The Inspiration Walk:
An immersion learning audio experience designed to help you hear how to see things differently.
So what is it?
The Inspiration Walk is a guided audio experience that gets your body and mind moving into (hopefully) unexpected territory to find inspiration on a challenge that matters to you.
It is an exercise in observation and synthesis that guides listeners through an immersive experience outdoors.
How does it work?
The listener goes through a sequence of tasks that ask them to find inspiration by shifting their perspective in order to collect many seemingly disparate pieces of inspiration. We then guide them through the exercise of fitting these seemingly random bits of inspiration to a project or challenge they are facing in order to create new ideas or to see the problem in a new light.
Ultimately, we hope listeners will leave with the intention of making time to seek inspiration in unlikely, everyday places and create a practice around applying it directly to a question they have.
Why did we make it?
The Inspiration Walk is an attempt to provide an immersive, engaging, and hands-on experience at scale that builds the creative confidence of the listener by showing them that creativity is an act, a choice, not something that some people have and others don’t.
The first prototype of the Inspiration Walk was originally developed for the University Innovation Fellows meetup in March 2016. The meetup provided a perfect design constraint: engage 300 students with varying backgrounds and expertise in design, without access to a class room or indoor space. We decided to add the constraint of not having a teacher present either.
The content and curation of activities of the piece was done by Tania Anaissie, Leticia Britos Cavagnaro and Erik Olesund. Erik and Tania, with the help of Hannah Joy Root, who then produced, distributed and edited the piece.
On the day of the big test the experience was facilitated by Breanne Przestrzelski and Magann Dykema from the UIF cohort. We received more than 160 feedback entries and parsed through the feedback before formulating a point of view for what to change and what to keep.
The now published version was created in August 2016 by rapidly A/B testing a number of short prototypes designed to answer specific questions:
What tone should the narrators have?
How much time does each activity need?
How clear are the instructions?
What takeaways are the listener bringing with them after the experience?
Erik and Tania kept working on the project, and joined by Seamus Harte the team sprinted for three weeks.
a peek into the prototyping process
Where can I try it?
Right here!
First, get up on your feet and head outside. Make sure you bring a mobile device, headphones, a notebook and a pen.
Once you’re ready, hit play on the audio track and start walking in the direction you’re facing.
The walk takes about 15 minutes.
Credits
Idea: Tania Anaissie, Leticia Britos Cavagnaro, Erik Olesund, Seamus Harte
Producer: Seamus Harte
Narration: Tania Anaissie, Erik Olesund
Post-production: Erik Olesund, Seamus Harte
Production help: Tania Anaissie, Leticia Britos Cavagnaro, Hannah Joy Root