Experience Design

RUBY AND THE ROSES (2023)

An interrogation of the messages we receive from an early age about achievement and productivity culture, Ruby and the Roses invites participants to offer their inner child a new kind of fairytale. Following the instructions of an audio track narrator in the style of old-fashioned storybook records, participants crawled into a children’s play fort, where a copy of the picture book Ruby and the Roses was waiting for them. Ruby is an excellent young knight, but instead of her story ending with a big achievement, an encounter with a beautiful rose bush leads to Ruby’s decision to just…stop. As participants progressed through the story, it became more and more clear that the objects around them were the same in the story, and less and less clear whether Ruby’s world was all that separate from our own.

Ruby and the Roses was shown as part of Odyssey Works’ The New Frame exhibition in New York City.

I CARRY US (2023)

Co-created with fellow experience designer and punk Kasaundra Couch, I Carry Us is an experiential zine re-imagining the story of Icarus as an exploration of burnout. After all, when you’ve been burning, wouldn’t the ocean be a relief? The zine is part story and part workbook. Physical copies are sealed with beeswax, requiring the reader to peel and break apart the edge of each page.

I Carry Us is available for free here.

STAR PARTY (2022)

An exercise in celebrating the business of everyday life. Partiers gathered weekly for a co-working accountability session, where they’d explain their goal for the hour and report in on their progress at the end. Tasks ranged from making a phone call to the doctor that they’d been avoiding to finishing a craft they’d long been putting off. Each person received a weekly personalized congratulations card for completing the task, no matter what it was, and a gold star sticker for their star chart.

GRANGER LEADERSHIP ACADEMY (2015-2021)

The conference of international nonprofit Fandom Forward, Granger Leadership Academy was an annual 4 day program teaching leadership and activism skills through an immersive “hero training academy.” Hotel spaces were transformed into the hallways of a revered academy for up-and-coming heroes, participants were often interrupted by emergency announcements about impending peril, and (as often happens in these kinds of stories) their educational weekend inevitably ended with a last minute battle. In this case, battles took the form of organizing 200 participants to learn about and support a local initiative over the course of 4 hours. Granger Leadership Academy consistently achieved statistically significant improvement in confidence, understanding of systems of oppression, teamwork, and likelihood to self-identify as activists. It was called a case study of intergenerational community building by Pop Culture Collaborative.