This book is for people who make things out of people: people who make social networks, organizational policies and processes, clubs, events, monasteries, recommender systems, classroom exercises, and so on.
It's about a new way to design these things.
It's different in three ways.
First, it’s about designing meaningful experiences, not just pleasurable or efficient ones.
Does that seem niche? It's not:
Meaningful experience is at the heart of what matters to us, but is often lost as products and organizations scale up.
One challenge here, is that we lack a vocabulary for naming these sources of meaning precisely. In this book, we develop such a vocabulary. We define a person's values as "the things they pay attention to when they make their most meaningful choices".
In our course, we write them in a special format, and test software against them:
Gathering a population's values helps us verify that meaningful choices keep happening as things scale up.
This method takes a wide view of meaningful experience. It's not just about peak moments—not just the moment you say "I do", accept your dream job, or solve the mystery. Meaning is everything you did to get there: the relationships you built, the supportive environments you needed, etc. The methods in this book give you a way to collect these backstories from users, employees, and so on, draw general conclusions, and reshape your design around them.
How it works: we start with a story where someone lives by a particular value—in the example below, it is *vulnerability*. We use that story to surface all the little things a design needs to get right, to make vulnerability possible.
