Design and experience strategy isn’t a top-down process for the privileged few, but a collaborative engagement along a narrative arc of surprise and transformation that changes audience and designer alike, according to The Experience Book authors Adam Scott and Dave Waddell, interviewed by The Future Laboratory’s co-founder Martin Raymond.

The age of experience, as we learn in the latest LS:N Global Back to the F**kture podcast, has been replaced by the age of transformation. Or rather, as The Experience Book authors Adam Scott and Dave Waddell explain, one has been subsumed into the other, so that when we talk of experience, we are really speaking about transformative moments that take us along an unexpected, and sometimes unknown and unknowable journey of change, challenge, and if we get it right, catharsis.

To be truly transformative in the audience sense, experience needs to begin with, and embrace, the audience it is targeting, says Waddell. ‘It needs to be a co-created and co-conceived journey that follows a narrative arc of exposition, inciting incident, rising action, climax, falling action resolution and dénouement – but that arc needs to be set by the audience as much as by the design or experience strategist.’ In other words, a more collaborative, interactive and shared narrative approach than the one used by more traditional experience designers and strategists. Tune in now.