🤔 Do you invite people over, have a calendar with stuff on it, organize humans, do strategy, write words, say things in public spaces, or make objects that people use?
🥳 Congrats! You are already an Experience Designer.
🏋️♀️ Want to become an even more kickass one? Huzzah! I am leading an 8-week virtual retreat on Designing Experiences for Radical Imagination this coming October and would love to have you.
📆 Info sessions are happening the next two weeks (the first one is Tuesday!), and the retreat begins on October 22nd.
Hello there. SURPRISE! Did you think we were done with the love languages because they are called The 5 Love Languages and we have had 5 posts and talked about 5 of them? A reasonable assumption … but no we are not done yet!
It turns out, in my humbly professional opinion, there are far more than five.
Need more context? This is the 6th 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, and #5 Gift Giving.
This is what I know: we each have our own oddly specific ones.
Mine are love letters and questions and gifting my favorite books to you at just the right moment.
My friend Margaux’s stepmom Dodie’s is making hand-drawn signs for everyone’s special moments.
My wife’s family’s is picking everyone up from the airport. My friend Mel’s is sending postcards. My friend Kelly’s is showing up, no matter how hard or far or chaotically difficult it is to get there. My mom’s is gifting tea towels she’s picked up on her travels, printed with something you love. My aunts’ is having a gorgeous little charcuterie situation set up whenever you arrive at their house, and taking you on an all-expenses-paid grocery shop to their most unbelievably bougie local market. My friend CJ’s is (extensively) planning outdoor adventures and inviting you along.
My friend Eva’s is making her people a birthday shrine covered in their favorite treats and lots of photos of their face: “Good shrines are a 90/10 ratio of stuff from around the house that person loves to new little gifts or treats. The point of a shrine is to make the person feel special and loved not to give them a bunch of junk.” And her grandpa’s was standing on the side of the road watching you drive away, with his arms in the air like a cactus, for as long as you were in sight, no matter how long and straight the road.
And so, dear reader, what are yours?
Don’t lose sight of them.
Because here’s the thing: the beauty of experience design is that it is a deeply personal craft. You won’t, and shouldn’t, make the same experience I would, even if the audience and intention and the content were the same.
We have to pull on the things we adore, the things we’re uniquely good at, whatever we’re weirdly obsessed with right now, the acts of care that feel like us, whatever fits into what my dear friends Jenny Gottstein calls The Sparkle Zone and Ayana Zaire Cotton (by way of N.K. Jemison) calls The Element X.
So here’s the rub: being an experience designer means caring for and loving on your people in your own uniquely specific ways.
It’s your party. And it’s your sauce.
Your assignment, should you choose to play:
Take just a moment, and think about your own hyper specific, most you-iest love languages.
And, if you need help…ask the people in your life that you love. Because they will surely know.
Want help identifying and gathering and watering all the seeds of your own experience design discipline?
Come join us this October for an 8-week journey into the craft of experience design. You’ll emerge with the tools you need to design for feelings and for change, an experiential offering of your choosing, and the inspiration to nurture 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. Info sessions are happening NEXT WEEK and THE FOLLOWING WEEK.
Enrollment closes on October 21st and the retreat begins on October 22nd!
Yours, Olivia