Surprise, Sincerity, Sublime — a Future of Liminal Design
If the current state of design seems pandering, predictable and insincere with indoor cats anxiously circling the food bowls of corporate America, it would also be fair to assume that our whole design endeavor needs, not more answers around how we get to the Kibbles, but much deeper and more interesting questions. The crisis is existential. Not technical other than in its sheer scale. There is an old Swedish saying: sex is never just about sex. This is true for design as well. Liminal Design embraces the bigger potential of our work and provides much-needed agency for designers as well as existential relevancy. And aliveness for those who experience it.
Drawing a hard line between transactions and their opposite, liminality, frames the issue quickly. Transactional design sets up predictable, scalable, fast and efficient trades. Push here, get that. Doing without thinking. It can carry simple emotions, but even these arrive pre-determined, like candy from a vending machine. It is linear, reductive and safely placed in our ordinary world. It preserves the status quo. Predictability is what lets it scale up to fit the large corporate ambition.
A liminal space aims at the opposite. It doesn’t even activate unless it promises deep surprise. Existentially meaningful surprise, not pre-packaged Disney thrills. The liminality I have in mind has little to do with empty pictures of parking garages and backrooms. It is an intentional space between two contradictory notions that allows us not to solve the contradiction and move on, but to hold the question open long enough for new, non-reductive insights to emerge — liminal in the original anthropological sense of a threshold state, betwixt and between (van Gennep, 1960; Turner, 1974). This is where we get to play with cognitive models of ourselves and the world, much like we do with literature and art. A liminal design cannot help but question the status quo of whatever it touches. It is a trickster. And we engage with it deeply because it is not predictable — when heart and soul feel the stakes are finally relevant, we slow down, look up from our shoes and pay real attention.
But what about beautiful design? Sure. But beauty alone doesn’t make design liminal. Kant, philosophy’s aesthetic masthead, kept beauty and the sublime in separate rooms. Beauty, for him, is restful contemplation: the mind at ease with a form that pleases it. The sublime is movement, the mind agitated by something that exceeds it. The sublime, he wrote, is a negative pleasure (Critique of the Power of Judgment, 1790). Joy and pain at the same time. Pain because we hit the limits of our imagination and cannot comprehend the scope of what we encounter. Joy from realizing there is more to the world than we can fully grasp.
Aristotle had a related take when discussing what makes a good story work: it has to be both inevitable and surprising at the same time (Poetics, c. 335 BCE). We know it, we have seen it before, and yet the context suddenly questions its narrative place and meaning. All great stories told well, like all great designs, move toward the same notion: things are not what they seem.
The key notion here: two emotions that stand in apparent opposition to each other. It’s a paradox. Yet we know it is true from first-hand experience, because this is what awe feels like. The classic example is astronaut Russell “Rusty” Schweickart, who, during a spacewalk on Apollo 9 in 1969, found himself suspended in infinite darkness and suddenly saw his world and planet below from a very different viewpoint. He was awestruck. And akin to numerous other well-documented reports of awe, he felt conflicting emotions: both smaller as a piece of the whole, and simultaneously part of something much bigger than himself (Gordon et al. 2017; Chaudhury et al. 2022; Stellar et al. 2024). Back on Earth, Rusty was a changed man. He dedicated much of the rest of his life to the environment. This is the transformative power of liminal experience — what the awe literature calls the need for accommodation (Keltner and Haidt, 2003). We are forced to find new viewpoints to see ourselves and our worlds through, and we feel acutely alive because we were made to confront our own limits.
A century before the astronauts, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. described the same stretching in The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (1858): “Every now and then a man’s mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions. After looking at the Alps, I felt that my mind had been stretched beyond the limits of its elasticity, and fitted so loosely on my old ideas of space that I had to spread these to fit it.” The contradictions of the experience resist easy accommodation, and we are challenged to revisit our existential scaffolding. The feeling is undeniable. What it means is left, deliberately, less defined.
It is worth being clear about what is challenged here. The world view we disturb is a set of mental constructs: the narrative models we build to navigate reality and make sense of our worlds (Bruner, 1991). Reality stays put — the Alps remained exactly where they were; what stretched was Holmes’s idea of space, the model he used to hold it. These models are always simpler than the world they map, and it is the models that liminal design invites us to revise.
This is of course how fiction and film work on us too. The house lights dim, we cut off the world outside and hand ourselves over fully to the story. We know what we see is not actually happening — and this is why we allow ourselves to partake so enthusiastically in what isn’t technically “true.” Real-world consequences and logic are suspended; the willing suspension of disbelief, as Coleridge named it (Biographia Literaria, 1817). A tiger charges on the screen and our heart rate climbs, but nobody spills popcorn running for the exits. We care when the protagonist hangs on by the fingernails because at this fictional moment it is us hanging there. We project our own dreams, hopes and fears onto the characters. This is how we make the story our own. If the experience was simple, we had a cheap thrill and went home. If it was layered and contradictory, making sense of what we feel takes real work — and done sincerely, that work can surprise us with new perspectives on ourselves. We surprise ourselves. That is the transformation, mirroring the one the fictional hero underwent on screen.
This is why, in a sense, we only design fifty percent of the experience. The other fifty we must leave to the audience, who complete it by making it their own (Iser, 1978). A design that answers everything is a door that closes politely behind the visitor. A liminal design is a door left ajar, through which the visitor keeps traveling long after leaving. A designed experience still needs a narrative arc — beginning, middle, end — but it is desire and curiosity to complete the story that pulls us deeper. Once we have closure, the experience is over and we lose interest. The logic runs both ways: if the held-open question is what makes us feel alive, then the fully answered one is where things stop moving. Die, even. A perfectly closed transactional design is a small funeral — efficient, punctual, and over. A good question always trumps the correct answer if we want deep engagement. In commercial transactions, friction and conflict are engineered away. In cheap thrills, the conflict is formulaic and the plot twists neat and tired. In liminal design the stakes are existential, and the ending is harder to accommodate because it is complex and contradictory. And now ours.
With this, we have the elements needed to intentionally design liminal experiences. I think of it in three steps (Liedgren et al. 2023, Liminal Design: a Three-Step Process and Framework for Deeper and Meaningful Experiences):
1. Narrative Desire. What deeper question, what conflict, can we extract from the narrative of the design problem? How do we re-frame it as a promise that creates curiosity and desire? The promise starts before the experience does — in the framing, the invitation and mythology around the product. And it must be worth caring about: a narrative that matters to us personally is what draws in our imagination, and imagination is what everything downstream is built on.
2. Optimized Abstraction. How do we give that question a specific shape — a metaphor — using the real-world elements at our disposal? The method is subtraction: we optimize by keeping only what the question needs, and it is this reduction itself that creates the abstraction. Film does this constantly: we are shown what matters for the story, and the rest stays outside the frame. The design’s job is to hold the space where the experience can happen; the experience itself belongs to the participant. A metaphor here is a vessel: it must carry the question intact, through the whole experience and out the other side, because in liminal design there is no last room. Only doors left ajar.
3. Suspension of Disbelief. Two questions govern this step: how do we know we have entered a liminal space rather than something else, and how do we maintain the suspension once inside? The first is answered at the border. A liminal space announces itself as a class of its own, apart from ordinary reality — and crossing into it is a decision, so the design must mark the threshold clearly enough to ask for one. The second is answered along the arc. Ceremony helps us stay: small rituals that celebrate where we are and create desire for what comes next — a film’s opening titles do exactly this work. Narrative room keeps the suspension alive: the participant completes the experience with their own projections, and the design keeps that space open for them. Beneath both questions runs the designer’s contract: it is safe here, the only agenda is the question itself, and therefore you may play in earnest.
This is not a formulaic paint-by-numbers solution to all things design. Finding the right original metaphor and specific manifested shape will always be a creative leap by the designer — and this is what elevates designers from the monkey work of streamlining already-defined transactions to leading the creation of rich and memorable experiences. Is it hard to do? Of course it is. So is writing a book that captivates, or making a film that inspires us to see the world anew. The kinship between serious art and design should not be underestimated.
I have worked with this model for two decades, and it works. Numerous concrete examples run through this article series — new technology, trust, opening film credits, the epistemology of AI, Barbie, video conferencing, photography, absences, juxtapositions and economic models. Liminality is a lens that fits anywhere design has grown numb and the underlying framework needs to be pushed closer to the edge to come back alive, not a boutique trick for art installations.
But the choice comes with responsibility. Humans are not easily tricked, and shouldn’t be. We sit at the top of the food chain because we know whom to trust (or kill, or mate with) before making ourselves fully available for deeper experiences. All liminal experience requires the participant to feel safe, and the design to be sincere in its aim. If we all suspect it’s really about serving us ads or taking our money — that every path leads agreeably back to the gift shop — we opt out. If the promise is trivial rather than profound, we never invest our existential curiosity, and consequently never become available for deeper experience. Sincerity is a concept we designers should spend more time with.
The corporate machine, of course, has a hard time embracing any of this. It needs control, and control needs predictability. Profound surprise is the one thing it is built to defend against. Its only sincere goal is to make more money, and that has never made for a good story. A story needs someone to care about, and the machine sees only customers. We ourselves are the product the machine processes, and in this sense it keeps feeding on us like a Cannibal, looking us over for what might be extracted. This is the Cannibal we must learn to kiss without being devoured.
We started with Kant’s sublime, so let us return there. Beauty is contentment: the well-kept lawn of Eden, restful and complete. The sublime is what disturbs the rest — negative pleasure, pain and joy at once, the moment we suspect the garden is larger than our map.
The liminal space — tense, ambiguous, suspended — protects the designer’s hope that the encounter may translate sincerely, even if only for a moment. When a user feels the moment as their own, the work has succeeded. The emotions are conflicting, the question lives on, now embodied and seeking new forms. It is no longer within the system’s control. It has already escaped. Sincerity may not be fun for the Machine. But for those trying to smuggle meaning into its circuits, placating is not the goal. Creating experiences that show us how to be alive and uniquely us is.
The work is disruption and poetry. Design can be a trickster. One should perhaps be mindful (sincere!) when using religious metaphors, but please indulge me: your job is not to be a dutiful groundskeeper of the status quo in a corporate Eden. Your job is to be the slither in the grass. And yes, in that sense, sincerity is the real fun.
Johan Liedgren is the founder of The Liminal Circle, an international think tank for applied liminality. An award-winning film-director, writer and strategy consultant working with media and technology companies on liminal product design, Liedgren is based in Seattle, Stockholm and Milan. His book “How to Kiss a Cannibal” will be available August of 2026. www.liminalcircle.com / http://www.liedgren.com / https://medium.com/@johan_liedgren
How to Kiss a Cannibal was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.