Meet Jake Barton and Local Projects

Jake: I'm Jake Barton. I'm principal and founder of Local Projects. We're a media design firm, so we make everything from iPhone applications to multi-projector installations for museums and public spaces. I find that we work as translators in a way. We are there to essentially to take new technological innovations, new engineering breakthroughs and to conceive of how they might work within physical spaces for visitors, for customers, or for clients. My personal background started with interest in performance and theater and with that in mind I then started working as an exhibition designer doing interior architechure. Which was super interesting, because you have to embed storytelling into the actual physical attributes of a space. I got obsessed with this idea, that you had this audience who actually, probably know a lot about that topic. Which is why they're going to it. So if you think about a car museum or World War Two exhibition. There's a high likelihood that the people actually in the audience themselves know a ton about the topic. And so I was, kept turning this over in my mind, how do you connect these people together? How do you turn what is essentially or typically a storytelling space into a community conversation space? And so, Local Projects was really born to explore that relationship, the ways in which people can talk to each other through technology. And from there, we've just continued to grow and evolve as innovation has continued to pace