TEDx Pittsburgh Profile: Christine Astorino

With little ceremony, Christine Astorino spreads her college notebook, the one from her time studying design in New Zealand, across the coffee table in her Downtown office. The room is pristine, chic in its sleek order--but lush with sumptuous pastoral details that recall Astorino's deep and lingering garden and landscape roots. The notebook's an arsenal of penned images and text, notes that leave little whitespace, that make little sense as parts, but as a whole, convey emotions that burst with quiet, spry, cerebral sincerity.

"When I was in school, my favorite part was this," Astorino says. "Conceptual design, how to solve a problem, how to understand the concept of the user. When I got to the real world of design, I realized there wasn't time to do that, that people weren't willing to pay for it. But that's when all the richness and great ideas happen, so how can that just disappear from life? So now I have people, I have a company, that does just this"--she gestures to the book--"Work that's about the richness of a concept or idea, and how to resonate it."

Astorino, a trained landscape architect and the former senior VP of marketing at Astorino architectural firm, is the founder and CEO of fathom, the company that does "just this."

fathom, a subsidiary of Astorino that was founded in 2003, is listed on the main Astorino homepage as a "special service," which speaks deeply to fathom's objectives and its accomplishments. fathom provides the service of insight, and in that, it is special. It is a research, design and strategy firm that aspires to connect people emotionally with experience, whether through designed environments, brands, products or services. The company works often with Astorino architectural firm, founded by Christine's father Louis, but also works independently, and collaborates with other design groups, too.

Under Christine Astorino's leadership, fathom has completed and stayed involved in projects in the healthcare, higher ed, sports, entertainment, urban design, hospitality, finance, consumer packaged goods and nonprofit sectors. fathom's little black book of experts (including eight full-timers and many, many more consultants) has worked through what hockey means to fans for the Penguins' Consol Arena; how Downtown employees and workers connect to their city's outdoor environment for PNC Firstside Park; what veterans need to heal for the VA Pittsburgh Veterans' Recovery Center; and how children, families and staff can transform their lives and others', too, for the Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh, which opened its $625 million, 1.5-million-square-foot Lawrenceville campus in spring of 2009.

It's a bit like a marketing firm, but quite different, too, Astorino explains. These differences are in the scribbled visions, in the processed renderings of those visions, in the New Zealand notebook, in the controlled chaos of emotions of making sense of wants and needs. fathom explores more than just the function of things, but also their texture, colors, scents and sounds--the visceral connections users have with those things. At fathom, words and feelings are privileged in tandem with, or even over, numeric values.

If all this sounds highly academic, that's because it is. fathom's a bit like a cultural anthropologist or a psychoanalyst, and Astorino is Three Rivers' Freudian Margaret Mead in pearls. Methods include one-on-one interviews, ethnography, collage generation, metaphor elicitation, color therapy and sensory analysis. These techniques enable fathom's clients to translate their users' subconscious desires into tangible priorities and design decisions. fathom can help with those decisions, and guide clients to the proper people to enact those decisions, but fathom itself is not the firm that implements the insight. "We do the thought-work," Astorino says. Meaning that fathom ferrets out what people want, then clients develop those insights further with their own marketing or branding teams.

"You have to start with a really deep understanding of who it is you're trying to reach, and that's really what we offer," says Astorino. "I'm a big believer that the emotional connection is what really enables you to capitalize on any type of opportunity because once somebody is connected in that capacity, you are memorable, you're impactful. You have a chance to really make a difference. Whereas if you miss that mark, it's gone. You can spend so much time and money and energy assuming you have the right idea, the right marking tactics, the best new product, this perfect space. But if you don't start with user-centered research, what you're doing has a chance of really missing the mark."

Astorino, a Penn State graduate who was born and raised in Pittsburgh, thinks her home-city is doing a better and better job of making that mark. She admires Pittsburgh's small business districts (Butler Street and Walnut Street in particular), its growing yoga and cycling scenes, its sprawling city parks, its arts institutions (the mother of two signs up her son and daughter for classes at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, and serves on the board at the Mattress Factory), and its stellar restaurants (Typhoon and anything Big Burrito, though she wishes for more organic and gluten-free eating-out options).

But what does Pittsburgh's thought-worker think her beloved city really needs?

"To have a louder voice. There's so much amazing stuff going on. I'd love to see even more people take the initiative to make things happen, and collaborating, and speaking up about it."

Astorino recently spoke at a TEDx Leadership Pittsburgh conference about fathom's work on the Children's Hospital. The video is posted below.

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Caralyn Green is the development news and Buzz editor at Pop City.

Photographs copyright Brian Cohen