I don’t know about you, but when one part of my life gets a little chaotic sometimes, I find myself letting other areas get chaotic too as I try to solve the first issue. This seems to be how the entire world is right now. Covid-19 sent our lives into chaos, and after the initial shock the first reaction was to try and mend that chaos in any way possible.

Here at Taylor Studios, we did the same thing. Immediately conversations began on how we could best help our clients. Is there a product we could provide for hand sanitizers or to remind people to social distance? Is there signage we could create to mark closed exhibits? All these solved real, tangible issues, but it felt like we were only solving a small part of the problem. It was as if there were a few leaks in a hose and while we were successfully creating solutions to patch the leaks, we had not turned our attention to find where the water was coming from in the first place.

So, we paused and collected ourselves. We thought about what was really at stake for our clients. If visitors cannot safely interact with the space in the way they used to, they may not want to interact with it at all. This puts the entire experience in jeopardy and ultimately puts a halt to a site sharing their stories and their mission. This felt way more important to focus on than how to make sure individuals stayed six feet apart. And because other companies had already rolled out new product lines to solve the tangible issues, we felt more of a push to focus on what we do best, interpretation.

With a new direction in mind, we worked on creating a tool that would help sites re-interpret their stories and share them in a way that functioned for this season of covid, but that would also be useful after. This looks different for every site, but the goal was to make sure that whatever the new experience was, that it was better than/equal to before, not less than.

Throughout this idea development, it reminded me that during chaos sometimes the most important thing to do it pause and regroup. Remind yourself of who you are and what you are trying to achieve. This might help uncover the bigger issue and how to find solutions to restore some sort of order. We don’t have control over what happens with this virus, but we do have control over how we reform the experience of life around it.