‘I believe we can all benefit from greater spaces for emotional nuance, to play a leading role in our life and community.’
Micah Kessel is a strategic designer, and principal founder of Playground of Empathy, an organization whose mission is to spread empathy throughout community.
I'm the CEO of Playground of Empathy, which brings my collaborative design experience to enliven the greater good. Playground of Empathy creates unparalleled immersive experiences that offer a paradigm shift in social quality time. We use the power of immersive design to craft deeply moving, authentic, and entertaining experiences that contribute toward large scale societal change.
These extraordinarily engaging group experiences combat our mass mental health epidemic at its source, by strengthening people's connection to their own and other’s emotions exponentially better than passive media like films or museums.
Our current modular experience on Gender Identity and Expression, which has just toured at Harvard, Massachusetts General, and the national Education First conference, and is already being booked at the Boston Museum of Science and the APS Conference in 2020.
As the Netherland’s first behavioral designer, I’ve created concepts for companies like Disney, Google, Microsoft, The Diabetes fund and various European Governments and Universities. I’ve given workshops or lectures on human centered design subjects at The Darden School of Business, the UVA school of Engineering, UNC Chapel Hill, the UVR Robins Graduate School of Business and the University of Amsterdam.
I began my career as an opera singer at the Met, age 10, and later studied poetic psychology through art song, at San Francisco Conservatory, operatic and baroque music at The Royal Conservatory of the Netherlands and multi-medial design at the Royal Art Academy of Belgium. My focus in all professions has been on developing the role of embodied emotions to create emotional nuance and empathy. Designing spaces for emotional nuance, is one of my most ongoing values.
My professional focus is in strategically designing the potential of mankind.
If you’d like to see my CV, or for questions, send me an e-mail. I like to work with interesting, imperfect people, with great values, and cared-for challenges.