Living Better Together: Daily tous les jours' Mouna Andraos and Melissa Mongiat on Radical Connection, The Role of Tech, and New Urban Space
Mouna Andraos and Melissa Mongiat by Richmond Lam.
By Julia Gamolina
Mouna Andraos and Melissa Mongiat are the duo behind Daily tous les jours, an award-winning art and design studio that leads a field of practice combining performance, technology, storytelling, and public space. Using music, dance, and other media to emphasize the joyful, whimsical, and unexpected, their work creates moments of connection and care between strangers. Their recent publication Strangers Need Strange Moments Together reflects on fifteen years of transformative urban projects.
JG: I loved your book Strangers Need Strange Moments Together. Tell me about how this concept became your focus.
MA and MM: Like many people, we emerged from the pandemic questioning everything, including the relevance of our work. Was it still important to do the kind of work we were doing? The book became a way to explore these questions and reaffirm our work as a positive force in a world that’s in desperate need of positive, collective experiences.
Every chapter was an exercise in defining what our work is about and why we do it. Participating in an emergent and evolving field of practice means that the “what” is constantly evolving, but it turns out that the “why” hasn’t changed. The desire to find ways for us to live together better has always been there, and that desire is the point of origin for the proposition that “strangers need strange moments together.” Our hope is that the book can become an open invitation to peers, artists, makers, builders, and anyone else who’s interested in living better together to join the conversation.
Hello Hello. Photography by doublespace.
Riverr Lines. Photography by doublespace.
Now let's go back a little bit — Mouna, you studied Liberal Arts and Film, and Melissa, you studied graphic design to start. Tell me about the why for each focus, and how you chose where you went to school.
MA: Between physics, architecture, environmental engineering and film production, I couldn't make up my mind. Studying liberal arts allowed me to keep that wide range of interests alive, and I figured making films would allow me to focus on a different topic every couple of years as I moved from one project to another.
When I graduated, the web was emerging as this new tool that would change everything, and people were willing to hire me to learn how to make stuff with it. I quickly moved from film to the world of digital and interactive media as a means to tell and share stories. After a couple of years, I got tired of only doing this online, so I decided to bring what I learned from interactions between humans and tech back to the physical world.
MM: Storytelling was always a focus for me. I started in graphic design at UQAM School of Design in Montréal, because the subject fell somewhere in between my first two loves: visual arts and architecture. But I always felt like I was working in the margins, borrowing from other disciplines to create films, installations, and exhibitions. I felt seen when I read the description for Central Saint Martins’ multi-disciplinary MA Narrative Environments: “every space tells a story.” It was the early days of the program and we were a small class from all over the world, people working in the margins of architecture, design, film, literature, and music. Everyone had the same reaction to that one-liner on the website and applied.
“I truly believe in the importance of democratizing tech. Not just the tools, but the way the tools are made. More than ever, we need to understand what’s inside the black boxes, so we can keep some control and ensure that the tech serves us.”
Tell me about each of your experiences working for various offices before starting Daily tous les jours. What did you learn that you still apply today?
MA: I never really worked for other people’s agencies or offices. I spent a few years working with friends in the early 2000s, imagining the future of media on the internet in startup mode. Then I worked as a freelancer in UX for a few years. I learned a lot about the role of tech in our lives and in our world, and how to design tech that supports all of the facets of the human experience.
That work also made me invested in ensuring that tech remains accessible and understandable to as many people as possible. I truly believe in the importance of democratizing tech. Not just the tools, but the way the tools are made. More than ever, we need to understand what’s inside the black boxes, so we can keep some control and ensure that the tech serves us.
MM: After my MA, I co-founded a collective called Milk and Tales that worked on interactive installations in London. We notably worked for the Royal Festival Hall when it was closed for refurbishment, so we experimented outside, with the people passing by as our audience. We brought the music outside to bustling corridors and plazas, putting up interactive walls and furniture. It was magical to see the surprise on people’s faces, and how adults became kids again. I found it deeply rewarding to see a public space that people were initially just passing through become a place of possibility, exchange, expression, and creation.
I ended up also co-founding a research unit on responsive environments at Central Saint Martins Innovation called Like People Do, where we worked on keeping a human focus while exploring the potential of technology. We were working with big tech players, often introducing them to very basic means of understanding human interaction. One post-it experiment we facilitated became the foundation for an extensive wireless sensor network.
Walk Walk Dance. Photography by Bedrock Detroit.
21 Balancoires. Photography by Olivier Blouin.
What are your goals for Daily tous les jours for 2026? Where is the practice today?
Events of the past few years have only underscored how much our lives depend on other people doing their part. As interactive designers and artists, we need to rethink our practice so that it contributes to a future worth living in. Healthy, liveable cities are a critical part of the more resilient world we hope to build. We’re asking ourselves what those cities look like today, and how they can be designed to help alleviate solitude and polarization. The strength of our social fabric depends on informal connections between strangers, but the reality is that we’ve all become phone zombies. We’re working to disrupt this, and it's led us to a place of using radical care and connection when approaching urban interaction.
Looking forward, we’re trying to define what accessibility and sustainability looks like for Daily. We’re interested in the lasting social impact that projects in public space can have, how that gets carried forward in communities once the artwork becomes part of everyday life.
“We brought the music outside to bustling corridors and plazas, putting up interactive walls and furniture. It was magical to see the surprise on people’s faces, and how adults became kids again. I found it deeply rewarding to see a public space that people were initially just passing through become a place of possibility, exchange, expression, and creation.”
Looking back at it all, what have been the biggest challenges? How did you both manage through perceived disappointments or setbacks?
Working in between disciplines and creating our own genre of work, has also presented us with many unexpected challenges over the years. We had to become experts at justifying how our work fit into municipal line-item budgets.
Another challenge is being a duo of moms working in tech and the built environment, two very male-dominated worlds. Work-life balance is a big illusion, even if we’re as creative with our time management as we are with the resulting work we put out in the world.
What have you learned in the last six months?
We need to match the imagination and boldness of evil people.
Who are you admiring now and why?
We have admiration for people at the front lines in zones of conflict, for activists and politicians who don’t give up in the face of current chaos and adversity, for policy-makers enabling deep change, and for artists who continue to create new worlds and expand our notion of what is possible.
Hello Trees by Discovery Green and DTLJ. Photography by Morris Malakoff.
Daydreamer. Photography by by DTLJ.
What is the impact you’d like to have on the world? What is your core mission? And, what does success in that look like to you?
We don’t take the word impact lightly! Given the current state of the world, we need to make sure our contribution is meaningful. Sometimes that means building criteria for success relevant to feelings and emotions, and sometimes that means building criteria relevant to economics and politics in order to bring these projects to life. It's a constant dance. But the prime focus is joy and collaboration, we’re convinced that it’s critical to surviving our strange times.
Finally, what advice do you have for those starting their career? Would your advice be any different for women?
We never had a plan. We started with projects. And project by project, we started to define something bigger. Don’t wait for the big plan, just get to work. Do what you want to do. And make sure you have friends.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.