Holly Slocum believes she has the best of both worlds.
Holly Slocum dropped out of high school in her junior year and went straight to work in a leather shop in a mall. In many ways her work now is far different from that of a young retail employee, but in some key ways she hasn't changed at all.
Whatever the job, she does it with enthusiasm. "I really enjoy working, and I think that enjoyment comes through," she said. "I tend to find myself in jobs where I really care about either the product or the mission of the company. In retail, I really believed in that product. That's how I choose what companies I work for."
She's also innately a team player who revels in collaboration. Many people resist pushback on their creative work, but, Slocum said, "I love to sit down with someone and get feedback and make changes from those ideas."
Those traits make her an ideal fit for the position she holds now as project manager and senior designer with the Electronic Literature Lab, an international nonprofit organization that is embedded in an award-winning research lab associated with WSU Vancouver's Creative Media and Digital Culture program. The ELL is dedicated to the preservation, creation and curation of born-digital art.
"What I love the most about the field I work in is that I think it’s the perfect balance between the brainy, logical, intellectual side of things and the creative/artistic side," Slocum said. "It's like a technology-art degree, so it satisfies both sides of my brain."
Dene Grigar, founder and director of the ELL and professor of Digital Technology and Culture, said about Slocum: "When I owned my design and marketing company in Dallas, I was fortunate to be able to work with many brilliant artists. None, however, match the talents and vision of Holly Slocum. The breadth of her scope, from print to digital design, is staggering. It makes me also proud to say that she is a Vancouver DTC grad."
The human face of technology
Slocum's retail career lasted only a few years. Although she worked for various companies and earned her GED, she kept bumping up against the reality that she needed more education to get the work she wanted. So in 2015, she enrolled at Portland Community College, then transferred to WSU Vancouver. "As soon as I heard about the digital technology major, I knew that was where I would fit," she said. She graduated in 2019.
Slocum oversees and coordinates the lab's work and designs websites and other web applications produced and managed by the lab. She is passionate about the ELL’s mission, which she defined as "to keep old pieces of born-digital art alive to be studied. They've often been created on computers that are outmoded. So we keep computers and software in the lab that lets us continue to access and read them, and scholars come and use them."
The mission extends to making digital art more accessible. For a project called Traversals, artists read their work and are interviewed by ELL, and the resulting product is livestreamed as video and published as a book. For a project called Reconstructions, ELL staff and students work with an artist to recraft the artist's original vision using technology available today. Many of these are done by the senior capstone class for DTC majors—"a class with a real-world workplace feel," Slocum said.
Because technology has become so central to our 21st-century lives, a paramount consideration in her design is accessibility. It is the connection between technology and humanity, and it starts with design. "The underlying concepts have to consider all people—making sure you're not creating a product that is accessible only to people who can afford it," Slocum said. "Even something as simple as a website—I believe we as designers and project leaders have a unique responsibility and ability to start lowering the barriers to being able to connect with our important technologies."
She brings that philosophy to her contract work for clients such as TaffyLabs, for whom she has worked for three years on the creation of a streaming platform designed to better serve content creators; the City of Vancouver, for which she created a mobile app to help envision new city parks; and Re-Imagined Radio, for which she designed the website and print pieces for every episode.
John Barber, the founder of Re-Imagined Radio who is on the CMDC faculty at WSU Vancouver, describes Slocum as a "polymath." He adds: "It's an odd word, but the perfect word, I think, to best describe Holly. She brings an incredible background of skills and abilities to the Re-Imagined Radio project, from graphics to usability, language skills to problem solving, photography to video, but most importantly her spirit of discovery, always seeking new connections, new bits of knowledge, and new ways to connect them."
Lifelong learning
This year Slocum began teaching a junior-level web design/development class as an adjunct in the CMDC program. As with everything she does, it brings out her love of sharing knowledge and helping students with projects, resumes and portfolios—"getting my hands in there and helping," as she put it.
"I want students to feel empowerment," she said, "that they can do something good to help make the world a better place. Some people might think we're just making websites, animation—how is that going to change the world? But those are critical parts of our culture. Every role in society is critical if you choose to see it that way and see how it impacts the people it engages with."
Working with digital assets requires one to be a perpetual student, because technology is changing all the time. "We tell students the greatest thing you can have in this industry is a passion to learn," Slocum said. "You’ve got to be a lifelong learner."
Slocum and her husband, Tyler Brumfield, have two children and recently bought a home with her parents "so we can help them as they grow into their old age and my children can grow up with their grandparents," she said. Their children are Elias, 8; and Iris, 1½.
Slocum is amazed at all that's happened for her since she was a teenager who couldn't see herself as a college student. "I never realized I'd be working in a university," she said, "but life takes strange turns."