The Origins of the Odyssey

We started Odyssey Works 25 years ago because we wanted to know the maximum possible impact our art could have on a person.

That question—the question of impact, of what experience our work makes possible—is the question at the core of experience design.

What we quickly realized was, of course, that everything we create, from a work of art to a conversation with a friend to a chair to your outgoing voicemail message is an experience.

And that there are ways of being smart about designing with that experience in mind.

There are ways of designing the conditions for people to be open, to be affected, to be transformed.

Odyssey Works started as a side project, an experiment, but we quickly realized that what we were doing was researching the granular mechanics of human experience.
Twenty five years later we are bringing all that research to bear on many other forms of making, and we are offering it to our community of students in the Experience Design Certificate Program so that they can apply it to what they are working on.

Design has been so focused on things for so long that we’ve forgotten the point. It’s human life we are intervening in; things are just the conduit.