Let’s all be saps
Let’s all be saps
Hopeful not hopeless // Love Language #7
Do you have things you want to suck less? Meetings? Airports? Waiting in lines? Boring conferences? Awkward meet-and-greets? The icky parts of the internet?
Do you have things you want to make amazing? Your kid’s birthday party? Voting? The book you are writing? A retreat?... Meetings? Airports? Waiting in lines?
Great news, I’ve made something to help you. I’m hosting an 8-week virtual retreat on Designing Experiences for Radical Imagination this October.
Our last two info sessions are happening next week, and the retreat begins on October 22nd! Snag your spot and bring a friend.
Hello there. Why yes, we are still talking about love.
Need more context? This is the 7th 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, #4 Physical Touch, #5 Gift Giving, and #6 You Do You.
Many many years ago, when I was a little baby design researcher, an incredible designer by the name of Caricia Catalani (who probably does not remember this moment at all) told me: “If you are doing design research well, you will end up falling in love with them a little bit.”
And it’s true. When people share themselves with you, honestly, because you have created the safety for them to do so, it’s hard not to care for the tender, true human they’ve shown you.
But there is a thing I have never understood: why on earth do we, as a society, say that we are ‘hope-less romantics’?
Being a romantic is, perhaps, the most hope-ful thing I can think of. It requires a belief in possibility.
And, dear reader, this is what I will say:
Being an experience designer requires that you, too, be a hopeful romantic.
And here’s why:
Looking for what we share
Experience design invites you to search for the little threads of overlap, to look for what it is we might share with one another. In what we bring in with us from our pasts or in this moment you have made, right now.
This looks like opening your dinner party with the question ‘What’s holding your attention right now?’ or seating folks next to each other that you know are both secret space nerds.
Desiring more
Experience Design as a hopeful romantic asks us to want more for our people — more beauty and more play and more tenderness and more delight. To not settle for what is or what has been.
This looks like deciding that you are on a personal mission to make the most boring meeting of the week the most desirable, exclusive gathering, or choosing to give each monthly family finance night a money-related theme and a costume requirement and a money-themed dessert (perhaps cash-themed — complete with Johnny Cash soundtrack and a ‘walk the line’ portion where you make decisions about the hardest budget items and the evening ending with ‘cashing out’ your change drawer to buy the biggest froyo you can).
Building worlds
It empowers us to be worldbuilders. To create, for one another, the worlds we want to live in. To build spaces that encourage us to be more full and more whole — for strangers and for neighbors, for friends and for people on the internet we have never and will never meet.
This looks like showing up creatively as the best guncles and godparents, or hosting a dating show that involves friends hyping their single friends up on stage rather than having them trawling the dredges of the internet dating sites alone (in their words: ‘Designed to make you feel good about yourself’).
Seeing one another
To do experience design well, we must get to know the people we are making for, honestly. What they hope for and what they’re nervous about.
This looks like spending a few hours interviewing the people you are making the thing for beforehand, or asking your friend whose wedding speech you are writing how they want to feel when they hear it and what they absolutely do not want you to talk about.
Doing the scary
Being a romantic means being brave. To offer something to someone, with hope — the hope that they will like it. To show someone who you are by making something that only you could make. To be extra, to choose to build something extra. To manifest things that are strange and unexpected and surprising…
These acts can feel wildly vulnerable and frightening bold. It is a risk to care. But, I hope you know, a worthwhile one.
This looks like making your corporate bi-monthly marketing report Dolly Parton themed because she is a queen and you love her or coming in a homemade, fully hideous swamp monster costume rather than as a sexy cat (please for the love spend three minutes watching this video you will not regret it).
Your assignment, should you choose to play:
Do it. Fall in love.
Make a love letter for a stranger in the form of a moment, or an artifact. Care enough that your heart goes racing when you deliver whatever it is you have built. Get to know them, in all their quirks and specificities.
Make them a world. And offer it with hope.
Do you want to do this? Make experiences for people in a way that feels like falling in love? Create moments that people will carry with them, in their pockets, for years or decades to come?
Thank goodness. We need more of you.
Join us for an 8-week journey into the discipline of experience design, starting October 22nd.
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 two more info sessions happening NEXT WEEK! If you are even a wee bit curious, come let us entice you in.
Enrollment closes on October 21st and the retreat begins on October 22nd!
Yours, Olivia