Hear from Joe Rohde, a former Disney Imagineer and the Experience Architect for Virgin Galactic. As an Imagineer, he was the leader of the team behind Disney’s Animal Kingdom. Joe is also Co-Chair of the Explorers Club 50 program.
Hear from Joe Rohde, a former Disney Imagineer and the Experience Architect for Virgin Galactic. As an Imagineer, he was the leader of the team behind Disney’s Animal Kingdom. Joe is also Co-Chair of the Explorers Club 50 program.
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Find episode transcripts here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/the-explorers-club-an-interview-with-joe-rohde
CALLI: Nate, I could not be more enthusiastic about our guest today. Most of the Explorer’s Club members that we’ve featured on the show are scientific experts in their fields, but exploration can mean many things and involve many different types of subject matter.
NATE: Exactly. Being an explorer doesn’t just mean finding something new or unfamiliar. It can mean rethinking the way we move through the world and examining our experiences through a different lens.
JOE: So, in short, I'm a creative person. I'm a creator. I am probably an example of one of those people who's expanding the notion of exploration, because I'm not a biologist, a scientist, and I haven't done a fantastically physical accomplishment across some great distance. What I have done is explore the relationship of information to huge numbers of people and how they can be made aware and made motivated to take action on behalf of conservation. And that was most of my career within Disney was projects that motivated people to take action on behalf of the natural world, on behalf of indigenous people, on behalf of conservation. And that led to my being in the Explorers Club, and that led to my being involved in the Explorers Club 50 program, which is specifically about expanding the definition of exploration by extending it to forms of exploration that are not necessarily the ones we have thought of in the past into the arts, into culture, into psychology, into the mental worlds that we occupy, and to people in other parts of the world who might not have imagined themselves as members of the Explorers Club.
CALLI: As an illustrator and sculptor, I’m REALLY excited for today’s guest… someone who approaches exploring from a unique perspective! Are you ready to unlock YOUR inner artist, Nate?
NATE: Absolutely, let’s do this!
[SFX: MUSIC IN/WOOSH]
NATE: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Discovery. Time flies when you’re learnin’ super cool stuff. I’m Nate.
CALLI: And I’m Calli. If you’re dropping in for the first time, welcome to Curiosity, where we aim to blow your mind by helping you grow your mind. If you’re a loyal listener, welcome back!
NATE: For the final episode of our Explorer’s Club series, we have invited a legendary designer, artist, and adventurer. Joe Rohde is the former Senior Vice President Creative of Walt Disney Imagineering and is the current experience architect for Virgin Galactic.
CALLI: Experience architect is maybe the coolest job title I’ve ever heard of.
NATE: Agreed. It takes a lot of psychological and emotional knowledge to do the work Joe does. You really have to understand people. I’ll let him explain further.
JOE: Well, so I am spending part of my time consulting with Virgin Galactic. I can't talk very much about the work that's happening, but the purpose is to to make sure that this journey into space acquires a rich and deep meaning, emotional impact and sense of purpose. That and much of what I do has to do with clarifying those things very often. All of these. Threads are inherent in a subject, but subjects are full of extra information. They're full of internal contradiction, they're full of branches and things. And part of getting people to have an experience is clarifying those things. It's almost like magnetizing things so that there's clear axes of polarity, clear ideas, clear emotions, clear experiences that can be had because they're not being interfered with. They're clear.
CALLI: We’ve talked about space travel a lot on this show but we’ve never approached it from this viewpoint. Like, how do you make an experience like this as meaningful as possible?
JOE: It's exploring both the human experience and re exploring places we think we've gone and we think we've seen. But doing that with new people who may see something different than we thought we saw it was that.
NATE: And he’s got plenty of experience in that kind of work from his time at Disney.
CALLI: I’m SO interested in his career as an Imagineer. It’s so many people’s dream job but it seems so difficult to understand how the job works and how you even get into something like that.
JOE: Walt Disney Imagineering is the branch of the Disney company that does physical projects, things that get built. Anything from hotels, resorts, rides, attractions and the road systems and the underlying utilities that support them, everything that gets built. So that was my career for 40 years, and it's a extremely collaborative environment. It's part of the instinct that I bring to this exercise is it's a very, very highly collaborative environment. And my particular area that I worked in for many, many years revolved around a park called Disney's Animal Kingdom. Disney's Animal Kingdom is a very mission-directed park with a strong conservation mission. I was instrumental in developing a conservation organization to go with it. The Disney Conservation Fund and the peculiar nature of all that work within the context of Imagineering led to, well, eventually led to the Explorers Club. Ultimately, I'm a designer. I'm a I was a director. So most of my work was leading other people who did the work. And because of the nature of the work, I ended up of necessity, having to do a lot of research is very research-based branch of imagineering. Because Disney's Animal Kingdom in particular because of the animals and because of the conservation mission, it's seeking to project a much more verité presentation than we are used to when we think of that identity. Right. It's usually very romanticized, very idealized. This is a much more straightforward presentation, and it needs to be because we're talking about very straightforward issues. And so in order to do that, we needed to collaborate with indigenous people, collaborate with local representatives, with biologists, with scientists, researchers, and we needed to go to lots of places in order to both absorb what it was like to be in such places. How were we ever going to turn those into an experience that people could have in another place and to make sure that that experience had some relevance, some meaning, some power to advocate. And so in service of that, I was all over Africa, Asia, Central America.
NATE: Definitely a dream job. And it sounds like it entails so much more than simply designing a portion of the park.
[SFX: Whoosh]
JOE: The first step is understanding philosophically what do we mean this world to mean? What do we intend it to mean? Because there's an infinite number of details that you could go look at. There's an infinite number of versions of a world you could present. But the choices that you make, even the choices about where am I even going to go to do the research, have to start from what do we intend to mean? So with with Disney's Animal Kingdom in particular, for example, there are other projects, but let's just stay on that one for a sum. We knew that we needed people to understand some basic ideas here. We needed them to understand a notion about the supremacy of nature, the unchangeable, untreatable value of nature itself. We needed people to understand that animals exist in the context of land and that that land now exists in the context of human decision making. So ideas like this exist before we even start design so we understand what the design is meant to express. And that leads us to specific places where we can focus the research so we can pull back details that will be more eloquent about getting that idea across. Because, again, we're not a museum. It's not a it's not a linear documentary, it's a physical experience. And so you have to sort of embed these ideas. You can't present them as much as you embed them in the place.
CALLI: I think that’s what Joe does so well. He is able to take these abstract concepts and create a physical experience. He’s creating something he refers to as a fictional environment; something that balances the new and familiar.
JOE: It is, of course, a built environment. And so for that purpose, it's a fictional environment. It also does not purport to be specific political entities like it's not Kenya, it's not Tanzania. It is a habitat area where one might go on safari, where one might go trekking in Asia and other areas as well. In the park, it has a quite a span. It's not all live realistic animals, but it's all bent towards this idea about our relationship to the natural world. So it's realistic in its detail, but it is artificial. It's created just like all the other places. The difference is its purpose. The purpose is to take action in the real world. And so the design is not well-served by idealism. The design needs to be realistic. And so really it's very difficult to tell a photograph that you took at Disney's Animal Kingdom from the documentary, photographs that we took on the research trips.
NATE: Disney’s Animal Kingdom is such a unique experience as well because they do have real animals and they include every thought and detail to create a balance of realism and fantasy. Joe was the lead designer of that project in addition to Pandora - The World of Avatar and Aulani, the Disney resort based in Hawaii.
CALLI: And just like he was saying earlier, he specializes in creating meaning for the guests and building these moments of significance for them.
JOE: And that that environment inevitably leads to this perception, not just that you're in the environment. It's not a replica of. A place you could go. It has been made to have meaning so that when you're in it you sense this idea that you sense the power of nature. You sense the importance of these animals. You sense the fact that there is this integration of human enterprise and the lives of these animals that is both positive and negative because you can't quite be anywhere without confronting it. You you we try not to replicate because, again, this has to do with this whole question of what's the nature of my experience. So we are it's more difficult than that, frankly. I'm asking designers to absorb the logic, the rules, the cultural instincts that lead to a building being the way it is, that lead to places being the way they are. So when people walk through that space, they don't find themselves thinking so much that it's a replica as that it is a real place. And then what makes it real is that there are living animals all over the place. They have real lives. Those lives take place across time. They do not replicate, they do not repeat. They go on through time. It is tied to real conservation efforts. Those are real. They are happening in the world. They are influenced by politics. They're influenced by war. They're influenced by the coming and going of people. They are real and they don't change. They can't be repeated, they can't be idealized. They're real. So this place then is not as isolated from the real world as a fantasy place can be. It can't be because it participates in reality. By being there, by, by its mission and by its design, it participates in reality while itself. It is obviously a built place, a little bit like a pseudo documentary.
NATE: The conservation portion of his work is incredibly important. As he mentioned, Joe frequently works with indigenous groups and different organizations to make sure that everything is as respectful to people and the environment as possible.
JOE: I would say as my career went on with projects of this nature, the degree to which you needed to involve local Indigenous cultural representatives in the primary decision making went up and up. So when we started, which is, you know, a very long time ago now, 30 some odd years ago, we had advisors and consultants. By the time I was done with my work, we had four partnering participants. So that's a transition and it's a transition that we see happening all around us in terms of representation, in terms of who gets a voice, who gets to say what's what. That's a big change. And that change influences things, how they're said, how they're presented, how you how you frame storytelling. We always tried to throw focus to local agendas, local people, local decision making, which now, of course, is very much the way almost all wildlife conservation is spoken about. But the design has also had to move. That way. The actual design has had to move that way as well.
CALLI: I find it so cool the way he speaks about the specificity of his work. Like he’s working with such big concepts but he also has to whittle those down to the smallest detail. And as the man in charge, he has to be able to know which of those little things adds to the greater goal they are trying to achieve and which doesn’t.
JOE: Every so often you'll come up against a design idea that's like, Oh, that didn't work the way we thought it would work. Or someone slipped and put in a detail like, No, that's that detailed off note. Trying to think of an OC one of the presentations in the park, you take a journey through a small village kind of area. In the village area is what appears to be a temple. And when we first built it, people take their shoes off before they go in these temples. And so we had a little sign, like you always see requesting the people take their shoes off. And we had little shoes outside because people take their shoes off, except that thousands of people took their shoes off as they went through the line. But how are they going to get back to their shoes? There's no like that was a mistake. There had been things like that and there have been little drop stitches here and there. We try to pick those up as they happen. But in general, I think that and other projects I worked on a hotel in Hawaii that's very focused on Hawaiian indigenous points of view in general. We try to put our design sensibilities in the service of these voices rather than to supersede them as an interpreter. That's kind of the most important part of it, right? And that's why I ended up in the Explorers Club, because my I do have an independent life as a explorer. And I have mounted expeditions, mostly painting expeditions in the Himalayas and Mongolia. But they pale by comparison to the, you know, accomplishments of some of the explorers we're talking about here.
NATE: And that is the perfect segue to our next discussion about what it means to be an explorer from a more artistic perspective.
JOE: You know, the word explorer, it's an old comes from an old Latin word. Right. Explore. And it has these two parts to it. Right. The X part of Explorer, which is to go out, go somewhere, and the or part, which is to talk about what you have seen. And when you take it apart like that and look at it, you can see that it matters a lot. Who goes out? What does it mean to go out? To go out from where to where and then who speaks and how do they speak? So when we talk about redefining exploration, we're partially talking about redefining it by defining who does it, who are these people? Where do they come from? What's their background? What's their point of view? And then so therefore, what do they see? And once they see this, what do they have to say about it? So we're not we're expanding the realms of exploration. We're adding the realms of art. We're adding realms of exploration, of culture. We're adding sort of a layer of exploration that isn't necessarily geographic.
NATE: And to our future explorers, Joe has an important message:
JOE: I have several pieces of advice. One is that almost everything is worth exploring. This is part of our message here. You do not need to travel far from home. You do not need to tax your body to the limit. Everything is worth exploring. The table where we are sitting right now could be explored at multiple levels, at the microscopic level, at the cultural level, at the physical level. So, number one, everything is worth exploring. Number two is who you are, who you are right now without changing who you are. Who you are is half of exploration. What you see, how you see, what you bring to the act of exploration will change exploration itself. So even if you are exploring something you think has already been explored, you are you and you doing that exploration makes it new again. And then the third thing is you are not alone. There are all kinds of people out there. There is an Explorers Club full of explorers, and many of them have the same arc of starting out somewhere utterly unrelated and utterly illogical in the arc that leads to what they have become. So there's really nothing to stop anyone from becoming an explorer.
CALLI: SO inspiring! We agree wholeheartedly with Joe’s assessment. Even by listening to this show, you are exploring!
NATE: Exactly! We’d like to extend a massive thank you to Joe Rohde for joining us this week. It was a great conversation and we can’t wait to see more from him in the future! I’m sorry to say that this marks the end of our time with the always inspiring members of the Explorers Club. Thank you so much for listening the last ten weeks.
CALLI: And a very special thanks to all the explorers who took the time to speak with us. We’ll be back next week with three brand new episodes of Curiosity. Until next time, stay curious!
[SFX: Whoosh]