Melissa: 00:05

When was the last time you laughed with a stranger?

Mouna: 00:10

Did it change how you see the place you live? I'm Mouna Andraos.

Melissa: 00:24

And I'm Melissa Mongiat. We're the co founders of Daily tous les jours, an art and design studio that leads an emergent field of practice combining interactive art, storytelling, performance and urban design to reimagine the way we live together. This is the first episode of Strangers Need Strange Moments Together, a podcast based on our new book of the same title.

Mouna: 00:45

It's been fifteen years that we're working together in public spaces. We've been trying to figure out how to create collective experiences that defy categorization, that really speak to the spirit of humans and celebrate our persistent desire for connection.

Melissa: 00:58

Each episode of the podcast is a deep dive into our questions and findings on the topics of cities, people, and designing for togetherness offline in real life.

Mouna: 01:08

So this is episode one, a manifesto.

Melissa: 01:12

Take it away, Michael.

Michael: 01:16

Hello, stranger. You're standing just one meter away, but you might as well be on another planet. The earth is burning. And if we don't find ways to come together, this may be the end. Yet we only connect with people who think like we do through channels designed to divide us. Public spaces are now filled with zombies on phones, but the way we socialize is the foundation. What would it take to break the spell? Beyond memes. In real life. Let's revive the human spirit. Disrupt the everyday with radical acts of empathy and care. It feels strange to smile, to dance, to make music with a stranger. But joy is not frivolous. Joy connects us, and right now, we need that. Enchanted moments as a form of resistance. Call it art. Call it infrastructure. Whatever you call it, strangers need strange moments together.

Melissa: 02:41

This is Strangers Need Strange Moments Together. I'm Mouna.

Mouna: 02:46

No. I'm Mouna.

Melissa: 02:46

And I'm Melissa.

Mouna: 02:48

Alright. And we're sitting here at the Daily tous les jours studio in Montreal.

Melissa: 02:51

And it's very early in the morning. So let's dive into it. There's a world happiness report from the UN, the United Nations, that states that resilient communities lead to happy communities. And our take is, can we close that circle and have happy communities become resilient communities, and that circle feeds itself?

Mouna: 03:11

And so, in that sense, joy is not frivolous. It has a lot of potential to build trust. When we share a moment of joy with people, people we don't know, we drop our barriers a little bit. We drop our guards, and we maybe start considering the other in a little bit of a different way. In that sense, we start generating more trust to each other, and we know that trust is something we're really lacking these days, And that trust is foundational for a resilient community, for these communities that we need to face the challenges of our contemporary world. We ask ourselves, what's ahead?

Melissa: 03:45

I think when joy becomes collective, it's what we call a community. Would you call a community that has no joy? Mm-mm. No, they're just a group of people having to deal with one another. When there's joy in the mix, they become a force together doing stuff.

Mouna: 04:01

I think we always had this feeling that the work we did was political, engaged, and meaningful. But for the first decade, we also had that feeling... we were looking for apologies in a way, saying, well, we're trying to change things, but is it enough to just bring smiles? Is that a big enough step? But during the pandemic, cities devoid of people, devoid of joy in so many ways, I think this is when we realized that we were on a mission that was actually important.

Melissa: 04:30

It's years of finding a place for what we do, really. Cities always come to us with, you know, always trying to find a place within the narrative, within the budget. And infrastructure seems so immutable. You don't discuss if you need infrastructure or not. And we started getting jealous of benches and sidewalks who all get an amount baked in city budgets.

Mouna: 04:53

The infrastructure is there, but the narrative, right, you can easily cut that from the budget. So in the middle of the pandemic, wondering whether we would still have a job and a studio, at the end of it, we reached out to all sorts of colleagues and collaborators across the planet to ask them a bunch of questions, see how they were doing. One of these people was Paul Kalbfleisch. Paul is a kind of curator.

Melissa: 05:18

A creative director who works closely with real estate developers and tries to elaborate visions for public spaces. And he always brings different players together to make it happen. Paul just wanted to know how we were doing, but he was mostly working on a book.

Mouna: 05:36

The book called The Joy Experiments with Scott Higgins. And Paul, in our conversation, said, well, that the work you're doing should be considered infrastructure, but infrastructure for the human spirit. And we were like, that's what we need. That's the budget item that we need to put on every city's yearly budget. And so in that context, during the pandemic in particular, we were everybody was about efficiencies and priorities and safeties and all sorts of bigger challenges, obviously.

Melissa: 06:07

Undeniable truths.

Mouna: 06:10

But amidst all of that, maybe along the way, all of us forgot to care about human spirit. As cities, we invest again in bridges and roads and sidewalks and lampposts and sometimes benches if they're appropriate for efficiency, for optimizing functioning, sometimes to beautify, not always. But we think it would be great if we can start thinking about the human experience and invest in that because we're not, not yet machines.

Melissa: 06:39

There's something really magical that happens when people participate and you see a transformation. Last year, we had a chance to experience that at the Milan Design Week. It's a big event, people are so overwhelmed, there's tons of stuff to see and do. And we had a chance to spend a whole week with our artwork and looking at how people interacted. The piece is called Duetti.

Melissa: 07:03

It's a musical bench and a musical bollard. And to see people's faces coming into this little Italian courtyard where the two artworks were. And they would realize that the music was created by this furniture that people were moving and the change and that layer of negative emotions be replaced by opening up to enchantment and possibilities and others. We're so stimulated in the online world with people and images and videos. And yet in the real world, we have this expectation of only responding to intellectual stimuli. I think we need more music, more dance, more things to get us in our bodies and in our soul and out of our heads for brief moments of time to be feeling like we are this collective. We're this group of people. And it's something that's lacking. It's something that many people are trying to bring back in different ways. And it's a great time to experiment right now and try different things. Mean, I if you think about it, for civilizations and civilizations, thousands and thousands of years, music has been used to bring people together. Hard times, fun times. How can we have it back today in a place where it's lived collectively? You shouldn't have to buy a ticket to go see a show. I mean, not all the time. It should be in your every day.

Mouna: 08:29

It's true. Like, I don't know, twenty, thirty years ago when we started working on the Internet, with the Internet, it was a place that was so filled with potential to change the world. We could fix everything by going online, making a better version of the world. We could, you know, bring all these things that we wanted in there and reinvent everything from scratch. But, really, as we know, it turned out to be a bit of an illusion and, in so many ways, a failure. I feel a little bad about that and having contributed to it. But maybe at the time, what we did wrong is put too much of the most brilliant people's mind and brilliant energies into trying to create this alternative world that would be perfect, and we missed an opportunity to improve the real world.

Melissa: 09:15

At the end of the day, it's a great tool, but there's magic in real life with real life encounters. And you realize that, especially during the pandemic, it was so obvious how isolated we had been and that you start seeing people that you don't even know that you miss and feel this weird sense of connection and being part of something bigger?

Mouna: 09:36

People you don't know? It's true, actually. Even people you know, you don't see often. I was walking down the street this weekend with my nephew from New York. It was still a beautiful weekend in Montreal after, you know, more difficult days, getting an ice cream, all of that. And every block or so, we would bump into someone we knew. And her nephew was like, what's up? You know everybody in this city or what? And I realized, well, it's true. It's a small city. It's not New York. It's a lot easier. And that moment when you're familiar with strangers in your city, I think, is such a precious and fantastic feeling. One that is true in a lot of urban context, people have lost. I think part of what we do is to try to create that sense of familiarity in the environments that we evolve in in every day so that we have a social fabric that's a little bit tighter, so that we're not alone having to face our everyday.

Melissa: 10:40

And you would hope that we would have learned something from the pandemic, but it feels we've already quickly forgotten.

Mouna: 10:46

Or maybe we're still there. I think we're still very much in this pandemic plus plus aftermath. It's gonna last for a little while.

Melissa: 10:56

The history books, right? They bundle up these things into big fifteen, twenty year period. One thousand years of dark ages and one hundred years of pandemic. Oh, no.

Mouna: 11:07

And only in one paragraph? Okay. So I think this is, in a way, the cost of engaging a little bit too much with systems that are designed to manipulate us. Maybe in a way they've been designed, or they have become systems that keep us apart. And the cost of losing that ability to connect with people who we disagree with, for example, losing that ability to expand our minds through these other ideas, reconsider our points of view, making sure we're continuously kinda keeping our critical thinking abilities alive, that we can make our own decisions for ourselves. It's it's really important. And I think, ultimately, even personally, if we don't make a real effort to go out there and reach into other ideas and other ways of seeing the world, we're losing a lot of our ability to grow and expand our exchange.

Melissa: 12:00

Yeah. That need of coming together because the world is collapsing. Yeah. It's gonna go down with a laugh. So whether you want it or not, there's a sense of being powerless or never being able to talk to the other and the other becoming more and more different from you. But there's that idea of training the civic muscle through small gestures. You were talking the other day about that little cafe a little bit far from your house.

Mouna: 12:28

That's right. Actually, it's kinda scarily close to my house. Yeah. It's a cafe that's filled with what people would call, like, conspiracy theories and propaganda. We randomly walked in there and started engaging in conversations with people who were there, really nice people. They welcomed us. They served us food. But then after a couple of minutes, as we engage more and look at what's around us, the posters, the writing in the bathroom door, all of that stuff, starts feeling a little weird, and we realized that it was a place very engaged politically, but very different from what we think. But yet still, it was an important experience. I think it's critical that we engage in these exchanges, that we become aware, apply our own ability for empathy, even with people we really disagree with so that we build bridges again and find this way to move forward, face some of the challenges we have collectively. We have to face them and solve them. We're not gonna do them as two separate camps or three or four or whatever. And often the problems that we have to face, the problems that they were identifying, really, I agree with, are things that need to be solved. But, obviously, it's how we think about the solutions that's completely different.

Melissa: 13:40

Yeah. We all want the same things. It's just different means to get there. And we need to share more information. There was this article in The Atlantic in the edition called the Antisocial Century.

Melissa: 13:55

And there were many super interesting things that were talked about in that edition and very much aligned with how we think, both from needing to understand the commonalities that we have. Like you say, we're all going through different things. We may have difficulty with our families, with aging parents, but somehow social media and the way things are constructed right now, we're just focusing on the differences. But also how we're more and more geared towards something that's very innate, like our sociability. We are social beings. There was this trend that they described about young people, young adults and teenagers right now, that they are so relieved in sharing how happy they are because their plans got canceled and how they got to stay at home and how worrying it is that people are so anxious now to be out in public space, to be with others, and that they prefer just to stay home. Phew, at last.

Mouna: 14:50

Stay in their bubbles. Yeah. What kind of bubble person are you, Mel? Are you a big bubble person, small bubble person?

Melissa: 15:00

I don't know. Depends on the day.

Mouna: 15:02

It's true. It depends on the day, and it depends on culture too. Like, you know, we travel to all these places around the world, and after a little while, you start realizing I started realizing really young as I was living in different continents that it's a cultural thing. It's a contextual thing. Right?

Mouna: 15:19

What is a stranger and what you can do with a stranger that is acceptable to you is really specific to your upbringing, where you live, where you come from. And so as we try to kind of experiment with breaking that bubble, it becomes an interesting maybe question to consider.

Melissa: 15:36

I don't know if it's so much the starting point of understanding the distance between strangers or just the magic that happens when it momentarily dissolves. We're not just trying to make a game for people who will play the game. We're trying to create this general space of engagement and possibilities. So you have a main proposition for playing, but you also have something for those who just wanna watch and for those who wanna play a little bit, as much as for those who wanna play a lot and find all the Easter eggs. I think it's creating something that has more diversity for everyone's ability to play, how they wanna play, whether the ability is physical or mental, that's just when the true magic happens. And it's not just when people do what you want them to do, but just when you create this new collective that temporarily is assembled and disassembled.

Mouna: 16:26

It's that whole variety of experiences that really reflects more the diversity of our society. And so if we can celebrate that and encourage it in public space, then maybe we're creating a more kind of inclusive open space for everyone. Because in real life, there are people who wanna play, there are people who don't wanna play, and there's everything in between. And we wanna make sure we invite all of them. What's really interesting for us in our work is really to try to limit the barrier to entry so that whether you're a passerby, an active participant, it's easy to come in. And there, you know, you have only a step to take, or none at all, actually, quite literally, is important to us. I think what we ask of people, what we ask them to do is really not as important as the fact that we just ask them to be there and be together. Sometimes our clients will be concerned. They'll be like, are people even gonna understand what's expected of them? Are they feeling comfortable, etcetera? Are they gonna get it? Yes, of course, we try to make it in a way that is clear, where the invitation is obvious, but that's not what we're mostly concerned about. What we really want is for each person to come with their own lens and receive the invitation how they want it. They can choose whether or not they wanna engage, create a smooth transition between passive engagement and a little bit more active engagement. It's easy. We want it to be easy for everyone and slowly encourage them to participate.

Melissa: 17:57

I have a question for you, Mona. Yes. Would you say that even if our proposition failed and that no one gets to understand anything, but they are united in demanding a better installation, we have succeeded?

Mouna: 18:13

I mean, obviously the designer ego kind of gets hit a little bit when people don't get exactly what you intended them to get. But at the end of the day, if they come back, if they show up, if they're together, if they find commonalities

Melissa: 18:29

in a positive way,

Mouna: 18:32

we keep doing it. So, okay, maybe a closing question. Maybe we wanna ask what the future that we're trying to prevent is. That sounds a little negative, but, you know, what's that future we don't wanna go to?

Melissa: 18:48

Yeah. I guess it's the future we hear mostly in films and futuristic stories where things seem so dystopian often, more often than not. We're trying to write our own film and have enough imagination for it to be beautiful and as joyful as the human spirit can be.

Mouna: 19:06

Okay. So the future we wanna create. That's a little better. Always. I mean, many days, I still wake up wondering whether what I'm doing is the most important thing I should be doing these days, wondering whether there wouldn't be something more important for us to work on, bigger problems to solve, and, obviously, the list is long. But, again, we accept that this is going to be our most important contribution for now to bring the poetry, to bring the magic, and the joy as a way to connect people and contribute to creating a more resilient community. This was the first episode of strangers need strange moments together.

Melissa: 19:51

Thanks for listening, and don't forget to subscribe.

Mouna: 19:54

And check the episode description for links to follow us online and to order your own copy of the book.

Melissa: 20:00

Another episode is coming soon.

Mouna: 20:02

We can't wait to announce our next guest.

Melissa: 20:05

Special thanks to Michael Baker and Claire Lecker.