Book Club: The Experience Design Building Blocks by Pigalle Tavakkoli

This month’s theme has been about the power of narrative – in retail, in research, in the way we talk about what we make and sell. So it felt apt to select Pigalle Tavakkoli’s The Experience Design Building Blocks for the first read of The Good Clothes Network’s Book Club, a compact and thoughtfully-designed guide on the principles behind creating experiences that will move people.

Tavakkoli has spent over fifteen years working across theatre, fashion and science. She worked with Alexander McQueen before a lightbulb moment at the V&A led her to found the UK’s first short course in Experience Design at Central Saint Martins. My husband took the course earlier this month and returned full of enthusiasm with a copy of her book. The Experience Design Building Block distills her teachings into a series of clear frameworks, and while it’s aimed primarily at event and experience designers, I found myself reading it with independent fashion brands very much in mind. Because since the pandemic, WGSN’s trend forecasting shows that how people shop, what they buy and the brands they choose are now inseparable from how they feel.

The book’s central argument is simple: the greatest mistake in experience design is making it about yourself. She distinguishes between ego – filling the frame with your own vision, tastes and assumptions – and empathy, which means suspending all of that to genuinely understand who your audience is and what they need. ‘Rather than being a knower,’ she writes, ‘we become a seeker.’ The ego mistake is talking at people about what you love rather than listening to what they need. On a vintage stall this might look like enthusing about the provenance of a piece when the customer is actually trying to work out if it suits them.

One of the concepts I found most useful is what Tavakkoli calls storyfeeling. Storytelling, she argues, is often about the brand or organisation. Storyfeeling flips that script: the audience becomes the protagonist, and the story connects directly with their own emotions, memories and aspirations. She draws on Scott McCloud’s theory of comics to make the point: the real action happens not in the panel itself but in the gaps between panels – the space the reader’s imagination fills in. Leave room for the customer to complete the story themselves and they become active participants rather than passive consumers. This connects to what I explored in this month’s long read: people aren’t just looking for a product; they’re looking for a different relationship with buying altogether.

Her Experience Change Equation moves through three stages: feel, think, do. The equation  deliberately places emotion first on the grounds that humans are driven far more by their subconscious than their rational brain. Change how someone feels and their thinking follows; change their thinking and their behaviour shifts. For a brand, that sequence is important: the emotional connection comes before the hang tag, before the price – even before the product story. It starts the moment someone walks into your space.

The book is concise and accessible rather than academic, with clear illustrations and the tone of a mentor sharing hard-won insights. If you want to think more clearly about the experience you’re creating for the people who come to you, it’s well worth a few hours of your time.

The Experience Design Building Blocks by Pigalle Tavakkoli. £14.99