So glad you have fallen into this internet wormhole. After mucking about here, have you now decided that “Oh, wait, perhaps I am an experience designer? How odd, I thought I was a [chef / CEO / grandma / chair designer].”?
Welcome. Indeed you are.
Want to edge a bit deeper into this experiential pool? I am leading an 8-week virtual retreat on Designing Experiences for Radical Imagination this coming October.
It would be a true pleasure to have you in the cohort. Find out more and sign up for one of our early-October info sessions below!
Hello dear internet reader. Thank you for being here, wherever here is — perhaps on your phone in the dentist’s waiting room filled with dread, or in your little home office, or in THE BIG OFFICE pretending to be click clacking away, or curled up on the couch with a cup of coffee, or in line at the pharmacy, or in any countless billions of places.
But also, do you miss physical books? Like, this would be nice on a thick rag paper, no? I, personally, have a fondness of the soft-touch covers and the slim, independent press runs of small, chapbook-sized stories, petite enough to slip in your bag or hide unassumingly between the big chonkers on your shelf. I like a good hand-feel to my books.
In our house, we (sacrilegious to some, surely) dog-ear the corners we want to stumble back upon, write love letters on the opening pages as we gift them back and forth, leave stickies inside with our hopes for one another for when they read this bit or that, scribble our extensive and unprofessional opinions on every recipe after making. This, sadly, is also why I am bad at libraries. I womanhandle my books. So we operate our own library of sorts, always sending people home with a book after a dinner party and promising to invite them over for another meal so they can return it. The books are all both unpreciously and preciously used.
All of this to say, we are physical bodies in a physical world and touching things can be nice.
Which brings us to our fourth love language: Physical Touch.
Need more context? This is the 4th 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.
Physical Touch
In one-on-one relationships, physical touch is not just sex, but all the tender ways we might interact with one another in physical space. It is our desire to be held. Our want for our partner to check in with us at a party every so often, brushing our hand with theirs in a little ‘How are you? You need anything? I’m here too.’ The way emotionally connected bodies in space orient towards one another, aware, like magnets, of where the other is in orbit.
Now, I am absolutely not saying to go touch everyone in your experience. Dear god no.
What I mean is that we must consider ourselves as creatures with physical bodies. Physicalities that desire breath, and movement, and stillness, and the delicious existence of living through our senses.
Physical touch in experience design is realizing that the texture of what we make matters. It’s designing the details of your experience, the artifacts, the environment, the interactions, with intention. Are they rough, soft, scratchy, rounded, sharp, sweet, eerie?
Designing for physical touch is remembering how it feels to slide your fingers under the lip of a juicy, sealed, thick-pressed paper envelope, ripping it open to pull out whatever has been tucked inside, and knowing how different that is from holding a one-sided, sharp-edged, shiny, brochure-reminiscent info card.
It’s realizing that the design of the chairs people sit in will affect how they relate to one another — are we sitting on floral couches, nearly knee-to-knee, tucked in a warmly lit corner or are we each in our own stiff-backed iron throne glaring at each other from across the hall?
When my wife-to-be and I first met up in physical space after months of a cross-country, slow burn, long-distance romance (maximally clichéd and loving it thank you very much), one of her best friends offered her this bit of advice: “Always sit on the same side of the table at a restaurant, so that you can watch the world together. Even if you have to awkwardly shuffle your chairs and cause a scene. And, also, then you can always be touching.”
Designing for physical touch is understanding that our bodies require moving through emotions — that we must finish the emotional cycle to actually process and integrate and move forward. That might look like giving folks a ten minute break to take themselves for a walk after a hard conversation, before they come back together to work on whatever comes next.
It’s realizing that different bodies have divergent needs and abilities, and taking the care and attention to details so that all can be present and participate.
It’s giving people enough information about the activities, environment, and weather so that they can dress in what will make them feel comfortable. It’s recognizing that brainstorming in an ice-cold room will not get you very far, because everyone will be clenched and feeling heat-scarce, and therefore idea un-abundant (fight, flight, and FREEZE being our three responses to threat). Or that having challenging talks in too-hot spaces will escalate everyone’s anxiety (my partner and I not infrequently say “oh wait, I was not annoyed I was actually just over-cooked, I’m sorry.” )
And…
The physical body does not cease to exist in digital space, though it feels as though many designers have designed pretending it is no longer relevant.
Designing for physical touch in digital experiences looks like inviting people to check in with and attend to their physical needs. It’s recognizing that glitchy loading pages can put people on edge and THINGS IN ALL CAPS SOMETIMES FEEL LIKE SOMEONE IS YELLING AT YOU. It’s knowing that color and shape have energy, and make us feel things. That a font can make us angry, or insolent, or calmed, or enticed. It’s rounding the edges of your visuals to soften the vibe, and helping people find comfort with newness through information hierarchy.
📌 Putting a pin in a rant I will rant at you one day on why I hate square, opaque, digital stickies
So hello there, human with a human body. Wherever you are reading this, I invite you to do the following: pause, close your eyes, take three big, deep, slow breaths, and feel the ground (through your bum, or your feet, or your whole body if you happen to be lying flat on the floor on your back how nice for you).
Ready…. go.
Hello. Welcome back. (No really, stop reading and just do this for me, please.)
Okay, there we are. Well done you. How do you feel?
Your assignment, should you choose to play:
Look ahead at your calendar. What is an experience you are making over the next few weeks? It could be a BIG IMPORTANT MEETING or having pals over for a potluck tomorrow.
Take a moment and consider how you will design for the physicality of those humans, and their bodies. What will the textures of your experience be?
Tune in next week for our next Love Language deep dive!
Do you design culture, or classes, or co–ops, or corduroy pants, or c-suite offices, or campaigns for the marketing team?
Congrats! You’re an experience designer.
Come join us this fall for an 8-week deep dive into the tangible tools of experience design. You’ll emerge with the frameworks you need to design for feelings and for change, a designed experiential offering of your choosing, and the inspiration you need to seed your own experience design practice long into the future.
If you make things for people, this is for you.
Jump into Designing Experiences for Radical Imagination this October.
Yours, Olivia