Living in Hypothesis
Life hums along for most of us, broken here and there by a timpani section’s worth of surprises, twists, and a fair share of necessary diversions. While every decade and generation has its struggles with change, the volume and nature of the soundtrack is decidedly marked.
This particular year we have been handed, seemingly out of nowhere, a reality far outside the usual measures of how we live our lives. Few of us were prepared to grapple with it, left instead in an alternate-seeming reality where we can’t embrace those we care about, where every move we make must be considered through the myopic lens of sanitation and prevention, risk versus need, and where all of the freedoms afforded the luckiest of us have become watered-down.
There’s the pandemic of course, but also an ardent, renewed, and socially-infused mandate for equality, inclusivity, and equity. Add to this, the questioning of what’s true and real leaves us struggling with who and what to believe. All of which is testing the institutions and paradigms that many of us have taken for granted as fact, norm, and solid ground.
It seems almost every aspects of every industry is being turned on its head. There is a version of the same question for everyone: “what does X (insert workplace, travel, hospitality, healthcare, education, shopping, elder care, etc.) look like now? The good news is that we are discovering or looking anew at alternate, better ways of being, of working, and thriving. As an example, there has been a long-raging debate about whether or not business of all sorts can work more flexibly and still productively, and it has now, by necessity, been proven to be the case.
Challenges that many institutions have been grappling with have now become code red, sink or swim scenarios. One such example can be found in museums, whose deliberations may or may not be coincidental to the time of COVID, but at the very least has had to double down on their reevaluation of their relevance, with very high stakes. In a piece by Lavanya Ramanathan, ‘Who are Museums For?’, she notes that, ”keenly aware of the racial reckoning happening across the culture and concerned about their dwindling base, museums are trying to court a younger, less fusty, more online and social-media-aware audience…they are beginning to collect outside of the usual old guard.”
Justine Ludwig, executive director of Creative Time and a former museum curator herself, wonders similarly. “Museums have been intended to feel like hallowed ground, which inherently makes certain people feel at ease and others Museums also have to contend with their own histories of collecting,” much of it she says were built upon cultural hierarchies that we might now find grossly problematic.
Museums, of course, are just one example of the needs to balance new objective requirements for health and safety with the subjective forces of race, identity, and questions about the sort of the society we want to live within. The questions of relevance, need, supply and demand, values, and questions of life and death, sacrifice, and individual rights versus collective good have all been laid on the table for our individual and collective assessment. And decision-making.
At PARE, we are comfortable in the places where there is no single right answer, engaging in experiments that reveal a right answer, for the right time, with the right client. And one that has the ability to transform.
—Steffany
