The Environment We Don't Notice
Too often design begins with the budget, the brief, the artist or the commercial objective before anyone has walked in the shoes of the people the experience exists for.
I've never found that a comfortable place to begin.
Walking the journey has always mattered more than drawing it because long before anything is built, the experience already exists in the mind of the person arriving for the first time. They arrive carrying expectations that have nothing to do with the plans spread across a designer's desk.
The same gathering can leave one person inspired and another unchanged even though the programme hasn't altered and the people haven't altered.
The environment has.
That instinct was there long before I worked in events. Producing raves in the late eighties gave it somewhere to grow. It wasn't about creating the loudest moment but understanding what should happen around it. Moving from high stimulation into somewhere quieter changes the experience and sometimes the conversation that follows matters more than the moment everyone came to see.
At the time it was instinct. Over the years it became part of how I worked. The observation never belonged to events. Events simply made it visible.
We've all lived within an economic environment.
It influences our behaviour so quietly that most of the time we don't notice it. Perhaps that's inevitable when we spend our whole lives inside something.
The Environmental Sports Initiative in 2006 was one place where this instinct found a purpose. Years later the Event Greening Program was another. Both came from wanting to create conditions where reducing environmental impact became part of how an event worked rather than something sitting alongside it.
We've all lived within the economic environment and, as far as I can see, we will continue to do so. It has created extraordinary opportunities and allowed us to achieve things previous generations could never have imagined. I don't see a reason to abandon it.
What interests me is what we choose to recognise as having value within it.
If increasing the Earth's capacity to sustain life had real economic value, what might become possible?
I don't know the answer yet. I only know I've been following the same observation for most of my life, and perhaps the knowledge gained along the way can now be put to some good.