Rising Stars: Meet Binh Nguyen-Duc of Los Angeles, Orange

Today we’d like to introduce you to Binh Nguyen-Duc.

Binh, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
My early childhood in Vietnam was highlighted by access to the very famous SNES, NES and Sony Playstation 1. This was rare at the time in the local context of Vietnam, and exposure to video games got a bad rap even then for the development of teenager/ early childhood education. Yet fantasies and virtual adventures benefited my creativity, and perhaps that is where my love for 3D visualization started – the ‘first contact’ exposure to the gaming industry.

In regard to the motivation to move to the US from Vietnam, having a father whose career identity is a business man dealing with foreign trades may have impacted my transplant outcome a bit. Studying abroad was trendy at the time. Higher education was also unchallenged by society as a means to progress in life and climbing the social ladder – promising jobs and monetary outcomes in life. Sounds heavy and not freeing, doesn’t it? You can get a sense here that was the heavier and hybrid state of my early life: lack, have not, and easily infiltrated by external and societal prescriptive ideas of how to live.

Looking back, perhaps the journey to the US has been about earning a life from my own artistic endeavor, not a life that was given to me by others. It was a big move to reclaim personal sovereignty. I wish people knew more about my career transformation in parallel with the recalibration of the 30s of my life – the automatic deletion process of what’s not me and what is truly me. In other words, I wish I’d learned that some of my past identities are temporary; I’m not stuck with a single role or an image of what kind of person I want to be or a vision of life I want to have. It’s a difficult lesson to learn because the instructions are found within each of us, not in the external world or some self-help books of modern day spirituality.

In a way, this is living in purity – with the deck of fate you’ve pulled and making the most out of it, absence of unfounded ambitions. I would also discuss more about not living from a point of lack, but rather from a position of “the glass half full.”

There’s a whole discussion on money and definition of abundance that are relevant to this. Yet because of the rabbit hole nature of such a topic, it would be my pleasure to save it for another deep dive in a separate interview.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Not being able to land a full-time offer over a long extended 6 years pushed me to work as a project-specific contractor and actively chose the shorter lifespan gigs that I resonated with and felt compelled to contribute to. This enduring chapter solidified my artist statement or a specific focus.

My experience of the design market in NYC between 2015-2019 was rather disappointing because of the tight and rather conservative way of running the design business model. That said, it was a specific time where the term “experiential design” or “environmental design” were trendy buzz words that not every professional circles among architecture firms, ad agencies, event design agencies have the universal understanding. For example, we have ad agencies that have commissioned lots of exhibits and installation projects under the pipelines, but the core strength of these agencies are mainly Graphic Design and without experts who understand spatial problem, circulation planning, design engineering. These businesses then outsourced to other design consulting firms and fabrication studios to fill the missing gap. It wasn’t a seamless design built model like how I’m practicing these days – thank goodness we’ve come along much further since in terms of the business model – not many studios can confidently deliver 3D spatial activation experiential design niche from beginning to FDOB delivery to client. I understand it’s a tough economy and everyone is hustling for work to survive, but abusively identifying with the highly technical and academic term “experiential design/ experiential marketing” is misleading and hurts the field in the big picture. I’ve witnessed business owners making false promises about their company capabilities that cannot be kept and intentionally misuse the nomenclature out of survival behavioral patterns because they’re influenced by what the market needs at the time. All of these need to be cleaned up, purified and realigned to an honor system of work collaboration. Perhaps it would ease the constant tension between Art and business profit in our industry.

Then again, having gone past that and saying “no” to the work that is not me, I’m able to establish a type of “artist statement” with clarity and the specialty niche that my contribution is needed in the arena of larger scale/ public art placemaking. That’s the gift of the struggle in my career story.

Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I’m an interdisciplinary artist with over a decade of experience in 3D design, architectural design, fabrication design engineering, immersive spatial experience design, art consulting and physical placemaking activation. Specialist in CGI photorealistic visualization workflow with a strong focus on creating high-quality marketing 3D renderings and experimental lighting/ reflection 3D simulation. My work encompasses visionary placemaking contributions to spanning world-class technology campuses with immersive themed conference rooms, European pharmaceutical workspaces, agriculture & life sciences research institutes, entertainment agency headquarters, brand activation environments, luxury retail, runway productions, and exhibitions.

My current ‘home away from home’ at work is with SPMD, a global collaborative studio of designers, fabricators, and curators that tell your story with a human-centered lens through art curation, design, architectural installations, wayfinding, custom furniture, and environmental graphics. We work with a variety of clients including brands, public entities, museums, agencies, developers, architects, and designers.

Perhaps an effective and digestible entry point to this question is to share with readers a glimpse of my formal job responsibilities at work:
A 3D design professional is an expert in the creation and development of sophisticated three-dimensional models and visualizations, employed across a diverse array of high-profile industries such as gaming, architecture, industrial design, and cinematic production. These highly skilled designers leverage cutting-edge software, including Blender, Autodesk Maya, and SolidWorks, to craft intricate, lifelike representations of products, environments, and scenes. The process involves a blend of artistic vision and technical mastery, from initial concept design through to the final render.
The primary responsibilities of a 3D design professional encompass the generation of detailed 3D models, the application of advanced texturing and lighting techniques, and the seamless rendering of realistic visual outputs. In certain roles, animation or the simulation of dynamic movement may also form part of the designer’s duties. Achieving excellence in this field requires a thorough understanding of core physical design principles—primarily spatial relationships, how the users move, circulate, interact in the physical site, get inspired and connected in not only the human mental and physical body, but the emotional body, the spiritual body, and perhaps more that are still in the unknowns to us. Our profession requires exceptional problem-solving capabilities to address complex design challenges and meet client specifications.

As you and reader can imagine from the “job description” above, the formal training to tackle the tasks involved is at the very least two-folds: 1/ design approach philosophy 2/ design visualization technical expertise. In regards to criteria number 1, often the design problem solving would be acquired through a series of core design studio courses at architectural schools, or perhaps apprenticeships. Looking back , however, my alma mater is definitely not an architecture school that teaches students how to design “safely…” There’s already a ‘biased’ and well established interest or even tradition at Cornell in what has not been done and can be made better with new attempts. I think you’ll find such a professional legacy quite common at leading higher institutions in every industry – certainly so in architectural education at the Ivy Leagues, UCL Barlett, etc. Resources wise, these prestigious higher institutions hire contemporary architects, designers, practitioners from the Greater New York area, London, other design ‘empires’ to bring the contemporary design issues to students. Ultimately though, all of these perks above however do not guarantee a satisfying life in the art and design. That’s decided by innate talents gifted from mother Nature. Schooling and even contemporary industry supplies & demands cannot provide standardized career pathways. For this very reason, I dislike mentioning the word “success” or “successful career” because every designer must locate the pathway that deeply resonates with himself or herself. This is in the realm of soul searching and owning up one’s life.

[…] going deeper into my design philosophy:
Nature is always the guiding force in my work. It’s a framework/ pathway already existing for us Earth inhabitants to reference upon. In fact, our ancestors were much more apt at observing and working with Nature during an earlier timeline when “specific modern technologies” were absent. Nature is a role model of technology and efficiency – examples are the complex biological structures of lifeforms seen under the microscope, or ecological systems of our tropical forest where specific species grow in close proximity, pollinate and complement each other. It’s fair to say that many of our modern day applications are simulations of Nature itself. And the stronger my biological link to Nature is – eating well, long walks along the beach every other day, soaking my eyesights with sunset rays, etc, the more complex and exciting ideas emerge from within.

Art is the secondary component [of importance] in my work. The world of Art provides the context of design practice and a platform to connect with an audience of people. Excellent art initiates a conversation with a participant from the inside out, plugging the individual deeper into the thoughts, sensations, feelings, moods that arise within the individual’s bodily experience. Art also challenges the audience to be open minded and facing oneself in deep honesty. A viewer may like the form of this sculpture and dislike the color of that painting – it’s all valid as long as the person is the decider and not giving his power away to external sources such as institutionalized art textbooks and adopting a curated point of view. Additionally I feel that we’re living in a harsh reality filled with chronic fatigue, fears for our own survival, psychological warfare more than ever before and so Art & Creativity are needed much more than ever before to balance life conditions.

And lastly, “modern day construction/ fabrication technology” is the quintessential toolkit to bring the work to life. I’m fortunate and grateful to have met talented other masters of design engineering, electrical and lighting integration, woodworks, metalwork, digital CNC and 3D printing, paint and printing, finishing along this journey. These masters are excited by newness, innovation, hope that can potentiate from the seed of a design idea and pour in the support with passion. Fabrication technologies give us a range of what could be possible so designers like myself have a vague idea of where and when to push and raise the bar further.

I hope that this helps provide adequate context for the readers on my story: It simply just happens as-is… just like how life doesn’t make sense as a coherent story.

Is there a quality that you most attribute to your success?
In the context of my career niche, I believe the catalyst of creative ideas arose out of parallel storytelling/ narrative importance between nature and technology of our client – the brand identity. Let’s dive deeper:

1/ Technology narrative: everyone knows who the big tech brands are and their dominant presence in our daily life. We have come to rely on the conveniences they offer. Their brand identities are impressive as ever in terms of abundance, resources, innovative infrastructures, and wide spreading influence. These can be translated into the formal design qualities such as monumental scale, systematic and orderly geometry of structures, innovative usage of building materials, etc

2/ Nature narrative: but where do big tech brands come from? What were their origins? Nature provides some answers to this: the physical land context of the Bay area where tech empires stand on. The land has distinctive environment features such as foothill region, ocean [adjacent] region, redwood region, and bay marsh region. These specific environment ecologies are crucial to our design ideas in order to best represent the overarching story of the brand and its context. Or in the case of the Santa Barbara region, the monumental Fig Tree icon holds a special place in the heart of the local human inhabitants. We translate appropriate Nature cues like these into our design.

It’s safe to say that with every project or installation, I get an opportunity to explore a formal representation of the discourse between these two narratives. It’s often a dance between the two.

Additionally, I want to stress the critical role of intuition. I often always start with intuition, gut instinct, gut check – if a design idea excites me in its spatial look & feel, its mood or atmosphere, or its behavioral impact toward users, etc – then it may have legs and from there I begin to investigate further. It’s a process of convincing myself. And stated before about working with Nature as a reference, I then begin to speculate what latent technologies are available to simulate and model after the atmospheric phenomena or objects found in nature. I work with light play a lot – it’s my obsession – and hence automatically I’m bound to work with electrical integration, LED control, etc.

The balance factor between artistic intuition and precision required by engineering and tech is how closely the available tech can mimic and bring to life the look & feel and quality of Nature itself. It’s never been about flexing the most technical and high budget gadgets available for me. Sometimes the design concept is so strong and is brought to life with reasonably simple technology. Such a project is often timeless and long lasting in its impacts.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.spm-design.com/about/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/spmdesign/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/binhnguyen-duc/

Image Credits
Phoebe Hans Kelly Numamoto