Phenomenal Work

Transitions

I’m headed today to Los Angeles to be part of the wonderful StoryWorld Conference, one of my favorite gatherings of the global community of experimental storytellers each year. On Friday, I’ll put this new idea in front of some of the smartest brains on the planet and make the argument that we need a global design movement based on phenomenology (or that we already are one and just didn’t realize it.)

So this point represents a sort of transition. What came before this was (at best) a disjointed notebook of ideas and discoveries that led to how I’m now thinking about my work. From here forward, I’ll try to stay focused on expanding the argument around the five core concepts that have boiled up from that into the manifesto: what it means to put audiences at the center of work, the realization that audiences create meaning (not us), a critique of the shortcomings of the language we’re using as a community, an exploration of the universal rules of design this leads us to, and what it would mean to think of ourselves as a movement.

How Did This Happen?

A few months ago, a handful of friends and colleagues convinced me that I should write a book, something I’ve never aspired to do. I’m more interested in creating an art movement, a shift in the dialog among creatorsabout the revolutionary ideas we’re exploring. After more than a decade of discussion focused around “the thing” perhaps there is a way to, instead, for us to talk about “the experience of the thing.” As someone who claims to spend most of his time thinking about experience design, I’ve got a vested interest in seeing that conversation happen.

So for the last four months, I’ve been in the researching and outlining phases of making an argument for this experiential approach to our conversations with each other. I’ve reached that point where the ideas feel new again to me, where the benefits and obviousness of the approach crystallize. A few of those conclusions told me I also needed this blog.

First, every great modern art movement starts with a group of friends and then eventually into a broader movement. We should take inspiration from that. In a hundred years, when people look back on this era of creativity, the will marvel first and foremost at how interconnected we are, interconnected in ways that make art movements before the 21st century seem hobbled by mere geography. Everything great we do, as a generation of creatives, will stem from this advantage.

Second, what we really need now is a term that is additive to what we already do, rather than something that replaces it. You don’t need to stop thinking of yourself as a documentarian, or a journalist, or a novelist, or a game designer any more than I need to stop thinking of myself as an experience designer. What we need is a language for discourse that lays out what we have in common, what makes us different than the documentarians and journalists and what have you that came before us. 

Third, we need language that connects what we’re doing to the long tradition of thinking on our art forms. We are not special snowflakes. We are not inventing anything. Instead, we’re crows looking for the shiny ideas that are worth appropriating from our shared artistic genealogy.  This is the world of phenomenology, which has been revolutionizing art, science, and philosophy for a century or more. There are a remarkable number of shiny things to appropriate there, and we’ll hardly be the first creatives to be turning to it.

All of this comes together for me in the big new question, “What does it mean to intend to make phenomenal work?” And this blog is a nest for me to line with shiny things and share them with you, my fellow artistic crows, so that we can squawk about them.