What

Each session we select a feeling, and delve into specific moments and experiences that have evoked that emotion. Individuals then choose one thread to follow, and go deep into spaces of intuitive and sense-based exploration, using one specific experience to unpack the nuance and particularities of the emotion. We then come together to share and learn from the diversity and edges of what folks found in their wanderings. Each session contributes a gallery entry to the Synesthetic Thesaurus, a growing collection of insight, artifacts, experiences, and nuance, to draw on for the future when anyone wishes to inspire an emotion through design.

Why & Who

 I define my craft of Experiential Design as Designing for Spacetime and Designing for Feelings. Through these sessions, I have four main goals for participants: 

1. To build our muscles around noticing emotions. 

2. To expand our modalities of expression and understanding. 

3. To grow a nuanced understanding of the specific emotions we want to inspire.

4. To be together. To take slowtime to simply exist in relationship, with ourselves and one another. 

I run Design for Feelings as an open invite, bi-weekly event. As of March 2022, I have hosted 13 sessions, and our invite list has grown to 200+ folks from creative communities across the world.

Emergent questions

• How do we re-invite our physical bodies and our intuitive ways of knowing into our design practice? 

• How do we inspire emotions in others? 

• How do we celebrate the subjectivity and complexity of emotions, rather than trying to define or synthesize our way towards alignment?