Hello there!
👯 Do you gather humans, have birthday parties, plan meetings, make art, lead a team, write nice things, move pixels around, conduct interviews, or teach people how to do stuff that you are very good at?
Good news! You are an Experience Designer.
🪩 Want to become an even better one? Excellent! I am leading an 8-week virtual retreat on Designing Experiences for Radical Imagination this coming October.
📆 Find out more and sign up for one of our early-October info sessions below!
My partner and I have a strong belief in treat culture. So much so that it was a final contender in choosing a new last name post-marriage. Hello we are the Treats. Nice to meet you. (No, sadly we did not choose it. You’re welcome — you’re free to use it for your own family-building needs).
It is the little delights, the delicious moments, the things we pick up for the other on a bop about town. I’m bringing you home a little treat. Ooh is it time for a treat? This could be a nice treat, don’t you think?
And also, my office is (perhaps chaotically) filled with bespoke card decks, tactile totems, fancy bookmarks, little hand-stitched booklets, postcards that have become art. Do you have these things? The treasures that you have deemed worthy or beautiful enough to keep around?
These two things, treats and totems, lead us to our fifth love language: Gift Giving.
Need more context? This is the 5th (but not final!!) installment in a mini-series on the 5 Love Languages as a framework for experience design. Check out the previous few here: #1 Acts of Service, #2 Quality Time, #3 Words of Affirmation, and #4 Physical Touch.
Gift Giving
In one-on-one relationships, gift giving can be the big things that mark important days — large gestures and long-schemed surprises, and the small things we bring one another — your favorite coffee or this silly little magnet that made me think of you.
In experience design, gift giving spans the spectrum of scale, too. The big things we give our participants, and the tiny little delights we weave in. It’s not just physical objects, it’s also moments and memories.
There’s two ways to think of this, perhaps:
How can your experience itself feel like a gift? Something of value. Something to be treasured and held onto. Something someone got specifically for you, that required that person to know you well enough to know what you’d actually like.
How can your experience be filled with gifts? How can you have an experience with treat culture?
Here are 6 considerations for making very nice things for your people:
Focus on the feelings
This I will always tell you about experience design, the first question you should ask yourself is: How do you want them to feel?
Taken care of? Seen? Delighted? Awed? Held? Elated? Pampered? The specificity and nuance of that feeling should guide your design choices.
And, feelings aren’t the same for everyone. You have to know your people to know whether a shark-themed present will delight or traumatize them. Because it’s often the specificity of a gift that makes it feel special — you probably wouldn’t consider Trader Joes Gluten Free Turkey Hot Dogs a really amazing gift, but my wife-to-be sure would.
Strategize the timing of delivery
Gifts can come at all different times:
Is there a gift you might include in the invitation or the before? Something that teases your experience or builds anticipation?
Or is there a treat at the beginning of the experience? Something your participants might need for them to be successful or a thing to help them feel prepared? You’ve arrived! Huzzah! Welcome! Here’s a hand drawn, beautiful map of the land to help you find the walking paths.
Or perhaps a delivery at the end? A parting something to take with you when you go. An object or artifact that extends the experience.
Make it tactile
I have 9 bajillion photos on my phone that I never look at. But the set of provocations on soft-touch, rounded-edged cards with luscious, saturated illustrations, tucked into their cozy, beautiful box? Those I keep within arms-reach of my desk.
We are physical bodies in a physical world. We crave texture and touching (see last week’s Love Languages post on Physical Touch).
AND, we humans love to unwrap things. It’s both the tantalizing feeling of anticipation and the manifestation of care and time invested by the gift giver — that someone bothered to make this thing itself an experience. It contains a before and an after, a transformation and a threshold.
This doesn’t mean there aren’t beautiful digital treats. But the ones that will truly feel like gifts will be the ones that still appeal to our senses — visually delicious images, curated playlists, the photo that makes someone chackle (chuckle/cackle) out loud.
We love a little luxury
“Everyone wants the stars. Everyone wishes to grasp that which exists out of reach. To hold the extraordinary in their hands and keep the remarkable in their pockets.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea
Please, don’t go off and rush order company-branded water bottles and koozies and mouse pads and pins and sweatshirts and toilet paper.
If you’re going to bring something physical into our resource-stretched planet, make it worth it. One small, thoughtfully designed, carefully (and sustainably) created object is so much better than a box of crap. It’s like Christmas — maybe our kids don’t need 100 new toys but actually three might be better?
This is your chance to pick the thing and make it EXTRA. Make it bougie. Make it a treasure, not a party favor that will end up in the trash in 5 minutes.
Gifts are often things that we wouldn’t necessarily buy for ourselves (not because we wouldn’t adore them but because of a treat-scarcity mindset and/or thinking we don’t neeeeed them). They are things that pulse high on DESIRE. Make them hyper-sensory and make the details exquisite.
Pay attention to the core needs
Consider our physical meatsuit’s core needs. Food. Shelter. Sleep.
These, too, can make great gifts. This requires paying attention to where your people are coming from, and what the experience might feel like for their bodies. And also, they too can be made luxury.
Gifts in this realm look like saying “Oh my goodness I know you haven’t slept and have been traveling for 32 hours, I made you a little secret nap den and here’s a satin eye mask, why don’t you pop away for an hour to have a little snooze and I won’t tell anyone. Also I left a chocolate on the pillow.”
Design for the memory
Gifts have the ability to be portals. Time traveling devices that transport us back to the experience. They are direct paths through spacetime. Without them, we might not have reason nor invitation to remember.
It’s the little matchbook that I picked up from an absolutely mediocre band playing on a street corner in Rio. Do I use the matches? No. But without them sitting on my shelf, would I ever have reason to go back to that particular stroll on the tail-end of Carnival, the big acacia canopy overhead and my first beiju (tapioca pancake) filled with drippingly juicy mango in hand? Probably not.
Gifts are ways to extend our experiences. To create loops back. To help folks hold onto the memories and the feelings.
Your assignment, should you choose to play:
Look ahead to these next few weeks. What is an experience you are creating? It could be a worky work thing, or the book drive you are organizing at the library.
Take a moment and consider: how might you weave in a gift or two?
Want to be the person whose parties no one can stop talking about? Want to NOT be the person whose meetings everyone dreads?
Come join us this fall for an 8-week deep dive into the tangible tools of experience design. You’ll emerge with the skills you need to design for feelings and for change, an experiential offering of your choosing, and the inspiration to seed your own experience design practice long into the future.
If you make things for people, this is for you.
Jump in with us this October in Designing Experiences for Radical Imagination.
Yours, Olivia