Jump in with us this fall! The Design for Feelings Studio is hosting an 8-week virtual retreat on Designing Experiences for Radical Imagination this October.
Want to uplevel how you gather, facilitate, teach, lead, design culture, or craft environments? We’ve got you.
Find out more and sign up for one of our early-October info sessions below.
Enrollment is officially live, woohoo!
If you have invited us to a wedding in the past few years, you have likely also received a card from me and my partner with the advice of “Don’t forget to tell each other you look hot!”
And this is the essence of our third Love Language: Words of Affirmation.
New here? Missed the past few posts? This is article #3 in a mini-series on Love Languages as a framework for experience design. Check out the first post on Acts of Service, and the second on Quality Time for more context!
Words of Affirmation
Hey you, yes you! I see you reading things for brain exercise. Way to go! Proud of you!
In one-on-one relationships, Words of Affirmation most often look like compliments and gratitudes. You’re looking really beautiful this morning honey. Thank you for taking out the trash!
For experience design, I have an expanded definition: What are all the ways you can affirm the people in your experience?
Here are a few things to consider:
How can you help people feel seen?
How are you acknowledging and actively designing for folks’ differing identities and needs?
This could look like ensuring inclusive pronoun options in your drop down menus, or making sure accessible seating is readily available and clearly mapped in your venue. It can look like naming that you know everyone is coming from a hard meeting about layoffs, and giving folks a few minutes cameras-off to compose themselves. It’s acknowledging the broader global context of a moment and adjusting the experience accordingly. It’s being intentional in how you invite people to introduce themselves with their professional expertise AND lived experience. It’s using someone’s preferred name, and pronouncing it correctly (it’s okay to ask!).
How can you acknowledge their progress and growth?
Experiences are things that change us in some way. How can you help folks’ recognize their steps, be they big or small? Consider all the ways to show, not just tell.
This could look like the note you write on your student’s paper after you grade it, telling them all the ways you see them stretching. This might be the way you, as a facilitator, mirror back to the group what you’re hearing, helping them see the brilliance in the conversation. Or perhaps this is the visual map that helps folks orient to where they are in the program.
*A watch-out*: Gamification is a common, and often effective, way to do this in an experience. Yes, I am indeed inclined to keep up my streak of meditations or language practice sessions. BUT use this with nuance. Will assigning points to community contributions give folks an “ick” feeling? Is this robot telling me “GREAT JOB” falling false and flat?
What language are you using?
Words matter. The nuance of words matter. How do the specific words you choose communicate care and relationality? Language is how we affirm our roles, positionality, and relationships with one another. Who are the people in your experience to you? Who are you to them?
This looks like a leader telling you “Thank you for sharing your perspective today, it changed how I am thinking about this,” rather than just “Thanks.” This looks like deciding how formal or informal your copy is. This looks like noticing the details of someone, and mirroring them back. This looks like the puns and the references that tie in your experiential metaphor, or grounding theme, helping everyone feel ‘in’ on the joke.
How can folks affirm one another?
How will the folks within your experience interact? How can you design ways for them to affirm each other, too?
This looks like ending your retreat with a circle of gratitudes, where each person offers a specific thanks to the person on their left. Or this could mean community conversations for folks to workshop their ideas with one another. Or establishing the practice of every person including their pronouns in their Zoom names, not just in their intake form, so that everyone can refer to each other. Or a Slack kudos channel that folks post to on Fridays.
Your assignment, should you choose to play:
Pick a thing that you’re crafting in the next few weeks — it could be a fashion show or a family road trip or a strategic planning session. How will you design in affirmation? How might you take a bit more care with the language you’re using? How will you help people feel seen?
Tune in next week for our next Love Language deep dive!
Thank you for reading. Thank you for the snippets of your lives you send in return, little thoughts and big thoughts, questions and “Yay I read this!” and “LOL.” Thank you for reminding me the internet is not always a cavernous and unfriendly void.
Yours, Olivia
Are you craving tangible structures, tools, and frameworks for designing experiences? Do you make things for humans? Would you like those humans to feel cared for, or seen, or elated, or intrigued, or empowered? Do you want to learn how to design for feelings?
Join us this fall for Designing Experiences for Radical Imagination!