What unites ghosts, taxes, gifts dropped on your doorstep, and the spa? Let me tell you.
Experience design is the rather electric tango between making patterns and breaking them.
We make loops — repetition, routine, ritual, in search of the trust and comfort and beauty of the known. Friends who show up when they say they will, our daily walks, always eggs and toast for dinner after a hard day. Solid structures we can count on, but also safety and softness. Nana making pastitsio at Christmas — a labor of using (and washing) every single pot and pan in the house, and knowing it’s coming making it even more decadent.
And (for better and worse)… we never forget the “Oh shit!!,” blow-your-mind, didn’t-see-it-coming moments. The surprise endings, the pop-your-intertube-rafting-type2fun-terrible-thing-that-makes-a-great-story, the friends who live across the country flying in under the cover of darkness to leap out from behind the couch at your surprise engagement party. The thing they did on stage that you’re still thinking about three years later.
We need both — the expected and the unexpected. Our assumptions met and flipped on their heads.
I have a working framework for you: The intersections of the expected and not, along the axis from scary to full of care (or “care-y” if you will).
It’s emerged from years of playing with how to design for more care, and less fear (and scarcity and shame). It’s a way to look at what you’re designing and spot opportunities for the soft and the spicy, and to observe where perhaps you have become as dreaded as your annual threatening letter from the tax bureau.
There are lots of ways in:
What are the people saying?
What are they feeling?
What is happening?
Your assignment, should you choose to play, is to answer these questions:
What are you making right now? A conference? A birthday party? A usually-very-boring Monday meeting?
What could it do with more of? More delight, perhaps?
And what could it do with less of? A bit less dread, if you could?
So please go out and surprise us…sometimes.
Yours, Olivia
This is dope. Love.
Beautiful, my dear— and so useful.