Welcome James!

We’re welcoming a new, amazing, and talented individual to our full-time team at the Hive, and we’re excited for you to meet him!

James is joining us as an Experience Designer, leading our programming efforts and supporting our curricular team. Read on to learn more about him.

James 

Hometown: Upland, CA

Favorite Place(s) in Claremont: California Botanic Garden

Something that fuels your creativity: NTS.live, the Doomscroll Podcast with Joshua Citarella, and long bike rides.

What brought you to the Hive?

Even though I grew up close to the Claremont Colleges, I never knew the Hive existed. In the Inland Empire, cookie-cutter homes proscribed a life for me and the schools I went to for undergrad siloed creativity in gilded towers. It felt as if I was on a factory line headed towards a future predestined. In my case, this future was law school. Then I walked into the Hive last November to visit a friend from high school who now works here. I was shocked. Sofas, tables, and chairs shifting constantly, bean bags under staircases, and I made an airplane fly. This building, I thought, was really living and breathing. Importantly, there were no padlocks on the colored pencils or Post-it notes, which, unfortunately, is the case in the schools I went to.

This fundamental belief and investment in creativity drew me in—this serious play. The Hive understands that innovators exist in every discipline and that real innovation requires diversity of thought and method. It is very, very cool and one-of-a-kind.

Why does programming/event planning, design, and all things making matter to you?

I come to programming from a contemporary art background. During my residency with in-tangible institute in Chiang Mai, the founder, Zoe Butt, explained it quite simply: art and programming are about trust. Yes, the art may be very good and push the envelope art-historically, but you do not have a community that trusts you to exhibit your art, attend your opening, participate in the public programming, and ultimately follow your method, then it means nothing. Investors like trust too…

From this perspective, my role as programmer and designer is to thread people together intentionally—in other words, intentionally designed networking. I personally hate panels and speakers because they are very two-dimensional in how they treat the audience. I speak, you listen. And when the speakers suck (which we all have sat through) it wastes everyone’s time. Every individual in a space deserves to be designed for. I want challenge, curiosity, confusion, discovery, and to be invited to participate with others when I attend an event. 

My utmost hope when designing events or programs is that participation leads to thinking together. No one holds all the answers, so questioning and learning together is such an incredible practice of trust—in oneself, the curator, and others. My favorite phrase at events like these is “I don’t know” coupled with a shrug, and bonus points when another person chimes in. That is my measure of success.  

What are you excited about as you enter this new role at the Hive?
 

First and foremost, I am excited to learn/practice human-centered design while continuing to be a skeptic. What about plant-centered design? AI-centered design? Why do we center the human? International law, with the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR), did so, and no one can say with certainty that it secured rights for humans. It may be comparing apples to oranges, but I believe it is worth many thinks. 

Secondly, it is very exciting to be in Claremont—the gateway to the San Gabriel Valley and the Inland Empire—as the region prepares for the 2028 Olympics. What are the ways the Hive can engage? What and where are the opportunities for us to “neighbor the global?” What is the role of human-centered design for an event as large as this one?

published by Salina Muñoz