Q&A with Architectural Laboratory Designer Nicholas Martin
Tell me about the creative organization that you are involved with.
The Boston Figure Arts Center is a place for people to practice art in my city. They need more members for the space to survive, so a group of us started putting together community events to drive membership. I have a critique group, where people bring in progress artwork and we give them feedback to help them achieve their goals. This smaller group has in turn helped me develop ideas for social events to help drive membership, while fitting in with the broader marketing goals of the organization. Collaborating with my friends and working within the budgetary constraints of a non-profit while creating memorable events is a very fun process. Somehow the budget constraints create better events – more people must help, so more people feel a sense of ownership. I never expected to learn how to be a community coordinator, but that is the role I’ve created out of necessity.
At those events you make then give away ice cream? Why do you make it instead of buy it?
I do make ice cream, partly because it’s fun for me, and partly to create a welcoming atmosphere for people. I don’t even eat ice cream anymore, I used to eat too much and I guess I got sick of it. Obviously anything homemade is a more significant gesture than buying it, and ice cream is almost universally appealing.
Tell me more about ice cream making.
The process of making ice cream can be as scientific as you want. I use a program that can simulate different ice cream characteristics such as perceived sweetness, fat content, freezing temperature and so on, based on a recipe you create. The program has a database of ingredients and knows how each ingredient affects these parameters. It enables you to create recipes that have good texture and sweetness, but that’s only the beginning of a good recipe. Making good strawberry ice cream is a good example – ice cream can’t have too much water. Strawberries are full of water when they’re fresh and taste like jam when the moisture is removed. How do you make good strawberry ice cream given these constraints? Even basic flavorants have issues which make a recipe challenging. There is some creativity involved in this. It’s an iterative process: make a small batch, get feedback, try it again.
What is the best flavor you’ve made?
From the feedback I’ve gotten recently, I think the best flavor I’ve made was a salted licorice flavor for a Finnish friend of mine.
How does this all tie into lab planning?
These experiences do parallel design work in some ways. All projects operate under time and budgetary constraints, like a community event. I collaborate with other people just like at HERA, balancing finding the best solution with finding a solution rapidly. Another parallel is documentation – having a clear and unambiguous record of your recipes and community event decisions is essential to improving your processes and having a way to see where things may have gone wrong.
Another parallel is constant learning. I don’t have a background in community organizing, so every event presents new challenges to me. Our clientele presents the same challenge. Work done in laboratories is incredibly specialized and any project could be a one-off lab typology for the entire world. The work requires the lab designer to be attentive and responsive to a degree which I did not experience working in other design fields. Our clients are discerning. We work with some of the most driven and intelligent people in our society and we need to meet that standard.