Abraham Burickson: the Craft of Experience Design

Charlie Melcher:  

Hi, I’m Charlie Melcher, founder of the Future of StoryTelling. Welcome to the FoST podcast. On this show, we’ve explored many different kinds of compelling experiences, from immersive theater pieces, to VR projects to retail experiences and beyond. So it may come as a surprise that the concept of experience design, as a practice that’s distinct from other kinds of design only really came to be relatively recently, within the last two decades or so. As humans, we already know a tremendous amount about experiences just by living, but experienced designers are working on turning that innate knowledge into a craft. They ask questions like, how do we design something as infinitely malleable as a living moment? How do we create those moments in a way that is empathetic, ethical, and changes the world for the better? Abraham Burickson is one of the foremost experts fleshing out the principles of this young discipline. Trained in architecture, poetry and playwriting, he’s studied the transformative power of design experience for over 20 years. He’s the co-founder of Odyssey Works, a collective that creates highly immersive performances for an audience of one where each experience is custom tailored to the participant and occurs not on a stage, but woven into the fabric of their real lives, and can last for as short as a few days or as long as a few months. In his forthcoming book, “Experience Design: A Participatory Manifesto,” Abraham has distilled his many learnings into a practical handbook for everyone who wants to create memorable, transformative experiences. I can’t wait to unpack some of those learnings with him today ahead of the book’s release on November 6. Please join me in welcoming Abraham Burickson.

Charlie Melcher:  

Abraham, it is such a delight to have you on the Future of  StoryTelling podcast. Welcome.

Abraham Burickson:

Thank you. It’s a delight to be here.

Charlie Melcher:  

I really been looking forward to this conversation, just the opportunity to learn from somebody who is such an experienced, experience designer. And there aren’t that many of you in the world. I mean, you really are one of the handful of true experts in this field.

Abraham Burickson:

I really appreciate that. I, you know, I’m always fighting with my spellcheck, which doesn’t want me to say experience designer wants me to say experienced designer. And so one day we will win that battle, Charlie. Exactly. Maybe that’s the purpose of this book.

Charlie Melcher:  

Yeah, and I so enjoyed reading the book. And I highly recommend it to everyone that they run out and buy when it’s out a copy of Experience Design: A Participatory Manifesto. It really clearly shares your deep experience and and thoughtfulness about the field. But I thought before we get into the book, I’d love to start the conversation, learning more about Odyssey Works, which was this organization collective that you co founded. Tell me a little bit about the origins of Odyssey Works?

Abraham Burickson:

Well, Charlie, it wasn’t meant to be a thing. It was a response to a conversation that I was having in 2001. So like before, the before the before with my good friend and collaborator, Matthew Purdon. And we were discussing this problem of how we make art. We, you know– an artist generally puts work out into the world, tries to cast as wide a net as possible, and hopefully, someone is affected by it. And, and there’s all these kind of aphorisms, these truisms that are out there where people say, Oh, well, if I could just change just one life, it would be worth it. And Matthew and I took a long walk down the, along the cliffs of Big Sur and discuss this and we said, well, what why don’t we just change that one life and forget about casting a wide net, and we started creating these experiences for an audience of just one person. There were experiments. And, you know, truth be told, they’ve always been experiments, for 20+ years now. They’ve been experiments and we didn’t back then understand or even have words for the idea of experience design. But what happened was these experiences we were creating, which were weekend-long, week-long, months-long performances for one person audiences. They were experiments in how one can design the conditions for powerful, or I’ll say transformative experiences. And we would collaborate with artists and designers and writers and craftsmen in all different disciplines. And we would come together around this question that we would have for ourselves about the participant, which is the participant was the person we were making this for, which was, what do we wish for this person. And, in order to get there, we would follow this process of research what we now call rigorous empathetic research, we would have them fill out a long questionnaire, some people take up to 10 hours to fill up this questionnaire, we’ve talked to their friends and family, we would go for walks with them, we would try to absorb their view on the world, we would listen to all the music they loved, we would go to places that were meaningful to them in their homes, and try to see what it was like to experience them through their eyes, it’s a little bit like falling in love with somebody a few. You know, if you do that, you you start to try to see the world through their eyes, because you’re concerned with their experience. And you do it because you have a certain aim. And that aim is about creating a kind of experience for that other person for their welfare or for their pleasure or for their benefit in some way. And this is the kind of core ethic of experience design. So, you know, Odyssey Works has been around for 20 plus years, and we’ve started out doing experiences for our team members. And they were quite wild, some of them, at first– I mean, people got buried alive and kidnapped and sent and cast into new lives and all kinds of things. And as we started doing work for people we didn’t know, we started learning a lot more about how to create safety, and challenge at the same time. It’s an exciting time, and I don’t think it’s by chance that we’re in people are really turning towards the idea of experience, not just as a buzzword, although there’s plenty of that, but as a way of making that has a certain kind of power. And when you start thinking about it, it’s so obvious. Oh, right– why make a thing, instead of making a thing to facilitate a certain type of experience?

Charlie Melcher:  

I’m just so amazed at the amount of work that would go in for an experience just for one person, it seems like such an act of love. I can only imagine people doing something like this for somebody that they love, like a love poem, or a love letter, where you really are trying you understand the person you’re really trying to connect to them in this kind of empathetic and emotional way. Do you think of it as this incredible gift to this one person? Or is this as much about doing it for you and for the team that’s making it?

Abraham Burickson:

Yes, to both. And I think that’s essential to an idea of experience design that I deeply believe in, which is that you as the creator are part of the experience. There’s a kind of mode of making where you kind of make your thing, cast it out into the world and let the machine have its effect on people. And is this the way we traditionally made work, back through the centuries? I don’t think so. I think our architecture, all the things that we make, were created in community, and the people who created those things were part of the community. And when we think about what we as designers, I’m trained as an architect, I have an architecture practice. And it seems like architecture may not sort of fit into the into this rubric, but I believe that it that it does in fact, I believe that all design and art processes do to a certain extent, because when we think about what it is to create something as an act of love or as a gift, it is aligning ourselves with the effect we wish to have on the world on other people that generally happens much more readily when we are doing something as an act of love. So, how do we develop a way of making that is more aligned with that with okay this is the way I wish to be as a maker in the world. This is the way I wish to have an effect on other people. I may not be creating for an audience of one I may be creating for an audience of millions. How do I then keep that aligned with my with my experiential goal in the world with my effect? How do I in other words create now from a place of considering my legacy? X number of decades, or years or minutes from now? And I think the answer is, is embedded in an experience design model. Because I am thinking about that experience as an act of love as a way of having an effect on others.

Charlie Melcher:  

There seems to be an incredible responsibility, because what you’re really doing is is creating an experience to change someone’s life. You’re actually designing a period of time where you’re controlling the person’s life. And I do appreciate that you frame that as a ethical choice, I wonder, and I’m kind of going right for it now. But are you not playing God? I mean, are you not taking on a role that’s like, all powerful in a certain way? And then is there some danger or, you know, that old expression about too much power corrupts?

Abraham Burickson:

That is such an important question. And I think when we first started, we’re like, Hey, we’re sort of like Greek gods up on the mountain, setting things in motion. What we quickly learned was that we’re not designing anybody’s experience. That’s the– that’s the big problem of experience design. We are not designing the experience, what we are doing is creating the conditions under which a certain experience might be possible. And one of the essential elements for an experience to be powerful is for it to feel alive. And one of the primary qualities of liveness is the unknown. I am not controlling this situation, it’s not designed, it’s not scripted, right. So this brings me into a moment of liveness, the great moments with… Going back to dating and people you love– think about those great conversations on a date, where you’re discovering something you didn’t know. These are live moments, these are engagements with the unknown, they’re very different than these troubling times when when you feel like something is designed for you to do exactly what you’re told to do. Press this, turn that, step this way, walk that way, say these words– it’s not live. And so as much as we might like to be playing God, and putting experiences into people’s brains, maybe we give them some pill or something, we realized that is that is never going to do it. Also, it’s very hard to do, but But it’s never really going to do it. So in fact, what we do when we when we design experiences is we consider how to how to invite the other person to engage in a collaboration around creating that experience. You know, when you think about UX, traditional user experience design, which sounds pretty close, I would say, in some of the some of my least my less favorite UX design ideas, there’s a kind of attempt to control people’s movements from moment to moment from interaction to interaction, and to do everything you can to minimize variance from that. Whereas with, with experience design, there’s an attempt to engage people with an aim with an experiential aim and see where they go with it.

Charlie Melcher:  

So for one, I just love that term of liveness, or liveliness, or it being alive. It’s, it’s something I think about a lot in this type of work as well. And then just this opportunity for the unknown, right, as you’re basically saying, it’s not scripted, we don’t know exactly what’s going to happen. In your book, you talk about the fact that the unknown and the unexpected, ours are so important, you need to leave room for them more how they elevate the experience, make it more memorable, more powerful. I wonder if you can talk about that for a second about the unknown, the unexpected.

Abraham Burickson:

It’s, in a way, the hardest thing for design. In my book, I talk about the Matrix, especially an architect. The architect in the Matrix, he says, You know, I created the Matrix and put everybody’s consciousness and I made a perfect world, right? Like so many of the architects of the 20th century, I made a perfect world and people kept messing it up, right. And I realized, oh, we need some some choice, some unknown, we need some problems, and I needed to let go of the perfection people rejected my perfect world. And I think it was the perfect– it was such a good explanation of the notion of liveness and the problem of design that does not allow for liveness for the unknown, we reject it. When you are talking to somebody in a play… I had this, I have had this experience in immersive theater so and they asked you to tell me something intimate and you say something intimate and then they respond on script. There’s a problem, it feels not live, right? But the really good performers will be able to respond to you in context of what they’ve designed, but to you, and there’s a liveness there, there’s an there’s a sense, you don’t know where they’re gonna go, we can feel it, we can feel when people are not being genuine with us. Right? I think about tourism, and traveling to Paris, or Las Vegas, or whatever it is. And, you know, there’s people who’ve designed it so tightly, right, and you’ve got the narrative, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. And, and you’ve been set up for the story. And then people come back, you know, even if they’ve just been on tour buses, or whatever, even if they follow the trail that is set, by the guidebooks by the tour guides all of that, but they come back generally to tell you is about those moments of discovery, those moments of the unknown, those moments where something breaks down the authentic appears, what is the authentic experientially authentic is a movement into outside of the scripted into the real life of something. And it’s what we long for its living, and especially in this, you know, I’ve I teach at an MFA program, Maryland Institute College of Art, and like, so many, so many programs from so many educational institutions, we went on to zoom. And it was not as good. As was so many things, we know that it was assumed to be not as good, but it was hard to put your finger on it. And so I worked with some my experience design students to do a little research, what was what was missing, actually, I mean, the class time was the same reading material was the same, you got to see everybody didn’t have to worry about, you know, commute time. Like actually, there were some great advantages and, and my students came back with a series of a series of studies on what was missing. And the most important thing they said was the time before and after class, the time when they’re rushing and talking to somebody in the elevator, or the time when they’re leaving, and just chatting about what had happened in the class are about something totally unrelated. The time when they wander into each other’s studios and look at what they’re making. There’s a liveness to the experience of education that I would argue is twice as important as everything that happens in class. It’s so much of what makes life worth living. Why don’t we design with it in mind?

Charlie Melcher:  

You know, another one that I found so interesting in the book is this whole concept of frame and how you frame things? And can you explain what you mean by that?

Abraham Burickson:

The frame is derived from the picture frame. The picture frame is such a powerful thing. Right? inside that frame is a piece of art. Outside that frame, is the rest of life. We’ve spent a lot of time as a culture debating Is it art, isn’t it art? That’s a very thing based way of thinking like, oh, the thing inherently is art. If you have a urinal on the in the bathroom, it’s not art, but if it’s on a pedestal, it’s art wait. Now our minds are blown. We can’t answer this question is that our but if you if you get rid of this notion of the thing, having an inherent quality and consider from a design point of view from how the attention is moving, how we are seeing, the frame is the device that controls that, of course, there’s the frame around a picture. But there are other frames, they’re all around us. And every time we move our attention into a frame, the frame defines how we are seeing and what we are looking at. And by seeing I mean experiencing, and then people started breaking the fourth wall, what is that messing with the frame, right, starting to bring your attention out, that was a big challenging moment. It’s not that challenging anymore. And in the past few decades, the rise of immersive theater has been a breaking of that frame. Now when you walk into the theater or whatever space that this performance is happening in, you’re walking inside the frame, and you understand that everything around you is to be considered in a story way in a performative way. Our job as experienced designers, then is to ask the question, what is the frame? Where does it start? When does it start? What is the mode of attention we want our audience to have? In other words, do we want somebody to come in and spend their time inside this space in a state of wonder in an analytical mode, in a mode of in gaygent with a story is all have slightly different design possibilities to them. And while they’re inside the frame, are we helping them understand? How do they understand themselves as a part of this frame? And are we then designing the interactions inside that frame to support that? Or not?

Charlie Melcher:  

And what’s important to think about what you’re saying is that the frame is not simply like this physical thing about the environment, or where to focus your attention. It’s also about the context and how you show up in the space or what’s your role is a kind of framing, how am I thinking about what I’m supposed to do in this space? And this all seems to tie into your conversation as well about world building. And the important role of world building in the sort of four pillars or blocks that you described for good world building? Would you mind running us through those?

Abraham Burickson:

There’s something that is so delightful about world building, and I would argue that that is because we get to move into a different mode of being inside of a world worlds have these have had all have these structures, of course, objectively speaking, in a thing based mode of making a world is everything. There’s no world building, right? The world is the world that’s it. Subjectively speaking from an experience, design point of view, the world is the totality of your context. Each world has these qualities, first of all of place and physics, objectively speaking places a place it’s a it’s it’s a location, subjectively speaking from the experience, design point of view, the place is the the physical bounds of the world, the physics are the subjective experience of how things are affected and moved by people in that world. One of the things I talked about in the book was Rosa Parks getting on the bus, during the Civil Rights Movement. The physics of the Jim Crow South said that Black people had to go to the back of the bus that was, that was the physics of how people moved and affected things in space. She didn’t do that. And so she engaged in what you might consider a supernatural act, right? She broke the physics of the world, it was like she was flying. And that caused a lot of a lot of reaction and response. So we have played some physics, we also have aesthetics and material culture. And that’s probably what we think of, oh, yeah, people wear these funny hats. And oh, you can always recognize the steampunk world, because it’s got all these gears. What’s interesting about these is that they, of course, are fun, and they are symbolic, and we can identify things that way. But they have embedded in them an ethic. And when we design worlds, we design worlds with a kind of moral core, they say something worlds all have something to say they have a value system. So the value system, inside the mechanics of a watch in, in a kind of steampunk world is something about I would suggest craft an industrial age, something about human ingenuity, something about a sense of discovery and invention. These are moral values. The next thing that we have to make a world is the population and the language. There’s no world without a population, the world defines the population. If you enter into a courtroom, you are a part of that population. You are not a podcast interviewer. I mean, maybe that’s what you do. Maybe you have a podcast, but inside the courtroom, you’re a defendant or plaintiff or an audience member, right? You are defined. And if you try to have run a podcast, inside a courtroom, you’ll get kicked out. The world defines the population. And so these are hard things to change these requires revolutions to change. The populations even little little little alterations in language, just say bringing them from the third person plural to to to be a pronoun that non binary people can use. It’s not a new word, but just this little alteration changes the population. Yes, people were non binary before these words were being used in this way, but entering them into the common lexicon is a world building activity. And finally, there’s, there’s the history and the myth of the world. Every world has as its origin story, it’s absolutely essential. You may wonder, you may go to say, a university and find all over the place. They’re telling you their origin story, it’s on the plaque, I would found an institution where any person can find can find instructions instruction in any study. Oh, that’s, that’s the origin story. And they have the date. Why are we so concerned with when things were started? It’s part of the origin story. It’s really hard, for instance, to design a world in a fictional world with a story in it without, without matching without Ken linking that story to an origin story of the world. So just utilizing these understandings of what world building is, allows us to consider our experience design, moments in context, allows us to say, not just, Hey, is it a good story, but is that story being experienced by the guest by the visitor in a way that seems meaningful?

Charlie Melcher:  

One of the things that, that I loved that you said in the book, and I’m actually going to quote it, you say, every event has its own type of physical engagement. But it is both the appropriateness of the physicality and the clarity with which it differentiates the event from everyday life. That makes it eventful. We dance at celebrations, and stand quietly at funerals. And I love that there is a physicality, that there is this kind of way that we ask our participant to physically participate, there are actions, body movements that are appropriate, or when done well, that are perfectly aligned with the story and the experience that’s being told. And I think that’s one of the things that really differentiates experience design from other forms of storytelling, because very few of them, you know, ever engage you with your body or certainly not in the full bodied sense, where we might dance at a celebration or stand solidly with our heads bowed, you know, at a funeral. And I wonder, you know how much you think about how to put people in different physical forms, because I also, so enjoyed Annie Murphy Paul’s book, The Extended Mind. But she really talks about this idea of embodied cognition, that our emotions start in our bodies, it doesn’t start in our brain, and then it tells our body, it’s actually the physicality that leads to us having a set of central inputs to the brain that makes us understand that we are sad, or we are joyful, or we are scared. And so using the palette of the body gesture and physical forms, it seems to me so important for experienced design –would you agree?

Abraham Burickson:

100%, there’s so much power there that if you’re not thinking about how the body is moving, you’re just leaving everything on the table. Right? most eventful events require us to go to the event. And it’s one of the reasons why online events are challenging to make eventful. We don’t have this reset this mental and physical reset, that traveling to the event offers us it is the first physical quality of an event, you have to go there. One of the things that events require is difference. There is a there is an idea of a kind of heterogeneity of life, that there’s ordinary life, and extraordinary life. There’s the everyday and there’s the events. There’s the week and the weekend. And every day, we build our lives, we do the hard work of making everything happen. And on the extraordinary times we transform or we shore up the world. That’s what New Year’s is right? Why is new year’s event. We know it’s kind of like, why do we have it? And why do we make promises to people about going to the gym for the rest of the year? What is this? What is this activity and why is it so universe nearly universal? You know, you have to be a kind of a curmudgeon not to celebrate New Year’s right? And I would argue because New Years makes the circularity of time possible. Right, you go you set up a new beginning. You say this is an extraordinary moment. It has no extraordinary qualities other than you made it into an event. And you probably gather maybe you go to Times Square, maybe you go some other public space. Maybe you go to somebody’s house, maybe you just go to a different room in your own house, but that might be a little less eventful and you mark the time and the space As a space and time of transformation, you have changed from 2023 to 2024. That is some power, you’ve transformed the year. And in so doing, you hope to also transform yourself. So many rituals around nears are about changing the self. This needs to be an extraordinary time it helps to go out and come back to your life. Right?

Charlie Melcher:  

You say that the impact from from experience design is not just to be physically immersive, but also psychologically immersive. And then you suggest that there’s even another level which is ontologically, immersive, right? That it has to actually really matter, not just affect you, but actually align with your value system or possibly be transformative. Explain a little more those three levels of immersion.

Abraham Burickson:

Yeah, I think we talk about immersion mostly as physical immersion. Most of the time when you hear immersion, you think you’re in it. But then you walk out, well, was I really in it? Or was that just sort of walking around in it? And that that question is the question of levels of immersion? Did you get really into it? Did the story catch you? Did you want to know more, was what was in your mind aligned with what was in the mind of whatever it is you’re immersed in? And this is a psychological immersion, you are thinking about what the place is thinking about, you are thinking about what the experience is thinking about, you go to a party, and you know, everybody there and everybody’s talking about something so are you you’re psychologically immersed. But if you go to that to a different party next door, and nobody’s talking to you, you’re physically immersed in that party. But perhaps you’re thinking about, you know, what you have to do the next day you’re not psychologically immersed in this is what we often talk about as kind of when when the thing was when the event was really good, or when it was not really good. Well, we can think about that more specifically, as a kind of psychological immersion. ontological immersion is when it matters. I often think about my my trip to the Vatican, which is amazing. And I’ve studied Catholic history. It’s fascinating. And so cool to see like some of these artifacts just just everywhere, you’re totally immersed, it’s, it’s its own country. Talk about immersion, right? You’re, oh, you step across this line, you’re in the Catholic world, right? And then you walk and they walk you through this long pathway is a long journey. I mean, it’s, it’s kind of crazy. I thought, Oh, I just go in and be in, in in the Sistine Chapel looking up. But no, there’s so much going on there, and you keep going. And so you’re looking at it, you’re thinking about it. And I walked out. And I thought, well, that was really interesting, but I’m not Catholic. I was talking to a friend who went to the Vatican, and was Catholic. And he said that every step was profound for him, sometimes challenging, but challenging in an ontological way. Right, seeing this long history engaging with the stories with the myths, you might say, with the place where it happened, where what was meaningful, is brought into the world for him was ontologically, immersive, and transformative, it’s very hard for something to be transformative, which is to say, changing on the level of meaning, without it being ontologically, immersive. And so when we ask questions about our designs, and how they affect people and who they affect, we can sort of start asking, well, will this be an immersive experience? And for whom? And how, and why and when?

Charlie Melcher:  

One thing that I did find curious is that you didn’t talk that much in the book about designing for groups or for social experiences. And maybe again, coming out of your Odyssey experience where you’re designing for one, it wasn’t really about the social interaction between the participants. But it’s something that certainly a lot of people today in this world do think about as they’re trying to make this type of entertainment, really immersive entertainment be scalable, and meaningful, you know, how do you get bigger groups into these things? How do you design for throughput, for example, or, you know, just greater meaning for people because they’re doing it with others. But I just wondered if you if you do have thoughts about experiential design for groups to really interact with each other to co create to have almost more aligned with ritual, you know, the kind of group experience that creates a bonding and something that’s that’s collaboratively powerful?

Abraham Burickson:

Yeah, well, it turns out most people are not creating it. experiences for one person audiences

Charlie Melcher:  

I wonder why?

Abraham Burickson:

For practical reasons, but also for reasons of, of having a wish to have an impact on more people, this is not not to diminish the activity. These principles are pretty much universal. When we start bringing in different people, it’s still one person’s experience at a time. Even if we’re designing for a million person throughput. Each one of those is having one subjective experience. The this brings on a number of questions about how you can how much control you can have. And I think we start to see that when you start working with more people, there’s more of the unknown, invited in. There’s also interestingly, more of the relational invited in, you are creating context within which relationships develop are altered or engaged in certain particular ways. And as it turns out, most of the experience design wisdom that comes to us through history is about groups who are experiencing things together. And when we start working with groups of people, when we start working with larger numbers of people, we can start to think about, okay, who are we inviting people to be? I think one of the things that often gets in the way of people really getting into an experience people designed for them is a lack of clarity around who they can be, and how they might engage. Sometimes there’s a well intentioned, am to not be too prescriptive. But in fact, what I’ve what we find is that most people really would like to know, what is the structure here? What am I allowed to do? How can I step in? What am I invited to and when you’re invited to that people really take it on? Because we long for that, I would argue that we go to most of these immersive experiences with the hope of living a different life for a minute. Yeah. And in order to live a life, who do we get to be?

Charlie Melcher:  

Yeah, no, I mean, look at the heart of all storytelling, it’s the opportunity to be able to see through somebody else’s eyes to be able to experience the world, and learn from another character’s experience safely, and get to, you know, fulfill some sort of fantasy of a different life, a different character, a different possibility…

 

Or what their world could be, or how they could reconsider how life might be designed in their home. When I was young architecture student, I was troubled by the, by the notion that my world was arbitrarily designed, that I was just a product of it, that my beliefs were not beliefs that I had come to after long inquiry, but they were just what was there. And so I went to the Amazon jungle and lived with an indigenous group known as the Shuar. And I was ostensibly there to study their architecture, and it took me a while to become accepted, but what I– I was really there with a question about this, what would it be to be in a world that saw things of people who understood things in a totally different way? And these people really had a very different world for me they had a very different understanding of, of what happens when you die and what is alive that he considered monkeys who lived in the jungle just to be another tribe who they related with sometimes word with the there were spirits in living in the waterfalls and in nature. And when you took crazy hallucinogenic drugs, you entered into the real world, and this wasn’t the real world that was the real world. So different, so different. And so challenging to how I saw the world in this question. It stays it continues with me to this day, when I came home after living in this world, after experiencing being around so many people who saw what might here seem wild and fantastical, to be totally normal, and saw my way of living as wild and fantastical. Everything seemed a little bit loose. And I think that when we engage with an experience that lets us have a taste of something different we return to home with a more critical eye to how we Live and how we might want to live. That goes for tourism that goes for going to meow wolf that that’s what happens when we go to college and come home and see, see our parents is as old fashioned. That’s what happens perhaps when we go to the fast Summit, and are around all these people thinking in all these exciting ways, and we come home, we say, well, what if we were thinking in all those exciting ways, this is, in a way, some of the profound transformative power of these visits to these experiences people have designed, I think it’s necessary on an ongoing basis, if we’re going to actually try to rethink the way we live in the world.

Charlie Melcher:  

Yeah, like, I like this thought that that actually going to these types of immersive experiences, let’s one leave with a little more insight into the fact that they can be the experienced designers of their own lives. I so appreciated that the the opening story of the last chapter was about a bit of your experience at the Future of StoryTelling back in 2017, we have this part of our group called the Future of StoryTelling For Food, FoST For Good. And as part of that we would invite different nonprofits to the summit, and ask them to pose a challenge to a group of members of our community with the thought that our community would help them would be able to bring their super skills as storytellers and technologists and experienced designers etc. And so you tell this story of your your being there and meeting with one of the lawyers from the ACLU, guy named Ronald Neumann, I think he was from the American Civil Liberties Union. And he put that challenge to all of you about helping to fix voting in America and how this was, we need more people to vote and how it was under attack. And you tell this story of the group sort of coming together to realize that the voting process was sort of a poorly designed experience. And people had such good solutions for it. But But I think sort of the purpose of you telling that story was really to underline how we are all looking to have meaning and purpose in our lives, to put our skills to service to something more important are bigger than just designing our own happy experiences. Do you believe that that is ultimately the big promise of experience design is to be in service of this bigger world or bigger issues?

Abraham Burickson:

Absolutely. Look, we have big problems. You know, we’re facing so much division in our country, in our world where there’s war, there’s, there’s environmental collapse, we have big problems. And there’s a lot of smart people who’ve been designing things to try to deal with those. And we are, we are still facing these very big problems, something needs to change. And I think that time at FoST was so illuminating. Because this, this lawyer from the ACLU, so intelligent and so passionate, and hardworking, and just really has really pushing this idea that that was so hard to achieve around making it a holiday to go and vote. And that was a very political push the kind of thing a lawyer would do, and the ideas that people brought to the table, were so out of left field in many ways, and brilliant, and exciting. And, you know, they were talking about making it not just into a holiday, but engaging communities in celebrating the voting in various different ways, having, you know, maybe having sales that are tied to voting or having the voting sticker be an entry pass and to some other event. And in this conversation, everybody was bringing their own expertise. And they were also bringing this kind of clear sense. That was, I think, settling on everybody and certainly in this kind of eye opening way on that on the lawyer, that when we only design inside the traditions of the discipline that we’re used to designing and I as a lawyer or as an architect or whatever we are limiting the experiential scope. Voting is more than just checking a box. Voting is the communal activity that defines democracy. And it’s crazy that we are all separate. I don’t know any other time and now that voting is done by mail so much even more separate. I don’t know of many other times when so many diverse populations are brought together in a single place to engage in an activity in a common activity. It’s incredible. And yet, we just go home, right. And these people were brought together, they were looking at it from all their different points of view, and saying, let’s take advantage of this, let’s make it a better experience. Let’s say, let’s not just have this one perspective on the problem. But let’s understand this as a as a large communal group experience, that could be fantastic. And designed for that, from where we’re at experience design is largely interdisciplinary, because it is working with the elements of life and life is largely interdisciplinary. It takes advantage of the deep wells of knowledge and practice in various different fields. And it needs really good craft. But it also steps back and says, what else can help me get there? How might we reconsider the narratives that we are involved in, and our origin story, and our idea of what our world is, in order to deal with in order to approach on a much larger level, maybe, then we would be able to actually bring enough force to bear on some of these problems, because we’re not limited to this one treatment that that is like this kind of whack. amole situation, right. And I think there are so many things that we can think of that way.

Charlie Melcher:  

You end the book by saying that you think of experience design as a call to action, a kind of bomb for pessimistic times, and a demand for meaning. And I think that’s a beautifully sort of sums it up but but also that the tools of experience design, are not just powerful, but you know, together can can be revolutionary. And I can just imagine what could happen in the world, if there were so many more people had access to these tools, and we’re consciously designing so many different experiences, to create something that, you know, brings a kind of morality and ethics, a optimism and, and a sense of making the world a better place that, that you bring clearly to your craft. I appreciate so much the work that you do. I wish someday to be able to have an Odyssey Works experience. I think everyone should have–

Abraham Burickson:  

Do you, now?

Charlie Melcher:  

Yes, I do. And I’m available. And I think that it’s funny, I was thinking about it, like people have their personal trainers and their therapists and their nutritionist, but who’s got their experience coach? You know, the person who’s gonna really like blow their minds and open the possibilities? I feel like you’re onto something here shouldn’t be a field of personal experience designers. In any case, if you’re, I’m game, so raise my hand, I’m available anytime.

Abraham Burickson:

Well, Charlie, be careful what you ask for.

Charlie Melcher:  

Abraham, thank you so much. It’s really just a joy to get to speak shop with someone who’s so knowledgeable and steeped in this in this tradition, and appreciate your contributions to it. So thank you.

Abraham Burickson:

Thanks, Charlie. It’s been a real pleasure.

Charlie Melcher:  

Once again, I’m Charlie Melcher, and this has been the Future of StoryTelling podcast. Thanks for joining me. At FoST, we’re dedicated to uncovering the very latest innovations in storytelling in order to pass them on to you, our valued community. If you’d like to stay up to date on our findings, you can subscribe to this show. Wherever you get your podcasts and sign up for our free monthly newsletter, FoST in Thought at fost.org/newsletter. For an even deeper dive into the best storytelling experiences in the world, consider checking out our annual membership, the FoST Explorers Club. Applications for 2024 are opening soon. The FoST podcast is produced by Melcher Media, in collaboration with our talented friends and production partners, charts and leisure. I hope to see you again soon for another deep dive into the world of storytelling. Until then, please be safe, stay strong and story on!