Experience design

Whether you’re in a vibrant downtown district, wonderful cultural space, intuitive workplace, or commuting via public transit, the best experiences move beyond bricks and mortar to connect digital trends and new services. In today’s economy, every business and organisation has become more aware of how experiences drive behavioural change.  It's what brings customers back into shops, people back to town centres, passengers back to transport, and what is at the heart of  thriving workplaces.

An experience is a blend of the tangible and the intangible, but always the result of thoughtful design and well planned choices. We are a collective of strategists, conceptual designers, technology designers, architects, urban planners, ethnographers, and service designers – helping clients to define, design and produce experiences that users will love. 

Human experiences, commercial goals

Experience design connects the physical design of your building or environment to the user experience you wish to offer. It’s an analytical and creative partnership in which we help clients to think through every facet of the desired experience, identifying the design implications and requirements that will produce the required results.

Here are just some of the commercial goals that experience design can help you address:

A human-centred process

Experience design is creative, commercial and rigorous at the same time. Our process has four phases: discover, define, develop, deliver. We begin by defining the goals of the project and establishing an evidence-based appreciation of user, customer or community needs and   preferences. We understand the integration with organisational priorities; and establish a shared understanding with stakeholders. From here we learn more about the people we’re designing for, explore solutions and refine concepts. Along the way we constantly switch our focus between the impact on people and considerations of wider social, environmental and economic trends. Experience design can be applied to individual services, buildings, districts or cities and we always strive to bring in the most diverse range of voices into the conversation.

Once we have refined our idea, we have the depth of technical acumen and project experience to fully design, implement and commission our experience design concepts.  We continue to play a role during operations, tuning and refining the experience once it is alive and in the world.

Given the way both society and economy are continually reshaped by digital tools, our experience design practice always integrates the digital and physical worlds, with a clear focus on solving human problems and delivering critical business, social and environmental outcomes. Experience design ensures success today and relevance tomorrow.

Multi-sensory and multidisciplinary

Once user needs and project requirements are clearly articulated, our integrated experience design team gets into gear, orchestrating the many disciplines needed to create and deliver safe, effective, efficient, and delightful experiences. Whether it is a multi-channel soundscape evoking the experience of nature, a media installation visualising the energy usage data in a high performance building, or a mobile app that helps you seamlessly navigate a complex transport hub, our teams have the expertise to deliver. We craft multisensory experiences with sound, light, technology, interactive media, physical environment, all the way down to the supporting infrastructure.   

Find out more about our award-winning work in lighting, acoustics and digital design.

Designing the urban experience

Experience design is equally relevant at campus and city scale. We have helped corporate clients set the user strategy and create user-centric smart buildings for their headquarters and campuses. In Providence, Rhode Island, we led an experience design effort to reimagine the city’s downtown district. Our practice has shaped experiences for major brands such as Delta and Salesforce and impacted outcomes for clients in the property, education, sports, healthcare and arts and culture sectors. 

Design for larger strategic objectives

Increasingly, design methods have been used to help organising work through pressing ESG  (environmental, social, and governance) challenges. We help clients to address these issues with user research, engagement workshops, and developing tools to turn abstract considerations into real world actions. How organisations and individuals change their behaviours will be a big part of meeting societal objectives and experience design can provide the methods.