TRANSFORM YOUR
WORK
Master the art of experience design1 with the Experience Design Certificate Program from Odyssey Works. Enroll in our 10-month, low-residency program, join an ENGAGED and dynamic community and become a certified experience designer.
October 6th, 2024
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.
Learn to Craft REMARKABLE Experiences
Align Your Work
With Your LIFE'S Purpose
Join an INSPIRING Community
20+ YEARS OF EXPERieNCE DESIGN DISTILLED INTO ONE PROGRAM
ODYSSEY WORKS has been at the forefront of transformative experience design for over two decades and has worked with employees at Facebook, Apple, Nike, The Stanford D-School, and countless others. With our program, you will gain access to the expertise of our experienced instructors, Abraham Burickson and Ayden LeRoux, who have written the books that define the field, lectured and led workshops at some of the most prestigious universities and organizations worldwide.
The Experience Design Certificate Program from Odyssey Works2 is a 10-month, LOW-RESIDENCY program designed to transform you into a cutting-edge designer of powerful experiences. The program offers personalized education with MENTORSHIP, feedback, and community building. It provides a broadly applicable and RIGOROUS design methodology that equips students with the tools they need to create innovative experiences.
October 6th, 2024
Program Curriculum
the ten principles of experience design
All we have are experiences.
Employ Empathy Rigorously.
experiences are framed.
Powerful Experiences Engage the Whole Person.
WE LIVE IN MANY WORLDS.
narrative is everywhere.
design for the unknown.
Transformative Experiences Work with Eventness.
use diagrams.
make work that matters.
EXPERIENTIAL RESEARCH
METHODOLOGIES
PERSONAL & PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE
October 6th, 2024
Schedule
Students will take a weekly course online and receive MENTORSHIP from our instructors. The program will be bookended by in-person weekend intensives. Students will leave the program with two COMPLETED portfolio projects.
DEVELOP YOUR EXPERIENCE DESIGN PORTFOLIO
Graduates leave the program not only with a MASTERY of the practices of experience design, but work to prove it. Their two portfolio projects span the digital and the physical, guided by PERSONALIZED mentorship and the excitement of a public presentation in New York City.
October 6th, 2024
Can humans and AI meaningfully collaborate? 2033: Nature Nostalgia asks you to determine that answer. Set in the near future, Artificial Intelligences have been granted legal status as non corporeal-based intelligent beings–NCIs. You are invited to reflect on your personal relationship with Mother Nature in order to co-create a visual story based on your interactions that employ text-to-image novel landscape generation. In other words, would you like to make some human-crafted AI generative art? By remixing elements of altar-building and ritual-crafting, 2033: Nature Nostalgia weaves personal reflection, generative painting, and collaborative storytelling to explore our relationship to Mother Earth, technology and the Nature of meaning.
Citizens Action Brigade is a (fictional) training program from a (fictional) nonprofit to create (non-fictional) social cohesion.
Have you been losing faith in humanity? Are you frustrated with the way folks treat each other? Do you sometimes think of running away to become a cave-dwelling hermit? Then join the Citizens Action Brigade and become part of a brigade of citizens that takes action! Our volunteer teams complete a state-of-the-art at-home orientation program to learn valuable skills that benefit their communities. Take action today!
Part artifact, part alternate reality game, part social experiment, Citizens Action Brigade is an experience you play at home with a group of friends, family, or tolerant strangers. Take on real-world missions assigned by training materials from the 1980s as you and your group work to restore a bit of your faith in humanity.
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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, 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.
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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
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Earth is dying. Scrambling to escape, a special ship emerges from a place where music and technology become one. A ship that runs on... music! A visionary conductor leads an orchestra that stabilizes the onboard AI to chart a new course in the stars in search of a better world. The conductor's death heralds a transformation to the onboard AI that ushers in a new era. New generations born aboard ship are restless, in both sound and body...yet deviation from the score will NOT be tolerated.
We often feel the power of community when we are faced with grief, disaster, the unthinkable. Flooded with adrenaline, our bodies tense as we mobilize, share resources, post on social media, check on our neighbors. But what if we were interconnected through our joy? What if shared moments of levity allowed us to soften our heart-posture with a neighbor? The Joy Box is a neighborhood-rooted exchange and an invitation to build collective memories of joy. Find something here that brings you joy and leave something behind that might spark joy in another. When my joy is bound to yours, and yours to mine, we begin to shift our gaze above the horizon of survival, toward imaginative futures where Black, Queer, Indigenous, Disabled people thrive. See the Instagram here.
NEUSTON: WE HAVE A PROBLEM is a new, indie card game which invites you into the middle of a big drama on a tiny scale, happening inside the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. In this two-player game, players must navigate the ever-changing and challenging environment of the patch, where Neuston creatures live amidst floating plastic. Make strategic decisions to outwit your opponent and protect the fragile ecosystem. With lovingly created artwork and cunning game mechanics, this unique card game offers a thrilling experience that combines strategy and environmental awareness.
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SPLITWEATHER is a climate-themed adventure endurance event series, encased in narrative. For our inaugural edition, we're exploring: The Sea and Plastics.
For this first event, our narrative is inspired by the adaptability of the sea life that now populates the discarded plastic that has been floating in the ocean for decades. Our guiding question is what might we learn from neuston adapting to their changing environment that we can apply to ourselves and our communities as we navigate the uncharted waters of this climate crisis. In other words, how might their adaptations inspire our own?
Build creative
community
Our programs are community-driven because the development of IDEAS never happens in a vacuum. Because we approach this practice as an evolving conversation, our students remain in community with us long after the programs are done.
TAP INTO
YOUR PURPOSE
Experience design is a PROFESSIONAL practice, but it is also a means of thinking broadly about your effect on the world. The experience design process, anchored by Phase Zero, builds a question of PURPOSE into any project. Your project may be as small as dinner or as large as a nation state; if you approach it from an experience design point of view, you are approaching it with purpose.
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Instructors
1:1 Mentorship
For more than TWENTY YEARS — since before “experience design” was a popular term — Odyssey Works has been researching and innovating experiential practices. Committed to creating an “infinitely more affected audience”, we understand experience design to be a MODE of practice rather than a technique, and have honed a vision for collaboration, experimentation, creative rigor, and empathy-centered making.
With international acclaim for our work, three books, dozens of lectures, and a history of pioneering pedagogy, the Experience Design Certificate Program is our invitation to reimagine the world together.
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.
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.
Payment Plans
$11,000 TOTAL
INCLUDES books and a materials stipend for the final portfolio project. Students are responsible for their own travel and accommodations for the weekend intensives. No transaction fees.
$3,350 PER INSTALLMENT
Divide tuition into THREE payments throughout the program. $3,350 per installment (+$1,000 deposit due at acceptance). Includes transaction fee.
$1,025/MONTH
Divide tuition into TEN payments of $1,025 per month (+$1,000 deposit due at acceptance). Includes transaction fee.
*Many countries in the EU offer sponsorship for arts related education programs. Applicants are encouraged to apply for arts funding if their country offers it. Students have received support from UK Arts Funding and the Canada Council for the Arts.
We happily write letters of support for all students who ask that are seeking funding from foundations, institutions, and their employers.
FINANCIAL AID
& SCHOLARSHIPS
Thanks to a generous donor we are offering two full-tuition SCHOLARSHIPS to BIPOC applicants. We are also proud to offer two half-tuition, need-based scholarship, and two half-tuition work study scholarships. All of these are extremely COMPETITIVE and we encourage you to seek additional sources of funding4. You will be able to INDICATE your interest in being considered for both forms of scholarship in your application. If you’d like to be considered for need-based assistance, there is a BRIEF additional form for you to complete.
Work for a company or institution that has funds for continuing your education or professional development? Odyssey Works partners with organizational leadership to support employees in this program. Numerous alumni who worked at places like Nike, IDEO, and McCann World Group, or at academic institutions, have received full or partial funding from their employers for our programs. Get the conversation started by sending your employer to this page today and feel free to contact us for further information.
Program Reviews
"I would recommend this program for anyone who is looking to be SHAKEN out of your normal way of thinking and to open up your process to different tools and different PERSPECTIVES."
"It was such a good reminder that deepening what MATTERS TO ME as a designer, rather than reaching for things that feel like what a designer should do, will produce better and more authentic results."
"This program has finally giving VALIDATION to the kind of work I've been doing for so long."
"The knowledge and CONFIDENCE I was able to gain from the EDCP was a key factor in earning a new position. EDCP is uniquely VALUABLE in that individuality is celebrated in a way that allows us to shine under an intense polishing - a friendly grit that sloughs off the PATINA of 'reliable choices."
"Thank you for WELCOMING me into the OW family with open arms and continued support. [I've received] community, connections, resources, inspiration, REFRAMING, transforming and owning your practice, and great books!"
“The program has helped me reframe my artistic and community PRACTICE, has spurred new collaborations, and introduced me to a diverse international community of practitioners.”
“Participating in EDCP has been TRANSFORMATIVE — unlocking a deeper purpose within my work and changing how I've approached life since. The program has equipped me with the TOOLS to create intentional experiences, which I have moved the needle for the organizations I serve. As these organizations thrive, it has meant REMARKABLE growth for my own business.”
“My experience in Odyssey Works has undoubtedly disrupted [my work life] and LAUNCHED me out of purgatory. I am…ready for “the great pivot” and I finally put my imposter syndrome to bed.”
“My experience with you and ECPD has been a TRANSFORMATIVE odyssey. Everything we have been doing has been immediately applicable to my work [at Wells Fargo] and I have used the experience design lens and the resources you’ve shared frequently.”
"I feel emboldened to take BIGGER risks and to think bigger."
"This year has been one of SIGNIFICANT disruption and liberation, and I believe this program was key to unraveling the world I knew…Thank you for imagining such a generative space where people from a KALEIDOSCOPE of lenses could come together and bring ideas to life. This was a joy and a challenge and a catalyst for so much more to come."
“I can CONFIDENTLY say that the ‘In Solidarity: The Beth El Civil Rights Experience’ project would not have been a success without what I learned in the Odyssey Works program. From diagramming to audience roles, I was able to directly APPLY those principles to this project, which is now a permanent installation and hosting students from around the country each week.”
10 MONTHS FEB-NOV 2025
10 HOURS PER WEEK
10-15 STUDENTS PER COHORT
Designed for Working Professionals
Establishing clear, tested practices across disciplines
We’re defining experience design by establishing clear, TESTED practices across disciplines. We are to experience design, what IDEO is to design-thinking.
An intense, hybrid program designed for working professionals
Learn to create INTENTIONAL experiences that compel you and your audience to engage and transform. Our students join us for 3 class hours per week, and bring the challenges they face with their professional projects to our program.
20+ years of experience design distilled into one program
We’ve written the book (well, two books) on experience design and are known for bringing INTELLECTUAL and practically rigorous craft.
A proven track record of success
Our graduates have secured multiple grants and funding, been featured on the radio, earned promotions at top companies like Meow Wolf and seen agencies DOUBLE their growth.
Personalized education that replaces what doesn’t work
The high-touch, personalized education offered at the Experience Design Certificate Program not only rededicates students to their work but offers specific toolsets for creating collaborative purpose-driven COMMUNITIES.
The design of the Experience Design Certificate changes each year to reflect the unique nature of individual cohorts.
EARN A CAREER-DEFINING CERTIFICATE
With a proven track record of success, our graduates have gone on to get PROMOTIONS, secure funding and large grants to produce their work, and GROW their organizations substantially within months of certification5.
Frequently asked
questions
What are the certificate requirements?
Students are REQUIRED to attend weekly classes in Spring and Fall, complete weekly assignments, and to produce two major Portfolio Projects. During the summer, students conduct LIVED RESEARCH independently, with the support of the cohort through accountability meetings and one-on-one mentorship meetings with the directors of the program.
We do not give grades, and find that it is more meaningful to give students narrative evaluations. In spring and fall, we write narrative evaluation letters to students, giving them detailed feedback about their PARTICIPATION, projects, and contributions to the community.
How competitive are applications?
We receive three applications for every spot we have available in the program. We aim to keep our cohorts INTIMATE and as directors, we want to know the name of every single person in the EDCP.
Who is the ideal student?
Our students come from ALL OVER the world (Brazil, United Kingdom, Canada, Spain, Israel, Russia, Netherlands, Australia, Costa Rica) and across the United States, and range in age from mid-twenties to late sixties. Those who are younger are often looking to jumpstart careers as experience designers by CONNECTING with others, solidifying their language and methodologies. Our students who are established in their careers come in looking to REFRESH their perspective and incorporate experience design practice into the work they already do.
As a professional development program, our students have often (though not always) completed other FORMS of higher education. More important than having other types of degrees is the sense that you have a developed relationship to your PRACTICE. Our best students are PASSIONATE and looking to do things in a new way. They come with questions about how they can make the world a better place. EDCP is a good fit if you are ready to deepen, re-engage, or re-think your orientation to creative work and your career as an experience designer.
How is this different from Design Thinking/UX/UI?
Experience Design is an approach to making in general rather than a specific step-by-step METHODOLOGY limited to a few applications. The basic notion - that an experience designer identifies the experience they WISH to create first and then works their way backwards - means that it is an inherently interdisciplinary practice, one which might involve Design Thinking or UX practices but might also involve wildly divergent practices. Many of our students come from Design Thinking / HCD or UX/UI trainings looking for something more broadly APPLICABLE and more transformative.
WHAT'S INCLUDED IN MY TUITION?
Tuition covers weekly class meetings online, ALL of your required reading material, as well as programs and most meals during our TWO in-person retreats. $500 of your tuition is allocated towards materials for final projects that are presented at our final exhibition in New York City, The New Frame.
What’s not included in my tuition?
You are responsible for your own TRAVEL and lodging for the spring and fall retreats, as well as a few meals during those weekends. We offer an optional summer retreat, the Odyssey Works Family Reunion, that you can attend.
Outside of the $500 Final Project reimbursement, if there is any software, equipment, or additional materials you require, those are at your own expense.
How have student careers benefitted from this program?
Students have had a wealth of success, both during the program and after they graduate. Numerous alumni have received PROMOTIONS at their current jobs or proposed new roles as experience designers at places where they work, like Meow Wolf, Wells Fargo, Nike, and Slalom. Every year there are students that find new jobs that are more ALIGNED with the work they want to do. Alums who have their own businesses find that being an experience design practitioner distinguishes their proposals, leads to higher rates securing new clients, and increases their revenue and value. The Experience Design Certification differentiates them as people who are at the forefront of thinking in new ways, indicating to others that they bring an empathetic, human perspective along with VISIONARY approaches to design.
Many of the Lived Research projects and experiences presented at the New Frame go on to be shown at other venues, exhibitions, festivals, or conferences. Our alums have received a wealth of GRANTS and awards to fund their projects, using the frame of experience design.
What If I have another questions?
Attend one of our info sessions and get answers to your questions, live from our program directors. You can also view recorded info sessions here, or get in touch with us.
LEARN ABOUT THE PROGRAM
Interested in learning more about the THREE KEY PHASES of the Experience Design Certificate Program? Join our mailing list to get notified about our next info session; which is free and a fantastic way to bring your questions directly to the program directors. We’ll talk about funding options, outcomes for alums, and who is the right fit for this INTIMATE cohort. Plus, you’ll gain access to a treasure trove of insights and updates about Experience Design and our Certificate Program.
Applications DUE BY OCt 6th 2024
EXPERIENCE DESIGNER
10 months
Feb–Nov 2025$11k tuition
Scholarships available10-15 studentS
per cohort10 hours
Per week
FREE DOWNLOAD
The four steps in this guide can be used at the beginning of ANY PROJECT to transform your design into an experience design. At the end of the guide, you will find worksheets that you can use to respond to prompts.