In June of 2025, I was a guest on the NN/g Podcast with the wonderful host Therese Fessenden. You can watch/listen to the episode, but the durable takeaways from it are all collected here!

This is my ChatGPT-generated rundown of the episode transcript, em-dashes and all. I did some light editing of it, but ChatGPT nailed the summary so well that i don’t feel the need to really editorialize it more.

Core Message: Design is no longer about interfaces — it’s about orchestration, storytelling, and human systems.

🎙️ Thesis of the Talk

Design is no longer about pixels and interfaces — it’s about choreography, orchestration, and storytelling.

• Not tool-based or pixel-based
• Not even product-based
• But human experience-based, system-aware, and narrative-driven

🔑 Big Ideas

• Design is Choreography: Designers shape relationships, decisions, and systems — not pixels.
• Post-Tool Era: AI will handle execution; designers must focus on strategy, narrative, and facilitation.
• Service Blueprints = Scripts for Complex Experiences: They map not just journeys, but organizational choreography.
• Language is the Future: Words and conversation will be the primary input/output of design.
• Anthropology Over Interface: Human observation, empathy, and cultural literacy matter more than ever.
• Chimeric Future: We’re blending legacy systems with magical AI — design must bridge that gap.
• Design for Help, Not Just Profit: The future of design is about human dignity, equity, and social support.

💬 Quotable Phrases

• “Design is choreography.”
• “Words and language are the top design skill of the future.”
• “We’re not designing software — we’re designing conversations.”
• “Words and language are the top design skill of the future.”
• “We’re done with being the best at operating a computer.”
• “Design for malleable, unpredictable human experiences.”
• “We’re not designing software anymore — we’re designing the holodeck.”
• “Every service experience is now a choose-your-own-adventure.”
• “The final interface is the human mind.”
• “It’s not about CSS anymore — it’s about anthropology.”

🔑 Core Themes & Big Ideas

1. Design as Choreography

• Introduced design as a “dance” — the intentional coordination of people, processes, and touchpoints.
• In complex systems (like NASA), the role of the designer is to “connect dots,” enable conversations, and shape the terrain over which experience happens — not draw interfaces.

2. The Post-Tool Designer

• AI will automate many production tasks (wireframes, layouts, code, etc.).
• Designers need to evolve into orchestrators, strategists, therapists, and anthropologists.
• “Words and language will be the top design skill of the future.”

3. Service Blueprinting as Previsualization

• Compared blueprints to movie planning: casting, budgeting, and choreography — not the filming itself.
• Service Blueprinting is the primary artifact in a future full of agentic systems, LLMs, and unpredictable interactions.

4. Human Problems Need Human Designers

• The enduring need for observation, empathy, and human connection.
• AI can’t do Follow Me Home visits, understand context, or advocate effectively for change.
• Designers are becoming more like therapists or diplomats: framing problems, advocating for users, navigating complexity.

5. Anthropology Over Interface

• Designers should lean into anthropology and collaboration, because we’re entering a new era of social reconfiguration, not just technological transformation.
• Modern life as increasingly lonely and disconnected, and positioned design as a force to counteract that.

6. A New Role for Design in the Age of AI

• Instead of resisting AI, embrace it as a “Promethean” force: powerful, potentially dangerous, but ultimately liberating if handled with care.
• Encourage designers to shape how AI helps humans — not just how humans help AI.
• We’re entering a “Gutenberg moment”: How will we use this power to help, not just profit?

Follow me on LinkedIn because that’s the only social media I use anymore!

Mural has long been a champion of creating collaborative tools and methods that support the ethos of “work isn’t a place, it’s what we accomplish together” as coined by Mural’s Chief Evangelist and longtime proponent of boundaryless collaboration, Jim Kalbach.

With that in mind, the Mural XR team is asking the question of: If work isn’t a place, but what we accomplish together, how can we accomplish things together, well… better?

Trains, planes, and automobiles… and headsets

Think about the world before trains. That’s right; choo-choo trains. Before the advent of consumer train travel, the most you could be “together” with someone was constrained by how far you could walk, run, or ride a horse in a single day (unless you were fortunate enough to have access to a sailing vessel and live within walking distance of a waterway).

For example (thanks to Rates of Travel from New York City, 1830 — Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States), in 1800 if you were in New York and needed to collaborate with someone in Chicago, you are looking at a 6 week voyage. You simply could not get there any quicker, and any benefit or value of being able to be co-present with someone who wasn’t within the little curved lines were lost to you.

The world was huge, but your world was very small.

Then, one day, the world got smaller and your world got bigger, once when you could board a train, and a few hours later, be in a place that would have taken you days to reach previously. Now, all the people, ideas, and resources of this new location were available to you. Access to the world became expanded, you could do things in a day previously impossible, and people you may never have had the chance to collaborate with were now just a train ride away.

Look at the map again: this new technology could get you from New York to Chicago in a day and a half.

And within 10 years of this map, you’d be able to cross the entire continental United States in four days. In the space of one lifetime, someone who grew up without having access to people further than a horse-ride away could now cross the entire continent.

This pattern was repeated with the telegraph, then the telephone, automobiles, airplanes — and then the big one: the Internet. In each case, the world became smaller and your world became bigger, with the means to collaborate and communicate over distance becoming more accessible to everyone.

Right now, if you were in New York and needed to collaborate with someone in Chicago, and you wanted to be able to walk around in 3D space, refer to the same objects as if you were in the same room, see their facial expressions, hear their voice spatially and know exactly how far away, and at what angle from you, they are standing… it’s all possible. You don’t need 6 weeks and a horse or 36 hours and a train, you need 6 seconds and a headset. This is available off-the-shelf, right now, today.

Today, access to the world-shrinking, life-expanding technologies of remote presence permeates our homes, our schools, and our workplaces. We do video calls with our doctors, our friends, we attend conferences and lectures and participate live from our living rooms. More and more people work in remote or hybrid situations, seeing quality of life improvements and increased flexibility like the world has never known.

That brings us to a new entrant into the roster of world shrinking technologies that hopes to be enshrined in the annals of history alongside the train and the telegraph: immersive, co-present devices.

The Internet of Immersive Co-Presence

Okay… I’ll say it: the Metaverse. The technology behind what we call VR, AR, XR, MR is a new, fungible general computing platform that allows us to make the world smaller, and our presence in it larger, by doing something that has, so far, only been possible when traveling by train, plane, or automobile: letting you feel “there” and present with someone who isn’t in your direct geographic location. By combining the sensory cues from vision, hearing, and proprioception, XR technology creates an illusory shortcut that your subconscious readily perceives as “true” if not “real.”

This isn’t to say that it is a perfect, or even convincing, illusion from the technical point of view. Legless, cartoonish avatars float about, their arms sometimes contorting into spaghettified appendages that would earn them a spot on the Fantastic Four, with facial expressions simulated by an algorithm if you’re not wearing one of the Quest Pro units with eye and expression tracking, which few of our participants were.

And yet, these are temporary technological hurdles that are already showing rapid improvement at a rate that will someday be just a footnote in the history of immersive co-presence, soon to be relevant only as a whimsical memory of the “olden days” of VR. Ask yourself: can you accurately describe iOS 1 on the first iPhone? Do you remember what it could, or could not do? At the time, Apple was heavily criticized for releasing such a device and software package that seemed so lacking, compared to the more mature ecosystem of the Blackberry-like smartphones.

We know where that led, and we want to be part of the movement that stays the course and realizes that the future is in front of us, not behind us. Today, given this new near-superhuman ability to instantly be remotely co-present with someone else, Mural asks the question, again: If work isn’t a place, but what we accomplish together, how can we accomplish things together — and better — by leveraging this immersive technology?

Mural and the Future of Collaborating Intelligently

Mural has spent the last decade bringing people together and fostering collaboration through its virtual whiteboard product, and the impact of this work is evidenced by the thousands of customers and millions of users who relied on the product throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Overnight, knowledge workers across the globe were sent home, and the difference between the companies who had the right tools in place, and who didn’t, became clear. Mural became an indispensable tool for remote teams, creating the place where work happens regardless of one’s physical location on the planet.

Over the following three years, companies shifted back and forth between full remote and hybrid, never sure where things were going to land, and at the same time the mindset toward where people can work shifted towards location autonomy and “work from anywhere”. It was clear that remote and hybrid work wasn’t just feasible at scale, for many it was preferable; desirable, even.

In parallel, the XR experienced an unprecedented investment in the technology and application when Facebook Technologies changed its name to Meta, and went all-in on developing the tools and hardware so other companies could create these new spaces for people to play, work, and gather. One such company was Mighty Coconut, makers of smash-hit (pun intended) Walkabout Minigolf.

And it was this game, Walkabout Minigolf, that helped bring a handful of Mural employees together to start to answer that question “how can we accomplish things together — and better — by leveraging this immersive technology?” We had discovered that, even as a remote-first company already, meeting and talking in these virtual spaces offered something no video conferencing tool or virtual whiteboard has been able to: the illusion of co-presence. So much so, in fact, that the Wall Street Journal joined us for a round of minigolf to talk about the future of work in Virtual Reality. Read a copy of that article here.

It is this inspiration that Mural’s XR team took on the quest to become not a VR app team, but the “bringing people together regardless of distance” team, just like those trains and planes of the 19th and 20th century did. As such, we aren’t in the business of making VR apps, we’re in the business of heralding a new era of connection, collaboration, creativity, and convenience. We just happen to be using XR to do it.

Mural XR’s eX(R)plorations so far

This brings us to the latest in Mural’s adventures in defining the future of work, with VR as a tool to bring people together for intelligent collaboration. This was our third public event where we took an aspect of this future of work, and conducted a VR-based series of activities with real people, customers and non-customers alike. Using Meta’s new “Horizon Worlds” worldbuilding app available on the Quest 2 (and now, Quest Pro), we were able to quickly spin up virtual words and create playable, testable “games for work” without having to invest in a fully-featured native application. It was rapid experimentation and deep customer empathy at its finest.

In February of 2022, we partnered with Voltage Control to help professional facilitators see how VR could be a tool used in their facilitation practices. It was somewhat of a “first time” for everyone and we weren’t quite sure what would translate and resonate when taking real-world facilitation and collaboration methods and porting them over to VR, but since this was a largely undocumented space where there were few preexisting examples, we just did it and learned as we went!

🔗 Watch the roundup video of this first event on Linkedin! 📹

Then, in June of 2022, we took it a step further and opened the event up to the public, giving it a hackathon-style format we called a “game jam” where participants learned to build and explored the facets of co-present collaboration in VR. One of our consultants and special guests was Mighty Coconut’s art director, Don Carson, a former Disney Imagineer and theme park designer. Don helped us understand the value of placemaking and immersion, and how the environment can have as much an influence on the experience as the activities themselves. Hear Don talk about this for 50 minutes during our VR fireside chat that took place on an asteroid ranch we built just for the event by reading the roundup article here.

The response to this June event was both thrilling and beyond our expectations, and it led to an ongoing relationship with Meta, the owners and makers of the Horizon Worlds platform we were using to create these events. Meta has the technology and resources to develop the VR and MR headsets (presently, the Quest 2 and Quest Pro), and Mural has the expertise, drive, and ingenuity to take what we’re the best at — collaborative intelligence, facilitation, and bringing people together to be creative regardless of distance — and apply it to the possibilities VR offers.

Which brings us to the 2022 Mural Fall Carnival.

Welcome to the Mural Fall Carnival!

Mural’s approach to XR and immersive co-presence is rooted in the values of the company at large: collaborative intelligence and making places where people accomplish things together. This means that our measure of successful facilitation is based on the success of the participants. The technological feats for this have already been accomplished by Meta through the Horizon Worlds app and the Quest devices; our goal was to prove that people can use them to have rich, meaningful, collaborative experiences with and without facilitators, not just equal to video conferencing tools, but better.

And what does “better” mean to us? Better means the human connection and sensory experience offers something that neither a real-world conference room, nor a video call, can offer: a blend of the interaction between people in a meaningful activity, and the magic that VR allows by making location and the laws of physics (and cost of materials, travel, etc.) less relevant.

It is a case where the third option that blends both the pros and cons of the two alternatives can end up being a independent and uniquely viable option all on its own, and in fact in some use cases surpass the alternatives. Mural absolutely believes we are entering an era of work where in the coming years, XR-based communication and collaboration will be the go-to choice, not the fringe exception.

Our research plan coalesced around testing how people would react to certain aspects of collaboration, connection, and facilitation in environments that were the VR embodiment of Mural’s long-standing commitment to “games for work,” where the collaboration isn’t left to chance. We designed our experiences to test the human psyche; how would people engage with the worlds, with the activities, and with each other? What would and wouldn’t work, for whom, and why?

This ladders up to one of the concepts that Jim Kalbach (our Chief Evangelist) has been promoting for many years, which is “Jobs to be Done.” Jobs to be Done, or JTBD, is a huge topic, but we can sum up our usage for this event by asking a single question: what would someone be hiring these VR experiences to do for them? Our hypothesis was to test different “reasons” you might hire a workplace VR app, and then see how people reacted. It was “say vs. do” hypothesis testing, and no matter how much we speculated, we needed to see it happen and watch the dance of human engagement live.

That’s what informed our building of the Mural Fall Carnival and the eight concepts which would tease out the impact of those different facets (and spoiler alert: there were an additional six concepts submitted by our guests!)

If we couldn’t create “new” feelings and ways of doing things in VR, it would never beat the board room or the video call. It can’t just be equal, it has to offer its own benefits and be superior in some way.

The Fall Carnival — How

Internally at Mural, we collaboratively brainstormed facets of what we wanted people to experience, and what activities could fulfill that. Taking from our deep knowledge of collaboration and facilitation, including resources from our Luma System, we chose ten different aspects of collaboration, communication, and facilitation to enable through VR “collaboration game” concepts to build and code in Horizon Worlds.

We knew we wanted to test the limits of how embodiment, requiring movement in space, and engagement with the environment with fellow participants, enhanced the goal for each concept. We also wanted to help people build cognitive maps of “where” they are and “where” things happen, which is a concept well developed in the Method of Loci theory (a concept codified by Cicero some 2000 years ago, but undoubtedly only as a description of what humans have been doing for the entirely of human existance).

We also wanted to include a healthy amount of narrative and role-play to move things away from being a unidirectional “lecture”, and change it into a bidirectional series of interactive events where the object of interaction was other people, not the enabling props or environment. This is consistent with Mural’s ethos that work isn’t a place, or a tool, or a process, but what people accomplish together.

Sticking with our ongoing habit of theming our VR events around an environmental metaphor, and since it was going to occur around Halloween, we decided that these concepts would be presented as a Fall Carnival of exhibits. These would be visited sequentially and then voted on by the participants, and would be an active learning, participatory research experience for both us and them.

Setting the tone for an immersive experience

The Mural Fall Carnival started in an autumn-themed farmland, with candy-striped tents, corn stalks, and witches hats lined up to greet our guests. Part of what we were testing in our hypothesis was the effect of environment and theme on the “believability” of being somewhere that wasn’t sitting in your home office wearing a headset on your face. The quickest way to shortcut that suspension of disbelief is a solved problem: ever wondered why some movies, regardless of budget, draw you in, and others don’t?

It’s suspension of disbelief that makes that choice, and the way to do that is to create a narrative the human mind craves — and as the Epic of Gilgamesh carved into tablets 4000 years ago proves, it’s not a technical feat that transports someone’s mind to a “new place”, but a feat of storytelling. Each of our VR carnival concepts were not just to demonstrate a concept, but to make you forget you weren’t “there” in the first place.

If the concepts only demonstrated an aspect of collaboration and facilitation, but didn’t convince the participant’s subconscious to suspend disbelief and be present in the environment, then the experience becomes a novelty rather than a viable new place where meaningful interaction can flourish.

Let’s take a look at these concepts, our hypothesis for each, and then we’ll get to the responses from our attendees.

The Carnival Grounds

The landing zone for everyone entering the event was the carnival grounds. Attendees were greeted by an autumn night in the countryside, windmills and hay bales in the hills beyond. Tents lined the perimeter that led to each of the concepts, surrounding a pair of stealth concepts we’d built into this lobby-like environment.

First was a massive “body polling” station where a pair of competing concepts were randomly flashed on signs at each end of a segmented platform. We didn’t tell anyone what this was or how it worked, but it was clear that something was going on. As people filed into each session and saw the station, they would instinctively follow their curiosity and step onto the platform and see the large meter above it tip in one direction or another. The more people on either side, the more the needle moved.

Suddenly, a small crowd became larger as people voted with their bodies on Pepsi vs. Coke, Cats vs. Dogs, The Movie vs. The Book, or Pineapple on Pizza vs. No Pineapple.

Did you see the trick here? With no instruction, no complicated mechanisms, and no request to engage with the environment, people were suddenly primed to be present. They wanted to race to stand on the Pepsi end of the platform vs. the Coke, and any thoughts of being in a headset or home office vanished as people colluded with each other and raced back and forth to make sure dogs won over cats.

And we hadn’t even started the event yet! This is the suspension of disbelief we were going for, hooking people into a moment of communication and collaboration (to make sure your side won) without calling attention to“being in VR”: you were just there, and the emphasis on using the virtual body helped participants psychologically take ownership of it.

Now that we’d started that process of moving people’s minds from the physical-world reality of their home offices and living rooms and into the virtual-world reality of the Mural Fall Carnival, the real engagement and co-creative experience could begin.

Concept 1: Rose Thorn Bud

The first stop on the carnival tour was our Rose Thorn Bud concept. This was a lightweight, starter concept that took the popular retrospective activity where highlights were placed as Roses, lowlights or pain-points as Thorns, and new ideas or opportunities as Buds. Typically, these are sticky notes put into a Mural canvas, or could be real-world sticky notes stuck to a wall.

However, in our VR concept, the simulated city-park environment served as the canvas, with picnic tables and rose bushes color-coded to match the sticky notes. The host playing the role of facilitator explained the event and demonstrated how it would work, and participants each could comment and take a turn. The goal of this concept was to try porting over a popular and successful framework into an interactive VR environment and see what happens when we let people act “within” the activities framed in 3D space.

Turns out, the learnings here acted as a great control group. While the activity itself has proven merit in its traditional format, without real content and real team members to interact with, the core value was lacking, and the virtual sticky notes were an underwhelming contrast to the virtual environment, taking people out of the moment and unsuspending their disbelief.

It was an important learning experience for us. An activity like this required far more real world context and interaction than a simulation could provide. And, like good scientists, we took this as a positive, learning about something that didn’t work as well as hypothesized and taking those insights back with us.

And that’s okay! We still had seven more concepts to learn from.

Concept 2: The Wilderness Campfire

The next concept was one with no prescribed activity or structure, only a dark forest night and glowing campfire. Participants teleported into the world and were greeted by the chirp of insects, a dark sky, and a small bunny rabbit hopping about. On a nearby camping table, a flashlight and lantern waited.

Instantly, people grabbed the props and formed a circle around the campfire. Any suspension of disbelief we lost in the previous concept snapped back into place as people began holding the flashlight under their avatar’s chins, telling stories, and conversing around the fire. On small plaques near the ring of stones encircling the burning logs were suggestions of different conversation topics or games. For most of our sessions, however, no prompts were needed as people were eager to discuss what they were experiencing and the contrast between the previous world and where they were now.

That was a magical moment; people were doing the thing the concept was meant to encourage. Having a productive conversation that brought people together around a fire the same way we’ve gathered since the discovery of human-made fire itself.

The attention of attendees was captured once again, simply by letting their minds settle into a place where the environment and context made the space. It fulfilled the same requirement in any collaborative organization or team: a venue that is conducive to meaningful communication, focuses attention, and encourages sharing.

In each session we led through these events, pulling people away from the campfire required several gentle prompts from the hosts. People simply forgot about time and that they were supposed to be on a schedule, and simply wanted to be present around the campfire with a purpose-driven conversation.

Concept 3: The Sailboat Retrospective (on a Sailboat)

For the third concept, we wanted to experiment with the power of blending the literal with the metaphorical. The Sailboat Retrospective is a popular tool that can help a team look back and identify different aspects of a project or time span: what helped (wind in your sail), what was in your way (rocks up ahead), what was your goal (the island in the distance), and what slowed you down (the anchor below).

We built an actual sailboat with space for everyone to gather on, with another miniature sailboat on the deck to act as the activity zone at arm’s-length, while also allowing people to generate ideas on sticky notes and place them on the actual sailboat.

There was an easter-egg in all this, one that changed the entire nature of the experience. During each session, invariably one person would manage to fall overboard… and discover that the entire underwater part of the world was fully fleshed out and navigable. Once one person heard or saw the splash, others would jump in and discover that there was an actual chain and anchor hundreds of feet below, and that a “deep dive” on the topic could be conducted amid an actual deep… dive.

One delightful side effect of this “world scale” experience was a comment about the anchor that stretched from the boat to the underwater space far below: anchors don’t slow you down, anchors keep you safe. What a wonderful twist on the metaphor-turned-real as we all gathered around the anchor in our diving helmets below.

Once again, it was this type of delighter that surprised both us and them. It wasn’t just that we could do a Sailboat Retro on an actual Sailboat, it was that when you wanted to do that deep dive, you could jump in the water where a diving helmet magically appeared on your head, and in the depths were the world above vanished, you could focus on a topic and feel the comfort, or terror, of the grimy deep. And like the campfire experience before, the hosts had to remind people we still had five more concepts to go and needed to keep moving.

Concept 4: The Question and Answer Genie

The next stop on the exhibits was a simple game adapted from several common workplace icebreakers where people are given a random question and invited to answer. Some were silly questions like “What is your most bizarre food craving?” Other questions were intense like “When did you last cry in front of another person? Why?”

The concept itself was simple: people could pick up one of three different shaped and color-coded objects (representing their “intensity”), and toss them into the genie’s fire. A question only they could see would appear in their field of vision, at which point they could choose to answer or not. But there was a catch: each time an object was thrown into the fire, the flames would change color to match the question’s intensity: green, blue, or red. If you saw a red tint appear and didn’t hear an answer, you knew someone had chosen to remain silent.

Now, remember, Mural is doing this for the first time just like our participants, being good scientists and just letting things happen and observing. It turns out, we didn’t have to give instructions for this game. Within moments of entering the world, people would see the enticing bins of colorful objects, and experiment to see that they were grabbable. It doesn’t take much to infer that the giant roaring bonfire a few feet away might be a good target for said objects. The curious people would try it, and see the flames change color. Then, someone would speak aloud the question, and answer it. This caused others to try and do the same.

Suddenly, everyone was grabbing objects, tossing them in, answering their questions, laughing, cringing, cowering… all without any instruction or prompt. There was no sense of being in a demo or a research project, they were there, present in this embodied activity, not interacting with the fire and the genie, but with each other.

The secret ingredient wasn’t our concept or the technical utility of VR, it was the delightful realization and suspension of disbelief that you could actually believe you were somewhere else with people doing something that would have been impossible otherwise. The participants were hundreds and thousands of miles apart, some on different continents, and yet strangers were now friends as they tossed question totems in the fire.

Hmmm… sounds a lot like what happened when suddenly you could travel further than a horse could take you in a day by boarding a train. Something out of reach was now possible, and at no point were there any comments about the fidelity or realism. Even if you were to recreate the game on a video call, you can’t gather around a fire with a genie’s lamp and see the colored firelight reflecting on the people standing next to you, hear their voice, watch their body language as they realize they got the question about their first kiss; and in a physical-world scenario, you can’t have a color-changing fire where magical questions appear only to you without anyone else knowing, giving you the agency to answer or not.

And just like that, this VR concept did something new and novel that neither alternative could do alone. The VR experience, in this case, wasn’t a poor substitute for either a conference room or a video call, it was something new entirely, a desirable third toption.

But… let’s keep moving, we still have four more concepts to explore.

Concept 5: The Thinking Hats

This concept was a facilitation tool to be used within the context of a larger conversation or activity, something that could be summoned as needed if a facilitator or activity required additional structure or guidance.

In this case, it was Dr. Edward Debono’s “Thinking Hats” exercise. Being effective in your job doesn’t always mean you know how to be effective as a facilitator, and often in groups with a healthy feeling of equality and democracy, people may be called upon to fill roles they aren’t experienced or comfortable with. The thinking hats help guide people toward specific properties of a discussion, letting them focus on just a slice of the overall breadth of potential perspectives.

The hypothesis we had here was a blend of narrative and the Proteus effect, best summed up as: when a person takes on the physical or representational traits of an avatar — such as a color-coded hat with instructional clipboard — they will feel empowered to take on the behavioral traits of the role they are playing.

We built six color-coded hats and clipboards and placed them in a storefront, allowing people to see them and go inside and become curious. The labels of each hat were clear, and the instructions prompted each person to adhere to a specific way of thinking: creativity, benefits, feelings, process, facts, caution.

However, this won’t work without a narrative goal, so our hosts created a roleplay where the attendees with the hats were presented with a problem they needed to discuss, but only from the perspective of their hat’s cause. This was another activity where the lack of a real team and problem could have hurt the process, but it still proved effective and resilient: the act of constraining one’s thinking to the facet of the hat encouraged the intentional use of a technique and guided the mindset and behavior.

Even though the narrative and request in this concept were fictitious, the muscles being exercised were real. The color-coded hats were a strong reminder of how group dynamics can be shaped, and how facilitation tools can take something lacking structure and add enough of a framework to make meaningful forward progress in a discussion.

Concept 6: This or That Showdown

The sixth concept was an experiment in taking a common, standardized methodology and building an interactive experience that produced the same output. In this case, we utilized one of the Luma System’s most versatile frameworks, the prioritization matrix. With the matrix, criteria are evaluated along an axis in something like a stack rank, with each axis typically being sorted individually. This is then interpreted on a two-by-two grid, and you get the classic four quadrant matrix that balances two axis criteria like effort vs. impact, or speed vs. difficulty.

Leaning on the advice of one of our Luma pro facilitators, we iterated on the idea of having a 1-vs-1 comparison of single items against each other. Each item would have the chance to be ranked higher or lower than the others, and at the end a stack would appear that could be applied to the axis.

What better way to create an interactive experience of ranking two sticky notes at a time than creating a full-blown boxing ring arena? The “This or That Showdown” was born.

The environment of this activity was meant to elicit an overwhelming sense of excitement and presence, to contrast with the simplicity of the task: see two opposing criteria presented to you and evaluate them based on the prompt, then push the large, color-coded button right in front of you!

We themed all the data around being on a superhero team, with prompts like “power best suited for helping during natural disasters” as the axis, and then the criteria would be presented two at a time. Mind-control vs. Super Strength, for example. By being forced to choose one or the other, the stack ranking happened in the background, and were this a fully fleshed-out and coded VR app, the prioritization matrix would be created for you as you went, and ported out to your Mural canvas.

This was another concept that had some polarizing feedback. The environment was rich and immersive, but could feel overwhelming and “too much” for a simple exercise. On the other hand, the utility of being able to focus and be “facilitated” by the activity was an appreciated factor, since the normal method of using the prioritization matrix on a two-by-two grid is often misunderstood, and this helped keep the method on track and focused.

Plus, it was a chance to see how people reacted to purpose-built environments that were rich and elaborate, as one of the unknown factors of what makes a VR-based experience more desirable than its comparatively simpler, but less engaging, counterparts.

Concept 7: Precarious Peril

Concept seven was a test of a known experience, tweaked for VR purposes. Mural is a popular tool for icebreakers, warmups, and other games that can be played at work, as it is a flexible canvas where multiplayer interaction is easy and fun. One of the templates that is most popular for these types of large-team games is a “quiz show” template that may or may not be similar to a certain TV game show where you’re in jeopardy if you don’t present your answer in the form of a question.

We present “Precarious Peril,” the game where you are given a clue and answer in the form of a question. The hypothesis here was testing if we get the same sort of engagement and enjoyment from a proven Mural template taken into VR. Obviously, we did not invent the game or change any of the rules of this popular game show, and the environment was built to be as close to a real TV studio as possible.

Participants entered and the game began, as did the surprises. We quickly learned that while some people were fully engaged and excited to have their chance on the big stage, some were reluctant to be in the spotlight and forced to answer questions. This touched on the notion of peer pressure and social anxiety, where most ice breakers and warmups were more round-robin, show-and-tell style, Precarious Peril put people’s anxieties in jeopardy by bringing the singular attention of the groups to the contestants.

It was good learning for us at Mural. While these large-team experiences, games, and warmups might be well-received when on a 2D Mural canvas and people are safe behind the protective layer of the webcam video conferencing grid, being on an actual stage, standing at the podium, and having the host call on you was an experience some love, and some hated. And this is a great facet for us to remember about the implications of co-present, immersive experiences: while the game of Precarious Peril might have functioned the same as it does in the 2D Mural template, the added factor that VR of being “there” on the stage, facing the host, with the audience behind you, introduces an entirely new psychology we have to consider.

What does one do when the safety of the video conferencing grid is gone and you’re simply there with others?

Concept 8: Sculptionary Creative Expression

Our final Mural-created concept ended the tour with a breath of simplicity and calm. Taking from several different simple icebreaker and team building activities, we wanted to make something where there was no structure, no time limit, and no rules: just easy, intuitive creativity. Out of this intent, Sculptionary was born.

The concept here was to give people simple primitive shapes, some buckets of paint, and a few intentionally constrained tools to change scale and length. From there, it was up to the individual to use their imagination to create an exceptionally simple sculpture to express a thought or idea.

This is another proven method used in workplaces in many different formats, from using LEGO, to spaghetti sticks and marshmallows, to simple improv games with no props at all. The big learning for us, however, was how quickly people began building things, observing each other, and having fun and treating this concept as if it were actually happening.

As with all the concepts we built, we were always testing a consistent hypothesis about what makes an experience succeed in suspending disbelief. Sculptionary was another that rose to the top of that list. Where some of the other concepts elicited a response where the participants were more play-acting and cooperating than they were really engaged, with Sculptionary they were actually engaged without needing to play-act. No one was pretending or roleplaying how they would act with this activity, they were really doing it.

There were no headsets, no polygons, no research projects, all of that faded away as people became immersed in this exceedingly simple, but sophisticated, activity of co-creation and play. And, like Mural’s Creative Scientist and worldbuilder Paul Tomlinson says each session, “play disarms fear.” Sculptionary proves both of our hypotheses: play does disarm fear, and active creative engagement with other people is quicker to immerse someone in a VR event than engagement with props or the environment.

Sculptionary was so popular, in fact, that one of the participants brought their team back later to conduct a real creative work session. How’s that for proof-in-the-pudding?

The Winter Carnival: A tour of the customer submissions!

With the main, Mural-created concepts successfully demonstrated during the first week of events, the call went out to our participants to submit their own ideas that Mural’s pro Horizon Worlds worldbuilders would create for them, and then Mural would facilitate inviting all our participants back to experience these user submissions at the re-themed Mural WINTER Carnival in early November!

And what submissions they were! While Mural didn’t have a formalized hypothesis for these, each submission had an intent and outcome we wanted to observe.

User-Submission 1: Jim’s Tower Building

Participant Jim proposed recreating the “reverse jenga” style of tower building activity in VR, similar to the marshmallow challenge. Teams of three were formed, with each team trying to work together to build the tallest block tower. There was a timer and an automatic height meter giving constant pressure, as well as the noise and action of the other nearby teams!

This was another example of a concept that became the “real thing” as soon as it started. No one here had to pretend to be building a tower with their small team, they really were. Shouts, laughter, and cries of encouragement could be heard in the large geodesic-dome room, and all notion of being in a headset or piece of software was gone; again, people were present and believed what they were doing was actually happening.

User-Submission 2: Alpine Hike Memory Game

Participant Clara’s submission was next. Combining conversation with subtle memory cues, the Alpine Memory Hike was a structured experience that let teams get to know each other through a planned series of “icebreaker” questions of increasing personal disclosure, all while wearing alpine hiker backpacks with color-coded sleeping bags.

Upon reaching the final summit and mountaintop lodge, teammates were surprised with a “spin that wheel” where a color that corresponded to the sleeping back color would indicate which other teammate’s answers they had to remember. This doubled down on the original question and answer game by forcing recall, and the team members collaborated to piece together the correct answer.

This activity was purely focused on the other team member’s statements and stories, with the memory component forcing everyone to think of what the person said, not anything to do with the environment itself. While low-tech with regards to the execution, it was high-engagement due to the usage of memory and the content generated by the other human players: their story. This was a consistent finding in that any time people interacted with other people–vs. Interactive with a prop or environment — the delight, retention, and engagement was more pronounced.

User-Submission 3: Not-quite-LEGO Serious Play

Participant Christine was trained and experienced in LEGO Serious play: “The LEGO SERIOUS PLAY®” method is a facilitated thinking, communication and problem solving technique for use with organizations, teams and individuals.” While we couldn’t replicate it exactly, the spirit was there.

This activity adapted the fundamental benefit and value into an experience inside of Horizon Worlds where players progressively used creative skills in a series of stations, ending in a combined station where the creations could be viewed and discussed as part of the process.

The combination of a recognizable brand with an activity that encouraged a playful, creative process stood out as people were able to discover the creative abilities in each station and see how they built on one another, and how the final surprise at the end with the large-scale rendering of the creations floating massive out over the ocean was a major delighter. One aspect of this concept, as was seen in the Sculptionary concept, was that heads-down creative work renders people silent as they think, draw, sculpt, create, or paint, which is a salient point to remember when designing concepts meant to foster discussion. If an activity requires quiet work or contemplation first, the energy level and attitude would need to be recalibrated with something else to redirect energy from outward to inward.

User-Submission 4: Sales pitch training simulator

Not to be outdone by other popular simulation games, like driving a truck or farm equipment, Participant Mark submitted a fully-featured series of escalating scenarios where one pitches their company to potential parties of interest, based on a training course the submitter does in their real world work.

Progressing from an elevator, to a coffee shop, to a board room, to seats on an airplane, to a large auditorium, the participants received text instructions on how they should outline their pitch, with recordings of simulated conversation starters from their mannequin partners. In addition to the participant experience, each station had a 1-way mirror where the other “coaches” could watch and listen, invisible to the participant.

Even as a simulation of a simulation, the impact on the participants was striking and instantly noticeable. Even while roleplaying, the act of having an environment, a mannequin prop, and a coaching script helped people detach from their anxieties in the moment and give the rehearsal a real shot. The visual cues combined with the instructions and pre-recorded conversation allowed people to instantly feel real emotional reactions to the simulated vignettes, which was a surprise to all of us. A wonderfully effective concept that had some of the most vocal interest in a follow-up.

User-Submission 5: 1–2–4-All Jungle Adventure

Our fifth submission comes from Participant Chris, a professional facilitator who had an idea to use an existing activity adapted to a larger-than-life VR environment.

1–2–4-All is a formal exercise where participants start out in silent, solo contemplation about a question, having the time to work out an idea on their own. When the time is up, they’re joined with a partner to discuss and combine and iterate on their idea as a duo. When the time is up again, one duo then joins another, and the conversation grows as the ideas are combined again, and again, in a bracket-like system where the final conversation involves the ideas from everyone.

This format gives everyone the same opportunity to share and listen, and we combined that with a series of jungle caves and rivers that came together as each stage progressed.

Adapting real-world activities that normally relied on the imagination to enforce their flow felt particularly well-suited for VR. The 1–2–4-All jungle adventure was immediately effective at guiding people through a structured process, where space and isolation guided the thinking and idea-combination process, offloading those cognitive tasks from the individual to the environment, a recurring pattern we observed through the breadth of concepts.

User-Submission 6: Conversation Fishbowl

To moderate the amount of time spent speaking in a structured conversation, the conversation fishbowl adapts the concept to having a “budget” of minutes in the form of a SCUBA tank, and each second spent speaking reduces your available oxygen. As everyone has the same amount of oxygen divided evenly from the total time available, everyone has the same amount of time. Submitted by Participants Anya & Catherine, this was a multi-purpose concept to be used as a facilitation tool alongside many other concepts as an addon.

The fishbowl and the oxygen tanks help everyone have their statements heard in the discussion, but also helps train people who over- or under-talk to monitor their surplus or deficit in oxygen and contribute more or less. For discussions that need light guidance but want to encourage equal participation, the fishbowl is a way to put the onus of timekeeping on the props and environment instead of a person as timekeeper.

The visualization of the budget of time left to speak, and the feedback of how much others have, or have not, spoken (shown as bubbles rising from tanks in use) is a novel way to move the burden of timekeeping from an individual to the process itself. While the effect was constrained by Horizon’s scripting limits, the parts that did work were instantly recognizable and understandable by the attendees.

The difference between Mural’s and User’s Concepts

One of the biggest takeaways from the user submissions were how different they were from what Mural had created. Where our concepts were driven to test facets of a hypothesis and specific ways people reacted, the user submissions were a wonderful shift toward more holistic, complete experiences that each would have been standalone “games for work” in their own right.

This was another important learning for Mural. Seeing what early adopters submitted as concepts of “VR for Work” painted a picture of where minds go when envisioning a future they’d like to see brought to life in VR.

And to add to our growing pile of evidence that VR can be a 3rd alternative alongside in-person and video-conference, each submission carried a special nuance where the same experience could not be had in a real-world conference room or on a video call. For each concept, the VR version allows you to do things neither traditional alternative does. It’s not a watered-down compromise, it’s a blend of paradigms that, when combined, make something greater than the individual pieces.

Video calls lack the presence, embodiment, and immersion.

Conference rooms lack the magic, theming, environment, and the “laws-of-physics-breaking” capabilities.

And… if this is true, then the XR-enabled teams of the future may opt to put on their devices regardless if they are in-person or remote, as these technologies offer something that can only be obtained by blending access to both embodied, real-world experiences and the XR technologies that are evolving by the minute.

It’s YOUR turn to join us…

Overall, Mural as a company and we on the XR team could not have been happier with the results. Not only did it work, it surpassed our expectations. Our NPS score was a 71, and immediately we had participants asking if they could visit some of the worlds with their teams… one going so far as to hold their remote-company Christmas party in one of the concepts!

As for our research, we got more data and insights than we could have hoped for, and many hypotheses refined, refuted, or given enough evidence that we can choose to roll that into our ongoing development work on our own native VR app currently in development.

That’s right: Mural is working on their own VR experience for use in the workplace, and it goes far beyond just virtual whiteboarding. The learnings we took from all the VR research events we conducted throughout 2022 are being rolled into our design and development efforts.

Want to be a part of our ongoing explorations in VR and our February event?

➡️ Use this link to let us know ⬅️ and soon we’ll be posting what we have in store for this next VR event, which is going to include some exclusive beta-testing of our native VR app! You will be among the first to see what we’re up to, so sign up and let’s all go on this Metaverse adventure together!

See you there!

A big thanks to Meta for helping us navigate the ever-evolving world of VR, for their hardware, and giving us support to conduct this exploration and adventure. And another big thanks to everyone who showed up to participate. We are confident that when our VR is ready and released, it will be something that takes everything we’ve learned and creates what we hope will be the world’s best-in-class VR for work experience.

Mural has long believed that creative collaboration, co-equal contribution, and instant convenience leads to better ideas, quicker progress, and an overall more human experience. This has been seen for the past decade in our virtual whiteboard product, and we hope to continue to champion that ethos is our VR products.

Because work isn’t a place, it’s what we accomplish together. And if we can accomplish things together, better, despite distance and disconnection, then maybe VR and the Metaverse can be a viable new option for where that accomplishment takes place. We certainly think so.

Mural, Metaverse, and Your Future of Boundaryless Collaboration in 2023 was originally published in MURAL XR on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

At its core, MURAL is a company whose mission is to connect people with each other, with their inner creativity, and to facilitate collaboration so that the great, wonderful, and hopeful ideas people have make it into the world. The digital collaboration Mural canvas has been one way we do that, unlocking collaboration and productivity beyond the constraints of just a digital whiteboard.

MURAL has always championed the tenets of collaboration and bridging the gap between people, their ideas, and each other. The digital whiteboard tool was one of the first to show you your teammates’ cursors on the screen as they flung sticky notes around with wild abandon, added drawings and pasted screenshots. It was an entirely new dimension of collaboration on the 2-dimensional canvas plane.

But, as technology evolves, so must any organization looking to expand how, when, and where they can serve their customers — and potential future customers. The advent of immersive presence technology (XR = AR, VR, MR) that is affordable and convenient has opened up a new space where collaboration and creativity can take place. A new layer that adds a 3rd dimension… that’s right folks, we’re heading into the MURALverse with this one.

Let us tell you a story about MURAL, Virtual Reality, and a cozy little ranch nestled among the craters of a far-away asteroid.

Dipping a toe into the rapids

In January of 2022, we cobbled together a virtual worldbuilding event in conjunction with the Voltage Control agency’s “Control the Room” facilitation conference in Austin, Texas. The idea was simple: could we take these on-premise groups of facilitators looking to learn new methods and techniques of how to facilitate team dynamics through virtual reality, and show them how to plan, build, and conduct activities in VR?

The options for where this could take place were limited to the only readily available, standalone VR headset: the Meta Quest and the recently released beta of Horizon Worlds, the collaborative worldbuilding VR app also by Meta.

A theme of “four seasons” was put together with some basic guidelines to create reflective, mindful activities that would allow for team communication and participation in VR. The focus wasn’t on the technology, but on how people would react to this application of the technology.

It was a river-rapid experience of figuring out nearly every step of the process, from notifying attendees, to getting them into hardware, to teaching them the basics of using the device and software. In the end, we finished building activities in the Summer and Autumn themed worlds, but for everyone involved, the experience was so novel and unfamiliar we were thrilled to see it work even if it was rough and messy.

🔗 Watch the roundup video of this first event on Linkedin! 📹

This prototype of an event allowed us to succeed at the most important step of any adventure, the first step. But, a first step is only good if it is followed by another, and another…

And it was with that notion, we decided to think big and set our sights on an event of cosmic proportions, which happened to coincide with an evolution of MURAL the company itself.

The Problem of Presence; and an solution

MURAL announced in March a new category we intended to develop and proliferate known as Collaborative Intelligence, defined as: “Collaborative intelligence is a new systematic approach that connects teams to unlock their genius — taking insights and ideas from possibility to reality.”

Taking insights and ideas from possibility to reality… or virtual reality! This second iteration of our VR event was the perfect place to explore this new frontier of virtual presence, connection, and collaboration. With that in mind, the name and theme of our June event was born:

Collaborative Frontiers!

The theme of Collaborative Frontiers was introductions, communication techniques, making new bonds, and reflection. And of course, embracing the “future of work” through the metaphor of space exploration, sci-fi and futurism. This was the milieu, the feeling, the tone. The ask of the participants’ activity was a bit different. We had to continually remind ourselves that we weren’t here to explore how VR tools work; that was a side effect. We were here to find the baseline of how people would collaborate and interact across several different platforms, time zones, schedules, and mindsets, with VR being the central hub and focal point of activity.

The challenge for the experience was stated as: “Use the 2 build weeks to plan and design a VR activity for groups of 5–8 people to spend up to 1 hour experiencing, coordinating with each other asynchronously to meet in VR, Discord, and your team Mural canvas to plan and build.”

MURAL would provide starting world as a template, just a purple, crater-strewn moon where we would meet with the attendees for check-ins and the various keynotes, and the attendees would sort themselves into teams that coincided with Red and Blue (and Green, though that team remained empty in the reserves).

We wanted to have as much of the interaction be “spatial” as we could, meaning that people were not just assigned to teams, they walked themselves to the Red or Blue platform in VR, and there were no breakout rooms for this, we used the natural sound falloff distance to allow groups to speak. You don’t need artificial breakout rooms when groups can simply move further apart until they can’t hear each other.

Active Learning in the Collaboration Enrichment Center

Before we jump into the main activity of the event, we need to take a little detour.

One of the most salient learnings from the first Horizon Worlds event from January was the difficulty curve of getting people who were new to VR, new to 3D modeling, and new to the Horizon Worlds platform (as it has just come out of beta!) up to a baseline effectiveness in building.

The target audience for our VR activities are similar to MURAL’s core audience; facilitators, team leaders, knowledge workers who work in technology or consulting, and those interested in collaboration. While some may have experience in some or all of the facets listed above, few felt comfortable combining all three at once, and there was an additional plot-twist to our effort.

Some of the excited attendees showed up to the VR space after having purchased a Quest at their local big-box store that very day, having never owned any VR devices. One attendee said the Quest was the first gaming console they had owned since an Atari!

Most of the tools and training were designed for people interested in the object creation and gamification elements of VR and Horizon Worlds. Our attendees weren’t part of the normal VR modeling and gaming audience, they were there to explore facilitation skills and Collaboration Design. We knew from the event six-months previous that this was a major barrier… but one we thought we could remove.

The solution? We built what became MURAL’s “Collaboration Enrichment Center” (casually referred to now as the CEC) from scratch, breaking down the core abilities for modeling in Horizon Worlds into discrete, learnable segments, wrapped in a facilitated, collaborative experience that utilized our tenets of Collaboration Design and facilitation as an active-learning experience.

We re-built the major components of the Horizon Worlds UI and visual elements inside of Horizon Worlds itself. Now we had a common frame of reference and visuals that mapped to the experience of the learner that the teacher could refer to. We took each of those visual elements and built the stages around them, and ended up with a seven stage process that consistently took the learners from zero-to-building in under an hour.

The first week of the two-week had bookable slots for our near-60 signups to schedule time with our training facilitators. Slots began to fill, and over the course of a week, 20-something participants showed up, participated, learned, and in the end, walked away with the baseline skills to be able to convert their collaborative ideas from the 2D MURAL canvas to the 3D Horizon World!

The best part: this wasn’t just teaching the fundamentals of Horizon Worlds and VR worldbuilding. It was an active learning experience and demonstration of Collaboration Design, an experiential prototype of working collaboratively, synchronously and asynchronously, from 2D to 3D.

It was a welcome surprise and breath of relief. The feedback from our CEC participants was glowing, not just because they learned the fundamentals of building, but because for almost all of them, it was their first collaborative, professional, and enjoyable experience of the Metaverse.

That’s what we wanted to do, build the bridge in people’s minds from the old ways of collaborating to new ways. VR happened to be the vehicle, but this immersive co-presence and collaboration was the destination.

The Main Event Kickoff

While the training sessions in the CEC were being booked, we were running the program in parallel. In the week leading up to the main event, we sent out video messages with teaser content, entertaining instructional material, and onboarding tips for having a good experience in virtual reality.

One of these videos came from our friends at Mighty Coconut, makers of VR bestseller “Walkabout Mini Golf”, in the form of Don Carson as one of our inspiration partners and presenters. Don is one of the Sr. Creative Directors at Mighty Coconut and for many years worked for Disney theme parks as a park Imagineer, designing the rides and experience in the real-world. Don refers to what he loves as “placemaking” and is applying his skills to virtual reality for the Walkabout Mini Golf courses (which you should really go try, they are incredible).

The spirit of this event was about connection, collaboration, and “placemaking” environments that enhance those goals , with the tools of VR building as a secondary learning experience. Don helped set our sights on the possibilities of what environmental storytelling can do (he’s built a whole museum for it you can go try).

Don’s message to the attendees on the opening day was to think about how environments can tell a story, how place and setting can create a narrative where the sum of the individual elements that make up a place can be much more than the individual parts. This is a critical learning for the future of immersive presence technologies like VR and AR. The technology gets us halfway there, but without thinking through how the virtual — or augmented experiences — create a narrative breadcrumb trail, they will never be more than an extra layer of tech noise. But, when executed with an environment and story-first design mindset, the promise of immersive technology goes from being a gimmick, to being an entirely new platform for collaboration and connection.

Self-organization, teams, and tools

Coordinating strangers across time zones, schedules, ability levels, and even languages was going to be tough. Or… it would have been, were we not already experts in remote collaboration. MURAL is a remote company and strives to be a vanguard in the Future of Work. We wanted this event to be a reflection of ethos.

All attendees were invited to a Discord which afforded us the team chat and video capabilities, and team Murals were created to act as the virtual home-base outside of VR. Asynchronous team communication was the backbone of the event, and MURAL was where that took place. In a future of work where people live apart, work is what is accomplished together. For us, that meant coordinating in MURAL and building in Horizon Worlds.

Taking what we learned from our work with Don and the principles of environmental design, we built a central hub world which we named the MURAL Moonbase as a way to guide the incoming participants to a central location without any instruction or prompting. The environment should “show, not tell” people what to do, meaning the decisions of how to place objects was how we facilitated the event without resorting to explicit instructions.

When it came time to form the teams, we encouraged the attendees to look at the space and self organized into the platforms that were color-coded and arranged in a pattern around the center. The environment told the story, and attendees were able to divide up, balance their skill, and self-organize because of what the space around them implied, without us needing to step it. It encouraged action and movement but kept the locus of control with the individual, not the facilitator.

And remember: this isn’t a real place, each person was sitting at home in their VR headsets. And yet… ask anyone who attended what they remember. Do they recall the room they were in and the headset a mere centimeter from their eyes, or do they recall where they were standing on the moon, who was to their left and right, what Don talked about when he gave his informal keynote or what he talked about during our Asteroid Ranch fireside.

This was the purpose of the event and the crux of MURAL’s perspective of immersive technology. It’s not about the tech or the tools, it’s about the places we can create and experience together. The environment may have been virtual, but the memory of the experience is real, and that’s not just a metaphor, that’s the science of how memory and neurology works. In the memory and experience of an attendee, it wasn’t them sitting in their home office or bedroom with a gadget pressed against their eyeballs, it was a trip to a fantastical old ranch on a crater-strewn asteroid where they sat on neon-pink hay bales and listened to a fireside deep-dive into the principles of environmental design with Don Carson, former Imagineer for Disney theme parks and current Sr. Art Director for Walkabout Mini Golf.

Placemaking and a Fireside Asteroid

As the overall goal of this event was about the experience and finding where our current limitations of transporting people’s sense of presence were, rather than it was about technical tools. With that in mind, at the halfway point of the event’s two-week schedule, we arranged to have Don sit down with us and do an unstructured fireside for the event.

Now, there’s nothing novel or new about having a guest speaker come and motivate and inspire, be it at a conference keynote or a private talk in a corporate meeting hall. And in the present, the likelihood that this sort of engagement would have taken place over video conferencing tools is almost certain; an audience of little tiny box faces starting at a slightly larger box face of someone talking. There’s no presence, there’s no immersion, and the brain — and mind — are unable to separate the moment from their computer screen, their home office, their sense of disconnection.

😞

We couldn’t abide that.

Instead, the weekend before the scheduled fireside, the MURAL worldbuilders created a new location in our virtual ecosystem: the Fireside Asteroid. Using the purple, cratered-moon from the event, we decided that a fantastical Space Ranch would be a great place for a chat.

We built the ranch house, the barn, the stage, the crystalline fire-pit with floating particles. We lined up hay bales, created a basketball court for pre/post talk socialization, a diving pool, and we even built a rocketship that takes you to the asteroid so that your mind accepts the transition from place A to place B, and forgets about the home office, the gadget on your face, or that these avatars you’re hanging out with are avatars.

People arrived, gathered around, arranged (or tossed) the hay bales. They shot a few shots at the hoop while we convened, and then settled in to hear Don talk from his plush, floating easy-chair as the crystal-fire crackled.

Watch the entire 50 minute chat here, your chance to hear from a former Disney theme park Imagineer for free!! ⬇️

Why would we do it this way? Isn’t a video call just the same?

Well… No. We don’t think so.

The human mind has evolved as the most powerful organic computer known to exist, and it relies on the sensory input of sight, sound, and most importantly, relationship to other people and objects in one’s space. The Fireside Asteroid setting, the nearness of other avatars, Don’s voice spatially located on the stage; none of these aspects were just “nice to haves” or window dressing. It was the core of the experience, something that video calls on computer screens cannot — and will not — replicate.

Virtual worlds, real experiences, intelligent collaboration

With hearts full of inspiration and minds full of ideas, our attendees returned to their build worlds to continue their collaboration, using Horizon Worlds, MURAL, and Discord to continue their experiments and explorations as the demo-day approached!

On the Red Team, a spaceship puzzle solving narrative game was being created, utilizing the theme of sci-fi novel series “The Dauntless Gambit” in the form of the story’s main setting, a run-down space barge named Matilda. The Red Team iterated and built in shifts, collaborating asynchronously in the MURAL and Discord, then meeting in VR to create their build. The environment of polygons and sound effects was one part, and the reinforcement of the setting and narrative of the facilitator’s script was the other.

On demo day, the participants were transported to the ship’s main command center and given a series of collaborative tasks as the facilitator play-acted the role of the ship’s captain, guiding them through a series of collaboration exercises and puzzles. As a prototype of an entire collaborative process and workflow, the purpose of the demo-day wasn’t to have a perfect product or air-tight experience (even if the ship itself has functioning airlocks).

Watch a segment of the Red Team world in action! 🎬 ⬇️

As we made our way through the stages and puzzles, everyone present was able to take note of just how present they were, crowded against the metal bulkheads and conduits of the ship, focused on the sense of space and connection with the group, their focus and attention light-years away from their actual, physical surroundings.

At the same time, the Blue Team had been working on their project; a maze-like series of escape rooms that took a lone attendee from an isolated chamber and let them figure out how to proceed to the next room where they would join up with their neighbor, moving from rooms that took one person to solve, to two people, to four, and finally eight. And like the Red Team, the Blue Team was able to plan, iterate, and collaborate on this creation in MURAL and Discord, then build together in shifts in Horizon Worlds.

On demo day, the participants were transported to the fifteen-room complex on the MURAL moon, working together to escape the facility before the planet overhead crashed down to the surface. In a narrative turn of events, the Blue Team had run out of time to finish the 2nd half of the mirror-image moon facility. But, as the purpose of the event was collaboration and narrative immersion design, a last-minute pivot was made: we crashed the planet into the facility, started a huge smokey fire, and let that “ticking clock” act as a narrative driver for the half of the event that had been finished.

Watch a segment of the Blue Team world in action! 🎬 ⬇️

And in the end, that was a much more narratively interesting choice to start the Blue Team’s narrative in medias res! The lived-in state of the level created a narrative tension that helped support the premise of the escape room activity.

What we learned, what went well, what didn’t

Overall, the event succeeded in what it set out to do… being that we had very little precedent by which to compare it! The idea was audacious with plentiful points of possible failure, but in the end, we as MURAL’s XR team believe that the learnings and experiences are something that could not have been done without just diving into this new frontier of collaborative storytelling and connection in virtual reality.

Through the event, the medium, and the message, we were able to test the waters of using VR not as a technical playground, but as a collaborative one. Most of the attendees were not VR technical enthusiasts, modelers, or coders. It was quite the opposite; we had pro facilitators, consultants, program managers, and team leaders. They saw the chance to broaden their horizons and have an active-learning experience first hand, setting aside their biases and preconceptions about VR and collaboration and simply being present in the virtual world, in the Mural canvas, in the Discord chat.

However the future of remote virtual presence and immersion plays out as the different developers of hardware and software trailblaze their way forward, it is an inevitability that these technologies will be available to put to good, moral, ethical use, bridging gaps across distance and presence. At MURAL, we choose to see this new general computing platform as a bridge to enhanced connection, collaboration, and creativity, which in turn allows for greater personal freedom of location, of schedule, of expression.

This is what the power of environment and presence technology offers us, and VR headsets are just a low-cost, easy to access way to tap into that. That is the core tenet behind MURAL’s foray into immersive technology. It’s not that we have these VR headset and are in search of a problem to solve, it’s the opposite. The inability for standard desktop technology to give us the benefit of environment, presence, and connection is a known, unsolved problem in the future of work and hybrid or remote organizations.

The upside to this problem we all will face is that now, we have the ability to short-circuit those problems with this presence technology, with meaningfully designed environments, and with narrative-driven, choreographed experiences that allow people to “be present” from hundreds or thousands of miles apart.

For us, VR is not a “solution looking for a problem.” The problems of disconnectedness, distance, and disillusionment around the “future of work” is something we all face… and we think we’ve found a high-potential answer that just happens to be VR, AR, XR.

It’s not all a Snow Crash dystopia out there in the meta-realities that VR heralds. If you’re feeling down about VR, lonely in your headset, or just want to be creative rather than consume the creations of others on these platforms, reach out. MURAL XR would love to hear from other people who believe in the new, collaborative frontiers these technologies will bring, and for every criticism and warning about VR and this burgeoning new application of technology, we hope to provide a different, optimistic, and ambitious alternative.

Be the change you want to see in the Metaverse.

Sincerely, MURAL XR team.

Special Thanks

This event would not have been possible without the generous help from our VR worldbuilding partners:

• Our friends at Meta—James and Ben—who helped support and coordinate the event and facilitate between the two companies.
• Matthieu Sabourin — Helped coordinate the event, manage the calendars, schedule the program. Thank you Matthieu!
• Paul Tomlinson — Helped design the worlds, program the shuttle, teach a scripting class to the attendees, and just overall make things look and feel so much better!
• Don Carson — For inspiring us, offering his advice and wisdom, and helping us reach for new heights in environmental storytelling!
• Wafflecopters — For giving us advice and inspiration about scripting, gamification, and Horizon Worlds
• All the other MURALISTAS at MURAL who helped test, plan, and coordinate the event, thank you again!

MURAL’s Adventure in the Collaborative Frontiers of XR was originally published in MURAL XR on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hello! After many months (years?!) of prep, Megan Miller and I are here to announce the evolution of Practical Service Design into…

🔥➡️ Practical by Design ⬅️🔥

✅ Bigger mission
✅ Bigger content
✅ Bigger goals!

📣 “Practical by Design presents a new practical way of working, developed on the job from real-world challenges with the aim to transform our work, our careers, our organizations, and our customer’s success. We want to enable you to make bigger impact — faster! — to address the unprecedented challenges we are facing in today’s world.” 📣

👉 Go read the blog post ✏️, watch the video 📽, and we can’t wait to see you in the practical future of work together!

https://blog.practicalservicedesign.com/a-new-era-for-getting-practical-by-design-cabc4d18bde9

It took a bit to figure how how, or if, this was even possible. Turns out, with enough planning and time investment, yes, it is. I had to hire a freelance editor and a separate freelance narrator to pull it off, but we’re up and running now. Soon, you’ll be able to read each new episode or listen to it on any podcast app of your choice.

The chapters/episodes of the serial vary in length, but I try to keep them in the 5000 word range since the narration speed ends up being around 30 minutes. I want people to get around an hour of new content a week, so this is all relative to what it takes to get someone a single installment of 5000 words or around 30 minutes of narration.

At the end of the post there’s a 5 minute preview of episode one of The Dauntless Gambit for you to hear what the end result sounds like!

This is what I actively did today, Sunday May 24th 2020. While The Dauntless Gambit was written all at once over 8 months, August 2018 to April 2019, it sat for a year in hibernation. Now, I take the chapters sequentially and produce them 4 at a time in staggered parallel, here is an example of what the cycle looks like on a day like today (Sunday, May 24th 2020)

• Chapter 10 was completely rewritten, this took 4–5 hours.
• Chapter 9 was tuned-up after having been line-edited and sent off for proofing. This took about an hour.
• Chapter 8 was reviewed for recording and sent in its final form to the narrator. That also took maybe an hour.
• Chapter 7 was listened to and any audio fixes were noted and sent back to the narrator. This took a little less than an hour.

I keep 4 episodes in production. Now that I have sent chapter 10 down the pipeline, I will start in on chapter 11, and the narrator currently has chapter 8, and the editor has chapter 10 to edit and 9 to proof. Since there are 2 of them, they each have 2 episodes at a time, but since there is only one of me, I have 4. This is the only way to produce 2 episodes a week with a 14 day lead time. If I start the process on the 1st of the month, it is ready to be released to the public on the 14th.

Right now, my weeks look like this

• Sunday, I spend most of the day doing the entire workflow as above. Stage an episode for Monday release, rewrite an episode, listen to an episode, revise an episode, and proof an episode.
• Monday, the narrator and editor have these days to work. I don’t have to do anything for the workflow and can do other run-the-business stuff.
• Tuesday, the narrator and editor have these days to work. I don’t have to do anything for the workflow and can do other run-the-business stuff.
• Wednesday, I stage an episode and rewrite an episode. Since this is a weekday and I have a day job, I split some tasks to Thursday.
• Thursday I listen to an episode, proof an episode, and revise an episode, since it is also a day job weekday.
• Friday, the narrator and editor have these days to work. I don’t have to do anything for the workflow and can do other run-the-business stuff.
• Saturday, the narrator and editor have these days to work. I don’t have to do anything for the workflow and can do other run-the-business stuff.

You may be asking “Why not get ahead by doing more on the days you aren’t in the workflow?” Well, because I am also using those days to write an entirely separate book series and need that time to write. Monday, Tuesday, Friday, Saturday are “net new work” days for the other project which is planned for a traditionally-sized novel and audiobook release.

Now, let’s look at the process!

First draft: 7–10 hours

This is the oddball since the first draft of the entire story was already written. But, if I were try take the outline of a chapter and write it from scratch, I put out around 500–800 words an hour. That is very slow. I am a slow writer. I can sometimes go faster, but it’s just not how my brain works.

So, if I were to arrive at a 5000 word chapter, it would have taken me 7–10 hours of sitting and typing. Yeah… it is not fun. I am not a writer who gets a lot of pleasure out of this part. If I were an athlete and storytelling were my sport, the writing of the draft is my mindless hours on the treadmill doing cardio while the outlining, planning, revising, and producing into the final product are the actual sport I want to play. But, this is unavoidable and one of the few things I can’t outsource.

The entire first draft, 320,000 words, is all sitting in the Scrivener word processor like this:

Rewrite: 4–5 hours

As I produce the text and podcast episodes at the time of this writing (May 2020), I now take a chapter at a time and rewrite it and take it through the process with the editor and narrator.

This is now it goes: I print the first draft to a PDF and read it on my iPad with an Apple Pencil stylus and mark it up, like this:

Then, I look at the PDF and the original draft in Scrivener and copy/paste into a new file and rewrite as needed. Some things are good, some are bad, some are totally new. The before/after diff in Scrivener at this phase looks like this:

I then take this new rewrite and run it through the ProWritingAid app which is like spell check and grammar check on steroids, and I send it to the editor. This process is about twice as fast as the original writing, which includes the re-read.

I experimented with trying to do the edit right in Scrivener without the PDF prinout and iPad, but the experience of marking it up with the tablet is just so much easier to think about. My mind processes text on a computer and hands on a keyboard very different than text on a tablet and hand on a stylus.

The iPad Pro 12.9″ and Pencil 2 with PDF Expert — took about 3 years to purchase, but I’ll never go without it again.

Content and structural edit: 2–3 hours

The block of 5000 words then goes to an editor (Hannah at The Storian) who does a read, comment, developmental critique, and line-edit. This takes her around 2–3 hours. She is not only line-editing and moving bad text around, but also leaving me comments in Google Docs about things that don’t make sense, appear out of nowhere, lack context, or somehow were lost in the shuffle.

This is one of the most critical steps because I can’t do her work myself. Even if I were to try, the author’s brain can’t see what the editor sees, just like you can’t smell your own bad breath. Even after all the time I put into the drafting and rewriting, she pulls out things that make me groan and roll my eyes at myself. This is what takes something from “decent” to “pretty good.” Here is the same page now in a comparison diff after it was edited:

Also, for the sake of the process, Hannah is line-editing a chapter and also proofing a different chapter in parallel. The way this workflow works (as you’ll see at the bottom of the article), the editor and narrator each have 2 episodes a week in parallel, and I being alone on the creator side juggle 4: a draft, a revision, a proof, and a script. Twice a week.

Fix and revise: 1 hour

Once I get the edited chapter back, I read and reply to the comments (so she has context for the proofreading) and make the changes. Most of the time, this involves adding content for more context, or re-explaining something I did a poor job at the first time. A lot of this is like a script consultant on a movie set, she’ll tell me “how did this character suddenly pick up a gun?” or “this made it sound like the characters were already on their way to the ship, but then you say they were seated at a booth.”

This is where it starts to feel more real. All the mistakes are being fixed, context is being added, and the narrative really starts to flow smoothly. I add all the changes and send it back to her for a proofreading round (along with the next chapter that needs editing).

Proofreading: 1 hour.

The proofread goes by a lot quicker since the task is not to do more edits. My changes are validated for coherence, but the rest of the text is simply proofed for error, grammar, structure. This is something that could go on and on for infinity, but as I want to release this as a semi-weekly serial and podcast, we can’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

Here’s what this part of the page looks like after a proof:

Narration pre-read: 1–1.5 hours

If you thought I sound like a slow writer, I am even a slower reader. My brain is hard-wired to read at speaking speeds, so I clock-in at around 175–200 words per minute. I’ve tried to learn to go faster, but it really feels like something neurologically constrained.

So, when I get the proofread copy back, I print it to PDF again and read it on the iPad with the Pencil, reading it in the narrator’s voice in my head and looking for anything that slipped past proofreading, but also anything that just won’t sound good when narrated. Narration is a whole different thing. Not only does narrative feel different when spoken vs. read, it’s also something that A) I can’t fix myself since my voice isn’t the narrator’s, and B) is sorta permanent since I can’t just sneak in a text edit once an audio chapter is released like I can with the text pages.

I go over it slowly, sometimes twice, and then just grit my teeth and send the script over with a summary of the feel and tone of the episode. At this point, we’re on a working ranch, if it’s not perfect, at least it’s worth what people are paying for it!

What the narrator gets at this point is what is posted as the text chapter. There’s no real photo to post since it is just a clean, edited Google Doc at this point.

Narration: 1–2 hours.

The is the black box where I just clench my buttocks and wait. As someone who wants to control the entire toolchain, relinquishing control to the narrator is the hardest part.

Thankfully, the narrator Chris Lynch ( here’s his website) somehow peered into my mind and delivers the finished episodes with hardly any corrections needed. 5000 words is about 30 minutes of audio, and usually I have to submit only around 4–5 single-word fixes.

The narration is what makes this a serious product. We’re using all the same tools, hardware, and techniques as any major audio studio. Chris is an experienced narrator with a quality setup, and I have 20 years of digital audio engineering under my belt to produce the finished product (more on that below).

Narration quality assurance and fixes: 1 hour

This is by far the hardest part for me.

Listening back to the narration and reading along to check it for errors floods my body with adrenaline, I am completely on edge and overwhelmed with anxiety. I pull up the text in Scrivener and follow along in Logic, listening for each word as I read.

You know that feeling when you’re watching a child or friend do a performance and you’re just on the edge of your seat? Or you’re watching your favorite Olympic figure skater do a routing and every jump makes you hold your breath? That’s what it feels like. It’s such a strange reaction. I listen in 5 minute bursts and take a minute or 2 break. If a word comes out wrong, I mark down the time and make the note for the revision, and just plow ahead.

The text on top, and the audio file below, listening to every word in real time.

Typically the fixes are just single words, things like adding or removing a pluralization, or reading a word wrong that probably felt correct at the time. Usually I get the punched-in file with the corrects in just a few hours.

Episode processing: 0.5 hour

Thanks to a consistent source file, actually creating the episode is not a lot of work now that I have done the first one. The intro music and outro sounds are all the exact same, all the episodes are in the same Logic Project with each previous episode muted.

Each narration track goes to the same effects bus so the compression, limiting, noise processing, and equalization are all basically the same, and I just tweak what is needed, add my outro, and bounce it all to disk. I purchased music and the bumper sounds I use, so all I do now is drag and drop the narration, tweak it, watch the final output RMS levels, and it’s good to go.

Every episode lined up with the intro music, busses, and repeated intro narration as a single reusable track at the bottom in red.

This is the fun part, getting to finally see something that was once just a miserable task of slogging away at prose so many labor-hours ago now feel like a real-life, premium production.

All together now

Overall, each episode ends up being around 30 minutes of audio and 5000 words, or about 10 pages in a paperback. It takes around around 18–20 hours of labor, meaning the entire book will take around 1200 hours to produce a 30 hour audio story of 320,000 written words.

Of course, half of the upfront time has already been spent in the manuscript writing in 2018, I could never do this at this pace if I had to write the story. My personal weekly time investment per episode is around 10 hours per episode, so I spend 20 hours a week to deliver 2 episodes of the Dauntless Gambit to the readers/listeners, and the editor and narrator contribute the other 6 per episode, or 12 total.

I suppose the current weekly labor investment to deliver a pair of 30 minute audiobook podcast episodes is around 32 hours. Wow.

Want to hear the first 5 minutes of episode one right now, the very words used in the example photos? Here you go!

Hopefully you’re asking both how and why I would do this. Well, hopefully before that you’ve sampled some chapters/episodes and liked them and THEN asked how and why.

The “how” answer is: it’s just a total marathon slog. I work my day job, I tend to my family, and I do nothing else but work on being a fiction creator. The COVID-19 quarantine helps make that easy, but even if it weren’t a thing, this is what I’d be doing. Thankfully my spouse and kids support this quest, and hopefully one day it can contribute to the financial support as well. But even if it doesn’t, I am not going to stop, this is what keeps me going.

99% of people would hate doing this, and I would not blame them. Most of the time, I hate it too. But, there’s no other way to get to the end-result I want, which is to put mainstream-quality fiction products into the hands of people all over the world that they will enjoy. If I have to sacrifice rest, relaxation, recreation, friends, a social life, exercise, self-care, and sanity to do so, that’s worth it.

I spent a lot of years, decades really, wondering when I’d “have the time” to be an author and creator of high-effort fiction products like all the authors and storytellers I aspire to be like. It took me until I was 37 years old to find the answer: never. I will never have the time. I will never have the energy. I will never have the freedom to be an artist.

So instead, I take from all the scant resources I have around me and make of it something more and do it without time, energy, or freedom. It’s not a fun process, but it’s the only one I have. But, I don’t have to have fun making my creative products for people to have fun experiencing them, and that’s what makes it all worth it. And in the end, I think needing the process to feel good is what stops people from creating things.

Once I stopped needing it to feel good, it became so much easier. I’ve learned the most important lesson I could learn: I don’t need it to feel good, I need the result to make you feel good.

Check out the first results!

So head on over to the Dauntless Gambit! If you’re reading this after June 1st, 2020, then episodes are already posted. If not, go to the main page and subscribe to the email list and follow me on the podcast apps and Patreon!

Originally published at https://www.erikflowers.com.

Making the Serial Issue 1: Episode Production Workflow was originally published in The Dauntless Gambit on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I present to you…

The Dauntless Gambit is a sci-fi espionage action-drama written as a novel and being released as a FREE serial!

Starting June 1st, new episodes will be posted in both text and audio format every Monday and Thursday. You’ll be able to read each installment right on this website, or listen in any podcast app. Between binge watching the next Netflix series, you’ll have a new twice-weekly show to keep your hunger for sci-fi drama fed!

Check out the trailer to get a preview of what’s coming:

See the podcast feed on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or PocketCasts. Click here to listen to a sample of episode one’s narration.

Of course, if reading is your preference, you can read each episode on your phone or computer. After all, it is written as a book first and foremost!

Episode One: Lights Out

“Lights out in three, two, one. Go.”

The voice in Samantha’s ear went silent just as the power to the overhead lights were cut, the night vision overlay of the hallway coming to life through the transparent surface of her visor. Wasting no time, she pivoted away from the wall she had been pressed against and sprinted into the room.

Samantha’s visor automatically adjusted the augmented overlay of the image it projected onto her retina to compensate for the contrast of light and dark, allowing her to see the layout of the room even as her targets scrambled to comprehend what was happening. Though the lights in this section of the building had been deactivated, the computer systems that lined the walls and desks all had their own uninterruptible power supplies, their screens and indicator lights leaving just enough darkness for Samantha to do her work.

If this sounds interesting, jump to The Dauntless Gambit homepage to see the “back of the book” blurb, the episode previews, and the FAQ about the project!

Now, the story of how we got here…

Something I’ve long heard about writing and storytelling is that you should do it for yourself. That creative passions should be about self-expression. That you should write with the door closed and edit with the door open.

I think this is mostly true, but the act of writing and creating was never very satisfying to me on its own. Whatever it was I wanted out of it, the activity itself felt more like labor in service to a result, but not a result itself.

My goal had always been to tell a story, but having it heard was always an afterthought. The focus was on creation, not sharing.

It took me a very long time to realize that I don’t want to tell a story as much as I want to have a story heard, and that is an endeavor of a whole different nature. I want to make things for people to experience and provide places for people to escape into like so many fictional places in the past were made for me.

Back to the starting place

Writing stories has been a passion of mine since I was young. I typed stories on an electric typewriter before I ever had a family computer. There wasn’t a day that went by where I wasn’t working on some story in my head, making notes in endless Word (then Google) docs.

But, being passionate about something and actually undertaking the endeavor are very different things. It wasn’t until April of 2018 that I was faced with the final reckoning of having to decide to actually do this, or just keep playing at the edges but never committing.

So, from April to August, I studied. I had an education in writing and played at it for years, but never really focused on developing the craft in a workman-like manner. I took those four months and consumed dozens of books on writing, storytelling, grammar, while at the same time taking online courses, listening to writing podcasts, and studying the current state of traditional and independent publishing.

Finally, in August I decided on one of the ideas I had and simply said “I am going to write this book.” Eight months later in April 2019, I had finished over 1000 pages of what would be named “The Dauntless Gambit.” The story of Samantha and Decker had been in my head for almost fifteen years, and now it was out on paper, no longer just a “something I want to do” but something I had done. I don’t have to wonder about completing the first draft of a book any longer, that’s been accomplished. One milestone down, hundreds more to go.

Not to be caught resting, the day I finished that first manuscript, I started the next, the first book in a planned fantasy series I had been keeping notes on but resisting starting until I was finished with the book I was writing. This book, the first in the Zaar Chronicles, I am still working on and plan to release it as a full-length novel and audiobook through normal distribution channels.

Then 2020 arrived…

However, while working on this much different second book, the 2020 pandemic hit. I wasn’t going to be going anywhere for a while, and I wanted to put something into the world for people who had burned through all their podcasts and Netflix queues and were looking for something new to entertain, engage, and/or distract themselves.

I decided that instead of leaving The Dauntless Gambit for full-length publication at some undetermined future date, I could use it to experiment with another goal I had, serialized storytelling and podcasts.

I read through the manuscript; still good. It would need work, but that’s okay. While I can’t edit, revise, proof, and record the entire 320,000 words in any reasonable timeframe… I can edit, revise, proof, and record 5000 word chunks and turn it into a “TV series” that you read or listen to instead of watch, and release each chunk as an episode as soon as it’s finished!

By doing this, the story that I love gets a second-chance at life and it gives me something awesome to try in the world of new media.

Enough delaying

Mid-April 2020, I decided that there’s no more reason to wait. I was bored with only focusing on manuscript writing. I wanted to have a secondary activity, something I could get out to people NOW.

Over about four weeks, I built my author website, sourced an editor and narrator, and developed a workflow to revise, edit, proof, record and release each chapter of The Dauntless Gambit as an episodic story every Monday and Thursday starting June 1st!

I wrote CSS, fixed plugins, made artwork, revised, revised, revised text, registered domains, hooked up podcast RSS feeds, dusted off Final Cut and Logic, made commercials and clips, and just worked relentlessly every hour before work and late into the night to get what amounts to an entire author platform and serialized-fiction podcast stood up.

I wanted it done as fast as possible. I would wake up anywhere between 2am and 6am, work on things until my day-job needed me, do the day-job, and then return to doing this. On weekends, I’d spend from around 7am to 9pm, taking breaks to play with my kids, but that was about it. Living in a quarantined, shelter-in-place area made it easy. It’s not like I had anywhere to go.

It takes 3 people (myself, freelance editor, freelance narrator) 14 days to go from my first rewrite of an “episode” (a chapter of the manuscript) to editing, proofing, revising, recording, tweaking, and releasing. Not quite “South Park” just-in-time production, but close.

This is what is coming June 1st: the first episode of The Dauntless Gambit, and then another every Monday and Thursday after until it’s done! And when it’s all posted, the whole thing will be compiled together and made available as a single volume book and audiobook.

From nothing to something

If you’re interested in reading or listening, add your email to my update list or subscribe with one of the podcast apps and be ready to start the story June 1st!

Maybe you’ll find something you like and be entertained for 30 minutes, twice a week. That’s all I am here to do, entertain through fiction. I hope you like it, and if not, I hope I can make something else that you do.

I don’t want to tell a story so much as I want to have a story heard, and that’s why I need you. Let the storytelling, and storyhearing, begin!

Head over to my follow page and sign up for email updates!

Announcing my new site and original serial-fiction podcast! The gambit starts June 1st! was originally published in The Dauntless Gambit on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How you’ve been getting the Bootstrap grid all wrong—and how to fix it.

No grid is perfect. Some grids are useful.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, I wrote 3 articles on Bootstrap. They have amassed a staggering 1.5 million page views. 😮 I wrote them after hanging out in the Bootstrap IRC channel for a few weeks, and after working with grids (Blueprint, 960!), designers, and developers for over a decade, it became clear that people know how to use a grid, but don’t really understand how it works and how to get themselves out of trouble.

These articles are for Bootstrap v3, but the core principles are still relevant. See the original 3 articles here: Intro to the Grid, How the grid works, LESS Workflow Tutorial

Bootstrap 4

There are a lot of articles on Bootstrap 4 and the grid as a whole. I am only covering a very narrow topic here: building your grid via mixins. This is a topic that is very under-documented, and I want to share my perspective on it.

Disclaimer: If you are using Bootstrap to quickly prototype and try things out, using the HTML classes is fine, it doesn’t really matter. It’s often preferable to just start creating a layout in HTML and include the Bootstrap CSS, without actually creating/planning a whole SCSS architecture. The point of this article is to look at more enduring, scalable, decoupled usage of the grid system.

The Misconception

For people new to Bootstrap or other CSS grids, the first thing they usually see is the application of a grid via in-HTML classes. There is a presumption that the Bootstrap grid implementation has to look like this:

<div class="container">
  <div class="row">
    <div class="banana col-sm-6 col-md-4">
      <p>banana 🍌 content</p>
    </div>
  </div>
</div>

Notice the div called .banana. An HTML element (a div) that has the classes applied to it for each responsive breakpoint column width. The behavior of the div is defined by the classes you put in the HTML:

col-sm-6 col-md-4

In the sample above, the div would be a 6-column at the small breakpoint range, and a 4-column at the medium breakpoint range. This would also imply that the undeclared “zero to small” it is a 100% width 12-column div, and everything from large upwards inherits the medium 4-column declaration.

When you’re designing a complex layout across lots of pages, you end up with col-*-* (and more) all over the place like a plague. It’s not uncommon for there to be dozens of different combos of this on a single page. Everywhere, you literally see elements that look like this:

<div class="col-6 col-sm-4 col-md-8 offset-md-4 align-self-start justify-content-end"> wow 😱 </div>

That’s not an extreme example. It’s a common occurrence. Now repeat it for every structural layout element on a page.

The Problems With This

The method of including the CSS classes in your HTML has various problems. First, it’s non-semantic; col-sm-6 col-md-4 says nothing about what that element is, only how it will behave responsively.

This also creates tons of unused CSS. Here is a Gist that shows the uncompressed CSS that Bootstrap creates so that all of its grid capabilities are available through direct CSS classes called in the HTML.

As is, it’s just about 2000 individual lines. Minifying or gzipping this reduces a lot of the payload, but it’s still pollution. Whether you’re prototyping something and just want to include the CSS as-is, or if you’re creating something more enduring but aren’t using SASS mixins, all of this is being included in your CSS.

Next, you’re coupling the behavior to the structure. If you’re working with something like React and SCSS, you would need to have the HTML classes in your React .jsx files, and then also be styling your HTML via your SCSS. This puts grid behavior in the HTML/.jsx, and styling behavior in the SCSS. You’ve now coupled your responsive behavior to the wrong end of your codebase.

This leaves you with split logic. In your HTML, you have:

<div class="container">
  <div class="row">
    <div class="banana col-sm-6 col-md-4">
      <p>banana 🍌 content</p>
    </div>
  </div>
</div>

And then if that .banana 🍌 class contains style, you will have this in your SCSS:

.banana {
  p {
    font-size: 3rem;
    color: yellow;
    font-weight: 600;
  }
}

The .banana 🍌 now is being controlled in two places. You’re defining .banana in SCSS as a large, bold yellow piece of text. Then, you’re putting .banana’s responsive behavior over in the HTML.

This doesn’t make durable, long-term sense. For prototyping, fine. But if you’re working on big, serious codebases across multiple developers, development teams, designers, repositories, plugins (like I do) etc, this is untenable and scales very poorly.

The Mixin Solution

So what’s the cure? The mixin.

Here’s our same .banana HTML block as above, but the grid behavior is now controlled in the SCSS by mixins along with the expression of the style. The HTML:

<div class="banana"> 
  <p>banana 🍌 content</p>
</div>

And the SCSS:

.banana {
  @include make-col-ready;
  @include media-breakpoint-up(sm) {
    @include make-col(6);
  }
  @include media-breakpoint-up(md) {
    @include make-col(4);
  }
  p {
    font-size: 3rem;
    color: yellow;
    font-weight: 600;
  }
}

That’s it. It’s all moved to the SCSS, and .banana can be changed and controlled from the central location. Entire, complex grid behaviors that cover any use case are centralized, organized, and scaleable.

Caveat: there is an argument about “look at all those mixins and media-query breakpoints I have to include.” Yes, this does move the heavy lifting to the SCSS and requires you to add both the media-query mixin (the media-breakpoint-up) as well as the column mixin (the make-col(*)). I find this to be much more preferable than NOT having it there and stuffing it into the HTML.

Turning off the CSS

Since I’m talking about eliminating the CSS and the usage of the classes in the HTML, we need to turn it off. Easy.

In the Bootstrap _variables.css file, there is a single variable that can be set to control if the grid classes get output in the CSS:

$enable-grid-classes:       true !default;

If this is set to true, you get ALL the CSS classes seen in this Gist. If you set it to false, NONE of the CSS for the grid is generated — all if your grid behavior is controlled via mixins inside of specific classes. Create a new variable in your own variables override file, and place it before the Bootstrap import (so it overrides the !default):

$enable-grid-classes:       false;

Containers and Rows

One nitpick with the above is that often, containers and rows don’t really have their own semantic names. You can do some semantic gymnastics and try and name them all, but often just including those as your ONLY non-semantic grid elements isn’t that bad. It adds very, very little to your compiled CSS, and lets you keep these global, structural elements named something that makes sense.

Since the .container and .row won’t be output by the compile (as noted above), I just recreate them, usually with a more unique name so that CSS styles don’t leak out, or leak in. It looks like this:

.grid-container {
  @include make-container();
  @include make-container-max-widths;
}

The above code will add the max-widths (the breakpoint pixel values) at all breakpoints. If you wanted to just have the max-widths from “md” up, you would create it like this:

.grid-container {
  @include make-container();
  @include media-breakpoint-up(md) {
    @include make-container-max-widths;
  }
}

This will give you the “full width fluid” container up until the “md” breakpoint. Great for when you want your grid to just be fluid on phones and tablets.

Now you have just one CSS class for your containers. The same can be done for the .row now:

.grid-row {
  @include make-row();
}

It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s drastically better than including the entire grid CSS. If you want to get fancy, you can make anything you want a .container or .row:

.tangerine {
  @include make-container();
  @include make-container-max-widths;
}

.pineapple {
  @include make-row();
}

Then in your HTML, you just wrap all your rows in .tangerine, and all your columns in .pineapple.

The containers and rows do lean away from semantic purism, but perfect is the enemy of good. By using the above, you add 38 lines of uncompressed CSS to your final compiled code, as opposed to 2000.

Happy Mixin-ing

I hope this helps clear up how to create your grid without the verbose, tightly coupled, non-semantic HTML classes.

Read Bootstrap’s grid documentation here, which touches on the above

Bonus Content: Customizing Grid Columns, Breakpoints, Gutters

One last thing: the actual grid parameters are controllable by variables in the SCSS as well.

Grid breakpoint values:

$grid-breakpoints: (
  xs: 0,
  sm: 576px,
  md: 768px,
  lg: 992px,
  xl: 1200px
) !default;

Container max-widths:

$container-max-widths: (
  sm: 540px,
  md: 720px,
  lg: 960px,
  xl: 1140px
) !default;

Number of columns and their gutter width:

$grid-columns:                12 !default;
$grid-gutter-width:           30px !default;

By changing these, you can customize the grid to anything you need. Want 17 columns? Done. 100 columns? Easy. 20px gutters instead of 30? A 1-character change. Just note the use of !default when you override these.

But before you go…

You should give this article maximum claps 👏, and you should follow me Erik Flowers on Medium (and on Twitter — @erik_flowers).

It’s been 2 years since we started blogging on #design and #servicedesign, Megan Erin Miller and I.

A lot has changed in service design, and also in the Medium publishing platform. Having said that, I wanted to put together a list of our top 15 post, all free for those who haven’t seen them, or those who want to bookmark for later. They are in descending order by pageviews, and add up to just over 100,000! Feeling energized? Go add some CLAPS 👏.

Here’s the annotated list!

Journey Maps and Service Blueprints

Top article and canonical distinction between the two types of mapping techniques.

The difference between a journey map and a service blueprint

UX to Service Design

The big 900lb gorilla in the room — how to transition.

Medium

Seeking Service Design Jobs

Megan’s canonical post on looking for service design jobs—and how to find them.

Hey, service design job seekers, we need to talk.

Core Capabilities

Wondering what you need to know? Look no further.

Core Capabilities of Service Design

Demystified!

A written version of the O’Reilly talk about just “what is service design” as told with opera houses!

Demystifying Service Design — Part 1

The lifecycle, in pictures

Understand how service experiences work, with easy to follow pictures!

Understanding the Lifecycle of Service Experiences

Silicon Valley

The valley of tech and the state of service design—not what you might assume.

Why Customer Experience Isn’t Enough: Silicon Valley Needs Service Design

Research for Service Design

Need the easiest guide on running contextual design research? Here it is!

Running Contextual Design Research for Service Strategy

The Battle is on!

Classic, pre-Medium article on how what is best for your customer and best for your company can often be at odds.

The Battle Between Your Company and Your Customer

Just what is service design again?

How many service designers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A shitload.

How many service designers does it take to define Service Design?

Jobs To Be Done

The four letter trend swiffering the design nation, explained here!

The “Job” to be done is never what you think.

Demystifying, part 2

You read part one, now go on a roller coaster ride and read part 2!

Demystifying Service Design — Part 2

Top 4 Questions, Top 4 Answers

ULTRON IS BACK, and he’s here to talk about the top 4 questions I get asked about implementing service design in a bigcorp!

Top 4 questions I get about implementing service design—and my big mistakes.

Okay so what IS a service experience?

Another illustrated post by Megan Erin Miller about what a service experience is in an easy to digest illustrated article!

What is a Service Experience? (explained through drawings)

Tallest Nail Gets the Hammer

And finally, one of my favorite posts on the difference between a product and service.

The Difference Between a Product and a Service – As Told With Hammers.

There you have it!

There’s your reading list for the rest of the week. Have fun, maybe learn something, comment, and give us those 750 claps!

As always, thanks for reading.

You should give this article a 👏🏻 or 50, follow Erik Flowers and Megan Erin Miller on Medium, and on Twitter @erik_flowers and @meganerinmiller!

(If you like this article, please go get our guide on Practical Service Blueprinting!)

Essential Practical Service Design Reading was originally published in Practical by Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How do you predict, and then shape, the behavior of a population? Or better, how do you design for something that is the collection of countless touchpoints or “products” that are interlinked, each with their own vastly different user-experience.

Service design is singularly centered on the human experience. We call it the end to end journey, but the service itself is something that is a collection of all the journeys that can be taken through it. The service that you design on top of is a big picture. Holistic is the word we use, but what does that even mean, and how do you look at something holistically and then approach it holistically?

I like to think of it in analogies. Service design lends itself to a lot of interesting analogies, which is good since you’ll be explaining what it is and how people should approach it a lot. If you thought repeating the tenets of UX ad nauseum was exhausting, service design gives you a whole new population of people to endlessly say “So, picture a…” as you describe what you intend to do.

Here’s a trio of analogies I’ve been playing with to try and educate myself and others on just where service designers should be placing their focus, and their priority.

Seeing It All at Once

At the 2013 Gamerscon video game conference, 974 different people had their playthrough of a level of Super Mario Brothers recorded. Even with almost 1000 different people playing, clear patterns emerge — patterns of convergence, and patterns of divergence. There are convergent areas of the level that most of the players either avoid or utilize, and there are divergent areas of the level where the patterns fall apart and randomness is much more apparent.

As Mario goes through and literally touches each part, the pipes, the bricks, the enemies, the journey of each player is altered a bit. But all together, it’s really “not that different” when viewed in aggregate.

Each of the playthroughs were overlaid onto a single video, and the result is what you see below. Can you see the obvious happy path? Or the places where it seems there’s no clear preference. Or the people who clearly have no idea how to play? My favorite part is the very beginning, at the 2nd pipe that has the perpendicular piece jutting out — people jump over to it, then realize it’s too tall to jump on top of, and have to go back. Imagine that as part of a service map. Something looks obvious and attainable, but isn’t, and you don’t know that until you get stuck.

Since a level of Super Mario Bros is literally an end-to-end, linear, contained experience, you can see easily the whole thing at once. Using any single player’s actions would not be very valuable to design a level around. If you devised a set of personas, you would have a wide array of people: a toddler new to games, an experienced teenage gamer, a Gen-X that played the game growing up, a baby boomer who says the last game they played was “pong.” Personas like this might be good when you’re targeting a certain group of people you want to appeal to and have a focused product/touchpoint you are the owner of. This is a lot more common in discrete UX design, whereas in service design you often aren’t the owner or designer of any specific touchpoint.

But what about when you need to target a group that is large, random, and far too complex to look at through the lens of any specific type of individual or touchpoint? What you need is an aggregate consciousness.

Science Fiction to Science Fact

There is a book by Isaac Asimov called “Foundation” that centers around a scientist named Hari Seldon. In this book, Seldon has created a science called psychohistory, a combination of history, sociology, and mathematical statistics. The purpose of psychohistory was to predict the likely future of a galactic empire’s population.

A huge super-computer took into account the combined behaviors of trillions of people, and using macro-sociology and mathematical statistics, it was able to predict the galactic population’s future with incredible accuracy when stretched out over hundreds of years. The book revolves around the immense power this would give the controllers of this computer — you can’t change the near future, but you can change the course of centuries with unrelenting accuracy.

And yet, using this same fictional computer to predict an individual person’s actions was incredibly difficult, if not impossible. Why was that, and what does that have to do with service design? The premise of this is that predicting the behavior of a single individual doesn’t extrapolate to the behavior of large groups of people. As the galactic empire continues on it’s journey through time, you have to look at it as a singular, malleable “mass action” of behavior.

Mass Action

Asimov makes a comparison with the actions of a gas. If you observe a gas, there is no way to predict the movement of a single molecule. This is known in physics as kinetic theory. Molecules are in a state of constant random motion, colliding into eachother and bouncing around like crazy. This is why a gas expands inside its container, unlike a solid. Picture a helium balloon, it floats because helium is less dense than air, and the random movement and collision of helium inside the balloon pushes it out enough that the volume inside the balloon is less dense than the air around it. As the helium molecules lose energy, the collisions become less, and the balloon shrinks down and stops floating. We can predict exactly what the gas does as a whole, but can’t even fathom how a single helium molecule will behave.

If we were to watch a colored gas with extreme magnification be emitted from a nozzle, a single gas molecule’s movement would be essentially impossible to predict. But if you look at the combined movement of all the molecules, the gas we see blowing out the nozzle, it is very easy to predict the action of the gas. We do it every day, blow some air (just nitrogen and oxygen gas) through a straw and push around a little ball of paper. Easy. Now picture a single molecule of nitrogen and its path down the straw, out the end, and towards the paper ball. Impossible.

One Big Collective Persona

With this idea of mass action of behavior, how does service design take into account that mass action of many individual personas?

I have a simple analogy I’ve been honing, which seems to be working and people just “get it.” I look at a service ecosystem as a national park. It’s a big entity, and has a lot of “things” in it. Paths, hikes, scenic overlooks, benches, restrooms, parking lots, hotels, restaurants, nearby cities. The combination of these things is the service a national park offers; they provide you with an aggregate “outdoor activity and vacation” experience.

If hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world go on that hike, who is the persona? There isn’t one. I don’t mean “there isn’t one,” but there isn’t “one”, no singular experience to focus on. This is true for any UX project, but I want to focus on where the persona exists; the landscape they traverse.

There is a national park aptly named Zion National Park, one I have visited probably 100 times, from being a baby to today. In 2013, the park served around 2.8 million visitors. Let’s take one specific hike: Angel’s Landing. Angel’s landing is probably the most famous in Zion. Through the lens of service design, it definitely has its own service blueprint. It has its own front stage, backstage, lots of touchpoints and channels. Intangible and tangible. And this hike also exists in the park’s blueprint as a touchpoint in itself!

My premise here is that a higher level POV of service design is focused more on the personality of the end-to-end experience, with a lot of channels and touchpoints that may all have their own separate “experience design” teams, priorities, and focus. It isn’t the service designers job to design the touchpoints or channels on a granular level. Service design is a distinct job of seeing the whole hike at once and mapping out all the traversals people can take on top of and through it. It is a very literal example of designing for and experience.

Designing Through Things

We can see the whole Super Mario level at once. We can guide a gas of millions of molecules through a straw. We can see Angel’s Landing all at once from our service design helicopter and how its touchpoints play together, and how the whole hike exists as a touchpoint in the overall park. The key is that we design for experiences through these landscapes as service designers.

The shift I’ve had to make as service design becomes an increased focus is figuring out how to look at all those entities and see how that collective nebulous entity will diffuse through what we’ve designed. It’s tough and it’s different than UX design.

I’ve ended up with these three analogy nuggets about service design that I want to continue to refine:

1. Finding ways to look at the end to end journey of lots of people, all at once.
2. Predicting a single individual’s movement is impossible — but get enough of them together in a structure and it’s easier to predict the mass action.
3. The persona of service design can be aggregate collections of group behavior that traverse a landscape.

It might not be perfect, and it might even be wrong in a lot of cases. Especially concerning the role personas play in service design, that’s a whole different collection of ideas and hypotheses. For me, it’s a frame of thinking that emphasizes the end-to-end view over the specific interactive view. It is what makes touchpoint design so hard, and why service design is becoming a key element in the successful experiences your company is trying to provide.

In the end, it is the impetus of why everyone has to be involved if you want to employ service design thinking. All the touchpoint owners and internal stakeholders need to see the entire picture. You can’t design for people’s experiences unless you can see the whole landscape at once.

Three Analogies For the Aggregate Nature of Service Design was originally published in Practical by Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

5 keys to creating a design led culture — in 500 words

Remember, this is *design* led, not designer led. There’s nothing that says a culture has to be led by, or even contain, designers for this to work.

I didn’t invent these keys; quite the opposite. They were taught to me over many, many years in successful, and unsuccessful, companies. Now I share them with you, in 500 words.

1. Rigidly customer backed

You have to be customer backed, in a big way. There has to be license and insistence that everyone in the company has the freedom to do right by the customer. Stop thinking you build products and start thinking you build relationships.

This means that people are empowered to talk to customers, to observe them, and to bring back qualitative data and empathy throughout the company. You stop what you’re working on and take a trip down the street to someone you’re seeking to serve.

2. Encourage exploration

Heads-down focus can be a crutch. Sometimes, you have to go heads-up and take a look around at all the possibilities that exist on how you can provide and perform service for the customers need.

No one ever “thought reeeeeeally hard” into innovation. See key 5.

3. Focus on customer benefits

Look at what you and your neighbor are working on. Can you clearly articulate in the moment what the customer benefit of what you’re working on is? If not, why not?

Without clear principles that everyone knows and adheres to about how what you do — and who you are — benefits the customer, why are you even in business?

4. Data guides; people lead

Data is great. This is an a priori fact. What is often overlooked is that there is a more important fact; yeah I said it, there’s something more important than data; the people you serve. They direct what you do.

Numbers rarely convey an emotional reaction. See key 1.

5. Understand the job to be done

JTBD. It’s a trend, and for good reason. People don’t want what you make. There is no debate. They want what you make gives them. The outcome to be had. Even if you don’t want to bring the JTBD vernacular to your company, at least know what that outcome to be had is. See key 2.

Bonus: Top-down support

Without some top-down support, at any level, building this culture going to be difficult. I won’t lie. I’ve been in places where a single intrepid designer tried to create this culture from the very bottom, where a director level manager did, and where a CEO did. I’ll let you guess at which company had the most success in doing so.

5 keys. Take them, leave them, adapt them, ignore them. I’m grateful to be at a place that has drilled this into my mind so deep I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forget. We exist to serve humans, not sell products.

There. 500 words (including the title).

Banana.

But before you go…

You should give this article a recommend 💙, follow me Erik Flowers on Medium (and on Twitter — @erik_flowers).

5 keys to creating a design led culture — in 500 words was originally published in Practical by Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.