These are the core principles of what we hope to achieve with The LA Experience - big picture goals that serve as both inspiration for brainstorming and ideation…..and as a set of guardrails that will allow The LA Experience to pivot with confidence when needed, knowing that it is guided by this set of “north stars.”

FLEXIBLE

Like the city that inspires it, The LA Experience is designed to grow and change - both over the years and on a daily or even a minute-by-minute basis. This applies to both individual experience design and to the layout of the building itself - with a minimum of permanent structural elements like support columns and fixed walls. The design imperative is to create a layout that can accommodate 4-5 medium-sized “experiences,” two large-scale “exhibitions” or one massive full-building “event.”

This also applies to infrastructure - with built-in cable management bringing power and signal to every inch of the building, freight elevators that minimize load-in time and labor, and a venue-class loading dock that accommodates two box trucks and preferably a semi.

This flexibility allows The LA Experience to host a wide range of activations - from marquee long-term installations that blend content and physical builds, to content-based experiences that respond to individual guest inputs, to exhibits that can be subsequently mounted in other locations.

RESPONSIVE

Individual interactivity is a vital part of any successful immersive experience, and our activations will feature all manner of interactive and participatory elements. But we intend to also design the experiences to be able to respond to groups of visitors’ interests and demographics.

This can mean simple, “warm welcome” elements - like a projected map of Los Angeles that “zooms in” and highlights the neighborhood of an individual guest or a school group, or interactive installations that recognize guests by name and respond accordingly.

Or it can mean more macro content adjustments - with the entire museum adapting the level of detail and pacing across all exhibitions at different times of day (with a more kids and families-centric tone on weekdays, a culture- and info-forward tone weeknights and weekend days, and a “wow factor” entertainment/nightlife vibe on weekend nights). 

While it's impossible to predict what will be available in AI-authored production-level content creation software when The LA Experience opens, there is no doubt, based on the recent AI text-to-video advances like the SORA software from OpenAI, that AI will be a key tool in our content creation.  It will also easily allow the spaces to automatically customize audio and onscreen text to the home language, age-level, or specific interests of individual guests.

Not only will this responsiveness provide a sense of individual engagement for guests, but it will allow a data-driven approach to ongoing programming that allows museum staff and designers to further fine-tune future installations to match guest interests and behaviors.

CONNECTIVE

Life in 21st Century LA can be an isolating experience. 

Neighborhoods are separated by massive freeways, clogged with traffic, so going cross town can seem worse than travelling across the state. Individuals wrap themselves in digital bubbles, ensconced in devices and platforms that reinforce existing ideas and prejudices. Communities feel fragmented, fighting for limited resources as they try to grow without sacrificing what makes them unique.

The LA Experience is, more than anything, a place connect, to bring people together, to make us truly see each other.

Installations are designed to foster a sense of closeness, collaboration, and community among visitors - in both the subject matter of the exhibitions and the experiences contained within. 

Digital technologies are employed only when they can connect rather than divide - no VR glasses or phone-based apps here. Simple analog interactions drive co-creation, whether it’s adding a bit of paint to a collaborative mural or getting interviewed about your life in LA by a complete stranger.

Each design decision is carefully scrutinized to make sure it can maximize human connection.

POROUS

Traditional museums are ivory towers - bastions of high culture bounded by four walls and too often largely separated from the neighborhoods and environments that surround them. The LA Experience will be the opposite - a community-driven space that not only exists in conversation with the neighborhood, the LA River, and the Southland as a whole, but whose programming actually bleeds out into those spaces.

Most immediately, this means extending the experience past the building's facade and into the surrounding Taylor Yards Park areas. This can take many forms - from a permanent installation of low-profile, localized audio equipment that can lead guests on narrative journeys without the need for apps or headphones, to temporary artist commissions like murals or sculptures that align with and augment the programming inside The LA Experience, to long-term communal artworks that grow and change as park visitors add their own stories and creativity to the mix, to high-tech installations like transparent LED screens that bring video content into the Park.

This also applies to the way The LA Experience will interact with cultural institutions and special events in the city. Rather than compete with the Autry or the Natural History Museum or the Huntington, The LA Experience intends to co-program and co-market with them, creating immersive experiences that augment their important So Cal-focus exhibitions. We have already met with the heads of these three leading Southland museums and they are all interested in exploring partnerships.

This external focus can similarly apply to partnering with major events in the city - the Olympics, the Oscars, the College Football National Championships or Super Bowl - where The LA Experience can become a de facto secondary guest hub by offering thematically-aligned exhibitions and programming. Versions of the experiences could be installed at other venues throughout the Southland as the opportunities arise, from shopping centers with empty retail spaces to empty warehouses to tents in parking lots. If the stars align, we intend to launch The LA Experience in advance of the buildings opening, in time for the 2028 L.A. Olympics, likely in a temporary tent featuring an Olympic sports Experience.

UNIQUE

Above all, The LA Experience should offer something new. It should not be a traditional museum, nor a black box space for purely screen-based experiences. It should be educational, but also entertaining. It should be a place to come to see cutting-edge technology, sure, but also a place to be truly moved, transported, changed by the power of storytelling.

If an exhibition is going to be installed in The LA Experience, it must be inarguably Angelino, the type of experience you couldn’t possibly imagine having anywhere else. Whether that is literally true (like exhibits about the history, culture or environment of the Southland) or more of a vibe or feeling (like stories about cultural activities, sports, movies and music that feel quintessentially LA) or just metaphorical (like experiences about dreamers and storytellers), the content must be unique and its connection to LA be immediately clear.

In summary, LA is a city of constant reinvention, an ever-changing, ever-evolving center of the world’s creative and cultural innovations. The LA Experience must reflect that dream, that striving, that showmanship.