Mat Duerden - Unlock the Experience Ladder. How to Elevate Experiences from Memorable to Transformative

Steve Usher (00:35.363) So Mat, look, welcome to the Experience Designers. Fantastic to have you on the show. Huge. Mat (00:47.758) Yeah, I'm really happy to be here. Like I said, this is something I've been looking forward to. I love talking about experience design, so thanks for having me. Steve Usher (00:54.295) Yeah, you're the man for experience design for sure. looking forward to delving in and getting to know a little bit more about your journey and yeah, let's like walk through that together and where we are today and dive in. So listen, can I just like dive back? First question for you is more about just like reflecting back on like your life. Where's some of those kind of that first junction for you for around experiences? Mat (01:06.328) Cool. Steve Usher (01:23.331) Was it the kind of anywhere that kind of correlates back that if you just, you know, reflected and plotted it back, was there a certain moment that really took you on the course? Yeah. Mat (01:29.96) Yeah, totally. Yeah, because I don't think I realized it at the time, which is often the case for, I think, most transformative experiences. It's over sort of reflection and integration where you're like, yeah, here's sort of my path, right? Because in terms of like an academic and professional path, it's pretty nonlinear. I think for me, it really goes back to the fact that growing up my family and my dad still operates a whitewater rafting outfitting company in Idaho and California at the time when I was growing up. So it was just part of growing up that we would go on these multi-day river trips. And it was something I both loved and was also like terrified of a little bit too. I don't think I would have naturally like. found the space, but just because that's where we grew up, like we would go on these trips. And when I was 14, my family showed up, we'd sort of tag along on trips when there was space and showed up and there was all of sort of our big commercial outfitting boats. This was for a five day trip. You bring all the gear and the food and everything, and you're just out, you know, in the remote wilderness for five days. And it was amazing. But at the end of this row, there was a tiny sort of dilapidated looking silver boat with a wooden frame that was sort of blue paint was peeling off of it. And I said, what is, what's that boat? And he goes very excitedly. He's like, that's your boat. He's like, I found it. You get a row it. was 14 feet versus, you know, 20 feet of a regular size gear boat. And I was terrified. mean, I rode and, but it just, it was so. scary in the moment and my dad was not one to sort of sort of ease off an idea that he already had so I spent that first day just convinced that and there was a big headwind that day and I saw the boats were getting further away and Anyways just convinced I was gonna like be on the beach by myself someplace because I couldn't get downriver But I survived that week And it was a really transformative moment in terms of wow like I could do this I overcame some fears and Mat (03:44.608) And as I really from that point on started guiding on trips, I would see changes similar to what I experienced, different flavors, but people coming from all over the world. And over the course of five days, five to seven days, I'd see relationships change and I'd see the way people interacted differently and the types of conversations and these, these social connections that were formed in such a short period of time that lasted, you know, long after the trip. so even. Steve Usher (04:00.985) you Mat (04:13.772) Then it was sort of pragmatically in my brain thinking like, what was it about this experience? Was it the setting? Was it sort of perceived challenge? Was it being removed from the everyday, you know, sort of hustle and bustle, societal expectations? And those questions sort of bounced around my head really more so that I could like, how do we provide better experiences on the river? But then led me eventually down sort of an academic path where I found this space. of studying experiences and how they impacted people. And it's still what sort of ties my journey together and what I'm really curious about. Steve Usher (04:42.457) Hmm. Steve Usher (04:50.561) Yeah, amazing, amazing. Yeah, because it has to be, there's a trigger somewhere for sure. There tends to be, and I think something you just shared there as well, which I'm sure we're gonna, certainly around the application of experience design and why, certainly from my perspective, why they are needed so much more as we progress as humanity and the intentionality around these, around certainly creating containers for experiences to take place. How would you define experienced design beyond the academia or textbook descriptions? Is there something just to bring that to life? Mat (05:33.395) Yeah, so I think for me, and I'll try not to get too academic here, it's just what I fall into, right? But if you think about, you know, to make anything, there's some type of raw materials, right? And so for experiences, Bob Rossman and I talked about like the six elements of an experience game. So you've got people, place, relationships, object, rules, and blocking. So those are sort of the raw materials. And as an experienced designer, Steve Usher (05:41.518) That's cool. Mat (05:59.832) What I'm trying to do is I'm trying to orchestrate sort of combinations of those elements into an experience scape with the hopes that somebody pays attention to it, right? Cause attention is the catalyst necessary for an experience to occur. So I'm going to design this orchestration of experience elements. hope somebody pays attention to it. And then if they do at the end, they're going to say, yeah, that, that was worth my time. It produced memories, emotions, whatever. that are valued by me as the participant and also that the provider did that, right? So it's that intentional orchestration so we can get to the end point where we're like, yeah, that was time well spent. you know, experiences do a lot of different jobs for us, but I think the processes to design them are applicable, whether it's an ordinary sort of service encounter or some sort of transformative experience that you're targeting. Steve Usher (06:52.673) Yeah, amazing. Just to kind of give the audience just a little bit of an insight as well, Matt, just give us a sense of like your academic environment. Like you're in a very sunny office today, but just in the sense of like what your day to day look like in terms of your academia side and obviously the cohorts that you work with. Mat (07:04.462) Hahaha! Mat (07:10.638) Sure. Yeah, so we, I sit as the department chair of a department of experience design and management in the Marriott School of Business at Brigham Young University, which is in Utah, so in the Western United States. We launched about, well, 2017. And the goal being let's bring together sort of design and social science and business management to create this hybrid opportunity for students to learn about the frameworks and processes whereby you design intentional experiences. So these are students, you the students up behind us. We admit about 135 students a year. We place them all over the place from experience industries where they're working for a company like Marriott International or Disney or something like that, to all over the place, patient experience, customer experience, really like any space. mean, from my perspective, every organization is an experience organization. You may make widgets, but the experiences you're providing internally and externally can be key differentiators if they're designed intentionally. so we sort of think about these buckets of experience industry and experience management where our students go out and do their work. And it's been super fun to build and really, I think there's just growing awareness, not only of the importance of experiences, but the... the field of experience design and how you intentionally go about doing that. So it's a really fun space to be. And I think I'll also say it really attracts amazing human beings that we get to work with as students who have this sense of like, mission driven. want to like impact people's lives, but understand like the importance of business. So it's just this nice hybrid of humans that we get to hang out with, which I think is sort of like, as I interact with experienced professionals around the world. Steve Usher (08:57.209) Beautiful. Mat (09:02.828) I think it also just attracts this type of people who are curious about people and just have this desire to sort of make a mark in the world. Steve Usher (09:12.119) Yeah, I totally agree. Can I just ask like how looking at the work, looking globally right now and the faculty that you, you know, you've been involved in building and, and, and the, yeah, and the practice and the, the education that you've been building around experience design, how, what else is going on in the world in that space from an academia point of view? there much, is there much, is it still evolving from, from an institutional level? What do you see from your lens from that perspective? Mat (09:42.572) Yeah, that's great question. mean, people have been interested in experiences forever, Like Aristotle had a lot to say about experiences and you can read in various like ancient religious texts, right? People are talking about like, here's how you live to sort of experience this or this and rituals and things, right? I think over the last really like 15-ish years, you can't even go back. mean, you know, like service design, especially in Northern Europe, right? has developed a presence. And you have other disciplines, you know, people have been talking about customer experience and experiential marketing for a while. So you see, from my perspective, you see a lot of contextual applications, right? So it's like, how do you design experiences for customers? how do you and the terms that are used are different. I think in the over the last 15 years, you've seen programs that have been a little bit like risen above context a little bit to say, okay, like, well, let's think about like experiences regardless of the context, right? And that's sort of where we hang out. I think we're unique in terms of being in a business school and sort of the combination of things we've pulled together and sort of the, idea of like, you know, we think about experience design as an umbrella of competencies and processes that can be applied in different contexts. but, increasingly we're seeing, schools that may have different names. and different sort of titles, they're still sort of, that's part of this emerging process, but definitely sort of kindred spirits in terms of content and career paths. mean, just, you know, two examples, Bentley University, which is east of Boston, they've got a master's program called Human Factors of Information Design. And a lot of times people like will sort of... Steve Usher (11:18.616) Hmm. Mat (11:38.798) mix up like UX and EX, right? Where UX, from our perspective, is a great field, but it's really focused on that human-computer interaction. But we can take UX principles and apply them over in customer experience or whatever. So they've got a really interesting program. On the research side, Breda University in the Netherlands, Breda University of Applied Sciences, they've got this amazing experience lab that Marcel Bostjansen leads. Steve Usher (11:41.538) Yes. Steve Usher (12:00.174) Hmm. Mat (12:06.286) And they're looking at all kinds of different ways to measure physiological measurements of experiences, right? So heart rate variability, skin conductance, eye tracking. So you're getting that in the moment, physiological data about how people are responding to experiences. In fact, Marcel will be here next week for the week we're working on a paper together on transformative experiences. And then in 2021, the Experience Research Society was founded. out of Aalto University in Finland. Virupi Roto was sort of played a role in that and you know that's developed with researchers around the world. So I really think it's still emerging but there's some really cool momentum that we're excited about. Steve Usher (12:35.673) Mm-hmm. Steve Usher (12:54.551) Yeah, I've seen some of the research. and it's needed because obviously human behaviour, human reaction, that whole just research string needs a lot of depth and a lot of review. Mat (13:09.582) Yeah, and there's lots of good stuff out there, but people haven't always been able to find each other, right? mean, and I met at a conference in New Zealand in 2019, and we've both been involved with papers that have been published in the previous couple of years sort of talking about the same thing. When we found each other's work, it's like, oh my goodness, like, let's do stuff together. And that's led to some really fruitful collaboration. I think, you know, people have been thinking about experiences forever. I think they're just being able to find each other easier and recognize that there's other people to collaborate with and learn from, both on the academic and professional side, right? The World Experience Organization is helping make that happen that James Wallman founded. And James is actually going to be here tomorrow. We're hosting him for two days. So we've got a lot of exciting things going on right now in this space. Steve Usher (14:00.461) Amazing, amazing. Good stuff. So you mentioned about kind of competence and moving like from an academia point of view and some of the kind of the more kind of umbrella overview kind of work that you do or the learning that you do. Let's dive into that because you've got a few models that I'd love to just kind of dive into. One of which you shared was the experience scape and let's kind of definitely dive into that and break that down. One thing that we saw, we did a bit of obviously did some research prior to this podcast. So, but one of the things that you kind of quoted on and that you really emphasize is outcome. Like what's, what do you want people to walk away and say, think, feel, and start from that place and reverse engineer? Um, what, what's your, how do you, how do you approach that? What's some of the things that you teach around that in terms of setting that intentionality and the before, during and after. Mat (14:59.484) Yeah, yeah. That's a great question. mean, the idea with like beginning with the end in mind is of course not new. mean, Steve Covey and others have long talked about those things and there's, you know, project management and other things like that. But recognizing that experiences are co-created. So I can't just design an experience and be like, okay, I'm done, right? Somebody's got to pay attention to it. And then it's ultimately how they react to it. You know, you can have 100 people have the same experiences and they'll come away with 100 different reactions, which makes experience design trickier, but also I think more interesting, right? Because of that piece. But to your point, where I like to start, when I start on a project, that's always the first question with the team or the client to say, what do want people to say at the end of the experience? Because I think that's that... targeted reaction gets at the fact that experiences that are emotionally evoking are gonna produce some type of memory, right? And then the way that we talk about that memory is basically a story. And so if you can have a sense of like, okay, there's a... Steve Usher (16:13.433) Hmm. Mat (16:19.83) No, not a limitless, right? But when you're starting with a blank slate to design an experience, there's a lot of different directions you can go. And having that simple statement of, you know, ideally what would we like people to say really helps provide a creative constraint to now say, okay, let's start hanging things on that, right? It can almost turn into your sort of like experience theme statement. So Joe Pine talks about, know, theming a lot, right? And it's not just about like, Steve Usher (16:47.117) Yes. Mat (16:49.464) you know, we're going to have a pirate theme, right? But it's like, what is the thing that like is going to be cohesive? So let me just give you one quick example. In 2020, I spent a semester in London that was cut short because of the pandemic, but we don't talk about pandemic. But before that, our university has a residential center in London. So different faculty go and they'll run programs. So I was Steve Usher (16:55.149) Hmm... That's Mat (17:14.926) getting ready to run a program with my good friend and collaborator, Jamin Rowan, who is a English professor. But we've done some other work together and wanted to do this interdisciplinary thing. And we asked ourselves that question, like, what do we want students to say when they finish this semester in London? And one of the things with study abroad, and this is true of experiences where the experience takes place in a context that is different than, you know, your everyday context, which is often Steve Usher (17:43.064) Hmm. Mat (17:44.814) the case. The research shows it can be really hard to take what you learned and experienced in that context and then take it back to your home context. It's almost like this import tax or something. Just because our attention gets gobbled up by other things. And this happens with study abroad where students are like, it was amazing. And I did all these things. like, well, how does that impact you now? And they're like, I don't know. But I got all these pictures and some souvenirs. especially this program with a lot of different majors, right? So we're coming from across campus. So what we settled on is we wanted students to be able to say that as a result of this experience, they were more curious and creative, right? So we were gonna make our decisions about the sites we visited, the experiences that we had, the books we read, the content that we focused on had to be tied to curiosity and creativity. And at that point, like learning outcomes, and that became what we called our transformative learning outcomes. And before that, you have to have learning outcomes and they're usually pretty dry and students don't know what they are and you sort of just do them out of obligation because that's what you're supposed to do. But this just became like the vernacular, like the catchphrase of the program, right? like everything was tied to like helping students become more curious and creative. We talked about our disciplines. was like, well, this is how an experienced designer or literary critic would practice curiosity and creativity. And so if you can have that statement, Steve Usher (18:42.978) Hmm. Mat (19:09.644) this overarching sort of reaction that you're targeting, it just provides that initial constraint, right? That creative constraint as you go. And then really you drill down to each touch point of the experience, you're thinking about how do we want people to react across all of these touch points? And sometimes you don't, just want, this is just easy, right? But there's those moments when you're like, we want to evoke an emotion or provide an opportunity to like gain an insight. And so, but I think it all starts with at least having that initial target. And I like those to be like short, pretty succinct statements initially. Steve Usher (19:35.659) Hmm. Steve Usher (19:44.437) Yeah, because it gives you that that anchor to kind of revert back to, but also it invokes creativity as well, because it gives you that canvas in which to then start creating from as part of the creative process. Yeah. Mat (19:56.118) Yeah, yeah, totally. You sort of define your sandbox, right? And I think creativity loves constraints, right? It's better to have like a space you're gonna play in rather than like, we could do anything. Yeah, no. Steve Usher (20:08.469) anything and everything. Matt, there was something in your book, Experience Design, and when I first read it, I was like, the different types of experiences. And I think for anybody listening, regardless of their context, I think this is a, I mean, I do share it out when I talk to people, it's one of these important models I do think people need to know as a minimum. which is the different levels of experiences from prosaic up to transformative. Would you mind just sharing walk us through that in terms of also how did you get to that as well? How did you get to that? Mat (20:36.825) Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a great question. I mean, that was a big collaborative project between a bunch of us in the department here, along with Bob Rossman, who I co-authored Designing Experiences with. real, the impetus was for a field to coalesce and make an impact, there has to be agreement on like, what is the thing that we're actually studying? Like, what's the phenomenon, right? Like, what is an experience? And we've written some on that. But then we also noticed just in both academic and professional literature that the word experiences was being used a lot, but terms like memorable and meaningful and transformative were just thrown around by both academics and by professionals. And I think it's really hard to design something if you can't define it. And it's really hard to measure something if you can't define it. And for a field, you've got to say, okay, this is our unit of analysis. This is the basic unit of analysis, right? Just like a You know, if you're a biologist, it's the cell, right? This is the basic functional unit, right? And an experience is that basic, a singular, like micro experience is the basic functional unit, right? Anyways, so we started digging into the literature about what people were saying about memorable experiences, extraordinary experiences, meaningful, what these words meant, and just trying to understand how people were talking about those. Mat (22:07.31) And boiled it down to this model, is the simplest form is just, there's ordinary experiences that don't leave any type of long lasting impact. And we have lots of those over the course of the day. And I think good ordinary experiences require careful design. And then there's extraordinary experiences, which are unique and separate and not as common. And so the first Steve Usher (22:27.79) Yep. Mat (22:36.738) You know, as I said before, like for an experience to occur, have to pay attention to it. and now if we pay attention to experience and it evokes emotion, it becomes a memorable experience, right? Cause we, when, when, when we have, when we experience emotion, our brain says, okay, timestamp this, it appears to be important. Hormone levels are different or whatever. Right. And that's a whole conversation about what emotions are, like our episodic memory says, remember this thing. Right. So that becomes memorable. Steve Usher (22:55.021) Yes. You Mat (23:06.572) Now the next step up would be if an individual then reflects on that experience in a way that they're extract meaning that is personally relevant. And Marcel and I have written a paper recently about like sources of meaning and things, because there's this whole meaning literature, right? But if you feel like, not just like I learned a fact, but like, wow, like my relationship with this person is different or my sense of identity or this, I learned like a Steve Usher (23:23.949) There it is. Mat (23:35.222) Like reflecting on this experience, I recognize I want to like set this different goal or I want to whatever, right? So that insight makes the experience meaningful, right? And then the next step up, if that insight becomes integrated into sort of our story about the world and ourselves, that influences our behavior, it's there's a change, right? That insight has led to a change and that becomes transformative, right? So it's both. Steve Usher (24:03.533) Yeah. Mat (24:03.726) this idea that the impacts stack, right? You can't just have change and not have those other things occur, right? And we've subsequently gone and done empirical work where we have some measures where we ask people about, you know, their perceived impacts and it lines up like 92 % of the time that somebody, they say that, yeah, I experienced change, they also talk about insights and emotion, right? And those things stack on upon each other. We also know, you know, looking at that, our measures compared to, also asking people like a net promoter score question, how likely would you be to refer or whatever? Then it lines up to that, as you move up the sort of experience type framework, that you also see increases in net promoter scores too. So the promoters are most likely those who say, yeah, change insight and emotion. Like I experienced all of those. Steve Usher (24:30.433) Yeah. Yeah. Steve Usher (24:58.209) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Mat (24:59.604) in that moment. And so it's both the impacts, emotion, insight and change, and then the processes of remembering, reflecting and integrating that move you up that stack. Steve Usher (25:14.713) Perfect. So let's talk on to that because that's that the the the reflection part as well as a huge element to then what you've just shared. Could you just break that down as well? So because we have our like we have our like experience ladder from ordinary to memorable to meaningful to transformational. So that that gives a really good context for everyone listening around the different kind of ladders of progressive experiences as it were in terms of the level of impact on self and maybe and others. Mat (25:25.88) Totally. Mat (25:42.53) Mm-hmm. Yeah. Steve Usher (25:44.217) Let's maybe think like linear lineary, if that's a word in a linear face. How does that how does that kind of stack up and how have you thought around that kind of work? Mat (25:48.173) Yeah. Mat (25:51.8) Well, and I appreciate you saying that because I think it's pretty rare that you have in a moment a transformative experience where you're like, this change, like right now this happened and it's changed me. Like maybe just a couple of times in life. I think it's pretty rare. Like this, this process takes time most often, right? And so if you think about, if you have a pool, Well, we all have ordinary experiences, right? We all have ordinary experiences. It's sort of the main thing that happens in life, right? We're just sort of functionally getting things done and moving through our days. I believe, and this is a study we're gonna do at some point, right? That if you look at the portfolio of experiences that people have, it matters. You know, you're more likely to have a trans... transformative experiences if you have a lot of memorable experiences, right? you're not having many experiences that evoke emotion, you're probably not, you know, it's less likely that you're gonna have transformative experiences, right? Cause you've got to have that pool. It's just like, you're more likely to have a good idea if you have lots of ideas. And so, and I think it also matters the diversity of emotions you're experiencing, right? It's not just about being happy all the time, right? But you know, the positive psych literature is pretty clear on the fact that, you know, we're, function psychologically, we're psychologically healthy when we're experiencing range of emotion, right? So if you have that pool of, you have an experience that evokes emotion, there's a difference between recalling something and remembering and reflecting on something, right? So if you remember something, there's a different, you're more likely to not just like, oh, this thing happened, but then to think, okay, well, Steve Usher (27:24.59) Yes. Mat (27:46.828) Let me think about that a little bit more. Let me reflect on it. And this is why I think storytelling is actually an experiential competency. If people are better and more comfortable telling themselves and other stories about what's happened to them and their experiences, they're more likely to extract meaning, right? Because storytelling is meaning making, right? And so that reflective piece, right? Something happens, it evokes emotion. Steve Usher (27:49.185) Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mat (28:14.134) you remember it and then how much do you chew on it and how much do you sort of think about it and talk to other people about it and write about it or however you're reflecting. There's all kinds of different reflecting modes. know, some of the research that hopefully we're publishing this year, we've done some reflection studies and doing different sort of experimental treatments and having people reflect in different ways. One of the things that shows is that reflecting with other people. who you had an experience with is like one of the most powerful ways to move to gain insight and meaning, right? Because you've all had the same experience. You're not having to explain the experience. You're just having, you just talk about it, right? And that shared sort of back and forth insights often arise. And that's what then moves it to like meaningful. It's not just, remember this, but it's meaningful because I've learned something from it that's important to me in some way. Steve Usher (29:00.697) you Steve Usher (29:04.439) Yes. Mat (29:05.772) And that could be in the moment, right? I think a lot of times when we design experiences, we try to just pack things in. But if we're not inserting opportunities for reflection, it's less likely that people are going to do that on their own. The environmental, sorry, not environmental, but evolutionary biologists and psychologists, some feel that like we're not hardwired to reflect. That wasn't something that we needed to do. sort of when we were just you know, survival was the main thing we were interested in. wasn't like, how good did that taste? Right? It was like, no, where's like safety and food and shelter and modern stuff. And so some people are really good at reflecting and others aren't. I think from an experience design perspective, we've got to think about where we plug in, you know, moments for reflection unpack stuff. Steve Usher (29:44.664) Yes. Steve Usher (29:55.49) Yeah, we got to invoke it. We got to create the space for for it. Yeah, I agree. Mat (29:59.64) Totally. Yeah, and it's not just that we want to like, I mean, there's pragmatic reasons for that too, right? Going back to this correlation with NPS, if you want people to feel more allegiance to your experience or brand or whatever, if you're just giving them memorable experiences, it's not enough to keep them coming back and or like tell other people about it. Steve Usher (30:21.721) Yeah. And I just go back on the meaning for one as well. I mean, I think there's, it also feels to me a little bit like it's more like intrinsic. It's that it has that depth, it has more depth to that meaning of it's made you stop and it, I don't know, it has that stronger feeling. I can't, can't quite put the words to it, but you get where I'm, what I mean with that. Mat (30:43.414) Yeah, like you've been able to extract meaning from that experience. And what's interesting, you could have a hundred people and we see this in our data, right? And this is sort of a next step in the research is, know, can have a hundred people have the same experience and you can have, you know, 10 who say it was transformative and 30 who say it was memorable. know, so there's individual characteristics as well and individual competencies that determine that, right? If you've had a really horrible day and you're Steve Usher (30:45.752) Hmm. Mat (31:12.234) mind is caught up on this like issue at work or in your private life, you have less mental capacity to unpack stuff and you could have an experience that for others was really impactful and insightful. But for you, it's just like, I don't have the brain space to make this happen right now. So there's, it's a complex process. Steve Usher (31:28.269) Yeah, it is. Transformative experiences, which is, know there's more and more coming our way with transformation and transformative experiences. And I can't, I just want to explore this one with you a little bit more, Matt, if that's okay. Cause I, we're in a period of time where, Mat (31:40.269) Yeah. Mat (31:50.232) Yeah. Steve Usher (31:54.392) like consciously, consciousness, like us as humans, like there's a need for transformation. There's also a lot being forced on us right now in terms of evolution of technology and AI and this exponential shift that we're seeing and the pace, the sheer pace of stuff, even from like, I don't know, I can feel it right now. I'm like, wow, I cannot keep up with this. This is actually... Mat (32:21.926) Yeah. Steve Usher (32:23.957) extremely difficult and near on impossible. So like transformative experiences and transformation for us as humans is going to be extremely important. And for those kind of those that are in the transformation economy, I think their role in supporting humans and our own transformation is super important. What do you see? What do you see in this space where we've got this kind of paradigm right now of Mat (32:27.246) yeah, totally. Mat (32:53.548) Yeah, I mean, a couple of things like a lot of people are talking about this topic right now. know, Joe Pines new book on the transformation economy will be coming out this fall and really excited. I think that's going to be a really impactful book. And I've heard Joe talk about that a number of times. I also like this, this connects in like this morning, I started listening to a book that just recently came out. got to pull this up so I, so I give the right title to it. Steve Usher (33:02.809) Can't wait. Mat (33:22.798) so it's called the sirens call how attention became the world's most endangered resource by Chris Hayes. so I think this came out just a couple of months ago and it popped up on my, Spotify book lists and recommendations and, and so I'm about like a quarter of the way through. So this is like not a full review, but you know, just to your point, he makes this case about attention. being this scarce resource, right? For a while it was like, we're in the information age and information economy, but information is not a scarce resource, right? There's like way more information than we have need of, right? What's, what's the scarce resources, our attention and the fight over and just the way capitalism and technology and everything has evolved that you have all of these really smart people and organizations continually trying to figure out how to capture our attention. Right. Steve Usher (34:01.475) Hmm. Steve Usher (34:18.937) Yeah. Mat (34:19.224) So the odds are stacked against us, right? And being able to sort of navigate and just assume that like everybody can like figure out like what we should be paying attention to. And I think I bring that up because again, the baseline requirement for an experience to occur is attention. And there's time and work that is required to have that full process from ordinary up to transformative. Again, sometimes it can happen spontaneously. Steve Usher (34:21.358) Hmm. Resist. Steve Usher (34:29.272) Mm. Mat (34:48.366) But I think those are few and far between. And as I said before, I think people need to have a rich portfolio of memorable experiences and then the competencies and time and support for those memorable experiences to evolve into meaningful and transformative ones. It's a process over time. This is why Joe and Jim from their first book talked about, when we talk about transformation economy, Uh, it's not staged experiences. It's guided transformations, right? There's this idea of like being guided and there's time involved and it's a process. But if our attention is, you know, always just bouncing all over the place, it's, think it makes it even more difficult to experience transformation. So it's both this piece of like, how do we help people have the competencies to know how to like allocate their attention in ways that is intentional. Steve Usher (35:19.341) Yes. Mat (35:44.234) and then give them the support through the way we design experiences to help them progress for men memorable, meaningful and transformative. And also just recognizing like transformation doesn't always need to be the end goal for every experience in every organization. Right. you could write like, you know, like I'm going to focus maybe on memorable experiences, but I'm going to like, I'm going to be aware of how those can turn into meaningful experiences. And maybe I'm Steve Usher (35:58.532) No. Mat (36:12.13) collaborating with another organization. I'm giving people the resources after they leave my experience to continue to sort of reflect and unpack, right? So I think there's a certain degree of strategy involved too and recognizing like, where is my economic offering if it's an economic offering? Like where does it fit in and not feel like I've got to, like everything's got to be transformative, right? Steve Usher (36:34.841) Do you think as experienced designers our role changes somewhat? My mind was just going there around from a memorable or a meaningful experience or being the stager of an experience, being an architect. So as an experienced designer, you're architecting a container on which to interact with and to create an experience for people. And then you're relinquishing control because you're never gonna be a hundred percent anyway. That's the beauty of. Mat (37:00.119) Yeah. Steve Usher (37:03.789) of this work is like you relinquish the control, but there's also this thing around moving from like this architect into the guide, which then becomes for me feels a bit more like, well, I've gone from being the architect and the creator into actually the support mechanism thereafter as you're moving up into transformation. That's what I was just thinking, yeah. Mat (37:12.844) Yep. Yeah, no, no, I think you're totally, I think you're totally right. And this, so, so Bob and I are working on a, I don't know what the final title we're just called designing experiences 2.0 right now. but, but I mean, this is one of the things that we're talking about. And what I love about experience design as a topic is that there's just like so many things that connect and that you can find like, this provides an insight. so I think, I think Bob was the one who found this. can't remember, but, so in, and I could get my time, my time, wrong on this, but it was like mid to late 19th century in Vienna. was, Vienna was sort of this hotbed of all things. Cultural psychology, you know, you got Sigmund Freud and other people you've got you know, the just the top thinkers and music and psychology and art It was just this hotbed of culture, right? There's these moments where a particular place is the place and it was it was Vienna and This is a period of time where there's more You know art is changing right so we're moving towards you know, art that sort of just looks like the thing to Gustav Klimt and others who are doing things that are, you know, moving towards what we would think about as contemporary art. And so art critics at the time, they're writing about this, start talking, and I can't remember the individual's name, but he talks about this idea of the beholder's share, right? So. It is like the art experience and Dewey has talked about this and others, but it requires the beholder of the art piece to do some work, right? They've got to figure out like, what does this mean to me? And what are the authors, you know, the artists intent, but also like what's my personal like way that I'm interact to how my feet, like what is that role? And they talked about this idea of the beholder share for this. Mat (39:33.134) you know, art that's emerging is bigger than just looking at something that looks like the real thing, right? And there's a different beholder share, right? So Bob and I in the manuscript that we're working on, were talking about taking that and talking about the site of the participant share, right? And as you move up from ordinary to memorable experiences, I think the participant share can still be fairly minimal, right? If you think about it, you can go and be entertained. Steve Usher (39:39.256) Yeah. Steve Usher (39:57.722) Hmm. Mat (40:00.43) and experience emotion and most entertainment, right, is fairly passive, right? We're passive audience members. And there may be a movie or a play or a concert that moves you to think afterwards and it could become meaningful, but I think that's less common than just I'm sort of binge watching Netflix or whatever. But if we want something to be meaningful, that participant share has to increase, right? We've got, like you're saying, we have to give people Steve Usher (40:00.589) Hmm? Hmm? Steve Usher (40:21.134) Yeah. Mat (40:30.016) more autonomy, more roles, more opportunity, co-create. And, and I think it's almost counterintuitive and if an experienced designer where you're like, I'm going to control every single element and do all of those things. Yes, you still sort of have to be super aware, but you've got to be willing to create that space to where you, and I like how you're saying this, you move almost from this architect to the guide. Your control is a lot less. And really at the end, you're not even, you're not a leader, right? You're like, you're guiding. And I used to do a bunch of stuff specifically looking at sort of adolescent and youth, youth development topics and experiences impact the youth. And one of the things I still remember from that space that they talked to professionals is, you if you're working with youth, you don't want to like, provide them the total structure of everything that you're doing, you're providing scaffolding, right? Because a building is being built. And you know, there's a lot of scaffolding initially, but is the building Steve Usher (41:00.025) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Mat (41:28.674) reaches completion, there's less and less scaffolding until it's just a free standing thing. And I think that same idea applies here as we move from ordinary, memorable, meaningful, transformative. Our scaffolding as experienced designers, it becomes less and less as people become sort of competent and owning that journey towards transformation. Steve Usher (41:38.009) you Steve Usher (41:49.05) Yeah, because I think going back to the experience, the more memorable experiences and we've seen in the entertainment and Meow Wolf immersive art installations, there's just like a burgeoning experiential marketplace, we're buying more experience, we're seeking more and I think sometimes even just on a more like a very high level, this is non-academic but just Mat (42:10.775) Yeah. Steve Usher (42:15.651) thinking about humans and our behaviors and we're buying more of this stuff and want to be entertained in different ways or we want to lose ourself of our, where we, know, maybe we're just having a break from our life for a while because it's not perhaps too good going to, it's totally good. Yeah. No, but what I'm thinking is that that becomes potential gateways for that attention to the point is creating an awareness through these kinds of moments of Mat (42:29.836) Yeah, which is totally fine, right? It's not like we don't need that. Yeah. Steve Usher (42:44.395) intentional experiences for people to go, whoa, wait a minute, hang on a minute. That was quite interesting. That's taken me towards maybe slightly more, yeah, internally around how I've thought about that, that shifted my thinking about my life and maybe how I want to change. And maybe I want to invoke some kind of transformative shift in myself. Mat (43:03.478) Yeah, totally. Yeah. Yeah. So there's a whole field around transformative learning. So there's a researcher, my goodness, I'm forgetting his last name right now, or his first name, Mesero. Anyways, so his thing is all about this model of transformative learning. And he was looking specifically about how adult, like adult learning. So somebody mid-career is like, I need to go learn something. Steve Usher (43:07.769) Amazing. Mm. Mat (43:33.0) And that, that entry point is sort of what you're describing. He talks about is a disorienting dilemma. So you have an experience that sort of upends your worldview on something where you're like, I don't know this or the other people might be right or whatever that thing is, or there's, know, there's this issue that I feel suddenly important. There's something that like sort of craps this bump in the road for you where you then. You know, have this reflection of like, what do I want to do? And And I really liked that idea of like, what is that instigating incident? And again, if you were just sort of like, like entertaining ourselves, it's less likely to happen. it's people have been talking about this for a long time, right? I mean, the Romans were all about entertainment for the masses to just keep people happy. Right. Right. Like let's not rock the boat. Let's just give them lots of holidays and lots of festivals. And, and, and, there was a. Steve Usher (44:17.049) They were, they were, yeah, it's a kid, yeah. Mat (44:28.674) there was a scholar in the 1940s, 50s named James Nash. And he was really interested in like the physical education movement. He was at NYU. And I didn't realize until this was just, I was looking at some of his work and stuff, out he was, he came to BYU for his like last three years and was the Dean of a college here. But he had this, he was called the Nash's pyramid. And at the bottom, or he would, He would talk about this idea of spectatoritis, right? This is in the fifties that he was worried that people were just spectating too much. And so the bottom of this pyramid was this idea of just spectating. And then as you moved up the pyramid, you got more and more to creating something, right? So it's like, you know, rather than just spectating, you should be more actively involved. And that may look like you learn how to play the guitar and you, you learn a piece that's already being written. Steve Usher (45:15.075) Mm-hmm. Mat (45:26.87) Right? Which is great. what if you, you know, you want to reach this point where you're actually, you know, writing a new song, right? That's like the best use of your time. So people have been thinking about this for a while, but it's funny when you think back in the fifties and he's like, we're spectating too much. Like what he would say about like how we're spending our time now. Steve Usher (45:46.872) Yes, that's used in in some in immersive theater as well, isn't it? Just in terms of the different participatory levels. Loving it. Yeah, amazing, Can I just also, you mentioned this earlier, I want to just pick, pull on that thread as well around experiences are co-created. Just like just broaden that thought and that comment just. Mat (45:54.006) Yeah. Yep. Yeah, totally. Mat (46:13.422) Sure, yeah. mean, going back to this idea you can have, you know, just we're having this shared experience here, but because you're the host, I'm the guest, we have different things going on before or after this, the stories we'll tell will be unique to us when we go away. This is, I'm gonna bounce around just a little bit here, but there's research that shows that when we compare like product purchases, Steve Usher (46:16.313) You Hmm. Steve Usher (46:33.283) Okay. Mat (46:43.2) it can actually like pull people apart, right? Cause it's like, man, your phone is cooler than my phone. or you've got a bigger TV or what there's all, it usually isn't like helpful for relationships, right? but when we compare experiences like that doesn't happen, it's like, we both went to Hawaii and you stayed like, I camped on the beach and you were at the Hilton, or whatever the fancy resort, that's less likely because it's like, That's my experience. It's like unique to me and my reaction and there's all kinds of reasons. There's just something about experiences that avoid sort of this comparison burden on relationships, right? Because what we take away from experience, I mean, know, and Daniel Kahneman's talked about this idea of like the experiencing self and the remembering self, right? Like in the moment, like here's the immediate. Steve Usher (47:24.013) Yeah. Mat (47:40.364) This is where the physiological data is really interesting. How does heart rate variability and all of these different things sort of impact and there's data to be learned from that. But then the experiencing self is like, yeah, you know, it rained the whole time I was there, but actually it was fine because, you know, it was like just part of the, you know, we sort of, create this story, right, from this. And I think this is, again, going back to storytelling, I'm a big proponent of storytelling as a competency. Right. And there's ways to teach people to be better storytellers in the way we sort of are explanatory style and locus of control, all of those things. so we just have to recognize whether we, we design like a participant share into the experience, whether we offer opportunities for co-creation, people are going to co-create the experience. Cause that's just how our brains work. I mean, even a conversation, right? Like I, I have like, things going on in my brain that I turn into auditory signals that your ears pick up and then go into your brain and you interpret that. And so it's like everything is co-created because we're just trying, we're just navigating through, you know, our environments and the experiences we're having. so I think recognizing that that happens rather than, sometimes it can be like, as an experienced designer, want to control all the elements. but we know when we give people more autonomy, Steve Usher (48:46.361) Hmm. Mat (49:05.953) They feel more intrinsically motivated and then they're going to engage in more active and participatory ways. And it doesn't mean that we just turn everything over to people, but like what's the right level of experience design scaffolding for that moment. Right. And it, like you were saying, it often will decrease over time, right? At the beginning, it's like, here's all the rules and this is what we're doing and here's this. And then over time it's like, people sort of know what to do and sort of figure it out. Steve Usher (49:35.607) Yeah, there's nothing more beautiful than watching a group of humans suddenly go, you know, just click and it happens. It's magic. Absolute magic. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's magic. It's magic. Mat (49:42.144) Yeah. Yeah. And where he just stepped back. Yeah. I mean, from, like a teaching perspective, like that's always where I'm trying to get to where it's like, I'm at the corner of the room and, and, the students are just doing their thing and they're engaged and on topic. And that's the best, but yeah, there's, there's work that takes to get to that point. Steve Usher (50:00.483) Yeah. So Matt, we've covered quite a bit and there's one element I just want to go, I want to anchor right away back to the beginning and then bring it into a different question here, which was around this kind of universal experience design, you know, the umbrella of experience design. There's so many like, you know, verticals that kind of go down inch wide, many miles deep in many industries and areas of expertise and niches. What's your view around the workplace and work and the transformative kind of era we're in right now, which, know, I know it's been well documented. We've gone through a huge work experiment with COVID, disrupted so many patterns of automation in our own lives, of daily automations and all of these things that we had and I guess kind of... questioned our mere existence in some of these, some of this period. So, and since then there's been, you know, lots of development from different ways of working. How are you seeing like, or how would you, or how do you think about work from an experience lens, an academia lens and thinking about all the different types of experiences? How do you see that if continuing to evolve and develop? And what do you think we need to really be spending attention on? Mat (50:59.218) you Mat (51:20.718) Yeah, yeah, a couple, a couple of thoughts on that. So I've done some work in this space with a couple of management scholars and Steve Courtride and Troy Smith and others, Marcus Butts. one of the things that's interesting, and I'm like a history buff, so I love thinking about sort of the like, like historical trends and context. if we think about, you know, pre-industrial revolution, pretty much everybody was like some type of farmer, right? Or like connected to the agrarian economy in one way or another, which meant that for a lot of people, like work and non-work didn't exist. It was just like, it was all the same, right? You like, were just trying to, you know, work together with people usually in your family to have enough food to eat and shelter and things like that. the industrial revolution comes along and we artificially separate those things. Suddenly there's work and non-work, right? And even work becoming something that was commoditized. It's like, wait, I get paid on a salary rage and then you have, and that led to Karl Marx and all kinds of other things talking about like the worker and things, but they're separated, right? And for a long time, especially in industrial countries, you know, what happened at work? And what happened at home were pretty separated and you didn't really talk about the one from the other. And there's theories about like, like spillover and compensation theory, like some people's jobs, like they were so engaged in it that spilled over into what they did when they were at home and others like, I know I'm going to do like the exact opposite of those things. Anyway, so they're really, really separate, those two spaces. and then because of technology first, I mean, we have telecommuting popping up in the. sort of 80s a little bit and social media and things started like creeping together and then COVID happened and just all got like smashed together, right? They were like in our closets, like I remember teaching a class and my co-teacher was like in his utility closet, like the water heaters behind him, you can hear like World War III happening outside and we're like teaching this course in our homes and we're like, what is happening? Steve Usher (53:20.963) did. Mat (53:39.584) Anyways, and so now we're like teasing it apart again, or there's all kinds of different flavors because we recognize like, man, like if we're always remote, the social connection piece is hard. But there's some great things about having that be an option. And so I think it's really fascinating looking at how companies are handling that, whether that's mandates or whether that's options. mean, there's companies where like, we also, we all lived in the same city before COVID and now everyone's like spread all over the world. So now how do we do work? but you know, we, we wrote a, we wrote a piece and a couple of years ago, just looking at this idea of like, what is it, what does it look like bringing? so like the principles that we know help people thrive when they're not on work, how do we bring those into the workplace? And what is, what does that look like? Cause Steve Usher (54:27.767) Mm-hmm. Mat (54:30.19) It's not just enough. Again, this goes back to intentional experience design. It's not just enough to be like, well, you know, people like to pickleball. So let's let people play pickleball at work or whatever it might be. Um, cause we, in the interviews that we've done, we, you know, we've heard people talk about this idea of like fundatory, like mandatory fun at work. Cause again, Like our experiences are individually perceived and one person's leisure is another person's labor. And just to say like, well, you know, to like improve the employee experience, we're going to put in a rock climbing wall or we'll do karaoke every night or what, like, it's just like throwing like stuff at the wall and see what sticks, right? If you don't know like what people's needs are and how they're going to respond, it's, it just requires careful experience design and understand like, well, what do we really want people to say, that, that work here? Steve Usher (55:03.231) Mm. Mm. Steve Usher (55:08.899) Yeah. Steve Usher (55:18.627) Yep. Yeah. Mat (55:20.172) What is it that we want people to say and then let's design for that reaction. Steve Usher (55:24.025) for that. Yeah, totally agree. So Matt, I just wanted to ask like from a future perspective, you know, we are at some interesting junction on many respects. But just from like an advisory from your perspective for anyone kind of listening who's, you know, got curious about experience design, kind of resonates with some of the things that we've discussed today, some of the models. What do you see, where do you see kind of experience to design heading over the next kind of five to 10 years if you had to kind of future gaze? What kind of direction do you think is gonna continue? Mat (56:03.51) Yeah, so this is a great question and something that I think myself and others are thinking about, and this is sort of where I am right now. And this is really sort of what's driving the work that Bob and I are doing is I think experience intelligence is going to be increasingly important for organizations and individuals. James Wallman, you know, first introduced this in his book, Time and How to Spend It. Steve Usher (56:13.913) Hmm. Steve Usher (56:17.785) Hmm. Mat (56:29.752) But I think, you know, for Bob and I, we're defining experience intelligence as the ability to design, to intentionally design and engage in experiences, right? Because we're all experienced designers and experienced consumers, right? And thinking about how we intentionally do that. And on the experience design side, experience design has to turn into, I think it's moving in that direction. Steve Usher (56:48.598) Mmm. Mat (56:57.822) A discipline, a field, and a discipline has certain sort of processes and common language and competencies. And we're moving in this direction, but it requires sort of synthesizing across different industries and backgrounds and fields to say that, this is like, when you design the experiences, this is what you're doing. An experienced designer should have these competencies. The model that we're currently working on is one understanding that the foundation of experience design is rich, right? Even though we may have just been talking about experience design for the last 15 or 20 years, people have been, like I said, Aristotle, religious, ancient religious texts, like people have been talking about experiences for a long, there's a rich history from multiple disciplines that give us insights into the importance of experiences and how people react to them. And then we talk about four pillars of experience design that are built on that foundation. So the first being a parrot, the paradigm, right? Cause a field needs to have a paradigm of how you view the world. And for experience design, it's experience lens, right? I talked about this idea of the experience being the smallest unit of analysis. That's that smallest sort of functional unit and really understanding what is an experience? What are different types of experiences? What are the impacts and processes that we've been talking about? The second is a process, right? So I think experience design has to be driven by human centered processes, that the human has to be at the center of that. There's a variety of different, whether it's design thinking or human centered design, but the processes that put the human and their needs at the center. The third pillar are strategies. Like how can we use best practices and empirically based strategies for how we design, you know, the anticipation phase before, how do get people ready for experience, the participation phase, what happens during the experience. And then finally the reflection phase, what happens afterwards and how do we use those strategies of designing, you are we, are we, are we targeting a memorable experience? Okay, this is what we should do before, during, after, and are we targeting a meaningful, here are things we can do before, during, after. And then finally, that is the management of experience. How do we stage it and evaluate it? Right. Steve Usher (59:18.339) Yep. Mat (59:18.518) And what are ways, you know, there's always conversations about return on ex, you know, the return on experience. And there's not just one golden ask these two questions and you get all this information, but I think there are ways to, to, to evaluate and measure and understand the impact your experience is making. And this goes back to like identifying those end outcomes and being able to say like, okay, this is what we put into the experience. This is how many people engaged with it. Steve Usher (59:41.229) Hmm. Mat (59:46.882) This is what they got out of it. And then being able to tell that story is how does this connect to KPIs. So if you can have that paradigm process strategies and the management of experience, that's the full, in our minds, the full, that's what experience design is. Steve Usher (59:59.98) That's amazing. Fantastic, fantastic. I could just unpack that alone for a moment. Can I, there's also a thing for me as well with AI, Agenic right now, I'm really leaning in watching a lot of YouTube, just keeping a little bit of a breast like what is happening? There's something that my mind goes to with this as well is that. Mat (01:00:10.605) Ha Steve Usher (01:00:27.661) We talk about the time well saved versus time well spent. And I just can't help, could this be the moment where we're gonna get so much time saved that if we just get now intentional about the moments where it's time well spent from a human perspective, what could we unleash? Like what could we achieve? Yeah. Mat (01:00:48.294) Totally. Totally. Right. I think again, and I love how you're like, okay, time will save time well spent. Like how can we use AI to save time? Right. And, and do, and it will continue to evolve and there's so much to learn. I feel like I'm always behind in the AI space. Just like, like I'd like, I don't know how you keep up. Steve Usher (01:00:58.445) What? Gunny? Yeah. Mat (01:01:07.65) with that space. But the issue is if we save a bunch of time and then we spend it and just hang out at the ordinary and memorable levels, then we haven't gained anything. Steve Usher (01:01:08.471) You can't. Steve Usher (01:01:22.605) Yeah, we're not gonna, it's not a good life experience. Or if we leave it in the hands of exclusively a CFO. Yeah, cost saving, thank you very much. So yeah, I think there's some interesting like debates around that. But yeah, I think, yeah, brilliant. Matt, just a final question. How can people reach you? Obviously there's some resources I'd love to share relating book, any research that you either you're working on or recently worked. Mat (01:01:25.527) Yeah. Mat (01:01:30.764) Yeah. Yeah. Steve Usher (01:01:51.725) with or on. Mat (01:01:52.054) Yeah. So I mean, the best place to contact me directly is on LinkedIn. That's like my, that's the one social media platform that I hang out on. And so always happy to be, you know, whether, you know, just to connect and follow or, or message me on LinkedIn. I'm pretty, I'm pretty active and aware. I, got a sort of a sort of a separate website, just, just mattdurdin.com that's got I try to keep updated in terms of podcasts and articles and stuff on there. And, but yeah, between the, between those two, you know, you've mentioned the book already, designing experiences that Bob and I wrote, we're working on another one. then anything that's sort of new and upcoming, usually post on LinkedIn and eventually get updated on the website. But love having these types of conversations. I think just like I said, at the beginning, one thing that I've noticed meeting Steve Usher (01:02:37.901) Amazing, amazing. Mat (01:02:45.752) you know, experience professionals around the world. There's this sort of like common language and recognition of like, we come from different industries or different backgrounds, but there's this thing about experiences that connects us. And I love having those conversations. Steve Usher (01:03:01.685) Yeah, likewise. it's a pleasure to have you on. I've been waiting for the right moment to have you on the show. So but thank you for that. And yeah, and we'll hopefully see each other at the summit maybe this year. Are you coming up? I will be there. I look forward to seeing you there. But look, thank you so much. Mat (01:03:10.509) this has been so fun, I've loved it. Mat (01:03:17.516) Yeah, yeah, are you going to be there? Okay, good. we can talk. I might be trying to put together some like pre-conference stuff because I'm bringing over about 10 students with me. So we might be trying to meet up with some folks. we can talk offline about that. Steve Usher (01:03:34.349) Yeah, I look forward to that. But Matt, thank you for joining. Absolute privilege. yeah, thank you for contributing. And genuinely, there's no one else I could think of like the experienced designers podcast. Let's get Matt Duran on. So look, thank you very much. Yeah, thank you. Cheers. Mat (01:03:47.345) no, it's my pleasure. Thanks so much for the invite. Thanks, Steve.