Mathew: So, You moved from Minneapolis to Chicago years back. Both Midwest cities but very different energies. What did that move clarify for you about what you were actually trying to do?

Ashley: There's always a lot of really great stuff happening here. Beautiful buildings, great art projects and galleries. People are making really good work. But it's very heads down, Midwest work ethic. Not a lot of taking credit or bringing ego to the table. There's some beauty in that but also this ceiling on ambition that bothers me. Anyone that's really excited about what they're making and doing, that's what they want to talk about. I find that frustrating.

Mathew: So, Wicker Park (where you live) went from a genuinely cool neighborhood to more chain businesses — what does that kind of creative displacement tell us about how cities treat the people who actually make them interesting?

Ashley: Wicker Park was the cool neighborhood at one point… it's less so now. Banks and Lululemon. But the Rainbo Club (where I was photographed)  is still an institution. Anyone in Chicago's art and music scene has a relationship to that place. The bartenders are all musicians. Bands that everybody cares about still pick up shifts there. You can still get a $2 beer. It's iconic.

Mathew: You cited Theaster Gates as someone who broke through the ceiling. What is that… and why does it exist here more than on the coasts?

Ashley: Theaster Gates has broken through that ceiling but that's partly the gravitas and charisma and fuck-it energy he has. He always tries to shine back on his city. Minneapolis is even more the case — part of the reason I left. Even when I go back, everything you say and do there, there's just this vibe I find really stifling to a candid conversation. But I've always been advocating for the global lens. There's no reason why Chicago, being the architecture and design city it is, shouldn't have a global design museum. Think about it that way instead of the provincial limitations.

Mathew: You started Murmur in 2020 right when the world stopped. And I kept thinking about this after our last conversation... Murmur seems to be doing real change work, working on conditions. Is that fair?

Ashley: I call it creating the conditions. Not trying to control outcomes, but asking whether what you're pursuing is a worthy enough experiment that feels approximately like it's going in the right direction toward the vision. People always want to know what's going to be the output. ROI, what's the output. And I'm like — giving people something that really transforms the way they think and the way they want to behave and show up in the world, that's going to be really difficult to measure, and it extends far beyond outputs you could put on a piece of paper before you begin. But also, if I'm successful in creating these conditions that really get people thinking and reflecting together in a meaningful way. What they will come up with, the patterns they will see and what they will do with it, will be much, much more interesting than what I could have predicted at the outset.

Mathew: You've been curating immersions since 2015. What happens in the room that couldn't happen in a conference or a report?

Ashely: I'm a lot more interested in doing everything I can to bring the most interesting people together and bring the richest experience together and then letting it unfold and letting people find their way through it. It's very facilitated, and there's a lot of thought in that facilitation that will feel accidental in the moment and really organic, even though it is actually really planned for. People are bringing sure, their professional experience and what they know, whatever subject they're experts in. They're also bringing really interesting life experience that we don't know that much about. And all of these things contribute to where the conversations go and what people decide to do with it afterwards.

Mathew: You co-produced the New Bauhaus documentary. What did you learn making it that bridges to the What Are People For documentary?

Ashley: Making the New Bauhaus, and then since then making other films, was initially about providing a different entry point to some of these complex ideas of design. The New Bauhaus is about Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. It's an immigrant story. It's a story about this creative school of the Bauhaus coming out of a moment of the Industrial Revolution that introduced a lot of questions about man versus machine. A moment of existential crisis, which we're now in again with this third industrial revolution. So there are a lot of parallels there.

Ashley: But in the course of actually doing the project, I realized that what was more impactful...what resonated with audiences more was telling a really beautiful human story about Moholy-Nagy that people could relate to no matter what discipline they're coming from. That really changed my way of thinking. Less of...please understand this content and the meat of this and more like: let's just create the right conditions for people to engage in a thing and find their own meaning in it. Human-centered storytelling rather than the academic and inaccessible way we usually deal with these topics.

Mathew: So... what is What Are People For actually asking designers to reckon with?

Ashley: I see the film as a call to action for design to be in the service of bigger, more complex, and more important problems. So much of design has been in the service of consumerism. Getting people to buy more things. Patrick has this quote. He said: the version of innovation that design has tied itself to is not very healthy. A future where we poison or overcook ourselves is pretty bleak. Surely we can come up with an alternative. And one of the pieces that comes through in the film is that we've designed all the problems that we have... which would suggest we can also design the solutions.

Mathew: What Are People For... it's kind of a funny name because it sounds to me to be a genuinely uncomfortable question. Was there something you heard in that process that scared you the most?

Ashley: A lot of people at the screenings in Germany were assuming we were going to get into a big AI thing. So even though this has been the working title for a while, even before the current level of craze around AI, that question means something different right now. But I don't think there's anything that scared me. What I think we get is clarity on Patrick's point of view. Which is... we're here for each other. We're here to make the world better for each other in the here and now, but also to be good ancestors. And that's really resonant with me across all of the work that I'm doing. I'm on my way to Peru to lead people in an experience and exploration of that idea. Where you can see so many examples of multigenerational principles of how to live well that have led to more resilient societies. The real question we need to be asking now is not so much what's the new thing, what progress will technology lead us toward. But where have we seen endurance and resilience? What societies have been able to overcome tremendous adversity (of colonialism, of climate catastrophe, of political strife) and continue to sustain and endure.

Mathew: We want you to bring the book and the film up to Minneapolis in the fall BTW.

Ashley: I do want to bring it up. Minneapolis is number one on my list just being from there. I'm so proud of what's been going on there... the way people in Minneapolis have come together. I feel like it's one of the bright spots. Gary treats the rollout like he would go on tour as a band... that's his origin story, he came from music. And because we're self-producing all of this we have all the flexibility to do that. We've been talking about doing some things that have a little more of that flavor and feeling. I won't be able to give it enough brain space until I get back from South America, but then it would be really cool to talk about it.

Michael: One of the big questions I have is how you get people to see the value in something so they actually want to change. Even getting clients there — I have the hardest time imagining that.

Ashley: People don't want to change if they think what they're doing is working well enough. Or they want to delude themselves that they can continue doing what they're doing and it's going to somehow fix itself. Patrick always says it's difficult to get people to change without pain or fear. That's where we can say — maybe now is the moment.

Mathew: We need a little more desperation.

Ashley: That's sort of Patrick's thing. But — I love TELL, by the way. I love this idea of just making a new club, a new community. Finding people, bringing them together, creating some visibility into one another's work. And then figuring out how to mobilize that. My partner and I are actually working on something at a smaller scale — not a magazine, just a photo project. But a similar idea.

Michael: Yeah.

Ashley: I've been asking myself since the second administration: where are the creative leaders in this moment? I'll be out there in the demonstrations and things. But we have very little in the way of graphic design or anything really coming to the fore and showing up as a resistance. And I don't know why that is. Almost everybody I know who's a creative leader cares a lot about this stuff. But we somehow haven't figured out how to coalesce our interests and efforts in a way that feels right to what we're actually good at.

Mathew: Cultural production, right?

Ashley: Right. And a lot of people were asking me this in Frankfurt too — where are the people? Why aren't people fighting this more? Why don't we see you? We're doing more protesting in Berlin about your government than you are at home. And it's not just protests. It needs to be something that feels more right for what we're really good at. Bruce Mau has his whole Massive Change thing. But I feel like there's something about all the different convenings and conversations and stories and experiences I'm circling around with people like yourselves — we're trying to move there somehow. I think we are.