Lifted
Designed an orchestrated, large-scale moment of appreciation to spark connection and shift how a community shows up for one another.
Role: Experience Design Lead
Scope: Cornell campus + NYC workplace · 500+ participants
Overview
Lifted is an experience designed to create a collective moment of appreciation and belonging through shared participation.
Through interviews and observation, I saw that many people felt disconnected and underappreciated, even in highly social environments. While people wanted to express gratitude and connect, there were few moments that made it feel easy or natural to do so.
Rather than designing an ongoing system, I focused on creating a single, coordinated experience that could spark emotion, shift behavior, and make appreciation visible at scale.
Impact
Lifted demonstrated how small, low-pressure interactions can create meaningful connection at scale, transforming how people experience a shared environment.
What began as a single activation evolved into a repeatable model that spread across contexts
and continued over time.
500+ participants across campus activation
Sparked hundreds of peer-to-peer appreciation notes
Created unexpected interactions between strangers
Became an annual campus tradition since 2016 (@cornelllifted)
Scaled to a workplace setting (Gensler NYC studio)
Inspired ongoing rituals (e.g., continued use of appreciation notes and shared activities)
Designing the Experience
The experience was designed to make appreciation visible, easy, and contagious.
Participants contributed notes of appreciation over the course of a week, without knowing how or when they would be delivered. At a set moment, these individual contributions appeared across a shared space, transforming a familiar environment into something unexpected and emotionally resonant.
To amplify the experience, I introduced simple but intentional elements such as balloons, drawing on the emotional impact of joy, surprise, and visual scale to create a shared atmosphere of celebration.
Principles
Individual contribution → collective experience
Designed for emotional impact → appreciation made visible at scale
Low pressure → easy to participate
Surprise and timing → creates memorability
Contagious by design → inspires others to participate
Activation & Impact
The experience culminated in a large-scale installation, where hundreds of handwritten notes and balloons appeared overnight.
Participants arrived to discover personalized messages, creating a moment of surprise, joy, and recognition. What began as individual acts of appreciation became a shared experience, sparking conversations and reconnections across the community.
Scaling the Model
The Lifted model was later adapted to a workplace setting at Gensler’s NYC consulting studio.
As the team grew, people felt increasingly disconnected and underappreciated. I applied the same system of lightweight participation and coordinated reveal, translating the experience into a workplace context.
The activation strengthened relationships across teams and became an ongoing studio tradition.
Designing for Collective Moments
Connection doesn’t always come from ongoing systems, but from moments that bring people together in a shared emotional experience.
When individual contributions are made visible at scale, they create a sense of belonging that is greater than the sum of its parts.
This work reinforced that designing for timing, surprise, and shared visibility can shift how people connect, making appreciation not just personal, but communal.
