Let us have a hot dog
Let us have a hot dog
The ritualistic sausage
Would you like to make more ‘Holy sh*t that was amazing!’ moments for the people in your life — for your partner, your Hinge date, your kids, your boss, your neighbors, your clients, your grandma, yourself?
Come join us for an 8-week deep dive into the craft of experience design. Our virtual retreat, Designing Experiences for Radical Imagination, starts next week.
Intrigued? Our last info session is TOMORROW, October 17th, at 12 pm PT. Can’t make it? Sign up to get the recording!
Enrollment closes October 21st at 9 pm PT, and we kick off on the 22nd!
My wife is a self-proclaimed “recovering recovering-sausage-hound.” And by that she means she was a long time vegetarian, semi-incited by an early-college incident of Texas sausage over-consumption. But she is now back to eating meat, and has been on a real hot dog bender of late (not not inspired by Nancy Pelosi eating a hot dog for lunch every single day).
And also, the 4 o’clock snack-attack-induced slump has been hitting real hard in our WFH house of late. The air in Bend has still been lingering smoky garbage, forcing us to be mostly indoor cats who have acquired a real afternoon chip-overconsumption problem.
So let me introduce you to our newest family ritual:
When the afternoon malaise hits, we put two hot dogs in the toaster oven, wrap them each in a paper towel (yes, we are just going bare and rogue over here), and then eat them while taking ourselves on a little stroll around the neighborhood.
We call it…
Taking the dogs for a walk. (It should be noted that, as we are currently only aspirational dog owners, these are the only dogs we have to take outside).
Here is why I am telling all you strangers and not-strangers on the internet about this:
An invitation…
Take the small moments in your life — the meh things, the dreaded tasks, the non-thing things that you stopped using your brain for long ago, and use your experience design witchcraft to turn them into rituals.
Here are some ways to do that:
Give them a name
Decide a theme
Put them on the calendar so you can look forward to them
Instigate special outfits
Document them
Send invitations
Go over the top
Celebrate before, during, after, or all of the above
Make prizes and incentives
Tell other people about them and spread the good word
Here’s what that looks like:
It’s our friends turning dreaded nightly bath time into ‘CLUB TUB,’ complete with disco lights, blaring pop music, and dancing your wiggles out until the toddlers stumble out of the bath and pass out instantaneously because they have partied so hard.
It’s the summer camp I worked at making dishwashing the most coveted job on the schedule, each pair on ‘Hobart’ (the infamous commercial dish sanitizer machine) coming in tutus or monster outfits or dressed as obscure movie references, with a rager of a playlist, ready to race the clock in a frenetic blur of spraying ladles and scrubbing pots, hurling bussing tubs full-force across the kitchen, and sprint-running plates back to the floor.
It’s having a one-song dance off, ‘Dumpster fire on the dance floor,’ every week to decide who takes out the trash, and then spending five minutes after ‘Trash Talking’ each other (an activity where you give the other person very nice compliments in a really angry voice and try to keep a straight face).
It’s early COVID in a 5-person apartment with a broken dishwasher, instituting a weekly ‘Monday Mug Draft’ — where we would compete for the ranked order in which we would pick the two mugs we were allowed to use (and handwash) for the rest of the week. (If you have ever spent all day at home with remote working adults you will be familiar with the astonishing rate of cup usage if not regulated).
It’s every kid on our college campus who was still awake at midnight during finals study week (read: all of them) sticking their heads out their windows for ‘The Howl,’ in which we would all shriek to the moon like perturbed werewolves about our crippling test anxiety.
***
These are what we remember from our days, and months, and seasons, and years. Not the moments that were pretty good and just happened to us. But the ones we made into experiences. The ones whose emotional resonance we changed for the better. That we took from dread to side-splittingly strange absurdity. That we transformed from ennui to anticipated delight.
These are the things we tell our friends about. Tell our kids about. Tell strangers on the street about. That make us smile to ourselves when we are alone in the dark.
Your assignment, should you choose to play:
Take a thing that is boring/nothing/unpleasant/anxiety-producing, and make it a ritual.
And please please please, tell me about it so that I can try it.
P.S. Want to spend more time thinking about the particularities of rituals and looping designs? Jump on over to this earlier piece on Repetition, Routine, and Ritual.
Yours, in daily dogs,
Olivia
Do you want to do this? Make experiences for people, yourself included, that feel like ritual and delight? Create both the silly and serious moments that make for the best stories and our core memories and the things we can’t help but share with everyone we meet, even those who have not asked?
Join us for an 8-week journey into the discipline of experience design, starting October 22nd (next week)! Our virtual retreat, Designing Experiences for Radical Imagination, will give you the tools you need to design for feelings and for change, guide you in designing an experiential offering of your choosing, and support you in collecting the inspiration you need to nurture your own experience design practice long into the future.
If you make things for people, this is for you.
We have one more info session happening TOMORROW! If you are even a wee bit curious, come let us entice you in. And if you can’t make the time (12 pm PT), sign up anyhow to get the recording.
Enrollment closes on October 21st and the retreat begins on October 22nd!
I feel mirrored... This reminds me of the book I am reading: "Species of Spaces and Other Pieces" by Georges Perec, which is also precisely the thing that's pushed me to design for feelings. Perec, very much like you, elucidates on the details that we notice about something once we, well, really notice it, give it a name, and a color. Like the sizes of streets and roads, the space between the door and the bed, the structure of a lined page, the painting that disappears once we hang it on the wall we never really look at...
The task I dreaded in my book reading experience was annotating the physical book. I feel like I'm ruining it. So, I got myself an unlined notebook with a drawing of a beautiful Cretan woman on it, sprayed it with my favorite perfume, and made it an extension of Perec's book. Now I can not only annotate alongside my reading, but also doodle, draw diagrams, and journal in whatever parts of the page I want.