Every once in a while, I’m reminded that no one can read my mind. I often assume that the people on my creative team can see the project as clearly as I do, so I’m always a little surprised when someone suggests an idea that seems completely unrelated to what I imagined. That happened recently during a team meeting, and it made me realize that I need to be more generous in sharing the vision before asking others to help shape it.

So here I am, sharing with you—and perhaps with the world—what I have in mind for an upcoming experience on an island in Maine. At its heart, it’s about how ordinary objects carry memories and stories, and how those stories can connect us to people we have never met.

I’m curious about how ordinary objects become evidence of extraordinary humans, humans who create the things that keep our world moving, thriving, and exploring. To see them, I look not at the people themselves but at what they made: books, horns, trains, roads, and food. These everyday objects and systems form the infrastructure of our lives, quietly revealing the imagination and labor of those who came before us.

A few years ago, I wrote about the humans in our food system—unsung heroes with deep, unexpected stories to tell. Now my attention has shifted to what I call industrial sounds: the sounds that linger in our analog world yet are steadily disappearing. The clatter of a typewriter, the blast of a steam whistle, the clicking rhythm of an adding machine. These sounds are more than mechanical noise. They are portals to the people who invented tools to solve problems: a horn to warn others, a typewriter to communicate, a foghorn to mark a dangerous coast.

Take a minute now, listen to your surroundings. What do you hear? The hum of your refrigerator? The distant leaf blower, a car passing, a jack hammer in the street nearby?

Why do these particular sounds matter to me?

I’ve long been fascinated by industrial sounds because of my interest in nineteenth-century science, industrialization, and the mechanical devices humans created to help one another flourish. Every one of these sounds carries within it the story of curiosity, experimentation, and invention. As the sounds disappear, so too do the stories of the people who imagined them—the inventors, mechanics, engineers, and entrepreneurs whose work quietly shaped everyday life.

Industrial sounds are difficult to notice precisely because they exist in the background. We train ourselves to tune them out. But what if we tuned them in? What might we discover?

Some have already vanished, like the acoustic handshake between early computers. Others are on the verge of extinction, such as the raspy slide of a credit card imprinter. Each year our soundscape grows quieter in ways we rarely recognize.

But what comes next? Which sounds will soon disappear? And why should that matter?

Every one of these sounds exists because someone once confronted a problem and imagined a solution. They designed it, built it, and gave it a voice. When those sounds disappear, something else disappears with them: our sensory connection to the people who made our world. These artifacts emerged from a time before AI, when turning raw materials into useful objects depended on the knowledge, judgment, and skill of human hands.

Of course, the loss of these sounds also represents progress. Digital technologies often accomplish the same tasks more efficiently and with fewer materials. Yet what we leave behind still matters. These disappearing sounds remind us where we came from and help us understand what it means to be human as we enter an AI future.

In a world becoming quieter, smoother, and increasingly frictionless, will we also become less aware of our own presence? If the sounds of human making disappear, do we lose something essential about how we recognize our work, our ingenuity, and our purpose?

I don’t yet have answers to those questions. But I believe they are worth listening for.

Now you know.

Read More Newsletters on the Lunar Society:

Read the Coop-to-Museum Series:

Catch up on some of my favorite and most-read newsletters:

Read my books: Humans In Our Food / Food Routes / The New Wizard War / Meat, Commerce, and The City

Watch my films: Shelf Life / The Arc of Oblivion / The Long Coast: Stream on Amazon Prime or Apple TV

Can happiness be designed?

That question stayed with me long after I returned from a recent trip to Sweden—not because Sweden consistently ranks among the world’s happiest countries, but because one small gift changed the way I experienced an entire week there. It made me wonder whether happiness is less about where we are than about how we pay attention.

This summer, a group of close friends and I spent a week kayaking through Sweden’s St. Anna and Gryt archipelago, where thousands of granite islands gather along Sweden’s eastern coastline. The islands are quiet places—pine forests clinging to weathered rock, tiny farms tucked between coves, and long stretches of open water in the Baltic Sea where big white swans seem to appear without warning, alone or in pairs, as if they have always belonged to the silence.

Just before we launched our kayaks, a friend handed me a small dusty-rose soapbox. Inside the lid was a mirror. The box held a handful of curious objects: a few tiny magnets, a blank refrigerator magnet, a tube of superglue, a bag of googly eyes, a plastic magnifying glass, and a red silk thread bracelet. Alongside it was a notebook and a small zippered pouch for collecting found objects.

There were no instructions. No scavenger hunt. No list of assignments. No promise of what I should discover. Just an invitation to see what might happen.

The soapbox also contained, I realized later, a beautifully designed experience.

Almost immediately, the contents of the box began changing the way I moved through the landscape. I started collecting moss, feathers, bark, wildflowers, and bits of stone in the little pouch. I tied the red bracelet around my wrist and forgot about it until I caught sight of it throughout the day, a quiet reminder to notice where I was. I glued googly eyes onto my water shoes simply because it made me laugh. I filled the notebook with observations that I might otherwise have overlooked.

Subscribe now

Nothing about the islands had changed. I had. The gift nudged me out of my familiar habits of travel. Instead of simply passing through a beautiful place, passively gliding along in my kayak on the surface of the Baltic Sea, I was more aware. Ordinary objects became artifacts. Small discoveries deepened my understanding the place. They put me in the present moment, drew me in. The landscape became something I entered rather than merely admired.

This, it seems to me, is what the best experience designers understand. They don’t manufacture happiness. They create conditions that make curiosity, playfulness, and attention more likely. They interrupt our routines just enough that we begin seeing differently.

Perhaps that is one reason happiness can feel so elusive. We often search for it in destinations, achievements, or possessions, while overlooking the quality of our own experience. A spectacular place experienced superficially remains just another photograph. A simple moment experienced deeply can become unforgettable.

As I was making my way home, I spent one night in a hotel in Stockholm. Riding the elevator to my room, I stepped in beside a man and woman whose smiles seemed almost impossibly radiant. Both wore conference badges.

The conference was called Eternal Happiness.

I smiled to myself.

Only a few days earlier I might have wondered what those experts knew that the rest of us didn’t. But after a week with a tiny soapbox full of seemingly random objects, I suspected the answer might be much simpler. Happiness isn’t only something we find or promote.

Sometimes it’s something that can be gently designed—through experiences that invite us to pay closer attention to the world, and in doing so, to ourselves. So yes, at least a nudge, an invitation to be more present can lead to what we might define as happiness. Perhaps the Swede’s are world class happiness designers. Or maybe I need more magnets and invitations to be happy.

Read More Newsletters on the Lunar Society:

Read the Coop-to-Museum Series:

Catch up on some of my favorite and most-read newsletters:

Read my books: Humans In Our Food / Food Routes / The New Wizard War / Meat, Commerce, and The City

Watch my films: Shelf Life / The Arc of Oblivion / The Long Coast: Stream on Amazon Prime or Apple TV

In the early days of my PhD research, I would sit for hours deep in the archives of the British Museum, carefully turning the worn and brittle pages of books and journals written during the nineteenth century. Librarians would place these books on a foam cradle, supporting their spines while my hands slowly lifted up one page at a time, gingerly turning the pages as I took notes. This experience, holding an original, old document in my hands, feeling its texture and weight, observing ink blots and stains, smelling the musky odor that rose from the fragile paper — inspired me to become a historian.

Sitting with an old document or object makes time slow or even stop as you realize that the thing in your hands belonged to people you will never know. It’s not a scan or a replica. It’s not an imagined copy; it’s the original thing with all its accumulated layers of meaning. We so rarely encounter the original thing anymore; we only see its digital shadow.

As you may know, I’m obsessed with archives and museums. I’ve been working on a portable personal museum, and the process has led me to think about curation, collections, and the strange emotional weight of objects. Just as I was beginning this article, I read a Substack written by a friend of mine in Austin. She’s also thinking about collections and invisible museums. It felt as though we had independently wandered into the same invisible museum.

Addie Broyles, writes beautifully about food, grief, and a lot more. You can enjoy her work here, where you can read about her experiences with invisible museum archives. We are both curious about the role of a curator and how museums seem to be sharing more of what they collect. Curators seem to be the gatekeepers of everyday objects. They decide what we see, when, and where.

Subscribe now

What was the curator thinking when it came to selecting a receipt book from a meat salesman in Smithfield Market in 1853? Did the curator save all of those receipt books, or did the curator decide to save only a few? Why? What is kept for later generations, and what is discarded, never to be seen? What was the curator thinking?

Curators don’t just exist in museums. We also curate what the world sees and knows about ourselves. I remember when I met a futurist here in Austin who told me he had discovered an archive of ancient cookbooks. He proudly told me that he had scanned them into a digital archive — and then destroyed the physical books. He was delighted, and I was crushed as I imagined all the books with their material histories, the marginalia, imprints, stains, and other sensorial information. It is miraculous and wise to digitize everything, and at the same time, portends a slow evaporation of the physical world humans once made with their hands.

And yet, even as we digitize archives, we still continue to accumulate countless objects that weigh down the shelves of storage facilities, both our personal storage spaces and those of institutions such as museums. We can’t resist collecting evidence of ourselves.

While in London in May for the World Experience Design Summit, I stopped by the Victoria and Albert East Storehouse. Opened about a year ago, the building occupies the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, The Storehouse is immense. Four floors contain over 600,000 objects, including an eclectic assortment of material objects from fashion, photography, theater, architecture, ceramics, sculpture, furniture, and decorative arts, oh, and 350,000 books. They are arranged in an order that feels random. A painting sits next to a lamp; a vase sits next to a dress. There are no labels or tags, so a visitor can make up their own story or imagine why the objects are juxtaposed. The storehouse contains some surprising objects, such as an office designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. The unique opportunity to see the vast number of objects on shelves without explanations and in random order takes us behind the scenes of a museum.

This trend towards museum transparency isn’t new, but it’s growing. Addie points out a museum that invites its community into its uncharted archives to determine what should be displayed and the stories behind them. But Addie also wonders if transparency, making available all of a museum’s collection, is actually a good thing. Can museums overshare? Constraints create mystery. Mystery creates longing. And longing gives objects their aura and value. To see everything may leave us feeling like we see nothing. Abundance flattens meaning.

Perhaps this is why curation matters so deeply. By selecting one object and placing it before us, the curator creates the conditions for attention. The object becomes illuminated, not just by light, but by focus. Addie suggests that we can’t carry every memory of everything. We can carry the few that are meaningful and close to us.

Do you think we should patiently await the curator who serves us bite-sized, memory-sized helpings of our material so we have time to satisfy our curiosity? Or should we be free to wander through the entirety of our collective material universe, choosing for ourselves what matters and what belongs in the stories we tell? You decide.

Join us for our next Lunar experience!

Read More Newsletters on the Lunar Society:

Read the Coop-to-Museum Series:

Catch up on some of my favorite and most-read newsletters:

Read my books: Humans In Our Food / Food Routes / The New Wizard War / Meat, Commerce, and The City

Watch my films: Shelf Life / The Arc of Oblivion / The Long Coast: Stream on Amazon Prime or Apple TV

I’ve spent my artistic life in a bubble, randomly painting and drawing whatever I found interesting. Attending art school is changing that habit, and a recent class assignment pushed me into a new awareness of how my own work relates to other artists and art forms.

Last year, I discovered the work of artist Ant Hampton, also known as Rotoraza. His name comes from some surrealist-inspired, Dada artists such as Jean Tinguely, who created performances that challenged technological representations of what it meant to be human. His kinetic sculptures often used mechanical parts, assembled and reassembled, often engaging the viewer by inviting them to observe the self-destruction of his work. His approach is one way of involving the audience in a work as performers and participants. Ant Hampton offers another, less mechanical example.

Born in the UK, Ant tangles with words, performance, theater, and something he calls Autoteatro. He sometimes works with Silvia Mercuriali to create works that involve the audience (usually only one or two people) in ways that offer the opportunity to both perform and experience the work at the same time. They often use headphones to prompt their audience through the work, which has no other audience than the participants wearing headphones. So everyone is in the work, making, performing, and observing together. It’s wild. You do get the feeling that the whole work can explode in one moment, but it doesn’t. The works of Jean and others can often feel chaotic, risky, guided, yet open to chance. Etiquette is one of their early works and is an example of the use of headphones and performance between two individuals. It’s guided, but only so much, allowing the individuals to experience the work in their own way.

His book project, Borderline Invisible, introduced me to the idea that books can be experiences in ways other than reading them. Similar to his work that explores conversations between two people as opportunities for performance, the book is experienced, not read, in the traditional way. The book appears as a physical book with a cover, pages, and includes mostly images. When I first held the book in my hand, I was disappointed. With such an emphasis on images, the book raised my expectations that the images were in some way special, of some aesthetic value. But the images were bland, not remarkable in any way.

Instead, Ant intends to take you on a voyage through the book by providing you with a recording, which you listen to with headphones so that you feel immersed in the book experience. At the beginning of the recording, he informs you that you should expect to be present for about 77 minutes, although he hints at a time in the recording that you could take a break. Very thoughtful and human.

While you listen to his calm, quiet voice, you follow a path through the book, flipping back and forth, from cover to cover, but not in any linear sense. After a while, you find yourself experiencing a story embedded in the path, emerging gently from information as it unfolds through its monologue

Last year, I experimented with this approach with my book, Humans in Our Food. We sent the book to a small group of curious friends, along with random artifacts, a map, and a puzzle piece, for example, to incite their curiosity about the relationship of the objects to the book. Several recipients of the book used the map to show where they lived, designed a book-inspired menu, or used a printed page to make a collage. I some ways, the responses felt similar to an exquisite corpse, an artwork created by contributing one layer at a time, usually by different people. This was just one of my experiments to see how books could perform in ways other than through a linear narrative. In the future, I hope to explore other ways to disrupt present conceptions of a physical book, inspired by such artists as Ant Hampton.

What about you? Have a book you think you could make an experience, other than by reading it? What could you make with a book, build with a book, turn into a collage, a song, a poem?

Join us for our next Lunar experience!

Read More Newsletters on the Lunar Society:

Read the Coop-to-Museum Series:

Catch up on some of my favorite and most-read newsletters:

Read my books: Humans In Our Food / Food Routes / The New Wizard War / Meat, Commerce, and The City

Watch my films: Shelf Life / The Arc of Oblivion / The Long Coast: Stream on Amazon Prime or Apple TV

I’m in my third month as an MFA student, my latest life experiment. The other students are good at what they do, since they have been honing their art practice as photographers and filmmakers for years before arriving in this program. I know a little about a lot, including photography and film making, but not enough to master any one skill. I do know something about how curiosity can lead to a life of experimentation, and how experiments can build skills beyond mastery.

David Epstein, author of the book Range, provides timely assurance that the breadth of what you know is as powerful as the depth. It’s OK to be a generalist, he suggests.

Epstein doesn’t have anything against those who master a skill. He believes that it’s important to have both specialists and generalists. He says we need humans who excel at “mental meandering and personal experimentation.” And as Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “…all life is an experiment.” Indeed, it is.

We generalists are suckers for experimentation. Or, as my art school advisor said this month, an artist can be someone who improvises, not always the artist whose photographs are technically perfect, or painters who can capture an image or emotion with precision. Nothing wrong with those who specialize and achieve excellence in their field, but sometimes the ability to have a range of ideas and the ability to connect them, build on them, makes for experiments that add to our overall understanding of our world and ourselves.

When not groping my way through my art life experiment, I continue to read The Lunar Men by Jenny Uglow. The members of the Lunar Society were expert experimenters. During their years together (1730-1830), they had an insatiable appetite for experimentation as a way to gather knowledge. Their quest for knowledge felt magical. They emerged from a world of alchemy and natural potions to a more structured process of understanding the world. Science as we understand it now was still understood as knowledge, philosophy, and existed somewhere in between science and alchemy. Some of the experiments performed by the Lunar men seemed audacious, glamorous, and even magical. In a way, the Lunar men became sorcerers, conjuring natural phenomena to appear without a rational explanation.

They saw experimentation as a way to be playful, performing experiments in public and private for their own amusement and for others. They had a sense of humor about experiments. Uglow mentions an alleged use of a magnet by the Lunar men to disrupt a magic show, just for fun.

In their enthusiasm to acquire new knowledge about materials and phenomena, they made bold experiments, often risking the occasional blowing up of each other or unexpectedly electrocuting one another.

Consider the Lunar man, Joseph Priestley, discoverer of oxygen. He was lighting materials on fire for decades before making his famous discovery. While experimenting, he was also writing about religion, grammar, education, electricity, optics, and chemistry. He was a generalist, and as Uglow writes, “he felt that he was adding to a shared body of knowledge that would lead to a better future.” His fellow Lunar man, James Watt, an expert on steam power, origin of the word “watt” and “horsepower,” described Priestley’s way of experimentation as “his usual way of groping about.” It’s a relief to know that groping can lead to a discovery.

Another Lunar man, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, was an inventor who had time for four marriages and 22 children. That’s notable for something. His friend, Erasmus Darwin, joined him to create fantastic mechanical devices and modes of transport. In a way, they were both conjurers, coming up with magic tricks in the sense that they could come up with completely unexpected solutions to problems that didn’t exist at the time.

Both Darwin and Edgeworth designed models for new modes of transport. The other Lunar men did the same, as if under the same spell. Edgeworth came up with a carriage that carried its own road, in effect using iron rails that would be taken as the carriage passed over them, much in the same way as a Caterpillar tractor uses its treads. Darwin developed a more comfortable carriage suspension design using his patented spring wheels. Edgeworth designed a “walking table” which was really a rotating series of wooden legs carrying up to 4o men, according to a letter written by Edgeworth to Wedgewood in 1758. Both Darwin, Edgeworth, Boulton, and others were laying the groundwork for later improvements in road surfacing, carriage design, and propulsion, such as steam power. All of these inventions seemed impossible mechanical marvels, especially during a time when many of the necessary technologies to solve these problems hadn’t arrived. But these Lunar men were unstoppable and not hindered by the judgment of what would later become institutional, elite scientists.

Learning from these Lunar men, and my art school mentors and teachers, I now feel comfortable groping, experimenting, and seeing life itself as one grand experiment. One grand opportunity to improvise.

There are risks in not being an expert in a field, or knowing too little about a lot of things. In addition to blowing something up, I might be wasting time, mine and everyone else’s. Experiments, by their nature, often fail. I’m willing to risk some failure for the occasional course correction or insight that may lead to a new insight.

Join us for our next Lunar experience!

Read More Newsletters on the Lunar Society:

Read the Coop-to-Museum Series:

Catch up on some of my favorite and most-read newsletters:

Read my books: Humans In Our Food / Food Routes / The New Wizard War / Meat, Commerce, and The City

Watch my films: Shelf Life / The Arc of Oblivion / The Long Coast: Stream on Amazon Prime or Apple TV

One night, during the late eighteenth century, when the moon was full enough to light the muddy clay roads of the English Midlands, a handful of friends would leave their workshops, laboratories, and forges to make their way toward one another. They gathered not for fame, or for profit — though both would follow — but for conversation.

Candles illuminated their faces as they shared ideas and experiments around tables cluttered with instruments, sketches, mineral samples, and half-finished scientific contraptions. What makes a person ride miles in the dark simply to continue a conversation?

They called themselves, almost playfully, the Lunar Society.

Five men, the original members of the Lunar Society, gathered to discuss their inventions and discoveries. They were Erasmus Darwin, Matthew Bolton, James Watt, Josiah Wedgewood, and Joseph Priestly. These five men were natural philosophers, a term for scientists before science became a profession during the early 19th century. They shared knowledge before it was divided into art and science, before knowledge became compartmentalized into theory and application, before manufacturing became the occupation of the poor and working class, and before theoretical academics gathered in elite institutions in cities. The Lunar men were interested in applied science, not so much in the theories.

These five men would eventually lay the groundwork for the Industrial Revolution as they played with steam, electricity, chemicals and medicine. They broke with traditional ways of experiencing the world, and were Freethinkers, Dissenters, and Nonconformists, all philosophies that questioned the unquestionable, especially the traditional religions at the time. Because they broke from traditional institutions, both church and state, they had the freedom to explore outside traditional beliefs. Scotland, considered outside the control and traditional philosophies of those in Oxford and Cambridge, was alive with contrarians, experimenters, innovators and entrepreneurs. The appearance of the Lunar Society in the British Midlands, away from London and on the way to Edinburgh feels right.

I’ve been a fan of the 18th century Lunar Society since my years as a PhD student at Boston University where my advisors Dr. Tom Glick and Dr. Lou Ferleger nudged me towards the history of 19th century British science.On one of my reading lists was a book, The Lunar Men, by Jenny Uglow. At first I was disappointed by what I felt was a misreading of my interests as a food historian. What did engineering have to do with food, I mused, not amused.

Eventually, my advisors led me to an old meat market in central London. One professor introduced me to this book about London’s food supply, a mid-19th century account that included the details of an extended argument between the meat market and Parliament. I spent the next decade researching and writing about the old market, which sadly will close this year. While writing about the market, I was surprised by the ways technology reshaped cities and their relationship to the countryside. Steam, railroads, civil engineering, chemistry and biology launched the Industrial Revolution and as a consequence sent the meat market out of London.

What I admired most about The Lunar Society was their delight with discovery, their obsession with experimentation, their interest in applying technology to solve essential everyday problems. They were makers, settling in Birmingham where the first factories appeared, forges, mills, the ecosystem for building the infrastructure for manufacturing.

Along the way, they married and thus often acquired the financial resources to build factories, hire workers, and send their goods around the world. And while they were building factories, they continued to experiment. Public experiments were popular, inviting families and merchants to see wild displays of electricity, chemical explosions, and lectures on biology. Science was experience, performance, and even when not understood, fascinating and promised a better world.

Why are these lunatics and their stories so important now? Because AI is pressuring us to reconsider what humans will do in the future. Companies are already replacing workers with AI and one would assume this drama has more to show us. If AI can replace analysts and marketing teams and assembly lines filled with robots, why worry? Along with this shifting workforce is the potential for a change of mind. We humans need to make stuff, hold on to our sense of curiosity and wonder, and experiment in ways outside the world of AI. Become one of the new Dissenters, Non-conformists. When AI gives you an answer, wonder if there is another answer not yet in the world of AI.

David Mindell, a MIT professor of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing, and author of The New Lunar Society, convinced me that these men, their principles, and their inventions underlie what lies ahead for our world and its economy. Manufacturing and the making of things, wrestling with the materiality of our world, engages us with humility, creating a positive tension with the desire for moonshots and the reality of the necessity to innovate in areas of building, logistics,transportation, shipbuilding, those physically moving the things we make. Mindell reminds us that this “middle” economy is not as sexy as the crypto-driven economy or AI but essential for our moonshots to work.

But really, this story is about friendship. We need to give a little love to our manufacturing economy while at the same time learning from the original Lunatiks about the importance of friendship, time learning from one another, and ways to make surprising connections with others who weren’t in their field. Lunar men Wedgewood, a chemist and potter, spent time with the doctor, Erasmus Darwin, Charle’s father, who thought about evolution, the nervous system and had a jovial sense of humor. The Lunar men played when they met together, calling their discussions a form of “Philosophical laughing.” They befriended fellow experimenters, especially those playing with electricity, such as Benjamin Franklin. During the 18th century, scientists were just beginning to understand this invisible material, making it visible through their public and non-public experiences, often frightening when unexpectedly something exploded.

Let’s engage in a little philosophical laughing. Know that no answer produced by AI is the quintessential answer; there’s always more to discover. This is why I co-founded our Lunar Society now. We have so much more to share with you; this essay is just to show you the mindset behind this new venture. How will it take shape? Explosions from public demonstrations of science? Doubtful. But you should definitely sign up for an experience we’re producing in late August on a remote island in Maine.

The upcoming August experience is just one of many gatherings of friends who love to experiment and who might not mind a little philosophical laughing in honor of those Lunatics…

Join us for our next Lunar experience!

Read More Newsletters on the Lunar Society:

Read the Coop-to-Museum Series:

Catch up on some of my favorite and most-read newsletters:

Read my books: Humans In Our Food / Food Routes / The New Wizard War / Meat, Commerce, and The City

Watch my films: Shelf Life / The Arc of Oblivion / The Long Coast: Stream on Amazon Prime or Apple TV

I See You

Last month, I passed through several TSA Checkpoints and watched my suitcase reveal itself to a total stranger. My red hardcase suitcase slowly passed through the CT Scanner, a device similar to a medical scanner, with low-dose X-rays that reveal a 3D image of its contents. We’ve relinquished our suitcases to scanners since 1973, after the FAA issued an emergency mandate in 1972 in response to the increase in hijackings and other terrorist attacks. After 9/11, when the FAA required all baggage to be screened through a new federally-created program called the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), we all became accustomed to baggage restrictions and regular scrutiny of our baggage.

Since I’m working on a suitcase-contained museum these days, I began to take a closer look at suitcases, their history, and how we use them. And, there’s no closer look taken than an X-ray scanner. Think of a suitcase as a book that contains your story, reflects who you are, where you’ve been, and where you’re going.

Think of a suitcase as a book that contains your story, reflects who you are, where you’ve been, and where you’re going.

When you go through a TSA Checkpoint, strangers take a look at all of that…not that they are interested in who you are. They want to know what you are taking into an airplane. They want to know if you packed a bomb or explosives. Of course, if they found those items, they would surely know who you are.

You can find limited examples of TSA X-ray images on the internet, so I began to gather interesting scans. The images are colorful.

Read more

A Historian Walks into An Art Fair

I walked into the main hall of Miami’s Art Basel this month with some friends to explore the art world. The enormous warehouse was filled with paintings, sculptures, and all the other objects considered art. Honestly, as a historian - my chosen academic field - I couldn’t make sense of it from where I stood. Without the context of place, time, and a narrative that provided meaning to the art, the scene seemed mysterious and unintelligible. Historians are all about context, and without that, art, even if pleasing to the eye and impressive in terms of craft, can make no sense at all.

​Actually, art isn’t about making sense. Jerry Salz says in How to Be an Artist, “…art doesn’t have to make sense. Art is like birdsong: it’s made of patterns, inflections, shadings, shifts—all things that have emotional and perceptual impact, even if we can never really translate their meanings. Every work of art is a culture-scape of you, your memories, the moments you spent working, your hopes, energies, and neuroses, the times you live in, and your ambitions. Of the things that are engaging, mysterious, meaningful, resistant over time.”​

As a historian, this made no sense to me until now. I think Salz is right. And historians revolt over such nuances of meaning, especially if it includes their own personal emotions. So how does a historian make sense of the art world? Well, I’m learning now.

Read more

Experience Design, From Netflix to Suitcase

I haven’t laughed so hard in a long time. Laughing so hard that tears streamed down my face, possibly filling up the visor attached to my helmet. The helmet was part of a full-body VR experience at the new Netflix House located in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. The Netflix hosts promised that by wearing the helmet, visor, headset, vest, and spiky attachments to both hands and feet, I would feel immersed in a VR experience about the Netflix series Stranger Things. ​

The host delivered: the experience was truly strange. What got me laughing was the beginning of the experience when the VR software dismembered one of us. We watched as she went sideways, her arms and legs separating from her torso, as she floated up into the air, recombining and becoming something both terrifying and amusing. The Netflix host quickly reset the system and she returned to her normal state, but this surreal, out-of-body experience reminded me that the developers of these new AR/VR experiences have a ways to go.

When the experience restarted, we all moved in a Stranger Things world, with Mind Flayers and Vecnas attacking us for what seemed like forever. We used our hands to fend them off, dodging and dipping to avoid being killed. Having never been a video game player, this experience felt like what I imagined a classic video game would be.

So are video games a classic experience design format?

Read more

Museum in a Suitcase

It’s been six or seven decades since I appeared in a Halloween costume. Encouraged by my daughter, who now lives in a neighborhood of Halloween enthusiasts, I am joining those who are rightly inspired by the recent theft of art from the Louvre Museum in Paris. Thieves already wear masks, so finding a costume should be simple: a black cape, a backpack bulging with empty frames, a few tools to pry pictures off walls, maybe a paintbrush to repair hastily removed from a vitrine, and maybe a beret, just to place this thief in Paris.

Not that I will be the only art thief this year. The theft from the Louvre is just the latest example of how committed art thieves can enter and steal notorious artifacts - in this case, bejeweled crowns, within eight minutes (some reports say less than seven; some say eight-ish) during opening hours of a museum. (OK, they did drop a bejeweled crown on their way out, but it seemed pretty easy to collect over $100 million of precious jewels on a Sunday morning.)

A few months ago, our book club read The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession by Michael Finkel and gained an appreciation of the fragility of museum collections. While reading the book, I wandered into a notable Austin museum and considered how I might steal the artwork if I were an art thief. Aside from feeling a bit weird about this endeavor, I did manage to find access points that were lightly guarded and exhibits designed without consideration as to how easy it might be to remove them from a wall. Sure, there are plenty of security cameras, but as we know now, cameras can’t catch everything all the time.

Thievery aside, museums continue to be one of my obsessions, and a museum is the focus of my experience design project certificate.

Read more

Paseo Sonoro (Sound Walk in Guatemala)

​On a recent visit to Antigua, Guatemala, my business partner and friend, Stefy (who lives in Antigua) experimented with an experience design we’re developing to listen to our soundscapes in new ways.

Antigua’s soundscape is hard to miss. From dawn to dusk, this “old Guatemalan” city nestled in between three volcanoes emits sounds such as the tinkling bells of the ice cream street vendors, church bells, church “bombs,” - which are essentially randomly occurring blasts of fireworks - air brakes from chicken buses, gurgling water fountains, street musicians playing guitars, the rumble of motorcycles along the cobblestone streets, and the high pitched whine of a coffee grinder. Together, they are Antigua. And much more, we were to discover.​

Even before we had the idea of a sound experience in Antigua, I participated in an artist residency, Gracia, where I recorded industrial (mechanical, not natural) sounds in Antigua, converted them into spectrographs, and then translated them into paintings. At first, my paintings were quite literal, but I had more fun playing with the lines of Mayan textiles and abstractions than with those graphs.

Here are some examples:

Read more

Dianne Ballon, Ear Witness

An osprey squealed overhead as it heralded the arrival of Dianne Ballon, the sound artist we invited for our film shoot this summer on Whitehead Island. A sleek black and white bird hovered, darted, warned, and welcomed us with mixed signals similar to a foghorn’s beckoning or repelling voice. The osprey’s voice was the first of many sounds that entered the soundscape that day, uninvited but intensely sensed.

Read more

An Island Visit

A solitary Adirondack chair on the weathered grey deck rocked back and forth in tune with the waves gently grazing the nearby small sandy beach. Across the bay, in the distance, the steely grey horizon framed the outer edge of my view. It was quiet.

So quiet, the absence of sound was a bit unsettling.

Read more

You’ve Been Replaced (Now what?)

What does it mean to be human in an age of intelligent machines? One moonlit night in Austin, fifteen people boarded a black van to find out.

A first-year film student, hired to be our van driver for the evening, greeted these guests as they climbed aboard the unmarked van. The van left for a secret destination in East Austin, where they were destined to spend the evening as our participants in an experience my work partner and I designed.

As students in an experience design course, Stefy and I were testing some of the methods and concepts we were learning and had spent months assembling all the ingredients for this evening. By the end of the evening, we weren't even sure what happened. Here’s why.

We’ve realized a great experience doesn't aim to teach - it invites. A good experience should invite you to think about your world without having to direct you toward any specific conclusion. Even in the same room, no two people have the same experience. This experience design course has really been challenging for those of us who have designed courses, workshops, or facilitated events.

Read more

My Mother: The Main Attraction

My bookshelves contain more than just books. They are crowded with other stories, photos, a stuffed sheep about an inch high, a bronze pig, foot-long pencils, a metal sign from a barn, and a photo of my mom in her clown costume.

I wasn’t thrilled when she decided to become a street performer. Sometime after I graduated from college, got married, and had two children, I noticed that my mom would appear with the Los Trancos Marching Band, a loosely formed community band that would amble through Portola Valley, a town in the foothills of Silicon Valley. Recently, I tracked down an old video of one of the parades to see if I could find her in the midst of life-size puppets, other clowns, and musicians. The incoherent video, sometimes in focus but mostly not, captured the California blue sky, with a puff or two of white clouds lingering over the Santa Cruz mountains.

Read more

The Paris Marathon and La Musée

La Musée

The line of visitors headed to the Musée d’Orsay wrapped around three blocks on Paris’s Left Bank. Grey clouds hung overhead, and although the weather forecast hadn’t mentioned rain, those clouds looked like they would release cold, foreboding rain showers any minute. We stood close to each other, as I huddled together with hundreds of others who found unexpected patience when promised access to one of the most famous museums in the world. (This one is ranked among the top ten museums in the world.)

About 20 years ago, I visited the museum with my family and sat with them in the central atrium inside, sitting on the marble stairs, with our sketchbooks, drawing a few of the classic statues in our midst. The idea of sketching in museums had become a ritual (OK, perhaps enforced by Mom), as we carried our museum sketchbooks with us while we traveled the world.

This ritual began with a visit to the museum gift shop (which is where most visitors really want to go in the first place) to find a postcard of an object or painting that exists at that museum. Then, with our chosen postcard, we travel through the museum to find the object on our postcard.

Read more

Jules Verne and the worlds we inhabit [Worldbuilding Series Part 2]

This is a guest post by my dear friend and talented writer, Stefy Bolaños. Read more of Stefy’s work on her Substack, The Learning Dispatch, a newsletter dedicated to exploring innovative formats and creative methods in the world of learning.

Jules Verne knew how to build a world. His stories constructed entire ecosystems, each with its own rules, technologies, and uncharted frontiers.

Imagine him now, not as the 19th-century writer with ink-stained fingers, but as a game designer, a learning architect, or a creator of immersive experiences. Would he be coding an open-world adventure game? Designing interactive learning maps? Sketching out a new kind of gathering where people step in to self-contained universes?

Take Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. This novel was a carefully designed ecosystem where the Nautilus functioned as its own microcosm, complete with an internal economy, technological marvels, and philosophical rules dictated by Captain Nemo. Verne created a self-sustaining world beneath the waves, filled with rules that felt natural even in their futuristic setting.

In Journey to the Center of the Earth, he crafted another world-within-a-world. The underground realm was filled with prehistoric life and geological formations that followed a strange but believable logic. The deeper the explorers went, the more they discovered about how this secret world functioned.

Even in From the Earth to the Moon, his vision of space travel was strikingly detailed. He accounted for physics, engineering, and even the financial and political machinations behind a moon launch, long before the Apollo missions. Instead of simply sending his characters to the Moon; he built a system where space travel felt possible.

Jules Verne built environments that lived beyond the page. He built worlds that functioned with an internal logic so precise that, even today, they feel eerily predictive. He understood that true worldbuilding is about creating a space where choices unfold organically, where readers (or players, learners, or travelers….) can shape their own narratives.

The World of 80 Days

One of Verne’s most famous works is Around the World in 80 Days. The novel follows the wealthy and enigmatic Phileas Fogg, who wagers that he can circumnavigate the globe in eighty days. With his loyal valet, Passepartout, Fogg embarks on an adventure that takes him across Europe, through India, Japan, America, and back to England. Along the way, he faces challenges: trains breaking down, political turmoil, and even an obsessive detective convinced that Fogg is a bank robber on the run. The novel captures the tension between the old world, where travel was slow and uncertain, and the new industrialized world, where speed and efficiency were becoming essential.

Decades later, the game 80 Days took Verne’s premise and turned it into an interactive experience where the story is shaped by the player’s actions.

What I loved about 80 Days is that it doesn’t force a narrative. It builds a world. Instead of a rigid sequence of events, it offers a playground of possibilities. Every train boarded, every conversation had, every object purchased changes the trajectory of the journey. The game doesn’t dictate a single story; it invites exploration within a structured yet flexible environment.

And here’s where worldbuilding gets really interesting: the more open-ended a world feels, the more rigorously designed it has to be. The rules must be invisible but solid. Choices must matter, even if their consequences aren’t immediately apparent. Players need to feel the weight of their decisions, even in a system without an overt morality scale.

I’ve played it a couple of times now, and I’m surprised by what needed to happen in the story for me to recognize the 'invisible' rules at play, like the way my own personality might dictate a possible outcome. Every time I play, I notice new patterns; subtle nudges guiding me toward different possibilities…

The worlds we walk through

We inhabit many worlds. Some are obvious: our homes, our cities, our favorite coffee shops where the barista knows our order before we say it. Others are more fleeting but no less real. Walking the Camino de Santiago, for instance, felt like stepping into a universe with its own language (Buen Camino!), its own culture (pilgrims, hostels, the ritual of tending to blisters), and its own mythology (legends passed down on dusty trails). It was a world that existed within but separate from the one left behind, shaped by invisible rules and shared rituals.

Teaching a class is another form of worldbuilding. A syllabus is a map. A classroom is a designed space. A learning culture is its own ecosystem of rules and rituals, where what is left unsaid is just as important as what is explicitly taught. As educators, facilitators, or experience designers, we are constructing a space where learning, discovery, and agency can unfold.

The Mechanics of good worldbuilding

Great worldbuilding, whether in fiction, games, education, or travel, relies on the same fundamental principles:

• Constraints create freedom. Just as Verne gave the Nautilus limits (its fuel, its secrecy), a well-designed learning experience benefits from structure. Too many options without logic lead to chaos; well-crafted constraints make exploration meaningful.

• Choices must matter. A great world responds to its inhabitants. Whether it’s a player navigating a game, a student engaging with a lesson, or a traveler choosing their next path, the best worlds make decisions feel consequential.

• Rules should be invisible but firm. Even in the most imaginative of settings, internal consistency is crucial. A world, whether built for play or learning, needs logic that feels natural, even when unspoken.

• Surprise keeps engagement alive. The best worlds allow for unpredictability: hidden corners, unexpected discoveries, the ability to break the expected pattern. Learning, like adventure, should leave room for the unknown.

The Worlds We Choose to Build

Whether we’re crafting a game, hosting a gathering, designing a learning journey, or walking an ancient trail, we are always engaging in worldbuilding. The question is: What kind of worlds do we want to create?

Do we want ones that exclude or ones that invite? Ones that dictate or ones that explore? Do we design rigid paths or dynamic ecosystems where people can chart their own course?

At their best, the worlds we build should be playful, open-ended, and flexible. They should allow for uncertainty, for surprise, for stories that no one could have predicted. And most of all, they should remind us that every step (on a trail, on a map, in a game, or in a classroom) is a choice we get to make.

Just like Jules Verne, we aren’t just telling stories. We’re building worlds worth stepping into.

Thank you Stefy for the fascinating insights on Worldbuilding! Check out Stefy’s Substack here, and come back soon for my installment on Worldbuilding for this 2-part series.

Subscribe now

Read More Newsletters on Storytelling:

Where Am I?

I Paid Someone to drop me in the middle of the mountains for eight days with no phone or map

The Hidden Meaning of Lost Objects

Dinner with Soviet Defectors and FBI Agents

Read the Coop-to-Museum Series:

My Museum, It’s NOT About Me

New Year Greetings

From Memoir to Museum: How I Found Myself in a Chicken Coop

Catch up on some of my favorite and most-read newsletters:

My Husband tried to impress me by inventing Ethernet 50 years ago

The World Championships of Cheese

Are Islands Just Small Continents? (Part 1)

A Backstory is Often the Real Story (Part 2)

Subscribe now

Do We Need A New World? [Worldbuilding Series, Part 1]

Escapes

One summer afternoon in 1998, I watched my children learn how to make fake blood packs so they could appear wounded when jabbed with a menacing sword held by the gallant knight standing with them in our kitchen. My kids were enthralled. (They still are today when I mention this scene to them.) Imagine…a knight sharing his secrets and tricks of his trade with you.

This scene occurred as I was preparing for a weekend Renaissance Fair held at our farm in Maine, almost 30 years ago. The tall man with his black shiny hair pulled back into a ponytail while enchanting our kids was preparing for a joust. He would be riding one of two black, sleek horses as he charged towards his partner, who would also be astride a sleek, black horse, in a performance of gallantry and sheer terror. Held on our hay field at the back of our farm, the jousters careened towards each other as they held long lances with one hand and their reins with the other. Occasionally, a lance appeared to graze the arm or leg of the opposing knight, or they ended up off their horses in combat. All this commotion often resulted in the piercing of one of those kitchen-made blood packs that had been earlier constructed in our kitchen.

And, we firmly believed that we were not on a 20th-century farm in rural Maine. Our kitchen had been transformed into what felt like the backstage of a theater, actors anxiously rushing to don their costumes, makeup sending clouds of colorful powder into the air. We were in a world of theater performers about to transform the world outside into a 16th-century Renaissance English Manor.

So when my classmates that I’ve been taking, offered by Odyssey Works, were assigned a worldbuilding exercise this month, I felt curiously at home.

Read more

Plunge in, Sit Back, and Wrestle with Words

I often get asked why we have a summer home in Maine. On the surface, most assume we chill along Maine’s coast to escape Austin’s red-hot heat during the summer. Really, there’s more to it.

During the 1980s, I struggled as a young writer to find my way, my voice, and just about everything else. One summer, my husband and I decided to take a break and headed to Maine where I had been a camper at one of Maine’s many summer camps. We signed up for a windjammer cruise and headed out into Penobscot Bay. By the time we returned to port, we were convinced that a small summer hideaway along the Maine coastline would be the perfect respite from Silicon Valley’s frenetic startup scene. We found a small summer cottage and began to explore Maine during the summer.

Another reason for being drawn to Maine was my association with my favorite writer, E. B. White. I loved his children’s books, so much so that I named my small outboard motorboat, moored outside our cottage, Margalo, after the small yellow canary in White’s book, Stuart Little.

Foolishly, I imagined that his talents as a concise and magical storyteller would drift along the coastline and infuse my writing with characters such as the mouse-like Stuart Little.

Read more

Museums as Memory Palaces

Standing outside our house in La Cañada, California one night, we stood with a few of our precious possessions (I had my parakeet in a small cage) and watched as the sky filled with flames, sending red, hot ashes down over our heads.The air was hot, filled with the sounds of sirens and firetrucks rumbling through our neighborhood. Even during the 1950s, forest fires were a way of life, igniting a cycle of burnt landscapes and green, beautiful trees and flowers. I remember the hibiscus blooms, coupled with an ever present bee-seeking nectar.

I have other memories of California, many from the years we spent as a family in the High Sierras, especially Yosemite Valley. During the ‘60s, my mother would drag us (it took dragging since we really wanted to go to Disneyland) to the Sierra Nevada mountains where we would visit Yosemite National Park. Over the years, we’d hike the John Muir trail, spend lazy summers along the Merced River, feel the mist off Bridleveil Falls, and listen for the yell during sunset when the campfire embers atop the valley would spill down towards the valley floor. We ended up loving Yosemite.

Even before our family fell in love with Yosemite, my mom spent time, sunny days on the Merced River that runs through the Valley:

Read more