Why His Professor Told Him to Skip Class with Michael Henderson
Michael Henderson’s anthropology professor gave his students some unusual advice: “If you find an interesting cultural experience, go and do that… and don’t come to my lectures.” Michael took him seriously. Unable to understand reggae music, he forced himself to keep listening. What happened next changed the way he thought about learning, culture and experience […]
What Trainspotting Taught Me About Experience
When two people are standing side-by-side watching the same event, is our experience the same? My brother loves trainspotting. And to be honest, I never understood why. Unlike birdwatching, where you never know what species you’ll see, trains are predictable. They run on tracks and they run on timetables. This means you know where they […]
What an Anthropologist Taught Me About Experience
Most people think experience is all about having seen something before. But what if it’s not? In the first conversation in my On Experience series, I sat down with corporate anthropologist Michael Henderson. I expected that our entire talk would be about organisational culture. Some of it was, but for most of it we ended up […]
What a Designer taught me about Experience
What if experience is not about what you know? Recently, I sat down with Industrial Designer Philippe Guichard for a conversation on On Experience. Given I’m a former architect, we naturally talked about design and creativity. Plus, we talked about ego, failure, culture and comic books. But the biggest insight I took away wasn’t really about design […]
The Things We Learn to See with Philippe Guichard
A few weeks ago, I sat down with Industrial Designer Philippe Guichard for a conversation on experience. I thought we would be talking about design. And we did. But as often happens with these On Experience conversations, the topic gradually shifted. What started as a discussion about products, creativity and culture slowly became a conversation about perception. It […]