Experience Design for Meaning Making

Photo of installation by The Windmill Factory

Throughout the ages, we have co-created, as community, spaces for connection. For making meaning together and for helping each other understand each other and our place in the world. But we have lost, left, or actively destroyed many of the spaces, rituals, and the cultures that stewarded them.

Many of these practices were previously held within spiritual traditions. From indigenous wisdom practices, to Greek trance + gnostic traditions, Taoism and even Christianity (while by no means perfect) were often the central hub for community and ritualized interaction in pursuit of connection and communion with each other and with something greater than ourselves.

But as a dear friend, monk, and Harvard economist, Soryu Forall of The Monastic Academy suggests, religion is just a set of ideological beliefs. In which case, capitalism may have replaced what once was a more decentralized process as the religion of our times. 

In this religion, fulfillment (over understanding) of our individual wants and desires is paramount. These days, every marketer knows to connect what someone wants with a product. But this tactic was founded by Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, to connect our implicit human desires - for power, belonging, purpose - to products as a way of keeping them under control. With a whole technological and cultural system built on this foundation, we find ourselves incentivized to keep our attention toward the products that we’re promised will fulfill us over the connections that actually would.

“Money follows the contours of the mind”, a protege of Soryu once said to me, and these days, the contours of the mind follows what distracts us. 

The trance that was used to bring about states of collective oneness and bliss is used to keep us glued to flickering screens that pitch us products between the mesmerizing cuts. The music and song that once connected us with the human spirit are relegated to “content” seeking monetization by any means necessary. The theater and art that once threw people into revelrous states of rapture and healing has been used for escape and be entertained. 

We have lost the sanctity of these great arts, and it’s not without its impacts. 

The entire world was already experiencing a loneliness epidemic even before COVID and rising rates of mental illness have been spurred on by the uncertainty and isolation of the pandemic. The reality of the global climate crisis is creating psychological dissonance, grief and existential dread. Amidst all of this, people are increasingly looking to understand themselves and their role in the world. From the rise of the personality tests to the fact that 70% of workers define their sense of purpose through their work, our culture is seeking meaning - and in a constant state of question it with 52% of the US population considering a career change in 2021.

But our human hunger for connection runs deep, and with it, hope for the return of these kinds of spaces that fill some of our most deeply held needs.  

Ida Benedetto is a renown experience designer and healer who came out with a profound piece of research called “Patterns of Transformation: Designing Sex, Death, and Survival in the 21st Century.” In it, she describes learnings from researching several spaces that are known for their capacity for transformation and suggests that, “in previous eras, social gatherings and ritual experiences were the domain of religious institutions, cultural organizations, or the state. Now, they increasingly fall within the realm of design as it expands to address challenges of human emotion and connection… Experience design offers a possible solution to our fundamental human craving for connection and meaning in the face of increased isolation and diminishing social cooperation.” 

How can experiences fill this gap? The Sacred Design Lab is one example of a group championing intentional design for transformation. A venture that emerged out of a collaboration with The Harvard Divinity School, their first major work was entitled “How We Gather.”  In it, they describe case-studies of various ways people are finding meaning (and it wasn’t your typical Sunday School). Instead, they cited classes like Soul Cycle, or Dinner Parties like The Feast as the new spaces where people were filling an age-old need. Now they are being hired by everyone from major corporations to churches themselves to design spaces of greater belonging and connection. 

Creativity is the answer and it’s everywhere.

I am a staunch believer that experience designers, artists and creators of all kinds are often closest to the places of inspiration where our human spirit and meaning reside. They pull from the ether new possibilities, express the internal, and create moments of wonder and connection to what is true in our individual and collective experience.  

Public art projects like Subway Therapy and The Strangers Project are offering every-day people a space for voicing their experience, offering cathartic sharing and connection through seeing our shared humanity across a wide range of total strangers. Death Over Dinner is creating ritualized space and community for a challenging and taboo conversation in the US. The Jejune Institute created a city-wide immersive game that created so much meaning that the lines between reality and fiction began to blur. 

These are just a few of the breakthrough experiences that have taken people out of their day-to day and offered them a new and more inspired way to look at the world; to find meaning and connection with each other and something greater.

The opportunity is to create as many spaces as there are kinds of people. Because, luckily, everyone is creative. We don’t require fancy studios and labs to design these spaces of connection. They can come from a mother who wants to do something special for her family. They can come from young people wanting to make something better and beautiful for their community. 

And now there are more and more tools empowering the every-day person to design such spaces. Matthew Chavez, the artist from Subway Therapy has started training young people to create their own art activations that create spaces of listening. There are a growing number of books like The Power of Ritual by Casper ter Kuile and The Art of Gathering, by Priya Parker that help people create their own experiences. And there are more tools than ever, from card games like this one by Esther Perel to DIY resources from a growing number of practitioners.

What is required is the intention to create something meaningful for someone else - an orientation toward expression as gift or service. What is required is connecting with an intention that motivates beyond the directives of just money. And what is required is the intent to bring the breath of inspiration we all share to others. 

Deep within each of us is a DNA that remembers how to be together. How to share stories and create meaning together. How to celebrate joys and heal grief together. How to sing each other’s names into belonging. If we can reconnect with the part of us that knows what it is to create these kinds of spaces with and for each other, we can find our way back to what we have lost in new and profound ways. We can meet each other’s hungers for our most basic human desires more fully together than we could ever do alone. 

*For those interested in this thread of conversation, I’ve started a conversation series titled “Transformation by Design”. You can check out the first episode with Author Judah Pollack that covers many of these topics here.