Audience Experience Desig

As the Senior Director of Design for the New World Symphony (NWS), I’ve been interested in understanding and applying design thinking to help teams design better and more purposeful experiences for their audience. In collaboration with Zach Manzi, alumni of the NWS, Conduit, modular music group, and with the financial support of the Knight Foundation, we developed Audience Experience Design (AXD). AXD is a human-centered design framework that provides arts organizations with tools to better connect them with their audiences.

The AXD framework was prototyped and tested with groups from the University of Miami Frost School of Music as well as the New World Symphony Fellowship program.

AXD has been applied to several Fellow lead innovation projects at the New World Symphony. These experiments resulted in a project such as Bear and Brass which has gained national recognition for its innovative approach to creating a unique audience experience and is being featured a the 2021 Virtual NWS Gala.