Whimsy Lab
Weird & Wild Event Experiments
I love Authentic Relating, but I’m kind of bored with it.
This is no commentary on AR. It’s such a rich set of tools and games, which I intend to pull from forever. But as I’ve gotten more into theatre work and ritual, started reading books and attending events on improv, and gotten curious about different types of design, I’ve started to want to branch out.
Earlier this month, Geof and I led a webinar in Immersive Experience Design. You can see/listen to the recording here (lmk if this link goes down at some future point and I’ll migrate it to Youtube). We talked about 3 different types of design:
Synchronous - Real-time facilitated activities, which participants have to opt out of if they don’t want to participate.
Asynchronous - Time-flexible activities which can (but don’t have to be) opted into at any time. Often facilitated by materials instead of people.
Environmental - Setting up the space and spatial elements to encourage the type of mood or connection you want.
Authentic Relating is a wonderful tool for the first of these. The latter two have been my learning area lately.
When Geof and I got to Asheville, we had options on what to do. Were we going to lead something here? Of course. But what should it be? Just how weird, wild, and creative should we get?
The answer, apparently, has been “to the maximum degree.”
It started with our welcome-to-us party.
Welcome to Town, Us Weirdos
Every event should have a purpose - something that you can look back on and measure whether it happened or not. As Priya Parker says, “A category [like a welcome party] is not a purpose”. We wanted to do a welcome party, with the purpose of letting people know exactly what they were getting into if they became friends with us.
We spent our first two weeks asking all our current non-local friends to introduce us to Ashevillains they thought we’d like. Then, we invited all those people to a “welcome to us!” party. We invited each of THEM to bring someone they thought we would like. (Purpose: get us in front of as many new potential friends as possible.)
Over 30 people showed up. We cooked a ton of food (because we know how to get people on our good side 😉) and let people mingle for the first hour. Then we got weird.
We started by telling everyone to take one of our friend-dating flyers. Since this party was all about spurring future connection, we created an easy way for people to know just what sorts of connection we wanted, and have a way to follow up. We created a flyer for each of us individually, and one for us as a couple (the GeofNess Monster). The flyers had our favorite activities, a bio, an FAQ and “buyer beware” info, and a booking link that went straight to a friend-calendar for each of us.
Note: These worked great - I started having invites from people I didn’t even know show up in the subsequent weeks, as the flyers started getting passed around!
Then we asked our new friends to help us learn about Asheville. We invited them into small groups to discuss what made AVL unique, and create skits around it. 15 minutes later we were regaled with all sorts of great vignettes — what it’s like to forage with people that know nothing about plants; scheduling hangouts that never happen; extra-long hugs with sighs; and seeing the same people everywhere you go.
Then we played “Good Bad Worst Asheville advice”. We heard how to date (and how definitely not to) in the area; where to buy the best and worst meat; and how to get people to show up to events. (Hint: invite all their friends and lock the doors.)
At the end of the party, we were pretty sure we’d entered the scene with full warning — and promise — of who we are as people.
That event was just the start. At the end of it, we told people about our true Asheville intention - an entirely experimental event series we call “Whimsy Lab”.
Fuck Expectations, Let’s Get Whimsical
The first Whimsy Lab happened last week. Here’s what we did, and what I learned from it.
