Abraham Burickson is an architect-turned-experience designer, co-founder of Odyssey Works, and author of Experience Design: A Participatory Manifesto. Through the Odyssey Works school and foundation, he is now applying world-building to three civilizational challenges: childhood, AI, and climate.
He explains:
Why every world has its own physics, and how Rosa Parks and Gandhi performed "miracles" by breaking it
How you become a different person in every world you enter, without ever noticing
The building blocks of any world: physics, population, origin story, language, aesthetics
Why "problem solving" is the wrong frame, and the question to ask instead
What religion understands about experience design that most businesses never will
Why children are losing agency, and how myth and mentorship can restore it
Why the climate crisis is really a story crisis about our relationship with nature
The one question that changes everything you make: what do I wish for this person?
Chapters
00:00 Intro
01:38 We're in a Little World Right Now
03:44 You Become Who Every World Tells You to Be
05:56 Masks, Shadow Selves and Why People Loved Sleep No More
07:13 What We're Exploring: World Building as a Life Project
07:58 Most of Our Problems Are World-Building Problems
10:02 World Building 101: Every World Has a Physics
11:23 How Rosa Parks and Gandhi Broke the Physics of the World
12:53 Origin Stories: Meow Wolf, Marketing and a Destabilised America
15:56 Aesthetics, Steampunk and the Feeling of Agency
18:08 Language Builds Worlds: Gen Z Lexicon, Esperanto and Saudade
21:37 Kids, AI and Climate: Where Abraham Is Applying This Now
22:43 Why Children Are Losing Attention, Agency and Community
23:45 How Myths Actually Worked (They Were Never Just Stories)
26:45 Coming of Age: Bar Mitzvahs, University and 'Adulting'
28:44 Story Masters: Building Real Mentors Into Childhood
31:53 Stop Problem Solving, Start Asking What World We Want
33:12 What Religion Knows About Experience Design
36:17 Reimagining Education From Scratch
37:43 The Question That Changes Everything: What Do I Wish for Them?
40:47 The Climate Crisis as a World-Building Problem
43:34 The Taker Narrative: Why We Treat Nature as a Resource
46:04 Small Communities Can Change the Physics of the World
49:16 Living With the Shuar: Monkeys as Just Another Tribe
51:41 Hopes for London Experience Week
BIO
Abraham Burickson, Co-Founder of Odyssey Works and the Experience Design Certificate Program, has spent more than two decades exploring the relationship between what we make and how it is experienced. He trained in architecture at Cornell University, in poetry and playwriting at the Michener Center for Writers, and studied alongside the Whirling Dervishes of Turkey and the Shuar of the Ecuadorian Amazon. His work has been discussed in The New York Times, Newsweek and FastCoDesign. He is the author of Experience Design: A Participatory Manifesto (Yale University Press, 2023) and co-author of Odyssey Works: Transformative Experiences for an Audience of One (Princeton Architectural Press, 2016).
Connect with Abraham:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/abrahamburickson/
www.odysseyworks.org
Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@theexperiencedesigners
Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1TeZLGnUAo7SNN8IZUHPVN?si=305fe14d75f84e59
Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-experience-designers/id1438152701
Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/theexperiencedesigners/posts/?feedView=all
Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theexperiencedesigners
This episode is brought to you in partnership with London Experience Week and was recorded live at Ministry of Sound.