Sometimes there are no rules
Why it's always Mary
I fell in heart-tenderizing love with Mary Oliver in the same season that I came to the realization that the thing I am supposed to be doing on this little home planet is helping us all design better experiences for one another.
And these two things are intimately entangled.
Because she has been my most profound teacher in all of it.
As she so reverently put it, attention is the beginning of devotion.
Mary taught me that to be an experience designer is to be awake to the cacophony of experiences constantly unfolding around us. To be hungry for this world. To be endlessly, devotedly curious about it.
To be an experience designer is to realize that puppeteer is not the primary role you must play. But instead it’s recognizing the possibility of the smallest moments in teaching us the biggest lessons.
That it’s our job to be awake. To be soft enough, to unarmour our hearts enough, to be heartbroken by the splendor and the fragility of it all. To be in awe. To notice.
And in a moment when experience design is being spun into the experience economy, brands seeing it as the next medium for capitalizing our attention, Mary would say…
Look.
Not to the billboards and the visuals projected onto our eyeballs through screens and installations in Times Square.
But to the three little chonky pebbles huddling together in the wind-blown sand. The chubby chub bird in your tree.
She reminds us that transcendence happens in our conversations with the world. That one blade of grass can be a far more potent inciter of awe than a billion dollar “immersive” production.
She has taught me the texture of the things I want to build in the world — the moments that help us have reverence and relationship to this unlikely and spectacular and sometimes shatteringly hard life we have found ourselves woven into.
And, we also must never forget that Mary is also feisty as fuck. The type of anarchist that understands that a walk in the woods could take down an empire, if we let it.
So all of this is a long way of saying that this morning’s lesson from the one and only Mary is as follows:
Three Things to Remember
As long as you’re dancing, you can
break the rules.
Sometimes breaking the rules is just
extending the rules.
Sometimes there are no rules.The experiences that stay with us are the ones that remind us that the rules we’ve been living slave to — the musts and the shoulds and the usualies and the as always — that perhaps they’re all meant to be broken.
That the infinite exists in us remembering that they were made up in the first place. That different is possible. That we can choose to make a more tenderly wondrous life for one another.
Your assignment, should you choose to play:
Go out and find a poem of hers. Or a poem of someone elses. But either a way a noticing-captured-in-words that reminds you of whatever it is you are craving.
And know that you are the person who can build the moments that usher in that feeling for others.
Devotedly yours, Olivia
Upcoming Studio Shenanigans:
🪄 Free Workshop: How to Design Experiences That Feel Like Magic
Tuesday, March 10th, 9 - 11:45 am PT || Hosted with Harvard’s Graduate School of Design
Next week I’m bringing back the MAGIC workshop as a part of HarvardxDesign’s UnConference.
Magic - the magic we’ve all felt in moments that stick with us months, years, decades, lifetimes later - isn’t just happy accidents, some woo woo words, or only the result of someone with “the touch.” Magic has rigor. It’s specific. It’s particular. It’s strange. It’s a form of resistance, the engine of worldbuilding, and a fundamental tool for experience design.
You’ll leave having taken something you’re designing in your life — a gathering, a classroom, a ritual, a celebration, an incredibly boring meeting — and made it transcendent.
Come learn the strategy for sorcery.
⚡️ Virtual Course: Designing Unforgettable Experiences
April 14th - June 2nd
If you want to learn how to break all the rules, expand the possibility set, and craft the moments that meaningfully mark our lives (and also, yes, make work a hell of a lot less boring and our projects a whole lot more potent), join the next cohort of our deep dive course.
Designing Unforgettable Experiences (formerly called “Designing Experiences for Radical Imagination”) is kicking off April 14th, and runs 8-weeks.
This flagship virtual course is my entire experience design process, soup-to-nuts, packaged up just for you. We’ll marry the rigor with the magic. And it will change every single thing you design from here on out.
📝 Bring a project, event, or experience you’re working on or want to put in motion.
🪩 Join the weekly immersive workshops to walk through a rigorous process for making whatever you’re making exceptional.
🧠 Swing through our open studios for collaboration and feedback.
🛠️ And keep using our tools, like the 120+ page Experience Design Playbook, for everything you design from this point forward.
Payment plans and scholarships available.
🙋 Only 30 spots total in this cohort (and next one doesn’t run ‘til late fall).
Want to chat about whether it’s the right fit for you? Snag some time on my calendar or send me an email at olivia@designforfeelings.com.
👀 P.S. You can peep the syllabus and the week 1 playbook on the site ⤵️!