Designing for Contentment
✨ A Synesthetic Thesaurus entry
Welcome to the luscious, soupy space of The Synesthetic Thesaurus; a place where we have enough time to complexify, rather than simplify, enough time to sit in the mess and enjoy ourselves.
This is a place where we ask: How do we design for feelings? And how do we design for a specific feeling?
Each post is a love poem to an emotion, the experience of slipping into a warm bath with the feeling, and letting it linger on your tongue.
Want a little more context on the lineage of this series? Find the origins of the Synesthetic Thesaurus here. Want to join the held spaces where these pots get stirred? Come play with us.
Today’s feeling: Contentment
What might it mean to design for contentment?
When you’ve received 79 marketing emails before you’ve gotten out of bed, when Google watched you buy a couch and now thinks you must need six other couches so every web page you’ve visited this month says “Hey, hey you! Without these other couches your existence will be horrendous and you will be unfulfilled and also for good measure you will probably be ugly forever. So come on over to our couch sale to be happy and loved and beautiful!”…
When this is what we hear all the ding dong day, what does it mean to be content?
Where have we felt it? How has it tasted in our mouths? Existed in our bones? How has it been specifically, uniquely particular — different than feeling satisfied, sure, or finished?
It’s found in moments of…
The post-cold-water plunge. The release. After the adrenaline rush wears off and you are wrapped in your sweats. Skin tingling and breath slow and deep.
In the settling sigh of your old, floofy dog as they circle and circle and finally full-body plop.
It’s there at the campfire, the ring of warm, flickering light and low laughter and whisky holding out the infinite darkness beyond.
We find it in the low hum of making with our hands, shoulder to shoulder with friends. Dumplings or wreaths or friendship bracelets. Fingers weaving. Focused and forgetting and remembering.
Through the tentacles of our senses it has been…
Honey gold and sun warmed.
Thick carpeted steps and cloud floating.
Softly contained, sharp-edgeless.
Full. Entire. Whole. And in balance.
Now. Not before. Not after. Here.
How, then, do we design for it?
How do we create moments, experiences, objects that give us the sense that we are enough? That we have done enough? That allow us to release our ruminations on the past and our anxieties about what comes next? Not forever but for now. What has to happen, so that we can settle into the quiet, accepting relationship with our bodies? How do we make a space — literally and emotionally — soft-edged? Protected from the pressures and the paces of what exists outside?
What if we…
Created time for exhalation before we began? For a relinquishing of the expectations and niggling thorns in our sides?
What if we burned them, crumpled them up, shouted them into the sea, or left them outside, somewhere else?
Or, what if we built a space within a space? A threshold to pass through so that our brains relish what is within the circle, rather than beyond.
Could we set the soundscape that is comfort and quiet, but not silence?
Might we invite you to wear what makes you feel held, and allow you the time once you are here to settle your body in the way that it craves, rather than rush you to sitting straight backed in your physical or metaphorical chair?
(And now) an invitation, for you
Dear friend…
Contentment. What has it been for you?
What has been the color of contentment? What cloud trails does it leave for you in your dreams? How have you felt it play across your skin? Understood it differently as you yourself have grown? What did it used to be? What could it be later?
And what might you make with it? For yourself… For others… For this home planet….
I’d love to know. Really.
Thank you to the humans who brought the aging contents of their refrigerators, who stirred, seasoned, tasted, and ladled this particular contentment soup during the live gathering on April 5th, 2023. For your magical brains I, and we, are grateful. You are the real stuff.
Want to join a live session of Design for Feelings? I’d love to have you. And more context on this particular Experientially series here.