Building Something I Don't Know How to Name…yet. 
An experimental workshop series starting September 6

For the past decade I’ve been interested in how design creates meaning. Now I'm wondering if we can design a process for figuring out what is meaningful to you. 

Everywhere I looked, the approaches felt incomplete. Life coaches promising transformation. Apps with daily affirmations. Expensive retreats. Gurus with answers. What if you treated this more like experience design or even entertainment? What if it could be exploratory rather than prescriptive? Creative rather than clinical? What if it didn't promise to change your life, just offered stimulating ways to think about it?

The experiment

So I wrote a clunky 24-question survey. I called it research, but really I was just testing whether this frustration was mine alone. Do other people feel the same way about this? Would anyone be interested in a different kind of approach? 

The surprising results

In a few days 73 people completed this ridiculously long survey. That alone was surprising. 

What really caught me off guard is that most people said they're already pretty clear about their priorities in life. 91% had at least some sense of what matters to them. But almost everyone has felt disconnected from what they say matters most. They know their priorities, they just can't seem to stay connected to them in daily life.

And when I asked how they'd want to explore this further, the answers weren't meditation apps or self-help books, expensive retreats or gurus. They just want conversations with others and creative activities, but also, a daily reminder of what actually matters. This is not a clarity problem, it's a connection problem, with others and with what's meaningful to you.

Figuring it out together

So I'm building something. I don't know what to call it yet - 'The Workshop Workshop' for now, which sounds ridiculous but somehow fits. Is it a format? An event series? A club? I don’t know. 

It's not a methodology (yet). I'm not promising it will change your life. I don't have a framework or a system or scientific backing. What I do have are stimulating activities - some borrowed from my teaching in design, some from other projects I've worked on. Exercises that might resonate with what those 73 people actually said they wanted: creative exploration, conversations with others, and reminders of what actually matters. 

For example, we might explore contradictions that shape your life (“I want X but I keep doing Y”), use randomness exercises to find unexpected patterns, or interview yourself using thought-provoking questions to uncover what you might not normally examine. If you have suggestions of things we could try I’d love to hear from you. 

To start off, I’m proposing a simple structure: together we'll do an exercise to clarify what’s meaningful to you (different one each time), figure out what would make it work for you as a reminder, then share with the group.

I'll run them monthly through December, testing different exercises each time. Join one, join all, see how you feel after each session.

Will it work? Let’s find out

I'll run it remotely to allow for people in different time zones to join. Depending on how it goes it could evolve into an in-person session? Run them regularly? 1-2-1s?

If this sounds like something you'd want to try, let me know. The first session is Saturday, September 6, with two time slots: 10 AM - 1 PM London time for UK/Europe participants, and 12-2 PM Mexico City time for Americas participants (6-8 PM London time). I'll charge £25 because I think a small investment helps everyone take it seriously, but if it doesn't work for you, I'll refund it. Limited to 8 participants per session.

I'll keep sharing how this experiment goes either way.