How experiences change the way people feel, think, and interact with each other?
My conversations with David Jeanne about transformative design sparked my interest in the concept of "liminality." What exactly are we talking about? What is at stake for a designer or an executive coach or any organisation transformation expert, and how might this shift my perspective of efficiency as a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt? Let’s go to the source…or rather, to Seattle, to meet Johan Liedgren.
Johan Liedgren is a writer, lecturer, director, and design strategist. Instead of treating design as just making things look pretty or making apps faster, he focuses on how experiences change the way people feel, think, and interact with each other.
He is widely recognized as one of the primary innovators who codified Liminal Design as a distinct methodology for modern digital products, corporate transformations, and user experiences.
👉🏻 Johan, how to define what is liminal design ? I am not sure this concept is very well known in France or anywhere in the world ?
« The instinct has been there for a thousand years; to add something to the purely functional design aspect of a thing. The concept itself is simple : you have two ways of engaging with something.
The first way is transactional. You know what you want, and the product is designed to deliver it fast, efficient, automatic and seamless. The better the transaction, the less surprising and ambiguous it is. If you want to know the weather in Paris tomorrow morning, it tells you that with any added perspective or intention. Those engagements do not involve us or our imagination deeply because they are predictable.There is no reason to engage. You press a button, and something comes out. In a transaction, and thus surprise and ambiguity is considered a failure. As technology mediates much of our lives and interactions with others, we of course risk turning our lives transactional. What happens then to the experiences, the questions and delightful frictions that remind us we are alive?
Liminal design is a different type of engagement. The question isn’t only what function it delivers but what part of us questions - how it through use can provide novel experiences that challenges us, have our imagination come alive, suggesting new perspectives on the world and ourselves.
To illustrate this, consider a book about Paris. A transactional book wants to sell millions of copies and asks what people want to know and gives them exactly that. The usual, without surprise. Another way to write about Paris, like Paris, When It’s Naked by Etel Adnam, instead dives into the daily routine of living in the city, and by standing still describes how the people and weather wash through the streets through the seasons with a lot of detail to things that would never make the pages of a tourist guide. But with Adnam’s beautiful book we get new perspectives, a different sense of time and a different Paris to enjoy. Suddenly, you get a whole new perspective that doesn't assume you are like everyone else, a tourist. That friction creates new angles and suggests new perspectives. It starts to create new stories.
All good stories follow this same premise : things are not what they seem. Take a train station platform where people get on and off. Beyond the transaction of catching a train, it is a shared liminal space. Not where we live, not where we are going - a place of temporary status and transition. How can we design for this so other travellers add to our experience, confront us with what we don’t already know. Create a narrative around the travel that allos others to participawte in something bigger than the transactional, just getting from A to B? Bringing strangers together under such a narrative creates meaningful surprise. In transactions, meaning and narrative are clear from the start and never change. In liminal design, meaning and narrative ending remain open.That’s for you to live. »
👉🏻 According to you, why do corporate change programs fail when they rely on transactional pipelines?
« They fail because they never tried to do anything different. You have to define a liminal goal instead of a transactional one. If an executive team acknowledges that customers are leaving because a product or process simply isn't interesting anymore, you can shift the discussion from pure transaction to liminality. Or, if you want to offer something different in a world competing on prince and speed alone, the liminal questions start to emerge naturally.
It comes down to changing the underlying metaphor of what we are doing. Take our current Zoom or Teams video call: a glut of research papers will show why this is a terrible way to interact with people. These platforms were designed to turn meetings into quick transactions. Because of that, the image is cropped, small as a postage stamp andI can't read your face properly, I can't establish direct eye contact, and I don't know your posture, don’t see your hands. My brain then, trying to consider real contact but lacking information, runs in overtime - this is why we have Zoom fatigue. From an evolutionary standpoint, not seeing your full body or your open hands triggers our reptile brain to assume you are hiding something or deceiving. That is why video calls are exhausting, Zoom fatigue. The metaphor in online corporate meetings, like anyone ever wanted that.
If you change the metaphor instead from a “corporate meeting” to a “deep professional conversation”, you can deliver this with the same technology :
You display the person in real size on a larger screen, you line up areas for direct eye contact.
You match the visual environment around both participants so the brain feels you are in the same physical space, a shared space.
You frame the image to see more - to read posture, see their hands, it builds trust.
Suddenly, strangers are suspended in a liminal space together and build an intense connection, saving thousands of dollars in travel.
All experiences, liminal included, are narrative in nature because they happen over time. With a beginning, a middle, and an end. It's what makes it an experience. If you come out of an experience the exact same way you came in, it was purely transactional.Nothing to remember, nothing new to consider. Think about it as a good film or a book, if you are not surprised, the book will have failed. Surprise is the fundamental difference between a transaction and a liminal experience. We are designing self-driving cars. Great! But why? What is the new promise? So we don’t have to drive ourselves? Or to make cars a designed place for reading, or back seat intimacy? It's all about the new story and metaphor offered as a more interesting proposition to what we have today. All very doable, if we actually want it. »
👉🏻 Is there a link between your narrative approach definition and the hero's journey by Joseph Campbell?
« Absolutely. But careful here, all too many eager consultants use the concept without offering real and existential surprise - just a formula, and that fails exactly 100% of the time. If you look at Campbell's structure, it starts with a reluctant hero who does not want to be a hero. No one likes an eager hero. The protagonist makes excuses, they are scared or have their own problems and must be convinced by a call to adventure. That reluctance is the design friction. And the friction is the message. That hero represents the audience, projecting their own real emotions, fears and dreams onto a fictional universe, character and struggles. The story arc becomes ours, without the real world dangers that might come from a real world adventure. Fictional experiences offer very real emotions. That is the key to it.
These meaningful liminal experiences must remain open, leaving room for the user and audience to engage with their own imagination. An author or filmmaker only writes half the story, the audience writes the other half by bringing their own imagination, hopes, and fears. If you get too prescriptive, it becomes a transaction. It cannot be prescriptive nor preachy.
You must introduce friction. As Marshall McLuhan noted, the friction is the message. It is the unexpected bump that forces people to stop looking at their shoes, pay attention and engage. The second you feel there is no more surprise to be had, the narrative is over. »
👉🏻 Is it too dangerous for managers to organize this kind of liminal experiences?
« Anyone in power often prefers transactional setups because transactions preserve power, scale easily, and maintain predictability. A liminal transaction will always challenge the status quo.
However, transactions do not speak to our true human needs. How do we know we are alive if we only follow rules, processes, or plans ? Liminality is about feeling alive through challenge and shifting perspectives.But the core resistance with anything that isn’t just transactional, is that corporations don’t really have much interesting to say about anything that is also true and sincere. Sincerity is the key notion here. If they want to make more money, and that is really all, is just not a very interesting story to tell. What is the easy question? Why is it a much harder one to answer publicly? And corporate scale, volume and repeatability, seamless efficiency etc is literally the opposite of what makes us feel alive and unique.
A hallmark experience of a liminal encounter is awe. Consider astronaut Rusty Schweickart from Apollo 9 in the 1960’s doing his spacewalk. When he stepped out into complete darkness and looked down at Earth, his entire world perspective suddenly changed. He knew the facts before, but experiencing it made him feel smaller, yet part of something infinitely larger. That is what awe does: your usual cognitive structures and sense of scale stop working. He cried inside his suit, and when he returned to Earth, he quit NASA to work on environmental causes, now focused on how all is connected.
Once your brain stretches through an experience of awe, whether from space, a cathedral like Notre-Dame, or a powerful book or film, our brains after the experience don't snap back to the same place. You come out a slightly changed person. »
👉🏻 To embody your vision for transformation and friction, which animal totem would you choose and why?
« A raven, a fox, or the snake in the Garden of Eden. They are tricksters.And this is what a designer should think of himself as.
Mythologically, tricksters create new worlds by disrupting what is standing still, rigid, and solid. The predictable status quo. Look at the Garden of Eden as a corporate setup : two people have everything, no needs, no decay, no choices. Perfect, but unbearable because nothing happens and nothing matters. Then the fallen angel turns into a snake, introduces the possibility of a rule to break, and raises the stakes. The trickster breaks the static state to allow for story, new opportunities, and real life to begin. »
Just like in our exchange, Johan suggested the snake, the raven, and the fox as totem animals, leaving the experience open. When I grabbed my box of acrylic tubes, all the ochres fell out. Was it a mischievous fox inviting itself in ? For once, inspired by this conversation, I let my paintbrushes decide.
👉🏻 What do we have to learn from the fox ?
🦊 1. Disrupting rigid systems through productive friction : The fox inherently disrupts controlled environments by breaking through fences and evading fixed traps, refusing to follow predictable paths. In human transformation, it symbolizes moving away from rigid, transactional routines where surprise is treated as a failure. By introducing unexpected roadblocks and subtle disruptions, the fox forces individuals out of « autopilot mode ». This productive friction challenges existing assumptions and creates the necessary opening for genuine behavioral change.
🦊 2. Navigating ambiguity in the liminal edge : Biologically thriving in the transition zones between field and forest, the fox masters the art of living in the "in-between" spaces. This mirrors the concept of liminality, where old rules no longer apply and new frameworks have yet to be established. Transformation requires leaders to step away from pre-defined corporate scripts and embrace uncertainty. By lingering comfortably within these threshold spaces, we allow people the freedom to experiment and reframe their own reality.
🦊 3. Cultivating narrative desire through open curiosity : A fox achieves its goals through agility, curiosity, and stealth not through brute force or overt mandates. Prescriptive change programs fail because they remove all elements of surprise and personal discovery. By acting like the fox, facilitators only provide half the narrative arc, leaving room for participants to write the remainder with their own imagination. Subtly provoking curiosity invites individuals to solve the puzzle themselves, ensuring deeper personal investment.
🦊 4. Awakening human aliveness and Awe : A sudden encounter with a fox breaks the monotony of a landscape, delivering an immediate spark of unexpected visual delight. This mirrors the ultimate goal of liminal design : restoring genuine human aliveness in environments dominated by rigid KPI. True change shatters habitual ways of seeing, evoking a profound sense of awe that makes us feel connected to a larger whole. It ensures that individuals emerge from the transformation permanently rewired and slightly changed.
🦊 5. The Trickster across mythologies and organisations : European, Norse, and Kitsune, across cultures the fox embodies the boundary-crossing trickster that challenges rigid order to unlock transformation. In European folklore (Reynard), it uses sharp wits to outsmart authority. In Norse myth, it echoes Loki’s shape-shifting, status-quo-disrupting friction. In Japanese yōkai lore, the kitsune guards thresholds between worlds, using illusions to force humans into moments of profound awakening. Who guards the threshold in your organisation? Who opens the door to liminal change when you, managers, are asking for a transformation ?
🦊 Johan, do you have any advice for designers?
« Think about your work as important work. Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath, and military officers or police swear an oath because their work has deep ethical implications for others. Why don't designers swear an oath? By not doing so, we assume our work has no ethical impact, which is false. We literally design more and more of the world that has become our everyday reality. Let’s make that count. Design things that truly matter. That makes the world a better and more interesting place.
“You have to own what you do, even if you work for a large corporation. If you just execute orders from management to make a process faster for a corporation, you are not a designer ; you are just a tool. Real design happens when you step back, take ethical responsibility, and ask what metaphors and realities you are building. Everyone has a bunch of easy answers, but very few people have really good questions. A good question trumps the correct answer in the long run.. »
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