Arts and Humanities Make the Difference: Kristin Eckhardt

Lisa Belisle: Hello, I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to or watching Radio Maine, our video podcast where we explore and celebrate creativity and the human spirit. We are sponsored by the Portland Art Gallery in Portland, Maine. 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.

Kristin Eckhardt: Thank you. Good morning.

Lisa Belisle: You've gone in so many different directions with your creative self. You've done visual art, architecture, you've done tech. You're a small business owner. So many different things, and you are working on integrating these successfully. Tell me a little bit about that journey.

Kristin Eckhardt: 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 if 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.

Lisa Belisle: And you grew up in the woods of Southern Maine?

Kristin Eckhardt: 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. My parents had about 30 acres in the woods and they were going to build a house. My father started with a chainsaw and a backhoe and cleared a driveway and did everything himself. Took him 20 years. It was in the woods, so still can't see any houses to this day from their property.

Lisa Belisle: I think you're describing something that's very real. 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 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.

Kristin Eckhardt: That's so true, and that's something I've thought about raising my own children and also at different phases of life. The things that I know a person can do for themselves that I perhaps didn't learn, even though I was exposed to that growing up. 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. I'm interested now in putting up vegetables, which I guess a lot of people call canning or pickling. Those are the kinds of things that it's easy to lose touch with. 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. I think that's another aspect of creativity, just what can you make do with the resources that are around you.

Lisa Belisle: 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?

Kristin Eckhardt: 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. 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. So I think it's baked into me that I do other things. I work a lot and I work remotely, so I 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. I think that's important because for a lot of people, it's not just the blue light, and it's not just 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. But for me personally, it's not nourishing most of the time. So yes, I try to just step away.

Lisa Belisle: I think that's so important. 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. Then we brought in this technology, which was really helpful in some ways. But we've now gone way over to the other side, and it has become actually a barrier. 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. 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, 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.

Kristin Eckhardt: 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. I think that's not always the case. And it's exhausting, isn't it?

Lisa Belisle: It is, and that's one of the reasons why I loved that you have this whole background that is visual art and your Parsons school background, and the fact that you've done these different things, and that apparently both you and your husband have collected art for a long time, and antiques and physical things that you actually use to bring beauty and joy into your world.

Kristin Eckhardt: 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 dot-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. 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. My mother-in-law has incredible taste, and she's always chosen really interesting things, which all three of her children 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. I would go to my grandmother's house, which was next door in the woods, and just ask her, can I have that? 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. So when my husband and I met, it was very natural for us to just poke around, treasure hunting. He has antique dealers in the family. So it's become a hobby that our children enjoy as well. We do spend a lot of time at home. We don't entertain very much. It's just our tiny world. I think world building, or environment building, is such a human impulse, to create these little nests. For us, it's just something that we can always turn to for satisfaction and stimulation and a lot of comfort.

Lisa Belisle: This is something that I think people maybe haven't thought that much about when it comes to working remotely, that you actually have to make the space around you feel really good because you don't leave very much. 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. I love the idea that it maintained the sense of hope that there is something else that's beautiful out there in the world. It sounds like as someone who continues to work remotely, that's still very important for you.

Kristin Eckhardt: Absolutely. Working remotely has so many advantages, 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 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. I'd already been working remotely. I was very happy that we already had the environment set up, 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 same time, doing school and teaching. 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 was that so many folks were going in the direction of the white background or the clean background. 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. 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.

Lisa Belisle: It's very humanizing.

Kristin Eckhardt: 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.

Lisa Belisle: 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. Paige's work is very bright and colorful, 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. 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, okay, we might be interacting virtually, but there's another world out there.

Kristin Eckhardt: Yes, and there's so many more facets to that person you're interacting with. 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. I recently had a great conversation with the owner of the Cornish Trading Company, who delivered a few treasures to our home. 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 starts conversations. It's allowed me to get to know people. 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.

Lisa Belisle: I think that's really true, because especially if you're dealing with more of a business setting, and presumably even in startups, there's still 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.

Kristin Eckhardt: 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. I've got a giant shell and a stack of books. So it's 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. That's just been so nice, because in life 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. 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.

Lisa Belisle: 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. 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? 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.

Kristin Eckhardt: Absolutely.

Lisa Belisle: 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.

Kristin Eckhardt: 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. We worked for a really incredible client roster. We had wonderful projects with the Smithsonian and PBS, and finance clients like Merrill Lynch, 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. There's a middle chapter of my career when I was a teacher. 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, 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. We focus on startups because we've been there. We understand what it's like. When my partner, Marc 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. We understand how to navigate the complexities of bringing 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.

Lisa Belisle: 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?

Kristin Eckhardt: Oh gosh. Well, people often give us a demo and then they say, do you think we have something here? So you 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, what should I do first? People have so many ideas. Ideas are cheap, 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. That was something that we had to learn very early on when we were trying to grow our user base. You had so many things you could do and would have wanted to do, but thinking about what was really going to help you keep the business going in 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 prioritization is one of the biggest challenges that we help people overcome. Another is, this is the digital product space, 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 be very self-critical. 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.

Lisa Belisle: I love that you're looking at this from the user's standpoint, because 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. 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, that they're willing to pay for, I think is important. 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. When I've talked to people about digital health equity, or digital equity just in general, 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. Trying to help others understand that, for you, I would think that would be kind of a fascinating experience.

Kristin Eckhardt: 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, we were in the education space, and the company that my partner Marc founded 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. 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. 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.

Lisa Belisle: 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 Maine Summer Humanities Program at Bowdoin College, and we were high school juniors. 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, no matter what field you go into. And yet that's such a hard sell sometimes, because we're like, oh, well, 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.

Kristin Eckhardt: 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. We were solving a problem together and we kind of had hit the wall. This was really about 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 a quality of life perspective, the humanities are just truly so enriching. 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.

Lisa Belisle: I agree with everything you just said. 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, 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.

Kristin Eckhardt: I couldn't agree more.

Lisa Belisle: And the fact that it's a way for us to communicate not just with our children, but also other people in the world.

Kristin Eckhardt: Yes. I love those anecdotes, and I'm thinking about what it's meant with my children and friends too. This is an advantage of technology, to be able to share a link to a song or to share an article. I'll never forget last summer when my eldest, who was going into her junior year, asked me, she needed to grab a book very quickly in the summer. 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. To be able to make that connection with people, especially back to 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 speaks to each of us on just a totally different visceral level, when we're talking about whether it's food or music or reading, that kind of nourishment, totally different.

Lisa Belisle: 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. Technology actually also makes that kind of possible in some ways. Books have been around longer than technology, but the music sharing, I used to say to my kids, 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. I never would have been able to do that with my parents, because their song knowledge was sort of stored on vinyl. 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.

Kristin Eckhardt: 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 rooms, 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. We create spaces that they want to come out into, and there's a record player. In our home that we're sort of reconfiguring right now, we're 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, the love of album covers and all of that. I think that's really exciting. Just the physical things that kind of get you either out in the world or out of your chair. Another reason I like vinyl 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 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 at the touch of a button. I think that's a really fascinating thing.

Lisa Belisle: Yes, it's very true. There are definitely songs when I was growing up that I never would have 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.

Kristin Eckhardt: And all the songs, the fourth songs, the ones I don't like, you just listen. That's an interesting thing in terms of creativity. So often now, 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. I think that that's so healthy. It makes me think of what you're saying about the humanities, just being challenged to consider other ideas, developing the mental stamina to really unpack things that might not necessarily be the most interesting to you. There's just a rigor of thought that you learn when you're engaging in those pursuits. That's just such a gift, to be challenged to think and have conversations about what you're thinking with others and understanding their point of view.

Lisa Belisle: I kind of connected with this an increasing tolerance, because one of the downsides of being able to edit everything out, or being able to choose things ourselves, is that we may specifically not choose things that other people like. So if we can get to a place where we're like, all right, lots of choices, respect everybody's choices, it's all good. And maybe I should spend some time listening to the B side of that record, because I don't know why you like it, but there must be some value to it. So expanding of the minds.

Kristin Eckhardt: Expanding of the minds. Absolutely.

Lisa Belisle: Thank you, Bowdoin College and liberal arts education everywhere. And actually to the teachers, really. I have to say that the one thing that has surprised me in this interview with you is that middle chapter of education. I came in and I kind of knew about the art side, I knew about the tech side, and I love that you have that bridging, that you've been able to integrate all of these things so successfully, in part because you have that educational background.

Kristin Eckhardt: Yes, definitely a large part because of the educational background. I think that well-rounded humanities background, a belief in oneself and appreciation for others and their point of view. And then also just the experiences that I had growing up, just being confident in my own ability to solve problems.

Lisa Belisle: Well, you have very successfully just kind of summarized our entire conversation, so clearly you must be very good at your job, working as a consultant and the co-founder of Notice with these startup people that you're working with regularly. How can people find information about your organization?

Kristin Eckhardt: Our website is wenotice.co, and we are happy to take inquiries and hopefully see people out in Maine.

Lisa Belisle: And maybe people will see you at the Portland Art Gallery at the upcoming opening. That would actually be quite fun. I hope that I get a chance to see you at the Portland Art Gallery openings coming up sometime soon.

Kristin Eckhardt: Likewise. There's a very good chance you'll see me there.

Lisa Belisle: Very good. Well, it has been my great pleasure to speak with Kristin Eckhardt today, and I'm going to say it just one more time. Fellow Bowdoin graduate, go you Bears. I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you have been listening to or watching Radio Maine, sponsored by the Portland Art Gallery in Portland, Maine. And please do come join Kristin and I at an upcoming art gallery opening, where we can continue to talk about creativity and art and all things wonderful and beautiful. Thank you, Kristin.

Kristin Eckhardt: Thank you so much, Lisa.