Week 1: Seed Your Purpose

This week we will begin with defining the discipline of experience design and exploring what it means to craft experiences for radical imagination. You will pick the experiential offering you want to work on throughout the retreat, identify your audience, and begin to define the purpose and shifts that will guide your decisions throughout the design process. 

Week 2: Design for Feelings

This week we will dive into the core question that will ground our experience design: 'How do you want people to feel?' We will explore the differences between feelings and energy, you will consider how folks’ feelings might change over time, and we will cover strategies for designing for internal divergence and shifting the energy in an experience. You will begin to map your experience, and will build on and complexify this map each week of the retreat. 

Week 3: Weave Relationships

This week is all about relational design. You will consider all the relationships at play in your experience: with self, you, the other participants, the external world, land, and legacy. We’ll dive into how to design for roles, inclusion, care, power dynamics, and connection. 

Week 4: Architect the Containers

This week we will look at experience design as a combination of architecture and engineering. We will dive into defining and designing the containers of your experience. You will choose a metaphor to guide your design, and we will begin to look at how the environment and the design of time can help you achieve your experiential purpose. 

Week 5: Create the Journey

This week we will look at our experiences as journeys mapped over time, with a variety of potential shapes. We’ll navigate designing for the highs and lows, and walk through the pivotal moments to design in every experience. You’ll identify the moments that matter most for your experience and map the beats. And we’ll play with designing for loops and textures of time. 

Week 6: Bring It to Life

This week we will explore all the ways to make your core moments memorable and sticky. We’ll look at challenging assumptions and designing for delight, pride, connection, and insight. You’ll return to your metaphor, and explore how to activate it through the design of the environment and core artifacts. And we’ll focus on designing multi-sensory experiences and picking the right details to go deep on.

Week 7: Invite Play

This week we will dive into play, wildness, and risk and their roles in creating dynamic and engaging experiences. We’ll look at different types and modalities of play and you will consider how to design for agency and challenge in your experience. We’ll explore how to design for ‘experiential re-enchantment,’ the feelings of magic, and the vulnerability and courage needed for participants to truly play. We’ll also discuss strategies for designing for the inevitable naysayers. 

Week 8: Playtest the Tools

This week we will work through the backend tools you need to take your experience from idea to implementation. We’ll explore what it means to playtest an experience, and you’ll identify and build what you need to design, test, lead, and tell stories about your experiential offer. We will close with folks sharing the experiences they have been developing over the course of the retreat.

This retreat is built for folks coming from all crafts and disciplines. Whether or not you have an experience design or design background, this retreat will provide you with a rigorous and nuanced practice for designing emotionally impactful and transformative experiences.  

You might be creating experiences through your art, the way you invest in community, gather your family, or lead a team. We believe that experience design has a role to play for us all and that the skills of experience design can help you design for connection and creativity across any of these spaces.

The sessions are all recorded and uploaded to the web portal on the same day, so you can watch them whenever you like! 

Throughout the retreat you’ll be applying the tools and frameworks to an experience offering of your choosing. This could be a gathering you’re scheming, a birthday party you’re hosting, a lesson you’re teaching, an event you’re producing, an artifact you’re crafting, a remote meeting you’re directing, or something else. The purpose of the project is to have something real and tangible to play with as we go through the content. 

Nope! We’ll help you choose the first week. 

Great question! 

We define Experience Design as the crafting of “containers” — emotional, spacial, temporal, and behavioral, and the moving of people through them.

We see Experience Design as creating a time bounded thing that transforms or changes someone in some way.

And, we view Experience Design as a craft of curiosity, rather than answers. Our practice will help you ensure that you are asking the right questions along the way, and help you gather the inspiration you will need to answer them in beautiful and unexpected ways.

This retreat is focused on experience design in service of radical imagination: the design of experiences that help unleash collective creativity, that are rooted in self and community, and have the intent of transforming ourselves and existing (and broken) systems. 

The homework is meant to help you apply the tools and frameworks to an experiential offer of your choosing. How big your offer is, and how detailed you choose to go in your homework, is up to you. 

The homework is part of the Experience Design Playbook, a resource that will be your ally in designing experiences long into the future. 

No, not at all. But bring your homework to Open Studios to workshop it and get feedback from the retreat community. 

You’ll have never-ending access to the recordings, tools, and frameworks so you can continue to leverage the resources as you design more experiences out in the world.

Download the syllabus to use as a reference for work. If you need additional documentation, feel free to email us at [email protected]!