Introduction

This project is very humbly a searchable resource of experience design case studies, organized and cataloged in a way that allows for finding specific references and discovering new information. We hope it makes the work of designers more accessible and valuable to future students and organizations interested in designing opportunities for experiences. We have begun organizing case studies, resources, and knowledge in this publicly available database and framework, sourcing input and submissions from the broader global community, resulting in an open-source handbook for experience design.

Developing this resource type will help lead to better design processes and experiences. Using a unifying experience design framework to organize these resources is an essential first step in structuring an accessible resource for those seeking information on experience design work. Through developing an introductory experience design course at Boston University and my professional practice in design strategy working for consumer-facing businesses, I have created a simple framework for cataloging and organizing case studies in experience design. Initially designed to give students a more specific understanding and approach to creating experiences, then adapted to develop business leaders’ customer experience strategies—I have been converting the framework into a prototype tool and database of case studies. Using the framework as a teaching tool, students began to populate a database with an initial set of experience-design case studies over two semesters, yielding hundreds of rough case studies as a learning resource for subsequent classes. 

The current state of the database.

I will generously label this site as a Beta release. We have a lot of work to do on it, but we felt that it was most valuable in the hands of the public to help develop this project further. Your thoughts and feedback are always welcome as we continue to integrate more case studies from our draft database and refine our existing content. Our plan is to open this up for public submission fully—we just aren’t ready yet. 

A note on accessibility. 

We are absolutely working on ensuring that this website is fully accessible. It’s not there yet. We continue to work on typography, navigation, and essential features such as alt-tags for the imagery. More to come in subsequent rapid updates in the coming months.

A note on credits and sources. 

This project began as a fairly informal academic homework assignment without enough structure to give appropriate credits and sources for, in particular, the imagery you will see here. We are working to fix that. If you would like anything removed because we have not appropriately credited the work or failed to see appropriate permissions. Please reach out. Our goal is simply to put all this amazing work in front of more people. 

Acknowledgments.

First and foremost, so much of the thinking behind this work was developed with my wife and partner, Amanda Rock, through our work at Station and over many years of collaborating with Epic Decade. 

Thank you to Jake Camara for willingly jumping in to help develop this site and my former research assistant Jacqueline Mang for rigorously pushing content and design to the point we could actually get to development.

And, of course, many of my former students contributed case studies to this project over four semesters as we tested the framework’s validity.

• Lauren Albensi
• Reem Alsanea
• Valeria Alvarado
• Davide Bianchi
• Natalie Bolton
• Angela Chao
• Hongjie Chen
• Kara Chen
• Sunny Chen
• Yulu Chen
• Grace Dube
• Kevin Dunn
• David Gao
• Savannah Garcia
• Nina Gozzi
• Emily Griffin
• Chris Guo
• Lauren Had
• Lena Johnson
• Jaes Kim
• Wanjing Li
• Wendy Li
• Ivy Liu
• Miao Liu
• Spencer Morgan
• Mayuri Nagpal
• Michelle Nie
• Lucia Pabon
• Jonathan Pinchera
• Shuning Ren
• Michael Rosenberg
• Nell Sheridan
• Sambridi Subedi
• Mariana Velasquez
• Laura Wagner
• Max Wallace
• Jialun Wang
• Shu Wang
• Miranda Xu
• Kayleigha Zawacki
• Ji Zhang
• Fei Zhao