The Rope

The rope is never just a rope. It is a line in space that becomes a line in the mind.

Have you ever wanted a VIP badge?

Can you remember how it felt when you finally got one, or perhaps more importantly, when you didn't?

It is extraordinary how much power we can give to a little piece of laminated card hanging around somebody's neck. I have spent most of my working life around events and have never particularly liked the term VIP, although I have certainly used the idea behind it. Not everyone at an event has the same requirements and pretending otherwise would be ridiculous. Artists need somewhere to prepare, public figures sometimes need privacy, security has to work and occasionally somebody simply cannot walk through the front door without creating chaos. What has always interested me is not the accommodation itself, but what happens when accommodation becomes separation,

because the moment somebody becomes a VIP, everybody else has become something else.

Years ago I owned and produced a weekend event called Parallel Universe. It was a multisensory immersive experience with some very well-known DJs and live artists and, like most events involving artists, it needed a green room. Ours could generously be described as basic. It was small, damp and really not somewhere anybody would choose to spend a weekend, so I did what any sensible producer would do and created something better. We made a comfortable area where the artists could sit properly, relax and get away from everything for a while, and because it was for them we roped it off. I thought I had solved the problem rather well. Not one artist used it. Instead they squeezed themselves into the undersized damp green room, surrounded by crew coming and going, catering staff trying to do their jobs and cleaners clearing things away, while the comfortable exclusive area I had created for them sat largely empty.

At first this appears to make absolutely no sense. If the purpose of a green room is to give an artist somewhere comfortable to spend time away from the audience, the comfortable area should have won. But I have seen versions of the same behaviour too many times since to dismiss it as artists simply liking green rooms. We can spend considerable amounts of money separating important people from everybody else and then discover that the separation has removed some of what made the gathering interesting. The person from catering is not there because somebody has decided they are important enough to meet the artist. The cleaner isn't waiting for an introduction. The crew member passing through probably has something else to do. A conversation with any of them has not been selected in advance and there is something refreshing about that when much of your life is spent around people who have been selected to be around you.

There is another side to this, of course, because while the people inside can become bored with exclusivity, the people outside can become fascinated by it. I once pushed that idea rather further when I owned a club night that was preparing to open. The slight difficulty was that the club wasn't ready. The interior was still being built and for two weeks there was very little inside worth seeing, but we put security on the door anyway, placed the red rope outside and played music. When people tried to enter they were told it was a private club and that they would need to register for membership. By the time we actually opened, around 4,000 people had registered for a club they had never been inside. For much of the period in which they were applying to join it, the thing they were trying to gain access to was effectively a building site.

There is something wonderfully absurd about that, although I knew perfectly well what I was doing. We had created the appearance of access before there was much of an experience to access, and people supplied the missing value themselves. The rope said there was something behind it that not everybody could have, and apparently that was enough to make quite a lot of people want it. Years later I came across research by Paul Fombelle, Nancy Sirianni, Noah Goldstein and Robert Cialdini examining VIP treatment, and one part of their work immediately felt familiar. Their experiments found that preferential treatment could increase satisfaction among those receiving it while decreasing satisfaction among those excluded, but particularly interesting was the role of visibility. For the VIP, the effect could be heightened when other people could see the preferential treatment taking place. In other words, being allowed through the door mattered, but somebody watching you go through it could matter too.

That explains an awful lot of human behaviour around events. The badge does two jobs. It opens a door, but it also tells everyone looking at it that the door will open for you. The rope works in much the same way. If nobody can see the boundary, part of its social power disappears. We instinctively understood that when we put the rope outside the unfinished club rather than somewhere discreetly inside it. The strange thing is that this desire to know something or be somewhere other people cannot is not necessarily unpleasant or divisive. Some of the most inclusive environments I have ever experienced were reached through remarkably exclusive systems.

Rave culture was a wonderful example. For anyone who grew up with a mobile phone, it is difficult to explain just how important the telephone box once was to Britain's youth. It wasn't somewhere you occasionally went because you had forgotten to charge your phone. There was no phone to charge. The telephone box was part of the UK's youth communication highway, and during the early rave years that highway could carry thousands of people towards a gathering without publicly announcing where the gathering was. A number would lead to a recorded message or another number, information would move through groups of people, meeting points would change and eventually you would discover where you were actually going. There were practical reasons for this. Many of these events existed outside the permissions expected of conventional venues and advertising the address to everybody, including the authorities, would rather have defeated the object. But the result was a peculiar kind of exclusivity in which information itself became the rope.

You had to know how to find the experience, yet once you had found it something almost opposite could happen. Thousands of people who had travelled through this deliberately awkward communication network could arrive in a field, warehouse or some other unlikely corner of Britain and many of the conventional signals about who was important and where they should stand became far less significant. The exclusivity had been concentrated in finding the place rather than endlessly reproduced once you got there. Nobody needed to spend the rest of the night demonstrating that they knew the telephone number. They had arrived. There was no better field hidden behind another rope.

I find that contrast fascinating because we tend to talk about exclusivity as though it has a single effect. It doesn't. The rope outside a club can say that the people behind it have access that you do not. The telephone number circulating through rave culture could say something subtly different. You knew how to get here. Both restricted access, but one could reinforce hierarchy while the other helped create belonging. The physical act of excluding somebody tells us remarkably little about the human environment we are going to find once we cross the boundary.

Then we put the internet in everybody's pocket and changed the game again. During the rave years, part of belonging could depend upon knowing where something was happening and not telling everybody. Now part of the value of being somewhere can depend upon making absolutely certain everybody knows you were there. I find the reversal quite funny. We have gone from thousands of young people going to considerable lengths to conceal the location of the party to people going to considerable lengths to ensure the party has been correctly tagged before they leave it.

The badge has changed too. A laminate used to communicate status mainly to the people standing close enough to read it. A wristband lasted until somebody cut it off. Now the photograph can travel indefinitely and the audience witnessing your access can be much larger than the audience actually sharing the experience. I have watched a particularly interesting version of this in Dubai, where somebody can stay relatively cheaply, buy a day pass to a beach club that looks highly exclusive, order a drink and create an image of themselves occupying a world that might once have required considerable wealth or social access to enter. There is nothing false about it. They really are there. The pool is real, the drink is real and the photograph is real. The only thing missing from the frame is how accessible the apparent exclusivity might actually have been.

Researchers have started examining this shift too, looking at the way experiences themselves can function as status signals when they are made visible to other people. That feels like a natural evolution of what Fombelle and his colleagues were seeing around preferential treatment. Visibility has escaped the physical environment. The person outside the rope no longer needs to be standing outside the rope to see somebody else cross it. We can carry the rope around with us.

None of this means exclusivity doesn't work. It clearly does. If anything, we have become extraordinarily sophisticated at producing it. What interests me is what happens after somebody has lived on the other side of it for long enough, because familiarity does something peculiar to almost everything human beings once considered exceptional.

Artists are particularly useful people to watch because the machinery of separation around them can be so visible. There may be a private entrance, somewhere secure to wait and people whose job is to ensure that the wrong people do not get too close. Much of that is entirely sensible, particularly when somebody cannot move freely through a crowd without attracting attention. But after the practical requirements have been met, another layer often appears. People considered appropriate are introduced, hospitality becomes more elaborate and the environment fills with other people who are also deemed important enough to be there. Then, surprisingly often, the person everybody has gone to such trouble to isolate starts wandering off.

This was what Parallel Universe had shown me in miniature. The artists weren't rejecting comfort. They were choosing the room where life was still happening. The small damp green room contained interruptions, people doing jobs, people who hadn't been selected for their status and conversations that nobody had programmed. The comfortable area had been designed around them so successfully that it had removed some of the unpredictability that made being there interesting. I have seen famous people spend more time talking to a cleaner or somebody from catering than to the person who has been carefully brought backstage to meet them. The cleaner isn't trying to impress them. The catering person may have no idea who they are. For somebody accustomed to entering rooms where everyone already knows their importance, that can be a surprisingly unusual encounter.

It turns out that boredom with privilege is hardly a new observation. Maria Edgeworth published a novel called Ennui in 1809, centred on the Earl of Glenthorn, a man surrounded by the advantages of his position and still unable to find much pleasure in them. I rather like the fact that more than two centuries before we started selling VIP upgrades, an author had already found enough material in the boredom of privilege to build a novel around it. Later writers returned to similar territory, and modern literary scholarship has even used the term “aristocratic boredom” when examining the worlds represented by writers such as Evelyn Waugh and Elizabeth Bowen. The rooms change, the clothes change and eventually somebody adds a wristband, but human beings remain remarkably consistent.

Grayson Perry has played with the same territory from another angle. His Super Rich Interior Decoration looked at wealth while Perry himself was perfectly open about occupying some of the world he was examining. He described himself as being both inside and outside it, and importantly resisted the easy idea that wealthy people somehow stop being ordinary human beings simply because their circumstances change. That feels closer to what I have observed than simply treating exclusivity as a moral problem. People behind the rope still get bored. They still want to be surprised. They still enjoy talking to someone they weren't expecting to meet.

There is behavioural research that comes at this from a much more everyday direction. Gillian Sandstrom and Elizabeth Dunn studied what social psychology calls weak ties, the people around the edges of our normal social world rather than our closest friends and family, and found that these interactions can contribute to happiness and feelings of belonging. In another experiment, even a small social interaction with a barista produced more positive affect than making the exchange as efficient as possible. That research doesn't explain why an artist leaves a VIP area and starts talking to somebody clearing glasses, but it makes the behaviour much more interesting. We spend a great deal of effort designing environments around the people we think somebody ought to meet, when part of the value of gathering people together may come from allowing them to encounter somebody they didn't know they needed to meet.

This is where Nick Jones and Soho House become interesting to me. I was around the original Soho House in those early days and was given membership, so I watched something develop that used exclusivity very effectively without making exclusivity the whole point. Nick had a door not everybody could cross, but what mattered was the community he was putting behind it. Soho House's own history describes the original idea in much the same way. Nick had taken the floors above Cafe Boheme in Greek Street and wanted somewhere for the creative community around Soho to meet. The first House opened in 1995 with around 500 members, many coming from that local creative world.

There was something clever about that model because the rope wasn't simply protecting luxury. It was protecting a mixture of people. Membership could be given to somebody because they might make the environment more interesting rather than simply because they could afford the most expensive table, and the value of being inside came partly from not knowing exactly who you might encounter once you were there. Nick himself has described wanting people to go in, have fun and meet each other, which sounds almost ridiculously simple until you consider how many supposedly social environments are designed in ways that prevent exactly that from happening.

Years later Soho House asked me to think about how experiences might be programmed for high-net-worth individuals, and I remember being interested in the problem contained within the brief itself. This wasn't about how to spend enough money to impress wealthy people. That is the obvious answer and therefore probably the least interesting one. If somebody's normal life already includes the private entrance, beautiful hotel, excellent dinner and access most people would consider exceptional, reproducing those things more elaborately does not necessarily create a more interesting experience. You are designing for people who may already be familiar with many of the conventional ingredients of exclusivity.

That is a completely different design problem. The challenge becomes how to introduce something that hasn't already been selected, polished and made predictable. It may be why the person from catering becomes more interesting than another carefully chosen guest. It may be why a cramped dressing-room corridor can hold people's attention when the expensive hospitality room doesn't. It may also be part of what Nick got right in the original Soho House. The controlled door did not need to lead to an increasingly controlled social environment. The boundary could protect the possibility of unexpected encounters rather than remove them.

This is also where I think our conventional understanding of VIP design can become too simplistic. We tend to think about the rope operationally. Security needs to know who can cross it. Production needs to know which accreditation gets somebody backstage. Hospitality needs to know where different guests belong. Those are necessary questions, but they aren't the only things the rope is doing. Every time we decide who can enter a space, we alter who can meet whom. Every time we isolate one group to make their experience better, we change the experience of the people outside and the people inside. The rope is shaping behaviour long before anybody thinks of it as experience design.

Sometimes the effect is exactly what we intended. A restricted entrance can create anticipation. Being recognised at a door can make somebody feel that they belong. A private space can allow someone who has spent hours being watched to relax. A difficult route into an event can create a community among the people who managed to find it. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of that. My unfinished club worked precisely because the boundary was doing its job, and rave culture would have been very different if everybody had simply been given the address several weeks beforehand.

The problem begins when we assume that because the rope creates value at the entrance, more separation must create more value once people are inside. Parallel Universe taught me almost the reverse. I had improved the artists' environment on paper and made it worse in practice because I had removed some of the human mess that made the green room interesting. The little damp room was not restorative because it was damp or uncomfortable. It worked because people moved through it. Nobody quite knew who would appear next. The rope around the comfortable area had protected the artists so efficiently that it had protected them from the experience as well.

That is the part of the rope I now find most useful. It isn't really an object at all. It is a way of changing anticipation, permission, belonging and encounter. Move it and behaviour changes. Make it visible and behaviour changes again. Remove it at the right moment and two people who would normally inhabit completely different worlds can suddenly find themselves standing beside one another.

Some of the most valuable things I have seen happen at events began like that. They were not in the running order and nobody put them into the production schedule. People who would probably never meet in their ordinary lives happened to occupy the same small piece of space for long enough to speak. Sometimes nothing came from it, which is fine. Sometimes an idea moved somewhere unexpected, a friendship began or two people simply left having seen the world from a slightly different position. Occasionally something much larger came from a conversation nobody had intended to happen.

You cannot programme that.

You can create an environment where it has a chance to happen.

This is where the rope begins to connect with the wider idea I have been exploring through the Restoration Economy. We are very good at measuring the capacity of the building and increasingly good at measuring what an experience takes from the physical environment. I am interested in the capacity of the person standing inside it, and particularly in what condition we return that person to their life when the experience is over.

That doesn't mean every experience should be restful. Some of the most restorative experiences of my life have probably been physically exhausting. A rave can leave somebody with aching legs and more human capacity than they arrived with. A performance can demand enormous attention and continue giving something back decades later. An unexpected conversation can take twenty minutes and alter a relationship, an idea or simply the way somebody remembers an evening. Restoration is not the absence of energy being spent. It is what remains after the energy has been spent.

Memory matters here because anticipation and surprise are extraordinarily good at surviving after the infrastructure has disappeared. Nobody keeps the hospitality furniture from an event in their memory with the same intensity as the moment somebody unexpectedly opened a door, the journey to find a party nobody would tell them the location of, or the conversation with a person they had no reason to expect would be there. We often spend enormous amounts on the physical environment while some of the things that remain longest cost almost nothing. They depend on understanding people.

Perhaps this is why, after all these years, the little rope still interests me. I have used it to make people want to enter a club that wasn't finished. I have watched information perform the same function across an entire youth culture. I have watched artists ignore the comfortable place created especially for them and squeeze into the bad room because the people were better. I have watched exclusivity become something people photograph and transmit to an audience that isn't even present, and I have watched people who have spent much of their lives receiving privileged access become far more interested in somebody who has no status to offer them.

None of that makes the rope good or bad. It makes it powerful.

So think back to the badge at the beginning. Remember wanting it and remember how it felt when somebody looked at it and opened the door. Perhaps remember how it felt when they didn't. And, if you have spent enough time wearing one, perhaps remember the occasion when you finally discovered that what was happening on the other side wasn't actually as interesting as you had imagined.

That entire journey is part of experience design.

Can we use the rope deliberately, not simply to manage access, but to restore human capacity, deepen belonging and create memories that remain long after the badge has been thrown away?

Absolutely.

But only if we understand the human behaviour on both sides of it.

References

Paul W. Fombelle, Nancy J. Sirianni, Noah J. Goldstein and Robert B. Cialdini, Let Them All Eat Cake: Providing VIP Services Without the Cost of Exclusion for Non-VIP Customers, Journal of Business Research, 2015.

Gillian M. Sandstrom and Elizabeth W. Dunn, Social Interactions and Well-Being: The Surprising Power of Weak Ties, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2014.

Gillian M. Sandstrom and Elizabeth W. Dunn, Is Efficiency Overrated? Minimal Social Interactions Lead to Belonging and Positive Affect, Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2014.

Maria Edgeworth, Ennui, 1809.

Grayson Perry, Super Rich Interior Decoration, discussed in British Vogue, 2019.

Soho House, The Secret History of Soho House 40 Greek Street.