I’m on a flight back to London after attending Stone Soup, another iteration of the “experience design camp” I attended back in 2019, and I don’t have much to add about it from the last time I attended. It’s still “self-organizing,” still packed with the kind of exuberant, thoughtful people you’d generally like to surround yourself with, and still focused on small, personal experiences. I knew that going in, so I was a little better prepared for what I found. And I’m grateful I had the opportunity to return to it.

I think it’s the experience it wants to be and I can’t knock it for that. The world needs more of that kind of thing. But more than once over the four nights I was there I found myself wanting something more, or something different, and the only thing I can conclude is that I’ve changed in the intervening five years. There were the predictable frustrations, like the fact that scheduling experiences was an immense pain¹ or that so many experiences required you to stand up and sit down on the ground dozens of times, which coupled with a decidedly subpar mattress on my bed meant I threw out my back early on and was constantly antagonizing it anew.² But I think my unease comes from three specific things.

First, Stone Soup is focused on such small, intimate moments — nature walks or breathing exercises or improv practice — that there’s not a lot of space for more complicated experiences. I ran a few simple larps³ but it really felt like the runtime needed to come in under an hour or people would lose interest and wander off.⁴ Second, the experiences on offer were largely unidirectional. With few exceptions it was pretty easy to identify a presenter and an audience. And while the audience was often invited to participate, the avenues for participation were often pretty narrow,⁵ although I didn’t make it to any of the improv-based stuff so I imagine those were doing more collaborative things. My interests tend to be pretty firmly in the co-creation space and that’s so much harder to design for. I wasn’t surprised that a lot of people exploring experience design didn’t incorporate much of it. Finally, and what I found myself missing the most, was there was a huge lack of theory or practical advice. There’s a value in both learning by doing and in exposing yourself to a lot of different things, but where I am as an experience designer I’m finding myself stumbling more over things like pacing and transitions and building in the right amount of agency, and those all seem like things which would really benefit from a discussion of narrative structure or some direct critique. And Stone Soup is more about providing experiences for each other than reflecting upon it or giving you the tools to replicate them. It’s more about working on yourself than preparing you to take what you’ve learned and radiate it out into the world. And again, I think that’s great and really valuable, but I think I’m ready for the next steps.

I didn’t have much time in Romania outside of Stone Soup, but what little time I had highlighted everything I liked and disliked about the place. My arrival was great; I got in the night before and had just enough time to wander out into the city and meet some other attendees. And for that the city felt modern and alive, dining outside with crowds on a warm summer’s evening. After the event was an utter slog to get back to the airport in time for my flight. What was a 4.5 hour drive to the event had somehow become a 7 hour trip with several transfers and every step of it felt arduous, with minimal signs and creaky Romanian infrastructure.⁶

I booked a late-night flight back to the UK, leaving at 10:10pm and landing, through the magic of time zones, at 11:30pm. I’m currently seated across from one of the most crowded smoking sections I’ve ever seen,⁷ having had to kind of force my way through a championship Taekwondo team from Kazakhstan to get through passport control.⁸ I’m already kind of maxed out on human interaction, so I’m not looking forward to rolling directly into the second larp for this month, but I guess I should have thought of that before I booked the ticket.

Next: London (LHR) to Prague (PRG)
Prev: London (STN) to Bucharest (OTP)

Footnotes

¹ After breakfast every day there was a long meeting where people would announce what experiences they were thinking about offering, and they’d propose a time. And the only times which were at all useful were “immediately after breakfast” and “immediately after dinner.” Everything else either ran into other experiences running late so the next ones would be delayed waiting for people to free up, or the facilitators had decided to move or cancel them without any way of updating the schedule. Even the time immediately after lunch wasn’t ideal, because it was followed by a “silent hour” and people weren’t particularly prompt at turning up after that.

² The convention was held on a beautiful rural B&B attached to a lovely stretch of land covered with plumb trees which had the unfortunate feature of being built down a significant slope, which wasn’t helping things.

³ A Crow Funeral and Still Life. I had nearly a dozen other games I wanted to run, but by the time I realized I wanted to run them I was already on site and neither the organizers nor the hosts had a printer.

⁴ The exception to this was the meals. Everyone was assigned to a group who was responsible for designing an experience for one of the meals, and these were pretty elaborate affairs. For one we were told we were dying, were walked down to watch the sunset, ate our last meal and shared some moments with each other, then laid down and were talked through our “death” where were were then invited into a kind of dance party/ritual in a tent before “reentering the world as spirit.” I realize now, writing that out, that it all sounds positively cult-like but I can promise in context it played less creepy than that and in any event the food wasn’t poisoned so no harm, no foul.

The following night the group responsible for the dinner playacted as aliens speaking a made up language who welcomed us to dinner, invited us to come up with names in their language and invent a word, then brought us down to a “spaceship” and took off to bring us back to their home planet. It was adorable.

⁵ I recall one experience which was “brushing each other’s teeth” and for as intimate as that experience might feel it doesn’t leave a lot of room for bold invention or creativity. At least, I kind of hope it didn’t.

⁶ I had assumed I was going to catch a ride back in the same car I had gotten a ride to the venue, but on the last day just before we left one of the organizers suggested we all pool together and arrange trips collectively and I, stupidly, agreed on the assumption I would be taken care of. And I was, I guess, in the sense that I did make it to the airport in plenty of time for my flight. But I didn’t get a direct ride to the airport, I did have to schlep my heavy bag from a car to a train to another train with an aching back, and rather than getting to spend a long relaxing time decompressing with everyone else flying out that day I arrived just as everyone else’s flights had left and got to sit alone exhausted in the Bucharest Airport, which is really kind of a hideous place to spend any amount of time in.

⁷ Apparently people in Romania only smoke slightly more than the EU average, but it sure feels like it’s way higher.

⁸ There were a lot of them and I was worried their passports might come under a bit of scrutiny; I have no idea how friendly Romania is to Kazakhstan. I might have been a little more chill if I had noticed the figures they had perched on top of the many large trophies they were carrying. From a distance it could have been gymnastics or dance.