June 13, 2024 • 47 mins
Civilization is an interactive immersive experience. Worldbuilding isn't just for sci-fi and fantasy, but how we can change our society.
Abraham Burickson, co-founder of Odyssey Works—an organization dedicated to crafting personalized, immersive experiences—has long been captivated by the transformative power of design. Whether in the structure of a building or the verses of a poem, he explores how these creations shape our perceptions and interactions with the world.
In his latest book, Experience Design: A Participatory Manifesto Abraham encourages us to envision societal change as a collective act of worldbuilding. Join us as we explore how societies formed through the experiences we design—spanning from weddings and funerals to conferences, protests, and the holidays we commemorate.
How would you redesign how we experience the world? How could fantasy worldbuilding be used for real-world change?
If you’d like to support Human Nature Odyssey, please subscribe wherever you enjoy your podcasts, leave us a review, and visit humannatureodyssey.com.
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By: Ray Lynch
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:04):
Excuse me.
Am I in the right room? Oh, yes.Thank you.
Come on in. Hi.
Nice to meet you. Hello. Hello? Yes.
Have a seat. Thanks.
Wow. This is a beautiful officeyou have here.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Well, thank you for coming in today.
(00:24):
You are Abraham Bergson, correct?
Good.
Abraham. Is it okay if I call you Abe?
Are you good? I prefer Abraham.
Excellent, Abe.
It is very nice to meet you.
Indeed.
As you know,I am the mayor of civilization.
With that comes special privileges. Sure.
A nice little office here, as you can see.
(00:45):
But really,I see myself as a mere public servant.
Okay. Yes.
The people that elected meto carry out their will.
For many years now,I did my job as they wished.
We built many towers,a fair amount of walls,
and of course, made enough plasticthat the mark of our times
shall be rememberedfor generations to come.
(01:06):
Yeah, that's a lot of plastic.
But I'm afraid public opinion is changing.
The people's view of themselves and theirrelation to the world is changing.
And as their humble servant,I must change with them.
You're quite right.
Quite right.
You see,things have not been working too well.
(01:26):
The seas are rising.
Our infrastructure is crumbling.
And people are generally dissatisfiedwith the condition of our global society.
People want what is being called
a societal transformation.
Mm hmm. No, Abe. I'll be honest with you.
When theytold me we were hiring a professional
(01:47):
to help with this transformation,
I thought it was going to be some SiliconValley tech genius.
But it says herethat you are an experienced designer.
And if I'm being frank,I can't for the life of me
figure out how that could be relevantto transforming our society.
Well, I am aware you have written a bookon this precise subject.
(02:10):
My assistant has provided me with a copy.
It is an odd little book.
I thought we might explorethis text together.
Shall we begin?
Sure. Let's.
Let's do it.
(02:31):
Welcome to Human Nature Odyssey,a podcast exploring the interactive,
immersive experience we call civilization.
I'm Alex.
(02:56):
A true
odyssey is marked by the fellow travelersone meets along the way.
It's importantto stop and share perspectives
on where you've been,what you've seen, and where you're headed.
You may have noticed from
the graphic,this episode is no normal episode.
That'sbecause this is the first installment
(03:17):
of Human Nature Conversations.
A companion seriesthat will start to sprinkle in here
and there to enrich our odyssey.
Last year, we focused on the novel Ishmaelby Daniel Quinn
about a telepathic gorilla's conversationwith the narrator
on re-imagining our speciesrole in the world,
(03:40):
something I love about Ishmaelis that it's a dialog.
Something happenswhen two people are in discussion.
New ways of thinking can be born.
And while we'll have many more episodesof Human Nature Odyssey,
that will be more like the ones you'veheard before, where it's primarily me
guiding us through ideas that expand uponthe ideas introduced in Ishmael.
(04:03):
It's time to throw some conversationsinto the mix.
And today, Abraham Bergson,
architect, author and experience
designer, will be just the personwe need to get us started.
Why? Well, okay, first,let me tell you a little story.
(04:23):
Ever sinceI was 14 and first read Ishmael,
I knew that one dayI would create some kind of
thing inspired by it.
Maybe it would be a documentary,maybe a book.
I didn't knowthat was for future Alex to figure out.
And over a decade later,
(04:44):
I realize now I was future Alex.
And it was finally time to figure it out.
So I started rereading Ishmaeland taking lots of notes, though
I still didn't know how to best expressand share them.
This was in 2018, coincidentally
the same year the author of Ishmael DanielQuinn passed away.
(05:07):
And also that year, my good friendintroduced me to something called
immersive theater in art form, whereaudience members
can actively participate in the story,sometimes even change how it unfolds.
And as we were getting into this,it occurred to me
Ishmael, too, was sort ofabout an immersive interactive experience,
(05:29):
a one on one conversationwith a telepathic gorilla.
Maybe I could create thatinteractive experience in real life.
So I started adapting Ishmaelinto an interactive experience
where participants went on an adventurethrough their neighborhood.
While we had a conversation over the phone, and that's when I met Abraham Erikson.
(05:53):
Abraham is an experienced designer.
We'll explainexactly what that is shortly.
And the co-founder of Odyssey Works,which creates personalized,
immersive, transformative experiencesfor participants.
He's thought a lot about how to create
interactive experiencesthat people find meaningful.
(06:14):
Over the pandemic,I participated in this program.
Abraham co-led for people designing theirown interactive, immersive experiences.
While I developed the Ishmael experience,which I finally ran for dozens of people,
guiding them on an adventurethrough their neighborhood.
I'd like to do that again some time,and that experience and the conversations
(06:36):
I had with people eventually morphedinto this podcast, Human Nature Odyssey.
And while I was working on a podcast,Abraham was working on a book
experiencedesign, a participatory manifesto.
And Abraham's book has a lot to sayabout how we, as individuals
and communities, can design the very worldwe live in, which is perfect.
(07:02):
Because where we last left offon our odyssey,
we talked about the needfor a societal transformation.
So please welcome
Abraham Garretson.
(07:23):
Hello, Abraham.
Thank you for joining uson The Odyssey today.
So before you had the wordsto call yourself
an experienced designer,you worked as an architect.
I'm curious,
how did your work as an architect leadto your work as an experienced designer?
I love that question, Alex.
First, I want to say I'm just reallyexcited to be talking with you about this.
(07:45):
I love Human Nature Odyssey.
I think it's been so fun.
I've been recommending itto everyone from my earliest days.
Even when I was a kid,when I began to be interested
in architecture,I wasn't interested in the buildings.
I wasn't fetishizing thethe the doorknobs and the patterns.
Of course, I loved those things,but I was always fascinated
(08:08):
with the fact that when I walked intoa building, I was different.
When people
walked into the Cathedral of Saint John,the Divine or
or especially important for me werethe were the masks.
In Istanbul, where
I am when I was 1920.
They were changed.
(08:30):
And it didn't take long for me to learnthat this is not entirely by accident.
It's not just a nice propertypiece of architecture.
This is by design.
Architecture changes you.
It is perhaps about walls and windows.
But when you look at it from the pointof view of experience design, it is about
(08:51):
creating transformativespatial experiences for people.
When I saw that,
when I started to feel that, I startedto look for that everywhere I went.
And the moreI looked at different practices,
the more I saw that they in fact,all could be understood this way.
Poetry, I discovered, changed mewhen I read Wallace Stevens and
(09:13):
13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.
I was changedjust by some words on a page.
How is that possible? Hmm.
What is this weird superpower that.
That wordshave to reorient me in the world,
just like the mosques in Istanbul.
And so I've been experimenting for 20plus years
(09:36):
and understandinghow the things we create affect us
and that is experience design
in a kind of simplified explanationcausing transformations.
You know, it's funny,I'm sure you've heard this a lot.
When I was getting into immersive theater
and people ask like,what does that mean, immersive?
(09:58):
And I would explain vaguely.
And they'd say, Well, well,then isn't everything immersive?
Is it? Well, yes.
Yes, it is a similar I imagineyou get that with experience design too.
It's like, well,
what is an experience isn'teverything we're doing and experience.
Absolutely.
I think the big switch, the mental switch,we're not actually designing
(10:24):
discrete objects called experiences.
We are designing for the experienceor outcomes of
whatever the things we make are.
That is to say,
I'm designing a house for you.
Mm hmm.
The thing.
A home is an experience.
And so when I design that thing,that house, like a traditional architect
(10:46):
does, I am also designing the experienceof home, an experience designer
starts from the home, not the house
says, what would it be to design a homeand then takes a step backwards
and says, okay, what is the housethat makes that home possible?
Really interesting things happenwhen you do that.
(11:06):
We can think about a much larger
site for architecturethan just the building itself.
We can start to really addresschanging lifestyles.
There's, you know, this problemthat we encounter with efficiency.
That's really it's really depressing,actually. Right.
You studies and I and I want themto be wrong and maybe they are.
(11:31):
But there are these studied
energy efficiency laws in California
which say that they've come upwith LED bulbs and all these rules
about energy efficiency and,you know, better windows.
And in the last 20, 30 years, I can'tremember when the laws were passed.
The technologyand each home has transformed totally.
(11:54):
And yet people are usingthe same amount of energy.
Mm hmm.
They are not different.
They haven't changed.
The technology has.
That's the difference between a thingbased approach
to architecture and an experiencedesign approach to architecture.
The experience design approachto architecture doesn't say
(12:15):
we're going to get these technologiesinto the house and experience
design approach to architecturesays we need to create a relationship with
energy consumption, with the environment,which is totally different.
I really love how you put this distinctionin the book when you say, quote,
Traditional design practicesinvite us to design things
(12:37):
and to use those things to solve problems.
But experience is not a problem.
It is life.
And so if designing experiences
is not about solving problems,
what is it about designing experiences?
About creating the life we want to live?
(12:57):
And if we start from a problem solvingpoint of view,
we're only going to ever get to zero.
But if we sit down and say,What is the life we want to live,
we can get to that life.
At least we have a fighting chance.
But if we haven't even outlined that,how are we going to get there?
Mm hmm.
Every thing we do, every design
(13:20):
we make, every widgetthat's created, every service interacts
in every home, every immersive theater
experience, every podcast
can tap into any of these questionsabout how we want to live.
Because this is what we're doing.
We're living with the thingswe've created.
We're completely surroundedby our designs,
(13:42):
especially if we consider our designsto be not just objects,
but services and.
Traditions and rituals.
What's so fascinating about this book
is that not just the thingsthat we interact with are the experiences,
but also the cultural designsthat we bring.
So storytelling rituals, New Years,
(14:05):
the concept of New Years,a calendar is a design.
And you know, we are at New Year's waywith bated breath as completely artificial
numbers, countdown and a completelyartificial four digit number changes.
Just because it's artificial and it'sdesigned, doesn't it all make it not real?
(14:26):
It's actually very transformative.
I mean, so many of us,it compels us into changing our behavior
often or compels us into shaming ourselvesabout not changing our behavior.
And, you know, language is a is as youdescribe it, and something that we've
designed football games, weddings,funerals, a conference, a protest.
(14:48):
These are all immersive,
interactive experiences that we
engage with.
And your book gives us some incredibletools to think about how to design those.
So like you're saying,not just to solve problems, but
to have at the forefront of that designbe, well, what
(15:10):
what do we wantto experience from these things?
The thing that I love that
you brought up rightthere is is the linear nature of it.
It's all scalar.
We can design, we can make it,we can design a tiny little world
and a tiny little event.
We can tell a short story that is athere's a whole world we've designed.
We can have an immersivetheater experience and a
(15:33):
tiny little theaterfor one on on on Times Square.
That's something a friend of mine created.
Or we can go and create a revolutionin our head.
These all exist inside the same practice.
It's the same practicethat we utilize when we when
when we throw a surprise birthday partyfor a friend.
There's this power of the imagination
(15:56):
to generate a different worldand to allow us to step into it.
And when we step into a different world,if it's really well
done, as you felt,probably in a great experience
of immersive theater,but also in a great story,
when you step into that different world,you sometimes can esthetically,
but also in your mind experienceliving in a totally different way.
(16:20):
Then we have the opportunityto act upon these things.
The world we create determineswho we can be and we can move around.
We are not actually any specific.
We're not fixed to any one identity.
We are stepping into these ways of beingthat are provided to us by the world
we're in.
It's that.
So then we could considerredesigning that world.
(16:42):
We can consider making interventionsin those identities.
We can consider what those rolesthat are laid out for us
result in and how they are contributingto a world we do or do not like.
We have this idea of a kind of fixed selfand then it's determined by the world
we're in.
What it doesn't mentionis that that world that we're in
(17:03):
is something that we designwith every action.
One wayI wanted to frame this conversation too,
because I wanted to hearwhat you think about it.
So in Ishmael, for those who haven't
already heard me blab about itenough, Daniel Quinn proposes
that we as a global civilizationare destroying the world, not because
we're inherently flawed as a species,but that we are held captive.
(17:27):
It's not that we activelywant to destroy the world or
are too innately selfish or greedy.
It's that we live in a societywhere our individual survival
depends on our collective suicide.
So the need for unlimited growth,
endless consumption of resources,the sixth mass extinction.
These are not accidents.
(17:48):
Our society is actually set up this way.
It's things are goingas they were intended or designed.
They weren't designed by one person
or a nefarious group,but by all of us over time.
And so I wanted to ask you,how does design work on a societal level?
(18:09):
It's so interesting, isn't it?
There's the question, how did we get here?
And I think you you said it so well.
And in that quote from Ismailthat we are entrapped in this,
we are in this world,and there are various ways
that this was built,various different work.
A whole civilization has a lotof designers throwing their hands in over.
(18:30):
Many generations. Over many generations.
But there's also singular individualswho make huge moves in those changes.
And we look at leaders,but we also look at artists.
We also look at technologists.
There are moments where you seebig changes happening.
And in the book, I talk about Dondi.
(18:50):
You know, what he didwas essentially world building
in a way that contradicted the worldin which he lived.
He did world buildingthat contradicted the caste system.
He did world building that contradictedhow one engaged economically
with life in India,with salt, with transportation.
He did world building that contradicteda logic of violence.
(19:14):
That was the logic of colonizationthat did not play with that narrative.
And when he did so, he overthrewthe greatest empire since Rome.
And I think the job is to take a look
at any society and look atlook at all those elements.
What is the origin story?What is the narrative?
(19:34):
What is the myth?
What are the roles that we are occupying?
How are they encoding in usthis way of being
and then saying,okay, what is another way of being?
Can we embody that?
Maybe we're going to embodythat in a piece immersive theater.
Maybe we're going embodythat in a short story.
There's incredible value in the adventuresof the imagination,
(19:57):
in worldbuilding, in allowing usto see another way of being.
This is what Gandhi did when he traveledthe world, before he got back to India.
This is what Che Guevara did.
This is what revolutionaries always do.
They go on journeysand they live in other worlds
and they come back and say,Oh, I understand how it can be different.
We need to do that.
And we have the toolswe can create, experiences that let us see
(20:18):
in a different way.
And once we've done that,
then we can gather our friends and say,What if it were different?
Hmm. We move between worlds
when I'm in my home with my family,I'm in one world.
When I'm teaching at the college, I'min a totally different world
and I'm never that same personin both worlds.
(20:40):
I'd be a realjerk to be acting like a fool
with my wife, right?
And I'd be like, really questionable.
But acting as I did with my wife,with my students at recess.
Right.
And so that the totality of the contextis the world.
And so worlds have these qualities.
(21:01):
Every world has a historyor a myth, an origin story.
Every world has a particular physics.
I'm talking about experiential physics,not Newtonian or Einstein in physics.
All right.
This is how you move around,how you affect things.
Who can do what? How bodies behave.
What's expected of.
(21:22):
You, what is expected of you?
Worldsalso have populations and languages.
What is code switching?
Code switching is the way wewe move between our roles
in different populationsand change our language to suit.
And we can do it very fast.
We're actually quite brilliant at this,especially people
who have had to movebetween a lot of worlds like immigrants.
(21:44):
One wayI want to frame the world building concept
because world buildingand the fact that we live
in many different worldsis a fundamental part of your book that I
think is so fascinating and a crucial wayto understand experience design.
And the funny thing is that
worldbuildingis usually associated with fantasy books
(22:07):
or preparing a Dungeons and Dragonscampaign.
Wikipedia describes world building becauseI did a little research coming into this
as, quote, the process of constructingan imaginary world
or setting sometimes associatedwith a fictional universe, unquote,
but you don't see it confined
(22:28):
to just imaginary worlds at all.
You see, worldbuildingis something that we all partake
in every dayand exist in in our real world.
Absolutely.And or you could flip it around.
I mean,
what were the what were the framersof the Constitution of the United States?
But people engaging in some kind of crazysci fi,
(22:49):
they were imagining a worldout of some pieces of paper.
Right.
That is a mat creating an imaginary worldand then stepping into it.
And because they can imagine it,it could be real.
And I think this is our first jobto imagine the other world.
I wanted to ask you to that
you say in the bookthat a world is not neutral.
(23:14):
What do you mean by that?
Every world has a set of valuesembedded in that.
If you go into a courtroom,
it is really strictly builtlike there are laws
about how high up the judge said,what kind of wood you have.
There are a very limited numberof actual rules you can play.
(23:36):
You could be in the audience,you could be a juror,
you could be a judge, you could bethe bailiff, you could be the defendant.
Maybe less than ten different rolesin that in that little world.
And the ethic the core ethic is justice.
Is itwell served? That's a different question.
The court ethicof the design of that world is justice.
You go into a playground.
(23:57):
The coreethic of the design of that world is clay.
If you go to a jail, what's the coreethic of the design of that world?
Right? Misery
or hypothetically repentance, but not.
Often, right?
It's a really important question and it'sone that's been asked through the years.
And I think it's really importantto take this notion in
(24:18):
pretty deeply,because we look at a world as neutral.
We say, well, the world is just what is.
I say, it is not.
I say the world has always embeddedwithin it a value system.
If we take a look at that, values system
and measured against the value systemwe would like to be living with,
we can see all these different waysin which it would probably change
(24:42):
every little design movefrom the architecture
to the social dynamics, from the holidaysto maybe what New Year's
is from different roleswe would play to the origins story.
It's all it's all pointinglike iron filings towards that moral core.
Why aren't wetaking a look at what that moral core is
(25:03):
and starting thereinstead of with the LED light bulbs?
When we talk about world building,it is a chance to reimagine activism.
I think that we're at this placeculturally where activism
is something that only certain peoplechoose to do.
It's it's almost a hobby for some or a job
as opposed to somethingwe're all inherently doing all the time.
(25:26):
You know, you make the point that wecreate and recreate the worlds we inhabit.
So in a way, we're all activists.
When I'm drive to workand then stuck in traffic,
I am an activist on behalf of the fossil
fuel industry and which is somethingI am an activist of,
(25:47):
unfortunately, constantly, and
especially in the 21st century.
I think that
after the sixties,
a lot of the institutionsthat were challenged by social change back
then got better at incorporatinga certain kind of activism
that it's almost like in activisttoday is seen as someone
(26:08):
that's participating in a gamethat's already been established
and you're trying to winthat game as opposed to
what you're talking about with worldbuilding and activists like Rosa Parks,
who refused to participatein the world of segregation, or Gandhi
who refused to participatein the world of British colonialism.
It's not about playing a gamethat's already been established,
(26:30):
but completely challenging
the the design of the worldand the roles and the expectations.
And I think that's a really powerful way
to reframe how to push for social changeand what our role is.
It's something that we're alreadyall doing all the time.
We're already designing experiencesjust by going
through the motionsof what's already been set up for us.
(26:53):
I think that also that pointsto a few things.
One is
we can have a
much broader view of seeking social changeif we think about not just going out
and protesting, which is absolutelyhazardous, has its place, but
asking the question where we are
most actively and generally
(27:16):
participating in the designand maintenance of our world.
We've been we're often toldwe have this list of bad things.
You know, you're bad for driving,you're bad for taking the plane.
You're bad for not voting.
You're bad for voting wrong. Right.
And it's very it'svery thing it's very checklist.
Right.
But we can actually step out and say,okay,
(27:39):
first of all, we live in a worldthat is designed.
We have stepped into it. We have a role.
We only have so much agencyto actually change the way
we get to work, to actually change the wayour house is insulated.
We only have so much money, etc.
There is
there is a certain amount of privilegenecessary to do a lot of these things.
(28:00):
And I think we need to have sympathyfor the challenge that is just to live.
But we can also
broaden the question of how it is
that we are participating in buildingand maintaining the world.
And we each do it in different ways.
Lots of ways we educate our children.
We perhaps we're teachers and we'reeducating other people's children.
(28:21):
Perhaps we are designersand we're designing things.
So we have the opportunity
to think about that design processin a totally different way.
Perhaps we are in a religious organizationand we can say, How do I understand
this religion,this origin story of this religion
in a totally different way,in a way that supports
(28:42):
this other view of the worldI'd like to live in.
We all have agency in variousdifferent ways
and we can say, okay,
maybe I'm not going to go out and protestbecause I need to get to work.
But I am involved in this otherthis other mode of maintaining
and reproducing the world,and I can work with that.
There are a thousand ways and.
(29:05):
We're talking about origin story.
There's a major way that I found thatyour ideas overlap with Ishmael.
You know, in Ishmael talks about howa culture is a people who share a story.
And this isn't just a storythat people tell out loud.
It often goes on, said, or is expressedmore subtly.
It's a story that people act outessentially.
(29:27):
It's an imaginary game for grown ups.
So how does this fit in withhow you see the role
of narrativeand worldbuilding and experience design?
This is the origin story,right? It's the story.
We act out both performatively
and quietly, right?
(29:47):
We have rituals in which we reenact them.
What is July?What's happening on July 4th?
What's happening on Independence Day?
Why are we watching fireworks?
We're out a joyous celebration of bombs
exploding in air, shooting, exploding in.
And we're celebrating that violencewe are reenacting historic.
We're all historic re-enactorsin this kind of symbolic way.
(30:10):
Some people actually go and do that.
Some people just go and play outGettysburg or play out the American
Revolution, dress up and that and moresubtle ways in our lives.
Once after we've gone and reinforcedthat narrative collectively,
we go ahead and reinforcethose narratives.
Personally,you look at religion, people are going
(30:30):
and walkingthe stories of the various religions.
You look at nationalism.
People are walkingthose stories, people are reenacting them.
And half of the of the purpose of events
and holidays is to reinforceand reenact these narratives.
There's a kind of norming.
(30:52):
Some holidays don't work anymore.
Nobody does much around Arbor Day.
That's my favorite holiday.
Every Arbor Day, I climb a tree,and I know that would be cool.
Maybe I should do that.
All right, well,what if it were your favorite holiday?
What would it take?How many people would have to be involved?
What if Arbor Day was a spectacle
(31:14):
on the scale of July,Fourth of Independence Day?
And if it were, what narrativewould we have to be reenacting
around trees
to actually
be building the world we want to have?
I think it's a perfect example.
The the the the sort of facile nature ofit tells us a lot.
(31:37):
We have the holiday,
but it doesn't actually connectto a resonant narrative for us.
We see in small scales communitieslike intentional communities,
devotional communities,professional communities,
the Apple campus, right?
These narratives are able to be developedand holidays
(31:58):
and events are able to be developedthat do do that
right, that do sort of invent
new modes of engaging with the narrative
and that those narratives are incrediblypowerful because is on board,
because that's whythey're there in the first place.
They join that community for that reason,it helps to have a calendar
(32:18):
that supports that.
What does a calendar calendaras a way of walking
the narrative of your world over time?
It is a dance score, essentially,
and if you are dancingto the score of that calendar,
you are telling the story againand again together,
and eventually the dance is in your body.
(32:42):
Yeah, well, that's the
funny thing about enacting a story
is because it involves a mindset shift,
which is an abstract thing.
It just takes place in your thoughtsand how you view the world.
But it's not just about shiftingthat mindset.
It's actually about how you're playing.
Pretend that that mindset is real,how you're acting that out in the world,
(33:05):
and there's this kind of interplaythat you're describing
where it needssome actual real world action as well.
And by having maybe an eventthat separate from a normal day
and bringing people togetherto act something out, it can help shift
the mind in other peopleand make it more real over time.
(33:26):
One thing I'll because again,I want to bring you on because Ishmael
leaves folks with these big picturechanges that need to happen.
We want to stop enactingTake your mythology, which puts simply
tells us that the world belongs to usand we must conquer it.
And we want to instead enact levermythology,
(33:48):
a lever storywhere we belong to the world. And
the book kind of leaves it there.
It's like, okay, so go offand enact that you belong to the world.
And I think it's very fairfor many people to read.
It's like, okay, how, how?
And I wanted to ask you, as someonewho is thinking a lot about this,
(34:13):
obviously you know,the answer needs to be personalized.
And what I respectso much from Daniel Quinn is that he's not
prescribing specific stepsthat folks can take.
It needs to be individualto where people are at,
what their community needs,what they experience.
But I'm curious, how would you want peopleto frame asking themselves
(34:33):
questionsabout how we go and enact the story
that we belong to the world?
I think that we're not going to do itby guilt tripping ourselves and guilt
tripping one another.
I don't know of any greathistorical change that was the result
of a guilt trip.
And I also think that we'reand I think you brought this up earlier
(34:57):
in the podcast.
I think that we havethis really problematic
end of our narrative story,which has an apocalypse.
It sort of assumeswe have all these post-apocalypse
fictions and sort of assumesthat's where we're going,
where there's something that has been madeexciting and appealing about that.
(35:20):
I think that's a problem.
I don't think we should be really excitedabout everything failing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Good news is we love worldbuilding.
We just love it.
Y y it is sci fi and fantasy.
It's just hop off the shelvesin bookstores.
While we was very, very so into HarryPotter and Game of Thrones,
(35:45):
why is the imagination so set to flight?
But by these great acts of worldbuilding,
I don't know for sure, but I can saythere's there's some excitement,
at least for me, in stepping imaginativelyinto a whole other way of being.
It's an invitation.
(36:06):
It's a fantastical invitation.
It's in a way, the same invitationthat sacred books have.
You could step into thiswhole other way of being.
And in doing so, you'll be different,
you'll be among different people,and you can step
imaginatively, estheticallyeven into this other way of being.
(36:27):
I think we need to lay out these
imaginative worlds and invite ourselvesand others to step into them
and those that can take placein zones of fiction,
that can take place in immersivetheater, that could take place
in human management,
that could take placein myriad different ways.
(36:49):
But it needs to be an invitation
that speaks both to our sense of fantasyand our sense of intelligence,
to our sense of responsibilityand our sense of community.
And if we can engage this lovethat we all have of worldbuilding,
I think that we have an opportunityto make that fantasy real.
Just as those who wrotethe American Constitution
(37:13):
did, just as Gandhi did withhis imagination of an independent India,
just as so many people did,or changed the world.
They're just acts of the imagination.
But they all functioned,from the point of view of an invitation
to a different world, not a list of thingsthat we need to change.
That's thing based design.
That's
(37:35):
fixingproblems is not going to fix the problem.
Being bold each in our own way and findingwhat is our version
of stepping outside of the worldwe've been born into
and trying to create worldbuild for ourselves.
That feels like you're saying not justshaming us into doing the right things,
but that feels actually excitingbecause I think for many of us,
(38:01):
the world that we areinhabiting is not that exciting.
It's it's
pretty limiting and it's stressfuland it's not something that we designed.
Our friends didn't design it.
It doesn'tbring us closer to our neighbors.
It doesn't have us feel optimisticabout the world we live in.
And there are certain realitiesthat we can't control.
(38:23):
We can't control the world around us,but we can try to
challenge the world and world,build it in a way
that is more thrilling for usand wakes us up.
One other thingI think is an interesting point, again,
that I see some overlap with Ishmaelis in episode seven, we talk about how
(38:44):
to create a societal transformation.
The goal is not to go into a boardroomand create a declaration,
some abstract lawsthat we then go back out in in force.
But it's an intergenerationaltransformation that is focusing
on what actually works for people.
And so the way you putit is a good experience.
Design is about the present moment
(39:06):
and you must design for the unknown.
It's implicitlynot about controlling every factor,
but creating enough of a structureand some guardrails that then
chance and random circumstance.
What other people need to bring in thingsthat we can't
possibly foresee can interact with it.
(39:27):
How do you find the balancebetween structure
and the unknownwhen you're designing experiences?
It's so important
because without the unknown,there's no life.
Without the unknown.
We're not really invitinganybody to participate.
We are trying to control people.
(39:48):
And I think if we look at many of the
experiments of the 20th century,you see the problem
with trying to control peopleand the evils that emerge from that.
We need to trust
that there is in the heart
of most of the people
(40:08):
that we are engaging with
something great that has to be there
and our designs need to be invitationsto that greatness.
Our designs need to be invitationsto the imagination.
If we find a fellow traveler
who is asking the same questionsas we're asking,
(40:31):
our job is not to give them the answer,but it's to provide a context
in which their brilliance can participatein creating that answer.
In the book, you say that the the unknown,the uncontrollable
is a feature,an experience design, not a bug.
And it's a bug in regular designand it needs to be controlled for it.
(40:53):
This is one of the major changesand we saw in the 20th century
people were trying to change societyby fiat and before that as well.
But really it was with good with goodindustrial means in the 20th century.
And yeah, a little extra gusto.
Yeah, a lot of gusto.
But I think one of thethings I've seen as a teacher
(41:13):
is that
people are rarely asked
to find the answer themselves.
They're they're
generally asked to choose between optionsthat are put in front of them.
I think what a great leader does
is provide the possibility
for whatever is brilliant in those people.
(41:37):
Whatever is longing, whatever is whatever,
might allow a person'sbasic question, their
their conscience to align with the worldyou've created, to come out
and be a general
take partin the creation of a better world.
This is our job as experience designers.
(41:57):
The designer says, This is your job.
You do X, the experience designer says,Here's the world we're trying to create.
We want to create a worldwhich has perhaps something
that is not a takeor mythology, that loves the planet,
that has a different relationshipwith the planet.
And we don't have all the answers,but we want to invite you and support you
and love you in the processof finding that together.
(42:22):
This is a place and a communityand a narrative
that will make that possibleyou are invited to step in.
And I think anybody who's hada great experience of education
has felt that that was what their teacher,
their professor,their instructor brought to them.
Not they did the system well.
(42:43):
Mm. For people who want to help
generate a
societal transformation in their own way,want help redesign
the experienceof civilization, of society,
what would you suggestthey ask themselves?
I think the first thingthey would have to ask themselves
is what would that world look like?
(43:05):
I imagine what that world would look like.
Have I had an experience
of a better world?
And then they can ask,What is my role in building the world?
That is not that.
And what role have I playedin pushing the world towards that. Mhm.
(43:25):
And then things start goingand the next question I think is
who can help me in this, who'sworking with me on this.
Right. Where is my community.
And then we have energyand then change can happen.
Thanks for
listening and you to Abrahamfor joining us today.
You can find a link to his book,Experience Design,
(43:48):
a participatory manifesto.
In our show notes.
Until next time, I hope you'll considerwhat kind of real world
world buildingyou might want to take part.
How would you redesign?
How you and those aroundyou experience the world?
And I'd love to hear what you think.
So feel free to reach outand leave a comment on our Patria
(44:11):
and to give you a sense of the road ahead.
This is going to be a summerof conversation.
Each monthwe'll speak with a new fellow traveler.
We meet along the way.
And then in September, we'll continuewith episodes from our flagship
seriesand explore ideas from authors, thinkers
and, you know, human nature odysseyrelated things.
(44:33):
Our odyssey is longand the road is winding.
Thank you for being a part of the journey.
And if you'd like to helpkeep the journey going,
please share this show with a friend.
Leave a reviewwherever you enjoy your podcasts
and consider joining our Patreon thereyou'll find more
from this conversationwith Abraham and other audio extras,
(44:54):
transcripts of episodes and audiobookreadings.
Your support helpsmake this podcast possible.
As always, our theme music isCelestial Soda Pop by Ray Lynch.
You can find a link in our Shownotes notes
and thank you to Michaelfor his help with this episode.
Talk with
you soon.
Excuse me.
Am I in the right room? Oh, yes.Thank you.
Come on in. Hi.
Nice to meet you. Hello. Hello? Yes.
Have a seat. Thanks.
Wow. This is a beautiful officeyou have here.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Well, thank you for coming in today.
(00:24):
You are Abraham Bergson, correct?
Good.
Abraham. Is it okay if I call you Abe?
Are you good? I prefer Abraham.
Excellent, Abe.
It is very nice to meet you.
Indeed.
As you know,I am the mayor of civilization.
With that comes special privileges. Sure.
A nice little office here, as you can see.
(00:45):
But really,I see myself as a mere public servant.
Okay. Yes.
The people that elected meto carry out their will.
For many years now,I did my job as they wished.
We built many towers,a fair amount of walls,
and of course, made enough plasticthat the mark of our times
shall be rememberedfor generations to come.
(01:06):
Yeah, that's a lot of plastic.
But I'm afraid public opinion is changing.
The people's view of themselves and theirrelation to the world is changing.
And as their humble servant,I must change with them.
You're quite right.
Quite right.
You see,things have not been working too well.
(01:26):
The seas are rising.
Our infrastructure is crumbling.
And people are generally dissatisfiedwith the condition of our global society.
People want what is being called
a societal transformation.
Mm hmm. No, Abe. I'll be honest with you.
When theytold me we were hiring a professional
(01:47):
to help with this transformation,
I thought it was going to be some SiliconValley tech genius.
But it says herethat you are an experienced designer.
And if I'm being frank,I can't for the life of me
figure out how that could be relevantto transforming our society.
Well, I am aware you have written a bookon this precise subject.
(02:10):
My assistant has provided me with a copy.
It is an odd little book.
I thought we might explorethis text together.
Shall we begin?
Sure. Let's.
Let's do it.
(02:31):
Welcome to Human Nature Odyssey,a podcast exploring the interactive,
immersive experience we call civilization.
I'm Alex.
(02:56):
A true
odyssey is marked by the fellow travelersone meets along the way.
It's importantto stop and share perspectives
on where you've been,what you've seen, and where you're headed.
You may have noticed from
the graphic,this episode is no normal episode.
That'sbecause this is the first installment
(03:17):
of Human Nature Conversations.
A companion seriesthat will start to sprinkle in here
and there to enrich our odyssey.
Last year, we focused on the novel Ishmaelby Daniel Quinn
about a telepathic gorilla's conversationwith the narrator
on re-imagining our speciesrole in the world,
(03:40):
something I love about Ishmaelis that it's a dialog.
Something happenswhen two people are in discussion.
New ways of thinking can be born.
And while we'll have many more episodesof Human Nature Odyssey,
that will be more like the ones you'veheard before, where it's primarily me
guiding us through ideas that expand uponthe ideas introduced in Ishmael.
(04:03):
It's time to throw some conversationsinto the mix.
And today, Abraham Bergson,
architect, author and experience
designer, will be just the personwe need to get us started.
Why? Well, okay, first,let me tell you a little story.
(04:23):
Ever sinceI was 14 and first read Ishmael,
I knew that one dayI would create some kind of
thing inspired by it.
Maybe it would be a documentary,maybe a book.
I didn't knowthat was for future Alex to figure out.
And over a decade later,
(04:44):
I realize now I was future Alex.
And it was finally time to figure it out.
So I started rereading Ishmaeland taking lots of notes, though
I still didn't know how to best expressand share them.
This was in 2018, coincidentally
the same year the author of Ishmael DanielQuinn passed away.
(05:07):
And also that year, my good friendintroduced me to something called
immersive theater in art form, whereaudience members
can actively participate in the story,sometimes even change how it unfolds.
And as we were getting into this,it occurred to me
Ishmael, too, was sort ofabout an immersive interactive experience,
(05:29):
a one on one conversationwith a telepathic gorilla.
Maybe I could create thatinteractive experience in real life.
So I started adapting Ishmaelinto an interactive experience
where participants went on an adventurethrough their neighborhood.
While we had a conversation over the phone, and that's when I met Abraham Erikson.
(05:53):
Abraham is an experienced designer.
We'll explainexactly what that is shortly.
And the co-founder of Odyssey Works,which creates personalized,
immersive, transformative experiencesfor participants.
He's thought a lot about how to create
interactive experiencesthat people find meaningful.
(06:14):
Over the pandemic,I participated in this program.
Abraham co-led for people designing theirown interactive, immersive experiences.
While I developed the Ishmael experience,which I finally ran for dozens of people,
guiding them on an adventurethrough their neighborhood.
I'd like to do that again some time,and that experience and the conversations
(06:36):
I had with people eventually morphedinto this podcast, Human Nature Odyssey.
And while I was working on a podcast,Abraham was working on a book
experiencedesign, a participatory manifesto.
And Abraham's book has a lot to sayabout how we, as individuals
and communities, can design the very worldwe live in, which is perfect.
(07:02):
Because where we last left offon our odyssey,
we talked about the needfor a societal transformation.
So please welcome
Abraham Garretson.
(07:23):
Hello, Abraham.
Thank you for joining uson The Odyssey today.
So before you had the wordsto call yourself
an experienced designer,you worked as an architect.
I'm curious,
how did your work as an architect leadto your work as an experienced designer?
I love that question, Alex.
First, I want to say I'm just reallyexcited to be talking with you about this.
(07:45):
I love Human Nature Odyssey.
I think it's been so fun.
I've been recommending itto everyone from my earliest days.
Even when I was a kid,when I began to be interested
in architecture,I wasn't interested in the buildings.
I wasn't fetishizing thethe the doorknobs and the patterns.
Of course, I loved those things,but I was always fascinated
(08:08):
with the fact that when I walked intoa building, I was different.
When people
walked into the Cathedral of Saint John,the Divine or
or especially important for me werethe were the masks.
In Istanbul, where
I am when I was 1920.
They were changed.
(08:30):
And it didn't take long for me to learnthat this is not entirely by accident.
It's not just a nice propertypiece of architecture.
This is by design.
Architecture changes you.
It is perhaps about walls and windows.
But when you look at it from the pointof view of experience design, it is about
(08:51):
creating transformativespatial experiences for people.
When I saw that,
when I started to feel that, I startedto look for that everywhere I went.
And the moreI looked at different practices,
the more I saw that they in fact,all could be understood this way.
Poetry, I discovered, changed mewhen I read Wallace Stevens and
(09:13):
13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.
I was changedjust by some words on a page.
How is that possible? Hmm.
What is this weird superpower that.
That wordshave to reorient me in the world,
just like the mosques in Istanbul.
And so I've been experimenting for 20plus years
(09:36):
and understandinghow the things we create affect us
and that is experience design
in a kind of simplified explanationcausing transformations.
You know, it's funny,I'm sure you've heard this a lot.
When I was getting into immersive theater
and people ask like,what does that mean, immersive?
(09:58):
And I would explain vaguely.
And they'd say, Well, well,then isn't everything immersive?
Is it? Well, yes.
Yes, it is a similar I imagineyou get that with experience design too.
It's like, well,
what is an experience isn'teverything we're doing and experience.
Absolutely.
I think the big switch, the mental switch,we're not actually designing
(10:24):
discrete objects called experiences.
We are designing for the experienceor outcomes of
whatever the things we make are.
That is to say,
I'm designing a house for you.
Mm hmm.
The thing.
A home is an experience.
And so when I design that thing,that house, like a traditional architect
(10:46):
does, I am also designing the experienceof home, an experience designer
starts from the home, not the house
says, what would it be to design a homeand then takes a step backwards
and says, okay, what is the housethat makes that home possible?
Really interesting things happenwhen you do that.
(11:06):
We can think about a much larger
site for architecturethan just the building itself.
We can start to really addresschanging lifestyles.
There's, you know, this problemthat we encounter with efficiency.
That's really it's really depressing,actually. Right.
You studies and I and I want themto be wrong and maybe they are.
(11:31):
But there are these studied
energy efficiency laws in California
which say that they've come upwith LED bulbs and all these rules
about energy efficiency and,you know, better windows.
And in the last 20, 30 years, I can'tremember when the laws were passed.
The technologyand each home has transformed totally.
(11:54):
And yet people are usingthe same amount of energy.
Mm hmm.
They are not different.
They haven't changed.
The technology has.
That's the difference between a thingbased approach
to architecture and an experiencedesign approach to architecture.
The experience design approachto architecture doesn't say
(12:15):
we're going to get these technologiesinto the house and experience
design approach to architecturesays we need to create a relationship with
energy consumption, with the environment,which is totally different.
I really love how you put this distinctionin the book when you say, quote,
Traditional design practicesinvite us to design things
(12:37):
and to use those things to solve problems.
But experience is not a problem.
It is life.
And so if designing experiences
is not about solving problems,
what is it about designing experiences?
About creating the life we want to live?
(12:57):
And if we start from a problem solvingpoint of view,
we're only going to ever get to zero.
But if we sit down and say,What is the life we want to live,
we can get to that life.
At least we have a fighting chance.
But if we haven't even outlined that,how are we going to get there?
Mm hmm.
Every thing we do, every design
(13:20):
we make, every widgetthat's created, every service interacts
in every home, every immersive theater
experience, every podcast
can tap into any of these questionsabout how we want to live.
Because this is what we're doing.
We're living with the thingswe've created.
We're completely surroundedby our designs,
(13:42):
especially if we consider our designsto be not just objects,
but services and.
Traditions and rituals.
What's so fascinating about this book
is that not just the thingsthat we interact with are the experiences,
but also the cultural designsthat we bring.
So storytelling rituals, New Years,
(14:05):
the concept of New Years,a calendar is a design.
And you know, we are at New Year's waywith bated breath as completely artificial
numbers, countdown and a completelyartificial four digit number changes.
Just because it's artificial and it'sdesigned, doesn't it all make it not real?
(14:26):
It's actually very transformative.
I mean, so many of us,it compels us into changing our behavior
often or compels us into shaming ourselvesabout not changing our behavior.
And, you know, language is a is as youdescribe it, and something that we've
designed football games, weddings,funerals, a conference, a protest.
(14:48):
These are all immersive,
interactive experiences that we
engage with.
And your book gives us some incredibletools to think about how to design those.
So like you're saying,not just to solve problems, but
to have at the forefront of that designbe, well, what
(15:10):
what do we wantto experience from these things?
The thing that I love that
you brought up rightthere is is the linear nature of it.
It's all scalar.
We can design, we can make it,we can design a tiny little world
and a tiny little event.
We can tell a short story that is athere's a whole world we've designed.
We can have an immersivetheater experience and a
(15:33):
tiny little theaterfor one on on on Times Square.
That's something a friend of mine created.
Or we can go and create a revolutionin our head.
These all exist inside the same practice.
It's the same practicethat we utilize when we when
when we throw a surprise birthday partyfor a friend.
There's this power of the imagination
(15:56):
to generate a different worldand to allow us to step into it.
And when we step into a different world,if it's really well
done, as you felt,probably in a great experience
of immersive theater,but also in a great story,
when you step into that different world,you sometimes can esthetically,
but also in your mind experienceliving in a totally different way.
(16:20):
Then we have the opportunityto act upon these things.
The world we create determineswho we can be and we can move around.
We are not actually any specific.
We're not fixed to any one identity.
We are stepping into these ways of beingthat are provided to us by the world
we're in.
It's that.
So then we could considerredesigning that world.
(16:42):
We can consider making interventionsin those identities.
We can consider what those rolesthat are laid out for us
result in and how they are contributingto a world we do or do not like.
We have this idea of a kind of fixed selfand then it's determined by the world
we're in.
What it doesn't mentionis that that world that we're in
(17:03):
is something that we designwith every action.
One wayI wanted to frame this conversation too,
because I wanted to hearwhat you think about it.
So in Ishmael, for those who haven't
already heard me blab about itenough, Daniel Quinn proposes
that we as a global civilizationare destroying the world, not because
we're inherently flawed as a species,but that we are held captive.
(17:27):
It's not that we activelywant to destroy the world or
are too innately selfish or greedy.
It's that we live in a societywhere our individual survival
depends on our collective suicide.
So the need for unlimited growth,
endless consumption of resources,the sixth mass extinction.
These are not accidents.
(17:48):
Our society is actually set up this way.
It's things are goingas they were intended or designed.
They weren't designed by one person
or a nefarious group,but by all of us over time.
And so I wanted to ask you,how does design work on a societal level?
(18:09):
It's so interesting, isn't it?
There's the question, how did we get here?
And I think you you said it so well.
And in that quote from Ismailthat we are entrapped in this,
we are in this world,and there are various ways
that this was built,various different work.
A whole civilization has a lotof designers throwing their hands in over.
(18:30):
Many generations. Over many generations.
But there's also singular individualswho make huge moves in those changes.
And we look at leaders,but we also look at artists.
We also look at technologists.
There are moments where you seebig changes happening.
And in the book, I talk about Dondi.
(18:50):
You know, what he didwas essentially world building
in a way that contradicted the worldin which he lived.
He did world buildingthat contradicted the caste system.
He did world building that contradictedhow one engaged economically
with life in India,with salt, with transportation.
He did world building that contradicteda logic of violence.
(19:14):
That was the logic of colonizationthat did not play with that narrative.
And when he did so, he overthrewthe greatest empire since Rome.
And I think the job is to take a look
at any society and look atlook at all those elements.
What is the origin story?What is the narrative?
(19:34):
What is the myth?
What are the roles that we are occupying?
How are they encoding in usthis way of being
and then saying,okay, what is another way of being?
Can we embody that?
Maybe we're going to embodythat in a piece immersive theater.
Maybe we're going embodythat in a short story.
There's incredible value in the adventuresof the imagination,
(19:57):
in worldbuilding, in allowing usto see another way of being.
This is what Gandhi did when he traveledthe world, before he got back to India.
This is what Che Guevara did.
This is what revolutionaries always do.
They go on journeysand they live in other worlds
and they come back and say,Oh, I understand how it can be different.
We need to do that.
And we have the toolswe can create, experiences that let us see
(20:18):
in a different way.
And once we've done that,
then we can gather our friends and say,What if it were different?
Hmm. We move between worlds
when I'm in my home with my family,I'm in one world.
When I'm teaching at the college, I'min a totally different world
and I'm never that same personin both worlds.
(20:40):
I'd be a realjerk to be acting like a fool
with my wife, right?
And I'd be like, really questionable.
But acting as I did with my wife,with my students at recess.
Right.
And so that the totality of the contextis the world.
And so worlds have these qualities.
(21:01):
Every world has a historyor a myth, an origin story.
Every world has a particular physics.
I'm talking about experiential physics,not Newtonian or Einstein in physics.
All right.
This is how you move around,how you affect things.
Who can do what? How bodies behave.
What's expected of.
(21:22):
You, what is expected of you?
Worldsalso have populations and languages.
What is code switching?
Code switching is the way wewe move between our roles
in different populationsand change our language to suit.
And we can do it very fast.
We're actually quite brilliant at this,especially people
who have had to movebetween a lot of worlds like immigrants.
(21:44):
One wayI want to frame the world building concept
because world buildingand the fact that we live
in many different worldsis a fundamental part of your book that I
think is so fascinating and a crucial wayto understand experience design.
And the funny thing is that
worldbuildingis usually associated with fantasy books
(22:07):
or preparing a Dungeons and Dragonscampaign.
Wikipedia describes world building becauseI did a little research coming into this
as, quote, the process of constructingan imaginary world
or setting sometimes associatedwith a fictional universe, unquote,
but you don't see it confined
(22:28):
to just imaginary worlds at all.
You see, worldbuildingis something that we all partake
in every dayand exist in in our real world.
Absolutely.And or you could flip it around.
I mean,
what were the what were the framersof the Constitution of the United States?
But people engaging in some kind of crazysci fi,
(22:49):
they were imagining a worldout of some pieces of paper.
Right.
That is a mat creating an imaginary worldand then stepping into it.
And because they can imagine it,it could be real.
And I think this is our first jobto imagine the other world.
I wanted to ask you to that
you say in the bookthat a world is not neutral.
(23:14):
What do you mean by that?
Every world has a set of valuesembedded in that.
If you go into a courtroom,
it is really strictly builtlike there are laws
about how high up the judge said,what kind of wood you have.
There are a very limited numberof actual rules you can play.
(23:36):
You could be in the audience,you could be a juror,
you could be a judge, you could bethe bailiff, you could be the defendant.
Maybe less than ten different rolesin that in that little world.
And the ethic the core ethic is justice.
Is itwell served? That's a different question.
The court ethicof the design of that world is justice.
You go into a playground.
(23:57):
The coreethic of the design of that world is clay.
If you go to a jail, what's the coreethic of the design of that world?
Right? Misery
or hypothetically repentance, but not.
Often, right?
It's a really important question and it'sone that's been asked through the years.
And I think it's really importantto take this notion in
(24:18):
pretty deeply,because we look at a world as neutral.
We say, well, the world is just what is.
I say, it is not.
I say the world has always embeddedwithin it a value system.
If we take a look at that, values system
and measured against the value systemwe would like to be living with,
we can see all these different waysin which it would probably change
(24:42):
every little design movefrom the architecture
to the social dynamics, from the holidaysto maybe what New Year's
is from different roleswe would play to the origins story.
It's all it's all pointinglike iron filings towards that moral core.
Why aren't wetaking a look at what that moral core is
(25:03):
and starting thereinstead of with the LED light bulbs?
When we talk about world building,it is a chance to reimagine activism.
I think that we're at this placeculturally where activism
is something that only certain peoplechoose to do.
It's it's almost a hobby for some or a job
as opposed to somethingwe're all inherently doing all the time.
(25:26):
You know, you make the point that wecreate and recreate the worlds we inhabit.
So in a way, we're all activists.
When I'm drive to workand then stuck in traffic,
I am an activist on behalf of the fossil
fuel industry and which is somethingI am an activist of,
(25:47):
unfortunately, constantly, and
especially in the 21st century.
I think that
after the sixties,
a lot of the institutionsthat were challenged by social change back
then got better at incorporatinga certain kind of activism
that it's almost like in activisttoday is seen as someone
(26:08):
that's participating in a gamethat's already been established
and you're trying to winthat game as opposed to
what you're talking about with worldbuilding and activists like Rosa Parks,
who refused to participatein the world of segregation, or Gandhi
who refused to participatein the world of British colonialism.
It's not about playing a gamethat's already been established,
(26:30):
but completely challenging
the the design of the worldand the roles and the expectations.
And I think that's a really powerful way
to reframe how to push for social changeand what our role is.
It's something that we're alreadyall doing all the time.
We're already designing experiencesjust by going
through the motionsof what's already been set up for us.
(26:53):
I think that also that pointsto a few things.
One is
we can have a
much broader view of seeking social changeif we think about not just going out
and protesting, which is absolutelyhazardous, has its place, but
asking the question where we are
most actively and generally
(27:16):
participating in the designand maintenance of our world.
We've been we're often toldwe have this list of bad things.
You know, you're bad for driving,you're bad for taking the plane.
You're bad for not voting.
You're bad for voting wrong. Right.
And it's very it'svery thing it's very checklist.
Right.
But we can actually step out and say,okay,
(27:39):
first of all, we live in a worldthat is designed.
We have stepped into it. We have a role.
We only have so much agencyto actually change the way
we get to work, to actually change the wayour house is insulated.
We only have so much money, etc.
There is
there is a certain amount of privilegenecessary to do a lot of these things.
(28:00):
And I think we need to have sympathyfor the challenge that is just to live.
But we can also
broaden the question of how it is
that we are participating in buildingand maintaining the world.
And we each do it in different ways.
Lots of ways we educate our children.
We perhaps we're teachers and we'reeducating other people's children.
(28:21):
Perhaps we are designersand we're designing things.
So we have the opportunity
to think about that design processin a totally different way.
Perhaps we are in a religious organizationand we can say, How do I understand
this religion,this origin story of this religion
in a totally different way,in a way that supports
(28:42):
this other view of the worldI'd like to live in.
We all have agency in variousdifferent ways
and we can say, okay,
maybe I'm not going to go out and protestbecause I need to get to work.
But I am involved in this otherthis other mode of maintaining
and reproducing the world,and I can work with that.
There are a thousand ways and.
(29:05):
We're talking about origin story.
There's a major way that I found thatyour ideas overlap with Ishmael.
You know, in Ishmael talks about howa culture is a people who share a story.
And this isn't just a storythat people tell out loud.
It often goes on, said, or is expressedmore subtly.
It's a story that people act outessentially.
(29:27):
It's an imaginary game for grown ups.
So how does this fit in withhow you see the role
of narrativeand worldbuilding and experience design?
This is the origin story,right? It's the story.
We act out both performatively
and quietly, right?
(29:47):
We have rituals in which we reenact them.
What is July?What's happening on July 4th?
What's happening on Independence Day?
Why are we watching fireworks?
We're out a joyous celebration of bombs
exploding in air, shooting, exploding in.
And we're celebrating that violencewe are reenacting historic.
We're all historic re-enactorsin this kind of symbolic way.
(30:10):
Some people actually go and do that.
Some people just go and play outGettysburg or play out the American
Revolution, dress up and that and moresubtle ways in our lives.
Once after we've gone and reinforcedthat narrative collectively,
we go ahead and reinforcethose narratives.
Personally,you look at religion, people are going
(30:30):
and walkingthe stories of the various religions.
You look at nationalism.
People are walkingthose stories, people are reenacting them.
And half of the of the purpose of events
and holidays is to reinforceand reenact these narratives.
There's a kind of norming.
(30:52):
Some holidays don't work anymore.
Nobody does much around Arbor Day.
That's my favorite holiday.
Every Arbor Day, I climb a tree,and I know that would be cool.
Maybe I should do that.
All right, well,what if it were your favorite holiday?
What would it take?How many people would have to be involved?
What if Arbor Day was a spectacle
(31:14):
on the scale of July,Fourth of Independence Day?
And if it were, what narrativewould we have to be reenacting
around trees
to actually
be building the world we want to have?
I think it's a perfect example.
The the the the sort of facile nature ofit tells us a lot.
(31:37):
We have the holiday,
but it doesn't actually connectto a resonant narrative for us.
We see in small scales communitieslike intentional communities,
devotional communities,professional communities,
the Apple campus, right?
These narratives are able to be developedand holidays
(31:58):
and events are able to be developedthat do do that
right, that do sort of invent
new modes of engaging with the narrative
and that those narratives are incrediblypowerful because is on board,
because that's whythey're there in the first place.
They join that community for that reason,it helps to have a calendar
(32:18):
that supports that.
What does a calendar calendaras a way of walking
the narrative of your world over time?
It is a dance score, essentially,
and if you are dancingto the score of that calendar,
you are telling the story againand again together,
and eventually the dance is in your body.
(32:42):
Yeah, well, that's the
funny thing about enacting a story
is because it involves a mindset shift,
which is an abstract thing.
It just takes place in your thoughtsand how you view the world.
But it's not just about shiftingthat mindset.
It's actually about how you're playing.
Pretend that that mindset is real,how you're acting that out in the world,
(33:05):
and there's this kind of interplaythat you're describing
where it needssome actual real world action as well.
And by having maybe an eventthat separate from a normal day
and bringing people togetherto act something out, it can help shift
the mind in other peopleand make it more real over time.
(33:26):
One thing I'll because again,I want to bring you on because Ishmael
leaves folks with these big picturechanges that need to happen.
We want to stop enactingTake your mythology, which puts simply
tells us that the world belongs to usand we must conquer it.
And we want to instead enact levermythology,
(33:48):
a lever storywhere we belong to the world. And
the book kind of leaves it there.
It's like, okay, so go offand enact that you belong to the world.
And I think it's very fairfor many people to read.
It's like, okay, how, how?
And I wanted to ask you, as someonewho is thinking a lot about this,
(34:13):
obviously you know,the answer needs to be personalized.
And what I respectso much from Daniel Quinn is that he's not
prescribing specific stepsthat folks can take.
It needs to be individualto where people are at,
what their community needs,what they experience.
But I'm curious, how would you want peopleto frame asking themselves
(34:33):
questionsabout how we go and enact the story
that we belong to the world?
I think that we're not going to do itby guilt tripping ourselves and guilt
tripping one another.
I don't know of any greathistorical change that was the result
of a guilt trip.
And I also think that we'reand I think you brought this up earlier
(34:57):
in the podcast.
I think that we havethis really problematic
end of our narrative story,which has an apocalypse.
It sort of assumeswe have all these post-apocalypse
fictions and sort of assumesthat's where we're going,
where there's something that has been madeexciting and appealing about that.
(35:20):
I think that's a problem.
I don't think we should be really excitedabout everything failing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Good news is we love worldbuilding.
We just love it.
Y y it is sci fi and fantasy.
It's just hop off the shelvesin bookstores.
While we was very, very so into HarryPotter and Game of Thrones,
(35:45):
why is the imagination so set to flight?
But by these great acts of worldbuilding,
I don't know for sure, but I can saythere's there's some excitement,
at least for me, in stepping imaginativelyinto a whole other way of being.
It's an invitation.
(36:06):
It's a fantastical invitation.
It's in a way, the same invitationthat sacred books have.
You could step into thiswhole other way of being.
And in doing so, you'll be different,
you'll be among different people,and you can step
imaginatively, estheticallyeven into this other way of being.
(36:27):
I think we need to lay out these
imaginative worlds and invite ourselvesand others to step into them
and those that can take placein zones of fiction,
that can take place in immersivetheater, that could take place
in human management,
that could take placein myriad different ways.
(36:49):
But it needs to be an invitation
that speaks both to our sense of fantasyand our sense of intelligence,
to our sense of responsibilityand our sense of community.
And if we can engage this lovethat we all have of worldbuilding,
I think that we have an opportunityto make that fantasy real.
Just as those who wrotethe American Constitution
(37:13):
did, just as Gandhi did withhis imagination of an independent India,
just as so many people did,or changed the world.
They're just acts of the imagination.
But they all functioned,from the point of view of an invitation
to a different world, not a list of thingsthat we need to change.
That's thing based design.
That's
(37:35):
fixingproblems is not going to fix the problem.
Being bold each in our own way and findingwhat is our version
of stepping outside of the worldwe've been born into
and trying to create worldbuild for ourselves.
That feels like you're saying not justshaming us into doing the right things,
but that feels actually excitingbecause I think for many of us,
(38:01):
the world that we areinhabiting is not that exciting.
It's it's
pretty limiting and it's stressfuland it's not something that we designed.
Our friends didn't design it.
It doesn'tbring us closer to our neighbors.
It doesn't have us feel optimisticabout the world we live in.
And there are certain realitiesthat we can't control.
(38:23):
We can't control the world around us,but we can try to
challenge the world and world,build it in a way
that is more thrilling for usand wakes us up.
One other thingI think is an interesting point, again,
that I see some overlap with Ishmaelis in episode seven, we talk about how
(38:44):
to create a societal transformation.
The goal is not to go into a boardroomand create a declaration,
some abstract lawsthat we then go back out in in force.
But it's an intergenerationaltransformation that is focusing
on what actually works for people.
And so the way you putit is a good experience.
Design is about the present moment
(39:06):
and you must design for the unknown.
It's implicitlynot about controlling every factor,
but creating enough of a structureand some guardrails that then
chance and random circumstance.
What other people need to bring in thingsthat we can't
possibly foresee can interact with it.
(39:27):
How do you find the balancebetween structure
and the unknownwhen you're designing experiences?
It's so important
because without the unknown,there's no life.
Without the unknown.
We're not really invitinganybody to participate.
We are trying to control people.
(39:48):
And I think if we look at many of the
experiments of the 20th century,you see the problem
with trying to control peopleand the evils that emerge from that.
We need to trust
that there is in the heart
of most of the people
(40:08):
that we are engaging with
something great that has to be there
and our designs need to be invitationsto that greatness.
Our designs need to be invitationsto the imagination.
If we find a fellow traveler
who is asking the same questionsas we're asking,
(40:31):
our job is not to give them the answer,but it's to provide a context
in which their brilliance can participatein creating that answer.
In the book, you say that the the unknown,the uncontrollable
is a feature,an experience design, not a bug.
And it's a bug in regular designand it needs to be controlled for it.
(40:53):
This is one of the major changesand we saw in the 20th century
people were trying to change societyby fiat and before that as well.
But really it was with good with goodindustrial means in the 20th century.
And yeah, a little extra gusto.
Yeah, a lot of gusto.
But I think one of thethings I've seen as a teacher
(41:13):
is that
people are rarely asked
to find the answer themselves.
They're they're
generally asked to choose between optionsthat are put in front of them.
I think what a great leader does
is provide the possibility
for whatever is brilliant in those people.
(41:37):
Whatever is longing, whatever is whatever,
might allow a person'sbasic question, their
their conscience to align with the worldyou've created, to come out
and be a general
take partin the creation of a better world.
This is our job as experience designers.
(41:57):
The designer says, This is your job.
You do X, the experience designer says,Here's the world we're trying to create.
We want to create a worldwhich has perhaps something
that is not a takeor mythology, that loves the planet,
that has a different relationshipwith the planet.
And we don't have all the answers,but we want to invite you and support you
and love you in the processof finding that together.
(42:22):
This is a place and a communityand a narrative
that will make that possibleyou are invited to step in.
And I think anybody who's hada great experience of education
has felt that that was what their teacher,
their professor,their instructor brought to them.
Not they did the system well.
(42:43):
Mm. For people who want to help
generate a
societal transformation in their own way,want help redesign
the experienceof civilization, of society,
what would you suggestthey ask themselves?
I think the first thingthey would have to ask themselves
is what would that world look like?
(43:05):
I imagine what that world would look like.
Have I had an experience
of a better world?
And then they can ask,What is my role in building the world?
That is not that.
And what role have I playedin pushing the world towards that. Mhm.
(43:25):
And then things start goingand the next question I think is
who can help me in this, who'sworking with me on this.
Right. Where is my community.
And then we have energyand then change can happen.
Thanks for
listening and you to Abrahamfor joining us today.
You can find a link to his book,Experience Design,
(43:48):
a participatory manifesto.
In our show notes.
Until next time, I hope you'll considerwhat kind of real world
world buildingyou might want to take part.
How would you redesign?
How you and those aroundyou experience the world?
And I'd love to hear what you think.
So feel free to reach outand leave a comment on our Patria
(44:11):
and to give you a sense of the road ahead.
This is going to be a summerof conversation.
Each monthwe'll speak with a new fellow traveler.
We meet along the way.
And then in September, we'll continuewith episodes from our flagship
seriesand explore ideas from authors, thinkers
and, you know, human nature odysseyrelated things.
(44:33):
Our odyssey is longand the road is winding.
Thank you for being a part of the journey.
And if you'd like to helpkeep the journey going,
please share this show with a friend.
Leave a reviewwherever you enjoy your podcasts
and consider joining our Patreon thereyou'll find more
from this conversationwith Abraham and other audio extras,
(44:54):
transcripts of episodes and audiobookreadings.
Your support helpsmake this podcast possible.
As always, our theme music isCelestial Soda Pop by Ray Lynch.
You can find a link in our Shownotes notes
and thank you to Michaelfor his help with this episode.
Talk with
you soon.
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