student showcase

Who is an experience designer?

It's a question that keeps coming up - especially as people are applying to the Experience Design Certificate Program. I mean - isn't anyone who designs something for a person in some way an experience designer? Doesn't a museum exhibition designer make experiences? Or a furniture designer?  Or even a person writing an email?

Well, yes. Of course. But the practice of experience design is not defined by the formal product, and that's the point, really. An experience designer utilizes the chair, the email, the museum exhibit to make an experience possible. What's so powerful here is that focusing on the experience allows for wildly new approaches to whatever is being made. Here are a few examples from former students that show what experience design is and how it can rethink issues of accessibility, climate change, and artificial intelligence.

Featured Student Work

  • Delivered by the fictional company Red Orchard Wellness, The Five Day Cognitive Cleanse is an interactive self-awareness journey delivered by post and email.

  • An interactive experience inspired by the Brothers Grimm tale, Little Snow White. It is delivered by post, email, and community online discussion, and is designed to develop and practice a daily habit of positive self-talk.

  • In addition to mailed packages of print materials, participants received two daily emails: each morning they received a reminder to complete the activity, and in the late afternoon a "promotional" email from Red Orchard Wellness. Created by Mel Bieler & Christine Lesiak

  • Fairest Fair is a mirror — a reflection — of the reality of many toxic workplaces. Developed from an exercise in adaptation, this immersive performance casts participants as editors at the prestigious style magazine Fairest Fair. Participants are invited to take on the challenge of deciding the magazine’s future, whether that means writing a stellar article for the next edition, or exposing the toxic work culture at the magazine and risking a better future by forming a worker’s union.

  • Performances of Fairest Fair took place on Gather, a virtual meeting platform that provides a video-game-like environment in which participants can communicate via voice and video. The world of Fairest Fair was designed to facilitate interaction between participants as well as provide an immersive environment that encourages participants to work together, unraveling clues and gathering evidence in order to steer the magazine’s future.

  • Outside of the playing space, participants also had access to the Fairest Fair website (fairestfair.webflow.io), which contained staff bios of the participants explaining their roles in the world, a Fairest Fair Instagram account, which provided additional clues relevant to the narrative, and emails from various accounts associated with Fairest Fair that introduced important characters. Performances of Fairest Fair concluded with an audience debrief that invited participants to reflect on the piece’s relationship to their own work life, and to imagine what elements of their play they might like to take with them into the real world. Created by Margo Gray, Taouba Khelifa, & Victor Carinha

  • Developed through an exercise in world-building, Menlo Park is built on the concept of play and initiates players to join an infinite tag league.

  • Menlo Park explores rich concepts of history, physics, population, and aesthetics into a world in which players join an infinite tag league, have their bodies embedded with 'geomite nano-technology with remote digital trackers' and compete for the attention of high ranking IT employees of Blue Edison.

  • Welcomed as Citizens of Menlo, you’re invited to the 95th Annual Infinite Tag League Games. Gather to embrace the time-honoured spirit of play and good sportsmanship in our most cherished tradition - Infinite Tag.

  • Facilitated by the Keepers of Play, your participation is a sacred rite of passage. First on your playgrounds, then in your neighbourhood Tag Parks, where you learned to leap and dive and evade and grow ever faster on foot. All in preparation for this moment. Created by Mel Bieler, Christine Lesiak, & Jerome Morrison

Applications Open for Certificate Program

Applications Open for Certificate Program

All of these projects began with an intended audience experience in mind. The results here are inspiring. But experience designers are out there rethinking a wide variety of fields. HR professionals are considering the effect of appreciation on job satisfaction. Hospitals are using immersive environments to reduce the stress of responding to COVID. And those endlessly creative folks at Meow Wolf want us never to see supermarkets the same way again.

Expand Your Experience Design Portfolio.

Build Creative Community.

Tap Into Your Purpose.

Running through Spring and Fall, our sessions will be bookended by in-person weekend intensives, the first at the Maryland Institute College of Art and the second in New York City.

During the remote sessions, students take a weekly course online and receive mentorship from Odyssey Works directors Abraham Burickson and Ayden LeRoux. Each remote session culminates in the presentation of an experience design portfolio piece.