Creating Spaces for Play and Participation with Mouna Andraos of Daily Tous Les Jours
Listen to the full episode on Spotify
Mouna Andraos is a co-founder of Daily Tous Les Jours, a Tiohtia:ke/Montréal-based art and design studio. In this episode, Mouna talks about her own professional journey, the coincidental story of founding DTLJ with Melissa Mongiat, and their work together for over thirteen years - focusing on public participation, connection, and staying true to their goal of using technology as a vehicle of social change.
Show Links
DTLJ Musical Swings & Daydreamer at the North Carolina Museum of Art
DTLJ's Musical Swings at the Buchheim Museum
Musical Swings on SuperSoul Sunday by the Oprah Winfrey Network
So I Decided can be found online at www.soidecidedpodcast.com and on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/soidecidedpodcast/
So I Decided is recorded on Lenapehoking, the traditional homeland of the Lenape people.
TRANSCRIPTION
EH: Hey everyone, and welcome back to So I Decided, a podcast about changemakers in landscape architecture and design who are making a positive impact on the world around them.
This podcast is generously supported by the Landscape Architecture Canada Foundation.
In this episode, we hear from the wonderful Mouna Andraos, who is a co-founder of Daily Tous Les Jours, a Montreal-based studio which she founded with Melissa Mongiat in 2010.
When I was a design student and also when I was becoming interested in design, the work of Daily Tous Les Jours was a source of inspiration on the role that public spaces could play in our lives. It was totally new to me before seeing the work that public spaces could contain these unexpected and fun, inclusive elements for people to discover, to perform, to play, to solve, to create, and ultimately to find their own way of engaging with the work. It's surreal to have had the chance to meet Mouna and hear about how she and Melissa founded the studio and have been creating together for over 13 years. Their work, which you may have seen, titled Musical Swings, has received international acclaim and been installed all over the world, and it even was featured on Oprah Winfrey's Super Soul Sunday series, in which Oprah calls the swings a living work of art.
Daily Tous Les Jour continue to innovate and rethink the possibilities of their living art installations, utilizing technology and finding new possibilities of engaging with the public. The studio also frequently collaborate with landscape architects and other designers on creating new experiences in public spaces.
If you haven't already, I encourage you to check out their work and website beyond this introduction to Muna and her story. I'm very excited and proud to share this episode, and I'm so grateful to Mouna for having joined me on the show.
Here's our conversation. I hope you enjoy it.
EH: Hi, Mouna.
MA: Hi.
EH: So nice to have you here.
MA: Thank you for having me.
EH: Thank you for being here. Thanks for making the time. It's really exciting to have you on the podcast and to hear a little about the incredible work at Daily Tous Les Jour.
Having been a landscape architecture student, the office and the studio always having been a real precedent of creating spaces for play and collaboration in cities, which is something your website also describes. So I'm really excited to hear about you and your story and some of the work that you're doing in the office. And maybe we could start with you introducing yourself.
MA: Great. Well, thank you for having me.
Very excited to chat and talk a little bit about our work from the lens, maybe of landscape architecture, which is one of the different hats we wear or we get put on our heads as we continue doing work.
So my name is Mouna. I'm the co-founder with Melissa Mongiat of Daily Tous les Jour, a Montreal based studio that has existed now for 13 years, actually. So it's been a little while. And we create kind of large scale collective experiences, mostly in the public realm, creating opportunities for people to engage with each other, get in conversations, collaborate, as you said, and ultimately engage in their environment a little bit more through that process.
So we've had the chance to work for clients in the kind of institutional sector, museums, cities, increasingly maybe real estate development or business improvement districts, all sorts of people who are interested in improving the quality and experience of our public realm and creating reasons for people to kind of be there, spend some time and engage with each other.
EH: Again, the work is so inspiring. It's so playful. It just, I feel when I go on your website and look through the portfolio, it puts a smile on my face that the ages of people engaging with these projects, you know, what they're doing and all the uniqueness that they bring to spaces. And I'm curious, how did you come upon this work? Did you study something directly related and how did Daily Tous Les Jours come to be?
MA: I studied originally in film. Actually, I wasn't sure where I wanted to study or what I wanted to do. Anywhere from physics and environmental sciences, I applied for architecture and there's a few architects in my family and then ended up doing kind of liberal arts and film as an undergrad.
I was interested in film as a medium that would allow us, that would allow me to explore any topic and not make decisions about what I was going to do in life.
So I did that for a little bit and then got excited by the potential of new mediums emerging at the time, mostly online and web. The internet was just starting and, you know, shame to say my kind of graduation project was a CD-ROM. But a CD-ROM on the city of Beirut, actually. So exploring kind of urban landscapes and hidden treasures within the landscape of Beirut. So maybe there was something there at the time.
And so I worked in web and was really interested in the potential to create interactions and engagement between people and technology from a human and social level. But after a while, I got a little kind of tired of the screen-based only experience and the kind of world that that was creating. And so I ended up doing a master's degree at NYU at ITP, Interactive Communication Program, which is really fun opportunities to explore physical computing and tangible interfaces and basically technology outside of the screen back into the real physical world and to see how some of the things I had learned about using technology to connect people could be applied in real life again.
And so this is a little bit the path that led me to do the work that I do. Moved back to Montreal from New York in 2008. And at the time, Daily Tous Les Jours co-founder Melissa Mongiat was just moving back from London where she had studied in narrative environments. So also trying to explore how spaces can tell stories. And so a few friends of ours insisted we connected. They were like, we're not exactly sure what you two are up to, but it feels like there's something similar. And so we did and quickly had a chance to work together on a few projects and the energy connected. And so we decided we were going to work together full time on whatever opportunities and projects would come to us. And really the studio became what it is through work and through practice. We didn't come with a very clear idea of exactly what we wanted to do. The first name for you, like the first URL we bought for our work before we even had a studio name was livingwithourtimes.com or .org, I can't remember. And it was inspired by a quote by a new media artist called Chopin who had talked about how in the late 90s in an interview that the new and new media artist is about being able to respond to the realities of our time at any given moment and be relevant and in echo with the changes that are occurring. And so this was the reason for us to do work and it still is today.
How can we be active participants in the conversations and shaping of the world that we live in through the practice of design?
EH: Did you grow up in Montreal? You also mentioned you did your thesis in Lebanon. Do you have or did you live there at any point in your life?
MA: So I am Lebanese. I was born in Beirut, but I never really lived there. I lived in a few places, Middle East and in France and then immigrated to Canada when I was a teenager with the family. And so the thesis was on Beirut, but not done in Beirut, although we were kind of going back and forth, just spending some time, but never lived there per se. And so adopted Montreal as an identity in my late teens, early twenties.
EH: Do you consider yourself an artist or like you said, you wear different hats. Maybe it's landscape, maybe it's urban design, maybe it's artist.
MA: I mean, we decided a few years ago not to settle on that question. I think different contexts, different cultural environments will make, will judge in a different way who gets to be an artist, who gets to be a designer, what it means. The reality is when we moved back to Quebec, the culture of design was not as evolved or kind of generalized maybe as it was beyond maybe some classic like graphic design and a few different disciplines. And so it was a good space to do work freely. Quebec has a fantastic system of support for the arts, Canada in general, but it's also very specific context for practicing the arts. And for us, we wanted to play around with codes and kind of not fit in any category from day one. And so at the time, design gave us that ability to be whatever we wanted to do and to be. And so now, Daily Tous Tous Les Jours is an arts and design studio. And we leave it at that.
EH: Can you tell us a little bit about what you're working on now at Daily Tous les Jours and what is keeping you all busy?
MA: It's been an exciting year. I think a lot of projects that maybe got delayed, postponed through COVID are finally landing right now. A few years when we started the studio, our work was mostly temporary installations that we would present in different locations, some touring work, some kind of site specific work. And then in the last few years, we've seen an increased interest in making some of these interventions more permanent as part of the landscape and as part of kind of public spaces and public realms. But these are longer timelines. So this year, we're super excited to be releasing two big projects in southern Ontario, actually, working with a developer there that has had a kind of vision for how to activate the public realm of new development as a way to kind of engage the community, increase the quality of life, and ultimately bring more vibrancy to the areas that they were developing. And so we're creating two pieces there that have just been installed and are in their first phases of being out in the world.
One is called Hello Hello, and it's a large installation on the facade of one of the main new residential buildings. And it's a large arch standing eventually on a small body of water on a small mini fountain, has three microphones and people are invited to drop messages in there to say hello to the city in front, hello to the river, hello to the context around the building itself. And their messages become a stream of colored light and music that travels through a very large arch.
EH: Wow.
MA: The wall is also a kind of a large reflective surface behind it that celebrates the river pattern. So it's been an exciting piece to work on and open. And then the second one in the same area in Cambridge is another one of our musical pavement series. And the musical pavements are ways to transform big plazas and traditional concrete block pavements into something a little bit more engaging and magical.
In this case, you could step on different dots, creating musical compositions, collaborating with others to do so. So transforming a bit the routine of just walking outside of your local coffee shop or your local office space, et cetera, et cetera, into a moment to engage with each other and make music and move in a different way. So these are the kind of projects we're putting out.
EH: I can't wait to see them. And they'll be there permanently.
MA: Yeah, they should be there permanently, whatever that means.
EH: That's so fun. A question that came to mind with the voice to text technology. Is that something that 10 years ago would have been available to you? Or as new technologies advance, are you also offered a new suite of tools to use in your projects?
MA: Well, sure. We've done a lot of that project, transforming voices into music we did in 2017, I think, in Houston. And some of the tech has evolved. But for sure, we're always kind of excited to see what's out there, what's becoming more accessible, what we can play with and divert existing technologies for the purposes of creating human interactions is always fun. But now some of our basic toolkit has become more stable, is always the same that we can use. That is also kind of easier to maintain when we're doing these permanent installations.
EH: And when you say your toolkit, are you creating your own technologies or kind of like shopping around? Are you building these systems to make what you see happen in the work?
MA: We build 100% of the systems internally, of course, using some software, platforms, languages, etc. that are out in the world. But we have an amazing team here of creative technologists and developers, both software and hardware. And so we develop all of it in-house, which is a little crazy sometimes.
EH: But yeah, I want to hear more about that. Let's say a project comes into the office. How do you start? What's the process? Is it really prototyping? Is it a lot of sketch? What does that look like?
MA: Yeah, the process is, I guess, quite a standard design process, starting with kind of ideation research. We look at the given site, we look at the public, we look at the story of a place and what the aspirations of the people who will use it or are using it might be. And from there, kind of build a narrative and a set of objectives that then allow us to start iterating through ideas and concepts. And for sure, prototyping is a key tool that we use. We use prototyping to validate hypothesis about usage and understanding affordability of an interface, quality of the invitation and the participation that we're going to ask people to do. And then prototyping as well for the tech components, for the material choices, prototyping scale, try to understand what the presence of an object is going to be in the public realm. So all of these elements, we try to kind of test early and often as software developers would say.
EH: When something is finished and installed, for example, the Plaza installation in Cambridge, do you ever go back and see, is this what we envisioned the project being. What can we learn from it? How did the idea sort of change based on that learning over project to project?
MA: Oh yeah, 100%. I mean, I think one thing we try to design within all of the projects we create are opportunities for all sorts of levels of engagement. And so what we try to design are opportunities for different levels of engagement anywhere from someone who just wants to pass by and look from the corner of their eye all the way to the repeat user who knows all the tricks, explain to everybody what the kind of secret modes are and the Easter egg and all of that. And the diversity of usage and participation is what creates a vibrant public space.
We don't, you know, we can't expect that you don't want just people who know all the rules and do everything perfectly. That wouldn't be an accurate representation of what, you know, that mixity and diversity that we ultimately want to encourage in the public realm. But also people do all sorts of stuff we never thought about always. So when we have the chance to do observation and spend some time, first of all, the first few months often on the new work, but want to adjust certain things because even though we did the prototyping and the this and the that, there's still things that maybe behave in a different way.
So we can adjust everything is they're all kind of connected objects, I guess we could call them. So they're all smart objects connected online where we can gather usage information. So we know remotely like who, not who, but how, when are the different elements being used and triggers what times of the day, what are the different usage patterns, etc. So we can adjust as we go a little bit and then for a given artwork, make some adjustments and then from project to project, do some learning as well for sure.
EH: I see that makes sense that you can also see things from the studio. What does that tell you?
MA: I was going to say, so for example, we installed this summer a piece in outside of a new city hall in here in the Netherlands. And so it's a kind of very low traffic, completely new area. And so it's been interesting to see, you know, whether and it's a piece that's mostly about passage and people kind of walk through its walk, walk, dance, loop, loop, dance in Dutch. And so seeing, OK, when are the moments that people are actually there? It's going to be more lunchtime, middle of the afternoon. This is when we're seeing more, more usage, for example, or are people only kind of starting to use it and then they're rearing out or they're going through the entire path and continuing to engage through the work.
These are elements we can understand versus a piece that will be more in a residential area, seeing patterns of after work usage and maybe longer durations of interactions, these kinds of information. And we're in the process of trying to understand better what we're learning and how these data can translate into understanding actual impact, social impact, ultimately, maybe also economic impact activity and whether or not we're bringing some of the kind of positive nudges we want to a given public realm.
EH: I think so. I would love to live near more work like that. I think that's really encouraging to also hear that you're all doing some internal thinking and reflecting. I mean 13 years. It's in relative sense, kind of a new company. And I'm curious of what your advice might be to somebody who is doing design and working in their field, which sounds like something you and Melissa were doing, just kind of following what felt right at the time, which led to your current work. But I think often it's difficult to see where the journey is going for a lot of people, the young designers, the students. So I mean, based on these 13 years, is it interesting for you to look back? Did you ever feel like that too, in those early days of starting to do this work and maybe not knowing where it would go?
MA: I still feel like that. Not to be negative to the people who think that they're still at the beginning of the journey. And it's interesting you say it's still an early kind of young practice. And it's great to see again the different lenses, like from maybe new media studio 13 years, it's pretty long run. And so, okay, already 13 years, et cetera. But now that we're starting to collaborate because we're doing more permanent work with, let's say landscape architects or architects, they're like, yeah, you're just emerging, which is encouraging. It's good. It changes perspective.
And it makes sense, right? When you're starting to do permanent work, I guess you need the experience much more than 13 years even to take on the responsibility of impacting people's lives for longer time frames than just a ephemeral month long intervention. But I don't know advice for us. It was, I guess, kind of instinct and curiosity and a commitment as well to the practice. When we started, Melissa and I were both doing freelance and a bit of teaching, which we still do. And a grant here, this that here, but we were like, okay, whatever we do, whether it's related to the mission of what we want to do together or not, it all goes in the same pot of this design studio. And then we split it up equally. And so I think that really helped us to focus.
And we've seen some friends and colleagues over time who started and this practice was part time. For who it was harder to really kind of pull it through because there was always something else maybe that was quicker, bringing faster results or someone who's getting more external work than the other. And so things kind of got this balanced.
So in that way, things evened out regardless of how bumpy the first few years might have been. So I think that was helpful. And then working through as a duo has been super helpful for us, really having someone to bounce ideas, concerns, anxiety, successes, all of that with. It's been great. And we're a bit like a seesaw when one is up, the other one's down, but it's fine. Like it turns. And working on consensus. And I tease her that we're like 99% disagreement, 1% consensus. And that's what's been keeping us going. Maybe not 99, that's a bit radical. 80%.
EH: Yeah. But I'm hearing commitment. Yeah, for sure. And knowing where to lean on each other and work through the turbulence of time. I mean, 13 years is a long time for the record, but maybe it's also the work is so... fresh. It's so fun. It feels new. And I think it's really exciting.
MA: Thank you.
EH: And I'm happy to hear that more permanent work is coming into the studio. What do you think changed? Do you think it's an attitude of the market and what people are looking for? Or is it also just a result of now being more seasoned and perhaps more people hearing about the studio?
MA: Yeah, I think it's a mix. I think there's kind of bigger understanding of the values and investments that need to be put in the public realm. For a while, there was more competition as well and a need, let's say from developers or cities to really think about what they're offering that was going to be distinctive and engage and enchant people as they came through. In part, there's that. Like at the beginning, people who would hire us were really... We would laugh like they would give us money because we made a sketch or like a prototype of a plastic tube in the middle of the street. We're like, trust us, it's going to be great. So it took a specific kind of personality to say, yes, okay, let's do this.
Now that we have a portfolio of work, it opens up larger number of people. So we get calls, let's get from landscape architects more now who are like, okay, I get it. I want to have something that is a little bit like that, an adaptation of this or integrate that specific project. And so that's been helpful. And at the same time also sometimes... I mean, it's fantastic because we can mature the projects and sometimes also means maybe we get less opportunities to explore completely different areas when your portfolio is still a blank slate. Then you can go anywhere.
EH: When you already have work, people call you because they want that kind of stuff. They want that one for themselves.
MA: Yeah. I want something just like that. Okay, we'll do it. We have other ideas.
EH: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Let's say somebody calls up and said, we want musical swings in our city. Is that something that the office has ownership over that design that product?
MA: Yeah. If someone says we want musical swings, we want the daily to musical swings, then you know, we'll still do a little bit of an understanding of the specific context. And then on some occasions do adaptations. For example, a museum commissioned us to do a new adaptation of the musical swings in Germany. And the museum is quite beautiful overlooking a lake. And there's a big bridge that is like a lookout for people. So we installed these very large swings underneath the bridge and so adapted the design and all the different components to the context. And now the Museum of North Carolina has made the acquisition of a new set of musical swings we're installing this week. And that's more our kind of standard version that they're getting.
EH: Yeah. What's next for Daily Tous Les Jours?
MA: No, I mean, I think for us, it's been interesting to start collaborating with architects, landscape architects and understand that field. Maybe on year three or four of the studio Melissa and I were invited to give a talk. I can't remember what the event, it was a kind of general design event. And at the end of the talk, someone came up to me and said, finally, "I understand what you do, your landscape architects!" And we look at each other and we're like, no. But great, this is kind of interesting. And kind of 10 years later, now we've started collaborating because of the permanent work, it becomes relevant to try to think about that. And also the thinking we're trying to bring around the table is, how do we create the type of interactions and engagement we're seeing at the scale of a single artwork or intervention at a larger scale of an entire kind of public plaza or maybe even a neighborhood? And so how do we set the foundation for a neighborhood to be able to become and transform itself into this kind of vibrant, culturally engaged and active place where everybody's welcome?
So it's been a process now to kind of learn about even that entire field and the urban planners and urban designers and architects of this world and kind of policymakers who are right now in charge of sketching, designing, imagining our cities. How do we engage with them early on and what kind of contributions we can make to that conversation has been something we're interested in exploring.
We're finishing a little book, Daily Tous Les Jours, Melissa and I, called Strange Moment Together, looking at how to design interactions in the public realm. So that's been a kind of process to also articulate what we do and why we do it.
EH I love the title. It's so true!
MA: Yeah, and so it's a constant process of reinvention, but it's been exciting.
EH: How do you typically get engaged on projects? Do you have or welcome different firms reaching out? Do you have people reaching out to join on various pursuits? Is it sort of a word of mouth share?
MA: We've been starting in the last few years to have, let's say, architects, landscape architects come to us early on in the context of RFPs or RFQs. And it's a little hard because there's no category officially for the stuff that we do. So sometimes we fall under public art consultant or what else have we been? Sometimes public engagement even and trying to rethink what public engagement might mean and how engagement with citizens early on on project doesn't have to be just large assemblies or virtual assemblies where we're kind of going over a project very formally, but where we can create pilot versions of what a group imagines a public realm to become. And that kind of pilot project becomes a space for exchange and conversation that might welcome different types of people and different types of inputs.
So we're still exploring, trying to figure out what is going to be the best way, but it's been fun to start doing that recently. And then on the other hand, as I said earlier, sometimes people just call us up and say, we'd love to have one of your pieces in that location in a project. How do we make that happen?
EH: This has been such a fun conversation and a very inspiring one as well. I'm so grateful for your time and looking forward to seeing more to come. Thank you.
MA: Thanks for the invitation. And exciting to hear all of the different stories that you're going to be putting out in the world. Thanks for having me.