Want to deepen your own experience design practice?
Looking for both the magic and rigor needed to build transformational, systems-changing, community-activating, and exceptionally luscious experiences?
Join us for our 8 week virtual retreat, Designing Experiences for Radical Imagination, kicking off February 18th.
Intrigued? We have info sessions starting the week of February 3rd. Register to get all your questions answered and to receive a sneak peak of the retreat content.
One of the questions I get asked most often is “How do I bring others into experience design?”
You’re hungry to talk feelings and make things a bit more wild, more interesting, more Holy sh*tooty!?!?! But your team, perhaps, is not. Or not yet.
Maybe they are unfamiliar, or resistant, or sad, or burnt out, or stressed, or grouchy, or bored, or disinterested, or overly-KPI-driven.
Or maybe it’s that you want to ask beautiful questions and make beautiful moments and you want to do it…not alone.
No matter your circumstances, whenever I get this question I find myself always giving the same piece of advice.
Start with inspiration.
Not with making. Or plans. Or brainstorms. Or schemes. Or instructions.
To do experience design, at least the type that we do here, you must be inspired.
Fear not. I am not requiring that you take your team on a multi-week yoga retreat in Bali or a 3-month pasta-eating bonanza in Tuscany. Though if that’s in the cards for you, sure, please do.
What I mean is a practice of noticing.
It’s noticing that our lives are a constantly unfolding set of experiences, both designed and not. Exceptional and mediocre and terrible.
And all of this, the range of it, is fodder for an abundant and inspired practice of experience design.
Taking out the trash can teach you something about how we deal with what we no longer need. Eating a string cheese might provide you with a new way to think about the expanding threads of time. Watching the chubby bird in your tree leave for winter could remind you that we must resource ourselves for the slow and the dark.
And, it is a transformative act. To learn how to look, together.
Saying to your team “Okay y’all, we are going to do experience design together now, even though you have no idea what I mean by that” tends to be rather difficult. Are we just going to make something good by pulling it out of our ass? Likely…no.
I don’t make promises lightly. And if you know me well you know I am a truly terrible liar. So I give you my word on this:
If you create a practice of noticing with others, it will change things for you all. Once you start seeing the world as experiences, it will become nearly impossible to stop your brains from manifesting that inspiration into questions, and alchemizing those questions into dreams for what you want to build.
So let’s get tactical. Here’s how to do it with your people:
Step 1: Gather Inspiration
Have folks collect moments and experiences to share with one another.
You could focus on the feeling you know you want to create in whatever you are making together.
For example, if you want to use experience design to evolve your team culture to feel more joyful, ask folks to collect some examples of other experiences that felt full of joy. Or, perhaps you want to redesign your customer support experience. Ask folks to come to your meeting with some moments where they felt well-helped, or seen, or validated in their questions.
Or, for an even more simple start, just ask folks to come up with experiences from their past week or month (time-boxing can be helpful), that were particularly good or bad.
Give folks a heads up so they can be collecting experiences ahead of time, or just give them ten minutes heads down to come up with ideas.
Step 2: Notice, together
Have each person share one or two of their experiences. For each experience, as a collective ask and discuss the following set of questions:
Why is it interesting? What do I notice?
What does it make me feel? Why and how?
What does this make me wonder? Or want to borrow? Or be inspired to try?
Step 3: Repeat
Doing this even one time will provide you with juicy fodder.
But building this into a practice, ritualizing it, developing muscles around it, is where the deeper individual and team transformations happen.
These questions will become more strongly-wired neural pathways. And as we walk the world we’ll start subconsciously asking them, all the time.
What can I learn from receiving this tender, handwritten piece of snail mail? Wow this airport carry-on luggage system is garbage — what exactly is it that makes me feel so angry here? I wonder why standing in line at this particular coffeeshop feels delightful rather than like a drag?
This is why we do this in every live session of our retreat, Designing Experiences for Radical Imagination. We always begin with listing out the best, and shittiest, experiences of our week. And asking why? Why did we feel that way?
It’s the noticing that will teach us which details matter.
Your assignment, should you choose to play:
Try it once, with your people, and see what happens.
Or better yet, set up a cadence for it. We kick off every week with a 30 minute inspo gathering session. Or we do this before sprint planning, every two weeks. Or once a month we’ll have a Friday hour for noticing…
And then, let me know what you notice.
Yours, Olivia
Want to join one of our live, free, virtual events? We have a Designing for Feelings session coming up on Wednesday, February 5th @ 8:30 am PT.
We’ll have an unhurried, stretchy hour for wondering, making, and talking about the nuances of a particular feeling and its role in experience design.
Find out more and get on the list below!