creation of innovation. Cities have to really frame that value proposition. But what I find in a lot of the global cities I’m working with, they keep trying to sell old hat. And that old hat is not working anymore. You’re not gonna convince the best talent to go through the trouble of getting to a city for what the payoff is. And in the book I describe a lot of parameters around the amount of work we exert as humans and the payoffs we get and the internet is wiped out, this kind of concrete, linear payoffs of speed, efficiency, price, variety, all those things.
Kevin Kelley (15m 54s):
They, they have just systematically attacked that and will keep attacking that, but they don’t have a monopoly on joy or delight or coming together. And so cities have to really focus on those aspects
Jeff Wood (16m 6s):
And downtowns should be changing because they were never really the right way to go in the first place. I feel like the monoculture of of office space fit a certain need and it fit a certain, you know, idea of what capital wanted, right? To have people all close together and the highest and best use of a downtown space and those types of things. And this makes me think about another part of your book, which is like you’re trying to get companies to compete with other companies that have them beat on every metric you have the Walmarts of the world, the Amazons of the world that have everybody beat on the idea of, you know, low margin sales and the ability to find anything you want. And some companies that are smaller just aren’t gonna compete with that. And so they have to do something different. They have to be something for people that the Amazons and the Walmarts can’t be.
Jeff Wood (16m 50s):
And so I feel like that’s a kind of a parallel to what we’re talking about in downtowns. Downtowns need to be something that just isn’t found everywhere else and can be easily gotten. Yeah
Kevin Kelley (16m 59s):
And and where I get concerned, you know, about all this is that we have architects that don’t really like retail, they just historically don’t. There are some that do, but by and large they just don’t revere that and they don’t wanna get involved in the kind of mundane aspects of life, particularly the corridors that go from downtowns to suburbia. They just ignore that. And they either wanna do flashy projects in downtowns, the kind of architecture stuff or way out, way out in the remote areas. But we have this real life that happens in between downtowns and suburbia that are comprised of layers and layers of shops and dry cleaners, grocery stores, barber shops, I mean restaurants, bars, cafes, all of these things.
Kevin Kelley (17m 45s):
And it’s analogous to me if doctors said I don’t want to do any of that. I only wanna do plastic surgery for celebrities, but I don’t wanna deal with that mundane stuff that people go. And we’ve kind of surrendered that and given that up to contractors and design build entities. But I think that is the issue is to go into that. And the bigger thing that concerns me is what happens if those layers are wiped out? And I shouldn’t say what happens, it’s already happening. Layers and layers of that culture is being wiped out by Amazon, Walmart, a few giant entities. We’re gonna have about five or six, I shouldn’t even say five, we’re gonna have about four entities from which get our retail and food products. And people aren’t really waking up to this.
Kevin Kelley (18m 27s):
So what happens to those areas as that happens? Well unfortunately those shops become havens for crime, graffiti, undesirable behaviors, trash everything. And then it starts affecting the neighborhoods and it starts affecting property values. And we get in this negative cycle, the same thing is now happening in downtown. And I want my profession to get in there and say, look, we have to help protect these layers. I don’t think we help them with handouts. I don’t think we help them with nostalgic pity parties. I think we have to get in there and really make them able to compete. As I mentioned earlier, there are, you know, on one level we have a desire to acquire that is a human thing and we have a desire to acquire at the lowest price possible.
Kevin Kelley (19m 13s):
But something else emerges once we get those basic acquisition needs met. Anytime any human gets those basic need mets, they’re then trying to figure out, well how do I belong? Who do I belong to? How do I experience life at a heightened level? How do I find myself in this world? And those are very fascinating aspects to me of how we can make these corridors and our downtowns more animated with a value proposition that goes beyond just commoditization.
Jeff Wood (19m 45s):
This goes to your theater of place idea. We had Sam Gen Way who’s a documentarian of Disney on the show a number of years ago, and he told us a story about Disneyland that’s kind of stuck with me a lot, which is that Walt designed Disneyland to be like a television. Mm. You walk in and you change the channel and you’re in Adventureland, you change the channel, you’re at Pirates of the Caribbean, you change the channel, you’re at Space Mountain. Yeah. And I feel like that kind of way of making people feel something when they go to a place and you can mock Disneyland all you want as a kind of a, a place that is quote unquote fake or whatever, you know, idea you have about it. But it made people feel something and it was something new to experience that reminded people of places that they’d been before, like Main Street or maybe it gave them a fantasy idea of something that they could imagine that eventually turned into this multimillion dollar industry of, of designing, you know, theme parks for people, but also movies and books and stuff.
Jeff Wood (20m 38s):
I mean prior to the Caribbean, et cetera. But I feel like that’s connected to your discussion of the theater of place, which is kind of this idea that you have been thinking about for a long, long time.
Kevin Kelley (20m 48s):
Yeah, you know, I’m so accustomed and used to the debates about theme versus kind of authenticity. It’s almost tiring, you know, I was at a Columbia school presentation many years ago and I remember the working title of the lecture was, is Place Branding the Antichrist to Architecture. And I thought, wow. And in the middle of my presentation, a historic architectural history professor stood up and said, you know, I, I just, I don’t think retail has any place in architecture. And she was attacking theme as well. And I stopped her for a moment and I said, could we just chat? And she talked about her distaste of branding, but I said, you, you’re standing there with a beautiful jacket, may I ask where the jacket is from?
Kevin Kelley (21m 33s):
She got a little ruffled and she said, well it’s a Prada jacket. And it was like interesting. I then asked her about her watch and her briefcase and they were all brands. And what happens to us is we signal so much of who we are, our social identity through our brands, and yet we kind of deny that this is operating this system. And the easiest people to brand in the world are intellectuals. They’re the easiest. In my work, the hardest people to brand are, are Walmart customers. They’re very difficult ’cause they’re extremely pragmatic and frugal with their dollars. And so this debate between thy and brandy and authenticity I think kind of misses the whole discussion of how our bodies work and our bodies.
Kevin Kelley (22m 15s):
We, we don’t walk backwards, we generally don’t walk sideways. We have an aperture, a vertical aperture, and we evaluate our world through a frame of reference and we use not our mind despite what architects think. We use our senses. Our senses are our first most powerful decision making analyzing tool within our body. And it’s constantly making decisions about its world. And how that ties into Walt and, and Hitchcock and Spielberg and these other folks is they understand how to elicit emotions out an individual through framing, through placing. And the brain has a remarkable ability.
Kevin Kelley (22m 55s):
The human brain can notice what’s most important in a scene. And so what I encourage all of my clients, whether they’re designing a grocery store, an urban district or an entire city, is to think in scenes, distinct scenes. And you can’t have thousands of scenes. You actually have to have a certain number of scenes in a store. We generally don’t want to have more than eight scenes in a city. We have a certain number of scenes and for us as we define a scene, a scene has a beginning, a middle, and an end and a mini climax in the middle of that scene that imparts a value. And that’s the key thing. So I mean use a very basic example, but in say a Wegman’s grocery store, the pizza person with the paddle singing up or throwing the pizza up is not just theatrics, it’s not just a theme element that is a scene about the values of what makes great Italian food.
Kevin Kelley (23m 46s):
And we could go to seafood and have a scene or sushi or meat and have different scenes. Ultimately you want all of your scenes to connect together to an overall moral of the story, good and bad. What what are we fighting for? What are we fighting against? Where are we going? Where’s our journey? What’s our Yoda or enlightenment? And, and, and this kind of sounds esoteric, but we actually get very specific about it in the book and in our firm about really thinking in terms of scenes. So when I go to a city, the first thing I wanna understand is where are your threshold experiences? Where are your most important scenes and what values do they impart? Now a good director edits out bad scenes, that’s what makes a movie tolerable.
Kevin Kelley (24m 29s):
If we see a movie we don’t like, it generally has scenes that don’t make sense and we’re like, well, I don’t understand where I’m at. Or that scene’s not believable and that that is a word. Again, we could go on And on about this, but this issue of make believe, you know, I live here in LA and the Grove is a successful shopping center which conjures up all kind of debate. Many architects hate it and think it’s fake many. The the public loves it. It sees more people than a great wall of China or Disneyland. They’re not coming there for verification whether this is a real sit or not, they’re coming there because they want a sense of a temporary community and they love walking around and feeling like they’re part of something.
Kevin Kelley (25m 10s):
And it’s very easy to jump into that scene. It doesn’t require learning a martial art or becoming getting a degree. You can jump into that synchronicity instantly and you can be around people. Do I wish community would be broader than temporary? Yes. But it’s a great place to start that sense of synchronicity among other humans and kind of create moments of social bliss.
Jeff Wood (25m 31s):
You take a lot of folks there to the grove,
Kevin Kelley (25m 33s):
I take a lot, how
Jeff Wood (25m 35s):
Are the bathrooms?
Kevin Kelley (25m 35s):
They’re phenomenal. They’re some of the nicest bathrooms and I can’t tell you I worked for a major mall company and they brought their whole board to try to figure out why they spent a billion dollars in a mall and it didn’t work. It didn’t generate the returns they had needed and even was less than initially for many, many years. And I just couldn’t understand why they, they knew their parking was bad and they knew their bathroom experience was bad and they said we were well aware of that and we were getting to it. But in our mind we start with that, we start with the work first, solve the problem of work and parking decks drive people crazy and they frustrate people because there’s a lack of orientation, they’re harsh environments.
Kevin Kelley (26m 18s):
And in many places we work with, we try to make that experience as good as it can, the walking experience to the venues. So it doesn’t always have to be by car, it can be by bike. But we’re trying to solve those issues first. And going to the bathroom is a very intimate and important issue that seems minor, but you fix those things first and then get to the cherries. But I, I, I cannot tell you the number of places I go to that have that equation flipped around the parking and the bathrooms and the other work aspects, elevators, escalators end up being something they’re going to get to, but it’s always about engineered out.
Jeff Wood (26m 57s):
I noticed that after I had a kiddo, bathrooms became a lot more important to me anyways,
Kevin Kelley (27m 4s):
Determines whether you’re gonna go there or not, right? I mean, yeah, I have a 6-year-old daughter and my wife and I’d be like, how are the bathrooms right off the bat because not at six but at two, you know, and three,
Jeff Wood (27m 14s):
Yeah, recently we got off the plane in Hong Kong and we walked up and there was actually a display almost like a, a graphic display that’s digital and it had all of the restroom stalls and it could tell you whether there was a person in there or not. And so like, we’re like, oh well this is, this is good, this is so nice. We understand this.
Kevin Kelley (27m 32s):
You know, I was always fascinated with Philip Stark’s work, particularly in Asia, in Hong Kong, I don’t know if you’ve ever been in one of his restaurants, but it’s, you’re having a great meal with somebody in a fantastic, you’re like, excuse me, I’m gonna use the restroom. And then it is the most fun, exciting, invigorating experience you’ve ever had. He makes peeing and the most glorious thing you’ve ever done and you come back to your table and you can just watch people come back and talk about, I just had the most exhilarating pee I’ve ever had because he understands that and he makes it a fun part of our life as opposed to this thing we don’t want to talk about. But these are the intimate issues that really relate to who we are.
Jeff Wood (28m 12s):
Putting aside how you’ve curated yourself over the last 35 years or so, I’m curious if you’re a Cecil or a Nina.
Kevin Kelley (28m 22s):
I am a perfect mix of that. I think probably a little more Nina. Nina. Sorry. My parents. You’re right. I joked and it’s an exaggeration, but I grew up with Archie Bunker and Martha Stewart living in the same house. My father’s ambitions were to make enough money to buy furniture once and never move again. And my mom’s ambition in life was to make enough money so they could constantly change out the home, reinvent it, and even move often. And I watched that debate as a child and it just fascinated me. And in the book I describe a scene where my mom and dad are debating whether there’s new colors or not. And my father is talking about Kelvin temperatures and light beams and things like that.
Kevin Kelley (29m 6s):
He said, there are no new colors, just as if there are no new temperatures. And my mom’s like, of course there’s new colors, there’s new colors every year. And my father remarks, well that’s just what somebody in Soho selling you to buy new pillow sheets. I found that debate fascinating because today I still have those debates in boardrooms where people think it’s fine, we don’t need to do anything and other people are trying to adjust it. And you know, in previous errors, when we had more supply of customers than we had facilities or we had more demand of customers than supply of places to get them, that was great. But since the internet is opened, we now have a reverse situation where we have more supply of places and not enough demand.
Kevin Kelley (29m 53s):
And when I go into organizations over and over and I look at the leaders around the table, obviously still to this day, heavily male. Most of ’em are cecils and they’re very linear and they’re very pragmatic about what they have. They’re, they think in words facilities. And what I don’t see enough of are demand side thinkers. And those are people that say, here’s what would get somebody to crawl through mud to crawl through barb wire to experience. And that is our test internally in our firm. We’re like, what would somebody go out of their way to go to a place to experience that they wouldn’t try to order on Amazon or from Netflix or from tender? You know, we have got to create a payoff that far exceeds the work.
Kevin Kelley (30m 36s):
And there are not enough demand side thinkers and companies that have place as part of their proposition.
Jeff Wood (30m 42s):
How do you manage the egos if you’re in boardrooms? I imagine there’s a lot of people that get their way a lot of the time.
Kevin Kelley (30m 48s):
The secret to getting people to change their mind is humor. Humor is everything. So whenever I’m working with a company, and you may remember in the book I have this idea when we’re stuck, particularly called find the Funny. No matter what situation I’m working in, I try to find the funny and I don’t necessarily have to come up with a funny, I normally get the funny by talking to employees of a company, even around serious topics. If I can get them off record out of the boardroom, out of the conference room, but casually talking to me, they will tell me the funny things about their business. Customers will also tell me the funny things about how they approach things. And once I find that funny, there’s an aha that happens and if I can get a nosed executive laughing, then I’ve got my key to getting into their psyche and understanding what they’re about.
Kevin Kelley (31m 39s):
Case studies of course help, lots and lots of case studies. I, I have many clients that hire me, some that say I don’t really even understand what you’re talking about emotions in place, but I’ve seen enough successful case studies that I want to do. And I mean on average we can increase sales 18 to 36% without changing the product, the service, the price, just the environment. That stat alone shocks people. And we have some venues where we can increase sales by 500% just by changing the environment. Now that’s an anomaly that very rarely happens, but on average anywhere from 18 to 86% just by changing the environment.
Jeff Wood (32m 18s):
That reminds me of the vignette you talk about in the book about product packaging design and and how, you know, basically you can take a product and package around it and they can give it to a focus group and it works out really well. But if you put it on the shelf with 50 other things, it might get lost. Or the design of the individual thing might get lost in the design of the whole. And I find that interesting, especially thinking about cities because there’s so many different experiences in a city that should be coming together as one. But people are designing an individual building but they’re not thinking about the whole.
Kevin Kelley (32m 43s):
Yeah, we take for granted that the human body is running off about the power of a 60 watt light bulb. And what fuels our energy is food. And as we go about our day, we’re kind of like electric car and we’re processing things constantly. We’re processing traffic, we’re processing phone calls and emails and environments and we get worn down. We get really worn down by places. So if somebody, your spouse calls you and says, would you mind dropping by the dry cleaner? Or drugstore can sometimes, you know, blow a gasket in us because we don’t really have the energy to navigate places or parking or walking or other kind of situations.
Kevin Kelley (33m 27s):
And I find that many companies are unsympathetic to the many other things people have to go through in their day. As much as I love going to Disney, if I’ve already had a Disney Day, I can’t do that or, or going to even a farmer’s market or a flea market if I’m wore out, I don’t know if I can throw that on top of that or a dance club. There’s a lot of things that happen in our body and that we’re outsourcing the processing or environment by our, through our senses and our emotions first and eventually get to inter intellectualization. But there’s a limit to that. And we need to take into account in cities and stores and other places how much information somebody’s already occupying.
Kevin Kelley (34m 7s):
Now the one thing that is interesting is some places rejuvenate us some places take our electric car battery and refuel it in the early days of Whole Foods, it was such a welcome break to the traditional grocery store that the number of hours people would spend in a grocery store was way increased. The amount of money people spent in the store was way increased. The experimentation was increased to the point that customers thought the store was more expensive. But no, the customer was just more engaged. We can all think the same thing happens to us at a restaurant or a bar. We end up spending more than we meant to spend. Or we go to a retail store and we spend more when we’re engaged and we’re having fun and we feel beautiful.
Kevin Kelley (34m 48s):
And that’s a key word. When you feel beautiful in a place, it recharges us, it refuels us. And so it’s really key to find ways to fuel people. And so the first thing I generally do when I look at a venue is I wanna see how people walk in and I wanna wait till they walk out. And I look at body language, 90% of what I need to know. I can tell just from watching their body language. And we’ve all seen people come out of film, super excited, jazzed up high fiving each other that movie re-energized them. We’ve also seen movies where people come out shaking their head going, what? What did I want My two hours back?
Jeff Wood (35m 22s):
Places
Kevin Kelley (35m 23s):
Have that same potential.
Jeff Wood (35m 25s):
You talk about movies yesterday actually Sony Pictures announced that they had bought Alamo Drafthouse.
Kevin Kelley (35m 30s):
Fantastic.
Jeff Wood (35m 31s):
I’m curious what you think about that.
Kevin Kelley (35m 33s):
I’m just excited to see big entities go in and resurrect the movie going experience. You may remember from the book I describe a great story of my daughter who grew up in the pandemic of never going to a movie theater. She was a bit of a homebody. We were always surprised, my wife and I liked to go out and our daughter just prefer to stay home and concerned us, but she just enjoyed home and we had all thousand movies at our disposal. But when we finally got her to go to her first movie, she just loved it. And she didn’t knew nothing of whether movie theaters were in vogue or passe or going outta business, but she begs us now anytime. It doesn’t matter what the movie is, she just loves that collective room experience.
Kevin Kelley (36m 15s):
And I worked for very famous successful movie theater chain called ArcLight that went out of business during the pandemic. Just heartbreaking because they couldn’t open their doors. This is yet another kind of, in my opinion, tragic loss of the basic fabric of our neighborhoods in our communities. If we’re not careful, we’re gonna get to the point where we’re not gonna get out of our PJs, right? We’re gonna sit at our house, have everything delivered in a work from home date, from home play, video games from home. This is far more serious than I think we’re taking stock of. And you know, I, I think as a society we’ve kind of all developed social anxiety. ’cause as we survey consumer groups, you know, people are feeling a sense of, you know, I’m just not used to going out anymore.
Kevin Kelley (37m 2s):
And they had a real hard time adjusting the pandemic by the way. They really struggle with that. They kind of went through a cognitive impairment of staying at home, but now they’re having a tougher time getting back out. But every time we find groups do get back out, they find it so rewarding. They find it so rejuvenating and they find it really exactly what they needed. And the reason is, as human beings, we’re social animals. We’re designed to be with others. We’re a cooperative species that feels good in groups, that is just the nature of who we are. I don’t mean to paint them as villains, but there’s a combination of online tech companies in Wall Street that has a number one goal of keeping you glued to a screen and not going out.
Kevin Kelley (37m 45s):
And we may not win that battle. And the evidence of what’s happening to kids. And you’re familiar with Jonathan, he’s book it’s been out for a while though. This kind of thinking is, is very dangerous. And we as the adults in the room need to intervene and say we have to get back out and exercise our sensory systems, our social chops.
Jeff Wood (38m 5s):
I find it sometimes, you know, tough to put down the phone. Obviously it’s an addiction machine and there’s sometimes when my 2-year-old daughter is like, daddy, no phone or you know, no more phone. Yeah, I have to pause and think, oh yeah, I got, I gotta put this thing down. We gotta go play or something. Let’s go for a walk, let’s go for a bubble walk. Let’s take bubbles with us and go for a walk. And that seems to help. But yeah, my wife and I used to go to the Alamo draft house all the time and we haven’t been back since. Obviously having a baby and a 2-year-old can put a dent in that. But I remember also some of my earliest memories of going to Alamo in Austin when I was there going for the Cartoon Festival or things like that and going together with a bunch of people to see some weird cartoons that nobody would’ve seen otherwise before the internet, before YouTube or things like that. And so that collective experience is a really kind of a formative thing.
Jeff Wood (38m 45s):
And you know, Austin brands itself has the live music capital of the world and Right, one of the things I love doing was going out to shows,
Kevin Kelley (38m 50s):
The group experience, right? And meeting people, you know, and seeing people. It’s how we learn. It’s how we learn to behave. You know? And if you don’t watch a grandmother and grandfather, a young teen date, a husband and wife, kids, we don’t learn how to behave. That’s why we’re having problems on airplanes is people have forgotten how to behave in public. Because we think behavior on Twitter is how we should behave on CNN. But really we learn social norms by being around other people. And we take for granted how much of that happens. And so my daughter in those movie theaters is looking at other kids and is looking at adults and going, okay, that’s how you treat other human beings.
Kevin Kelley (39m 32s):
A lot is at stake places an endangered species on many levels, not all levels. And the casualties are high. We have to go back and pull that back. And I’m doing my part with my small firm and my, my business partners doing his part. We’re really going out there trying to save places, but we need a whole collective force to go out there and try to save places, downtown’s, offices, suburbia, little shops everywhere. I, I’m 59 years old and so I I’ve seen a lot in that time, you know, and I grew up in the suburban Brady Bunch era, you know, and, and, and watched that mentality. And I’ve kind of lived through the NASA space launch and all, all the different era.
Kevin Kelley (40m 13s):
And I think there was this one thing where we never really questioned our elders or our professions, right? And thank gosh that had started happening in the nineties and we really started going, maybe modernism was a mistake. Maybe the planning engineering highway system is not the way to go. Thank gosh we’re going through that. But it, it really has a lot of vectors coming into it. Sustainability certainly is a vector. Wealth disparity, income disparity is certainly an issue. There are a variety of factors that are hitting it in such a way that I, I, I 100% agree that we’re in a different world where we rethink it. And as I’ve surveyed this and I searched this constantly in my soul and even have to question some of my own beliefs and doctrines that, that were deeply instilled in my head.
Kevin Kelley (41m 2s):
But the one thing that I’m convinced of, and it’s not some magic answer, but density is good. We are just going to have to embrace density at all levels. And recently since this pandemic, of course there’s this narrative that suburbs is it, and everybody’s going out and it, that’s not the solution. The, the solution is this density, which is going to change the land ownership rights, which this country’s so based on the American dream, the car, but over and over to me, I keep coming back to, it’s just the way to go, right? Walkable local markets. And when I am working with urban districts that have peaked, and I didn’t want this to get lost when I kind of said, downtowns need to become playgrounds.
Kevin Kelley (41m 47s):
I don’t want them to become theme parks. Yeah. What I really wanna get back to is service retail and not theme retail. And what I mean by that is downtowns need to be livable full of housing, full of parks, social areas, bars and restaurants coming together. But the way to resurrect a district is generally to come back with retail that really is functional and make sense and shops that make sense so that somebody living on floor 32 can go down to a dry cleaner, can go to a local shop and get things done differently than say Amazon. And we have to reward them for that. We have to say, well, it’s great to go to the dry cleaner, you enjoy that or go to the coffee shop. And that density is, is the key to getting back to that.
Kevin Kelley (42m 31s):
And I think we may be heading there whether we want to or not, because the economic crisis that we’re having, I mean the downtown situation, that debt, that bill is coming due somewhere and it’s going to create a massive shock to the system. And I keep trying to gauge that. Is that bubble equivalent to the Great Recession housing bubble? And I don’t know, a lot of economists say no, but it is going to have you, we’re gonna feel some tremors from it.
Jeff Wood (42m 60s):
The south corridor, as I call it, the south end in Charlotte, that’s a kind of a case study in what you can do if you can, you know, think about a place as something different. And it’s come a long way since you started. I’m curious about the initial idea and the process to getting to the place where now it’s a vibrant neighborhood with tens of thousands of people and a light rail line and all that stuff. And you know, it started with an idea that this place could be different.
Kevin Kelley (43m 23s):
You know, it’s, it’s so rewarding to be a part of something. So I don’t know, remarkable and outstanding as South End and where it is today because it was a little engine that could story really, my business partner and I, Terry Shook, we worked in a downtown environment for another firm that he was part owner of. We left that firm in 1992 to start our own firm, but we couldn’t afford downtown. And we also refused to work in suburbia in a kind of a cubicle, you know, drop ceiling place. We thought we can’t do that. So we were scavenging around trying to find somewhere, and like all cities that have a hub and spoke, there are these corridors.
Kevin Kelley (44m 4s):
And we saw this one corridor called the South Boulevard corridor that the city engineers really had as a pipe. They, they were widening the roads, destroying the sidewalks, cutting down the shops, you know, and then wondering why the people lived in such apathy when I was like, well, you’ve left them with apathy. My business partner and I went into an old factory, an old mill called Atherton Mill. We were one of the first tenants there, a developer named Tony Presley owned a lot of these dilapidated buildings. And we came in and we started, you know, redeveloping in them. And we were using our principles of consumer behavior and branding and saying, could we do that to a place in 1994?
Kevin Kelley (44m 45s):
I mean, we were trying to think, could you brand an urban district like you brand a Coca-Cola or Apple? And could you use those principles? And we did. We started building, we built a brand constitution, we built a brand vision. We had an annual operating budget of a fundraising budget of first 5,000, then $20,000 a year, which was nothing. And we were dealing with crime, vagrancy, drugs, prostitution, you know, we had just every number of problem you can imagine. But the key thing we really did was develop a name. So it wasn’t called South End Development Corp, it was called just South Boulevard. We developed a brand vision and then we developed a place vision that included, and it was audacious at the time of trolley.
Kevin Kelley (45m 28s):
Our critics called it the Folly. And we had all these critics and we went to the city and we asked the city, we said, if you give us $20 million, and this took us a while, I wanna be clear, I’m jumping forward, but we said, if you give us $20 million, we’ll give you back $125 million in economic development. That took a tremendous amount of effort to do, but they gave us the $20 million and we brought back a billion and a half. So it is one of the most successful urban districts in North America. It’s outta control. And in the book I kind of talk about the bonfire effect, which is it could be blazing too fast and too much. So you have to watch those things.
Kevin Kelley (46m 9s):
And the bonfire masters, those, the leaders of any brand or any community have to maintain that fire so that it, it neither goes out or gets too roaring. But South End is definitely on fire and has been on fire. It is more successful than downtown Charlotte.
Jeff Wood (46m 23s):
What’s been the reaction to the book so far?
Kevin Kelley (46m 25s):
Very receptive. You know, I, when I first started working on it, it’s not a profit center at all. It’s a loss center. But I, I was so concerned about the fate of place and I initially called the book Saving Place because I was concerned about what’s going to happen to society if we don’t maintain all the social, cultural, economic layers of place. And I got tired of hearing about the star architecture projects, but not enough about the everyday projects. And I went around and shopped it to publishers and I’d say 80% of them turned me down. They said, too narrow, not hot. Do you have anything on ai?
Kevin Kelley (47m 7s):
And, and oh dear, I didn’t have anything on ai, but a wonderful publisher named Matt Holt, he decided that it was worth it and he believed in it. And what blew my mind was how well the public reacted to it. I mean, people jumped all over from all over the world, Australia, France, Sweden, all of the United States, of course. And people are much more concerned about it than I realized. And it’s one, you know, Adam Grant’s Top 10 summary read, it’s one the next big idea book of the Month among others. And it’s one Financial Times book of the month. So it’s doing really well. You know, the thing I probably should have started this out with is that, you know, the old analogy, you might remember that story about a older fish, ask a younger fish, how’s the water?
Kevin Kelley (47m 56s):
And younger fish said, what’s water? I think we’re that way about place. I think we’ve forgotten that we’re always in a place no matter what, even if we’re texting or doom scrolling, we’re in a place and the places we’re in are in us just as much as the food we eat. And they’re either healthy places or unhealthy places, which will affect our mood, our longevity, our wellbeing. And we’re never unplaced. We’re always in a place and we don’t think about this enough. And my profession isn’t doing enough to help people think about it on a societal level. We’re too interested in objects and not interested in humanity.
Kevin Kelley (48m 37s):
And so it’s a very important book that I’m very happy to hear is being received exceptionally well beyond what I expected.
Jeff Wood (48m 45s):
Well the book is IrrePLACEable How to Create Extraordinary Places, that Bring, People Together. You can get it at your local bookstores. Go in and ask them for it. I’m sure they can order it for you if they don’t have it already. Kevin, thanks so much for joining us. We really appreciate your time.
Kevin Kelley (48m 58s):
Thank you. What a wonderful show. And I’m just so glad you’re out there bringing these topics to mind to everyone. So thank you for what you do.
