Things I Wish I Could Redesign
I spend a lot of time reimagining everyday life. Here are a few of the experiences I fantasize about redesigning, if only I had the chance:
Weddings
Before I got into experience design I was a wedding photographer for more than 10 years, and at the more than 250 weddings I attended I noticed that while the locations, venues, and details changed from wedding to wedding, the overall experience was pretty much always exactly the same. It occurred to me that couples believed the only way to personalize their weddings was by personalizing the tangible details—the colors, flowers, food, and decor—but in focusing on the look there was a missed opportunity to really shape the way things feel. The pandemic changed the way we gather and shifted our priorities onto relationships, and I think this is an incredible moment to completely rethink the way we celebrate marriage and mark this major life transition. Experience design offers a new approach to how we plan weddings, around people, not things.
High School
As the parent to a teenager I’m constantly baffled by how unnecessarily soul-crushing high school (still) is. Academically and socially kids are overextended, overworked, and their individual needs and experience are largely ignored. A huge part of my work is co-creation—creating with the community, not for it—and high school is a perfect example of why failing to involve the users is a total disaster. The students have very little say in shaping their high school experience, and I can already hear the resistance to changing that fact. In the same way we assume if we give kids too much control over their diet they would likely eat ice cream all the time, we assume giving kids more control over their education would mean the end of tests, homework, and in-person classes. But I think teens are vastly underestimated. I think they recognize the importance of education, but I also think they would get so much more out of it if they had some say in how it was delivered.
First of all, homework is a scam. There is no reason kids should be learning for seven hours a day just to come home to hours more work. It’s inhumane and I doubt anyone has stopped to question whether the stuff they are learning is really worth the cost of learning it. That cost being self-care, family time, household responsibilities, and most importantly, rest. Not to mention the testing system validates skills which are no longer even useful in todays’ world, committing lots of information to memory. The world is rapidly changing and the education system can’t keep up and it’s woefully under preparing our kids for the world that’s awaiting them.
Why does no one care about whether kids are having a good experience? This is four years of their most formative and exciting years, and instead of lifting them up, singling out their skills, and letting them shine, we’re beating them down and extinguishing their joy. It’s really devastating to me to see it happen and feel powerless to do anything about it. If given the opportunity, I would put together a panel of smart, engaged kids and together figure out what kids really need from high school today. My guess is that I would be surprised what they reveal if given the chance, but also I’d bet they need more downtime, more personalization, more support, and more opportunities to use their creativity, wisdom, and voices. And yeah, they might do away with homework, but maybe that’s totally ok.
Therapy
I’m a huge fan of self-discovery, personal growth, and deep transformational healing and I recognize that for a lot of people therapy is an important piece of this puzzle, but it never really spoke to me. I just felt like talking about my experience was a far cry from what I really hope to achieve on my healing journey, which is shifting my experience. I noticed during the pandemic a few local therapists were offering walk & talk sessions, and while I never had the chance to partake, it seemed so much more appealing to me than sitting across from one another in a clinical setting. I remember reading once that the best place to have difficult conversations is in the car, because sitting side by side allows people to open up more without the vulnerability of being looked at, and walking together works that way as well. But it made me wonder if there are other small adjustments that could be made to make the experience of going to therapy more transformative. What if instead of conversations, it was a journey together?
Hospice
This idea actually came from my sister. After spending weeks visiting our uncle in hospice care and recognizing how clinical and depressing the setting was, she thought about delivering an immersive experience to hospice patients in their last days using imagery, sound, and even smells to give them respite from staring at the same blank walls and beeping machines. We’ve had many brainstorming conversations about this, and have even discussed the possibilities of using VR to deliver a truly personalized out-of-this-world experience to someone who can’t leave their bed.
The Berlin Brandenburg Airport
If you’ve been there, then you know.
Breakups
We have cultural rituals for birthdays, graduations, and death, but one significant ritual I think is missing is in sanctifying breakups. Breakups and divorces are some of the most impactful moments of transition in our lives, and they are usually dealt with unceremoniously and without the necessary reverence both to the love that came before and the innumerable possibilities that lies ahead for both people. Our grief is often processed privately and without the support of our former partner and community, and there is very little fanfare to launch us into the often intimidating, uncertain, but exciting next chapter on our own.
