The Design for Feelings Studio
presents
Designing Experiences for Radical Imagination
This 8-week, virtual, immersive incubator will give you the skills you need to design imaginative, unforgettable, and transformative experiences.
October 22nd — December 13th, 2024
Enrollment closes October 21st at 9 pm PT
EnrollJoin us inside this creative retreat to learn how to architect and facilitate experiences that unleash collective creativity and nurture transformative relationships.
Attend 8-weeks of Immersive Workshops and live Open Studio sessions to develop and get feedback on your own experiential offering.
This retreat is for you if...
- You make things for people
- You are trying to facilitate change, and you need new tools to help people gather differently
- You are craving more soulful, connected, intimate ways of sharing space with community
- You think you might be an experience designer, but don’t yet have the language or frameworks to confidently step into the discipline
- You consider yourself an experience designer and want to add more tools to your toolkit
- You have been through an experience that makes you say “wow” and “YES” and “this is the thing I didn’t know I needed” and want to learn how to design those types of moments
- You are building something — a program, and lesson plan, an organizational culture, an event, a product, an installation, a birthday party — and are committed to making it unforgettable
- You want to create luscious worlds that feel like poetry, story, adventure, and wildness
By the end of the retreat you will have...
Learned the tools and frameworks to design experiences for radical imagination
Designed an experience of your choosing with rigor and feelings, and crafted the critical details
Gathered inspiration to seed your experience design practice long into the future
Meet your guide
Olivia Vagelos is an Experience Designer and Community Strategist.
She is the founder of The Design for Feelings Studio, an agency that exists in service of designing experiences with the texture of poetry, supporting people in nuanced emotional exploration, and building the conditions for folks to imagine and manifest more beautiful, regenerative, inclusive futures. The studio marries the rigor and magic of experience design.
Before launching Design for Feelings, Olivia was at IDEO, housed inside their online school, IDEO U, and the Play Lab.
While there she helped start both the Experiential Design and Community Design disciplines and define the future of creative online learning. Prior to IDEO she was designing and facilitating programs at the Stanford Design School and with The Hewlett Foundation.
She has worked with clients ranging from multibillion dollar entertainment companies to small community-based non-profits, and taught and lectured at the Stanford d.School, Stanford LEAD, Santa Monica College, Columbia Medical School, and Georgetown.
Mitch Carter Jafery
Co-Founder of Friday Gallery & Design Fellow at IDEO, former Chief Creative Officer at IDEO
"Olivia is a world-weaver, spinning together meaning, myth, ritual, language, and the full spectrum of the sensorial into spaces and experiences that unlock new possibilities.
But rather than floating off into the clouds, her work has the thoughtful grounding and warm depth of a philosopher mixed with the playful spirit of a curious explorer.
When we speak of “magic,” we mean delight in the unexpected, the joy of wonder, emotional care, and a full-bodied sensorial immersion we are happy to surrender to.
Quite simply, Olivia is a magician."
How it works
Discover
Register for an upcoming Info Session to learn how our frameworks can help you design experiential containers for connection and creativity, and to get a taste of the retreat content.
Enroll
Enroll in Designing Experiences for Radical Imagination to get access to the Experience Design Playbook and join us for 8 weeks of Immersive Workshops, homework, and collaborative Open Studio sessions.
Map
Over the course of 8 weeks develop a rigorous and inspired map of your chosen experiential offering that details the architecture, core moments, relational design, and details of your experience.
Designing Experiences for Radical Imagination
$2000
Payment plans available
All the tools you need to build transformative experiences
If you’re looking to make things that move people or change outcomes, alchemize the energy of a room into something beautifully new, or set the conditions for emergence, join us this fall.
By the end of our 8 weeks of Immersive Workshops and Open Studios you will know how to design for the moments that matter, architect the unexpected, and nurture the relationships that are needed for the good-hard work.
And, you’ll have a rigorous map, the juicy details, and an implementation plan for an experience of your own.
Want to learn more? Join one of our info sessions!
EnrollRetreat Schedule
Weekly 2-hour live Immersive Workshops: Tuesdays at 9 am PT
Weekly 1-hour Open Studios: Fridays at 9 am PT
Can’t make every live session? No worries! Every Tuesday workshop and Friday open studio is recorded and uploaded to your retreat library on the same day.
Attend the Immersive Workshops
Learn the tools and frameworks to design experiences for radical imagination in our weekly, live sessions
Design Your Own Experience
Spend 8 weeks crafting an experience of your choosing, diving deep into the feelings, relationships, structures, and details that make an experience unforgettable
Access our Experiential Playbook
Receive a comprehensive playbook for designing experiences for transformation and emergent creativity
Participate in Open Studios
Workshop your experiential offering, gather inspiration, and leverage the collective wisdom of your cohort of peer experience designers
Why now?
Whether or not we’re intentional about it, we are all affecting one another’s experiences. Whether we are awake to it or not, we are all experience designers.
And so we get to choose to take more care, and intention, and bring more beauty to the spaces and places we create, influence, and hold.
The world needs more soft, juicy, wild, mysterious, poetic, courageous, kind spaces for us to dream up new futures together. The world needs more people who want to help each other remember how to play. The world needs more people who know that how we gather can be how we change.
We need radical imagination.
Maybe when you hear experience design you think UX/UI or you think event production, and you might think that's not you. But experience design exists across disciplines. Across crafts.
You may be a yoga teacher, or be planning your wedding.
You may be getting out the vote or designing programs in government. You may be surrounded by folks who have been put through the meat grinder of capitalism and need resuscitation. You may be designing a teaching fellowship or helping third graders understand the trees. You may be any of these things. But you are definitely an experience designer.
I want to help you make whatever you're making unforgettable. To be the thing that, years later, decades later, of all the millions of moments we go through, it's what people remember. To make an experience that sticks, because it changes you in some way.
This retreat weaves threads from poetry and narrative design, from the structures nature has evolved, from improv, from facilitation and learning design, from architecture and environments design, and from the devoted act of observing the way we exist with one another.
Join the retreat
Designing Experiences for Radical Imagination begins October 22nd, 2024
Enrollment closes October 21st at 9pm PT
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What is experience design?
We define Experience Design as the crafting of “containers” — emotional (feelings), spacial (environments), temporal (time), and behavioral (actions, intentions, activities), 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 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.
Keely Adler
Cultural Futurist at RADAR & Dentsu Creative
"Olivia is such an inspiring and refreshing voice in the world of experience design.
She challenges your existing perspectives with tenderness; brings depth, texture, and emotion to every topic she writes and talks about; and takes participants in her sessions on a gentle and provocative journey into what's next in truly beautiful ways.
Work with her! You might cry? You'll definitely feel warm and fuzzy. And maybe a little upset by the world as it is.
But that's ok, because you'll already be on your way to building what could be, instead."
Isis Arias
Executive Experiential Producer & Brand Marketer, Former Marketing Lead of Global Live Experiences @ Netflix
"As an executive producer in experiential marketing, I find Olivia’s approach to designing with emotions super aligned with how we should all approach experiences. Her ability to create safe space with intention is unique. I find her strategies and tactics incredibly valuable and useful and have started to integrate her thinking into my own approach.
Besides trying to manifest a way to work together, I am always passing her workshops on to others in the industry that I think could benefit!
If you get a chance to spend some time in her welcoming space, definitely take it!"
Our Experiential Framework
Designing Experiences for Radical Imagination focuses on three critical pillars: designing for connection, designing for structure, and designing for play. The retreat will provide you with a rigorous playbook that you can use to design all of your future experiences, from products to people programs to parties.
Design for Connection
Design for Structure
Design for Play
Money back guarantee 💸
As we all know, life is always out there life-ing. So just in case it lifes real hard for you, there are full refunds up to the first day of the retreat.
FAQs
Is this for me — I don’t have a design background?
What if I can’t make the weekly times?
What kinds of projects or experiences can I work on in the class?
Do I need to know what my experience offering is before the retreat starts?
What is experience design, exactly?
How much time will the homework take?
Is the homework graded?
How long will I have access to the retreat content?
How can I get this approved by my job for professional development?
Savannah Kunovsky
Managing Director of Emerging Technology at IDEO
"Olivia is my go-to thought partner for creating unique experiences. She is an incredible facilitator and designer, who knows how to tap into the soul of an audience and craft experiences that transcend, inspire, and ground. With her background in learning design, she's broken down the art of experience design and been a longtime teacher for me in the art of crafting moments people love. Could not recommend learning with and from Olivia more!"
Ravon Ruffin Feliz
Artist, Cyber Anthropologist, and Facilitator at Citation Studio
"No matter the format, Olivia creates a space of authentic grounding and connection to oneself and to others.
Olivia is truly able to help folks across disciplines tap into what is human and reimagine inside possibility. Her work feels like magic."
Melanie Kahl
Innovation Director, Community Weaver, & Educator at Meld Strategy
"Olivia lives, breathes, and dreams experience. Beyond crafting containers that liberate and delight, she models a facilitation style that is equal parts bold and soft — inviting others into the magic of an experience.
She toggles between artful experience, rigorous strategy, and masterful tactics. As a facilitator, she jumps in joyfully, and people follow.
Anybody that works with Olivia grows. The sector is lucky to have her wisdom."
Newsletter
Join our Substack for weekly experience design tools, invitations, and reflections in your inbox
Public Virtual Gatherings
Join our open, public sessions of Designing for Feelings and Designing for Spacetime
Info Sessions
Learn more about the retreat, ask questions, and get a taste for the content at one of our info sessions
Have questions?
Drop us a line at [email protected]