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Work For Humans
Experience Design: Creating More Meaningful Work | Abraham Burickson, Revisited
01:14:18
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- [00:04]
A
If we're having a conversation and I know exactly how it's going to go, it's not alive. If we're having conversation and we are walking down a path in myriad ways and we don't know what's going to happen, it feels live. Once we sort of take a look at the way our lives are designed, how limited the structures of our interactions are, of our movement in space, of our modes of thinking. Once we recognize them as already designed, we can understand experience design as opening that up to new possibilities. There are few realms of life that are so designed, that are so in flux now than work. It's such an exciting moment. It's why I was really happy to be talking to you.
- [00:51]
B
Welcome to the Work for Humans podcast. This is Dart Lindsley. Whenever I talk about Experience designing the show, I almost always bring up this conversation with Abraham Bergson. Twenty years ago, Abraham and his collaborators realized that they were producing art for large audiences, but only reaching a few in each group. What if they designed a work of art for one person and bent all of their efforts to making it fit that one person's unique needs? They set out to do it, and it led to a long series of highly customized experience designs, some lasting months and involving scores of artists but only one single audience member. Abraham's new book, Experience Design a Participatory Manifesto, assembles all the methods and tools and ways of thinking that they developed through building these experiences. Abraham is an author, a speaker, and a design expert with over two decades of experience exploring the design of experience. He's the Artistic Director of Odyssey Works, co Director of the Experience Design Certificate Program, Lead Experience Design Faculty at Maryland Institute College of Art. He has a background in architecture from Cornell University, where he studied the transformative power of designed experiences by studying the whirling dervishes of Turkey and the Shar of the Ecuadorian Amazon, and with countless artists, designers and students over the years. In this episode, Abraham and I talk about the design that he and his colleagues have done at Odyssey Works, how managers can design experience at work, and about companies as platforms for co creating such experiences. We also discuss why experience is not totally designable, the experiences created by even static products, the power of the origin stories and myths around organizations, and other topics. So when you enjoy this episode, don't forget to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. And now I'm very pleased to bring you this conversation with Abraham Berkson. Abraham Berkson, welcome to Work for Humans.
- [03:10]
A
Oh, it's an absolute pleasure.
- [03:12]
B
On this podcast, we've been sort of walking a path. As we've moved forward and this conversation has been happening in public, it's become increasingly clear that work and the experience of work is a design problem or a design opportunity. And the further we got into it by talking to a lot of different people. We've had Joe Pine on the show, We've had Teodi Han, who I saw in some of the pictures in some of your videos and a number of others. What we've realized is that the kind of design problem or opportunity is, is an experience, design problem or opportunity. And that opens up a lot of questions about what that practice is. And a part of what it means is that every manager is an experienced designer or needs to be, and is that even possible for that to be the case? And how does one make that practical? And so you've recently written a book called Experience A Participatory Manifesto, and you have a course offering in it. And I want to get into that, but I want to start off with one of your previous books and one of the things that you've talked about in the past, which is Odyssey Works, because there's a way in which I see that as probably a platform for discovering the things, many of the things that have gone into the book. So what is OdysseyWorks?
- [04:33]
A
You know, first I want to say, Dart, that I'm really excited to be talking to you because what you just said, what you've been discovering, that work is an experience. Design is something that I'm incredibly interested in. This is a conversation I've been looking forward to having more. We don't have it enough. And I hope that perhaps in our conversation today as we we can draw a thread from this weird performance group that did experimental crazy stuff for 20 plus years from there to what it is to design the experience of work to be not just more pleasant, but more meaningful. I hope we can draw that line in a way that makes sense, because it makes sense to me. And I think that if we put these together, sometimes something really beautiful can appear. And perhaps that's why I wrote the book, the most recent book. So Odyssey Works was founded in 2001, so it's a while ago now. And it was founded by myself and my dear friend Matthew Perdon. And it was based on a question. It was based on a question around art making. I was a writer and an architect practicing those two things. He was a theater maker and a painter. And everybody is talking about how you sort of create your work and you cast it out into the world. And you hope that somebody really gets it. And it's this kind of wide net approach. And we don't really question it, but we often have these kind of off the cuff truisms like, well, you know, if one person is changed by my work, then it was worth it. And so we were saying, well, what if we just made the work for that one person and let that one person be changed for it and not bother with all the other people who think it's not worthwhile. And that led us down a path. And that path led us to creating weekend long, week long, months long performances for one person audiences. And we had a huge crew of artists and designers, of architects, of craftspeople who would get together and study all the material we could gather about our one audience member to try to create a transformative experience for them. We would have them fill out these enormous questionnaires, takes up up to 10 hours to fill out. We would listen to all the music they love. We would go visit their home, talk to their mothers, go for walks with them, go to the sauna with them, just try to be completely immersed in our audience member such that we began to think and see through their eyes as much as possible. If this strikes a familiar note for anybody who's ever fallen in love, that's sort of what we were doing. We were falling in love without all the dating baloney, you might say, right? There's wonderful things that happen when you fall in love with somebody. You open to a whole new world. Maybe you learn to love things you didn't love before. Maybe you learned to hear music in a new way. This is part of the brilliance of it. And similarly, when one falls in love with one's children, if one has children, you start to see the world through their eyes. And part of that is this innate practice of empathetic research that we automatically long to go into. It's not a job, it's an opportunity. I have a child, I have somebody I'm in love with. I long to find out what it would be like to see through their eyes. This, I would argue, is the most natural approach to design that there is. And we're still making these experiences. We're not not doing this anymore. But we spent two plus decades creating these because what we found out is that our work was far more interesting than the original idea had suggested. Our work brought questions to us as artists, as makers, as designers that we didn't know we had. And some of those questions, many of those questions, were what we would later understand to be Experience design questions such as what are the contexts that we have to create in order to make it possible for an individual to be open to hearing a piece of music or to be in the right physical state, to feel like they are going on a journey? Or what is actually the purpose of surprise, of discovery? How do relational moments change us? How do we balance times of quiet and times of engagement to generate the effect that we want to have? I think at the beginning we had a kind of hubristic notion that we could know the person perfectly, like they do in the movies. Whenever somebody's manipulating somebody, they just know them perfectly, like in that Michael Douglas movie, the Game. And they know everything, every way they're going to react. If you're going to turn left, you're going to turn right, whatever it is, and how you're going to feel about it. And what we discovered was that this both was not possible and quite arrogant, but also not the goal. Actually, what we wanted to do was to use these experience design tools to create contexts within which something was possible experientially that had not been possible before. Some kind of relationship, some kind of opportunity to behold something. I think many of us go to museums and have a hard time with, say, the structure of a museum. They've done research and they've found that people spend. I forget what the number is and it keeps changing. I've heard the numbers. I don't know. 19 seconds in front of any piece of art. These are great works of art. These are things that are created over long periods of time. Some of them meant for beholding it in extended moments. And they are not designed for 19 seconds engagements. And, you know, I think many of us feel frustrated. We did an odyssey once where we invited a whole group of people to a museum in San Francisco, the De Young Museum. And we had our own tour guide. And the whole purpose of that tour was to spend more time with the art. It was very simple. We had our tour guide and this was part of an odyssey. For somebody who's actually my wife, and because she likes to view art in this way, she doesn't want to rush through. She's a curator herself of Native American art. And 19 seconds, remember that number. We went in, we looked at the first piece of art for five minutes, and that was jarring. We started to see the way that just slowing down the pace because there are timescales and rhythms built into our experience designs just messing with that transformed the space. People started to gravitate towards us. We went into the next piece Seven Yorkshire Landscapes by David Hockney. We spent 15 minutes there. 15 minutes. It sounds like nothing for a great work of art. 15 minutes. And we had come in with, I don't know, 20 people. And we started accruing people. And by the end we went to do this piece called Anti Mass. And we were there for a half an hour and we stood quietly just taking it in. It was so jarring. By that point, we had accrued over 50 people in the room. The guards were so unsettled. I heard one say to another one, what are they doing? And the other one said, I don't know, I think they're looking at the art. It was ostensibly what a museum is for, but in a way a redesign of the experience design of the world, led by just this one performer who was not performing anything weird, but just changing the way that we engage with space and we engage with time so that we could have a totally different experience. It's revelatory when we do these things, it's nothing. What, we spent a little more time with a piece of art. This is the power of experience design.
- [13:13]
B
On work for humans. We've been exploring the principles of multi sided management, which is the belief that work is a product that every company designs, builds and delivers to employees. Along the way, people started asking how they could put these ideas into practice. So I founded the work design firm Elevenfold to help your company grow, create the kind of work that makes teams feel alive and engaged instead of dead and dull, so you can reduce turnover and build commitment. We're doing something revolutionary here. Learn more@elevenfold.com that's one one f o l d.com you've answered some of my questions already. I'm going to restate them and I'm going to sort of the things I was going to ask. So you're creating an artwork for an individual or an experience for an individual based very deeply on that one individual's whatever you can learn about them. And one of the questions that I was going to ask is, is the intent specific or is the intent emergent? Which is you're dealing with one of the central problems of experience design in general, which is that no matter how well I craft your experience, no matter how much I know about you, it's always going to be experienced in an incredibly complex way based upon your context, your history. And it makes me want to give up. And I say this in the context of work too, that as a manager, if you're a curator of experience, you curate experiences and then you can't predict. Like, the way people respond to those experiences is completely unpredictable. And it will change from team to team and it will change from person to person. Then the question becomes, is it so out of your control that it can't be designed with intent?
- [15:02]
A
I mean, I think you're putting your finger very quickly on the great mental shift that we have to engage in in order to engage in experience design. I'm trained as an architect. I teach in a graphic design program. There is a mania for control in the design world. This reached its peak during modernism. The idea that we could totally design people's lives with a house, with an environment, with a piece of art. It's like the architect in the Matrix. If you've seen that he's sitting in his room full of screens and complaining that he had designed the perfect world and people rejected it. Why did they reject it? It was too perfect and they wanted to mess with it. I think the writers put their finger on it there. Experience is not designable. So experience design is an impossibility and brilliant. And what it requires is transforming the designer's obsession with the unknown, with chance as something to be controlled for, something to be fixed, changing that from a bug to a feature. Because this is life. Life is the unknown. If we're having a conversation and I know exactly how it's going to go, it's not life, it's not alive. If we're having conversation and we are walking down a path in myriad ways and we don't know what's going to happen, it feels live, it has liveness. This is the unknown. Experience is life. It's not a problem. This is also the other mania of ordinary design, of thing based design, I like to call it, which is that you find a problem and you fix it. It's very one to one. I am designing for a better way to sit because we sit wrong. So I make a better chair. But experience design is an engagement with life, with all this wild complexity of the unknown. And I am not designing to fix the way we sit. I am designing to create the possibility of an experience of engagement with the body and this kind of posture that allows me to speak to you in a better way. So it's not that we can't have any agency. Quite to the contrary. The design of conditions is the invitation of our audience to have possibilities that were not available to them beforehand. Experience design is not actually about limiting, it's about opening it up. And once we sort of take a look at the way our lives are designed, how Limited. The structures of our interactions are of our movement in space, of our modes of thinking are. Once we recognize them as already designed, we can understand experience, design as opening that up to new possibilities. You talk about work on your podcast. I think there are few realms of life that are so designed, and there are fewer realms of life that are so in flux now and so in a space of experiment than work. It's such an exciting moment. It's why I was really happy to be talking to you.
- [18:21]
B
There's a couple things I want to clarify for the audience about. What do you call one of the things that the Odyssey works? Creates? Is it a piece?
- [18:31]
A
We call them Odysseys.
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B
You call them Odysseys. Okay, so there's one audience member. How many artists are generally involved? What's the range of number of artists and types in one Odyssey?
- [18:42]
A
It depends on the Odyssey. It depends. But we've had as few as 15 and. And as many as 100, depending on how you count it. One of the primary elements to creating an Odyssey is that it's an experience for everyone. It's not just for that one person. In fact, you might actually say, oh, that one person is just offering the gift of a world into which the rest of us can step, into which the rest of us can start to reflect. This is another kind of switch from ordinary theater or design or whatever it is. You know, an ordinary design. You design your thing, you send it out into the world, and you go the other direction. In Odyssey works, we would take the material, and we didn't feel like we could genuinely create for somebody unless we were wrestling with the things they were wrestling with relative to ourselves, unless we were some way feeling we were in relationship to them. And yeah, it's a terrible business model.
- [19:53]
B
Right. But also it's very. It's interesting, right, that to go to one, an audience of one, you end up with an artist team of sometimes a hundred. It's like a switch as a complete flip. And what I imagine is, I imagine these groups of artists together immersing themselves in what they've learned about this person. I imagine them collectively in a room talking through who this person really is and what they love and what they don't love and what their situation is. It seems like one of the most, you know, Stacy Barton I had on the show, she does experience design for Disney for bespoke events. So one time, events that happen. And she said that all theater anyway has to be about the audience member or the audience member will walk away. She's done a lot of street theater. And it seems to me that one of the most overwhelming experiences of this is simply being seen. And one of the most overwhelming experience of being the subject of an Odyssey is being attended to independent of what the Odyssey is. You're nodding, but do your scripts evolve during the telling? Do you adapt along the way to things that are happening?
- [21:16]
A
Yeah, I think the answer is yes. And we don't exactly work with scripts. Our primary mode of structuring what we do is the diagram. And this is because the script is based on a particular tradition, filmmaking theater, which traditionally doesn't have the interactive live component. We use scripts, we use storyboards sometimes. But we find that working with diagrams helps us determine for ourselves what the experiential aim is first. So we say, oh, we really want this person to have ultimately a sense of freedom. Let's say this is the goal here. And we have an idea that if we move through a kind of series of engagements, we can get there based on what we understand, all of our research, that when this person has thought about a lot of things really intensely and had a good intellectual engagement, when this person has had a good physical engagement, something releases in them. Why do we know this? Because the stories they've told us. And so we build a diagram that is used as a working model. Not a fixed model, but a working model for how we are going to structure our time together. And it's really interesting. Then we'll have scripts or all kinds of fixed media inside of that. Maybe there's a piece of music composed by the composer. Maybe as our participant is riding the subway, two people who happen to be on the same train car walk up beside him and, you know, hang from the. You know, hold on to the bar above and start having a conversation that is seeding a bunch of information that, you know, that's all very scripted. But the beauty of the diagram is that we can share it with everybody. We can graphically communicate quite clearly what it is that we're trying to do in such a way that everybody is responsible to that before they're responsible to the minutiae of their particular scene. So I'm thinking about this one performance from 2012 where we were working with this person who was very smart, and we went through all these kind of intellectual, fun engagements. And then we'd all agreed after a week together of thinking and talking and dreaming about the person, that we wanted him to walk 10 miles carrying a rock. And there was more narratively to this, more reason for this. But then we did this right, and so he sort of has this long adventure built around the sort of myth of Sisyphus, which these people on the subway are telling each other. And he's walking. He's dropped off at the top of Manhattan, and he's given an address. And he walks to the bottom of Manhattan. And it's a hot day. And he has all kinds of adventures just on his way there. And then he meets me. And I have a scene worked out. It's not necessarily scripted word for word, because I work mostly in improvisation. But it's structured, and it has an aim to kind of structure a kind of conversation around a question that we had for him. And when he showed up, in order to transition him to the next scene where he'll be kidnapped and wake up in an entirely new life out of the city, we wanted him to be ready for this kind of transformational moment. And so I was going to bring up these topics. And he shows up in this little house that we had inside of a park in the East Village. And I was all ready to go with this. And my experiential aim was to invite him into a contemplative place. And he shows up, and he is deep in a contemplative place. He has been spending hours thinking about life and then just being quiet. It was. The last hour had just been a walking meditation for him. And we hadn't understood that. We hadn't planned on that. Instead, you know, I was about to go into my thing, and then I remembered, okay, I have to investigate what is the goal here? Because I'm in service of the experience I'm trying to create. Not in what I've scripted here. And then I just sat with him. We had a little meal planned. And then instead of some crazy kidnapping moment, I simply invited him into the crate that was prepared for him. And it was a quiet moment of purposefully walking forward. As opposed to kind of a crazy kidnapping. I think of all of these moments in our work as Odyssey works, as these kind of laboratory experiments and experience design. How can we remain true to our experiential goal in a moment when we have a script, when we've structured what we're trying to do? How do we build in that sense of responsibility for everybody on a team.
- [26:21]
B
That's a much more reliable and robust way to do it if you can do it. Which is that everybody understands the objective, not the tactics.
- [26:32]
A
Right? And I would argue a large part of the reason that doesn't happen is because of our communication. I work with companies and OdysseyWorks has a certificate program, it's a year long program. And I come into places and they have goals. Right. They have mission statements or mission questions, and they're on the wall. People see them and they sort of sit there like aphorisms. They're not frequently made actionable at every step of the path. And so when I work with people, I work with them to try to reconnect their current work with those mission statements. Right. And it's super effective, but it needs something to carry it. Graphic communication can do that because it requires us to continually ask the question, what is the form I'm working in? Because otherwise we're rendering ourselves into the details. It's like if a house was built with a set of instructions that started with the doorknob, ended with the tiles, and it was just a list, we would have trouble understanding what that house was supposed to feel like. Right. I think once we look at various different traditions, design traditions, but other traditions of practice, we see ways that they've solved for this problem. You know, I love the section cut as an architectural tool. I did used to teach also in architecture programs, and I love it because it has in it a way of understanding space. It invites us to understand the space we occupy, where a floor plan is sort of more of a practical thing and you know, a stage play. It's very hard to understand just reading word by word until you get to the end and have a conversation, say, with a dramaturg, what the play is really about. But perhaps if you had a diagram, you could know that from the beginning.
- [28:28]
B
So the second cut is something where you see the architecture from the side. Is that what it is? It's a lot more like the first person experience of somebody in that space. As opposed to the God's eye view of somebody thinking about that space.
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A
Exactly, exactly.
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B
The kind of God's eye view that creates cities like Brasilia, for instance, that are completely uninhabitable. Or, you know, Courvoisier. Did I say that right? Courvoisier.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Who had these intellectual ideas of what a building should be, but not what the first person experience of somebody living in that building might be.
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A
Yeah, you know, I took a pilgrimage to Brasilia. I don't know if you.
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B
It's on my list because I want to go look at it.
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A
Yeah, yeah. It's in the middle of nowhere, which I guess was kind of the point. And I mean, I love modernist architecture. I love how beautiful and experimental it is. It's so exciting. And I, I went there, you Know, having seen the pictures, and I walked the center city. And it was a terrible experience because they sort of didn't care about the human body in motion. Right. It was all about the car in motion. And you don't hear that right. But what you see in architecture magazines or the textbooks or whatever is like these kind of fetishes of the. The. Of the single object. And those are exciting. But the primary experience, the embodied experience, is of being a lone body on the highway going from point to point, which is not good, right?
- [30:00]
B
Yeah. Okay, That's a really good analogy. So I have a piece called the Origin of the Work for Humans Philosophy. And what it came from originally was some friends and I climbed the Golden Gate Bridge. We climbed up one of the long strands that goes up to the top. And what I experienced there was an object designed by humans, but not for humans. That was the big thing that came away from me for that, besides, you know, fear and other things, but just that this enormous object had been made by humans, but not for humans. And then once sensitized to it, I could start perceiving that in other situations, some of them were physical, like crossing a bridge or walking through Brasilia. Sounded like, for you, it was designed by people, but not with you in mind. It didn't see you. You know, a good design sees you going through the security checkpoint in an airport is one of those places. It's designed by humans, but not for humans. And I would argue that most work is designed by humans, but not for humans. And that that's the fundamental feeling that you get when you're in work and you don't like it, is that it doesn't see you. It is designed for some other objective.
- [31:19]
A
Yes, I think. I love that you keep saying it is designed. It is designed. It is designed. Because I think one of the things that keeps us from changing things is this notion that. That it simply is. This is how work is. You go to work, you stay, you punch your clock, you sit at the computer, you have this kind of chair, whatever, and that's how it is. And maybe somebody invented something to try to intervene in that. So there was a little design, but the whole thing is just the world as it is. And I think from an experience design perspective, we can take a look and say, even though there's not some one person who sat down and said, this is how we shall work, it is a designed experience. Not just work, travel, families, cities, communities, religions. All of these things are the products of human choices that are experience designs. Whether the people who are thinking, creating them, we're considering them as experience designs or not. And once we look think about things this way, we can say, okay, what is the experience design I'm working with? What are the experiential affordances of every element of this design? We can be really analytical. We can get down to the nitty gritty. What is the relationship between the wheels on my chair and the community that I am entering into in this place? What design aspects of this community? Because we spend a lot of time there, less now. But are we not there? Are we still part of it? If we're at home, we're still in community.
- [33:03]
B
We're still in the community, right?
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A
Design choices have made this community support toxic individuals or not support them, support an inefficiency in our mode of making, or not support them, denigrate the relationship between our most important values and the work we're doing, or support that. These are all design decisions. And we can see by looking at various different places where people are working in various different ways, they're experiencing life, that there are design decisions that have been made and they affect these things. And we need not take it for granted, take any of these things for granted. And fortunately, we're in this time of vast experiment which is going to yield all kinds of results. We think we're sort of done, okay, zoom, not zoom. Maybe we need to come back to work. Sounds very like singular choice, but in fact, we are using ourselves as guinea pigs to look at what it means. I was working with a bunch of my students, my experience design students at the college where I teach during Deep Pandemic when we were just having classes online. And I said, look sort of the same, right? I mean, we come to class, you go home, you have your homework, you see the people in the class, we have conversations. And it's much easier for me to give you links to interesting media. So everybody's saying, it's worse. Why is it worse? And they had some comments. I said, let's do some research. And so they spent a couple of weeks just taking notes. We asked the question, when are you in class? When are you in school? Like as an experience and when are you out? And what did you used to engage with in school? And what do you no longer engage with in school? And one of the things that kept coming up was people talking about the time before and after class when they would just run into each other, or the time when they would just wander to people's desks and talk about something totally irrelevant. This kind of in world experience of being in school, which allowed them to feel they were. Scholars like to use that word sometimes because it sort of implies a kind of avidity for the activity. Right. It encouraged it. Right. And there's so much to that. And at home, we're in a world that has totally different things. What is the world of your home? It's very different for some people, especially students who've kind of been moved into a denatured space. I work mostly with grad students. They're not in dormitories, and so they've had to make their home. And it's some sort of recreation of where they came from with some aspiration. Maybe there's a community of friends, but it doesn't have this fullness. And so it was very difficult. I mean, we saw so much mental health issues coming up during Pandemic amongst our students and amongst everyone. Of course, the obvious thing is because of loneliness, but I would argue that we were without the contextual support that made us capable of being who we wanted to be in the world. That's the question I think we can ask in a bigger way about work now.
- [36:26]
B
So what I want to do is. And by the way, something that nobody probably mentioned, but it occurred to me while you were talking about that is school is sexy. You never know who you're going to meet. You're with people, you're forming relationships, you're making eye contact in a very different way. And humans care.
- [36:47]
A
I agree so much because that's the unknown, that is the space of potentiality, of possibility, and that is what is sexy. That's also why we love cities. Why would we love a place where it's where we live in a tiny box and don't have a backyard and have to be on a stinky subway? Because we are constantly engaging with the sexy possibility of what might happen.
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B
Christopher Alexander, who we were talking about earlier, he has a chapter on cafes and why they work, why public cafes work, and he says it's a platform for possibility. You just don't know. It's not like home. You might meet somebody, you might, you know, see somebody. I don't know. It's just. It's much more magical.
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A
Yeah. Because liveness requires the unknown.
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B
So let's talk about the curriculum of an experienced designer and what goes into your course. What's in the book? Because here's the greatest fear of this conversation is that somebody in business is listening to this and says, this is too groovy for me to implement. I don't know how to implement this because I don't have an army of artists and I can't pay attention to every individual person with this level of detail. I actually would argue management is scaled to do that. Management can get very specific with people. But let's do talk about the curriculum and what's actually learnable and what isn't.
- [38:13]
A
I love that question. Just a couple days ago, we had a conversation with a couple of our students. One runs an entrepreneurial incubator and the other does product at Wells Fargo. And we were talking about the questions of, you know, how do you engage these ideas at scale just to address this kind of head on? Not so much it wasn't so much about HR, but about sort of processes within teams. And one of the things we kept coming back to because these are folks who are in our program but are already applying the concepts that we work with and the concepts that are in my book. One of the things that kept coming up is this idea that you have to begin, and this is what I've been sort of coming back to in our conversation. You have to begin with clarity around your experiential aim and an actionable understanding of how to apply that. So it's not just the motto or the mission statement or the mission question up on the wall, it's how are we going to manifest this all the way down the line? How is everybody on the team going to get on board? It's something we come up against quite a bit. We're working on a consulting project right now. We're with an organization who's with a team of project managers in an organization. They say, well, we work with the artists below us and the money people above us. And they don't. Not only don't they talk, understand each other, but they don't even speak the same language and they're moving in different directions and we are stuck in the middle like the middle child. And one of the main tools that is there is this notion of engaging a phase zero approach. We call this phase zero, the phase when you set down this experiential goal, you articulate it, you diagram it, and then you take a look at your processes with leadership and you say, how is this experiential aim going to be manifest through our process? And then you get everybody on board. The beginning of the conversation is not your job is to go out and do market research. The beginning of the conversation is your job is in the context of this experiential goal, which is related to our mission. But the goal of this project of this activity, whatever it is, of this team, you have to play this role. You are invited to play this role, but you need to understand it in that context. So that if the participant gets to your house and you're about to have this conversation with him about something deep and you find he's in a different state, you got to pivot. Same thing if you're the researcher, if you're doing market research and you find something totally different that informs, not this little question that you've been asking because it does, but is related to the bigger experiential goal of your team and of your organization. You pivot and you pivot in a way that everybody up and down the line understands it. This is real alignment. And then the money people and the artists, even though they have different roles, even though they're playing different parts, are still working the same question, they're working the same problem. But to go back to your question about curriculum, there's essentially the fact that this way of thinking applies to all ways of making that are for people. It doesn't matter if you're making an app, a one on one odyssey, if you're doing scientific experiments, if you're creating a workplace, starting this way makes it possible for you to stay true, as it were, to the experiential aim. The curriculum of our program lays out a series of tools for experience design and gives people an opportunity to practice with them and to work with them. And these are tools such as how do you create experiential narrative? What is world building and how does one actually do it? And I'm not talking about Narnia or Westworld, but I kind of am, because it's actually the same activity to design Westworld as to design a college or as to design a workplace. There's a lot of the same principles involved. What are the tools of relationality, of engaging with the unknown, of structuring the potential for people's attention to move in particular ways that can be applied across fields? And we have artists and we have bankers and entrepreneurs and scientists and engineers, all kinds of people. And that is, by, pardon the word, again, design. Because experience design wants to be inherently interdisciplinary. You perhaps have an experiential aim that is beyond your capacities as an HR person, as an architect, as whatever you are. The experiential aim drives the collaboration. It says I need to hire somebody who is a sound designer, I need to hire a chef, I need to hire somebody who's really good at agile processes. Whatever it is, the experience drives it. And Then you change the team. Otherwise you're constantly protecting a certain personal territory around work. But if your organization works towards an experiential goal, there's a fluidity there. And because of that, we have a wildly interdisciplinary and diverse team. So they do. We work with those basic principles of experience design, which are the principles essentially in my new book. And then they go off and do lived research. Because you need to live experiences. That doesn't mean you don't do research. We have people read books, they ask a question, right? It's sort of this process in miniature. What do you want to know? What do you want to discover? Read the books, talk to the people and go out and do the things, but do them with the question clear in mind. And then they come back, they use their learnings to push the field forward and then to develop a proposal for a final project, which is where our students in this current cohort are now. They're tearing their hair out a little bit because that project gets presented publicly in New York in November. So those are the three stages. It's essentially a master's program or an mfa, maybe a three year MFA squished down into a single year.
- [44:39]
B
So first of all, there's one thing that you pointed out in one of your TED talks that is different from. From something that we've talked about on the podcast before, which is Joe Pine describes the progression of economic value. And it starts off with goods, and then it goes to products, and then it goes to services, and then it goes to experiences, and then it goes to transformations. And that he sees the whole economy moving in that direction. But one of the things in your TED talk that I thought was fundamentally different is that you see products, static products, like this pen I'm holding in my hand, as being an experience, as invoking an experience, and that the experience of the product is in there, right? You show a picture of a whole wall of spoons, just different kinds of spoons. They might all feed you from a utilitarian perspective, but they are all different experiences of eating. I just think it's super important to point that out. And you said it before, you said experiences are everywhere, but experiences are baked into products. Absolutely static products as well, because otherwise it's very easy to think of experience as it always looks like theater. It always looks like something I can walk into and be inside. It always looks immersive. It's not always immersive. And so you define experience very broadly. And I think it's very liberating.
- [46:06]
A
I think it's really important. You know, we're spirits of the material world, as they say, right. And I don't care about this pen. I mean, I have a love of pens, actually. You know, I'm a writer and I love the pen that feels right in the hand and that I can write well with and that. That is part of me doing some piece of writing that I feel good about. But it's. It's not the pen per se, but what the pen is catalyst for. And we can get really hung up on the way a Muji pen looks and how much it costs and its translucency. But I would argue that the reason we love it is because it suggests a possible experience, a way of engaging that we like. And perhaps it facilitates that anything that we make, we. We can understand as an experience. And if we do understand it as an experience, we're asking the question, not is this the best iPhone, but how is this object impacting my life, my community, the culture at large, my work, my quiet time, and what is its role there? And are my design decisions about this iPhone? I did not design the iPhone. Are these design decisions serving those aims? Everything is part of that. Think about food. I mean, think about how your best experiences of food probably involve the wonderful sensory moment of eating the food, but also involve the relational moment of who you are with, also involve the contextual moment of where you are also involved, the narrative moment of how that meal connects to a story of your life that you wish to celebrate. These things happen inside of an. They are parts of an experience. Design. I think no matter what we make, we can start thinking about it as a part of an experience and a part of a context. That requires, of course, a little bit of letting go of control, because it's just a part. And not only is it just a part of. It's a part that perhaps facilitates an experience but does not control it. It has experiential affordances, but those affordances aren't as tight as perhaps design affordances are in our minds and this kind of traditional notion of thinking about it. So there's a little bit of sort of humility that has to come in, but the other thing that it does, and I think you've spoken to this, is instead of saying, oh, well, it's an experience, it doesn't matter what the stuff is. No, it really matters what the stuff is, because the stuff really affects us. If that smell of that sauna that you go to, if it's too strong, you may not feel immersed in it. If it smells like some moment in childhood, you may have the wrong association to really feel it. In fact, the demands upon craft are both much greater and more measurable in a certain sense. Whereas before we're like, okay, well, it's a great, It's a great piece of architecture because it looks really good and it's in this tradition. It's a very relativistic approach. Right. How do we say what beautiful is? There's been so much arguments about this. Maybe we put aside beautiful or good in traditional modes and say, okay, what is the experiential outcome of an engagement with this design? Is it doing what I hoped it would do? Am I feeling what I hoped I would feel when engaging with this? And if it is not, it's failing. Right. And if it is, then there's something in the craft that makes it so. It's actually much more measurable than traditional product, traditional design.
- [50:01]
B
A couple things sparked for me there. One, you know, Christopher Alexander, who we talked about earlier, he said that great architecture is defined by the events that keep on happening there.
- [50:12]
A
Yes.
- [50:13]
B
It's the events that are catalyzed that are important. So what would you think about describing companies this way in relation to how they work with work, which is that they are actually a platform for co creation of experience, as opposed to delivering experience to you. Here it is, it's in a package, it's for you, it's much more. We're going to have a palette for you. We're going to create a platform within which you have range of motion to co create experience as somebody working there.
- [50:47]
A
Absolutely right. And we can think of a company or an organization as creating possibilities of ways of being both internally and externally. We are having impact on the world, and we are having impact by somehow putting something out into the world. And we are having impact by gathering small, medium enormous numbers of people together around a particular experiential aim. What if all those people were really aligned not just because work means you gotta get up and go to work, which is true to a certain extent, but because there is a certain experiential aim which may be sort of broadly defined, maybe an open question, maybe a collective exploration that we are engaged in together. I think you hear about small groups of people changing the world. There's incredible, there's sort of this logarithmic power. When people get together, their power multiplies and they can do so much more. Real collaboration is both, of course, incredibly challenging, but also incredibly powerful. And when those people get together around the same aim, there's energy there. And there's the possibility of changing the internal world and the external world. And everyone is involved in developing the culture, developing the world that is creating that output. But the people in charge are absolutely first and foremost world builders. They are experienced designers. They have to not so much have a vision that is so smart that it will create the right product and get people to work hard, but they have to vision how to create a world that invites people to make their best work and feel fulfilled and to have an impact on the external world that is in alignment their phase zero with their experiential aim.
- [52:53]
B
I want to talk for a second about narrative. Had John Truby on the show who wrote the Anatomy of Genres. And we spoke about the stories that play out in work and how sometimes work is a detective novel and sometimes it's a love story, and sometimes it's a horror story, and sometimes it's all these different narrative patterns. And we talked about the beats that happen throughout a story. So would you say that the concept of a beat in a narration is similar to the experience objective that might be at one point in one of your diagrams, in one of your experience diagrams?
- [53:36]
A
To a certain extent, it depends on the diagram. Maybe what I would take from what you're talking about is there's a time structure and there's a rhythmic structure to our engagement with any activity. And that rhythmic structure helps us to develop a narrative in which we are a player. That makes sense. One of the things I talk about in the program and in my book about world building is this engagement with narrative. It's sort of a truism. We're always engaged with narrative. It's the sea we swim in. Frank Rose would say. But we can ask the question, what is the way that we are currently engaging in narrative together and are we engaging in the same narrative and what does it take? And there's one of the brilliant sort of moves of world building is creating a narrative structure within which anybody who wishes to be in that world will feel they can engage. And the keystone to this is the origin story, the origin myth of any world. And organizations, companies, universities, artist groups, everybody is constantly telling and refining and retelling and trying to convince you of that origin story. And if it's a well done origin story, if it's compelling, if it has this sense of the magical which all the really good ones seem to have, there's often something supernatural. I would argue most nations are founded in their origin myths by these supernaturally powerful people. I mean, what were they like in real life, you know, probably a little more ordinary. But the beginning is this kind of supernatural activity. We are constantly reading these biographies of these great founders who are geniuses. What is a genius? A genius is kind of a supernatural quality, right? They have brilliance from another place. They're like prophets, right? And they bring this, and this is the origin story. And then everybody who's there is then relating their story, if it's a good one, if that world is well built, they're relating their story to that origin story. How am I supporting this? How am I maintaining the world in alignment with the origin story? Or how are you bad person not maintaining the world in alignment with that origin story? I did some work at Apple, and if you go to Apple and walk around, people are talking about their founder, Steve Jobs, as if he's still there. Because that origin story, the story of Steve Jobs, is so strong that people there wish to remain in relationship to that story. There's a structure of work. There's a structure of maintaining a narrative. There's timescales, there's activities, there's constant checkings in with one's own narrative and how it relates to the narrative of the origin story that allow this thing to be maintained. There's events, there's rituals, all these things maintain a relationship to that origin story. And really effective organizations, places where people want to be are places where that story is meaningful to them because it sort of contains the phase zero. It contains the aim of the place in a way that even a diagram, much as I love diagrams, couldn't do.
- [57:08]
B
It's a very interesting thing because in every company that I've been in, the conversation has always been, we're not like we used to be. That's always there. And that's partially because there's a myth of what we ever were that we're comparing ourselves to, which is highly idealized,
- [57:28]
A
you know, and it's always like that everywhere. Our country is not what it used to be.
- [57:33]
B
Exactly.
- [57:34]
A
College is not what it used to be. Families are not what they used to be. And this activity is the measuring of the present against the origin myth. It will never be like it used to be. And that is a kind of upward pressure. It's a moral pressure from the ideal of the origin toward some sort of activity. It's productive in a certain sense because the people who are saying that are saying, let us figure out how to get there. Of course, this can be used for ill or good, depending on what that origin myth is. And we fight over those origin myths we argue over them. But if, you know, if you have a myth that your company used to be really ethical and did great things and was very supportive of its employees, if that's. And you feel like it's not going, that you have two choices, right? If you feel there are people in leadership who are trying to bring us, bring your team in that direction, then the narrative you have is, I am part of trying to get back to the goodness, get back to the greatness. And if you feel that people are pushing against it, if you feel they are not supporting that the original moral core of your organization, the ethical basis of it and your story is that we are not what we used to be. You become disaffected organizations or you're the resistance all the time, or you're the resistance, you know, or you quit.
- [58:54]
B
You're the rebel. The rebel force or something like that, right?
- [58:58]
A
I mean, I think so many people have such a hard time when they go to a place and it was supposed to be so great, and they come and they find the story isn't true. There's nothing worse than finding that the story is not true, that what you were told, it's a loss of faith. And those are terrible moments.
- [59:15]
B
I want to talk about the diagrams. Joy Mountford, who's at Ford at the moment, but she was at Apple for a decade. She was the head of user experience there. She writes scores. They look like musical scores. When you interact with a Ford autonomous car, what's the sound, what's the vision, what's the smell? What's the touch that you're going to have at each moment of that experience? For instance, what do your diagrams look like? I know it's at the top. At the top we have, here's the experience objective and that's going to be the guiding for everything below it. But what are the strands or what's the structure?
- [59:55]
A
Well, they're all different depending upon what we're trying to do. So if that sounds like a cop out, perhaps it is. But I can describe sort of a simpler one that in our Odyssey works experiences that we've come back to, which is essentially a graph on an x, Y axis where we're plotting two things against each other. It's a time based experience. So we start from zero, we move to the end, from left to right, and then we have the Y axis up and down. And then we're measuring two things against each other. Or we're measuring one thing in the positive and the negative. Like a physically engaged experience and an intellectually engaged experience. So the top is intellectual, bottom is physical. And then we look at all these pieces and we first draw an arc. We draw this arc and we start, say, this is the arc of movement from the intellectual to the physical to something else that we want to get through. This is the main experiential through line that everything else needs to hang off of. And then we start filling in underneath that arc. There's an arc on the top, actually, for the intellectual, and an arc on the bottom for the physical. And so some things go really high and some things go really low. And we sort of build out these little boxes for the various different scenes. Sort of like touch points as we move along. They're somewhat to scale, but you can see where they are. And then we start layering other parameters on top of that. Like, what is the pace of this scene, how fast moving, how slow moving is it? Or perhaps we'll layer on that. What is the environment in which this is happening? What is the aesthetic quality of that environment? And then we throw in a few details. This then is a working document. It is not actually just to tell other people what we've come up with. Then we have this little machine, and then we sit down with the team and we're like, oh, well, if we can, maybe if we push the physical engagement up a little higher in this scene and slow that one down, let's see what it looks like. And then let's. Let's prototype that. Let's test it out, let's run through it and see how that affects us. And we can start to use that as a little research machine, just a thought experiment machine, so that our editing process happens on. On the diagram. And then we go and work out the details. We start from the big picture, which is that experiential aim, Work out the details. Otherwise, if we weren't doing it that way, we might write a long script and then say, okay, what was the emotional arc of this? How did that happen? But there are lots of different types of diagrams. The diagram really needs to follow the experiential aim. I love that you're speaking about scores. And the history of scores is wonderful because for hundreds and hundreds of years, they really structured music in a pretty tight way. And then early in the 20th century, a bunch of people like Stockhausen started saying, how do we get out of this fixed place? How do we start messing around with what happens if we liberate the score, if we start playing with other scores, if we start exploring other things? And you had John Cage and all these people who were bringing in different modes of experience around music. One difference I would suggest. So a score is a kind of diagram. But not all diagrams are scores. Scores are generally diagrams that are determining actions. You follow the score, you play the score. That's sort of in the nature of the score. Whereas a diagram can also just represent relationships. Even a single symbol is a diagram that could kind of contain an idea that you're referring back to. So there are many more pieces of diagram for any performance that we make. And we don't just do odysseys. I've worked on online platforms creating experiences for small groups and pedagogy and all kinds of things. But for any experience you create, there are many diagrams because many of the processes have their own particular experiential aims. And you need to be able to look at them and think about them clearly and be able to put on the page the things that you really need to work with. That's what the diagram lets you do. It says, okay, what are the main things that are supporting my goal here? I need to put them on the page. I don't want to rely on the traditional staff with its 44 time or whatever it is that's going to structure it for me. On the other hand, a score, when or a diagram, when you consider the structure, allows you to consider the structure. You can build the shape of your score. You can build your notational system to structure things intentionally. Not by default, but intentionally. Say you want things to happen again and again. What is the shape? Something circular. Maybe you want things to happen again and again, but increasing intervals, spiral. There are all kinds of tools innate to the score, innate to the diagram that help us intentionally structure the rhythms of our experience and the relationships that are essential to those experiences.
- [65:18]
B
I design multi day facilitated analytical sessions. So a lot of them, what they were going to figure out some problem together and it's going to be a strategic plan or it's going to be something else, but it requires a lot of analysis. And so we create something that looks sort of like a. Well, I mean, it's a schedule for what's going to happen. But we have a column for how's this going to feel? How's it natively going to feel and how do we want it to feel? Because there's a native feeling that everybody right here is going to be confused. We just know that because that's what always happens in the middle of a large analytical piece of work is that everybody gets confused. And what we need to do right there is make them feel okay about that. And so what we'll say is, you know what? Right now, let's call it out on the table. This is a confusing part of this meeting and that's okay. That's where we're supposed to be right now. And everybody's cortisol goes down. And so I can see how this becomes very practical. And I can also see how once you've done it a few times with a diagram, you start to become much more instinctive and able to ask yourself the question in the moment, what's the feeling that's going on here? What's the experience that's happening? And improvise off of it, right?
- [66:33]
A
Because you know what you're trying for, right? Then you can improvise much better.
- [66:38]
B
We're going to get meta on this question. The question I usually ask is, what job do you hire your job to do for you? Classic design question. But the reason I want to get meta is it's the utilitarian version of a product, which is a product is for getting something done. And so asking that question about you and your work, I want to ask the question and then I want to say, is that the right question for an experienced designer?
- [67:05]
A
I mean, it's such an experience designed question, isn't it? And I think this notion of setting out your experiential aim, which may be like your mission statement or your mission question, is aligned with the question of what do I want to do with my life? What am I here for? We don't really take the time to ask. That's why we call it phase zero, because we always start with phase one, right. And I'm an architect, so we go to where we start a little bit too late. What do I want to do with my life that is aligned with my deepest values? And if I can ask that question in such a way that it permutes all the way down through my activities, which is, this is asking a lot. I know, but the question you've just asked is that question to me, Unless I'm misreading it.
- [67:57]
B
No, that's it. Sometimes people answer the question in a very practical sort of like, I hire my job to make money and then you say, why? And they say to take care of my family. There's lots of reasons why people earn money. And so you dig down deeper into it. But then there are these larger things to see other people shine. There's many different answers to this question. How would you answer it for yourself?
- [68:21]
A
Well, right now my job is representing these Ideas both in our certificate program, in this book that I've just written, and in conversations like these. Because I believe that we need better tools. And I feel that part of the job that I need to do is to offer people what I can to deal with these enormous problems we're facing. I don't think that experience design is actually about having a fun weekend at an immersive environment. I think that having a fun weekend at an immersive environment is a piece of a bigger question about how do we reconceptualize our way of being, our way of living? How do we transform not these one, these little design decisions, but the bigger context in which we are active? How do we change our world? Because I. I feel we are in a pessimistic time, Dart. I feel that we are facing nearly insuperable looking problems. I feel those myself. And yet design is inherently optimistic or cynical. It can be optimistic or cynical. And I believe if you're taking the optimistic route, you have to say, well, if I believe something can be better, perhaps the way we've been doing things is not right. I think we need to change the way we're doing things so we can address these larger problems, so we can change our world. This is the job I want my job to do. I want to put these out into the world. I didn't always know that. I didn't know that creating these experiences for one person audiences was research for this. But now I understand it to be that. I think we can use these tools in ways that people have been using them for centuries. Religion has been using them, that architects have been using them, guilds have been using them. Think about the incredible tradition of the journeyman carpenter in Europe to rethink our world and perhaps make it better. Perhaps have a vision that is not a whack a mole approach to dealing with small problems, but a holistic approach to saying what is the world we want to live in? If I can offer anything in that direction, I hope my job helps me do that.
- [70:41]
B
What does it cost you?
- [70:46]
A
Well, I have to do a lot of talking. I have to stay up late writing. You know, I've got these young kids and they just take up all my time. So I end up, you know, writing at 2 in the morning when some kid wakes me up, I'm like, well, here's my chance, I can write that thing. And so it's been a bit of burning the candle at both ends. Dart. Yeah, there's been a bit of that. That is the first thing that comes to mind. I think most parents of young children would probably say that. I feel it's amplified by pushing against the wish to just stop. I also want to manifest many of these ideas in my home. And one of the main, my main experiential aims with my children and my family is to be present and to be doing this work while being present. Because if I can't do that with them, who am I to talk about anything?
- [71:45]
B
I had Don Norman on the show and I asked him that question and he said relationship with his family was the greatest cost. So that's what you're working on as your experiential aim in the home?
- [71:58]
A
Yeah. If I can't represent it, if I can't manifest it in my own life, I don't deserve to talk about it. Where can people learn more about your work? Well, I would love to send everybody to our website, which is owprograms.com which talks all about the certificate program. And my book Experience Design, a Participatory manifesto is coming out on October 24th from Yale University Press. And you can get that wherever you get books, Amazon is fine. And then just get on our mailing list. I have a newsletter where I talk about ideas of experience design. It's bi weekly or monthly depending on how things are going. And I try to relate experience design ideas to bigger ideas that you might not ordinarily associate them with. I talk about politics, I talk about immersive theater, I talk about family, all kinds of things. When you start digging into it, there's just so there's experience design learnings all over the place. I think it's a really interesting time dart. I think this is where an inflection point.
- [73:10]
B
Where can somebody find your newsletter@abrahambjergson.com and
- [73:15]
A
I have a virtual walk that you can take with me there, which is a little kind of fun. I wish I could go for a walk with everybody, but I created this to make a kind of piece of that possible.
- [73:29]
B
Thank you very much for coming on the show. This has been fascinating and I've really enjoyed it.
- [73:36]
A
Dart, I love what you do. It's been really wonderful to be able to talk to you.
- [73:44]
B
Thanks for joining me for another episode of Work for Humans. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a five star rating. Wherever you listen to podcasts and share the show with one person you think would get value from it, believe it or not, this really helps us grow the show and reach more people who want to build the kind of work that people really want as Always. Thank you to my producer Jason Ames at 9th Path Audio for his insights into content and in high standard for quality. Final note, the opinions shared here are my own and not the views of Google or Cisco Systems. Thanks again for listening. See you next time.