In late October I am guiding an 8-week virtual retreat on Designing Experiences for Radical Imagination.
Want to go deep on the tools of experience design? Intrigued by the invitation to make things that feel luscious, layered, and transportative?
Enrollment is live! Sign up for one of our early-October info sessions!
We went to the Oregon coast last week, and here is what children everywhere help us remember, irrelevant of water temps or (apparently) their own body temps: the waves are an experience. A good one.
When you’re in the frothy, jumbly, washing-machining surf, there is nothing else but you, the last wave, the next wave, the bathing suit you keep needing to hoist up, and whoever it is you’re splashing about with. No emails, no lists, no to-do’s.
And that’s what I want more of in this world.
And so, if last week’s post was “you doing the things others hate,” than this week’s is “helping others do the things they love.”
Need some context? We’re spending five weeks looking at the 5 Love Languages as a framework for experience design. Check out Acts of Service, the first of the five (from last week) for some grounding!
Without further ado, may I present:
Quality Time
In one-on-one relationships, Quality Time is spending time together in ways that hold meaning, and are intentional and undistracted. It’s going for a walk after work to reconnect with one another. It’s planning a weekend away. It’s having family dinner every Sunday. It’s reading poetry in bed in the morning.
In experience design, I think of Quality Time as helping the folks in your experience be with what matters.
This could mean being with each other, being with themselves or their senses, being with an idea or a moment or a place or an ancestor or a story or a memory.
What’s important, as the name suggests, is the quality — not the quantity. It’s a resistance to our culture of commodified attention. It’s not multitasking, being pinged at all hours, checking our phones, or being unable to read these stupid buttery biscuit instructions because of the 700 pop-up ads.
Quality Time as a lens on experience design means looking for the ways we might stay. How we linger. It is being in relationship. Listening. Remembering. Witnessing each other. Sharing space. Slowing down enough to taste time.
This looks like a bucket at the front door of your dinner party for folks to put their phones in.
Or the reminder in your meditation app to silence your notifications before you press play.
Or starting a fellowship gathering by having folks find a person they don’t know well, and listening while the other shares their response to the question “Why are you here?” (Thank you Tanya Birl-Torres for introducing me to this opening invitation).
Or recognizing that designing for grief might not mean designing for distraction, but rather for more time with the memories of those who have been lost.
Or choosing to have folks do less at the retreat, not more. Giving them space and time for thinking, for talking. For long, leisurely lunches and walks in the woods with one another. For choosing less content, in service of more conversation.
Or the installation in which someone created a velvet entrance to the chairs they had placed on a bluff, for strangers to watch the sunset together. And as the sun went down over the water, everyone who had assembled would applaud. (I cannot, for the life of me, find the write-up — if you know it please send it along!)
And you know what is the opposite of quality time? It’s the folks designing this toilet (above) that slants forward, so that English employees everywhere spend less time enjoying a nice moment of respite and more time slogging away at work. We hate it. Boo.
Your assignment, should you choose to play:
What are you making right now? A vacation? A workshop? A 5-year-old’s birthday party? A retirement send-off? A midnight book exchange? A bathroom?
Within whatever it is, how can you design for quality time? How might you make choices that help people be with?
Tune in next week for our next Love Language deep dive!
Does diving into frameworks like this feel like the good kind of brain gymnastics?Do you want to design the types of experiences that make people say “Ooooooooh” and “Ahhhhhhhhh”? Do you hope that the things you are making will be the things other people can’t stop talking about?
Join us this fall for Designing Experiences for Radical Imagination!
P.S. I host a live, public event called Designing for Feelings. Our next gathering is on 09/11 @ 9:30 am PT. We’d love to have you.
Yours, Olivia