EXPERIENCE DESIGN is a revolutionary way of designing focused on the experience of the audience. It has the power to transform any art or design practice that involves humans.
Odyssey Works began in 2001 with two friends, Abraham Burickson and Matthew Purdon, taking a long walk along the cliffs of BIG SUR. An architect and a THEATRE MAKER, they asked, What would happen if we knew who our audience was and designed specifically for them? What followed was more than two decades of experiments, collaborating with HUNDREDS OF ARTISTS across disciplines, establishing the form of an Odyssey: weekend-long, weeks-long, or months-long experiences for one-person audiences.
Who We Are
Odyssey Works is currently directed by Abraham Burickson and AYDEN LEROUX, who have been collaborating since 2012, when Ayden came aboard and made a book documenting an Odyssey, Isolation and Amazement (Samsara Press, 2013). Over time the group developed a deep understanding of how to design for TRANSFORMATION, and in 2016, Burickson and LeRoux began to organize the research of the group into a new approach to meaningful2 experience design, shared in books, workshops, lectures, and a YEAR-LONG CERTIFICATE PROGRAM.
Together they have directed Odysseys, co-authored Odyssey Works: Transformative Experiences for an Audience of One (Princeton Architectural Press, 2016), developed a discipline-defining pedagogy3, and projected experience design into wider public understanding. In 2023, Burickson published Experience Design: A Participatory Manifesto, which laid the groundwork for a more meaningful approach to the emergent field.
On top of its own programming, the team has LECTURED, led workshops, taught classes, and designed experiences for such places as the The Stanford D-School, The Maryland Institute College of Art, Yale University, Gallaudet University, Central St. Martins, as well as The Exploratorium, The Cleveland Museum, The Future of Storytelling, The Modern Elder Academy, The College of Extraordinary Experiences, The World Experience Organization, The Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and many more.
Odyssey Works is also the center of a COMMUNITY4 of designers dedicated to the development of a better approach to making, one focused on empathy, intelligence, and impact.
Meaningful, as in connected to a value system. Experience design is a powerful toolset, and should be used to achieve important aims.
We differentiate experience design from UX/Ul as well as XD and HCD.This is a much broader toolset. See FAQ for more info.
Because change happens best in community.
ABRAHAM BURICKSON Co-Founder of Odyssey Works and Co-Director of the Experience Design Certificate Program, has spent more than two decades exploring the relationship between what we make and how it is experienced. Trained in architecture at Cornell University and in poetry and playwriting at the Michener Center for Writers, he has also studied the transformative power of designed experience with the Whirling Dervishes of Turkey, the Shuar of the Ecuadorian Amazon, and with countless artists, designers, and students through Odyssey Works. He is also the founder of The Long Architecture Project, which rethinks architectural practice from the perspective of Experience Design. He has won prizes, lectured and taught widely, given a TEDxtalk, and was once hired by German television to kidnap an American skateboarding champion. His book on Experience Design was published by Yale University Press in 2023.
AYDEN LEROUX is the Co-Director of Odyssey Works and Co-Founder of the Experience Design Certificate Program. An advocate of interdisciplinary and genre-defying creative work, she holds art and writing degrees with extraordinarily long titles from New York University and University of California San Diego. She writes extensively about disability and sexuality, and her essays, fiction, and criticism have been published widely. Her praxis is informed by experience in artist collectives, worker-owned cooperatives, and farming, and seeks to cultivate radical hospitality, GENEROSITY, and intimacy. When she was eight, she told her parents she wanted to dress up as a painter for Halloween. Thinking she meant house painter rather than fine art painter, they unwittingly opened a decades-long existential inquiry about the intersection of domestic life and creative practice.
SOPHIE LARSMON is an Associate Director of Odyssey Works and an Immersive Director & Experience Designer known for her unconventional theatrical productions and innovative audience personalization techniques. As a London-based Creative Director she's currently developing a ground-breaking Location-Based Experience to open in 2025. Sophie previously led Any One Thing, a pioneering Immersive Theatre & Software Development company, where she collaborated closely with Abraham on projects like 'The Book of Separation'. Her background includes stints at prestigious venues like The National Theatre and THE WEST END, alongside founding SoLar Productions, which supported emerging theatre makers. Sophie's commitment to dramaturgy and narrative innovation shines through her diverse portfolio, spanning traditional and immersive theatre.
PROGRAM MANAGER
TAOUBA KHELIFA is a creative director and communications strategist with over ten years of experience in experience design and storytelling. She brings curiosity and exploration into her work and loves SOLVING communication challenges by designing innovative and transformative solutions. Taouba is an alumni of the 2022 Odyssey Works Experience Design Certificate Program. She is based in Canada, but her heart lives around the world. She enjoys capturing and telling stories through photography and film.
GUEST FACULTY
TIU DE HAAN is a ritual designer, creative facilitator and idea doula, specializing in reminding people how to shift their perspective to see the magic in the MUNDANE. She works with individuals, teams and global organizations helping people connect to their creativity and wake up their sense of wonder.
KRISHNAN UNNIKRISHNAN's journey to remix oral storytelling tradition through modern technology has thrust him onto an uncharted path of interdisciplinary and emerging mediums including XR, live roleplaying, collaborative ritual-making, and generative AI art. Crafting hi-tech make-believe with embodied stagecraft, he invites you to participate in emergent community experiments for personal and cultural transformation through the sacred power of play.
GUEST SPEAKERS & CRITICS
RACHEL EVE GINSBERG is a strategist and experience designer who consults on initiatives of all kinds, from large scale research projects through designing programs that connect strategy to tactics. Rachel is particularly passionate about PROTOTYPING collaborative approaches to community engagement and connecting artists and makers to cultural organizations to explore big ideas together.
ZACH MORRIS is a director, choreographer, experience designer, and Co-Artistic Director of the internationally acclaimed Third Rail Projects. Zach's work includes theater, dance, site-specific performance, multimedia installation art/environments, and he is particularly interested in how all of these intersect with audience-centered experiential gatherings.
JASMIN JODRY is an award-winning creative director based in New York, renowned for crafting transformative immersive experiences. With over 20 years of experience in the US and Europe, she partners with leading brands across culture, tech, luxury, and entertainment sectors. Her work includes projects for Cirque Du Soleil, Meow Wolf, and ‘Avatar: The Shape of Water,’ as well as the upcoming ‘Bob Marley: Hope Road Immersive’ in Las Vegas. Jasmin specializes in merging art and entertainment to create shared 'Story-living' experiences that foster participation, emotional connection and lead to transformative perceptual shifts.
MEGAN LIVINGSTON works to create meaningful and transformative experiences through individual and collaborative work in Baltimore City — she is currently seeking LIBERATION frames everywhere she looks, so that she can build on a practice of self-transformation and usher in a praxis of worldbuilding, not for the sake of narrative or entertainment, but to contribute to the MANIFESTATION of a world we might all actually want to live in. She is a Core Creator with Submersive Productions, a company member with The Acme Corporation, an Odyssey Works Advisory Board member, Communications Manager for The Baltimore Rock Opera Society, and the Program Manager at 901 Arts.
RISA PUNO is a NYC-based sculpture and installation artist who uses interactivity and play to understand how we relate to one another. She has exhibited with many museums and organizations in the US and internationally. In 2019, she was selected by Creative Time for their inaugural Open Call award and was named FIGMENT’s first-ever Interactive Artist of the Year. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, NPR, The New Yorker, ProPublica, The Boston Globe. Puno grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and she studied art and medicine at Brown University and earned her MFA from New York University.
ALISON S. M. KOBAYASHI is an award winning interdisciplinary artist whose hybrid work mixes documentary and fiction through video, PERFORMANCE, installation, interactive and illustration. Her performance Say Something Bunny! received critical acclaim heralded as "The best new theater experience in town" by Vogue, was a NYTimes critics’ pick, was listed in Time Out’s 2017 top ten productions and BOMB’s Best of Performance list in 2018. Kobayashi has received nominations for a 2018 Drama Desk award and 2019 United Solo Special Award and is the recipient of the 2006 TSV Artistic Vision Award.
PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE PANEL
LEA REDMOND reveals the extraordinary hiding in the ordinary: a saltshaker, a penny, hand gestures, clouds. Lea creates books, TOYS, games and small adventures that invite humans of all ages to be curious, playful, and kind.
BARB GROTH is founder and creative director of the Nomadic School of Wonder, a traveling troupe of wondermakers who create “adventures in awe” rooted in nature, art, COMMUNITY and play. Barb has led creative teams at the most imaginative and iconic brands on the planet — Walt Disney Imagineering, Google, Alphabet and Meow Wolf.
LYNN KIANG is the Creative Director and co-founder of Dome, an experience design studio for cultural institutions where interaction and spatial design meet. She is also a Senior Lecturer in Communication Design at the University of the Arts London.
TASSOS STEVENS is director and ceo of Coney, an arts and social change charity making all kinds of play to spark change. He is writing a Playbook, to which you can subscribe.
LAURA HALL is an artist, writer, puzzle-maker, immersive and narrative designer living in Portland, Oregon, where they create video games, immersive experiences, and escape rooms. She is the author of Katamari Damacy for Boss Fight Books and Planning Your Escape for Simon & Schuster.
ERIC CLOUGH is the founder of 212box, a multidisciplinary ARCHITECTURE and design firm known for innovative projects like the "Mystery on Fifth Avenue" apartment and numerous Christian Louboutin boutiques. Educated at Washington University in St. Louis and Yale University, Clough integrates elements of architecture, product DESIGN, and art into his transformative designs.
BOARD OF ADVISORS
JAMES GENONE
BROCKETT HORNE
MATTHEW PURDON
JON CROPPER
GABE SMEDRESMAN
ERIC CLOUGH
IDA BENEDETTO
MEGAN LIVINGSTON
