The Power of Designing for a Single User

Scale is often considered the pinnacle of success. Whether it’s writing a best-selling novel or building an app that has millions of users, we judge the significance of work by how many people it reaches.

Odyssey Works—an experience design collective—takes the opposite approach. They create bespoke performances for an audience of one. 

They spend months planning and researching a single person—learning everything they can about who they are designing for. They talk to their friends and family, read their favorite books, and learn about the decisions and questions that person is sitting with. 

Then, they craft an in-depth experience to help that person explore the themes of their life. The result is a meticulously curated, months-long performance filled with surprise encounters and personalized art installations that seem to mirror the very fabric of a viewer’s existence. These experiences often involve a fusion of reality and art, challenging each viewer to confront their deepest fears, explore untapped desires, and unearth profound truths about themselves. 

Photos from Carl Collins’s odyssey, where he was tied to a stake like Joan of Arc. Photo credit: Ayden LeRoux

Odyssey Works’s goal is to create an individualized experience that is exponentially more powerful than could be possible in a mass-market offering. And they often succeed—people have changed jobs, left relationships, and made other significant life changes after going through their “odysseys.”

Moreover, their work has established them as experts in the field of experience design. Their  work has been covered by the New York Times, NPR, and Fast Company, and designers from companies like Apple, Meta, IDEO, and Nike have flocked to their training programs to learn their unique methodology.

Odyssey Works is an example of what I like to think of as “the power of one.” Instead of scaling up to find impact, sometimes you can do more significant work by scaling down. And focusing on a single person can lead to breakthroughs in science and business as well. 

Medical insights from a single patient

For the past 16 months, I’ve been dealing with long Covid. At various points, I’ve dealt with headaches, brain fog, dysautonomia (nervous system dysfunction), and whole-body fatigue. While most people recover fully from Covid-19, some battle ongoing symptoms for years. And while I’ve been lucky to have a mild case and have found ways to manage the condition, there is no known cure.

In 2021, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) put $1 billion toward studying long Covid, known as the RECOVER project. They focused on large-scale observational studies, which haven’t yielded anything of note. Two years later, the money is running out without much to show for it. “I don’t know that they’ve contributed anything except more confusion,” said physician-scientist Eric Topol. 

While the RECOVER project has made little impact by going shallow and broad, a small lab led by researcher Paul Hwang may have made a breakthrough. Instead of broad-scale studies, Hwang and his colleagues focused on the singular case of Amanda Twinam, a patient struggling with chronic fatigue and a rare genetic cancer disorder. 

Chronic fatigue is an illness that looks similar to long Covid, and some researchers believe they are one and the same. Hwang and his team theorized that Twinam’s genetic disorder might be causing her fatigue, but when that hypothesis turned out to be wrong, he and his lab began an intense investigation to try and discover the root cause.

Over several years, they put her through a battery of biochemical tests. Eventually, they found that she was producing an excessive amount of the protein WASF3 and that other people with chronic fatigue also had heightened levels. They then genetically engineered “Amanda mice,” which also over-produced this protein, and found that they too suffered from fatigue.

“Amazing findings in medicine are sometimes based on one patient,” Hwang said.