Experientially

What if we all became experience designers?

Imagine…

Imagine…

These experiences aren’t accidental. They aren’t good luck or coincidence. These moments are made by people. The sparkly ones. The ones who play in the darkness, work inside the cracks, often quietly, and always with deep care.

They help us remember things in the root sense — they engage with our feelings so that we can carry memories, moments, people, and ideas with us long after. 

They are heart-led. 

***

Hi there. I’m Olivia. And I’m Mark. 

We met at IDEO. 

Mark took Olivia to lunch on her first day of work, asked questions, quoted a dead poet or two, smiled a lot, and told her that she seemed like she was made more of trees, star dust, and cold lake water than the beeps and boops of a 9-5 world (he was right, she is). 

Olivia thought Mark was some alchemy of a 600-year-old soul and cheeky 6-year-old (also accurate). She sprawled out next to him, staking claim as his desk buddy, immediately bought a copy of his favorite book and gave him a copy of hers, and took to bear-hugging him in the hallway while asking what he thought about most things. 

That was more than 7 years ago. 

This past year we re-found each other, as we always seem to do. This time, we were each emerging from near crippling burnout after a decade of hustle.

The more stories we told each other, the more we realized what felt missing, and what was truly important.

Like you, perhaps, we’ve experienced how productivity, efficiency, and the bottom-line have been a vacuum to the heart stuff at work and in our communities — connection, meaning, story, creativity, play, feeling. The way those who connect us, hold space, and create moments that feel human are consistently undervalued. We’ve seen how younger people get out-voiced by older ones; more intuitive people get outmuscled by louder ones; and how business always comes first. 

We’ve both been told we’re too sensitive, too soft, too weird — that leaders “didn’t know what to do with us.” Or that “maybe leadership isn’t for you.” We carried that with us for a while. We tried fitting in. Tried leading in the way we were told leadership was supposed to look. 

But they were right. It wasn’t for us.

We’re two people who love magic — building new worlds, designing heart-felt experiences that inspire togetherness, telling beautiful stories, and listening in a way that transforms both parties in a relationship. We spend long and delicious hours wondering how we might help people laugh. We care about the heart stuff. A lot. 

For a long time we’ve worked behind the scenes helping corporate cultures feel a little more human. We’ve hosted retreats, designed a circus under the guise of research, supported people in having hard conversations, tried telling more inclusive stories. But when we leave, we see what wins — that "business as usual" way of working. We see "who" wins. Those who got us there in the first place. 

So we’re trying something different. 

We have a hypothesis — that in order to activate our collective imaginations, make the mundane magical, and come back into right relationship with self, community, and planet, we need more experience design. And most importantly, we need more people doing experience design — no matter their age, their job, or their industry. 

What do we mean by experience design, exactly? 

It’s building worlds for people to play within.

Our hunch is that it starts with feelings — that designing for feelings is the core mindset, or state of being, that we must embrace.

This means that whether we’re designing a dinner party, a meeting, a day in the forest with the important 3-year-old kiddos in our lives, a climate action fellowship program, or a new wheelchair, we have to start with, and center on, the emotional experience of those we hope to include and impact, and those we might unintentionally harm.

We’ve identified a core set of skills we believe make up the backbone of an experiential design approach: 

Generous listening: Being present, holding space for others, and leading first with listening (always) especially when there’s difference.

Brave questioning: Bringing curiosity, boldness, and humility when challenging paradigms and shining light on the unexpected.

Joyful collaborating: Working with others in a way that centers on play, purpose, liberation, and abundance. 

Radical making:  Making as a way of learning, generating new possibilities, including others, and sharing power.

Inspired storytelling: Finding confidence in your own voice, and leveraging story as a way to shape identity, build relationships, and spark action.

Empathic relationship building: Designing for current and future relationships that exist between self, community, and planet.

Artful facilitating: Showing up and improvising with the energy and alchemy that is present.

***

We want to go on this adventure with you. To be detectives in search of the heart stuff— overturning rocks, listening with care, asking questions, and creating art together. 

We’re committed to learning in public, having our minds changed, and co-creating meaning.

We want to live in a heart-felt world. One that’s caring. Abundant. Imaginative. Playful. Where people are unafraid to lean into feelings, to trust each other, and create things that feel a little bit wild; a place where everyone’s an experience designer.

Will you join us?

We’re launching a series of global art projects — invitations to unpack and explore these heart-led skills.

Reach out if you’d like to play with us, and follow along on this journey through our Substack, Experientially (click “subscribe now” to join the party).

With care,

Olivia and Mark