The experience of The Experience Book

It is with some disbelief that I write to report that the first run of The Experience Book being almost sold out.

I can’t talk for Dave Waddell (who can?), but for me the publishing of a book that is both culmination and example of everything I’d spent my working life on was an extraordinary time. It was September 2022, the descriptor ‘post-Covid’ still fresh on everyone’s lips. The UK’s contingent of books (printed in Spain) had been delayed at Heathrow, the venue for its first launch had to be changed last minute, and we had no real idea – physical books or no physical books, venue or no venue – whether there was an audience out there for something that goes so far as to describe itself as ‘an authoritative account of experience design’, one that promises to take the reader on ‘a playful, provocative, and eclectic romp through millennia of human creativity’. To say I was anxious is something of an understatement. We were in danger of falling off a cliff of our own making.

I needn’t have worried. The book (with actual books in attendance) was duly launched in Brighton, London, and Melbourne. It’s been kindly featured in the likes of We Heart , AnOther Magazine , www.icon-magazine.com , and DEZEEN LED . We’ve been invited to share its thinking on podcasts and at a range of different events, including Martin Raymond ’s Back to the Fu**kture. We’ve started a course – The Experience Course (no surprise) – off the back of it. The book’s not going to make it onto the New York Times’s bestseller list, but it’s certainly been one of the publisher’s top sellers. Everything’s happened as one would have hoped – plus a whole bunch of (wonderful) surprises to boot.

Most importantly, it appears that it and its subject does, after all, have an audience. I would be lying if I said it’s everybody’s cup of tea. It’s not. Indeed, one reviewer describes it as having ‘interesting content’ but being ‘terribly written’. For others, the book’s design and deep pinkness satisfies so much more than all its talk about consciousness or machines for belonging or availability bias or kin selection, etcetera. However, if the feedback Dave and I have had is anything to go by, I’m delighted to say that it also appears to have caught the imagination of a wonderfully eclectic group of thinkers, designers, and makers. As example, last week Dave passed on a note from Richard Simcock (Chief Medical Officer at Macmillan) sharing the fact that the book’s currently providing those leading the charity’s strategic refresh ‘with a North Star of what good should really look like’. I can’t tell you how much this and similar mean to us.

As said, the first print run is almost sold out. If you haven’t got one, it’s still available – just. And if you find that you can’t get hold of one, then place an order at Black Dog Press: the more orders, the more likely it is that the second run gets printed. Welcome to the economy of publishing.

https://blackdogonline.com/products/the-experience-book