This fall The Design for Feelings Studio is hosting an 8-week virtual retreat: Designing Experiences for Radical Imagination.
Get on the list for updates on when info sessions and enrollment go live!
Experience design can feel squishy. Perhaps because at its core it’s all about designing for feelings. And feelings can feel… like soft, slippery slugs. Hard to define, and harder still to confine, slow moving and exploding (ew), having spent all night tracking slimy trails across our brains.
And along with feelings, experience design is the sculpting of time and space, two things that are expansive, swirling, and change as soon as you glance away.
And this, friends, is why I am obsessed with frameworks.
Frameworks can give you a skeleton, something solid and architectural, to design around, to make plans upon. Offer you a grounded guide on which to make choices.
I’m getting married at the end of September and so, even more than usual, I am thinking about love. And as my friend Meg has identified, weddings are an opportunity to design for love in a lot of directions (so much so that she has named her own not-wedding-wedding a LOVE PARTY instead).
In honor, we are going to spend the next few posts looking at one of my all-time favorite frameworks for experience design:
The 5 love languages:
Maybe you’ve heard of them? They were created by Gary Chapman in 1992. The proposal is this: there are five ways of loving. And we each have our preferences for how we like to receive love, and how we like to give love. And usually they are talked about in reference to one-on-one relationships — how knowing your own and a partner’s love languages is a massive communication and connection unlock.
But for years I’ve been using them as a tool for experience design. Because I do believe that to design experiences for people, we must care about them. And care is, in many ways, love.
So without further ado, up first in this mini-series: Love Language #1.
Acts of Service
In a one-on-one relationship, acts of service are talked about as doing thoughtful actions for your partner, ones they generally hate. It’s sorting the bills because it gives them anxiety, washing their car, calling the pest control because the spiders have been proliferating and we’re not loving the home invasion.
In experience design, it’s the same.
It’s taking care of the shit people hate doing, the things folks dread, fear, detest, find boring or annoying or stressful or like a massive energy drain.
It’s looking for the unproductive friction in your experience — the moments of challenge that aren’t necessary for the growth or change you are creating but are instead just a pain in the ass. And taking care of them.
This looks like Disney Land creating organized stroller parking at each ride, because figuring out where to put your child wagon and remembering an hour later which potted plant you stashed it behind is a huge headache.
Or my friend Jenny’s expanding Voter Concierge Corps, a trained, non-partisan group of volunteers that helps you do ballot research (especially for the down ballot measures that folks often find head-scratching), and identify where and how you’re voting.
Or creating a seating chart for an event full of strangers, because the social anxiety of figuring out which chair to choose can be crippling.
Here’s the thing, though. Acts of service don’t look the same for everyone.
I, for one, hate figuring out the internet, doing market research, and moving the laundry from the washer to the dryer. Someone else, on the other hand, might dread grocery shopping (one of my great joys in life), hanging pictures (how satisfying!), or packing (hello, I am a virgo, let me make you 9 million lists).
In many ways, this is great. Because it means that you can fulfill folks’ acts of service dreams without it also being terrible for you! And at a larger scale, this looks like organizations and companies building a business or a purpose around taking care of your needs in a delightful and smooth way.
And also, it means that we have to know the people we are designing for. Know them well enough to know what irks them, so that we can ease that irk.
Experience design is a personal and intimate craft. Because, yes, the feelings slugs live in our hearts (Yum!).
Your assignment, should you choose to play:
What are you designing this week, or this month? How can you build in an act of service? What friction can you design out of your experience? What do people find annoying that you can make smooth and easeful?
Tune in next week for our next Love Language deep dive!
HOT TIP: Want to also become a framework nerd? Craving experiential exoskeletons? Want to learn how to make experiences that help people feel loved on? Come on in!
We’re hosting an 8-week virtual retreat this fall on Designing Experiences for Radical Imagination.
Get on the list to be the first to know when info sessions and enrollment go live.
P.S. I host a live, public event called Designing for Feelings. Our next gathering is TOMORROW, August 29th @ 9 am PT. Get added to the calendar event below!
Yours, Olivia