I grew up outside.

In creeks and forests and fields, with dirt under my fingernails and no particular plan to come indoors. I ended up spending twenty-five years designing experiences for the world as it is. YONDER is my attempt to design for the world as it could be. This is the story of how I got from one to the other.

I went to art school — drawing, making, visual thinking — which felt right, until the fear set in.

I grew up watching my parents struggle financially, and somewhere in my second year I made a quiet, panicked calculation: how does a person actually make a living doing this?

So I pivoted. Toward new media, toward emerging technology, toward wherever the jobs seemed to be going. When I graduated in 2000 the internet was catching fire, and I caught it with both hands. What followed was twenty-five years as a designer at the edge of whatever was coming next — interactive media, physical-digital spaces, augmented reality, spatial computing. I got very good at building things that worked. At making people feel something in designed spaces. At leading teams that could hold both craft and complexity at once.

It was meaningful work. I don't disown it.

But the kid who grew up belonging to the outside world was still in there. Quieter now. Watching.

Around 2013 something shifted. I came across a concept that I haven't been able to put down since.

Scientists call it shifting baseline syndrome — sometimes called ecological amnesia — the idea that each generation inherits a world already diminished and mistakes it for the whole.

A child who grows up never having heard a forest alive with birdsong doesn't know to miss it. The silence feels normal. The baseline shifts, quietly, generationally, and the forgetting becomes invisible — written into what we accept as the natural order of things.

A book called Paradise Found made this visceral for me. Steve Nicholls reconstructed North America as the first Europeans encountered it — skies so thick with birds they darkened the sun, rivers so full of fish you could walk across them, grasslands stretching to every horizon alive with millions of bison. A world of such staggering abundance that the settlers thought it inexhaustible.

Reading it, I felt something I can only describe as a grief for a world I had never known. And then a second grief, quieter and more disturbing: the realization that most people around me didn't even know this loss existed. We had all inherited the diminished version and called it nature.

I started reading everything I could find. Ecology. Systems thinking. Collapse theory. Indigenous knowledge. Deep time. Two hundred books over several years. I wasn't looking for solutions. I was trying to understand the root — not the symptoms but the source. What kind of thinking produces a civilization capable of this? What worldview has to be in place for humans to unsee what they're doing to the world they live in?

What followed was four years of depression. I don't say that lightly or dramatically — it is simply what happened. Once you fully understand the gravity of what is unfolding, once you can't unknow it, there is a period of grief that has to be moved through. I couldn't pull myself out of it, no matter what I did.

Until I found the others.

There is something Timothy Leary said that became a kind of compass for me: find the others.

The people who have also taken the red pill, who are also awake to what's happening, who are also refusing to look away — and who have somehow found a way to be energized rather than paralyzed by it.

I found them in Earth Regenerators, the global community that formed around the work of ecologist Joe Brewer. I found them in the Animas Valley Institute, where the wild becomes a mirror for the interior life. I found them in the Regenesis Institute, where regenerative practice is taught as a way of perceiving. I found them in Bhutan, on a journey that quietly rearranged something in how I see.

Through these communities and teachers I began the longer, slower work — not just learning new things but unlearning old ones. Gregory Bateson wrote that the major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think. I had to find that difference in myself. To see the worldview I had been looking through — its assumptions, its blind spots, its inherited logic — and then carefully, painstakingly, build a new one.

This is not a quick process. It is ongoing. But somewhere in the middle of it, something shifted.

I stopped asking: how do I escape the work I've done

And started asking: what if that work was preparation?

Twenty-five years of designing immersive experiences, leading creative teams, building at the intersection of place and story and technology — none of that disappears. It sharpens.

What I've come to understand is that I inhabit two worlds that rarely speak to each other.

The world of structure, execution, capital, and scale — where things actually get built. And the world of ecology, emergence, reciprocity, and long-term thinking — where the why lives.

Each world needs what the other has. The regenerative space is full of visionaries who struggle to execute. The default world is full of executors who have lost the vision. I can move between them. I speak both languages. I know how to translate.

YONDER is where that translation happens.

This is my independent design practice, focused on ecological experience design for places that matter — land restoration sites, learning hubs, regenerative destinations, retreat centers, cultural institutions, and the developers who are building something they actually want to be proud of.

The work begins with listening. To the land. To the people. To what wants to emerge. And it draws on everything — twenty-five years of experience design, a deep grounding in regenerative practice, and a genuine love for the places and communities that are trying to do things differently.

Before YONDER, this work took shape across a wide range of place-based experience — museums and cultural institutions, immersive entertainment venues, interpretive trail systems, corporate brand environments, public installations, experiential retail, and destination resorts. The through line was always the same: how does a place make people feel, and what does it ask of them?

That body of work has been recognized by The One Show, Fast Company's Innovation by Design, the Webby Awards, and SEGD, and featured in Wired, Forbes, and Communication Arts.

I am a graduate of the Regenerative Practitioner program at the Regenesis Institute, a certified Prosocial facilitator, and a student of the Animas Valley Institute. I co-founded and produced the Outside In podcast, exploring the inner and outer dimensions of transformative design. I serve as Sustainable Design Co-Chair of SEGD. I mentor within Bhutan's Pelsung program for Gelephu Mindfulness City, contributing to conversations at the intersection of culture, ecology, and regenerative futures. And I am an ongoing student of the living world, which remains the most generous and exacting teacher I have found.

A note on
why this exists

I spent a long time building things for a world I wasn't sure I believed in anymore. YONDER is how I take twenty-five years of hard-won craft and aikido it into something that matters. If you are stewarding a place. If you sense that something more is possible. If you have felt that pang of longing and decided to build toward it rather than away from it — I would love to be in conversation with you.

— Joel Krieger, Founder, YONDER