Rebuilding Our World One Step at a Time

It’s been a devastating week–a week in which American politics has shown that women’s bodily autonomy, trans rights and healthcare, curbing climate catastrophe, and immigration issues are all going to need to be fought for in the coming years. When our first book about Odyssey Works came out eight years ago, it was released the day Donald Trump was elected and ultimately made us recommit to the ideas put forth in the book about empathetically driven modes of making. It’s no stretch to say, the Experience Design Certificate Program was born of that day and how hard it was. We envisioned a world that valued experimentation and avoiding the default assumptions of how to make things. We wanted to make new structures and reimagine how the education was shaped.

This year we started the Odyssey Works Foundation in an endeavor to further our commitment to inviting a kaleidoscopic set of perspectives into shaping and learning from experience design as a field.

Experience design, as we see it, is an instrument of transformation. The guiding mission of the Foundation is to make our program accessible and fund scholarships for our incoming students. We have been joined by esteemed board members, Topher Lin and Lea Redmond, to work on cultivating an empathetic vision for the field of experience design. And so, I’m wondering if you can help us to rebuild our world in a way we think will cultivate a more full-hearted, human sort of design.

We’re not seasoned fundraisers. What we know is that we have built the school we want to exist in the world and part of that means making it accessible to all. Equity is part of the physics of our world and this school; when we look around the classroom I feel grateful and proud that there isn’t a white majority. We have had people apply to EDCP from Afghanistan, Austria, Costa Rica, Brazil, Germany, Guatemala, Sweden, Norway, Germany, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, India, Russia, Israel, the Netherlands, Trinidad and Tobago, the Philippines, Turkey, Nigeria, Burundi, France and more. Our BIPOC scholarships have been a bedrock of this program from Phase Zero and now it’s time to expand what we can offer.

We’re entering the 4th year of our Experience Design Certificate Program and our cohorts have ranged in age from 25-65. We have gay, queer, trans, nonbinary, genderfluid, and two-spirit in the program. They are people from a wide-ranging set of religious and spiritual practices, class backgrounds, abilities, and races, and I feel devoted to continuing to uphold the diversity of that space.