Title: Graduate Experience Designer
Company: Arup
Location: Brooklyn, New York
Overtime: Coney will cook dinner to “disconnect” from Pro AV, but you’ll usually find him “going out and living in that excitement” of immersive experiences, artist meetups, and live coding events.
Why You Need to Know Him: If there’s one thing Coney has learned over his years, it's how to see what's possible in an opportunity, assess the risks, and take full advantage in a positive, creative light.
Michael Coney is a man who keeps himself busy. Wearing many hats, he is currently the graduate experience designer for Arup, an engineering consultancy that uses “imagination, technology, and rigor to shape a better world.” However, he is also the creative technologist at his own MouseHole Studios. Perhaps his LinkedIn page sums up best who Coney is at heart: an experience designer and cyberpunk storyteller.
For Coney, this was always the way. “It wasn't specifically AV, but I just love technology,” he said, reflecting on his youth. “I was always into video games, and I had a VHS camcorder that my parents would let me use. I was splicing coax cable at 13 in my bedroom to set up multiple TVs.
“I started there, but it was always ‘how can I do things that are more fun?’ ‘How do we do that?’ I was really involved in theater and music and lots of live performances and entertainment, so it was also what story are we trying to tell? Those things have been constant.”
Coney spent his undergraduate time at both SUNY Sullivan and SUNY Purchase where he studied, well, just about everything: communications, media studies, emerging media, new media, and programming. It was there MouseHole Studios was born. “I only had a camera and a MacBook and so everything fit in a backpack,” Coney said. “It was like a full studio. And I would go to a site, film things for people, and then I could edit them right there. It kind of grew out of that.”
He's also done a lot of work on immersive experiences. “What I enjoy most is that you can give the opportunity for someone to not just be somewhere else or be someone else through that wish fulfillment, but that you get a chance to make these worlds real. You can poke around corners, you can look at things up close, you can walk up and touch them, and it feels like you're there.”
With a CTS and soon a master’s from NYU IDM, Coney has been with Arup for just about two years where he is instrumental in things like high-level concept design. He’s also on the AV team, so he helps create designs for large-scale clients on aviation projects, healthcare, education, and museums, just to name a few.
While many projects are currently under wraps, one which Coney was proud of was at Lincoln Center with New York Public Library. “It was based around an ongoing exhibit on Lou Reed and his legacy,” Coney explained. “It was 10 years since his passing, and Arup was brought in to design an ambisonic listening room from some multichannel recordings that we had taken 10 years prior to one of Reed’s last performances in multichannel ambisonic audio. The listening room was designed as if you were on stage with Lou Reed, and it was designed with a concert experience in mind. We had a truss, we had stage lighting, we had multi-monitor display wall set up so that you could really feel what it would feel like to be on stage.”
Among the next big things Coney sees in the Pro AV industry is what he called the “gamification and more of these structured immersive scenes on a very small scale.” He also feels we're a lot closer to generative AI content in parks and venues like museums and science centers. However, what he really sees as the next step in the evolution of Pro AV is wearables.
“[I did a] project called Net Vibes, which is a wearable that I developed last year. It allows a user to feel, to sense Wi-Fi with their body,” he said. “It essentially gives you a sixth sense, so you can feel the Wi-Fi networks around you in the same way that you would hear or smell something. While it may not be a very useful sense to have, the idea is to speculate on what's possible with these systems, with this technology, and where can we take it beyond that.”
What advice does he impart on the next generation of Pro AV? “Formal education, either through college or through certifications, I think those are essential,” Coney said. “But on the other side, you're developing your own sense of self.
“One of my favorite questions to ask people, whether I'm at a party or at a conference, is what's exciting for you right now? What are you looking forward to? Because I think that chasing that feeling is very important in finding out who you are and where your specific interest lies. Everyone always says, ‘follow your dreams’ or ‘do what you love,’ but they don't really say how to do that. So, I find that question of what is exciting for you helps because everyone knows what they're excited about.”
