Interaction design for love, a thread. I'm gonna get a bit concrete so you might not want to miss this one.

The idea that interaction designers create flow states by carefully increasing challenge, tension, shock, fear, or aggression over time is incomplete and sadly emerged from systemic unexamined misogyny in science and design.

At TRU LUV we proved that we can also create flow states by carefully deepening love, connection, care, creativity, insight, purpose.

The commonly understood challenge flow state is related to the fight-or-flight response and our new love flow states are related to the tend-and-befriend response.

The fight-or-flight response may lead to narrowed perception, exaggerated perceptions of threat, feelings of fear or anger, and behaviours of self-interest, self-sabotage and domination of other people.

The tend-and-befriend response may lead to enhanced perception, feelings of calm, connection (to self and others), fearlessness, and transcendence, and solution-oriented, justice-oriented and pro-social behaviours.

While fighty feelings generally need a sense of danger or pressure, love feelings can occur in response to challenge or in response to love.

So it's not only flow states that we can do differently--we can do narrative structure and several other concepts differently too. But that's another chapter.

Although our stress responses are generally instinctual and immediate in the moment (depending on how much meditation, shamanism, or other related activities you do that give you more pause and control), we can train our stress responses over time based on mindset and practice.

The tend-and-befriend response transmutes fear into love. The tend-and-befriend response is also correlated with reduced PTSD and increased post-traumatic growth. I would consider the tend-and-befriend response to be antifragile.

Advertising generally plays on our basic fears. We have seen the rise of ASMR (love) advertising on Instagram. But the vibe on Instagram is changing now that Facebook is paying more attention to it. Pros and cons there.

Propaganda and subversion also plays on our basic fears, especially individually targeted propaganda. Cultivating our tend-and-befriend responses may be considered an inoculation against being manipulated.

When video games and gamified apps and social media have used flow states connected to our fight-or-flight responses to create engagement, have been been training ourselves to respond to each other more reactively and less compassionately?

If we have shifted our psychologies at scale in that way, what good and what bad has come out of it in our societies?

What happens when we create experiences that are built on deepening compassion?

Internally in TRU LUV we've identified 150 alternatives to gamification curves of rising challenge. You can see one of them in #SelfCare in the massager ritual.

The massager is a repeated interaction that changes over time. This is sort of like how puzzle games repeat similar themes but get harder with each iteration. In our massager, instead of getting harder, the interaction gets smoother. This is a curve from awkward-to-smooth.

The interaction happens to get easier over time, not harder, but that's more of a side effect and not the part that really helps create refuge and build resilience. It's that the experience is a metaphor for connection.

Our model goes much, much deeper than flow states. I'll share more over the coming months or so. If you want to experiment in the meantime, I encourage you think about experiences of falling in love in your life and what they feel like.