Designing for Kindness
✨ A Synesthetic Thesaurus entry
Welcome to the swirly wanderings of The Synesthetic Thesaurus. This is a place where we ask: How do we design for feelings? And how do we design for a specific feeling?
It’s where we have enough time to ask sticky, cartwheeling questions. Enough time to complexify, rather than simplify, and luxuriate in what we find.
Each post is a love letter to an emotion, the experience of slipping into a warm bath with the feeling, and letting it linger on your tongue. All pulled from a live community gathering of Designing for Feelings.
〰️ 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. 〰️
This feeling: Kindness
What might it mean to design for kindness?
In this moment, more than ever, it’s a question worth wondering.
Kindness is something we often talk about as an action word. An identity word. Can you be more kind to your sibling, my little one? How kind of you to think of me.
But what does it feel like, to feel kind? What happens, inside you, when you are kind…to yourself, to those you care for, to those you don’t know well at all?
And what is it like, to experience kindness from others? What is it like when spaces are kind? When moments are kind? When actions are kind?
Where do you feel it in your body? Does it have an energy and texture? Does it have a voice?
How might it be different than the close-but-not-quite-it feelings of feeling generous, or expansive, or empathic?
We find the feeling of kind in moments of…
Slowing down enough to listen to the quieter voice inside our heads.
In the pouring of a hot cup of tea for someone come in from the cold.
It’s in a little chubby baby hand, when they pat you on the back. Reassuring you, in a moment where the roles seem reversed. Speaking without syllables “It’s okay, I can help.” The little one who can offer something, though we think they cannot offer anything of consequence. But they can. They are saying I am here too. I see you. I see that you might need something. Here is the small thing I can do.
It is not necessarily found in the fixing of the problem. In the space of solution. But in the choice to be with.
Sitting with someone as they go.
Kindness lives in acts of witnessing, of seeing one another. Of looking.
And sometimes that other is your own small self.
With our senses it has been…
The soft rush of rustling leaves in the wind.
Warming spices and slowglowing orange yellows.
Our little energy field, moving outwards, wondering about someone.
Circular, concentric, soft-edged. Gently wrapping itself to drape around what it finds.
Pouring carefully from a filled cup.
River rock water-softened and smoothed. Weighty and small and having seen much and stayed, little and humble and there.
How, then, do we design for it?
How do we create moments, experiences, objects that say it’s okay to be becoming, to be changing, to have needs? How do we show up with soft curiosity, not needing to always fix, but to be with? How do we design for the small moments, the small acts? How do we resource ourselves, so that we give away from a place of not needing to replace, or to get back? How do we stay soft in a hard world?
What if we…
Designed for more space between? Kindness so often happens in the interstitial. It seems to require the slow, and to require looking. So could we un-plan our selves, our spaces, our experiences, just a bit?
Could we create conditions for the quiet offers and acknowledgements? Little ways to say “I could maybe help” or just “I see you doing this hard thing. That is a lot to be carrying” but not “I can fix that for you.” Moments to wander over to someone’s desk, someone’s board, someone’s porch with a literal or metaphorical muffin.
What if we arranged the chairs such that we could smile at one another, rather than face the person we’ve been told is most important?
Might we make time to look back and relish the small acts we have done for one another, alongside the big and important and numerical goals?
And now an invitation, for you
Dear friend…
Kindness. What and how has it been for you?
What has been the color of kindness? What little footprints does it leave for you to follow? How and where have you noticed it in your body – does it live more in your hands or your chest or your cheeks?
And what might you make with it? For yourself… For others… For this home planet….
I’d love to know. Really. My hope for the comments here is that they become a pool of small kindnesses and tingly little curiosities.
〰 Want to join a live session of Designing for Feelings? I’d love to have you. And more context on this particular Experientially series here.〰
Thank you to the humans who brought the aging contents of their refrigerators, who stirred, seasoned, tasted, and ladled this particular kindness soup during the live gathering on April 5th, 2023. For your magical brains I, and we, are grateful. You are the real stuff.
Wonderfully said - now time for me to put it into practice. I will try to be more conscious of being kind this holiday season to both family, friends and strangers - Thank you!