I’m in the airport, heading to Croatia for a couple weeks of downtime. I just spent the weekend at Stone Soup, an “experience design camp.” Only it’s not really an experience design camp. It’s more of the idea of an experience design camp. What I mean by that is that it was organized, if organized is the right term, around non-hierarchical principles. The published schedule consists basically of times for meals — and the meals are provided by teams who do the shopping, prepping, and cooking independently of other teams. The actual content, the events and workshops and discussions you’d expect to find, are entirely provided by the attendees.¹

My general experience with similar events is that things advertised as “self-organizing” usually mean “someone in the group gets stuck with organizing everything but never gets credit for it or nothing gets done.” This didn’t seem to have too much of that. In fact, although everything seemed to be flying by the seat of its pants, nothing major seemed to get lost. Food showed up roughly on time.² Things may have been canceled and been aggressively moved around the schedule, but there was almost always something interesting going on, and even if there wasn’t there were friendly people hanging out and looking for a conversation.

I often feel disconnected from people, especially traveling around the world alone. And especially dropping into a group of people who largely knew each other,³ it’s easy to feel marginalized. I’d like to say everyone put in an effort to make me feel comfortable. I’m sure some people did. But it never felt like it. Instead, it felt effortless. It felt like I just obviously belonged, that anyone who was willing to be a part of that community would.

As to the actual event, it wasn’t what I expected. Which is to say, I was there because I’m interested in experience design. I’m playing and designing larps, which I’m taking as a bunch of small experiences put together to create a space for people to tell stories in, kind of the way you frame a house so people can live in it. What I was looking for, then was a place where I could talk about designing experiences, and some ideas about different ways to create those experiences.

What I found was more basic than that. Maybe because of the structure, maybe because of expectations, maybe because of the people who came together to create the camp, what I found was people who were kind of crazy passionate about creating experiences — simple and direct experiences like walking through the woods at night, or having a water fight in the rain, or rigging a looping audio monologue and mood lighting in the bathroom — but which seemed unbothered with moving beyond that.

I don’t want that to sound like a criticism. I might have liked something more directed and practical, but what I found was undeniably powerful and valuable. And I’m not sure how you would get something more structured without changing the nature of the event, the low-key “let’s just hang around a big house in the countryside and make things for each other” nature of the thing. I’m still looking for that more practically-focused convention. But I don’t want it instead of this one. I want it in addition.

I was talking with one of the other attendees late Saturday night, and she pointed out how badly most of the people there needed the event. We live in a world that’s both deeply interconnected and vastly disconnected — interconnected because it’s so easy to stay in touch, disconnected because the sheer volume of information makes it nearly impossible to have any of them be deep and meaningful. The world needs to start repairing those connections, making them real, anchoring ourselves to each other. I don’t know how to do that. Stone Soup seems like a good start.

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Footnotes

¹ Thus, the “Stone Soup” of the name, after the folktale where some wandering travelers convinced a village to provide a meal by having each villager provide a separate ingredient.

² And, to be clear, this wasn’t just cheese sandwiches or massive bowls of spaghetti in tomato sauce. People really put effort into it — bread straight from the oven, freshly-picked salads with herbs picked from the garden on the property, simple but elegant curries. We ate well.

³ This was the third Stone Soup, following previous ones in Poland and the United States, and most of the attendees were part of a loose group of friends who were interested in this sort of thing, or at the very least interested in someone who was attending who was interested in this kind of thing.