How to Be a Better Human - How to be the set designer of your own world (with David Korins)

Episode Date: March 1, 2021

Many of us are spending the majority of our time confined to our homes and becoming aware of how the space we're in can affect our well-being. Design expert David Korins has made countless spaces come alive-- from corporate offices and Lady Gaga concerts to Broadway hits like Hamilton and Dear Evan Hansen. In this episode, he offers insights on how anyone can approach design and create the ideal environments in which to live, work, and play. David is the founder and principal designer of David Korins Design, a multidisciplinary creative firm developing and designing innovative experiences. David has worked extensively as a production designer in TV, film and award shows. He has been awarded an Emmy Award, Lortel Award, an Obie Award, two Drama Desk Awards, three Henry Hewes Awards, and three Tony Award nominations. To learn more about "How to Be a Better Human," host Chris Duffy, or find footnotes and additional resources, please visit: go.ted.com/betterhuman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. For several years of my childhood, my go-to outfit was an orange mock turtleneck, tight black sweatpants, and a little black beret. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I am not the person you should be asking for fashion advice.

In fact, I am not the person you should ask for style advice of any kind. You do not want your tips from me. And partly, partly that is because I'm colorblind. So if you ask me, do these colors clash? I'm going to just stare right back at your face and say, I don't know. Do those colors clash? But it's not just that I'm colorblind. It's also that I'm intimidated by the whole world of design. What if I take a big swing in decorating my living room and then the first person who walks in and sees it says,

oh my gosh, was your home just vandalized? Seems safer to avoid that possible scenario and just stick to the absolute defaults and avoid making any big choices. That's what I feel. But that is not in the spirit of this show. If you've been listening, you know that I'm not supposed to be the one with all the answers here.

I get to talk to these incredible experts from the TED universe, people who do have answers, and they get to give us all advice on how we should be thinking about things differently. So on today's episode, I am going to step far outside of my comfort zone and I'm going to ask design expert David Korens, a guy who has worked on everything from Lady Gaga concerts to the Broadway show Hamilton. And he is going to tell me and tell all of us how we should be thinking about design differently. To kick us off, here's a clip from David's talk at TEDxBroadway in 2018. To kick us off, here's a clip from David's talk at TEDxBroadway in 2018. Over the next couple of minutes, I'm going to give you three ways that I think you can move through your world so that you too can make revelations of space or at least reveal

them. Step one, therapy. I know, I know, I know, I know. Blah, blah, blah, New Yorker, blah, blah, blah, therapy. But seriously, therapy, you have to know why you're doing these things, right? So when I got the job of designing Hamilton, I sat with Lin-Manuel Miranda, writer, Tommy Kail director, and I said, why are we telling this 246-year-old story? What is it about the story that you want to say? And what do you want people to feel like when they

experience the show? It's important. When we get that, we move into step two. That's the design phase. And I'll give you some little tricks about that. But the design phase is important because we get to make these cool toys, right? I reach into Lynn's brain, he reaches into mine, this monologue becomes a dialogue, and I make these cool toys and I say, does this world look like the world that you think

could be a place where we could house your show? If the answer is yes, and when the answer is yes, we move into what I think is the most terrifying part, which is the execution phase. And the execution phase is when we get to build this thing, and when this conversation goes from a few people to a few hundred people, now translating this idea. We put it in this beautiful little thing. We put it in the Honey, I Shrunk the Kids Super Sizer machine, and blow it up full scale, and we never know if we did it right until we show up on stage and go,

is it okay, is it okay? Here's the thing. You don't have to be Lin, you don't have to have a book that you want to turn into a show in order to do this in your real life. You're already starring in a show, by the way. It's called your life, congratulations.

But seriously, Shakespeare said it, all the world's a stage. He nailed that Congratulations. But seriously, Shakespeare said it. All the world's a stage. He nailed that part. What he screwed up royally was that part where he said, and we are merely players. It's ridiculous. We're not merely players. We are the costume designers and the lighting designers and the makeup artists in our own world. And I want to get you to think about being the set designer in your world. We are going to dive deep into design with David in just a moment. But first, a beautifully designed ad break.

And we are back. Let's get into this interview, shall we? My name is David Korens, and I am a creative director and designer. What's so interesting about being a designer is that we get to control those things, right? We get to stand in the laboratory and put in a little bit more, you know, blue or a little bit higher window or whatever the thing is to elicit certain emotional responses. And that's what really was the impulse behind the TED Talk. It was trying to encourage people to look at the world and have some amount of culpability and to be able to say, I actually am in control of the choices that I make and how I live in the world. And so if I want to take a different commute to work, or I want to change the color of walls in my living room or I want to wear a different kind of clothes that will, in fact, have a deep emotional resonance to response to both how you feel, but how others feel about you. I feel like especially right now when so many of us are spending so much more time in our

homes and kind of becoming aware of these things that were easy to ignore because we didn't see them all day, every day. kind of becoming aware of these things that were easy to ignore because we didn't see them all day, every day. It's especially present now, this concept of how we can design and change the spaces that we're in. So for people who are listening or also just for me, like, how would you kick off our own processes when we're thinking about redesigning our personal spaces or trying to see them differently and better? Well, I think whether you're designing a Lady Gaga concert or you're doing a restaurant or you're doing your home and your world, you have to ask yourself, am I good at communicating my own personal feelings? And am I in touch with the ways in which I can describe my environment?

And how do I attach the description of the environment to an actual emotion. And what I mean by that is, okay, you're sitting in a room right now. How do you feel in the room? What does it make you feel like? And what are the things in the room? And can you describe them? So behind your head, I see a gray sheet hanging there. Is it a taut sheet or is it a loose sheet? How does it make you feel? Was it an arbitrary choice or was it not an arbitrary choice? And so I always get into this place of therapy. I always ask a ton of questions. How are you feeling right now? How do you want to feel? And what are the things that are affecting that choice? And so I start with people's relationship to objects, temperature,

color, overall space. I know that sounds kind of hippy dippy, but if you think about it, just put yourself in a blank room and now let's say it's 10 foot square. Add one huge armchair, an overstuffed massive armchair. That's going to feel a certain way. Maybe it'll feel comfortable. Now take that chair away and put in a tiny little wooden rickety chair. It's going to feel different, right? So the massing of the chair will feel differently. Now, if you paint that chair bright red, it will feel very different than if you paint that chair black and white. And so I try and get my clients and collaborators to think about every single choice as small and as detailed as possible, having a deep effect emotionally on how

you may feel in that space. And you start there. And if you can really refine the way in which you can describe things, both what they are physically and literally and how they make you feel emotionally, you're halfway there. It's so funny because, so if you're listening, you can't see this, but I record in kind of a little blanket fort so that we get audio isolated. See a aforementioned part of that gray fabric behind your head. The gray sheet is not a design choice as much as it is an audio dampening choice. But I truly have never been more self-conscious than being like, oh, I'm going to talk to one of the world's leading designers while I'm inside of a little blanket fort like made by a child. This is hilarious. But I would challenge you to say, okay, what would happen if that fabric was, you know, baby blue? Or what would happen if that fabric had a different pattern on it?

It would affect you every single day and every hour you spend in that recording booth would change the way that you feel about the recording booth. And that's what I'm saying. Become aware of the choices that you have made, can make, and will make. And if you own those things and understand that there are different levers that we pull, right? So we've all heard that kind of analogy, like don't paint a tiny room black or dark or red or something, you know, a pulsing kind of color because it'll drive you mad. Well, you know, what's really fascinating about just hearing you talk about this is that for me, I get overwhelmed by design choices because I think of myself as like not being good at design. And but but when I'm hearing you describe it, right, of course, I can in my

head imagine like, what is a relaxing room look like? And when I do it like that, I'm like, oh, yes, of course, I can see like what a spa, what a calm area would look like in my head. And it makes it a lot easier to then think like, okay, so how could I make the space that I'm currently in look more like that rather than trying to think like, what is quote unquote good design or fashionable or something like that,

which feels just, it feels very mysterious to me. Right, well, you know, listen, the world is filled with, there's no such thing as good and bad design, right? There just isn't. There are things that are potentially more successful or less successful, but successful to what? It's all relative. If I want to make you feel uncomfortable and I design a room with lots of weird asymmetrical corners and things that you're going to bump into, then it's successful

because I did what I was trying to achieve. So I always say, pull back the lens and go back one step. Don't be afraid of design. Ask yourself what it is that you want to accomplish in that room or with that said design. And then ask, look at every single one of the pieces and the isolated choices and say, is that choice heading you closer to or further away from that goal? So you probably said with that gray blanket behind your head,

I need something to baffle the sound that's going to make these walls less reflective. Well, that's successful, but you could do that with any color, any texture, any weight of fabric. So then you ask yourself, did I pick the right one? How did I get the gray fabric? Did I get it because it was in my other closet and I brought it over here? Or did I get it because I love the color gray and it's going to be inspiring for me? And so you have to be honest with both your questions and your answers to those questions. Yes. The honest answer is this was the closest blanket. And that is the only reason. Right. Well, then I suppose if you were looking to do the least

amount of work, you nailed it. Successful design. But, you know, you probably didn't, you know, when you made those choices, here you are X amount of hours later in that room and you probably could say to yourself, OK, now that I made that choice, am I going to muster up any more energy to attack this choice again so that I have even more insight to how I feel and therefore make a different decision? Yes. I'm getting a clear message that I should muster up more energy to change this blanket. Yeah.

Just saying. a clear message that I should muster up more energy to change this blanket. Yeah, just saying. We will be right back with more from designer David Korens in just a minute. And in the meantime, man, I am going to try and figure out a more stylish little blanket fort to be recording in. I'm trying to get you the best sound that I can, but I clearly have sacrificed style. And for that, for that, I deeply apologize. We will be right back.

And we are back. Now, if you're like me, you probably used to think that designers only work in a few very specific areas, right? Like on sets or on fashion or the inside of fancy homes. But as David brought up in his talk, design is about way more than that. Here's a clip. I was driving through a parking lot and I saw a puddle. I thought, oh, I'm going to veer to the left. No, I'm going through it. And I hit the puddle and like all the water underneath my car, and instantly I have an aha moment. Light bulb goes off. Everything in the world needs to be designed. I mean, I'm sure what I was thinking is actually the drainage needs to be designed in this parking lot, but then I quickly was like, everything in the world needs to be designed, and it's true, because left to its own devices, Mother Nature is not going to carve an interesting

or necessarily helpful path for you. not going to carve an interesting or necessarily helpful path for you. I've spent my career reaching into people's minds and creating worlds out here that we can all interact with. And yeah, you might not get to do this with fancy collaborators, but I think if you leave here, those three easy steps. Therapy. Who do I want to be? Why do I do the things I do?

Design. Create a plan and try and follow through with it. What can I do? Execute it. I think if you add that with a little color theory, some cool design choices, and a general disrespect for architectural standards, you can go out and create the world that you want to live in. So David, listening to that clip, it makes me kind of wonder about the choices that those of us who are not designers, just regular people who maybe live in small spaces, what can we do to make our smaller homes feel more spacious or at least less overwhelming? Well, that's an interesting question. I would first start by saying, do you really want to try and make this tiny apartment feel more spacious?

Or what is it that's good about a small apartment? You know, I moved pretty recently and someone said to me, don't move into a place that's too big. It's going to feel kind of palatial and planetary between all the objects and you're going to feel alone and lonely. So some people actually really like tight quarters. And so I would say if what you want

is for the place to feel more airy and open and spacious, I would look at all the big ticket items. First of all, storage and having an appropriate place. I happen to be a pretty neat person, and so I know where everything is, even if it doesn't necessarily have a closet or a drawer to go into. But I would say, is everything that you need right where you can get to it? And do you know where it is? Because there's a sense of ease there. But I would just say, start with color. I would ask the question of, are the color of the walls helping you? Lighter, airier colors are going to have a more spacious feeling. Also, is there natural light coming in? Is there not natural light coming in? Can you control that? If there isn't natural light, people are always like, oh my God, my apartment's so dark. Well,

this is why we invented electricity. There are ways to light spaces in different ways to make them feel different, right? I would look at every single object again and ask myself the question, do I have a place for it? Is there a way in which I put it away or store it? Is everything the lightest, brightest, most airy version of itself? And how do I feel in each part of the room? Where do I spend my most amount of time? Where do I entertain?

And I would break it down like I do with a show, a scene breakdown. Where do I of time? Where do I entertain? And I would break it down like I do with a show, a scene breakdown. Where do I spend time? What do I need versus what do I want? A few years ago, I went through a total purging of my life with regard to objects. And for about two years, I lived almost like a monk-like existence where I basically got rid of everything, and not truly everything, but everything that I didn't touch or use every day. And then I slowly built up a beautiful object that only gave me joy.

I know it sounds like Marie Kondo, but like if it strikes joy, you keep it. Then you start to kind of move around the space both with your eyes and literally and kind of ask yourself like, do I need this or do I want this? And needs versus wants in all of life answer most of the questions. So I kind of looked at each one of the parts of my home and said, you know, in what way am I going to use this part of my house? And what do I want

to feel like when I'm sitting there looking at that or interacting with it? I moved during the pandemic. So I set up my entire new home based on the idea that we were going to be stuck in it for a year. So I changed my office setup. I'm sitting here next to a window in which I get bright sunlight. I happen to be a total freak. I love and need light. I'm one of those guys that keeps the setting on my iPhone at its brightest and people are like, oh God, how can you look at that? But I'm just like, I need the light. So I set up my entire life where I work out in the morning, where I drink my coffee, where I work to set up so that my day could unfold in a certain kind of way. But the second part of the design process, as I talk about in the TED Talk, about there is the therapy part, there's the design part, and there's the execution part. The building and executing of that, or the conceiving of a painting but then actually doing it, I kind of glossed over. But that part is really challenging. Getting people to understand how to actually manifest into

three dimensions, a thing that only exists in your head, is the other half of the battle. So the first half is really saying to yourself, well, what does it feel like? What do I want to feel like? And what can I do to possibly accomplish it? The what can I do to accomplish it is the design phase, right? I understand and recognize that this is my issue. I want it to feel brighter or airier or more spacious in my apartment. What can I do? Now you are in the design phase. The what can I do is I can paint my walls a lighter color. I can rip off these horrible window treatments off my window. I can make my furniture smaller. I can get rid of that sharp, pointy coffee table and get a round one. I can do all those things. But then there's like,

well, what color? And where do I get, if I get rid of those window treatments, how am I going to do that? And then where am I going to get this? The execution phase is everything. Because how many times have you ever bought something and thought, oh, I thought this would feel different, or I thought I would like this pink color, but I don't. And that part, that's how the sauce just gets made. This is exactly where I get stuck, right? Is the like, okay, I know that I want it to feel airier or I want to have like more of a private space or something like that. But then the, okay, so then what do I do? It feels like, what if I make this big change and all of a sudden it doesn't work out and then

it kind of, it becomes overwhelming. Right. Well, I think that there's, you know, there are like the freakish perfectionists like me, or there are the people who work in an iterative process. You had to answer a question, how do I baffle the sound in my sound studio so I'm going to get the closest blanket possible? You made a change and you made a choice, and that was great. Now you can refine that choice, right? Now you can say, I might want a different color or hang it in a different way.

So I would say that's why they make paint chips, right? You can go out and get a bunch of paint chips. You can go buy a small bit of paint. You can paint it on the wall. Live with that color. Live with that choice. Go in incremental phases. That's why also you can return objects.

You can buy a coffee table, live with it for a while and send it back. You can get a new rug. You can put some paint on the wall. You can do those things and you can kind of go halfway steps. I feel like in the end, you know, you only get 6,294 things you're going to do in your life and then you're going to kick the bucket. And like you should try and spend every day a little bit better, a little bit more efficient and a little bit more at ease than you did the day before. And so if you wind up painting close to the right color, live with it for a month, live with it for two months, learn about it, feel it.

People get so stuck in their minds about, oh my God, it took me 17 years to paint that wall. Once I do it, I'm never going to do it again. You know what? In order to paint a wall, all you have to do is move that couch away from it and paint the wall. It takes like two hours to do it. And, you know, so for a lifetime of happiness, it's two hours of work. This is certainly the case for me where I have moved quite a bit in the last 10 years, you know, maybe not every year, but I've rented a lot of apartments and moved around a lot. And I always have felt like there's this two week window when I get into a new place where in that two weeks I can like design things and put things up and move chairs around. And then if I don't do it within the first two weeks after that, I'm like, yeah, that's the blank wall. What do you mean? You can't put something up on the blank wall.

I totally agree with you. That is inertia. And as we all know, objects that stay in motion, you know, or object in motion, stay in motion, unless something crazy happens to them, right? I'm totally with you. I feel the same thing. I have that boundless imagination and a boundless amount of energy until I'm quote unquote done. And then don't ever talk to me again about design. The truth is this is where you realize one plus one equals three, because if you get a friend and you get a six pack or you get a friend and you promise them like, you know, a show on Netflix, you would be amazed at how, you know, reopening that can of worms and redoing that wall that was affecting you. Both will be a bonding experience for you and your friend, but also it's much faster. I think the effort that you're saying is like, oh, you know, I just don't want to go back down that road of like everything's in its place. I, too, have had to move a bunch. You just have to treat it like

like your happiness depends on it because it does. And think about if you had a splinter in your foot, you would get rid of that splinter. Yeah. And I do think that the the idea that, you know, you can take that the things that weigh on us mentally and seem so enormous actually are such small amounts of real time and then pay off huge dividends is it really rings true to me. So if I can, I'm I'm actually really fascinated by going back to the fact that you recently moved and you did go through this process for yourself. So some of these, I'm sure, are so obvious to you, but you put your desk next to a window so that there was natural light. For me, someone who loves and needs light, I was always going to make my workspace a priority to be next to a window. But I also felt like because of the pandemic, I needed to create a space where I could not really meditate, but kind of chill out that was not in front of a big black rectangle on my wall called a television. So I created a different separate space that felt like I could have some kind of emotional respite

from staring at that thing on the wall. People always start by, okay, it's the living room, where's the television going to go? And they should, because we as a culture spend so much time watching television. That's how we get a lot of our information. But I just, I had a choice. I have a living room and then I have what we call the family room, like a smaller little study area, which is where I'm sitting as we speak. And we made the conscious choice to put the television in the tiny room and make the living room a space for conversation and contemplation and just a different kind of energy. Because when there's a television on the wall, everyone tends to, even when it's off,

orient themselves towards that rectangle. And I felt like it was very important, especially as we're going to spend so much time inside, to have a place that was not really guided by and dominated by technology. Yeah. It's interesting to hear you say that too, because it makes me realize how when you are conscious about that and conscious about design, then you actually create a space that isn't just about how it looks. I think that's sometimes how I think about design, but instead it makes it so that your family will sit and talk to each other rather than sit and watch something together.

Totally. I mean, don't get me wrong. We spend all of our time in that little study. So we all jam ourselves like sardines in front of that television anyway, because we are human beings and that's what we want. But it was important to me to set up the place such that if God forbid, you know, or when we get to all commune again with groups of people, I get to have a space that is not going to be dictated by that need to orient myself to

technology. Yeah. Yeah. I've heard you describe design as like telling a story and it's telling yourself and your family a story about what you value. 100%. And that's where we put the musical instruments in that same room, the living room with no television. And it's where I have an easel where I paint and try and suffer through the act of creation to make things for my wall. So all of the kind of creative center of the home is in that room with no television on the wall. And so the other one where I sit and do work and when we watch television is intentionally kind of pushed to one side such that it doesn't dominate the social part of our lives. Where do you keep your inspirations? Do you have like a scrapbook or is it like a folder on your computer or

where do you keep them? In all different places. I sort of have this mental Rolodex that I filed through. And actually one of the greatest piece of advice I ever got before I moved here from school was someone said to me, if you're going to live in New York City, do not walk with your head down. Walk with your head up and look around on every single street corner,

you're going to find people more and less fortunate than you. You're going to find like three-part operas on every corner. And there's going to be like the most inspirational things you've ever seen. And I, by the way, rinse and repeat for not just New York City, but the entire world. When I always feel like your fountain of creativity, you know, it gets depleted as you design things, you create things, you try out different things

you've been working on. You kind of use those ideas and you need to refill those fountains. You get those fountains from books. You get those fountains from travel and through conversation and interactions with people. So to me, it's like I travel and I like file these things away and photos. I have, you know,

hard drives filled with images and all that stuff. But the truth is every one of the artistic endeavors is unique unto themselves. And so again, how we designed Hamilton in 2015 was one snapshot of who I was, who Lynn was, who Tommy was, that's the director and the writer, who we were in that moment. If we had the exact same script and the exact same theater and the exact same parameters that we sat down in 2021, we would create a different version of Hamilton because we're different people. We're seeing it through a different lens. And so it really starts with who are you in this moment? Who are your

collaborators in this moment? And then you find your research. I like to break down my research into two buckets. One is realistic research. So if I'm designing a real space, I might say, here's a picture of a chair that I love. I literally love that chair. If I could own that chair, I would have that or this rug or this window treatment or this wall color or this cool sculpture. But then there's this other equally important bunch of research, which I call kind of the abstract kind of just like sensorial response. Like what is the artist's response to this thing? And so it's like, I might be designing a living room, but I might find a piece of

research that's like a labyrinth. And I might say, I have no idea why this labyrinth feels right. Or it's a space filled with cobwebs or whatever. And what it's code for is I want the space to feel, you know, rectilinear, or I want the space to feel like it has a lot of starts and stops, or it feels complicated, or, you know, so it's code for that. But you have to, again, you ask yourself, well, what is it about this labyrinth that I really respond to? Is it the color? Is it the material it's made out of? You know, a labyrinth made out of hedges is very different than a labyrinth made out of like old ancient stone. And that's very different than a corn maze, right?

All of these things are labyrinths. But can you get more specific with your labyrinth? And what is it about the specific labyrinth? And how does that apply to a real space? One thing that I imagine is also really relevant about what you just said to people who even have jobs that maybe we don't think of as traditionally creative that aren't artistic jobs, but is the idea of finding creativity and finding purpose for other people's visions. To me, it's like, it's such a fascinating thing where people say, well, you're an artist and you work in a creative field. I'm

like, if you're a banker or a stockbroker and you work in a cubicle, you should be sitting there at your desk right now listening to this thing and look around. What does the cup that holds your pens look like? What does your desk blotter look like? Do you have photos of your family pinned up against the wall of your cubicle or are they in frames? What is your chair like?

You're sitting in that chair eight, nine, 10 hours a day. I just saw you shifting your chair. I know, I just adjusted as soon as you said that. I was like, okay, I'm aware of the chair all of a sudden. Everyone drinks out of a cup or a mug. Are you drinking coffee? Is it a water bottle? All of those choices. What are you wearing right now? Does it reflect that? You've heard this idea like the clothes make the man or the shoes make the man or dress for the job that you want, not for the job that you have. Those things have real and deep meaning to them. What it means is like, look sharp, play sharp, right? So if you show up to work and you're always kind of dressed down, that has an effect subconsciously on you, but subconsciously on the people who

you're playing with. And so to think, oh, I'm not an artist and I'm not in control of these decisions. Well, like open up your closet and take a look at the colors that you have. But my whole TED talk and my whole gestalt and my way of being is to try and get people to understand that they can be the designers of their own lives and that they can truly affect the way that they not only think about themselves, but that the way that the world will think about them. And there are tons of those tricks. It's the reason why politicians, quote unquote, get down in the crowds with the people they want to feel of the people and with the people. These are all design choices. Like look around. People who want to feel that way

or make you feel that way about them, they roll up their sleeves. The president rolls up their sleeves and they get down to work. Why? It's like a working man's thing. It's a design choice that they made to feel less stuffy and more approachable. Well, David Korenz, thank you so much for being here. You have certainly helped me in learning how to be a better human. And I'm sure that everyone listening feels the same way. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. And we'll talk about that gray curtain afterward. Listen, next time you see me, it's going to be a completely different backdrop. Or you know what? Not. And you'll be like, listen, I own this choice. And so, you know, go F yourself, David. I got this. Thank you for future episodes.

This show is produced by Abhimanyu Das, Daniela Balarezo, Frederica, Elizabeth, Yosefov, and Cara Newman of TED, and Jocelyn Gonzalez and Sandra Lopez-Monsalve from PRX Productions. Stay tuned. We'll have a new episode for you next week.