What I've learned about transformation design thus far #74

Archetypes are recurring patterns in the human psyche: forms that appear across cultures, dreams, and myths. The hero, the mentor, the shadow, the journey to the underworld: these are discoveries, patterns found wherever humans tell stories. Jung called them universal, and they are super powerful ‘material’ for design.

Working with archetypes gives transformation design depth. The experience built on an archetypal pattern inherits the millennia of storytelling that tested it.

This does not mean decorating experiences with mythological imagery. A spa dressed in Persephone, her name on the door, her story on the wall, is decoration. A spa sequenced so the guest descends first, into dark and heat, and only then climbs back toward light, is structure. A lobby that calls its entrance "the crossing" is decoration. An entrance that makes you pass through something narrow and low before the space opens out, so the threshold is felt, not read, is structure. The myth is ‘embodied’. The descent before the rise. The ‘death’ before rebirth. These patterns are the grammar of transformation; the designer who learns them writes more fluently.

The power of archetypes is resonance. When an experience touches an archetype, it touches something the guest already carries. It ‘awakens’ something native. The guest recognises what they are encountering, even if they can’t name it. That recognition is where transformation really works well.

I’m not saying the transformation designer need not be a mythologist. But familiarity with the great stories does enrich the palette, not to reproduce them literally, but to read the patterns they encode. The patterns are the treasure. The stories are the maps to where it is buried.

A both entertaining and deep podcast series with a strong mythic base is The Emerald: Currents and Trends Through a Mythic Lens, or here on Spotify, by Joshua Michael Schrei. I can’t recommend this one more. It’s truly an amazing series if you would like to enrich your palette through Myth.