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In a world flooded with fixes but starved of resonance, Real Lived Experience introduces a transformative way of seeing, sensing, and designing with life itself. Rooted in over two decades of global health design, this book offers a perceptual reorientation - one that moves beyond systems and metrics to engage the raw, affective ground of how health, illness, and care are actually lived. For those ready to think and feel differently, this is both a provocation and a path forward.

Paperback, Hardback and Kindle editions. 330 pages. 

Sick of health innovation buzzwords? So are we. This book cuts through the noise ... with feeling.
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"RLX begins with the concrete experience of people as they live through health challenges. At its core, it asks us to see differently. It turns perception outward and inward, encouraging enterprises, innovators and designers to look beyond categories, metrics and protocols to truly attune to what people are feeling, doing, and (sometimes not) becoming."
This book doesn’t just challenge assumptions. It dissolves the ones you didn’t know you were making.

"This new book from Chris Lawer and Nicki Sutton is quite possibly the most important book on tomorrow's customer experience I shall read this year.  If you have anything to do with the customer experience at all, even if it is not in health care, read the book, then put it down, read it again a few days later and go for a long walk to think about its implications. I can guarantee you will not be disappointed."

Graham Hill, Customer Experience Thought-leader and Consultant

"RLX speaks directly to frustrations I have had over the last quarter century working with social complexity and social emergence. Its talk of fields and ever-unfolding becoming and the associated need for design to be an ongoing process... That's all whispering sweet nothings into my ear. "

Robert Peagler, Principal, Social Innovation Associates

"I love how you centre the fluidity of real lived experience. Living with chronic illness means change is a constant companion - and innovation must reflect that. Life isn’t static, and neither is good design."

Nicole Thorpe, Director Cultinova, and Innovation Steering Group, Parkinson's Europe

"Real Lived Experience is a bold, necessary, and profoundly thought-provoking work. It reminds us that health is not a system to be managed, but an ongoing interaction with ourselves, with others, and with life itself - the true ground of wellbeing. "

Bill McAllister-Lovatt, The Disruptive Innovator

"RLX is a wonderful (if not divine) struggle to understand how we can promulgate understanding and practices of helping individuals as such by engaging with them more than ,or even instead of, viewing them as categories of suffering to which categories of interventions can be applied."

Gary Riccio, Community Care Exponent
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At its core, Real Lived Experience is not just a book - it’s a perceptual rupture. It invites readers to abandon the tired vantage point of systems, strategies, and solutions, and to step into the unfolding, affective ground of life as it is actually lived.  It is a book that doesn’t fix broken models but renders them unnecessary. Its power lies in its refusal to simplify, its commitment to the subtle, and its call to co-compose with the living textures of illness, recovery, constraint, and care. For those who have felt the limits of the system - and of the usual ways of thinking about it - this book doesn’t just offer insight .... It offers an exit.