A Vanishing Point
Joshua Rubin 0:08
I remember Abraham took me and put me in a car and put a blindfold on me. And then drove me for hours. And I had this moment of realizing it was the first time since I was a child that I'd ever been asleep in a car not knowing where I was going. And letting go. And surrendering to the not knowing was really profound.
Joel Krieger 0:39
What would it feel like to wake up immersed in a performance that was created just for you. One in which every single moment you encounter is crafted with an intimate understanding of who you are, and who you hope to become.
Pavani Yalla 0:57
Odyssey Works creates performances for an audience of one. Each experience is custom-tailored to its participant and occurs not on a stage, but woven into the fabric of their daily life. The experience can last anywhere from a few days, to even a few months. And the results are transformative. Many of these people report to have changed jobs, relationships, or moved across the country. It's amazing how a single performance can alter the course of someone's entire life.
Suldano Abdiruhman 1:32
I'm starting to see shifts in my work that I feel like directly are connected to it. One of them was quitting a job I had during the pandemic. And then I was thinking about what having a small business would look like, which turned into a real thing that I started with a close friend of mine, I think I felt this renewed sense of self. It was really like... it felt like a new beginning.
Joshua Rubin 2:04
They had given me an ability to see the world in a new way. Anytime you can have these moments of brief awakenings, to the magic and synchronicity of the world, you're lucky. As a theatrical experience, it's hard to imagine anything like this comparable. Something that is being done and created for you. With you. It is bizarre and unique, and special.
Joel Krieger 2:56
Welcome to Outside In. I'm Joel...
Pavani Yalla 2:59
And I'm Pavani. Each episode we'll discover design in unexpected places.
Joel Krieger 3:04
So these creators may not always call themselves designers, they actually go by many different labels. But they all have one thing in common. They create moments that have the power to change us.
Pavani Yalla 3:25
In a world full of mass-produced objects and experiences that are designed for anyone, and everyone, Abe Burickson designs for someone. This episode explores a bespoke, more intimate flavor of experience design, where you throw out the need for something to scale to a mass audience, and instead, intentionally design for an audience of one, two, or even just a few.
Joel Krieger 3:53
Abe and his partner Aiden have experimented with all these formats, from the one-person Odysseys that you just heard about at the very beginning of this episode, to a two-person online experience, called the Book of Separation. And finally to Abe's unique approach to designing custom homes, called the Long Architecture Project.
Pavani Yalla 4:15
Joel and I recently experienced the Book of Separation. Although it's an online performance experienced while apart, we somehow were able to have a sensory, embodied experience that made us feel more connected than at any other moment during the pandemic.
Joel Krieger 4:31
We start our conversation here with Abe describing the Book of Separation. And then we take a brief tour of some of his other work—exploring the transformative power of truly bespoke and participatory experience design. Enjoy!
Abraham Burickson 4:57
The Book of Separation is a digital online experience for two people to have an experience of togetherness, while being incredibly, or not so incredibly, far apart. Obviously, it emerged from our separation during the pandemic, which is something that so many artists are thinking about. The Book of Separation was an experiment in trying to create a different kind of intimacy, a different kind of togetherness, utilizing our online systems that we're so dependent upon. Now, the essential way it works is you get a phone call, each of you, ideally, for people who haven't seen each other in person in a while, say you did Joel, and you Pavani, and you're interviewed about each other, you're asked, you know, kind of general speculative questions, and some more intimate questions. And this custom-built system called one thing takes all that information and custom designs, the other person's experience for them, that is a kind of collage of animations, audio tracks, and videos that take you on a journey, kind of around this fairy tale, fictional world, together. You bump into each other. From time to time you send each other postcards, you even talk to each other on the phone, the phone rings, and you talk to each other, all to create a kind of new way of going on a journey together. I was inspired by, I mean, it's just a small thing, but you know, I was inspired by this thing my wife did for me a long time ago, on my birthday, I think when we were first dating, and she just sent me... she just sent me a poem. Like it's just an email, it was some poem that somebody had written, I don't even remember what it was. She didn't write it. But she linked every word to a different online material. Maybe it was a YouTube video, or a song or a text or something like that. I mean, we've all done things like this, right. But there's something very unique about internet connectivity between people that happens with that. It's interesting, there's no other place where that really happens, sending somebody links. And I think when the internet first happened, people were super excited to kind of be doing that. Just like, you know, when I got my first cell phone, I was like, Oh My God, I can go to the most beautiful hilltop in San Francisco and have a conversation with somebody in a beautiful place? Right. And so we forget that, but I was thinking back on that and how that every mode of interaction and communication has its own quality of connectedness. Even think about letters, think about how intimate a letter is, even though it's really distant even though you don't have like, you don't have a face, you don't have a body. You have a different kind of intimacy than, say, an email or even like a voicemail, like there's something about it. And so the the medium of connection, the medium of relationality, changes what's possible, and we're in the middle of pandemic, and we're in the middle of everybody diving headfirst into zoom, and performances happening on Zoom, and all these things getting poured into what was essentially meant to be, you know, business conference room software, and trying to make it work, which is kind of awesome. Like, I love, I just love the way creative people break things and make them do new things. But zoom has this sort of limited potential. It's super torso focused, right? And it, it causes this very strange relationship to people via screen, and to looking and to a certain kind of self consciousness. And I had felt that we were trying to pour live performance into zoom into Internet connectivity. But maybe there was some emergent form of connection on the internet that we could find if we really got experimental. And so that was the experiment. And it took a year and a half.
Pavani Yalla 9:27
Yeah, it was amazing. I mean, you mentioned the word medium. You are using paper and pen. You're using, like you said, the internet. You're using your phone. You're in your own home in your own room. Then you're directing us to do things physically with our body, to look in a certain direction, I mean, all of those things together, created the experience and I think that as a designer, I know that there is power in that but to actually experience it come together like that I think was very, very powerful.
Abraham Burickson 10:02
Yeah. And you know, Pavani, there were so many iterations.
Pavani Yalla 10:08
I'm sure.
Abraham Burickson 10:09
You know, in some of them, we had people like spinning around in the room. And, like one of the, one of the great challenges, I think, for digital experience is embodiment. And so we were thinking like about how, how the fact that people were alone in their rooms, and had some kind of power over that agency, could allow them to maybe be more embodied to engage their place more, you know, just the activity. You know, there's not much of a spoiler at the front. But you know, the activity of going and finding a book that reminds you of your friend, brings the materiality of your home, you're really interested in the weight of the book, there's something about holding the thing in your hand, and associating that with the other person both brings in this embodiment of like holding the book, but also makes this piece emergent from your home, and from whatever history you have with those books. And so I know a lot of times with digital experience, it's all here in the screen. And we're thinking, Well, why does it have to be, you know, certainly, it doesn't have to be like, there's the rest of your life. And there's all that randomness. And sometimes togetherness is the material culture of the space in which you live. So, yeah, it was an experiment. And in that as well,
Pavani Yalla 11:34
I also appreciated how easy it was to follow the instructions. So for me, personally, and I was like, I told Joel, actually, I had called him on my drive home to get home in time to be able to do this experience in time. And he was like, gosh, I hope you get there in time. And I did, but all of that baggage of, I'm running late, and all the things that happened in the day I was bringing into the experience, but there was something about how it started and the instructions we received that totally helped me feel settled and feel excited, and feel, you know, embraced honestly, in that time. So you have to design for all the various contexts that people are bringing into the experience.
Abraham Burickson 12:20
Yeah, there's a certain level of relaxation that you want a person to be able to have. And, and trust that that, like you said, is, is an embracing and I think it's taken me a long time to really learn that, you know, because I think a lot of people don't want to muddle muddy the waters with lots of instructions and reminders and things like that. But I found over time that it's okay. It's okay. It's worth being reminded. So you don't feel lost. You feel like you're in good hands. The other thing that you mentioned is so key and was one of the things that was sort of essential to this effort, which is the the way you had to drive home fast to meet Joel at the appointed hour. And digital experiences rarely are just more and more geared towards on-demand when you want it, which, which is great and convenient, and a lot of ways, but we have a different psychological approach to them like and when I say approach, I mean, the way we approach them is is different, it loses a certain kind of specialness, because it's not an event, right? Like I recall going to shows before pandemic a long time ago. And I would have great experiences at shows that weren't that good because I was sort of awoken and made attentive by getting there by showing up on time by knowing everybody else was getting there. At the same time that they were with me. There was an eventness to it. There was a bracket around that time that was powerful for my own attentiveness. And we wanted that here. And so you're excited. You made it like you made it home on time. Yeah, for the show. But you wouldn't have to do that for, you know, Stranger Things or something.
Pavani Yalla 14:22
Right. I'm curious about the emotional arc of the experience and how intentional or designed that was.
Abraham Burickson 14:32
Yes, I started less with an emotional arc than what might be called an experiential arc. It started with a bunch of diagrams like the conversations were all in diagrams at first. If this were an actual video conversation, I can show you the final diagram of the piece. What I was looking for was to be moving through the emotional and physical and narrative experiences of togetherness and aloneness. And the different emotional valences of those. And I won't give a spoiler, but like there are times in it, when you're sort of reminded of the great things about being alone and times when you're reminded of how annoying everybody is, and it's so great they're not with you and there are other times, you know, largely the sort of baseline idea is, you know, you're looking for togetherness, you're looking for each other. And so there was an arc to that. In the diagram, that began the whole thing, it was this sort of these kind of increasing loops of togetherness and separation, we sort of envisioned it like to, you might say, shoe laces that are sort of connected at the beginning and they get pulled apart, and then they get sort of wound together one point get pulled even further apart and break at one point and then come back together and get tied in a knot. And so the emotional arc of it could be sort of visualized that way. And then once I had done the, once I've done the diagram worked with my designer to make it look clear for everybody, we were able to use that arc, as kind of the guiding principle more so than the script itself. I use the arc to to do the script for the designer to design the images, the the composer, all those things, that's kind of the baseline.
Pavani Yalla 16:28
So I'm smiling, because that totally worked. After Joel and I did the experience, we connected briefly. And I told him, there were two very, I'm just gonna try not to spoil it for others as well. But two very powerful moments in the whole experience for me. And one of them was very much where you feel the loss of separation and specifically with your friend, right? And then the other was, oh, it was surprising to me, like, oh, yeah, I kind of want to be alone. This isn't so bad. And I know you know exactly what I'm talking about. But those were the two most powerful moments and why I actually remember exactly what I was seeing on the screen when I experienced those feelings. So it totally worked on me and was probably what was most memorable about the whole experience is flip flopping between feeling alone in a good way and feeling alone in a bad way.
Abraham Burickson 17:21
I'm really glad to hear that, you know, one of the great challenges of the piece, and one of the things that we were trying to do, was to create enough of a story, a specific enough story that you felt like you were entering into the world, but a generic enough story that you felt you could overlay your own meanings onto it. And that was also iterative and a really interesting challenge, right? Because the idea was not that you come totally into my story, but that you and Joel together, create a new story with this framework.
Pavani Yalla 18:00
Yeah, for sure. So I want to kind of switch gears a little bit. But it's, I think, all very related. You are most known for your Odysseys, right? The experiences that you've created for a single person or an audience of one. If you could briefly describe those experiences and how you know, what is the common thread between all of your work essentially and then how has it culminated in your most recent work?
Abraham Burickson 18:28
So, Odysseys (which we started making 20 years ago, which is mind blowing) are day long, originally than weekend long and week long and month long performances for one person audiences. And they emerged from a kind of question about the ideal audience that my friend Matthew and I had been discussing for a long time. We're out in San Francisco, we're and we've gone down to Big Sur, we're going for a long walk on the beach, and we're talking about this problem. The ideal audience is just that one person who happens to get it. You write a poem, I was a poet and an architect, and he was a theater guy and a painter, you know, you do create your work, and you send it out into the world. And hopefully, there's that person who understands this, and it's perfect for them. And maybe you designed a building that was brilliant, but a lot of people thought it looked like a sewing machine, but you knew that embodied the truth of the world. And so you end up designing for that person, which is, you know, will hopefully show up we said why don't we just design for that person? What would happen? What would be the follow on effects? And so we did, we tried it, so Okay, let's just create the experience for one person and, and I will honestly say at the beginning, we had a kind of a notion that maybe sort of like that Michael Douglas movie, the game? Yeah, we thought, Oh, well, you can like perfectly craft, what they're gonna go through and you can understand you can totally understand them. And you can create this thing that is just like clockwork. And, you know, they have decision moments, but you can be like a Greek god and just kind of set send it down from on high. But I think what we discovered was that A) you can't 100% understand another person, and B) maybe it's more interesting to create something that is a dynamic relational thing about you, and that other person. Suddenly, we as artists weren't these kind of, I don't know, wizards behind the curtain, which is sort of how artists in the professional world tend to be treated, right? Maybe they're geniuses, but they're not in relationship with their audience in this kind of, you know, professionalized world like maybe they'll come out and take a bow after the show, or, you know, give a talk after the installation. But generally, if they're not in relationship, and it's kind of a funny thing, why not, you know, you sit around playing music with friends, you're in relationship, you paint a picture of someone you care about, that's in relationship, it's the way you see them. There's something about intimate, small and community based art making, that is inherently relational, that sort of emerges from relationality. And we found that when we got into doing things this way, the relationality was inevitable. And getting rid of the, the need for a mass audience, getting rid of the need for some kind of advertising that would appeal to everybody. So you get enough butts and seats or books sold or whatever, having 100% sold out shows because you only have one audience member. And always a satisfied audience in that sense, you put aside a lot of those kind of ways of being and you can really enter into relationship. And then what we found was, oh, well, then if this is relational, let's just expand the relationality of it. And we would bring on the person's friends and family and our own friends and family or the communities in a particular place or communities with a particular interest. And what we found was, instead of having hundreds of people coming to see a show, we would have hundreds of people connected to developing, creating, making the world of this piece at various different levels of commitment. And so we would make these experiences which were narrative, and aesthetic experiences that would enter into the life of our audience member, sometimes for months, maybe, you know, maybe it would start say with a children's book that our participant, that's what we call them, our participant's priest gave him a children's book for their four-year-old kid. And it was kind of a weird children's book, maybe it was about a secret room that the little girl in the children's book drew into her imagination by drawing on the sidewalk and opening the door and stepping in. It was a room where she could do any all these fun things that she wanted to do in private. And then maybe after this book had gone into bedtime circulation for a while the participant then got an invitation to his own secret room, you know, but of course, it wasn't a chalk-drawn door on the sidewalk. It was a 20,000 square foot shut down hardware store, downtown Brooklyn. And it goes in there. And there, of course, are all those things that he likes to play with, something to write on something to music to play books to read all the things that were in the children's book that have been planted months before that he'd been engaging with with his kid. Now he's engaging with it himself. His secret room and then maybe in the secret room, he reads a another story. There's a notebook. Somebody else has been living here. Every time he goes. He goes week after week after week. And every time he goes that notebook is there's a little bit more written in that notebook. And it's a story. It's a story of the person who's been there when he wasn't trying to hear the music of this incredible cellist again, and searching high and low and then maybe one day after he leaves his secret room. He sees me who he knows I'm the guy from Odyssey Works because he signed up with us. He knows who I am. But I'm that character, that character's really me but I'm also that character. And we go for a walk and we talk about music and he loves music. He's a musician. He's also a writer, but he's a musician. And we talk about having traveled to have powerful experiences of music and I tell him about how I was In, I was studying the architecture of this indigenous group in the Amazon and, and I went deep into the forests met this community. And they played this music on these stringed Western instruments. But the strings were out of tune, they were walking back and forth, and back and forth. And, and it obviously wasn't about the tuning of the music, it was about this experience, this drone, this being and if it's dark, there's like some candlelight or something I can't quite recall. But it was the eeriest experience of my life, it seemed to go on for months, or more, but it was probably only about half an hour. But it was an experience of having gone somewhere, and been totally about a musical moment. And then while we're having this conversation, we're in the car. And then we're at the airport. And then I open up the back of the car, and I have his suitcase and give him his suitcase. And I pull out of the top of his suitcase, his itinerary, his passport, and he looks at it and he sees he's on his way to Regina, Saskatchewan, and he goes on the plane. And on the plane, he's given by the flight attendant, something flight attendant thought he dropped, which is this weird score, which he can't make heads or tails of... some kind of postmodern musical score. And he's studying it as he's traveling. It's a long trip, it's like eight plus hours, something like that, to get even more probably to get to Saskatchewan, and then he gets there. And he doesn't know why he's there. And so border security is a little bit suspicious of him. And he gets into this whole long debate with them about whether it's okay for him not to know why he's there. And he says, I'm a writer, and they say, Sure, everybody's writer, he says, look it up on the internet, they say the internet is easily faked. Which is true. He says we could go down to a bookstore just got a book out. Finally they let him through. Did Odyssey Works plant that border agent? Do we have that kind of power? Did we make him define who he was in terms of his character in the world? Or was it just luck, and then he ends up at this hotel and he puts his stuff away and he comes outside and there's somebody waiting for him with a truck and he says let's go and they go and they go out of Regina, Saskatchewan, which is this kind of Emerald City sort of city, not that it's green and beautiful like that. But it has the there's like prairie on the outside and city on the inside. And they're right next to each other, which is not like the cities I know in America. And they go until the city fades into the distance. And when they when the city is gone, they stop at the edge of the field and they go for a walk through the field and he starts to see this weird structure, like a single room. It's a single room in a field. That's all it is. It's got a window on each wall. And he realizes he recognizes that window because there was a photo of that window in his secret room in Brooklyn. And he realizes Oh, the photo of that window. The picture on the wall was also an illustration in the children's book that months before he had been read and started reading to his daughter and gets closer and closer and hears the music. He hears the cello music which he realizes was on the CD player in his secret room already, and gets closer. And this is of course the cellist who's written about in the children's book. And then he goes inside and he sits there. And he sits there for two hours listening and watching her play this piece of music, which was composed for this moment. And this was two hours, this was two hours he spent there. But it was of course a month long experience to get to this particular moment, this particular relationship to this piece of music to this event, to go back to what we were talking about before to this event that was so built up to that he when he got there was so present later he said, he said I'll always have Canada, meaning he'll always have this moment. And this was a whole weekend just for this two hour experience. And they turned around, went back to the hotel, spent the night and flew home the next day, whole weekend just for that. That's the kind of thing that Odyssey Works does.
Pavani Yalla 29:24
Beautiful. Thank you for that.
Joel Krieger 29:26
Such a surreal gift. It's almost like you get to know these people so well. That the experience you craft for them has this innate transformational quality. I mean, people...how are people different on the other side of this experience?
Abraham Burickson 29:43
Yeah, it's so interesting. You know, we have a kind of a point of faith. It's sort of simple maybe it's like an artist kind of creed and that's that powerful, artistic narrative. aesthetic experiences are transformative, that seems to hold true. People change their lives, almost universally, they move, they leave a relationship or start a relationship or fully commit to a relationship within the next within the following like three months quit a job. These major life changes tend to happen. I'll say that when an Odyssey was done for me, there were all these grandiose moments, you know, they were like I was conducting an orchestra of voices while blindfolded. And I had been listening to my favorite piece of music at the time was Gretzky's Third Symphony. And so I was just so in it, you know, I just been not, I just been you to just like non stop taking that piece of music in. And so then they knew that. And so all the musicians, everybody in the room sort of knew the piece of music and knew how to go to it. And they knew that I would, so I conducted them to play this piece of music live, they loved, I am not a conductor, I'm not even a musician. So that was it was kind of an amazing experience. But, the most powerful experience of that Odyssey, amongst other more spectacular things was when I was walking down Market Street in San Francisco. Alone, I had to go from point A to point B, simple transportation thing, go for a walk. And then out of one of these, you know, junky camera stores, came a friend of mine. What a surprise? And he just walked with me and didn't say anything. And then a few blocks later came another friend who walked with me and didn't say anything. And we kept going like that, till I got to point B. And it was all I really wanted, was to literally, and metaphorically walk with a friend, I didn't really realize that. I thought maybe I wanted to conduct a great orchestra of voices perform my favorite piece of music. But actually, what I wanted was that.
Pavani Yalla 32:13
I'm imagining that there is a lot of research on the individual that goes into creating an odyssey in order for someone to know that that's what you needed, you didn't even know that you needed it, right? In order for them to make that happen. They need to really understand you. Can you talk about that process, that upfront research process just a bit? How do you get to know someone, so well?
Abraham Burickson 32:38
It varies depending on honestly our budget and time. But at a minimum, it involves them filling out a questionnaire, that's about 15 pages long, it takes at a bare minimum, two and a half hours to fill it out. On average, somewhere in the six to seven hours range and not infrequently around 10 hours. So it's a huge commitment, then we do interviews with them, and as many of their friends and family as we can. And then we do things with them, maybe go to the sauna with them and have a conversation, spend time going for a walk in the woods together, finding out what it is to be together with them. And then we take the things that they've told us about themselves. Like, what music they listen to, and what's their favorite place, and what ideas are they interested in? We look at these things and then we try them out ourselves. We see how could we fall in love with this kind of music? What would it take? How might we learn to hate the subway in New York because it's so crowded and garbagey as she said she said it was garbagey... How can we hate the garbagey nature of the subway and love the symmetry of St. Patrick's Cathedral? And how much do we have to listen to this music until it's like familiar to us... second nature? What books do we have to read? We'd split up their reading lists so that everybody would read it. And if they're really into some particular idea like say sushi making, you know, we would go watch Jiro Dreams of Sushi and then kind of have long conversations getting into the idea of craft around sushi. The point being in a way to fall in love with the person and you know how when you fall in love with a person you start to see through their eyes? In part, you're motivated because you want to bring them something that like, right, you want to bring them happiness and joy. And in part because they've infected you, and they're opening their new world for you. And so that's what we try to do in order to enter into a kind of new subjectivity around them. And we have this marker, it's probably silly, but it's, it's also sort of, quite effective of when we're ready, which is, when one member of our team has dreamed about our participant, then we're ready, then they've entered them where at least then at least somebody has crossed the line into internalizing the other person.
Pavani Yalla 35:48
Empathy is like the one word that comes to mind as you're talking, practicing empathy or to get to know this person and step inside their shoes. And I'm thinking about our day job, Joel, as designers in the corporate world, and how very little time we actually spend doing that. First off, because we're usually designing for mass audiences. And it's impossible to do it, we create these personas that are supposed to mean something. And it feels so freeing to be able to actually truly design for a single person.
Abraham Burickson 36:25
Absolutely. Right. I mean, of course, we're an ideal case, right? I mean, it's somewhere, we're somewhere, what we're doing is somewhere down the line of kind of an imaginary thought experiment. And, and when, when I think about, I also am a designer. I'm an architectural designer. And I do think about the function of such a thing in the world. And I often come back to this book about sustainable design called Cradle to Cradle, maybe you know it, when I first read that, just piss me off. I don't remember all the details in the book. But I remember it was like, largely impossible, I was never going to enact any of these things, right. One of the things in the book was, you know, this book, you can put it in a hot bath, and wash all the letters off and then print a new book on it. I'm like, That's ridiculous. This is not something that will happen. Right? That is just some way down the line, idealistic thing. But that was many years ago. And I've come back to that book a lot. And the ideas of sustainability in that book quite a bit. I'm not enacting any of them. But it represents a kind of a vanishing points of an idea of a way of thinking, and this work with Odyssey works. Even for myself, you know, these performances, these one person performances, my hope, is that it will serve as a kind of a vanishing point for empathetic, experiential design. And that when you're at your day job saying, well, that's just impossible. Like, I'm just designing for a mass audience, that can be somewhere in your consciousness, and have some have a little bit of a gravitational pull. I've been thinking about this a lot over the years. Because I, for a long time, had a fairly standard architectural design practice. And it felt like I was going in two directions, you know, I was doing residential design and, you know, making things that were looked good and I thought functional, the way I'd been taught, but I also had this other practice, which suggested that we can think of any particular thing, not as the thing, but as a kind of nucleus for experience. And that that experience can be understood, you know, perhaps in the UX way of thinking about experience or like, Oh, you do something, it's you have certain feelings, your body moves in certain ways. You are likely to like it or not, and do things, right. There's that kind of various sort of small concentric circle, small circle around that experience of the moment of engagement with it. But there's also the kind of follow on effects of that object. What, what are the follow on effects of putting a tray for your shoes by the front door? Right? Not only are you going to put your shoes in it, maybe, but maybe you'll have a different attitude towards the home. Maybe you'll start to have a different relationship between inside and outside. Maybe your understanding of warmth will change, maybe your understanding of clothing will change. How will that affect the way you're thinking about other things in your life? Right? These follow on effects are fascinating. And when you design a home, which is what I usually do, when I'm doing architectural design, you're creating all these things that have so many follow on effects, we know that we're always going back to home as the seed of ways of being. But when you do a standard architectural design practice, you sort of like, okay, well, you know, there's a work triangle in the kitchen and things need to be near each other, you have these six rooms, and there's a living room, which has to look nice, you know, all these kind of standard things. But we're not thinking about these follow on effects. And so started thinking about how to look at this other work and Odyssey works as an influence on this. And this idea of of home, which I was creating homes,
and to say what would it be to stop making things when I'm doing architecture, and to start considering the not just the big picture of a person's life, but the effect of a community, like a family as a community, but also the community in which the building exists? The effect that this intervention in their life will have, and suddenly it dawned on me, oh, my God, we we have this enormous opportunity to make the building of a home or even the renovating of a home into the most intentional moment in a person's life. Right, if I wish to be a an environmentalist, that sort of low hanging fruit, right, I can, you know, design a truly green house. But okay, am I going to do that like a LEED way? Am I going to do you know, all these checklist things? And I've done it? Or can I think about how the house will encourage me to live in a different way? Not just how's it gonna have a smaller footprint? But how will the house for instance, how do I think about sizing closets? So I don't buy as much disposable stuff? How do I think about the the way the garden works? And then what, what do I need as a person? Or what does my client need to remember their connection to nature? Because that seems to be in our conversations that has seemed to be what drove them to want to be an environmentalist, this emotional feeling this, this sense, this this aesthetic connection to the qualities of nature? What would it be to bring that in? Do we have to for instance, instead of running the rain outside of the house and away from the house, maybe we want to run the rain into the house and have it so that there's a fountain in the middle of the house? That trickles whenever it's raining? So you're not? So yes, you're protected from getting wet? But you're not isolated from the sounds that made you love environmentalism in the first place? Or maybe it's something else, maybe you're somebody who wants to develop a different a new kind of community, how does that? How does that live in the house? And so I'm sort of trying to build these in and I realized what we needed to do was have a phase architectures like very structured into these phases, right? design phases, and what if we had a phase before that, where the architect and the client together slowly and intimately explored questions of their, of the clients future of the clients impact of their aims and life in the world and community and family and esthetics and use that as the kickoff moment. And once I started doing that, with with my clients, it started to seem absurd to me the way I used to work, which is, you know, you show up somebody's like, oh, I want to, you know, house with like, good views and the kitchen. I'm like, Okay, here's some options. You good. We'll do that. Right. And then let's get into the nitty gritty of like, picking tiles and stuff. Right and totally disconnected from who they want to be, who they want to be what impact they want to have. And you know, it it's so rare that we have an opportunity to do anything that is related to that tends to be this, this abstract thing, but you know, the building of a house, or even the renovating of a house is an unbelievably an unbelievable outlay of resources, both Financial material, and timewise that it seems such a shame that we miss that opportunity to do it together.
Pavani Yalla 45:13
Absolutely. I'm living this right now. So we just recently moved into a home a couple months ago, it was a new build, we didn't really get to, it wasn't like a custom home or anything. But there are so many details that I would have done differently had, we gone through that type of a process, which is so rare, as you mentioned. But now, you know, accepting the architecture for what it is even like, where we place furniture, what we hang on our walls, you know, all of that I'm obsessing over it now because I know the impact that it can have on our lives. As I was researching a bit for this conversation, I was looking at your website, and I discovered the long architecture project, which is I think what you're starting to talk about now, I had a moment where it's like, oh, my gosh, this rings, so true. We have a spot in our new home. Now, upstairs, it's kind of a common area between all the bedrooms, it's kind of like a landing, all the bedrooms open up into that common area, we never had that sort of a space in our previous home. And just having that space has now created a ritual of us being together before bedtime with the kids, you know, reading to them playing with them. And then we we go to bed, this space, something about it has changed how we interact with each other in just the last couple of months. And I'm seeing the effects of it. So it totally hits home for me right now. And I wish we could have gone through that type of a process.
Abraham Burickson 46:43
Right? Yes, I wish everybody could write like I would, I would love it. If this were if phase zero was just inherent in every design process, it wouldn't be that hard to have a process at the beginning that says, Okay, let's think about how this relates to your aims in life. And so much of that has is this kind of hangover from modernism, somebody some brilliant person, having those answers for you that you even see it in sustainability, which is also again, the low hanging fruit about trying to live a purposeful life, most architectural design, that tends towards sustainability tends towards a kind of checklist approach. That is somebody came up with best practices, and you buy them or you don't, right, it sort of comes on down, right? It's it's a passive approach. And so much of design sort of encourages our audience to be passive. But what if it didn't do that? What if the design process was something that encouraged them not only to be active, but the idea that the design could activate the the audience, the user in such a way that they move into a way of, of embodying or projecting into the world, their best values, I think, becomes a kind of a utopian thing, all the so many of the utopias of the 20th and 19th century, in an America that I know of, were based on somebody had an idea that other people kind of bought into. But I feel like there's a there's a, there's a an alternative utopia, which is one that empowers people, to, to go to the place of their most ethical urge, and become that and be empowered to do that. Just imagine it, just imagine if every design thing that you were engaging with, from, from graphics to house to car to, to, to human resources, which is a design, which is right, was done in some way in relationship to your best ethical aims. How would the world be different? Sounds like chaos? I know. But maybe it's a good chaos.
Joel Krieger 49:21
Yeah, it's a it's interesting, because I think right now a lot of people put a lot of effort into the aesthetic choices that they make when they're, say decorating the house. And so that scene from if you remember the movie, Fight Club, wherever Norton is like, the catalog and everything I've chosen, that that represents me and who I am. So it's like this, this pivot from these these choices as being a static thing that somehow represents some aspect of your identity. And these more kinetic choices that propel you to be more of what you say you are or what you say you want to be. That's fascinating.
Abraham Burickson 49:54
Yeah, I think, you know if we can start to build processes into design that begin from this kind of idea of experience. And allow people to feel empowered, will move in that direction naturally. I think the tools are there. I think the ideas are here. And growing. When I first did my first Odyssey nobody spoke about experience design. But now, the word immersive is everywhere. Yeah. And the idea of experience. How, however it's being interpreted, is all over I teach at Mica. And we've started these immersive experience classes there mica in the art school in Baltimore. And somebody in the administration was like, can we get this word immersive, just into the name of the department?
Joel Krieger 50:59
Got to ride the hype curve. Right.
Abraham Burickson 51:00
Right. And, you know, you see it but you know, on the one hand, things get thinned out in terms become, sort of, they lose their force. On the other hand, it still represents an interest, especially now, God, what a moment we've been through, or still going through, where we've been separated from each other where we're, we're hungering for experiences, or hungering for embodiment or hungering to re approach the normal world except we knew there were all these problems. So there's this, there's this inflection point. It's the perfect moment to be having this conversation, I think.
Joel Krieger 51:43
Yeah, it's interesting, because the, the word immersive. In what I was hearing, you talk about before, you're really interested in the relationships between things. It's almost sounds like a been reading a little bit about systems design. And it's like seeing the relationships between things rather than the things themselves. And to me immersive. It just sounds like it's a very singular, enclosed thing. And what I love about what you're expressing about your work is, it's always in relation to something else. And I mean, I snagged this quote from maybe your website or an article, it's it said, or you said, Does your design make the world more or less fair, encourage greed or generosity, these are questions that tend to fall outside the design process. And so I just love that this idea of, you know, thinking about the experience, but thinking about this dynamic web of connections that unfurls from it. And, and considering that in the process as well, which, which I feel like is quite quite a different than where the whole immersive scene is going.
Abraham Burickson 52:50
I mean, that's the power of an idea, right? Like just the word experience, when you drop it, when you sprinkle it on top, like a little bit of salt or something, you sprinkle it on top of, of this word immersive, which Yeah, has, you know, it seems to largely mean that you walk into a room and there's Van Gogh to the left of you Van Gogh to the right of you, Van Gogh above you, right, there's Van Gogh everywhere, you're just inside that go. It's aversive. You know, that's, yeah, you're inside a thing. But when you take it, when you take the word experience into the word, immersive, when you take the idea that we've been talking about experience in the moment experience in an ongoing way, you really get into it. You start thinking, okay, there is physical immersion. I'm in this bathtub, I'm literally immersed in water. There is my room, all of these things, but then there's also a kind of psychological immersion, right? Am I You're telling me a story, do I care or not? You know, I walk into, you know, guests are there, walk into the bag that we went there walking, which I've never been to none of them. But I've seen the pictures, I walk into Van Gogh, and, you know, I love Van Gogh's biography, I just read it, I just read Van Gogh's biography, and in fact, I went to Sam Raimi to where he was in the, in the asylum, and I walked around and I imagined what it was like and so I'm immersed psychologically, in this as well as being immersed physically but then there's like this further step right. The experience of immersion Am I ontologically? immersed? Am I spiritually immersed, is this connected to what is meaningful to me when when you go to Mecca and you're a believer, it is all of those things. It is on it is physically immersive, spiritually immersive. narratively, you're in a story, you walk a story. You know, the journey tonight is you're not just going to that Holy haram, the the, the the stone that you circling doing this whole thing, you're reenacting all these narratives from the Quran, when you go to the, to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, put this put your prayers in the cracks. The story is they go up to having the stories, this was the, this is the piece of the of the Holy Temple, the only piece left, right, you're in the story, you're, you're narratively immersed. You're in this old city of Jerusalem with its aesthetics and its tensions and its violence and its, and its history. And so you're physically immersed. But you're also ontologically immersed if you're, if you believe in it, and it's connected to everything you've longed for in your life. And so, you know, yeah. The immersive industry makes some really cool looking things. And that's great. But when we think about it, experientially, we really dig into it, what are the other ways that it can be immersive? And oh, by the way, you know, all of these religious and political practitioners from the millennia have been thinking about this too, for quite a long time and have done amazing things with it. And we should learn from them. This is like a renaissance of those ideas rather than a new idea. Hmm,
Pavani Yalla 56:18
love it. This is Joel like so in line with what we used to nerd out about.
Joel Krieger 56:23
Yeah, I never thought about this before when you said the, the political and what was the other one? The religious? Yeah, of course, like, of course, immersed in a story. And what's more immersive than that, when you read when you fully inhabit this worldview, it it changes the color of everything that you see in every experience you have is informed and, and the meaning is made through that. So yeah, I just, that's a great connection there for me, and considered,
Abraham Burickson 56:56
I decided to become an architect when I was when I when I was in college, and I left college. And I went to study the whirling of the Whirling Dervishes in Turkey. And I went to Turkey, to do so. And I was young and everything was new and different. I've never been traveling alone before, you know, during that night, so I would go to the dervish lodge. And during the days, what was I doing, I was wandering the city like a tourist and I would walk into those mosques, those incredible mosques in Istanbul, they were just they were everywhere, you know, yeah, there's like the Blue Mosque and, and the is Sophia, those are incredible. But, but you, but you just go deep into the city, and you happen upon another incredible mosque, and maybe, you know, there's something a little less, you know, there's not tourists going in there. And I would go in, at that time, I, you know, I was practicing and I would go in and enter into the space and be changed by it. It's such an amazing thing. Believe it or not, there's something that changes you about being in a sacred structure dependent you know, if it's one of these grand structures, but there's this ritual of going in, you know, you have to wash before you go in, you have to take off your shoes, you have to like enter into a posture. You know, like, just like when you go into a Buddhist meditation, you have to bow and, and you have to have a certain kind of quiet and then you go into the mosque, and there's an orientation on Earth, right, it points you it points you towards where the sacred is, it says this way to Mecca, which is to say it this way to God. And so the Earth has a different understanding now and there's this geometry to these buildings, which is very simple but sort of structures and understanding the world of heaven above and you below and you in the world and you in relationship to these axes of the sacred and and I realized I was somebody else I had different potential. I had different thoughts in my mind, I had a different set of tensions and relaxations in my body. This had changed me and I realized after that I wanted to be an architect. But what I really wanted to be was an experienced designer who made architecture.
Pavani Yalla 59:22
Yeah. That reminds me a lot. So my family's originally from India, and growing up, we would spend summers there. And the temples, the Hindu temples that I grew up visiting, would often have similar effects. Growing up, I would always want to challenge the things that I was told about religion. You know what, what you should believe you should do this because something bad will happen if you don't, right. I think we all grow up with that to some degree, regardless of what the religion is. And so to be told, God is in this temple, we have to go there, just thinking that I want to Go there, if you don't actually then go there something bad might happen, right? Like these were all of the stories that I would be told. But then to go and actually experience something there, despite rebelling internally against the thought of it was very powerful for me. So specifically, there's, there's a temple in Southern India, that is a top seven hills takes about four hours to hike up to get to the temple. And there is, of course, a route that you could take by car, but it's better to hike up because you are going to attain something different. And we would try to hike up every single time. And initially, it would feel like oh, my gosh, I can't believe I have to do this, I have to go up to see God in this temple. But then every time we would do it, I just came to appreciate it differently. And we would do it without the hike, sometimes when we were short on time, and it would totally change your experience of actually being in the temple. And once it was raining the whole way. And we took our art, we had to take our shoes off, because that's the best way to hike up, right. And it was a spiritual experience for me. And, of course, I was older at the time, so is able to appreciate notions of spirituality. But everything you're talking about, takes me back to those moments. And there are many temples that I visited, but the architecture of the temple, but also the rituals and the ceremonies involved in how you approach how you enter what you do thereafter, all of it had the ability to change me or transformed me, even if I wasn't 100% bought into the notion that God is here. Yeah.
Abraham Burickson 1:01:38
Wow, that's such a, that's such a great story. And it really points to I think one of the one of the things that seems maybe obvious when you spend enough time looking at it, but is is the notion that we need to be prepared for an impression, you know, the difference between driving up, as you said, versus walking up, as he said, versus walking up barefoot is huge. The thing at the end is the same, but you are prepared in a wholly different way. And the effect is enormous. And I think, you know, a cynic might say, Oh, well, that's what made it feel sacred as you went through all this walking, and you got tired and and your feet are hurt. But I think a more generous understanding of that is that we have a lot that's in the way of our fully receiving something that's in front of us. We have habits, we have a sort of timescales of attentiveness, or dis are in attentiveness. We expect for instance, a movie to be, you know, an hour and a half to three hours at most. And after that we enter into a different mode of being because we've left this kind of expectation. We only have, you know, I think the museum people say on average, you look at a painting for like 22 seconds or something like that, you know, we only we only have a certain amount of time we feel comfortable standing in front of an image a painting will listen to a pop song for three minutes, but not for 40 minutes. And and and there's something that when we're in our ordinary habits, we have our ordinary defences up. It's very unlikely that you know, an image of a of a cross or, you know, or starve David or something's gonna throw anybody I know, into a religious reverie. And right just looking at it in passing. But there's something about that walk up the mountain preparing you for that moment, just like we prepared Rick, for months to get to that moment in the cube in Saskatchewan. Would it have been the same if she had been playing on a street corner in New York? That weird piece of music? Probably not? Is that because the music was worse? No, it was because the preparation was worse. And I think, how shall I put it? There's mind blowing aesthetic experiences all around us that we that we are in no condition to see. We walk in a world of extraordinary beauty. And most of the time we're caught in our complaints, our defenses, our tensions, all of these things. And so I think one of the main things that that an experienced designer can do is think not about the thing itself, not about like, oh, you know, the color red, you know, but think about what are the conditions within which this can be really received what you had a spirit To experience up in that temple and there, you know, there, there are plenty of religious people who say, you know, at the end, all the religious, all the religions are kind of the same thing. They're all pointing in the same direction. It's just the road that you walk to get there. This is a refrain I've, I've heard a number of times, and what if that's true and the real, the real structure of various different religious or spiritual practices is the structure of making it possible for us to see what they have to offer? That's the non cynical answer, right? The cynical answers like, oh, you chant a lot, you're gonna get high, and then you'll feel like you're around God, right? Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, learning from that there's so much to offer for, you know, take those, take those learnings and bring them to something that you wouldn't expect, like human resources. What can human resources do to help employees think about whether they're making something meaningful, or help them make something meaningful? Or see the value in the others around them? Can we take this idea, obviously, to architecture, but also to education? And what is the proper tempo of education? Do we want to just throw information at people every week in the same pattern? Or do we want to spend all semester preparing for one idea? What do you take away from college? Do you remember? And what if college was oriented only towards those few takeaways? And we got rid of the extra stuff and really designed an experience of deeply engaging with an idea? Would that be still as valuable?
Joel Krieger 1:06:44
It's totally different way of thinking about it, that's for sure.
Pavani Yalla 1:06:46
I was just thinking how many places actually think this way, or how many people think this way, and how awesome if that impact could could reach different fields and have a farther reaching? Transformation?
Abraham Burickson 1:07:01
You know, we just started a new school. And we're calling it wildly creative title, the experience design certificate program, it's a one year program, we have our first cohort starting in January, we spent quite some time thinking about what it would be to create a school, a program that did the things we're talking about, that brought designers from all over the field artists and designers from wildly different fields together, under the umbrella of this way of thinking, originally, it was going to be an MFA. And then we thought, maybe, maybe we want people to still be able to be in their lives, and making things and that could be actually not like a concession, but a an essential element of the program. And it's really exciting. I just want to tell people this because I think, you know, we have these people coming from lots of different countries, lots of different practices for this experiment. And taking these expertise says, and seeing if we can change the way that these practices happen across these fields on an ongoing basis, our first cohort is 15 people, then we'll do another one in a year. And I want everybody to go and check it out. Because I want all of your brilliant listeners to apply next year, when we have our next call for applications, anybody's inspired by this way of thinking and wants to transform how graphic design works wants to transform how education works, wants to transform how human resources works, how art making how immersive theater works, inside a community that we hope will continue and grow building a kind of an idea base and a knowledge base and a community base for this way of thinking. To, to sort of take over, right to kind of start at least some small utopian practices in places where you wouldn't imagine them possible.
Joel Krieger 1:09:12
Is it remote, or you said people are coming together is part of this in person.
Abraham Burickson 1:09:16
It's low residency, so they come together, and then they go apart. And then they come together and they go apart. And this is very intentionally designed. You know, it's sort of like your trip up the mountain poverty. You know, like, there's a lot of walking involved. Like that's not the sacred moment, right. There's a lot of online time involved, which is really intentional, it's building. And then there's these heightened moments, this event newness to it, and so we've designed this program, around some of the same structures of experience that we designed the some of our Odysseys like that trip into into the room in Saskatchewan for for the weekend. And so it's all we're bringing together these ideas of experience design towards the aim of facilitating people in bringing the ideas of experience design into other fields.
Pavani Yalla 1:10:10
That's great. We'll have to check back in a year. I'm just so curious. Yeah, well, of course that to come on in, because I'm thinking about like, Are most of us who call ourselves experienced designers like have come through different avenues of formal education. And then most of the skills I think we picked up are not through formal education, it's, you know, on the job or just the life right. But to have a have a program that is very much geared towards something that is, I think, true experience design, not some of the stuff we see out there. It sounds so, so awesome.
Abraham Burickson 1:10:50
Yeah, poverty. I mean, it's right. Like we are, I don't know about you, but like, I think back on my education, like, oh, but that moment was really experienced design. Oh, there was that thing that there. But really what they're talking about was this. It's such an emergent field that people haven't been talking about it directly. There's not a lot of books out there. I'm working on a new book, but it won't be out for like two years because of publishing takes a long time. But but there's not a lot of people addressing it directly. And you have to kind of like lift up the veil and look at you know, think about the art of gathering by Priya Parker. Oh, we love. Right? That's, I mean, that's an experience design books on a specific topic. But you know, then you can even go further back, you look at Mircea Eliade is the sacred and the profane. And he's talking about the art of experience design through these these notions of inventiveness and ordinariness, like the and how those two work together, sometimes we call it the liminal and every day, and how you can design for instance, you can take these ideas and use them to design say, a certificate program, right? Yeah, an educational program where there's the everyday where you build your use utility usage of the thing and the heightened transformative times where you integrate in a new way, and you change who you are. And the relationship between these you just, there's so many people think about them the idea of performativity and architecture, which has been around for decades, you know, not thinking about the piece of architecture as a thing, but as a facilitator of ways of living. Isn't that experience design? It's been there. So it's, it's not like the idea wasn't around. But so many of us had to say, Wait a second. Isn't this all connected? Yeah. And that's what we're doing in the program. We're saying, yes, it's all connected. If you've been thinking that way, if you're one of our wandering souls has been saying, wait a second. Come join us. That's where we're
Pavani Yalla 1:12:47
at. Love that. I have one final question that just came up for me. You've talked about design, you also talk about art. And I know people often will juxtapose the two or compare the two, do you have a point of view on those two things?
Abraham Burickson 1:13:05
I think it's really interesting. And it has been helpful for me to think about these things in terms of experience. The art that I love is art that moves me. I'm, in many ways, moved into a different way of being, it has an effect it like gets inside of me, and changes something. I was just reading. George hoppin, who's my favorite sort of lesser known poet. And I just read this one stanza from one poem. And by the end of that stanza,
I had a different way of seeing the world around me. I was so grateful to that. And then I think about design like architecture. And it, it can do the same thing, except it's a little less personal, perhaps.
It can change me it can change the way I see things, but it tends to interface with the functionality of life. The design practices tend to be more connected to the quotidian, more connected to, you know, where I take a shower and how to figure out how to get to the exit. And you know, how do you put this IKEA bed together? One thing just to zoom back is of course, on the other side of it is how do the people who are making these think about their process? The way we tend to be taught is an artist has some kind of concept or inspiration. designer has a process. And so the way we're taught is quite different. And so On the one hand, I think it's a really important distinction between art and design, in terms of where we're coming from culturally and practice wise, and on the other hand, I think we can start bleeding them together more. What happens if the graphic designer tries to come from a place of inspiration? What happens if the, if the poet tries to think a little bit more about, you know, what is the conditions of listening to this piece of work? Why is nobody coming to these poetry readings? Why is a poem that's hard to understand? So hard to listen to on a first read, but so powerful on the 34th? Read? Why is the number of readings not embedded in the design of the poem? If we can start bringing the ideas and the working methods of of the traditional artists and the traditional designer into the room with each other, then the idea of experience can be the link. And I think it's liberatory. I think the idea of experiences formally and personally and ethically liberatory.
Pavani Yalla 1:16:22
What's been top of mind for you? Like? What are some of the things that you've gleaned from our conversation?
Joel Krieger 1:16:27
It's made me think a lot about how we live in a world that is, it's a world full of mass produced objects, and experiences. And I think it's precisely because these things are designed for everyone, that they're actually designed for no one. So the question that's been spinning on my mind is, you know, what happens when we start designing for very specific people, when you're designing for a mass theoretical persona, everything you're doing is abstracted. And when you're designing for one specific person, somehow everything becomes very concrete and real. And you have to move into relationship with that person, the person you're designing for becomes an active agent and a integral part of this design process. Like, for example, their process for doing the Odysseys a aid talks about researching the person, they do things together with them, I thought that was wonderful, you know, it's like, okay, you're actually going to go with a real person, and experience together the things that they love and the things that they hate. And through that, you begin to see the world through their eyes. And I think he said something to the effect of they're, they're basically trying to fall in love with this person. And my favorite part about this whole process was that they actually had a signal for when they knew that they were ready for the performance when the team member dreamed about the participant, and that's when they knew that they were ready. And I just, that just gave me chills. Because it's, it's kind of being in touch with this. With this intuitive side of yourself as a designer, I mean, I, I feel like in the world of deadlines and deliverables, there's this forcing, there's this rush, everything's rushed. And so much about doing a good job has to be getting yourself ready to the point to where you can do a good job. So it's like all that work of priming, and getting ready. And, you know, preparing the ground and your mind making it fertile, so that you can actually see the dots to connect them. That's important work. And yet, maybe you actually can't make a wonderful thing until you do all that work, and being in tune with yourself enough to know when you're ready. I just thought that was a wonderful, a wonderful insight and something that I think everyone can incorporate in some way to their own personal process.
Pavani Yalla 1:19:13
Yeah. So I think you're talking about priming your own mind through this intense research process, right, which I think is powerful. I think Abe is also in the same interview talking about the importance of priming or preparing your audience for the experience that they're about to have. He says, There are mind blowing experiences all around us that we are in no condition to see. We walk in a world of extraordinary beauty. One of the main things that an experienced designer can do is think not about the thing itself, but think about what are the conditions within which this can be really received. That like for me, I think nailed it in terms of what we should all be doing, everything that leads up to the experience, the context surrounding the experience, so that the person is in the right frame of mind, to have the most, you know, epic version of the thing or the experience. You know, I was a few weeks ago in Mexico, we went on vacation, it was our first time leaving the kids back with with my parents. Every morning, I had set my alarm to wake up in time to see the sunrise over the Gulf of Mexico. You know, at the very beginning of this interview talks about event newness, the state of mind, you're in when you're, you know, anticipating arriving in time for something, I mean, I was totally feeling that. And then, when I did arrive, you know, I was like, the only one on the beach. And it was, it was an epic sunrise, not because of where it was. But because of the conditions within which I was receiving that experience. I just remember thinking like, oh, my gosh, this is a momentous event, look at what's happening, the moment the sun comes up, look at the sky, and it's like, we have sunsets and sunrises every day. There's nothing more routine than that. And yet, we don't, you know, experience that in that way, every single day. And so for me, that's just a simple example of I think, what he's talking about, which is that the stuff exists around us. Experience Design is really I think, even more so about designing those conditions, so that you can
Joel Krieger 1:21:44
Yeah, I love that bit. You and they've got into at the end about religion, because what you're talking about in that whole segment, just really helped me to see why these structures exist, why ceremonial rituals exist? It's because it's all the things that lead up to the thing. Part of what this has highlighted for me, too, is, you know, I've always had an aversion to this whole desire to scale. You know, that that that was always the question that was asked to me is, you know, like, here's a, here's a cool idea. Yes, but how does it scale? Well, maybe you think shouldn't scale. I mean, that's what's so beautiful about Abe's work is that has nothing to do with scale. There's no way to scale this. There's a way to replicate it in a decentralized way. But scale abstracts everything, and it, it makes it to where, yes, you can affect a greater quantity of people, but in a much less personal and powerful way. And I think that's why so much of our design world feels so dead. There's no soul in it. There's no spirit in any of that stuff that's designed. But when you're designing for one or two or a few people, it's about that, that relationship that you can't have. When you're a designer designing for an abstract theoretical audience, you don't actually have a relationship with them.
Pavani Yalla 1:23:16
Yeah, you know, you were saying it's hard to scale, a bespoke experience like what they've done with the Odysseys. But if you think about the book of separation, on the spectrum of bespoke to something somewhat mass producing, it kind of like starts to tip in that, hey, this is something you can put out there and a mass audience could experience it still, you know, intimately with just another person. But it's basically a formula or an a set of assets that they put out there. So I think that's smart, where they're using technology to help create still a personalized experience for more mass audience. So there's something there where I think for those of us who are like, how could I possibly applied some of this to what I do, because I have to design for a mass audience. It's like, okay, maybe you can't go off and create one person experiences, but you can apply some of the principles to your process. And he says it in the interview, too. It's not, you know, sometimes it feels like what they do is so far fetched. And so you know, niche, but you can still apply that to other fields and other kind of common practices.
Joel Krieger 1:24:30
A lot of tech is trying to do this in a scaled way. So you think about Spotify, your personalized playlist or whatever, and I don't know how I feel about all that. Okay, there's an algorithm. It's, it's learning things about what you do and what you like, and trying to make the experience more relevant to you. But it's not doing the same thing. It's not able to really listen through to see something that you don't tell it. And that to me is what so interesting about the Odyssey work stuff is, it was the moment where he was having an odyssey done for him. And he didn't even know that what he wanted was to walk with friends.
Pavani Yalla 1:25:18
Well, same thing with the book of separation, right? Because you and I both were in it. And your experience was shaped by me. And my experience was shaped by you. It was still much more personal than an algorithm. Yeah,
Joel Krieger 1:25:31
That's true. Right? Yeah, I think it has a lot to do with because the, the only thing that was exploring was a relationship, again, between two people. So yeah, it's almost like what made it adaptive and responsive and live was the fact that it was two people exploring a relationship that they already had with each other. Also, um, I just thought of ask great questions. And I think that, as a designer, that practice of asking questions, tends to get lost in the shuffle. But really, it's the most important thing you can be doing. Because it's a way to help you really think and see the situation in a way that you you might not otherwise. So questions like, what if we stopped making objects and start making experiences. So let's stop thinking in terms of things, and focus instead on the experience that those things enable. And that's a different way of looking at things. So we're not we're not designing a house, we're actually creating an experience that enables daily rituals that help you achieve the goals in your life, and help you move towards the person that you said you wanted to be. In the interview, I mentioned a quote from Fight Club and actually dug up that quote, just a reference here. So this is a moment when Edward Norton is talking about his Perfectly Decorated apartment. And he says, like everyone else, I have become a slave to the IKEA nesting instinct. If I saw something clever, like the coffee table in the shape of Ian and Yang had to have it, I would flip through catalogs and wonder what kind of dining set defines me as a person. And just think about that for a minute. That is the way that most people go about decorating their house. It's like this esthetic collecting of things where you attach your identity to them. And so I'm just offering this as a counterpoint to what he was talking about choosing to place a thing in your home. Because of the experience, it enables. Like I love the example he mentioned of the shoe tray. It's a seemingly mundane thing that probably an traditional architect wouldn't think about. But it's placed there. And he placed it there, because it helps you remember to take your shoes off when entering, which has following effects, like making the home field more sacred, and clearly defining, outside versus inside and so on. So I just I just wanted to call this out, because I really think this is a new way of looking at things. But you almost have to train your eyes so that everywhere you look, you don't see the thing, you see the experience of the thing. And I feel like that takes that's gonna take some work to begin to see the world in that way. Abe is like our kind of people in that he is a cross pollinator. That's where I relate to him so much as he's all about breaking down these silos. I mean, even the way that he thinks about designing a house, he's totally obliterating these edges, this boundary of what it means and pulling in all these other disciplines and ways of thinking about things.
Pavani Yalla 1:28:57
That's the end of this episode. But if you're curious to learn more about aid, his collaborators and Odyssey works, go ahead and check out Odyssey works.org. And special thanks to Suldano Abdiruhman and Joshua Rubin for helping us understand what participating in an Odyssey is really like. You can learn more about their experience, and everything else we've mentioned. In the show notes for this episode, just head on over to outside in podcast.org and click on this episode page.
Joel Krieger 1:29:27
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