Creative Leadership Retreat: Lucy McRae
Show notes
This episode continues our special series recorded live at the Creative Leadership Retreat in Sonoma, which we co-hosted with our friends at September Works in late September. We gathered 40 leaders from design, business, and the arts for two days around the theme of coalition building.
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We’re skipping around a little bit as we air these episodes —Lucy McRae was our final guest. She calls herself a body architect, and she spends her days getting scientists, artists, and designers to work together. She led far-future research at Philips, and has worked in Hollywood writers’ rooms including Blade Runner 2099. Her work looks at technologies that bring as much terror as hope, like genetic engineering and growing children outside the womb. She makes them feel familiar by building them from soft, everyday materials such as jelly, textiles, and her own body. The night before this conversation, we screened two of her films.
Aarron and I asked where her lived-in, retro-futurist aesthetic comes from, and how she orchestrates costume, choreography, camera, and music in a film. She told us she used to bring collaborators in too late, and how changing that improved her work.
Our guests asked how she decides what to pull from real science, and where to push into fantasy. A former Philips colleague asked how to convince an organization to invest in speculative, provocative work. Others asked how 14 years of classical ballet shaped her process, and which company’s patent library she’d raid if she could. We also talked about her research process, the sci-fi she keeps coming back to, and how growing up with a math and art teacher made her a polymath.
This series is presented in partnership with September Works, a product design studio. They envision, evolve, and reinvent digital products. Learn more at september.works or reach them at [email protected].
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