Episode 285: Designing for Real-world Experiences with Dave Waddell
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Hello, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the UI Breakfast podcast. I'm your host, Jane Portman, and today our awesome guest is Dave Waddell, co-author of the Experience book, and we're going to talk about designing for real-world experiences today.

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Hi, Dave. Hello.

We're thrilled to have you here. Congrats on the book. It's not as brand new today, but it still matters a ton. Before we dive into the main topic, tell us more about yourself, your background story, and what you at Fritz state. Right. So let's start from now and work a little bit backwards. So I am a designer, strategist, and researcher for Fritz.

Master Planning Agency, Experienced Master Planning Agency, Free State. I'm also an author of several books, the last of which was the Experience book. I came into the business having quit as a teacher. I was a primary school teacher for many, many years, loved it. But I knew that there's a shelf life to that sort of work. And I decided to come out of it when I'd done my

bit in the classroom. I had no interest in going into management. And I set up a copywriting company following that. And that's when I started to work with, among many different types of organizations, Free State. However, I also wrote on the side as a journalist, a travel journalist and a booze journalist, which is why I ended up writing things like a whiskey book. I was a whiskey taster for some years. And I've worked with Free State for probably now 11 or 12 years.

Fantastic. Who else can talk about experience design, if not a booze person? This is a pretty bad joke, but really a multimodal experience, right? Yeah. Well, it's interesting you should say that because one of the things that has come out in the last 10 to 15 years in terms of how PR companies work with booze companies, work with journalists and so on, and also anybody who's trying to promote a product

a product like, let's say, whiskey or travel or accommodation or anything like that, they try and create these experiences that they invite journalists on. And so they think a great deal about what that experience will feel like.

And, you know, as soon as you walk into one of those experiences, as the journalist, I'm saying, whether it works or not, whether it feels false or whether it feels authentic. And I mean, one of my most.

authentic experiences was actually working in whiskey because so many of the whiskey distilleries in those days were nothing like the wine you know where wine is so much more advanced in terms of how it sells itself to the world whiskey hasn't been until recently so you could still go into those distilleries that would run by people who'd worked there for say 40 years and

and in exactly the same way, with exactly the same equipment, and with exactly the kind of multi-sensory experience that you would expect from somewhere like that. And the PR companies that used to invite us on those would then try and spin things

not a story out of that, but also experiences around it. And I never forget once when I went to this particular distillery, which was exactly as I just described. But then also we were taken to this woods. We had no idea where we were going, but we went down this path. And then suddenly a little bit further on down the path, around the corner, we heard this sound of music. And it was these bagpipes that were being played. We went around the corner and this bagpipe

player in full Scottish regalia stepped out and started to walk ahead of us, didn't even acknowledge us as we walked down through the most beautiful countryside. And then we got down to a lock, a lake, and just beside it was just a very, very plain cabin, not much down there. And there was a chef waiting there that actually just...

prepared a meal right there and then and we drank whiskey we tasted it with the food the fish and and it was you know that was a really beautiful experience you know very simply designed with just a few bits and pieces put together to create it it felt real it felt emotional it felt kind of it

that I didn't feel like I was looking from the outside in. So there you go. That is just an example of that kind of world and the kind of world I work in now. That's a great teaser in the industry, I guess, of experience design. So...

Master planning. My digital heart just does not acknowledge the term. So tell us more what that means and what your company does. And that does not involve digital products for what it's worth mentioning. It doesn't involve digital product.

in terms of when we talk about the master plan as such, but actually the world of the digital is definitely involved in all of this. So let me begin from master planning. Master planning is a framework of strategies, delivery plans, scheduling plans, teams, and everything that might go in to the design and delivery of a built environment product.

Now, that might be something as large as King's Cross that was recently done, which is a piece of city. It might be a street. It might be a tower block. It might be just a house. So it's the master plan for that. When we talk about experience master planning, the way things have been done, you know, for the last, I don't know how long, but, you know, it feels like forever.

The experience of the end user is something which is overlaid onto the design. So traditionally, when it comes to designing for the built environment,

What an architect would get commissioned to do would be to work from sort of a preparation brief, which then would become a set of technical designs, which would then become built into a whole kind of different sort of scheduling and deliveries. And then it would be designed and the developer would then make sure that it's all built and delivered. And then at that point in time, everyone leaves the scene.

So it stops and it's handed over to whoever. So it might be a local government. It might be the private individual company that commissioned the whole thing. And that's how it sounds. And it's very lineal. And almost the last thing that's thought of, which is weird if you think about it, the last thing that's thought of is the experience.

You know, the people who will be using it, the end user. So, you know, often that's called the overlay is technically right. What's the experience overlay here? You know, it's not that no one's thought about what the function of what they're designing for.

It's not that. It's just that once the research has been done, then that's laid to the side as the evidence base for creating this place. And then right at the end, it then goes into the hands of like, you know, you might think the PR companies, the marketing, the management companies, depending on what we're talking about.

So in terms of that's the standard sort of master plan. When you talk about an experience master plan, what we are trying to do and others like us is trying to introduce experience right at the beginning.

And us to follow through with it all. An example of that, and a lot of this is happening more and more, is that when you get an intervention, a big infrastructure project, often you'll have maybe two or three years where the land that has been identified as where it's going to occur, it lies fallow.

So it's been changed and people have been moved out of it and so on. And in the old days, and you would know this because, you know, you can see the boards and it's all boarded up and you can't go on the land. You can't use it. You can't whatever. For communities that live around there, that's just an eyesore. It also affects the community. It affects connectivity. It affects socialization. It affects all kinds of things.

However, now a lot of people are using what are called meanwhile state interventions. A meanwhile state is the activation of land and buildings that is set for being changed in some form or another. That might be demolition, that might be all sorts of things. And so the community is able to involve itself in lots of different ways using that. And often what happens with a meanwhile state, it then starts to dictate the design.

of what comes next because you begin to learn things about the different groups that live there. It's not just a piece of research where you have a lot of surveys and things like that. People becoming involved in the land, the community that builds up around the project then begins to inform the master plan. So when we're talking about experience master planning, we're talking about exactly that. We're talking about what we call the experience underlay.

And that underlay there makes a ton of sense to us because, after all, the so-called end user or customer or whatever is our actual people, our groups, our friends, our neighbors, our family members. These are all of the people that are being designed for and they need to be part of the design.

And so a meanwhile state is a really good way of starting to get people involved in a piece of design. However, we think it could go even further where we start to talk about not just a meanwhile state, but an always meanwhile state where the piece of design that you're creating is never the finished product.

It always involves people. It always takes and learns from the activities that are occurring there and then. A really good way to understand that is when you talk about, I mean, I'm sat here in a shared workspace. That shared workspace has changed over the years and it hasn't changed because an architect has come in and knocked a wall down or anything like that. It's changed because the people in it have changed.

And so the way the design of it and what it offers now, even in the two years I've been here,

has changed to the extent that some of the rooms that I used to go into for that particular function no longer function in that way. And it's constantly learning off the people that it serves. And I think that's what we're talking about when we're talking just generally about experience master planning. We are trying to provide that underlay for the design.

You're trying to undermine two key principles of any government project. Basically one,

Caring about the community, absolutely not the case ever. And two, it's always waterfall. It's always, it's basically the opposite. It always starts from the blueprint and up, you know, never iterative. And you're trying to make the approach work. And what you're describing is obviously part of some reality somewhere in the world. How does it work? Is it that the government or the person who orders the project that

is motivated to do this this way in a community-driven way, in the iterative way? Or how does this start? Yeah, I can answer that through the example of King's Cross, which many of your listeners will probably know was for many, many, many years, decades,

It's basically a transport nexus. It was very, very run down in terms of the kind of residential community offer. There was a lot of broken ground there. The canal that ran to the north of it was pretty much a no-go area. It was...

the kind of place that a lot of young people used to love going to because it had these real breakout clubs and things like that. But in terms of like, you know, being a family, growing up there and that sort of thing, it was in a real mess. And nobody could do anything with it because it was so hard to work with all the different interests in terms of transport, in terms of government, in terms of local authority, in terms of all of those kind of things. And so when Argent, which is the developer, came along, Argent St. George no longer called that,

They produced this document, which was really all about being a human in a city. And the CEO of Argent attended 331 meetings on his bike, talking to different community members, not telling them what the developer had in place, but rather asking, what are your problems? What are your issues? What are your concerns? What would you like to see? What do you like to see happen? You know, actually,

standard good practice in terms of engaging with communities and working out how to work with those communities. There was so much good work done there in terms of relationship building between the developer and the community that developer was serving, which is not the case a lot of the time with developers. Often it's that they're very distant.

They create something and profit is the bottom line. And they even delay things to release it into the market when the market is favorable rather than releasing it when it's favorable for the community. So Ardent and George were completely the opposite to that. They're still involved 20 years later. I mean, it's a 20-year project. They're still involved after it.

They're still helping manage it. They've still got a massive, massive piece of input into it. But what your listeners will be absolutely amazed by, if you think of the fact that this was a very, very big master plan for a seriously complex project in London.

they left a fifth of the master plan blank when they put it together. Can you imagine putting whatever, whether you're an engineer, whether you're a UX designer, UI designer, whatever, can you imagine leaving a fifth of it blank and presenting that to whoever and saying, right, we're starting now. And so they left it blank because they knew that at some point or another, circumstances would change. New ideas will be born in the making of it.

So they wanted to be ready. They needed it to be flexible enough to accommodate that. At the same time, talking about meanwhile state, what they did do is they activated the site with all of these different, they use artists, they use all kinds of suppliers to turn it into the sort of place that people like visiting whilst it was being changed and built and designed.

And one of its most famous ones, it built this beautiful swimming pool in the middle of the horizon, had giant cranes on it. It was actually in the middle of the whole kind of site. And people used to go and swim there. And in fact, when they eventually got rid of it, the community was asking for it back and wanted to keep it because it had become really part of King's Cross.

One last story on this, talking about agility, talking about flexibility. At the centre of King's Cross is a university in the Granary building. This is an old Victorian building that was earmarked for some kind of business or some kind of corporate use.

And at the very last moment, when they're thinking about what to do, Central Saint Martins, which was sort of scattered over specific sites in London traditionally and one other site, one main site, got in touch to talk to Roger Madlin, who's the CEO of Argent, and they talked about using the space. And in that conversation, they converted it and they placed Central Saint Martins at the center of it, which when people have written about it, they've described it as a masterstroke.

you know, of design as if it was always in the plan. However, it wasn't at all. It's a beautiful piece of flip, a really good piece of footwork and it's worked superbly because what you've got there now is this university that,

has lots and lots of young people coming from all over the world to this specific area, and which also is home to people like Google and all sorts of tech and other businesses. And so this combination, this campus, if you like, of

Corp, University and Resi is quite an extraordinary venture considering it's taken like 20 years to do. It's not perfect. It really isn't perfect. And I don't think, you know, Argent would say it's perfect. There are things about it that could be improved. But really, you know, all things said and done, it's an extraordinary piece of work.

Thank you for introducing this concept of agile iterative design and master planning. Can you walk us through the process, very top level to begin with, how a free state, your company, your consultancy works within such projects and how you as a researcher probably get involved in the earlier stages and how it all unwraps?

So basically what we offer is sort of special counsel, which is sort of a consultancy arm where we work generally with senior leadership. And often it's less to do with the built environment and often more to do with organization change. So change management. And then we also work on projects, designing projects. And normally they're pilots because our whole process is to create the framework,

for initiating and designing pilots. And then in doing that, the teams that are involved in it, the tech, the people, the culture, the branding, the identity, everything that's involved in creating a specific project then is taken in-house. So we help set it all up and then we step back

and we move away. And sometimes we're there as a review body later on, but often not. And then the last thing we do is training, which we basically set up a few courses, one of which is the experience course. Well, I say a few courses, it's all the experience course, but there's like different iterations of it, and which we teach like online. And it's normally at the moment, senior leadership, it's quite new, it's about a year long. So we do between eight and 10 people come to like a

a 12-hour session spread across two weeks. And so that's the kind of training. But to hang that all on an example, I suppose...

So we work with airports and one of the airports that we worked with for over the years and in many, many different ways was Melbourne Airport in Australia and in Victoria. Now, Melbourne 20, 25 years ago used to be extremely well known for being a good 25, 30 years ago, a good, solid airport experience.

for traveler, employee, and everyone. Unfortunately, that fell away to the point where if you went on to any of the forums, everybody was talking about the toilets. Everybody was talking about the experience of border control. Everybody was talking about, you know, the fact that the whole journey

from entering the airport to the gate that you go through to catch the plane. It was just the kind of experience they wanted to forget. And I suppose that your audience and yourself, you will have had those journeys. You know, you would have experienced that airport experience, not Melbourne specifically, but, you know, some others. And you would have also experienced the reverse where it's just gone everywhere.

brilliantly and there are many reasons for that going brilliantly and we've worked with Melbourne to help create a journey that emphasised the why

the how and the what of what that journey was all about. And so let me break that down a little bit. In terms of sort of working with designing, say, what was it effectively a quite a linear process in terms of the airport journey where you would like, you'd, you'd,

You'd drive in or you'd be bussed in or you'd come by train. You'd end up, you know, experiencing having to park or find your way about. And then you go and put your bags in. You go through and you go through border control and then you're out into airside. So you go from landside to airside. That whole experience, you need to know

What is valuable about that? So the way we often work is we create these a bit like great brands do. We say, well, what is the purpose of it? What are you trying to do? Which is actually more than just, you know, get people through like cattle to catch planes on time. You know, it's more than just being efficient.

It's more than even being effective. It's creating experience in which people actually genuinely like and remember the place. They have to spend a great deal of time there sometimes, you know, and they don't want to feel like they are being designed into these kind of like cattle runs, whether it's through border control, whether it's through shopping or whether it's through the food offer or whether it's through all of these things.

They want to feel like they're cared for. They want to feel like they have autonomy. They want to feel like they can reach out for help if they want it, that help is around. And they want to feel like it's not just a kind of digital overlay in terms of what that help can be, but that they can actually, there are human beings around to help them.

And so when I say we worked with Melbourne, we genuinely worked with Melbourne. We worked with some really good in-house teams to start working on, well, what could that look like? You know, what could, you know, recognition feel like? What could inspiration feel like? What could all of these different values that we, what does flow look like? You know, is it single speed or is multiple speed?

Are there pause points? Is there generosity involved in the journey? Do you feel like you're really cared for as you move through it? I haven't been to Munich Airport, but we've done a lot of research on it. I don't know whether you've been there, but they run a really good show there. It's not just an airport for people to catch planes.

It's an airport as a destination. They've got a massive land side where there's lots of events and things like that for people to be able to go and experience different things. So all the reports that come out of that and the kind of way they integrate things

feels really good. In fact, they've done such a good job that they are now training other airports. So they have a blueprint which they send out and they work with other airports to help. And, you know, Melbourne, not so much, but, you know, there've been telephone calls between the two of them. But yeah, so that's our process. So then we talk about, okay, you've got the why bit, which is the purpose, the identity and the values. And then you have the enablers,

How do you enable this journey? Well, you've got to have real good policy for it. You've got to have really good teams to make that happen. You've got to have a set of tools

which are a big whole ecosystem approach to design where you've got the right sort of tech. You've got the right people working there. You've got the right culture. You've got all the right training going on. You've got the permissions to be the kind of person that cares and wants to work with passengers. You've got exactly...

exactly the kind of experience that is, I'll tell you a story in a second, which is completely the opposite of that. Now, just to bring this to an end,

We've worked over the last seven or eight years with Melbourne doing lots of different things and having patches of time not working with them and then come in working back with them. But they have just recently won a ton of awards for being sort of the best airport for all the sorts of things they were considered the worst airport for by passengers. I mean, if you look up Melbourne now, you'll probably find some of that old stuff. And it just, you know, it doesn't reflect actually what it is like now. A lot of it.

amazing work's gone into it. Can I interrupt you for a second and ask for a few clarifications? You've asked a lot of right questions. How exactly do we make people feel welcome and what exactly do we do? What are some of those answers in practical life that you've been able to achieve that have changed physically in Melbourne airport?

Okay, so one example would be Melbourne, like a lot of airports, that the company that runs Melbourne Airport is relatively small and has a small amount of direct employees. And the rest of the airport is manned by suppliers. So you've got thousands and thousands of suppliers. And one of the real difficulties with airports like this is how do you create a single culture of

you know, among employees and also anybody who works for the, you know, your suppliers. And also don't forget in the mix, you've got these giant clients, which are essentially the airlines who are not necessarily, they say care about the whole airport. They care about their passengers and getting their passengers through. So you can see where the power struggles and the dynamic might come into that.

So what we did is we produced a set of training guidelines and worked with the experience team, which was set up when we started working with them, was set up this experience team, which worked with all the different departments and joined all of the different departments to the overall aim.

which was to create this airport, you know, that felt like it genuinely did care, that it did all the things that an airport does and more, that it was a destination that people enjoy being there and would come back to. And so that changed enormously, enormously. People were given permission to go beyond what they would consider their normal roles and responsibilities. So one of the things that was initiated was that, you know, if a passenger needed space

something that might have been out of the ordinary or it might just be quite normal, you would stop whatever you're doing and your job was to be with the passenger until that problem was resolved. There's no passing the buck. There's no things moving on. There's no anything like that. Your role is to step forward and be with that person. That was a really big change. And the head of experience, one of the stories she tells is of somebody who was dropped off

at the airport and had absolutely nowhere to go. And the back story was that she'd come from another country to be with relatives and was going to get married in Australia and then live in Australia. Something had gone wrong and some trust was lost and she was dumped, literally dumped back at the airport and she would have to fly home. And she knew in flying home, there's a great deal of shame.

when she arrived because of the way it was structured, because of all of that. So it just so happened that one of the security guards noticed her and went to talk to her. And lo and behold, he spoke the same language. And so he stayed with her the whole time. He arranged for her through the airport to be flown to Brisbane

So not to fly out of the country, but flow to Brisbane and to stay with people. He gave her a – she didn't have a phone. She had nothing. He gave her all of that. The airport sorted out. And they threw her there. She's now – and this is a story that she's told me. She's now – she's well. She's living in Brisbane. She's really happy.

And it's that kind of thing that that training program brought out. Permission given to that security guard, for example, to step forward. So that was part of the design. But I should say, I should say that this is kind of bottom up design because it relies on the people, the communities, whether they're, you know, the stakeholders, whether they're employees, whether they're passengers, whatever, to be there and to take it forward.

You're describing that really rings the bell. One of the books I really loved was about four seasons written by the founder of the hotels. And that's the type of service and approach you can afford to have at four seasons, which

While being realistic, dirty bathrooms was one of the problems that you described. What if that person would be responsible for cleaning bathrooms and he would spend all his day dealing with the passenger? How does that work? And were they able to fix the bathrooms in the end? What was that problem about? So one of our initiatives was, and we had a whole bunch of different initiatives. One of those is love your toilet. Yeah.

The toilets were talked about, you know, insanely on forums. It really, really matters to people. And also... It's not just in Australia. It's everywhere. And also it's the access, the different types of access, depending on who you are and what you need. So there's often the toilets. I'm not talking about Melbourne specifically, but the big problem is they're dirty. They're not in the right place. They don't suit

particular needs and wants, all of those. So Love Your Toilet and also the whole cleaning that went around it, the supplier and everything like that. So Love Your Toilets was redesigned. The feel, the look and feel, the amount of toilets and where they were and everything like that was beautiful. But the service was

that went into it was extraordinary as well. But a cleaner, it's funny you should say that because that was an example that the head of experience was sharing with me. She said that if a cleaner saw somebody in distress,

Then they were able to go and help that person and then stay with that person and leave what they were doing because they had a system all set up for them being replaced. So it wasn't like, you know, this is we're really strung out. We can't, you know, we can't back it up or anything like that. You know, you can't expect somebody to leave their post unless you've got somebody who can come in and fill it.

But it's that relationship building with your customer base, if you like, your passenger. You know, it's that kind of thing that people remember. You know, we are massively social animals, right? And these are the sort of things that we love doing. The vast majority of us love to help people, love to converse, love to do all these kind of things. But, you know, our places of work often hinder that.

As someone with short hair, I've been at least three or four times in my life repeatedly questioned in female bathrooms in like Cairo, Egypt, whether I'm a woman or not. And like, you can see me now. I'm not very questionable in that regard. I was up to the point of saying, I have three children, people, please let me in. Yeah.

And you know, what you're describing is a bit on a different side of the spectrum, but yeah. - You'll remember that over and above everything else because that's the way we're built, right? You know, somebody can say 20 nice things to you and one sort of, you know, like half little criticism and we will just focus on the little half little criticism, right?

And so that is our experience. That's how we experience the world quite often. It's how we've evolved here. What you're describing, that Munich airport is brilliant. I've been to Munich airport. I don't recognize it as outstanding. I just recognize as a

great airport and I don't remember it as much as I do the bad ones. That's pretty miraculous. That's exactly what you're talking about. Yeah. Well, interesting you should say that because I don't know what you were doing and where you were going on that. But one of the things that when we're doing the research with Melbourne, one of the people who worked at Melbourne was saying, look, you've got different types of travellers. Some travellers travel so often that they don't want to

sort of massively memorable experience. They want an almost opposite, a forgettable experience. It's so good, you know, that there's been nothing bad that's gone on. You know, it's just gone exactly as you might expect, you know, given the fact that you maybe fly 50 times a year. For example, Heathrow, just a number of levels is already really over the head for when you arrive and you're trying to make sense where you are. That already is like a puzzle for me as a traveller.

Airport side, we don't have much time left. That's been a fascinating discussion. But we've got here to talk about the book. And I'd love to hear how the essence of what you are as a company, you've been thinking about writing this book for 10 years, how that has been crystallizing and what kind of stories and what kind of approaches made it into the book and why?

Yeah, so interesting, like the making of the book's a bit like the kind of design that I, you know, the process that we champion. So you have a great idea, you know kind of what you want to go into it and what it's going to look like at the end. But actually when you start doing it,

The actual doing changes it. It's almost like whatever you're doing speaks back at you. Who is it? Michelangelo was asked, how do you do that? How do you sculpt that? And he said, the stone speaks to me when I actually do it. And every artist would understand that. And I'm not saying designers are artists,

But I think that if we just like try and follow a structure too heavily, then it all kind of falls apart. So the book itself, we just started, we knew what the framework was. We had an idea that the way it's divided is it's a guidebook and a source book. The guidebook

just takes you through our methodology, which is essentially the importance of story, the importance of strategy, but at the right sort of time, and the vision making that includes in it, how you bring it to life. And that is essentially it. There's no rocket science involved at all. However, throughout, it talks about things which feel quite counterintuitive, one of which is

You know, with the strategy section where we begin by saying there's no such thing as strategy, but this is a chapter about it. And our argument is that, you know, we and this I don't know whether, you know, your husband, you were talking about being an engineer and whether he finds this in different parts of his work where people just get overwhelmed by strategy.

So they're overwhelmed by their data. They're overwhelmed by their research. They're overwhelmed by the amount of, they've got a library full of research and strategy documents, and they don't know how to make their way through it. So, you know,

Yeah, I mean, it sounds like it sounds the easiest thing in the world, but don't strategize unless there's a problem, right? Don't have to. And then another thing is, you know, that we are that a plan is never set to come back to the King's Cross example. A plan is never set in stone. It's always being replanned. We are always in the planning. We're always in the making. And I shared this with you, you know, designers and marketers in terms of selling products are

always sell a story of design, which is massively lineal, you know, that takes you through the research, the development, the prototyping, the this and the that. And you think it's the cleanest thing in the world. And actually, you know, design is exceptionally messy. And the reason why it's exceptionally messy is it involves humans and humans are really complex.

you know and we we we and all kinds of things happen um and i and i think for the better and so this book was the same sort of thing you know we started it having an idea where it was going to go and it did kind of go there but you know we didn't for example have the corp building in the middle of like king's cross we had a university in the middle of king's cross and the book is the

same. Some of the examples that we were going to use, we didn't use at all. However, there are some things that are always there. It's the whole ecosystem approach. It's a start now, plan long term kind of philosophy where you pilot things, you iterate, you build up, you learn, you measure. There's this kind of continually improving cycle in it. Patagonia, for example,

is just a wonderful, wonderful example of all of this. A company that started essentially selling climbing equipment and then moved into Apparel and then became a real leader in innovating around Apparel and then had this kind of crisis moment in the 90s where it realized it was doing nothing for the environment.

and that all of its products were, they were made in such a way that people who are working in the shops with the products were getting sick because of the chemicals in the cotton and so on. So they re-looked at their value system totally. They said that one, everything that they were making had to be of high quality. And so there was quality checks throughout from all the way through the pipelines, from downstream,

and to upstream. So everything was really beautiful. And also for them, no decision would be made unless it was good for the environment. So those two values, they've got more values, but those two values were critical to how they then changed and the things that they then went on to do. I mean, they're such a good example of design

in action, you know, they're constantly like, and I think this is what happens. And this is why, you know, really good designs evolve and iterate and so on, because that is exactly what happens. What is the relationship between the user? How does the user in using it design back at the product?

Actually, Patagonia, I think, has been used as one of the examples in one of my favorite books by Simon Sinek, Start With Why. It's a foundational story of how they were able to propagate those values into something successful.

For example, some photography companies were able to do that and some weren't as they were surviving the digital transformation of sorts. Yeah. But, you know, I mean, I haven't read that book, but I do know his philosophy, the why, how, what. I mean, if you look at Patagonia,

you know, when it was set up, the founder and the people around him, all they wanted to do was sort of climb, jump, run in places that they wanted to do that in. You know, that's their big why. Yeah. This, why do I do this? It's because this is, this is being free. And,

And we want to be free in nature. And we want to test ourselves against nature or with nature. And that was their big why. And then that then evolved into, oh, we want to make the right kind of crampons and footwear and things like that. And he started to forge his own and sell it out the back of his car. And then from that moment, he went on a holiday to Scotland. He found the rugby jersey and he brought a rugby jersey back because he loved climbing with it.

And it was in that action that then other people were saying, oh, that's a good piece of clothing to climb in. Everything about it, the collar and all of that kind of stuff is great. And then from that, the apparel then started to build. But then they got really much, much more sophisticated. I mean, it's just the way it evolved was messy.

And the way we tell the story in retrospect is always, you know, what story making does. It just cleans it all up and tidies it up, makes it very lineal and makes it almost inevitable. It's inevitable that that would have happened. Inevitable, inevitable, inevitable, you know. And actually, it's not like that at all, which is why Patagonia is so brilliant.

Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom today with us. Where can people get the book and where can they follow your work and Free State? So freestatestudio.com is where you'll find us. And then from there, you can go anywhere. You can find where the book is. It's published by Black Dog Press. And you can order the book there if you fancy that. You can see our training sessions. You can see everything we do there. So I would go straight there and then you can find everything else.

Amazing. Well, thanks so much again and have a wonderful rest of your week. Thank you, Jane.