Events with Friends: Emotional Ergonomics & Desigining for Feelings w/ Shuya Gong & Olivia Vagelos
Hello there.
[Take a breath. Deeper. Hold it. Don’t let it out. Okay, let it out. Now breathe it back in. Hold it.]
You’re cordially invited on a cyberspatial field trip to explore the emotional ergonomics that guide the traversing of our physical and digital worlds in our meatsuits. We will be peeling back the curtain of how our products, services, and environments have been designed (or not!) for feelings.
[Wait, are you still holding your breath? Keep holding on—is time changing for you? Is it speeding up? Or slowing down?]
We’ll meet at the shared sensory intersections where feelings are embodied and time is flavored in unexpected ways. This field trip will invite you to co-create language around how our time on the electronic frontier affects our human meatsuits, and play with tools for shaping the emotional resonance of our feelings frequencies. What is the experience of anticipatory grief? Or synthetic nostalgia? How might we design for emotional motion or feelings fatigue?
[Oh that’s right, let your breath go. Phew.]
We’ll follow it up with a bit of collaging the future from the RADAR team — imagining what a world that prioritizes emotional outcomes in design might look and feel like, with all of the gathering’s grounding in emotional ergonomics and designing for feelings to pull from.
See you in cyberspace.
xoxo,
Shuya, Olivia, & the RADAR team
ABOUT SHUYA & OLIVIA:
Shuya Gong is exploring the emotional ergonomics of cyberphysical spaces through Chaotic Goods, a product studio conducting research through crafting navigational tools for chaotic systems. Shuya is also the creative director of IDEO CoLab Ventures and an innovation fellow at Harvard School of Engineering. She’s currently working on (and looking for collaborators for) a very chaotic system of magical conveyor belts moving entangled objects around the world—also known as a supply chain data exchange standard. Please get in touch if you might have any interest.
Olivia Vagelos is an experiential designer crafting containers for the collective acts of radical imagination. She leads The Design for Feelings Studio, a creative agency that exists in service of designing experiences with the textures of magic and poetry, supporting people in deep and nuanced emotional exploration, and building the conditions for folks to imagine and manifest more beautiful, regenerative, inclusive futures. She is currently building a School for Experience Design. Find her weekly braindumps on designing experiences on Substack.
Olivia and Shuya met at IDEO bumping into each other in every Slack channel they joined until they finally decided it was high time they make subversively designed messes together. Of late they have been scheming and dreaming about writing the textbook for ‘Time, Space, Feelings, and Good Chaos’ (a working title). Let us know if you’d like to be on the mailing list for updates or have any interest in being a beta reader!
ABOUT RADAR:
RADAR is a global community of people thinking about and building better futures.
Together, we’ve dreamt up and collaboratively published three crowdfunded reports into the future of culture, run public hackathon and education events for hundreds of people online, built an ideas platform which was recently awarded a grant of over $150k, and shared in the rewards — all in service of accelerating better futures, together. And we’re just getting started.
For too long, the future has seemed to belong to the few and the powerful. But we choose to believe there’s a different truth — simple and radical — hidden in plain sight: The future belongs to those who think about it. And in our view, that should include more, and we mean way more of the population than it does today. In fact, we believe it so much, we co-wrote a whole book about it (read our Field Guide to the Future).