about

Experience Designed Performance from the Odyssey Works cohort creating an experience for an audience of one

“The idea is a beautiful inefficiency: a tiny but infinitely more affected audience.”

— Chris Colin

History

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Imagine waking up to find yourself immersed in a performance that is all about you. Since 2001, Odyssey Works has been creating immersive, durational experiences for an audience of one. Our team is made up of artists in dozens of disciplines who study the life of one individual and use whatever means necessary to create intimate, meaningful performances that last days, weeks, or months and occur not on a stage but interwoven with the life of our audience of one. The experiences are transformative; most of our participants change jobs, move, and make new commitments to loved ones shortly after their Odysseys.

 

who we are

Odyssey Works was co-founded in 2001 by Abraham Burickson and Matthew Purdon, and is now helmed by Abraham Burickson and Ayden LeRoux. LeRoux and Burickson have been collaborating creatively since 2012 and have a combined twenty five years of experience teaching and coaching. They co-authored Odyssey Works: Transformative Experiences for an Audience of One (Princeton Architectural Press, 2016), which posits six proposals for new modes of artmaking and engagement with the world. The two collaborators have lectured and led workshops globally at companies, universities, and museums such as Facebook, Apple, Adobe, the Brooklyn Museum, Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), Cornell University, California College of the Arts, Central Saint Martin’s, Stanford, Yale University, University of Texas at Austin, Fordham University, Galludet University, the Future of Storytelling, the Immersive Design Summit, Battersea Arts Centre, Southern Exposure Gallery, the GoGame, Modern Elder Academy, Urban Games Factory, Die Fabrikanten, and the After the Show symposium. 

 
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With international acclaim  for our work, two books, dozens of lectures, and a history of pioneering pedagogy, the Experience Design Certificate Program is our invitation to reimagine the world together.

Program Directors

Abraham Burickson

Abraham Burickson, Co-Founder of Odyssey Works and Co-Director of the Experience Design Certificate Program, has spent more than two decades exploring the relationship between what we make and how it is experienced. Trained in architecture at Cornell University and in poetry and playwriting at the Michener Center for Writers, he has also studied the transformative power of designed experience with the Whirling Dervishes of Turkey, the Shuar of the Ecuadorian Amazon, and with countless artists, designers, and students through Odyssey Works. He is also the founder of The Long Architecture Project, which rethinks architectural practice from the perspective of Experience Design. He has won prizes, lectured and taught widely, given a TEDxtalk, and was once hired by German television to kidnap an American skateboarding champion. His book on Experience Design was published by Yale University Press in 2023.

Ayden LeRoux

Ayden LeRoux is the Assistant Director of Odyssey Works and Co-Founder of the Experience Design Certificate Program. As an artist and writer, her work aims to cultivate intimacy and urgency between the artist and audience. An advocate of interdisciplinary and genre-defying creative work, she holds art and writing degrees with extraordinarily long titles from NYU and UCSD. Her essays, fiction, and criticism have been published widely, and her installations, performance, and photography, have been exhibited internationally. When she was eight, she told her parents she wanted to dress up as a painter for Halloween. Thinking she meant house painter rather than fine art painter, they unwittingly opened a decades-long existential inquiry about the intersection of domestic space and creative practice.

Sophie Larsmon

Sophie Larsmon is an Associate Director of Odyssey Works and an Immersive Director & Experience Designer known for her unconventional theatrical productions and innovative audience personalization techniques. Currently serving as Creative Director for Medea Creations in the UK, she's designing their inaugural Location Based Experience in London. Sophie previously led Any One Thing, a pioneering Immersive Theatre & Software Development company, where she collaborated closely with Abraham on projects like 'The Book of Separation'. Her background includes stints at prestigious venues like The National Theatre and the West End, alongside founding SoLar Productions, which supported emerging theatre makers. Sophie's commitment to dramaturgy and narrative innovation shines through her diverse portfolio, spanning traditional and immersive theatre. She holds degrees from Birkbeck College and York University, and is actively involved in academia, serving as a Guest Lecturer at Birkbeck College and a Fellow at The Royal Society of Arts.

Guest Critics & Visiting Artists

  • Eric Clough is a visionary architect and designer known for his innovative approach to space and living environments. Described by The New York Times as “his ideas about space and domestic living derive more from Buckminster Fuller than Peter Marino”, Clough has left an indelible mark on the world of architecture and design.

    In 2001, Clough founded 212box, a cutting-edge architecture and design firm that has redefined the boundaries of creativity. The firm's headquarters in Manhattan's Financial District, situated near the World Trade Center and 9/11 Memorial site, serves as a hub for their multidisciplinary endeavors. 212box specializes in diverse fields including architecture, real estate, product design, film, and graphic design.

    (THIS IS A PLACEHOLDER!)

  • Lea Redmond reveals the extraordinary hiding in the ordinary: a saltshaker, a penny, hand gestures, clouds. Lea creates books, toys, games and small adventures that invite humans of all ages to be curious, playful, and kind. Visit Lea’s world of wonder at LeaRedmond.com. 

  • Creator of ‘Say Something Bunny’

    Alison S. M. Kobayashi is an award winning interdisciplinary artist whose hybrid work mixes documentary and fiction through video, performance, installation, interactive and illustration. Her performance Say Something Bunny! received critical acclaim heralded as "The best new theater experience in town" by Vogue, was a NYTimes critics’ pick, was listed in Time Out’s 2017 top ten productions and BOMB’s Best of Performance list in 2018. Kobayashi has received nominations for a 2018 Drama Desk award and 2019 United Solo Special Award and is the recipient of the 2006 TSV Artistic Vision Award. Her video work has been exhibited internationally at both museums, performance and film festivals including; Bilbao International Film Festival, The Western Front (Vancouver), The Power Plant (Toronto) and Pace Digital Gallery (NYC) and Les Subsistances (Lyon). She was a fellow at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, and a guest artist at the 2008 Flaherty Film Seminar. Since 2012 she’s been producing Special Projects at UnionDocs, a Center for Documentary Art. There she collaborated on expansive documentary projects like Living Los Sures which New York Film Festival described as “one of the most comprehensive, incredible and in-depth interactive projects that we at the film society have ever seen” and was founding art director of the documentary journal, World Records. Kobayashi grew up in Mississauga, Ontario and is currently based in Toronto and New York City.

  • Tassos Stevens is one of Coney, a charity with a mission of making all kinds of play to spark change, following principles of adventure, curiosity, and loveliness. Recent projects range from The Golden Key, a one-day event across the City of London for over 35,000 people, to Evergreen, an adventure gift commissioned bespoke for one person, as well as live events online via Coney’s Pop-Up Playhouse.

  • Founder of Cooper Hewitt Interactive Media Lab

    Rachel Eve Ginsberg has spent the past decade as a consultant and experience designer exploring the relationship between information systems, interaction design and sensemaking. As the founding director of the Interaction Lab at Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, Rachel built an interdisciplinary program focused on audience experience. Prior to her work with the Smithsonian, Rachel led strategy and partnerships for the Columbia University School of the Arts’ Digital Storytelling Lab. As an artist, Rachel pursues projects across a range of media exploring self-discovery, catharsis, and building compassion for self and others. Her work has been programmed at the New York Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontier, and International Documentary Festival Amsterdam’s Doc Lab.

  • Risa Puno is a NYC-based sculpture and installation artist who uses interactivity and play to understand how we relate to one another. She has exhibited with many museums and organizations in the US and internationally. In 2019, she was selected by Creative Time for their inaugural Open Call award and was named FIGMENT’s first-ever Interactive Artist of the Year. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, NPR, The New Yorker, ProPublica, The Boston Globe. Puno grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and she studied art and medicine at Brown University and earned her MFA from New York University.

  • Third Rail Projects Co-Artistic Director

    Zach Morris (he/him/his) is a director, choreographer and Co-Artistic Director of the internationally acclaimed Third Rail Projects.  Zach is co-creator of the immersive theater hits Then She Fell, The Grand Paradise, Sweet & Lucky with the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, and Ghost Light at Lincoln Center Theater’s Claire Tow Theater, among others. Zach's work includes theater, dance, site-specific performance, multimedia installation art/environments, and he is particularly interested in how all of these can intersect with audience-centered experiential gatherings. Zach has been honored with numerous awards, including a Chita Rivera award, two BESSIE awards; projects he has collaborated on have garnered a Drama Desk Nomination, a Peabody Award, and an Emmy Award. His work has been presented nationally and internationally with the support of numerous grants, commissions, and residencies, and he has had the pleasure of teaching, mentoring, and creating new platforms to support the work of artists at home and abroad. Zach holds a BFA in Directing from Carnegie Mellon University. 

Board of Advisors

James Genone

Brockett Horn

Matthew Purdon

Jon Cropper

Gabe Smedresman

Eric Clough

Ida Benedetto

Megan Livingston

Jacob Marshall

What is Experience Design?

Experience Design is a design methodology in which the final product is the experience of the user or the audience rather than the thing that is created.


Because everything* that a human engages with creates an experience, experience design is discipline agnostic, and experience designers tend to work across disciplines.

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*even this website.

After all, a website is only fully revealed through your contribution of time, attention, decisions and actions. To earn these, the success of a site depends on more than just looks. It must also be written and organized with intent. Whether the intent is to inform, overwhelm, or trigger another emotion entirely, the underlying structure and pacing are vital aspects of the experience. These considerations are part of a design just as much as the colors, images, and typefaces used. 

This site was designed and developed by Erica Holeman on the Squarespace platform.
The sans-serif typeface used is Scandia by Process Type Foundry. This typeface is Ballinger Mono by Signal Foundry.

Immersive theater makers, experiential marketers, and installation artists often think of themselves as experience designers. But experience designers can be found in a wide variety of practices, from graphic design to architecture, from Human Resources to religious practices, from social design to political activism. Experience Design is the practice of placing the emotional and the affective at the center of the design process rather than the “thing” or material that is created. Where traditional design is complete when the “thing” is produced, experience design comes to life in the lived subjective experience of the audience. 

Learn more about the intimate experiences Odyssey Works has designed for the last twenty years.

There are no things, only experiences. The future of design lies in abandoning the idea of the thing and prioritizing an ethics of transformation.

Design experiences, not things | Abraham Burickson | TEDxGramercySalon

 
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ten principles of experience design:

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  • When we make the experience the aim of the design process, we are no longer making things, but putting those things in service of our larger experiential aim.

  • Experiences exist only in the lives of the experiencers. We must learn to see with their eyes, and use research and inclusion to help us see what we cannot.

  • Experiences are framed by agreed upon or assumed limits inside which is the design, outside of which is the rest of life; these are temporal, spatial, and conceptual.

  • Experiences are received through all the senses and may be intellectually, emotionally, and physically immersive.

  • Worlds are grand collective experience designs. Whether at the scale of a country or at the scale of a board game, the general design principles are the same. Worlds determine who we can be and what we can do.

  • Because the experience of narrative can be found not only in texts, but in things, in interactions, or in environments, the experience designer writes stories in many different forms.

  • The defining quality of liveness is the unknown. Therefore, for an experience to feel truly alive, it must include the unknown.

  • When a well-structured experience meets an engaged group of people, eventness emerges, and change is possible.

  • Diagrams are the tools the designer uses to become the experience designer, liberating the design process from the strictures of old notational forms.

  • Because we have a finite number of experiences on this side of oblivion, your work had better be meaningful.

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Press

Additional Press

Radio Tania: 

Locating the Borderlands

The Rumpus: 

Rick Moody Interviews Abraham Burickson

San Francisco Magazine: 

Sunday in SF: Casting Call for the World's Strangest Play!

The Stanford Storytelling Project: 

Episode 403: How to Give

Tn2 Magazine: 

In Close Quarter

marina abramovic institute, IMMATERIAL:

When I Left the House it Was Still Dark

Press Inquiries

For press inquiries, contact us, or fill out the following form.

Designing a home is the best opportunity you will ever have to design an intentional life.

When you build a home you make a series of choices that will structure your life for years. The design of your home drives how you work and how you will rest; how you relate to friends and how your family relates to itself; what you value, what you love, and how beauty enters your life.