Gideon D’Arcangelo, Arup

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT When an announcement came out about the experiential work being planned for the new Terminal One at New York's JFK Airport, I was familiar with some of the parties involved but not the one guiding it all - a design consultancy called Arup. I clicked over to LinkedIn and was surprised to learn this wasn't some little boutique company, but a multinational firm with more than 10,000 people. Arup describes itself as a collective of designers, consultants and experts working across 140 countries. One of the intriguing aspects of the company is that while it has teams very much focused on the creative process, it also has large teams focused on wildly different aspects of projects, like structural engineering and water conservation. I had a great chat with Gideon D'Arcangelo, a Principal at Arup who is running the JFK project and came over to Arup after many years at the much-respected creative tech firm ESI Design. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Gideon, thank you for joining me. I think the first thing to do is tell me about your company.  Gideon D’Arcangelo: Dave, it’s great to talk with you. Gideon D'Arcangelo, I joined Arup five years ago. I just reached my five-year anniversary of joining. Arup is a global design and engineering firm, 20,000 people strong, with over 90 offices. So, we work at a global scale. We're really joined up globally, and we do all aspects of design. We are a very multidisciplinary firm. We started out as structural engineers. We are a firm that has major projects with the Sydney Opera House and the Center Pompidou.  Arup is a cooperative. It became a cooperative in the 1970s, and so we have members that work globally, and we pride ourselves on our interdisciplinary design and practice something called Total Design, which is the more integrated, the more different disciplines working together, the better the outcomes in the built environment. Our main focus is on sustainable development, and in fact, the United Nations' sustainable development goals are our mission statement for the company and we feel that we can really move the needle since we touched so many projects in the built environment globally, every year, we can really move the needle in that direction.  Interesting. So, I'm curious about the sustainable development part of it. Is that a pivot that the company has made seeing where things are going, or is that kind of always been in the DNA or has been for some time?  Gideon D’Arcangelo: I'm really happy to say that sustainable development has always been in the DNA. Arup's been a leader in this place and has been leading in these concepts of sustainable development for 30+ years, if not longer. There are certain professionals here, Joe De Silva, for example, in the UK, who have been leading in sustainable design and development thinking for over 30 years, and really, we are happy to see that the sustainable advice practice that we have as the world is caught up to really understanding that this is a priority and a necessity. So not a pivot at all. In fact, something that we're just really happy to see is that everyone is focusing on it and prioritizing it as much as the firm is. I was recently at a conference in Europe about digital signage. One of the major discussion points was what they coined as green signage and the whole idea of sustainability. I led a number of panels, one focused on the North American market, and I told the audience and confirmed it with the North American panelists. While green signage is a big deal, and there's a lot of discussion around sustainability in Europe and other parts of the world, it's barely on the radar in the US and Canada, perhaps to a lesser degree, with a notable exception, maybe very large corporations, but most businesses really aren't talking about it yet. Gideon D’Arcangelo: I think that's right that America tends to be and in Canada,