Brad Koerner, Koerner Design

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Brad Koerner is a Harvard-trained architect who has spent decades looking at how technology affects and defines built environments. He has a specific interest in technologies like lighting and digital displays. An American based now in beautiful Amsterdam, Koerner works with both end-users and technology companies. By his own admission, he's obsessed by the question of how digital and interactive technologies are starting to disrupt centuries-old thinking about architectural design. We met recently at Integrated Systems Europe, where he did a well-received talk on his ideas and observations. He later sent me the presentation deck, and it was pretty clear I needed to get him on this podcast. In our chat, we get into a whole bunch of things - but focus quite a bit on the terms immersive and experiential ... what they mean and how they get applied. Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS TRANSCRIPT Brad, thank you for joining me from Amsterdam. Can you give me a background on what you do and what Koerner Design is all about? Brad Koerner: Yeah, thanks, Dave, for having me. It's really an honor. So Koerner Design is my own design firm, and I focus on the future of the built environment, iSPAN, architectural lighting, digital signage, and circular economy product design. What would be a typical engagement? If there is such a thing as typical.  Brad Koerner: A typical engagement for me is working with lighting design companies to create sustainable products. I've been engaged with a few digital signage and marketing firms looking at trends in digital media. I'm also working with DC Power folks, thinking about sort of infrastructure-level improvements that help lighting and digital signage. So a company would come to you saying, we are thinking about doing this, but we don't have our heads wrapped around how it would all come together?  Brad Koerner: Yeah I speak a lot. I talk about the future of the built environment through a variety of different channels, and a lot of people find inspiration in the pieces that I do. For example, I just spoke at Integrated Systems Europe on immersive digital environments, and an earlier presentation I gave was called “Every surface is a screen, now what?”  The year before that I presented at Integrated Systems Europe, also on DC Power Systems. These videos go out there and they get people really inspired. They start to see these industries in new ways. They look at their problems with a fresh mind, and they really want to engage them in an innovation process, right? A proper design-driven innovation process. So I help them do a future envisioning session: what are the trends, what are the options, what do they have? Then we turn that into a sort of proper wishlist of product concepts or new business concepts, and then we drive it into the roadmap where it's scoped and prioritized, and they focus on that.  I also then take it all the way out and help 'em with product marketing and marketing communications for those new launches. So they would come to you because you're not selling them anything other than your insight and expertise as opposed to trying to angle them toward how they're gonna use a fine-pitch LED wall?  Brad Koerner: Correct. I'm agnostic when it comes to all the technologies and equipment.  You talk in your presentations a lot about immersive digital experiences and I'm very curious about how you define immersive because I just wrote the other day about a company that described a billboard along a roadway as immersive, and I thought, boy, that's really stretching to call that immersive, but maybe I'm wrong. Brad Koerner: I think it's helpful for your audience to understand by background. I'm an architect. I have two degrees in architecture, and when I was young, I always wanted to be a Disney Imagineer as a kid, and that's what drove me into architecture, and then as a side interest, I too