What is our mission?

To improve urban relationships through the arts. To do that, we’re going to do three things:

1. We will create opportunities for artists to express the art that is in them. It could be show, concert, gallery opening, film, or a party. We will create these, partnering with artists, in a way that causes interaction with and between people.
2. Bring creativity to corners of our urban areas that thirst for that connection to the art. Art and its ability to touch and connect people is the means in which we aim to improve those urban relationships.
3. Have fun! We’re doing this to enjoy life and the people around us. We’re creating opportunities for others and sharing in that experience.
   

Why are we doing this?

Because we’ve experienced first hand a decline in our society; a decline in the sum of human connection that holds a society together. That intangible yet so important thing is called social capital. This is a term that Robert Putnam used in his book Bowling Alone.

In that book, Putnam demonstrated with detailed analysis that social capital is has been in a decline in America for some time. People don’t attend club meetings anymore. Families don’t have dinner together much anymore. And fewer people “invite their friends over.” These are not just academic things. Recently, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. It was easy to see that many people didn’t have strong social support networks which could sustain them through the crisis. Contrast this against the people that crossed the American frontier hundreds of years ago and how they supported each other; through winters, crises and it didn’t matter if they were family of each other’s or not. We have a very different country now. This is not isolated to an individual’s situation or behavior. This is a societal trend.

Without getting into more detail, we aim to do out part in reversing this trend. Dale Phurrough founded Social Living Productions to focus on people that live in urban environments and strengthen the relationships between one another through art.

Who is Dale Phurrough?

Dale Phurrough is driven to bring creativity…the possibility of creativity…to the world. Everything else falls from there.

After being an Army brat for 9 years, his family settled in Alabama where he completed high school. After getting his undergraduate from Georgia Tech, Microsoft saw his potential and recruited him before he graduated.

Dale spent 13 years at Microsoft in various roles, divisions, and responsibility levels including sales, development, project management, support technologies, and cross-functional team and people management. He was one of two developers responsible for the first customizable “home page” in the world and has over eight years of experience building complex internet-scale services at Microsoft which served millions of people a day around the world.

After that, you might think Dale would continue along the same trajectory. Instead, he decided to change his life to be more in line with who he was. Always craving and surrounding himself with art and creativity, Dale found a way to combine that craving with a long-term plan of his to start a business.

What is this plan and how did it get started?

When Dale was 19, he was in Atlanta, Georgia having dinner with some friends in a neighborhood called Buckhead. It was a theme restaurant which served the food on painter palettes. Suddenly, as his food was being served, Dale noticed everything going on around him. He noticed the waiter balancing the food, the bread staff on another table, a busser clearing a table, the chefs in the kitchen, the host politely queuing the customers in the lobby, and more. He recognized the coordinated “dance” of the restaurant which was thought up, then designed, and finally put into action to create a dining experience for people like him. He wanted to “dance.”

After getting his degree, Dale focused on his Microsoft career while in parallel going through options of a café, bistro, restaurant, diner, coffee shop, bar, dance club, and back to a bar. He was discovering that he enjoyed creating environments where people can socialize, listen to music, and enjoy a well made drink. Even today, he wonders if he has some Irishman in him. There’s something about the Irish pub experience and the community around it that speaks deeply to his soul.

As Dale grew his knowledge and planned his departure from Microsoft, he came to realize that there are aspects of running a bar that don’t interest him. But creating an environment for socializing, music, and drinks—ah-ha—that he did enjoy.

So what created Social Living Productions?

Dale is a member of the Burning Man community. This community is rich with artistic talent and free thinking which can challenge, as is needed, a southern boy raised in Alabama. Having been to Burning Man each year since 2002, Dale saw “burners” living their lives in very unconventional ways; creating their lives in unconventional ways. This proved to inspire him and change assumptions that he had previously made. He saw great wisdom in the gift economy which is encouraged in the Black Rock Desert. One aspect of it is its relation to social capital and how gifting can build those relations between people.

He then reflected on his own experience moving to Seattle and the Seattle experiences of cliques and standoffishness that he hears others experience. He can’t get away from art, so that was part of the mix. Dale wanted to create something together with other people; creating an environment for socializing. That is when the idea for Social Living Productions came to him.

Dale would start a business to create environments which facilitate people strengthening urban relationships. This isn’t a dating club; that is very different. Such clubs are focused on building 1:1 relationships rather than societal relationships. And they rarely include the artistic collaboration which is so important to Dale. Instead, Social Living Productions will focus on artistic shows, events, parties, and any other interactive experiences which engage their team, his artist collaborators, and the other people which live in urban cities with the intent to build their relations together—their social capital.