The Tech interactive
Community Engagement | In-Progress
Client: The Tech Interactive
Services: Community Engagement, Consulting, Research, Implementation
In 2025, Quynh-Mai Nguyen of Art Builds Community was brought on by The Tech Interactive to develop a marketing campaign to encourage the Vietnamese community to visit the museum. Art Builds Community led extensive community engagement with facilitated focus groups from different age groups to understand what the Vietnamese Community valued when it comes to experiences and receiving marketing.
Feedback from focus groups were synthesized and created into recommendations for The Tech and are currently being piloted through existing programming such as English and Vietnamese bi-lingual tours and workshops and events.
Community Day guests gather to view the hometown screening of The Empathizer inside The Tech Interactive’s New Venture Hall.
The Empathizer
film screening
One of the recommendations that were piloted through The Tech was curated programming around topics that affect the Vietnames American community for the museum’s Community Day event. A San Jose native, LA- based Vietnamese American filmmaker Fred Le was invited to screen his documentary “The Empathizer” followed by a Q&A and multigenerational Vietnamese American panel facilitated by impact producer Quyen Ngo of ViTam.
Shot over two weeks in Saigon and Hanoi, The Empathizer is a feature length documentary featuring over twenty second-generation immigrant Việt Kiều sharing their journeys back to Vietnam and the ripples that their reverse immigration may have caused among their families. The project takes a look at the effects of wartime trauma through the eyes of the children of refugees, a generation removed from the events which led to their parents’ escape from Vietnam yet deeply shaped by the circumstances of their birth.
