Experience by Design

Higher education’s imminent demise has been long forecast, with a number of factors contributing to this terminal condition. The cost of higher education in the United States is unparalleled in the world, with the average in-state cost of even public universities increasing 63% since 2008. This growth has outpaced all other price indices by far. The fundamental model of higher education has also b...

Looking at the Life Celebration website, you might be surprised to discover that their business is funeral memorial services. But with the bright colors and designs comes a philosophy of elevating memorial experiences to another level. The realization that funerals had become too routine (and, well, lifeless) led our guest Jim Cummings on a quest to not only provide unique experiences, but also le...

During the pandemic, people have been trying to find ways to fill their time, often by pursuing hobbies they always wanted to pursue. One such hobby is learning how to play guitar. Who better to talk about teaching guitar online, as well as designing online learning experiences, than Justin Sandercoe, also known as JustinGuitar. Justin is one of the top 10 YouTubers in the United Kingdom through h...

Megan Burns has been involved in analyzing organizational efforts to create better customer experiences for over 20 years. From her early days at Forrester, to now with her own consultancy called Experience Enterprises, Megan knows how to approach an experience ecosystem, and importantly how to help organizations change to reach their experience goals. In 2014, she developed the Customer Experienc...

We live in an experience economy, where experience channels abound in business. Whether customer, user, patient, employee, or something else, we are facing expanded opportunities to create and design experiences. Given this emergent reality, why are not more colleges and universities developing programs in experience design? To explore this question, Neil Lundberg and Mat Duerden visit the Experie...

Durell Coleman has for a long time been interested in how to create inventions and entrepreneurial opportunities to create social change. With an early interest in engineering, sparked by working on cars and home improvement with his dad, Durell followed that passion to Stanford University. Connecting an engineering degree with sustainable design through the famed d.school, Durell has followed tha...

Given all the challenges we are dealing with as a society right now, talking about bikes might seem unimportant. However, in fact, the topic of cycling, exercise, and inclusive environments is exactly on topic for this moment. Today’s guest is Lindsay Goldman, who was a professional cyclist as well as Director of Marketing for USA Cycling. Since our conversation, she has moved on to become the Dir...

Friend and colleague Mike Goldberg comes by the Experience by Design studios to talk about his career in design. Mike’s career extends back a long way, with 27 years teaching graphic and web design at the college level, and 37 years of professional award winning graphic and web design experience. Some of his past clients include marketing and advertising campaigns for the Dana-Farber Cancer Instit...

Patient experience is an ever-expanding area of work as hospitals, especially in the US, try to compete for higher patient scores to not lose valuable reimbursement. It is perhaps understandable that a lot of attention in the patient experience is directed at the point of care, and what happens when a patient is receiving treatment. However, such a view is dangerously myopic. There is a lot more t...

"You gotta slow down to go fast" - Douglas Ferguson Voltage Control president, design thinking facilitator and innovation coach Douglas Ferguson recently published a book called Beyond the Prototype that aims to help teams and organizations (and individuals!) go from generating awesome ideas to implementing them. Over the course of our conversation we cover: the power of systems thinking seeing va...

Gary and Gio go a long way back to 2013 when Gio was a student in Sociology of Sports and later did an internship with CBS Sports where he paired music with sports highlights. From these humble beginnings began a career in media working with some big shows and performers, where today Gio LoMonaco is a Coordinator of Music and Media Licensing at Viacom. Whether watching a movie, or streaming a show...

Before COVID-19, the criminal justice system was cracking under its own weight. Now, those cracks have started to spread. Police are changing how they perform their duties based on the virus, limiting pro-active policing and placing N95 masks next to Kevlar vests as safety equipment. Courts are shutting down based, suspending trials and releasing those awaiting trial. Prisons are facing a potentia...

It is not surprising to hear that everyone’s state of anxiety is pretty high. We are all facing a very uncertain future. Turning on the news, which I recommend doing only in moderation, it is easy to get caught up in the frightening images and metrics as the pandemic spreads. Enter digital psychiatry and e-mental health tools. Technically speaking, digital psychiatry refers to any electronic devic...

Shelley White is an Assistant Professor of Public Health and Sociology, and Program Director of the Master of Public Health. Meenakshi Verma-Agrawal is the Assistant Program Director and Associate Professor of Practice at MPH@Simmons. What a difference a week makes. Or does it? With the expanding pandemic of COVID-19 disrupting more lives, many here in the United States might feel caught off guard...

Gigaom CEO, publisher and author of "The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity" stops by virtually to chat with host Adam Gamwell and guest host Astrid Countee to help us make sense of just what Artificial Intelligence is, what are its promises and limits, and what this means for the possibilities of conscious computing and smart robots. Byron breaks down the ph...

We meet a lot of people who say they want to do a podcast, and in fact they are technologically easy to produce. Getting listeners is another matter altogether. And getting listeners pay for content is a totally different proposition. The  podcast landscape is pretty saturated, with as many options as stars in the sky. How then can podcast producers create listener experiences that their audiences...

Loans have a fascinating cultural property. We might think of ‘loan sharks’ as the present-day manifestation of the ancient pronouncements against taking advantage of people through the giving of loans. More generally, people who handle money in some cultures are seen as ‘unclean.’ So, the topic of loans and lending is by no means a new one. This makes tackling the ‘loan experience’ a unique chall...

Micah Solomon had dreams of wanting to be a rock star. When that wasn't going to happen, Micah's new journey took him from opening up a recording studio that became a manufacturing business, which then led him to be a Customer Experience star. In this episode of Experience by Design podcast, Micah visit the Experience by Design studio to talk about his new book, "Ignore Your Customers and They'll...

Whitney Quesenbery has had a long and influential career in user experience. The author of three books on UX, Whitney has been involved in a lot of projects aimed at making things more usable. But perhaps none of her work is as important as her co-founding and co-directing the Center for Civic Design. Whitney talks about her unintended introduction into the world of experience design through a the...

Bill Fleming stops by to chat with Adam about branding, marketing and design. Bill is a Boston-based Independent Brand & Marketing Strategist, and Business Consultant for Designers. On this episode we talk about what brands are, how the cultural work of branding has changed in recent decades with the advent of new and easier to use technologies, and how we can think about brands as conversations -...

Emily Guendelsberger, author of the book “On the Clock: What Work Did to Me, and How it Drives America Insane,” was a journalist who, upon her newspaper closing, decided to work at a variety of jobs. Her choices included an Amazon fulfillment center, to a call center, to a McDonald’s. As our conversation shows, the book explores what it means to work today, where deskilling, automation, technologi...

Liliana Petrova, formerly the Director of Customer Experience at JetBlue, and now Founder and CEO of The Petrova Experience, describes herself as an “Organizational Culture Evangelist.” The airline industry might seem like an odd place to plant your flag to keep love alive, but if you are going to carry forward the gospel, you need to go to dens of evil. And there is perhaps no place as evil as th...

Are employees like customers now? For example, does an employee's capacity to leave feedback on social media or employment sites like Glassdoor tip the balance of power in the workplace when employees are unhappy? How are mega companies like Amazon changing their approach to employee experience and helping other companies wake up to coming back to the fundamental point of starting with the human?...

The new year, and the new decade, means that we are now officially in the future.  Of course, any discussion of the future has to include a discussion of technology, and how it is shaping our future. This makes for a perfect time to welcome our next guest to Experience by Design, Vice President of Artificial Intelligence Rick Britt of CallMiner.  The path to VP of AI would seem to be paved with en...

Anyone who has ever received a medical bill in the mail knows the experience of trying to understand the costs. Stories abound about making sense of the codes, line items, services, and treatments that are part of the pages of billing that we can receive. This makes the financial aspect of getting treatment often the most painful. Jayson Yardley and Avadyne are trying to change that. Hear how Jays...