Patterns of Transformation by Uncommon Places Design founder Ida Benedetto is a design reference for creating intimate social gatherings that offer the potential for human enrichment and transformation. It identifies the core design components of transformative social experiences through ethnographic analysis of well-done sex parties, funerals, and wilderness trips.
social, emotional, physical
conditioned, embraced
exploratory, progressive, cyclical
repetitive, acute, dramatic
Despite the dramatically different context, lessons from Patterns of Transformation applies immediately to organizational consulting.
- When conflicting needs and expectations limit a team’s creativity, ingenuity, and productivity, norms from well-done sex parties can point to new ways to collaborate without sacrificing individual needs and differences.
- Where an outside threat like changing market forces or regulatory norms poses an existential risk to an organization, lessons from wilderness trips help teams focus on what’s most important and collaborate to surmount the threat together.
- Following a major change, loss, or defeat that has left a team deflated and demoralized, experience design insights from funerals can help the team take a necessary pause to reckon with their new reality and move forward with renewed energy.
Patterns of Transformation has been taught at The Carnegie Mellon School of Art, Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, and New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, among others. It was a key influence in Bruce Feiler’s bestseller Life Is in the Transitions. Bruce initially thought that the messy middle of life transitions was just that, messy. After speaking and reading my research, he realized that the messy middles conform to the structural patterns I identified in this research, and that all 100 life stories he collected neatly fell into one of the three patterns, with only a few small exceptions.