Experience by Design

Yesterday I had the privilege of attending the Assistive Technology Conference of New England, put on by TechACCESS of Rhode Island. It was a great event that brought together professionals and companies that are trying to improve accessibility through technology for those with ranges of physical and intellectual challenges. Walking around, looking at the exhibits, and talking with people, I was c...

I am back from the FTT Fintech Festival, hosted by VC Innovations and taking place in London. I was hosting a panel on attracting the next generation of customers to mutuals, which are member-owned financial institutions offering different types of services and products. I was lucky enough to have a great group of panelists, and it was a great event over two days. To say that I learned a lot would...

It is that time of year again when employees have to make a selection of their benefits package, which includes your healthcare plan. I just got the announcement from HR that the enrollment period is now for that uniquely American thing that we call “employer-based healthcare.” It is fascinating that a healthcare program that is unlike any other developed country is taken so for granted as “that’s...

I went to a Catholic all-boys high school run by the Christian Brothers, a teaching order founded by St. John the Baptist De La Salle. I will give them credit for giving me great preparation for future academic success, and even maybe this podcast. So at the foundation of Experience by Design are the Christian Brothers.  But that wasn’t my first brush with Catholicism. I did a fair number of the s...

My first jobs were in restaurants washing dishes and busing tables.  I would go on to do other jobs in restaurants, including cooking, waiting on tables, hosting on occasion. I think working in restaurants is a great first job because it teaches you to deal with people, and work in collaboration with different functions. So no matter what you do in a restaurant, it is a great experience to prepare...

One bit of news that caught my attention was the declining trust that the American public has in higher education over the last decade. In good news, Gallup found that trust did increase from 2024 to 2025. However, it is still markedly down from 2015. Not surprisingly, those levels of trust differ by political affiliation, as most things seem to different by political affiliation nowadays.  Anothe...

I don’t think I am alone in finding art very intimidating, but yet like all of us being I am inextricably drawn to it.  I had the chance to go to a concert last night with the band Queens of the Stone Age. I have seen them three times before, but never quite like this. For this tour, they were playing beautiful smaller venues, like the Boch Theater in Boston where I saw them. The tour was in suppo...

I used to have a Zen proverb a day calendar, the ones where each day you tear off a new sheet that has another saying that was meant to make you contemplate, get in touch, consider, explore, think. My years always started off well, but by about June I was just ripping pages off trying to catch up to the day I was supposed to be on. I honestly think I got more mileage out of my Dad Joke a Day calen...

We are now in the first days of autumn, and there isn’t a better time to be in New England. When I first moved to Boston, one person told me that spring was the best time in New England. I never again trusted anything that person ever told me. Fall is the best time, and perhaps September is the best month in the fall. Not that I don’t like the winter, because I do (as long as there is snow to Nord...

Recently when talking to my freshman class about time management strategies, part of me started to feel sorry for them knowing that the challenge of time management only gets harder and not easier. I’m sure it feels overwhelming to have so many classes, social activities, for some sports obligations, joining clubs, and even hopefully sleep. There is a lot to balance, and achieving that balance see...

Standing in front of a classroom, or trying to talk to anyone raised in the distraction generations, emphasizes how we are constantly trying to compete for attention. I guess that competing for attention is nothing new; it is just the sources of distraction are different. Back in the “before times” of not too long ago, people would get distracted by daydreaming, where their minds would wander to s...

I think I am being honest when I say that I have never eaten at a Cracker Barrel. I may have once or twice in my life, but I honestly don’t remember. This is not out of any ideological reason or intentional decision. It just never happened. Never seemed like a place I would want to go when passing by. Given that there are four Cracker Barrel’s in Massachusetts, it is hardly an option. I don’t thin...

For parents who have school-aged children, it is the most wonderful time of the year when the children are gone from the house and return to places of learning, or at least someplace other than bothering their parents. We love are children dearly, but loving them when they are somewhere else is a welcome reprieve.  Each new school year presents some amount of changes in how education is done. Part...

I am just back from a vacation that took me across three states, one Navajo reservation, and some federal land in the southwest of the United States. Departing the humid and heavily greened northeast to the dry and brown and red landscapes of the southwest was a major transition. I have never spent that much time in that part of the country, so it was, you might say, quite the experience. Travelin...

Throughout my career as a sociologist, I have come to the conclusion that people find sociologists annoying on a deeply personal level. Anthropologists have great stories about travelling to exotic locations. People seem to really appreciate psychology because they think it helps them to better understand why people do the things they do. Historians, while might be boring with their details and mi...

One of the things that I have come to thoroughly enjoy as a type of past time is the learning about the history of World War II in the Pacific theater. A book that I have been listening to recently is “Japanese Destroyer Captain” by Captain Tameichi Hara. It is amazing listening to give a version of things from the perspective of a Japanese naval commander who went through the Imperial Japanese Na...

Being a sociologist means that there often are only so many opportunities to “do sociology” in a way that has impact. It is not that sociology doesn’t have value and practical applications. On the contrary, I would consider it one of the most useful and practical disciplines. But it can be hard to combine the opportunity to do practical application while working in an academic environment. I am ve...

Stories are the ways that we can relate our experiences to others. It is the most primary form of human communication, which makes it kind of ironic that people seem to be discovering the importance of storytelling. Through stories things become memorable, or more easily remembered. Growing up going to Catholic school, I might have a hard time remembering the Ten Commandments or the Beatitudes, I...

The Employee Experience MBA class that I'm teaching this summer is in full swing, with a lot of ground to cover in a short amount of time. One of the things that I emphasize out of the gate is that employee experience is about optimizing the organization for the employee. Or, put simply, treat your employees like human beings, and treat them well. Shocking I know. But there is something about some...

Summer is in full swing, and with summer for academics comes the typical question, “Do you have summers off?” I can’t speak for all academics, but summers don’t mean the lack of work, but the shifting of work. We go from our primary focus being on teaching and into other pursuits that we don’t have time for during the school year. Typically that means research and writing.  For me, it is no differ...

Happy Fourth of July to everyone out there, as I record this on the day before the 4th. For those in the US, this is the day that we celebrate our independence from the British. No offense to our British listeners. But to be fair, we are not alone in our desire to kick the British out. Nice to see that we could put that ugliness behind us. Now we are happy to closely monitor Royal Family news, ref...

I’m currently working on a book called Experience by Design, and by currently I mean the last three-plus years. You could say it is a work in progress. But as the saying goes, “progress, not perfection.” When all you see is the goal, it can be hard to see the progress you are making. So making progress I am, and hopefully I’ll have something to share about that soon. If you would be interested in...

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One of the things that I am starting to notice more and more is the difference between “getting older” and “feeling older.” Getting older is something that is unavoidable as long as we’re alive. But I find feeling older comes in waves. I am finding that seeing another child graduate high school is another moment in which I am impacted by feeling older. My daughter Hailey has reached the end of her...

Parenting children is definitely one of the hardest challenges that we can face in life. But as challenging as that is, it is nothing compared to reparenting your inner child. Some of you might be familiar with that turn of phrase. It refers to the process of dealing with childhood trauma, and “short-falls” in the manner in which you were parented in the first place, especially in relation to nurt...