A Decade Exploring Meaning-Making
For the past 10 years, I've been obsessed with a question:
Can we design meaningful experiences that help people connect with what actually matters to them?
What started as academic research has evolved through multiple experiments, each one teaching me something new about how meaning-making actually works. Here's how I got to Workshop Workshop.
The vision that launched everything
ARS-1 became my first experiment in exploring the question of meaning-making through personalisation. I built a contraption that would create a personalised concoction through scent tests, or so called "aguas de tiempo" (traditional Mexican herbal remedies) using tinctures made from flowers, roots and seeds.
The project which remains unfinished launched what would become an investigation into how meaning actually works.
The thesis that built the foundations
My MA dissertation explored whether we could extract the meaning-making mechanisms from religious practices and apply them to design. The core insight: religions have spent thousands of years perfecting ways to help people connect with purpose and meaning. What if we could learn from that without the religious baggage?
The research gave me a framework for thinking about meaning as something that can be intentionally designed rather than just hoped for.
From theory to prototype
I built a physical machine that attempted to create personalised meaningful objects. Users would interact with various stimuli, and the machine, powered by artificial intelligence, would combine elements based on their preferences to create a custom "amulet."
The technical execution was ambitious but clunky. More importantly, I learned that meaning can't be manufactured through clever algorithms: it emerges from process and relationship, not just a final object.
Building a wellbeing business
Mood Lab was my attempt to create a scalable business around personalised wellbeing experiences. The concept addressed what I saw as a "spirituality crisis": people hungry for meaning but disconnected from traditional religion. I designed 30-45 minute sessions that would adapt to users' personalities and emotional needs, mixing "pleasure and life-meaning with a dash of purpose."
The project included detailed business planning from R&D through consumer electronics, targeting "spiritual but not religious" urban professionals. Though I developed the complete framework and technical specifications, I learned through prototyping that designing wellbeing "for" people rather than "with" them felt too prescriptive and maybe even counterproductive.
The first workshop format
This was my first attempt at creating group experiences around meaning-making. The format invited participants to channel frustration and anxiety into creating meaningful moments of beauty and connection for future participants of the workshop to find.
I learned that people were hungry for this kind of exploration, but the framing was a bit ambitious. Creating these moments and building the setting for them in a few hours required a skill set that most participants didn’t have.
Scaling the vision
ATLAS represents my most ambitious experiment in meaning-making: designing an entire institution around creating transformative experiences. The vision is to create "pavilions" within a larger "labyrinth" where people can explore connection and meaning in audio format first, and eventually evolving into an IRL destination.
I see this monumental meaning-making vision as my personal "Sagrada Familia". A project so enormous I might not live to see built.
The breakthrough
After years of complex theories and ambitious installations, I decided to test the simplest possible version:
Just gather people and explore meaning-making together through conversation and creative exercises.
I ran a survey first. 73 people completed it, and the results surprised me: 91% already knew their priorities, but almost everyone felt disconnected from them in daily life. This wasn't a clarity problem, it was a connection problem.
That insight changed everything. Instead of trying to manufacture meaning for people, I might be able to help them stay connected to what they already know matters.
What I've Learned
A decade of research distilled into one key insight:
We don't need more frameworks for finding meaning. We need better ways to stay connected to the meaning we've already found and to each other.
Workshop Workshop is my attempt to create exactly that: a simple, experimental format for exploring what matters and staying connected to it.
Want to join the experiment?
This journey also informs my strategic consulting work. If you're curious about any of these individual projects, feel free to explore them.