Experience by Design

In today’s data saturated world, businesses are looking for ways to cut through the noise, and consumers are looking to feel seen and heard. Tools and techniques from the social sciences like Anthropology and Sociology can help organizations thrive in today's complex world by focusing on people’s lived experience in context. Learning to see connections from an experience standpoint reveals often implicit rules and relationships that shape how and why trends and ideas matter. Audiences will take away how to understand customers more holistically, integrate experience and systems design thinking ethically, and build more sustainable and authentic relationships. We'll explore how aligning experience and brand charts the future through transparency, sustainability, responsible tech and more.Travel with Adam and Gary, along with previous guest Jen Briselli, to the 2023 South by Southwest event for their session "Customers in Context: Social Science for Marketers." A packed room of over 300 were on hand to hear about how social science can be essential to designing brand experiences. Listeners will hear how to receive a special summary of the event, with tips and ideas on how to think like a social scientists when creating brand experiences.This episode brought to you by the Experience Research Society (EXPRESSO)

Designing for an international audience can provide challenges to the experience designer. If we are going to design with the cultural norms and expectations in mind, how do we handle when the number of cultures we are catering to seems to always increase? This also is a major challenge when living in a multicultural society where we have people from many different backgrounds. At least in that situation, we might have a national culture we can orient to. But what then about living in an international city, where people from all over are constantly arriving, each with their own sense of what is a “moment that matters” or what constitutes a “wow” and transformative experience? And of course, national culture is only part of that equation. We also can think of wealth cultures, religious cultures, age cultures, gender cultures, recreation and hobby cultures, and the list goes on and on. In the face of such complexity, the impulse can either be to turn and run, or to oversimplify to the point so that all these groups are reduced to a least common denominator which serves no one in particular.Today on Experience by Design, we are happy to welcome Kiran Varri, current CX consultant and formerly of ITC, the international luxury hotel chain. Kiran has had his own international journey. Growing up in India, he then went to university in Dallas, TX. And if that wasn’t enough culture shock, he then found himself working in Dubai. In the midst of all these travels, he has gotten to know a bit about working across cultures, and how to leverage those challenges to create vital opportunities.In our conversation, we discuss how multicultural workgroups are the key to designing international experiences.  We explore how ‘intercultural frolicking’ is vital to unlocking experience designs that resonate with audiences. We also talk about how building a common and shared culture from is like the US motto E Pluribus, Unum, or Out of Many, One. By allowing people to showcase their talents, they can find new ideas through their shared creativity. Out of this we raise the larger question, How do we foster cultures of more openness and acceptance, and not to lose our focus on the importance of being human.This episode brought to you by EXPRESSO, the Experience Research Society.

In a media environment where we are beset on all sides by messages, it can be hard to connect with your audiences. More challenging still is educating and impacting. We are all familiar with ads on television for different medications, from restless leg syndrome to depression to atrial fibrillation to skin problems to Wilfred Brimley “diabetus” advertisements, it is easy to feel uneasy about our health. It raises the question of whether the purpose of these ads is to educate or to convince that we indeed need to “speak to our doctor” about a certain drug despite the quickly-spoken side effects. Even when focused on “human-centered” design, it is easy to lose the human in the drive for profit. Not that there is anything wrong with making a profit, but when that becomes the sole driver, then all other considerations can take a backseat to that goal. To create a successful marketing and branding experience, it is not just about convincing, but also connecting. And as our media and social environments continue to change, we have to be innovative in how we create content that connects with people in a way that makes them feel cared for. Today on Experience by Design, we are pleased to welcome Wanda Toro Turini of Ketchwords and Rock-It Fuel. Wanda has built a career around innovating how people connect with their target audiences. Her interest in helping people led her to get a Doctorate in Pharmacology. And her passion for innovation and entrepreneurship led her to work with Novartis as a Sales Specialist and innovating in eBusiness. This path ultimately led her to exploring how to optimize how we connect with people through leveraging the power of new technologies to create more engaging content. We explore the concepts of awareness versus education in marketing and content creation. She tells us about her move from the pharmacy to sales to entrepreneurship, and what she learned from each along the way. We discuss why we need an outside perspective to help us see what we can do for others, and how to create systems to deliver on that promise. Finally, we talk about shamanic journeys and strategic meditation, and what a long strange trip it's been.This was the first in our series of ExD Live, hosted by the ever affable Michael Kirkpatrick on location at Centric Park in beautiful downtown Newburyport, Massachusetts. Centric Park provides experience design and rapid innovation for great companies committed to customer centricity. 

One of the lessons of the pandemic is raising the relevance of the workplace as a physical location in which people come together to accomplish their tasks. There are numerous stories of empty locations and attempts by employers to bring people back. Some of these attempts involve enticements, while others involve threats. Both speak to the growing question of what does the workplace provide to us that we cannot get working at home? And how might we design workplaces that people want to be at?To create a better workplace, the workplace designer has to embrace the experience design mindset. Workplaces are not just about utility, but about the experiences they provide and the vision they represent. The cubicle farm of some workplaces tells you what is thought of workers, especially one devoid of life, growth, and hope. We form an emotional attachment to the work spaces that we inhabit. Whether it’s a home office, a cozy corner of the library, or a bustling cubicle in a bustling office, our work spaces become an extension of ourselves. We come to rely on their familiarity, the way that the light cascades through the window or the smell of the coffee machine in the break room. It’s not just the physical attributes of our work spaces, though; there’s an emotional attachment that develops, too. Space and place come to mean something.Today on Experience by Design, we are pleased to welcome Doug Shapiro, of Imagine a Place Podcast and Vice President of Research and Insights at OFS Furniture. Doug talks to us about how we need to develop more creativity as a society in order to face the challenges that we have in front of us. Creativity is not just the future of work, but the future of our world. He describes the strong connection between place, health, and productivity. We dig into how the design of an environment has to reflect the different types of people that exist in that place, and speak to them all in their own way.The workplace needs to be different in order to support what is important to do in person, namely connect, laugh, and create new ideas. As plants need sunlight to grow, so do we. And beyond that, we need a fertile environment in which we feel cared for, nurtured, and welcome. Ultimately, we need to think about the soul of the workplace, and how to create one that creates a culture that supports the flourishing of those who work there.And also how laughter might be the best metric of success of all, and how a closet full of wigs might be the key to changing corporate culture. 

In experience design, there is design thinking, design doing, and design strategizing. Seldom do all three things come together in one package. This clearly presents a problem. Thinking isn’t enough without the doing. And doing isn’t enough without a strategy for what we are doing and why we are doing it. How to tie these things together becomes not just a challenge, but a requirement if you want your company to succeed long-term.Taking the messy, ephemeral aspects of how we go through life - expectations, memories, senses - and turn those into strategic points for organizational action. And it is not just about having organizational action, but more importantly organizational impact. The question becomes in what ways are the experiences we design impactful? And how do we have impact that has larger meaning and connected to a greater purpose? Changing behavior is hard because it is easy to come back to the old behaviors. With old behaviors comes predictable outcomes. In a world where change is needed, we can no longer abide by predictable outcomes.Today on Experience by Design, we are very excited to have Dr. Aga Szostek. Aga is one of the foremost experience design thinkers and strategists around. In 2021, she published The Umami Strategy: Stand Out by Mixing Business with Experience Design. She followed that up with Leadership by Design: A Guide to Transform You as a Leader in 2023. Central to all of her work is how to take complex ideas, couple them with theoretical frameworks, and turn them into actionable strategies. Her practical approach is inspired by a deeper knowledge that is built on her own unique path to her current work.In our conversation, we explore what is at the center of experience design as an emergent field. We discuss how she works as a type of Experience Therapist who helps her clients shift their worldview and strategy. Her Umami Strategy course is meant to help people find a way to do things that are meaningful to them, and can be meaningful to others. Rather than going for the big change, you can go for 1000 small changes. Once people see that change is possible, then you give them confidence to make those bigger changes. Ultimately, every experience designer is a person who wants to fix the world. Through her perspective and work, Aga definitely is on a mission to deliver on that promise.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of being an experience designer, or a designer of any kind, is the opportunity to make unexpected connections in order to deliver new experiences. Often this starts in our backgrounds of study. Because there are so few programs targeted in experience design, the majority of designers combine their educational background in different ways, practicing a strange type of professional alchemy that results in creativity and innovation. And if you talk to an experience designer, which we do a lot here at Experience by Design, you often get the same kind of response, “I don’t know how I got here, but I'm sure glad that I did!” One of the best thing about doing the podcast is the opportunity to explore those diverse backgrounds and journeys, tracing the circuitous routes that many of us take to get here. While it will be a good thing to at some point have experience design programs that train experience design professionals, it will be unfortunate if we lose the spirit that comes from the diverse journeys.Today on Experience by Design, we are glad to have consultant and experience designer Jaci Badzin. Jaci brings with herself a range of personal and professional experiences that she combines to make memorable experiences. We talk about her affinity for backgammon, her training as a dancer, her knowledge of gymnastics, her working with some of the biggest brands around, and her work running her own experience design company. We also talk about how constraints are the possibility for creativity. When you don’t have the budget, you can see what you do have. When you don’t have the space, you can see how to best use the space you have. When you don’t have the staff, focus on the skills of the people you do have. Her role is to bring the parts together in unique ways, and be the conductor of the experience orchestra.Jaci also thinks she has some idea on how to make academic conferences less boring, which would be her greatest achievement of all!

One of the fascinating things about doing experience design is the innumerable ways in which we can apply our understanding and work. While we might talk about silos such as customer, user, employee, patient, and the like, it always comes down to people. Or, some might say, humans. And it is not just that we are dealing with humans in our design, but that we should be humanistic when approaching our designs and for whom we are designing. Rather than designing “at” people, we need to design “for” them, or even hopefully design with “them.” There are many ways that our designs can make a difference in people’s lives when we are open to those possibilities.Today on Experience by Design, we are very fortunate to have Vaishali Dialani, now of Konabos but formerly of NOW Money. Vaishali also is a winner of the CXPA 2022 Emerging Leader in CX Award for the Middle East. We talk with Vishaly about how the company started with a strong dose empathy for their migrant worker customers, who can be in precarious employment and immigration situations regarding their stability and opportunities. She talks about how her own background of being of Indian descent but growing up in Dubai helped her build trust with customers. We explore how the use of the app was about much more than the app itself, but about cultural norms, mindsets, and social context. Ultimately, the financial tool had a major impact on setting culture through technology, impacting the person who is using it as well as the family back home where the money is being sent. In this way, it became a tool to help provide services and support to the globally underserved and unsupported. 

Anyone who has been involved in education knows that education ain’t easy. It can be tricky and challenging to figure out how best to learn, integrate, and distill information to an audience. From the days of Socrates in the Agora and even before, the challenge of reaching learning with information that connects and educates has existed. The emergence of a wide array of technologies has further complicated the question of how to teach. Google Classroom and Zoom, along with the array of learning management systems that exist, have not necessarily changed how we do teaching; rather it changed just how we delivered it. What is needed is a fresh re-evaluation of how we reach broader and more widely distributed audience with information that they need.To help us explore these topics, we welcome Dr. Mohamed Latib to the Experience by Design studio. Mohamed is one of the founders of CX University, as well as PX University, online educational resources for those who are looking to become trained and versed in these areas of experience design. Mohamed has had a long career in teaching, consulting, and professional development with a variety of clients. While he has learned that each client comes with their own unique needs and characteristics, there are common features that need to be considered - because at the end of the day, you are dealing with humans.We talk about the democratization of knowledge through technology, courteous nudges, and learning support. We also discuss how experience boils down to three elements: cognition, emotion, and behavior. Finally, we explore the systems-based elements of experience design, and how if you build content that is robust, and that captures people’s interest, then you can deliver meaningful learning experiences that provide the educational foundation upon which they can build their futures.

When confronted with all of the wicked problems that we are facing as a country, global community, and species, it can all seem pretty hopeless. The great abolitionist Frederick Douglass famously said, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and never will.” When looking at the challenges of these wicked problems, we can see power and profit, and the resistance to cede that privileged position, to be a foundational challenge to making positive change. It might seem that big challenges require big complex responses. However, at the same time, great changes also can have humble beginnings.To continue our conversations around social responsibility and designing social change, we have Professor and Attorney David Johnson from Stanford University. David has extensive experience working as a general counsel for high tech firms in Silicon Valley. But before that, he got his start as a marine biology student with the intention to do environmental and oceanographic sciences.   These beginnings led him to combine his legal experiences with his love and care for the environment. We talk with David about examples of social activism that started small but resulted in big changes. David describes the design of a type of activism starter kit, highlighting inspirational stories of social activism to inspire and direct contemporary and future generations looking to make a difference. These tools are part of his search to identify what are the elements that need to exist for a single action to trigger a movement for effective change. Design and designers can help activists improve their actions so they have the best chance of making that kind of change possible. Ultimately, when you design things well, good things can happen. And when you design social change and activism experience well, you might just save a planet. 

As social scientists in sociology and anthropology, we are well-versed in the examination of business as a source of disruption in society. The privileging of profits over people, the extraction of resources for the benefit of shareholders, question ethics and legality rationalized as a necessary evil. Especially looking at the slash-and-burn era of the 1980s and 1990s, we saw business culture as "greed is good," with Wall Street being given greater attention and importance than Main Street. As a result, it is easy to be cynical of the greater calls by businesses to be ethical and socially responsible. While there still are important reasons to be suspicious and critical of the motives and impacts of business (especially large multinationals), there are other indications of change in the mindset and philosophy of business culture and leaders. Gary's own place of employment has touted “Business for Good” as a mantra where businesses are a part of the solution to the massive challenges and wicked problems facing all of us. As the Business Roundtable endorses a “stakeholder model” and there is more discussion of ethics and social responsibility, we are left wondering just how serious can these claims be taken?To talk about social responsibility and business, we welcome Drew Bonfiglio from Emzingo. Emzingo was born out of an academic exercise in graduate school that now exists as a thought and action leader in making business as a force for good. Replacing the studying abroad experience with more of a focus on social entrepreneurship, Emzingo provides pathways for businesses to do better and be partners in creating positive social change. We talk about the challenges of making businesses live the words that they speak. We also talk about the B-Corporation movement, and how Emzingo has been part of the effort to create certified socially responsible businesses. Working with company leaders and employees, Drew and Emzingo try to create socially responsible experience and design outcomes for a better society. Finally, we talk about how swimming in mayonnaise can get very tiring, and how trust is the absolute key when asking companies and employees to wade into uncertainty.