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. So  its  frustrating when passion is confused with conceit.

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 many years ago… 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 and 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 has broken through that ceiling. That’s mostly due to the quality and rigor of his work, also partially to the gravitas and fuck-it energy he has, but I think as well the fact that he assumes a global lens. He works internationally then brings diverse thought and practice back to Chicago and always shines back on his city. As far as Chicago creative leaders, he’s the most frequently cited but there are so many others doing amazing work. I’m a huge fan of Bernard Lloyd as an example of merging art, food, and place in pursuit of equitable development.  

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, for instance. 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. My mentor Patrick Whitney taught me to always question  whether what we're pursuing is a worthy enough experiment going in approximately the right direction toward the vision. People always want to know what's  the 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, is 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, 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?

Ashley: I'm a lot more interested in doing everything I can to bring the most interesting people and experiences together and letting it unfold. Letting people find their way through it. There's a lot of thought in the facilitation that feels accidental and organic in the moment, even though it is actually planned for. People are bringing, sure, their professional experience, whatever subject they're experts in. They're also bringing essential 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: Is human-centered design too focused on human-centric thinking? Do you think the field has a blind spot there?

Ashley: I think we're all part of this thing. We shouldn't think about human beings as some kind of separate thing from nature. Because of tech advancements we've been favoring convenience above everything else. From the consumer standpoint we think it makes our lives easier. But we haven't considered the trade-offs, which are quite profound. Isolation. Meaninglessness. Being surveilled. Which becomes suddenly very dangerous when you have the current administration in place.

Mathew: It's the illusion of individuality inside a system built for social control.

Ashley: Just swipe, shop for your dates, whatever, we become more and more egocentric. When we're participating in consumerism we're like special snowflakes…everything's convenient and tailored to us. But as participants  in the labor force at a cost, we're replaceable. Units of production. That clash is starting to emerge, and it's making people really unwell at an individual level. At a collective that becomes super dangerous.

Mathew: You said it in our last conversation... "convenience reinforces individualism and erodes community." That's a hard argument to make to somebody who just likes ordering their groceries from their phone. How do you make that case without killing the comfort?

Ashley: Oh god.

Mathew: Or whatever we think that is.

Ashley: The convenience question is a big one. Convenience is what we're being sold by companies that make products and services with digital technology, we can be in more than one place at one time. We can work from anywhere. But we feel lonely. We feel isolated. We can track everything...great, I lose my suitcase and it's probably more trackable than it used to be. But also we are being surveilled and our privacy has been compromised.

Michael: For sure, we are not even aware what the real cost will be.

Ashley: We can get any information we’re looking for immediately on ChatGPT but we’re also totally overwhelmed by the amount of information coming at us and can't make sense or do anything with it. So, there are all these bigger compromises we've made somewhat unwittingly for the sake of convenience. Was it worth it to not have to go to the grocery store? We’ve lost the opportunity to have a cute relationship with the cashier, to say hello to the neighbor on the corner. We’ve lost spontaneity and the  feeling of being part of the world, ofusing our bodies and moving around.  Is it worth the negative consequences to the planet? 

Mathew: I mean it makes you think. How do you flip that story? I believe it already. I've never been an Amazon shopper personally, but how do you reengineer that story to people when they've been so engineered.

Ashley: Systems-level change doesn't come from altering individual shopping behaviors. It has to come from other forces like regulation, policy change, economic models. Patrick has specific ideas about building the cost of waste into the cost of the material. There are pathways to meaningfully move the dial more quickly.

Mathew: Mhmm, but maybe it's a both and kinda thing?

Ashley: We’re hooked and it’s hard to change, even when we want to. People actually are like, I'm tired of this. 

Mathew: For sure, but sensing it is not a plan to get out of it.

Ashley: I think this is why we've been so vulnerable to certain political rhetoric. It capitalizes on the fact that people know something's not right. It becomes really easy to scapegoat…… “this is because of the immigrants, this is because of the trans takeover” or whatever it is. It's so seductive. We share a sense that something is wrong, and there is something wrong. We feel it. We're just placing the blame in the wrong places. That's what's been unfortunately pretty genius about the current administration. The marketing tactic of it all. But every regime like this one in the course of history has used very similar approaches. We should be able to spot it.

Mathew: On a flip to marketing — I helped launch Everlane back in 2011 with a promise of Radical Transparency, which just got bought by Shein. This has rattled me a little, and made me wonder...Can we ever really buy our way to better?

Ashley: We have to start imagining entirely different economic and social systems. That's where we are. We're being pushed to such extreme discomfort that it may (if there's any kind of silver lining) open up the possibility to imagine something different or want change enough to do something about it.

Mathew: Right.

Ashley: I'm totally fascinated by communal living models. We've been really narrow in what we think is possible. Even the idea of home ownership as the metric of progress from generation to generation. Why are we so caught up in that idea?

Mathew: Or sometimes I even think about the word economy itself. If you ask economics students about different types of economies, they don't see options of any other type of economy. There's just THE economy. They don't even recognize there could be another model. Economy just means financial, not anything else.

Ashley: Right. Being able to see value and understand value in ways that aren't monetary… that's something we don't spend enough time just considering and trying to define better.

Mathew: 1000%

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 was initially about providing a different entry point to some of the 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, the Bauhaus, coming out of a moment during 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 the third industrial revolution. So there are a lot of parallels there.

In the course of actually doing the project, I realized that what was more impactful...what resonated with audiences was telling a really beautiful human story about Moholy-Nagy that anyone could relate to regardless of discipline. 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 find their own meaning in this. Human-centered storytelling rather than the academic and inaccessible way we usually deal with such 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 important problems. So much of design has been in the service of consumerism. Getting people to buy more things. Patrick has this quote: ”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 concepts 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 that 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 exploration of that idea. There are so many examples of multigenerational principles and 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? Or what progress will technology lead us toward?  But instead, 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: Me too! 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 have come together. It’s one of the bright spots in America right now. Gary [Hustwit, director of the film] treats the rollouts of his film projects as if going on tour with a band. He originally came from music. Because we're self-producing, we have all the flexibility to program it how we want with 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 won’t change if they think what they're doing is working well enough. And sometimes they delude themselves that they can continue doing what they're doing and the problems will fix themselves. Patrick always says “it’s nearly impossible 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: Ha, maybe…however morbid.  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 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 Trump administration began: Where are the creative leaders in this moment? I'll be out at demonstrations and there’s very little in the way of graphic design or creative storytelling showing up as a resistance. And I don't know why that is. Almost everybody I know who's  creative cares a lot about this stuff. But we somehow haven't figured out how to coalesce our interests and efforts to make an impact.

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 leverage what we're really good at. Bruce Mau has his whole Massive Change thing. But there's something about all the different convenings and conversations and stories and experiences I'm circling around with people like yourselves — we're all trying to move in that direction somehow. I think we are.

Mathew: TELL is kind of in documentation mode...showing up in spaces and talking to people who don't have publicists on staff and aren't getting their stories to bigger places, and it seems that second spaces are vanishing. I used to go to those spaces and they'd be distributing environmental and animal liberation front material. It wasn't just the programming. It was a community. It was philosophy.

Ashley: 100%. It was reinforcing a sense of identity and being part of a particular community. I came to everything through music first. Being a punk kid growing up in Minneapolis then in Chicago in my 20s. Before smartphones you just had your couple of spots (The Empty Bottle, Rainbo Club)  where you knew you were going to run into your people. It was like a big party of 40 people every Thursday night at Rainbo. And there was a lot of resilience in that. If something happened to any single person, or they needed some extra cash, there was a group of people that could be called upon.

Mathew: And you kind of couldn't fake it. Too much democratization became its own thing. You didn't have to read the books or own the records to at least pretend you were part of it.

Ashley: Meaningful engagement requires some blood, sweat, and tears. You have to invest. That's what pissed me off! Suddenly the bros showing up to hang out. They didn't invest years of work getting to concerts, building out their  interest, taste or community. They just came in and consumed it off the shelf on iTunes. They didn't put any work in.

Mathew: Doing the work...that's been a reoccurring theme.

Michael: Mathew and I talk a lot about conditions and trying to not control outcomes. Just like you were talking about earlier. What you're saying really speaks to what we're trying to broadcast.If you ever want to test things out, Mathew and I would be more than interested.

Mathew: Have a fun amazing trip in Peru.

Ashley: It would be great to have you guys come on an immersion sometime. And bringing the book and the film to Minneapolis — I want to make that happen.

Mathew: We'll be in touch.

Ashley: Yes, I’m excited.