Arts and Humanities Make the Difference: Kristin Eckhardt

And today it's my great pleasure to have with me in the studio, Kristin Eckhardt, who is a fellow Bowdoin graduate go you Bears, for those of you who are familiar with our slogan, but more importantly the co-founder of Notice, a consulting firm specializing in startups and so many other things. So I think we have a lot of things we could talk about. Speaking of creativity, welcome today. Thank you. Good morning. You've gone in so many different directions with your creative self. You've done art, visual art, architecture, you've done tech. You're a small business owner. I mean so many different things and you are working on integrating these successfully. Tell me a little bit about that journey. It all starts with this gut instinct that I try to follow toward people I enjoy working with and opportunities that will challenge me. I've always believed that I don't know how to do something, I will figure it out because I'm a Mainer and that's what we do. So I think that's been a big piece of it. And you grew up in the woods of Southern Maine? In southern Maine. There are still woods there, but there were a lot of woods back when I grew up in the seventies and eighties. Yes. My parents had about 30 acres in the woods and they were going to build a house and my father started with a chainsaw and a backhoe and cleared a driveway and did everything himself. Took him 20 years so it was in the woods, so still can't see any houses to this day from their property. I think you're describing something that's very real. I mean, I remember, I don't know how many wood piles my sisters and brothers and I created out of the wood that we needed to put in the wood stove to heat our downstairs. Now we did have heat and running water and all the other things, but still there is this sense that no, there are physical things you need to do to take care of your body, your family, and a lot of them you can do yourself, but not everybody comes in thinking that way. That's so true, and that's something I've thought about raising my own children and also just at different phases of life, the things that I know that a person can do for themselves that I perhaps didn't learn, even though I was exposed to that growing up, I didn't develop those skills. And the ones now that I feel that I am interested in learning, I learned to sew from my grandmother and my mother. We learned to do so many things, building a home and living in the woods and a lot of people, I'm interested now in putting up vegetables, which I guess a lot of people call it canning or pickling, but those are the kinds of things that I think that it's easy to lose touch with. And I'm happy to see that there's a growing interest among a lot of people who live in many different places in those traditional skills. And I think that's another aspect of creativity, just what can you make do with the resources that are around you. What do you feel like getting your hands into today? It's interesting to think about the fact that you've done tech, but you also describe yourself as somebody who really likes to step away from tech and likes to be in the physical world and spend time outside. And now you're talking about gardening, canning, doing things with your hands. I think a lot of people, you're right, are understanding the importance of that for wellbeing. Did you need to turn a corner to come to that place, or were you always in the place where you're like, no, I need all of these things? That's an interesting question. I think more than ever, I am aware that I make the choice to spend a significant portion of my days unplugged, but I don't really know that it was something I thought about until many folks started talking about that and raising children who have devices as such a part of their life in school, but who my kids tend to just not choose that I've thought about more recently what it means to make that choice finite attention and all of that. And for me, growing up was a big piece of that. We didn't have cable television, we didn't have access to a lot of the kinds of more interesting things that a lot of kids and teens did in the seventies and eighties. Like MTV. I was telling my children yesterday, we didn't have MTV, so I just grew up doing other things. And so it's, I think, baked into me that I do other things, but I do now because I work a lot and I work remotely have to take breaks and step away. And for me, that just means getting out of my house, not just getting off of my laptop. And I think that's important because a lot of people, it's not just the blue light and it's not just that whatever task that you're involved in, I do feel that so much of what we're consuming when we're online isn't necessarily nourishing, even though it might be useful for our or the other things that people do. But for me personally, it's not nourishing most of the time. So yes, I try to just step away. I think that's so important. And I know that when I started in medicine, the electronic health record and the screen was not as ubiquitous. So I actually am a bit of a dinosaur. I remember paper charts and there are probably vanishingly few people who remember those things. And then we brought in this technology, which was really helpful in some ways. But we've now way over to the other side, it has become actually a barrier. And I think one of the biggest things that people in medicine complain about is the amount of screen time that we have and the distance that it's created between us and our patients. But I think also for me, one of the things about being full-time in medicine was I spent so much time in front of a screen and at the end of the day I felt like my eyes were bleeding because there was all this information, I was trying to assimilate it, and I was like, am I human anymore? I'm not even really sure. Am I just part of the matrix? I don't know. I'm not surprised to hear you say that in terms of the effect, that sense of your eyes hurt at times. It's just too much. And I think that a lot of people don't even necessarily realize how in different professions the technology has crept in and become so ubiquitous and how so many people assume that different professions are still very human centered. And I think that's not always the case. And it's exhausting, isn't it? Well, it is, and that's one of the reasons why I loved that you have this whole background that is art and visual art and your Parsons school background and the fact that you've done these different things and that you apparently both you and your husband have collected art for a long time and antiques and physical things that you actually use to bring kind of beauty and joy into your world. Well, Parsons, that was an interesting chapter. I did pursue a master's in architecture very briefly and also an MFA in digital design, and it was at the beginning of the first.com boom. So a summer opportunity led to something more interesting. I was introduced to someone who had also studied architecture and not chosen that career path. And I just got caught up in that, which was very exciting and no regrets. I would never have been a very good architect, but my husband and I and our family were always interested in the environments that we're creating. And he grew up in a family that collected a lot of art quite seriously. They lived internationally and had incredible opportunities to access collections that so many tourists would not have had a chance to view. And my mother-in-law has incredible taste, and she's always chosen really interesting things, which all three of her children I think very much appreciate that they got to grow up in that setting. And then for me, I started in a different way collecting art when I was a little girl. My mother, my grandmother and my father were amateur painters. And I just would go to my grandmother's house, which was next door in the woods and just ask her, can I have that? And so I started collecting her paintings and then my father would take us to the Portland Sidewalk Art Festival. I remember saving my allowance and going there and I think it was August and buying art. And so when my husband and I met, it was very natural for us to just poke around, treasure hunting. And he has antique stealers in the family. So it just has become a hobby that our children enjoy as well. And we do spend a lot of time at home. It's very much for us, we don't entertain very much. It's just our tiny world. And I think world building or sort of environment building is such a human impulse to create these little nests. And for us, it's just something that we can always turn to for satisfaction and stimulation and a lot of comfort. This is something that I think people maybe haven't thought that much about when it comes to working remotely, is that you work remotely, you actually have to make the space around you feel really good because you don't leave very much, right? I know that when the art gallery during the pandemic wasn't doing as much in person, people were buying a lot of art because they were staring at the same wall behind their computer for hours at a time. And I love the idea that it kind of maintained the sense of hope that there is something else that's beautiful out there in the world. And it sounds like as someone who continues to work remotely, that's still very important for you. Absolutely. Working remotely has so many advantages, of course, especially as a working mother, but also as a person who likes to get out on a nice day and go for a paddle. But it's challenging and you do start to have to think, I think a bit more consciously about the kind of setting that you're in, or it can be a little bit depressing and isolating. So yes, I was very happy when the world shut down in 2020 for a time I'd already been working remotely. I was very happy that we already had the environment set up in a sense that we hadn't neglected to create a space that we liked being in. What was different is everyone was in it all at the time doing school and teaching. But yes, I was happy to have that. And speaking of the remote world and the environments we create, I remember noticing that suddenly all of my colleagues, everyone was doing Zoom calls. I wasn't just the person calling into my office in New York while everyone else sat in a conference room. And what was funny to me, that so many folks were going in the direction of the white background or the clean background before. Most people, I think now do a Zoom background. And I remember looking around my home for a place where there wasn't anything on the wall, or at least I could strip it down to almost nothing. There wasn't a single room. We live in a very tiny house some of the time, and there was no hope. And so I thought, well, it's books and it's shells and it's tiny paintings, and hopefully people will get used to it. And I've had a lot of people comment that they like the background. Well It's very humanizing. I think so. I think so. I just feel that it's important to be surrounded with things that inspire you back to your creativity, the books or the sticks you collected on the walk or your children's artwork. I happened to have a breakfast with an artist yesterday, Paige, and she had a group of people who love her stuff. And this particular individual I was talking to, she owns her own accounting firm, and it was very important to her that she actually have works on the walls. And Paige's work is very bright and colorful, and so that when they look up from the numbers as she describes it, they actually have something that they see that is bringing them back out into the brightness. And I think that even watching each other on screens and being like, oh, there's something interesting behind you. I think that is another way of just remembering like, okay, we might be interacting virtually, but there's another world out there. Yes, and there's so many more facets to that person you're interacting with. I mean, it's not just a disembodied head. They have interests and they have a personality and a full rich life. So yes, it can be very humanizing. And I recently had a great conversation with the owner of the Cornish Trading Company who delivered a few treasures to our home and bath. And when he and I first connected, because I was in there all the time, he was like, why are you buying this leather rhinoceros? And I was like, well, it's for my background because I really enjoy switching it up so that when I'm talking with my clients, it's been the same thing for many years now. But it starts conversations and it's allowed me to get to know people. And I think that when people collect art or bring other treasures into their home, it is a really great opportunity when you're welcomed into someone's home to understand them a little bit better. I just love the way people's environments can express a bit about who they are. That's really intriguing to me. I think that's really true because especially if you're dealing with more of a business setting and presumably even in startups, I think that there's still kind of the intersection with the corporate world. People can't necessarily dress in super creative ways. You kind of want to remain somewhat neutral. So if you can at least have your leather rhinoceros in the background, then it's going to generate some conversation I would imagine. Indeed, it definitely does. One conversation that I've had many times is I have a stack of books about oysters and we're big oyster fans. Another pastime if we're not out looking for treasures is to just go up around the Damariscotta River area and just grab some oysters. And I've got a giant shell and a stack of books. So yes, just good to have things that I can turn around and look at and inspire me. And then it's been fun that it gets other people asking questions and takes it to a place where it's a little bit more intimate and more personal. And that's just been so nice because not just the working remotely aspect of it, but just I think in life we want to, we're in business as well, we want to have good connections and really feel like we're understanding the people that we're working with. And sometimes if you're just entirely focused on the task or the project, you can lose sight of who the people are. And then when things get tricky, it's really nice to be able to draw upon a deeper connection. Yes, and I can see the parallel there in medicine as well, where it's become so abstracted that when you go see your Nurse Practitioner for your physical, you end up with all these data points. And it's awfully nice when that Nurse Practitioner turns around and says, but tell me about your dad. How's your dad doing? Or where have you traveled recently? Or something like that. I think that that's that layering of humanity that sometimes can get stripped away. So we really do need to reintegrate it when we're talking about tech. So I want to ask you about the specialty in startups because I know that as the co-founder of Notice this is a big thing for you. I want to learn more about that because I'm guessing that there are very specific things that people who are working in the startup world need to understand or have questions about. I'd be happy to talk about that. So my partner and I have worked together in a number of different settings over the last 25 years. He's the person who studied architecture, who like me, did not pursue that as a career, who gave me my first tech job back in, gosh, the late nineties. And we worked for really incredible client roster. We had wonderful projects with the Smithsonian and PBS and finance clients like Merrill Lynch, let's see, technology clients like Sony. It was an amazing time. It was at the time where you really couldn't build your own website, and most organizations didn't have that function within their corporate structure. So they were looking to boutique agencies to create their websites and solve a lot of their data visualization problems. So we had a number of really amazing opportunities. And more recently, we regrouped my partner and I after, gosh, well, there's a middle chapter of my career when I was a teacher for, I left New York after 9/11 and became an educator, got a master's. So I'd been in education for a while. And then when I was looking to see what was beyond the classroom, they had started, the technology firm partners had started an ED tech company. So I found my way back to working with them. And more recently, we've gone out on our own. So we focus on startups because we been there. We understand what it's like. When my partner, Mark Tinkler started Vocabulary.com, the company that he successfully sold to one of the whales in ED tech, they started from nothing. You had to build something from nothing. And we understand how to navigate the complexities of bringing a product to market, a digital product to market. We both really love being creative. We have a level of language and then we have actual experience doing this, not simply a degree in business or a degree in technology. We've done it and had to make a lot of difficult decisions around product marketing, the technology. So that was our love. We just said, let's get together and keep working together, but let's focus on startups because those are the kinds of problems that we really love solving. They're very thorny and they're very exciting, and usually the founders and the staff are really gung-ho and very eager for support and help. Speaking of thorny concerns, thorny questions, what are some of the things that people come to you with when you are talking about their startups? Oh gosh. Well, people often give us a demo and then they say, do you think we have something here? And so that's been to have people who put so much energy and so many resources into starting a business and kind of look at you imploringly to validate. I can totally relate to that feeling of wanting other people to see what it is that you're trying to create. One of the thornier questions or more challenging problems that people bring to us often is like, what should I do first? People have so many ideas. Ideas are cheap and meaning it's easy to come up with them and it costs nothing to come up with an idea. The challenging part is prioritization and thinking about what's going to move the needle. And that was something that we had to learn very early on when we were trying to grow our user base is you had so many things you could do and would've wanted to do, but thinking about what was really going to help you keep the business going and the early years so that you could have the resources and the latitude to do something that was maybe more creative down the line. So yes, prioritization is one of the biggest challenges that we help people overcome when we're working with them. I think another is this is the product space. The digital product space is really coming at things from a truly user-centric perspective. Many folks go into it with an idea of the product that they want to create or the problem that they want to solve. It is difficult to consistently put yourself in the shoes of a user and really imagine that you've never seen this before and you've never used it before. And to make some very self-critical. And I think that's something we both learned in architecture school and art school. We talk about crit all the time, and charette, you're given a problem. You have to solve it. You bring something out to a small group and they tear it apart. So my partner and I are kind of inured to criticism in that sense. So helping our clients understand that, getting all of that feedback, having other people really tear apart your ideas so that you can build them back up into something that is going to work is part of the process that makes you stronger as a person who's being creative and also in business, but also that makes your product stronger, that people will ultimately use and love because that's what we're trying to help our clients do. Create products that people will use and love, and then also build awareness, bring them to the market. I love that you're looking at this from the user's standpoint because I know that it's obviously, it's a product, so you need to be able to sell it to people and they need to be able to use it. That makes a lot of sense. But when I think about this intersection with your educational background and the importance of really translating things into something that other people are going to be able to do something with and create that value for them, I mean, again, that they're willing to pay for that I think is important. But I think sometimes we do forget that just because we bring something forward doesn't mean other people are going to appreciate it in the same way. And I know when I've talked to people about, for example, digital health equity, I mean for digital equity just in general, that what we think other people want and need and can use is very, very different than what they actually want and need and can use. And trying to help others understand that for you, I would think that would be kind of a fascinating experience. Absolutely. It is fascinating, and it is a never ending problem to solve because your users are always bringing different ideas. You're always faced with competition and threats, and there are so many things to consider when you're developing a product that really meets people's needs and then hopefully goes above and beyond that and delights them. And to your point on equity, I mean, we were in the education space and in the company that my partner Mark founded, and it was a language learning app. It was Vocabulary.com, so it was teaching children words, equipping people with the building blocks of thought so that they could access information and really open up their worlds. And the conversation around equity came up a lot, and it wasn't just about what literacy does in terms of advancing equity, but also giving students access to tools and information. And I just feel very blessed to have worked on so many different problems, if you will, challenges, and to be able to work with clients now across industries, solving all sorts of different problems. It's really stimulating work, and it's just so much fun to be a part of it. So I started this whole podcast by letting the entire world know that you and I are Bowdoin polar bears. And then we actually behind the scenes realized that you and I had both been to a program that I don't think still exists, but it was called the Main Summer Humanities Program at Bowdoin College, and we were high school juniors. And it was so important to me, even though I would go on to medicine, which is not necessarily a humanities per se, more science oriented, but it's so interesting, this idea of the importance of having access to different things like the visual arts, like music, like literature, I mean, no matter what field you go into, and yet that's such a hard sell sometimes because we're like, oh, well this is, education is very expensive, so please focus in on what it is that you need because you're going to need to get the return on that investment. So true. I just had this flash to a moment in my early career when I was sitting around the table with some graphic designers and some software engineers, the guys to write the code and make the thing work. And we were solving a problem together and we kind of had hit the wall. And what this was really about was trying to convey to a client what the best solution would be. This was backend in the services business, and we were building things for other people. And I realized that I needed to step in and translate for both of them what they were thinking into language that would resonate with someone who wasn't in our group solving that problem. And I just thought about writing and what I got out of my humanities experience in addition to the arts education that I received, was an appreciation for how to write. And also when I went out into the world, I realized that if you struggle with writing and crisply articulating your ideas, it can be very limiting in your career trajectory. And not to be transactional and mercenary about it necessarily, but if you have difficulty writing, you'll hit a limit, I believe in many careers because ultimately it's communicating to other people outside of your domain that gets you to what I think of as the more interesting opportunities and access to different people who can challenge you and offer you more. But just from pure, just the quality of life, I guess I would call it perspective, to have something that is just, well, the humanities are just truly so enriching. I see. We were talking about this before too. My children are very mathematically oriented and I'm so glad that for now they're still studying history and reading novels and in our home exposed to art and culture and music. I can see what it does for them. It makes them happy and it gives them an outlet that is entirely different and they like to think it grows their brains in really interesting ways. I agree with everything you just said. And thinking about my own children, for me, it's a source of ongoing connection with them that two of my daughters are big readers, and so at least with one of them, she and I will be like, well, did you read this? And I'll say, well, yeah, but save that book for me, but I'm going to trade you for the next book. And then my other daughter, she and I trade music back and forth, and my son who is also in medicine, he and I will talk about medicine sometimes, but often we actually trade narratives in a really interesting way and we're very story oriented. So I think that it's so much more connective to have the ability to communicate in multiple different ways that comes really from the humanities that we kind of need to maintain as humans. I couldn't agree more. And the fact that it's a way for us to communicate not just with our children, but also other people in the world. Yes. I love those anecdotes and I'm thinking about what it's meant with my children and friends too, especially, and this is an advantage of technology to be able to share a link to a song or to share an article. And I'll never forget last summer when my eldest who was going into her junior year asked me what she needed to grab a book very quickly in the summer. And I don't recall what the urgency was, but I'm looking at my shelves thinking what would interest her? So I grabbed this Sally Rooney and I just lit up inside thinking she is ready for this book, and I know her as a reader. I think she's going to love it, and she devoured it, and it was so gratifying to realize that we didn't sit and unpack it or analyze it. She just told me how much she loved it. We had a few moments of this kind of recognition and we shared that. It was just very profound. And then the music, endless music sharing with both of my children, it's just a lot of fun. And to be able to make that connection with people, especially again, back to kind of remote life, I can't tell you how many times I've made a connection with a colleague or a client because we talked about a record that we love or a book that we're reading. It's entirely different. It speaks to, I think each of us on just a totally different visceral level when we're talking about whether it's maybe food or music or reading that kind of nourishment, totally different. And I can so relate to what you're describing that when your child finally gets to the stage where you're like, oh, I think you can understand this now. And it's not as graphic as some of the things that I could give you, but I feel like it's safe enough and you're old enough that you can get these concepts. And I mean, technology actually also makes that kind of possible in some ways. I mean, books have been around longer than technology, but the music sharing, I mean, I think I used to say to my kids like, oh, well, that's from an old song that you would never know. And they're like, mom, we can have access to all the songs now so we can absolutely just look it up if we don't know it, but chances are they're going to know it anyway. And I never would've been able to do that with my parents because their song knowledge was sort of stored on vinyl, which I just think that it's funny that the liberal arts thing and the arts thing has actually been amplified. The ability to access this has been amplified as a result of technology, and yet we still have a need for the physical things. Absolutely. We do have a need for physical things. I am picking up on the word vinyl, which you mentioned because that's one of the physical things, and it's related to this thread about music. That's one of the things that we share in our family. I love to collect records and I find record shopping a source of inspiration, even just from a graphic design standpoint. It's just so great to get out in the world, go to enterprise records and say hi to Bob and just check out what's there. And I love that when we're home, we've set up our home so that our children come out of their rooms. They have tiny, I don't want to say miserable rooms, but they're not anything that a child would want to just hold themselves up and lose hours at a time doing unless they have to study. But we create spaces that they want to come out into, and there's a record player and in our home that we're just sort of reconfiguring right now and putting the record player right in the dining room so that it's there because they've developed a love of vinyl also and an interest in graphic design, like the Love album covers and all of that. And I think that's really exciting. But just the physical things that just kind of get you either out in the world or out of your chair. Another reason I like final is that you have to get up and turn it over, and you might actually listen to the entire side of an album instead of just clicking to the next song. So it's different. It's an entirely different way of consuming art when you listen to records because you're listening to the album, presumably as the artist intended it. You can't just pick the song and put that track in the mix and then decide you're tired of it, just touch of a button. I think that's a really fascinating thing. Yes, it's very true. I mean, there are definitely songs when I was growing up that I never would've been that interested in, but my parents had those records, so I was like, oh, okay. I'll listen to Elvis Presley. That's fine. And all the songs, the fourth songs, the ones I don't like, you just listen. And that's an interesting thing in terms of creativity. So often now, I mean, think about it. We can edit out anything we don't like if we're experiencing things solely on phones and screens, but if you choose a little bit more of an out in the real world approach or a more analog approach, it just gets a lot harder to filter out everything that you don't like. And I think that that's so healthy, and I think that makes me think of what you're saying about the humanities, just being challenged to consider