Karl Baumann is a designer and visual storyteller. He currently works as a Product Design Manager at Ford, where he leads teams to create mobile/web products for mobility subscription services. Karl's work focuses on delivering connected services to better people’s lives or creating immersive storyworlds to transport their imagination. He has exhibited broadly, most notably at the Guggenheim Museum, CES, the Getty Center, the UN World Urban Forum, and the CHI 2018 Showcase, where he won “Best Design Study." Karl has a PhD in Media Arts + Practice from the University of Southern California (USC) and an MFA in Digital Arts and New Media from UC Santa Cruz.

1. Tell us about how your story began. What first inspired you to become a visual storyteller?

I grew up watching sci-fi films with my dad. He introduced me to 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Aliens (1986), and Star Wars (1977). I probably first became interested in films after we watched Flash Gordon (1980) when I was like 4 years old. It transported me to another world with its special effects, wardrobes, and (ridiculously 80s) music. 

At a young age, I wanted to create these alternate worlds. I loved drawing comics and making models when I was in elementary school. In college, I studied experimental films and did my thesis film in Argentina, after watching the 60’s documentary La Hora de Los Hornos (1968). At that time, I was really interested in exploring alternative social and political futures, rather than just fictional storyworlds.

2. What motivated you to pursue a PhD in MA+P?

I’ve always been interested in USC. As a kid growing up in the South and the Midwest, USC seemed like the Mecca of filmmaking.

The MA+P PhD program started around the time I was about to graduate from undergrad. By then, I was also interested in philosophy and emerging technology, so it seemed like the perfect program to explore new ideas and new mediums beyond traditional filmmaking.

I was only 22 and knew the program would be competitive. I created a 10-year plan to get a master’s degree and work for 5 years before applying to the 5-year PhD program. So, I went to UC Santa Cruz for an MFA in Digital Art New Media to further build my craft. Luckily, the plan worked and I got into the MA+P program!

3. While you were at SCA, were there any experiences or pieces of advice you received that were impactful on you as an artist?

 

1.) Find collaborators and 2.) learn the foundations of your medium in order to break the rules.

1.) Collaborators are central to your development. Many of us were raised on stories of the individual artistic genius: people like Beethoven or van Gogh, who toil away in solitude to make their masterpiece. But you need to surround yourself with people that inspire you and that can complement your skills/ways of thinking. 

What helped me develop at USC was being a part of different research labs. It was a great opportunity to work with a diverse set of people outside of my department, tackle a central topic, explore new mediums/methods, and create interactive experiences. Through SCA Professors Scott Fisher and Alex McDowell, I worked on future storytelling and spatial computing projects with Intel, Google, BMW, and Steelcase.

In parallel, I also worked with Annenberg Professor François Bar on community cycling/urban projects. Through François, I met local artist Ben Caldwell, who I collaborated with for 5 years doing community design work in the nearby Leimert Park neighborhood in Crenshaw. My final dissertation project “Sankofa City” was a collaboration with Ben to co-design future visions of South LA.

2.) Learn the rules and don’t dismiss the fundamentals. When I was 18, I was naive and thought that if I skipped all the intro courses then I’d create something truly original. But it’s important to take some foundational art, photography, or graphic design courses to understand composition, color, and lighting.  People have been studying this for thousands of years and a quick semester will go a long way to master your craft.

4. Tell us about what you do as a digital designer at Ford. What is your day-to-day like?

 

I initially joined Ford’s Research and Development lab in Palo Alto in 2018. We used human-centered design methods to interview customers and explore experiences that felt like emergent trends for the future. I was looking at mobility and urban systems more broadly - like smart cities, self-driving cars, shared bikes/scooters, and connected vehicles. It was an extension of my work at USC, both the innovation consultancy work with Google, Intel, etc. and my dissertation work collaborating in Leimert Park to imagine the future of their neighborhood. 

Flash forward to 2024, I’ve been more focused on near-term electric vehicle adoption. I’ve spent the last 2 years directing a team of designers within an internal startup called Ford Drive. We’ve launched a program to make electric vehicles more accessible to Uber drivers and help reduce the rideshare carbon footprint in our cities. The program is currently live in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego. As the product design (or UI/UX design) team, we work in agile 2-week sprints to create and evolve our mobile app, website, and design system - that we built from scratch.

I’m still working on projects that envision the far future, but I want to be able to make real impacts today and build towards that future.

5. As a designer, is there unexpected or surprising overlap between narrative storytelling and product design? 

It’s all about simplicity, communication, and then finding moments for delight. Both storytelling and product design are about translating complex systems to the audience. 

In product design, it’s about a complex computational system translated into a short number of clicks. In storytelling, it’s about the complexity of human existence, relationships, and society translated into a short film or experience. How can you add value to someone’s life in the briefest amount of time? 

There are certain formal elements you can do to create the most logical/intuitive sequential order of the experience. Or there’s visual techniques of composition and color to direct users’ eyes to the most important elements. In product design, you need to be very careful to not overwhelm the user. But you also hope they’ll keep coming back - potentially everyday - to use your app and discover new features. And when appropriate, you get to add new novel interactions or feedback that delight people. 

Interactive storytelling is great because you build on the foundation of product design and can layer more expansive visual worlds, immersive audio, and narrative payoffs. Audiences come for a different reason, but you still need to provide intuitive guardrails to allow them to unlock the full potential of the experience.

6. Your work has been exhibited in museums, including the Guggenheim and the Getty Center. What is the process of creating immersive work for display in the museum space?

The most important part of museum shows is considering the live audience and the architectural elements of the space. When we did our video installation at the Guggenheim, it was part of a larger show on alternative modes of transportation. The curators did a good job to complement each project and guide audiences through a larger coherent story amongst different pieces.

At the Getty, it was a traditional outdoor screening of one of our video projects. I was truly honored to show there. But at the same time, I realized it’s hard for a screen to compete with the grandeur and beauty of the Getty’s architecture, landscape, and the LA skyline beyond it. If we had more time, I would’ve created a dedicated interactive spatial story to complement the video.

I’ve done spatial storytelling projects in the past, inspired by the artist Janet Cardiff, who created audio and video tours using binaural audio. The spatial audio creates surreal slippages in which you question what’s coming from the storyworld and what’s in the building around you. The live experience of the museum makes the story richer through unexpected and often serendipitous moments of overlap between reality and fiction.

7. What values and goals are at the core of your work at Ford? Why are these important?

 

I think at the core of my work at Ford, it’s about changing the way people access and experience mobility. The pandemic has changed the way we interact with each other virtually, but ultimately, we’re spatial beings. After growing up across the US and living in both LA and San Francisco, I’ve experienced a wide range of American urban planning. How can we create a balanced multimodal system of travel that engages your sense of place and makes life more pleasurable?

Early in my career, I sensed that telling stories to change the future wasn’t enough. They can help create a vision, but you also need to change the built environment. Our society’s values are expressed and experienced in our urban planning. This is why I initially became interested in spatial storytelling and then I evolved my thinking through urban planning friends that I met in LA. I’ve tried to carry on those values in my work at Ford.

8. Looking back at your career thus far, are there any projects of yours that you are especially proud of?

I’m still most proud of the work I did in Leimert Park and the Sankofa City project. I felt like we were doing something unique for a greater good - and it tied together all my interests in speculative design, science fiction, community co-design, and urban planning. It was a way for me to work through much of what I discussed in your previous question: how can both storytelling and urban experiments complement each other to build a better city?

We started with running workshops to repurpose old payphones to tell neighborhood stories and bus benches to become musical instruments. Then in my dissertation workshops, we were using worldbuilding methods (I learned from Professor McDowell) to explore questions like: “What if shared self-driving shuttles replaced privately owned cars?” and “What if augmented reality (AR) wearables replaced smartphones?”

These community workshops resulted in a short film and virtual reality (VR) experience that presented future visions of the neighborhood. My Leimert Park collaborator, Ben Caldwell, has been able to use these visions to work with the city to run pilot programs for community shuttles and improvements to the neighborhood.

 

9. What’s next for you?

It’s funny that I had a very linear 10-year plan when I was 22. A lot of that shifted by the time I finished USC. Now, I have a general “north star” of where I’m going but I am more open to adapting to the changing landscape around me. It’s all about balance. I want to be a part of organizations exploring the edge of the future, while also designing things people can experience today. 

I’ve also learned that just because you have a creative job it doesn’t mean it’s your personal outlet. I still look to other activities and hobbies to express myself without a financial imperative. For example, I’ve been reaching out to Ben to continue our design work focused on community impact. 

As you get older, you just learn to juggle more dimensions of your personality. For me right now, it’s finding time to be a father, a designer, a storyteller, a manager, and part of the larger LA urban community. 

10. Do you have any words of advice to offer to those interested in entering the fields of digital design and immersive storytelling?

It’ll never be perfect the first time, so build iteratively to get your experience in front of people as quickly and often as possible. Then evolve it from there. With both product design and interactive storytelling, the audience (or the user) is the most important - yet unexpected - element. 

I know it can be hard at first. But it’s important to become comfortable showing rough versions of your work and seriously listening to both the positive and negative feedback. By seeing real people test and interact with your experience, you move beyond the ideas in your head and can evolve it to truly have a meaningful impact for people.