How to Design Experiences That Feel Like Magic

​A two-hour immersive workshop and 45-minute discussion on using strategy for sorcery and turning intention into awe - designing experiences that transcend what feels possible and create moments of gobsmacked wonder, intimate connection, and alchemical transformation.

​Magic - the magic we’ve all felt in moments that stick with us months, years, decades, lifetimes later - isn’t just happy accidents, some woo woo words, or only the result of someone with “the touch.” Magic has rigor. It’s specific. It’s particular. It’s strange. It’s a form of resistance, the engine of worldbuilding, and a fundamental tool for experience design.

​You’ll leave having taken something you’re designing in your life — a gathering, a classroom, a ritual, a celebration, an incredibly boring meeting — and made it transcendent.

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​About the Host

​Olivia Vagelos runs The Design for Feelings Studio, an agency focused on building and teaching new tools for experience design, and supporting individuals, teams, and communities in using experience as an engine for catalyzing more just, beautiful, regenerative futures. She and her wife also run Aftermap, an end-of-life planning and post-death crisis care company that marries the emotional with the tactical, and brings experience design to the tender ending moments. Her past lives were spent leveraging the power of play inside of IDEO’s Play Lab, building community strategy and content at the online education business IDEO U, and designing programs and pilots at the Stanford design school.