2020 Experience Design Incubator Cohort
Kyle Bowen
Kyle Bowen is the founder of SuperHelpful, a research firm focused on helping museums and cultural institutions create more innovative and equitable organizations through problem-space research. You can follow Kyle’s work through his newsletter, SuperHelpful Letters.
Isabella Bruno
Isabella designs at a large museum in D.C. Isabella’s new creative practices are futures thinking (through Radical Museum Futures) and Liberating Structures facilitation (formed a community of practice for museum workers, currently at 100 members). Through writing, drawing and other narrative mediums, Isabella is helping us imagine radical futures and nurture radical imagination within our field.
Victoria Firth-Smith
V is a pākehā lesbian experience designer, autoethnographic researcher and doctoral educator. Her practice-led doctoral thesis titled Make Welcome critically explores experience design in higher education. V founded the Museum of Experience™, in 2019 to collect, interpret and display personal experiences of national significance in a pop-up format.
Jenny Gottstein
Jenny is experience designer in IDEO's Play Lab, chief fun organizer at civicengagementparties.com, lead recycling party-enthusiast at heyscoreswap.com, co-producer of SF Immersive Design Week & former zombie apocalypse disaster preparedness game architect.
Margo Gray
Margo (they/them, she/her) is a Minnesota-based experience designer and theatre maker whose work focuses on building audience empathy for unfamiliar experiences. When not making art, Margo can be found canoeing, biking, or hiking in the north woods.
Dan Klein
Dan teaches improvisation as a Lecturer at Stanford University in the Graduate School of Business, the Department of Theater, and the d.school. He travels around the world (virtually, now) hosting conferences, delivering keynotes, and leading workshops on creativity, story, connection, and play.
abc.net.au/news/2019-11-29/workplace-dan-klein-improvisation-skills-can-help-us-work-better/11735342
Tossie Long
Tossie is a ritual sound and experience designer that conjures across genres spanning from african cosmology, heavy metal and afro futuristic productions. She work at the intersection of culture, music and sociopolitical edges.
Casey Rosengren
Casey is a community-builder who spends his time thinking about how to help the religiously unaffiliated find connection, meaning, and belonging. Some of his projects include Hacker Paradise, the Gathering Summit, and Human Missives.
Matthew Stein
Matthew is a puzzle & ARG designer, fiddler & composer, printmaker & origamist, and letterboxer & explorer. He is passionate about dehydrated dark leafy greens, functional programming, stellated rhombicuboctahedra, and fake secret societies.
Fereshteh Toosi
Fereshteh's current participatory projects are designed to foster interspecies connection through outdoor encounters, exchange, and sensory inquiry. Fereshteh’s past artworks include sculptures made from oyster mushrooms that are used for bioremediation, contemplative kayak outings augmented by handmade sound circuits, photograms made in collaboration with prisoners, and a walking performance about lithium.
Eli Zemper
Eli is garden director, curriculum coordinator, and instructor at Washtenaw Technical Middle College. Over her past 49 years of her life she has variously: been a roller derby girl with the Detroit Derby Girls, blown glass, brewed beer with a local female collective, assisted with homebirths, directed The International Poetry Guild, and worked as a dramaturg for professional and amateur theaters.
Yidi Tsao
Yidi is a proud citizen and the Leading Investigative Nurse of THE AMBULATORY FREE STATES OF OBSIDIA while serving as the koolRabbi of Orangeudaism, a wiki happy religion. She enjoys constructing new neural pathways within her little skull, advocating the Open Revolution and connecting to various forms of being.
Laika Young
Laika is a waking dream designer with a passion for crafting interactive experiences that catalyze new perspective-taking, foster wonder, and invite integration with the full spectrum of life and emotion. In the Odyssey Works Incubator, Laika will work on crafting an experience design methodology centered around creating meaning-making rituals for end-of-life care and remembrance.