GREATER GOOD SCIENCE CENTER · CREATIVE DIRECTOR · PURPOSE ACROSS THE LIFESPAN
400 people for the summit. 6,000 for the course. The framework that made both possible didn't exist before this project.
How might we translate rigorous research on purpose into an experience people could feel their way through, beyond what any paper could do?
participants in the virtual summit
400
participants in the online course
6,000
from brief to live summit
6 month
The situation
The Greater Good Science Center studies the science of a meaningful life. Their Purpose Across the Lifespan project had something real to say. But the team were writers and researchers, people who thought in text and citations, not in experience design or visual frameworks.
I was brought in as Creative Director and content lead to build the summit from scratch: brand, speakers, interactive content, the full experience. The brief was broad. There was no established playbook for what this should be.
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What I owned
Everything from vision to delivery. I read through the research on purpose, languishing, and flourishing to get to the substance before touching the design. Then I built the creative framework, curated the speakers, developed the brand, and designed all the interactive content.
I operated as both creative director and content expert simultaneously. The design decisions and the intellectual substance were mine to make together. You can't outsource the thinking when the thinking is the product.
Jane Goodall was on the program. She came through the Greater Good Science Center's own relationships, and it turned out to be one of her last public appearances before her death. She was there because she believed in people pursuing purpose beyond their professional work. Holding that alongside the rest of the program required real care about sequence and tone.
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The constraints
The client team were exceptional thinkers who lived in text. Getting them to commit to something visual, to see how an experience could carry meaning that a white paper couldn't, required a different kind of case-making.
The timeline was tight: 6 months from concept to live event. And for a stretch of that time, a key piece of the program was still unresolved. Building the surrounding speaker lineup, and making sure it had the right range of voices, requires a settled anchor to design around. When that anchor is moving, everything downstream has to stay provisional longer than anyone wants.
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The trade-offs
The client came in with a vision for the activities: outside partners, sourced content. I worked through what was available and found that the flow didn't hold. The pieces were good individually. Together they didn't make a coherent experience.
I had to make the case to set that aside and use my own existing content instead: purpose work that integrated design thinking and design-your-life methodology. That's a delicate ask. It can read as self-serving. The argument I had to make was about the experience first: this is what will actually work for your audience. Not about what I brought to the table.
The risk was real. Advocating for your own work over a client's initial vision requires that you've done enough of the other work to have earned the credibility to say it. I had. They came around. The program was more coherent for it.
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The calls I made
After reading the research, I built an original visual framework: a timeline mapping the predictable moments across a human life when people lose their sense of purpose and when they can come back to it. The highs and lows weren't random. They were identifiable. College graduates adrift after the structure of school falls away. New parents who set their own sense of direction aside. People in midlife trying to reconnect to something that got buried under years of being busy. Retirees who suddenly have time and no frame for what to do with it.
The framework made the research legible. Clients and stakeholders could see the argument. The audience could find themselves somewhere on the timeline. For a team of writers who weren't used to thinking visually, having a picture to point to changed what we could build together.
The same timeline the team used internally became the teaching tool for the audience. That continuity was deliberate: one framework, doing two jobs.
The plan after the event was to make the content available in some form. I proposed a mini-course as the vehicle. The key decision was to design the summit and the course frame together from the start, so the two could move as one arc. Participants who attended the summit got extended learning. Students who came to the course fresh could follow the same arc without having been in the room.
The client's first instinct was to make the event accessible. I pushed the format further into something that could keep teaching on its own.
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What changed
400 participants at the summit. 6,000 in the online course.
A group of researchers who thought in text left with a visual framework they could use to teach with. The course continues to reach people who had nothing to do with the original event.
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What this unlocked
Research without a frame for experience stays on the shelf. The work here was building the bridge: from what the science says to what a person can actually feel and do with it.
That's what I do. The Greater Good Science Center's work deserved an audience beyond academia. Getting it there required thinking about the whole system: the experience, the visual language, the extension, and the person on the other end of all of it.