Create Memorable Home Experiences: Interior Design for Moments That Matter | Ana Marcu | Skillshare
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Create Memorable Home Experiences: Interior Design for Moments That Matter

teacher avatar Ana Marcu, Home Wellbeing, Licensed architect

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      3:13

    • 2.

      Experience Design

      3:58

    • 3.

      The Current State

      2:36

    • 4.

      What Matters to You

      3:40

    • 5.

      Prioritise What Matters

      3:00

    • 6.

      Identify the Moments

      4:08

    • 7.

      Assess the Challenge

      9:16

    • 8.

      Question the Challenge

      2:59

    • 9.

      Class Project

      1:14

    • 10.

      Final Thoughts

      1:42

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Project

About This Class

Embark on a purposeful journey towards redesigning your home, centred around those significant moments that make your life and your family's life truly meaningful. Utilizing an attached workbook and your home's floor plan, this class provides an introspective exercise to help you identify, conceptualize, and actualize your home design vision.

This class is a reflection exercise with the help of the attached workbook and your home floor plan. 

In this class you will learn: 

In this class, you will gain insights into:

  • The application of experience design in the realm of home interior design: Experience design is a holistic approach that considers the user's journey, not just the final product. In the context of interior design, it involves creating a sensory, emotional, and aesthetic experience that meets your needs and reflects your personality.

  • Identifying the existing strengths and shortcomings of your home: Before you begin your redesign, it's vital to identify what currently works well in your home and what doesn't. Perhaps some rooms serve their function perfectly, but others feel cramped or uninviting. This step allows you to maintain the elements that already fulfil your needs while improving areas that fall short, ensuring that the end result is a home that's more comfortable, functional, and truly yours.

  • Identifying the values and needs that resonate with your home environment: Your home should reflect your values and lifestyle. Are you an advocate for sustainability? Do you cherish family time or quiet moments of solitude? By identifying what's important to you, you can incorporate elements that reflect those values, such as using eco-friendly materials or creating a cosy reading nook.

  • Recognizing the moments that are significant to you: In the hustle and bustle of everyday life, we often forget the importance of the simple moments that bring us joy. Whether it's a family meal, a morning coffee ritual, or an evening of relaxation, acknowledging these moments can guide the design process. It ensures that your redesigned space supports and enhances these activities, making each moment even more special.

  • Assessing the challenges that would require us to implement the moment: Implementing changes to create spaces that celebrate your significant moments can come with challenges. This could involve spatial constraints, budgetary limits, or a lack of certain design elements in the market. I'll guide you in foreseeing these potential hurdles and strategizing to overcome them. This could mean maximizing the use of a small space, balancing between splurging and saving, or customizing design elements. It's all about finding solutions that don't compromise your vision but rather bring it to fruition within your specific circumstances. This understanding helps ensure a smoother, more successful redesign process and a result that truly encapsulates your cherished moments.

  • Questioning the Challenges: Confronting challenges can often lead to more refined, creative solutions. By asking yourself what emotions you want to evoke during your treasured moments, you can guide your design choices more effectively. For instance, if you desire a sense of peace during your morning coffee ritual, consider what design elements foster tranquillity for you. Is it natural light, a certain colour, or perhaps a specific view? Additionally, consider how to create these feelings with minimal effort. Could rearranging furniture, adding mirrors to enhance light, or simplifying decor achieve the desired effect? This process of introspective questioning can help you navigate challenges in a way that makes your design process more efficient and your results more personally fulfilling.

Learning outcomes:

  1. Understand the experience design principles and apply them to create holistic, personalized home interiors.

  2. Identify the current strengths and areas for improvement in your home to form a solid foundation for your redesign project.

  3. Clarify the values and needs that are significant to you, allowing these insights to guide your design decisions.

  4. Recognize and define the moments that hold personal significance, translating these into tangible design concepts.

  5. Design home spaces that reinforce and celebrate your cherished moments, enhancing daily experiences.

  6. Effectively question and navigate design challenges to create fulfilling, functional spaces with less effort.

Class requirements and prerequisites: 

There are no stringent prerequisites for taking this course. However, the following might be beneficial:

  1. Interest in interior design: While no prior experience is necessary, a general interest in the field of interior design will make the course more engaging and enjoyable for learners.

  2. An open mind: Be ready to explore new ideas and embrace creative and unconventional solutions.

  3. Basic understanding of your living space: Being familiar with your home’s layout, room dimensions, and existing decor can help you participate more effectively in exercises and discussions.

  4. Photos or floor plans: If available, pictures or floor plans of your home could be helpful tools during the course. However, they're not essential as we also emphasize conceptual thinking.

  5. A writing medium: A notebook or digital device for taking notes, jotting down ideas, and filling in the worksheet will be useful.

Who is this class for?

Anyone who is thinking about starting a home design project or a redesign project. Often redesign projects happen when there is a major life event or a big change in the family structure, like kids leaving for college, or maybe the items around us feel old and lacklustre, and we feel the need for a change. 

This class will teach you how not to get side-tracked by pretty things but select items that will support the kind of moments that you want to create together with the people you love in your home. 

This course is intended for anyone who is eager to transform their living space in a way that reflects their unique lifestyle and cherished moments. It's perfect for those planning to embark on a home design or redesign project and wish to do so with a thoughtful, personalized approach.

It's also an excellent fit for those interested in interior design as a hobby or potential career path. You'll gain a deeper understanding of how to apply the principles of experience design within the realm of interior decor, which can enhance both personal projects and professional pursuits.

In short, if you're passionate about creating a home environment that not only looks aesthetically pleasing but also nurtures your significant moments and experiences, this course will be a valuable journey.

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Download the Class Worksheet here! 

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Love the class project? Want some more fun quizzes and reflection exercises?  Try the free "Home Happiness Worksheets Bundle". 

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Follow up on some of the photos of the class.

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Who am I?

I’m a licensed architect with over a decade of experience in Vienna, Austria. I have a double degree in Architecture and "Building Science and Technology" and I am deeply passionate about design psychology and optimising interior design to create great emotional experiences for people. I aim to design spaces that make people FEEL loved, happier, healthier, and more creative.

In my classes, you will find tips and strategies that will help you design a great home. You will learn how certain design decisions can influence your emotions and behaviour and what you can do to create a home that will make you feel happier and supported in your goals.

You can also check out my class How to Think Like an Architect

Resources.  

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Links to related classes

A Hygge Home: Danish Interior Design Principles for Cosiness and Comfort. 

Bedroom Design for Better Sleep 

Minimalist vs. Maximalist Interior Design: Find the Perfect Blend for You

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Meet Your Teacher

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Ana Marcu

Home Wellbeing, Licensed architect

Top Teacher

About me:

I'm a licensed architect and have over a decade of experience in the design and architecture industry. I have worked as an in-house architect on various projects with a strong focus on furniture, interior design and experience design. I have a double degree in Architecture and "Building Science and Technology", and I am deeply passionate about design that generates great emotional experiences for people. I've recently started my little design studio, and I'm excited to teach you everything I've learned to help you create a great home for yourself.

Transform your surroundings, transform your life!

Your home environment profoundly impacts your mood, thoughts, behaviour, performance, and overall well-being.

Learn how to design a livi... See full profile

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Transcripts

1. Introduction: When you look through your happiest memories about the home you grew up in, what comes naturally to mind? [MUSIC] I think that what you might remember are moments of intense happiness, surprise, or joy, it might be quiet moments of reflection and creativity, or they might be moments of deep connection with members of your family and other people. What we end up carrying in our hearts are not the items in our homes but the special moments that were created among those items. Therefore, at the beginning of any interior design project you want to reflect on what moments you want to create in your home. Once you are clear about them they become the North Star of your project. Every decision you take from there on has to be in service of those moments. You don't just buy a table but you buy a large table because the moments when your entire family has dinners together matter to you, or an extensible table because your occasional moments when your friends visit matter to you. The items we choose to surround ourselves with should be carefully selected to support and influence the creation of these specific moments we want to have more of in our life and they should not be left to chance. Hi, my name is Ana Marcu and I'm a licensed architect living in the beautiful city of Vienna, Austria. I have a double degree in Architecture and Building Science and Technology and have worked over a decade as an in-house architect on a wide variety of projects like private homes, office spaces, and hotels. Throughout my career the one area that I have been most passionate about has been interior design because it is the one layer of the building that has the power to move us on an emotional level and when done right can inspire us to be the best version of ourselves. In my role as a teacher, I want to take all this knowledge and help you design a home that will inspire you to be happier, healthier, and more creative. This class is a reflection exercise for you to identify the moments that matter at home for you. Normally, this is an exercise worth doing before you move into a place. But for the purpose of this class, I have adapted it a little bit for people who are already settled in and want to identify what areas of their home and lifestyle need refreshing and restructuring in order to create more memorable moments in their life. In order to complete this class you will need the floor plan of your home or at least the rough sketch of the floor plan and the workbook attaching the class projects and resources section. In most of my other classes you have received a workbook as an added bonus for you to reflect on what was being said in the class. Within this case the workbook is the class. Step-by-step, I will walk you through a number of reflection exercises on your lifestyle in home environment that will help guide you identify and create the important moments at home that matter to you. If you like this class I believe you will enjoy two more of my other classes. One is Interior Design for Better Habits and the other one is called A Calm Home. I hope that by now you are excited to take this class. Are you ready? Let's start the class. 2. Experience Design: Welcome to the first lesson. Before we get into the first exercise, I would like to explain the importance of experience design for the interior design process. Now you may have heard about the experience design in the context of web design or application design. When designing the interactions that people have for this specific piece of technology, the designer will look at how people naturally interact with a bit of software and develop that software to support this natural way to interact with that piece of technology. The more the piece of technology responds to this natural way of interacting, the more that piece of technology is loved and accepted by people. When the user finds what they need with ease and can achieve their goals quickly because such a piece of technology user-friendly, the interaction is pleasant and positive. Spaces too, can be user-friendly or user unfriendly. We all have gotten lost in a massive grocery store because there is no natural light coming from anywhere, and all the aisles look precisely the same. Or have felt terribly uncomfortable in hotels with endless narrow corridors in rows of doors looking exactly the same. If not for the numbers on the doors, we would feel completely lost. Many spaces have been created with little thought to the user's overall experience in mind, and we can tell that by how we are left feeling when we leave them. The more signage, numbers, and arrows a building needs, the less thinking was applied to the user's experience in those spaces. But there are also a lot of spaces where the user experience has been thought out in great detail. The craft beautiful experiences for customers or employees. What that means is that a whole roadmap of a person inside a space is mapped out, and based on that roadmap, the interior design is created to support the experience. For example, in the case of a shopping experience, a designer might be thinking about where the customers attention might go naturally in order to decide where to place products. They might think of the specific height where to place those products, so they will be grabbed with ease. They might think about designing the dressing rooms to make the customer feel more comfortable. They might think about where to place the cash register so that the customer is able to see it from far away places and what items would be best located around that cash register so that the customer would purchase more items on their way out. The design of the experience of a customer in a shop can make the customer feel the desire to come back or you can make them feel like they never want to come back. If it's an office space, a designer might be thinking about the types of work that the employees do and which types of rooms would best support them to do that kind of work. For example, they might design focused spaces for individual work and different size meeting rooms for working with other people. They might be thinking of ways to make chance encounters happen more often to support the exchange of ideas and how to give employees the ability to customize their work environment for their specific needs. The design of the space around us, while it's not a magic one and cannot make us do anything in particular that we do not want to do. It can influence us to display more or less of a certain kind of behavior. More and more thinking is invested in designing spaces that support a particular type of desired experience. Why do we leave our home experience to chance? Why should we design a space that makes us sit all the time if our desire is to become more active? pore a space that encourages us to watch TV when we want to spend more time learning to cook. Knowing what experiences we want to live at home matters because we can structure the interior design, support those experiences, and creating environments that ensure that they happen. In the following lessons, I want to walk you through a series of exercises. They'll help you identify these moments for you and give you a roadmap on how to implement them. [MUSIC] 3. The Current State : Now that you understand what experience design is, let's start crafting the experiences we have in our home. Like any planning process, you first need to assess where you are before you start making changes. What is it that you are working with? For this first exercise, make sure you have your home floor plan or a rough sketch of that floor plan, and you have downloaded the workbook from the class project and resources section. Let's open it to the first page. For this first lesson, I would like you to do an inventory of your feelings when walking around your home. Try to identify how you feel in every space of your home, and then use color to color over your plan. Use a light and bright color for positive feelings, and a dark color for negative to neutral feelings. Try to finish this sentence. This space makes me feel positive because, or this space makes me feel negative because. By now you might be wondering, why I'm I asking you to do this? What is the point of this exercise? Well, the point of this exercise is to identify those spaces that either have the potential to be improved or possibly changed to allow for the right moments to take place. If you are happy you about a space, it means that it fulfills some job in your life. It support you to become the best version of yourself. Even if the sole purpose of this space is that it's pretty, it still serves the purpose of lifting your spirits when you are there and therefore, it is essential for you. On the following two pages, you have the opportunity to take a few notes about how these spaces make you feel, and clarify the reasoning behind them. Why do you think you feel that way? What is happening in that space that makes you happy or irritates you? I'm just going to give you some examples to spark your imagination. For example, let's say that you like your living room because it has big windows, and a lot of natural light coming in, or you might say that you like your living room because of the natural wood floors which you love to walk barefoot on, or maybe you say you like your bathroom because you enjoy frequent baths. You might say that what you don't like is your tiny wardrobe that is about to burst from the series of clothes or the entry way because it is dark and disorganized. Write down everything that you feel and try to clarify what about it makes you happy or sad. When you are done writing down how the spaces of your home make you feel, we will move to the next lesson. Go a layer deeper and look at the underlying needs and values that might be revealed by how spaces make you feel. [MUSIC] 4. What Matters to You: Welcome back. In this lesson, I'd like to help you go a little deeper in understanding why specific spaces make you feel positive or negative, in order to identify what matters to you on a deeper level. Look at the colors on your floor plan from the previous lesson and reflect a little bit on your daily activities, then try to answer these questions. Why is it that those spaces make you feel that way? What is the underlying need or value that is being reflected here? What do you care about? Let's look at what we have written down so far. You might have said that you love your living room because the oversize windows allow for a lot of natural light to come through. But what might lie beneath that statement? You might see that you love the natural light because bad weather and dark spaces make you feel sad and the bright light in the living room always puts you in a positive mood. Therefore, the living room ambiance plays a positive role in your mental health. So your mental well-being is essential to you. Or you might say that you love the big windows because you still have so much light in the evening when you come home and you get to play with your kids for a few hours. The reason behind your love for big windows is your connection to your family. So the family connection is important to you. Or you might say that you like your living room big windows because you love seeing your guest jaw drop when they come in. In that case, what you value is your social standing and how you look in front of others. You see, we might say we like the same things, but the reasoning behind it can be very different. It points towards very different values and needs. This is why it is essential to dig a little deeper as to why we love or hate certain things. Let's look at more examples. You might say you like your living room because of the natural wood floors which you love to walk barefoot on. This points to the fact that physical well-being, specifically tactile sensations, matter to you. If you say you like your bathroom because you enjoy frequent baths, then my assumption about you being someone who cares a lot about their physical well-being and enjoys tactile stimulation, can be further reinforced later in the design process. You might find and implement more moments conducive to physical well-being or introduce pleasant textures to the touch through the home. Now let's look at the spaces you don't like so much. You might say that what you don't like is your tiny wardrobe. It is about to burst at the seams with your clothes. That might just point to the fact that fashion and style matters to you. Having a quiet moment of self-care in the morning where you don't have to go frantically through the wardrobe to find your things and leave the house feeling really good about yourself, matters you. Maybe you said that the entryway makes you sad because it is dark and disorganized. Why might that be? Maybe making a positive first impression on your guests matters to you, which shows that you care about your social standing. Or perhaps feeling excited to be at home is a moment that matters to you, which says that you want to feel more joyful at home. Or maybe the reason you don't like it is that your kids can't find their things and there is a jam at the door for 20 minutes in the morning, and you want your kids to feel better supported. So the connection with your family matters to you. I hope you understand by now what I mean with finding the underlying values and needs that generate feeling positive or negative in a space. Now that you took a mental tour through your home and have an idea about what needs and values are important to you, let's try to prioritize and evaluate them. [MUSIC] 5. Prioritise What Matters: In this lesson, I would like to help you identify what areas of your life matter to you the most, in order to clarify what moments would likely matter to you at home. In the last few lessons you've already figured out for yourself how some spaces make you feel and the values and needs those feelings might be pointing to. With these values and needs in mind, I'd like you to figure out for yourself two things. One is what areas of your lifestyle matter to you the most? Two is, which ones do you feel are not well covered at home? Let's look at our results from the previous lesson. From the list I have gathered, I can see that physical well being is located on both the list of positive and negative feelings. Therefore, I can conclude that this topic really matters. I can also see that family and mental health also matter. Use this list to make informed decisions when picking the areas of your home lifestyle. For this exercise, I've selected five areas for you under which many home activities can be gathered. Like cooking and eating together or alone, mental and physical well-being, hobbies and activities, intellectual and professional development, and others, for example, spiritual development. These are not perfect groups. I have placed the category others, for things that you can't precisely pinpoint in any one area or one specific activity. Topics like order and social standing can be gathered here. They can be why specific spaces make you happy or sad, but they don't belong to any group of activities. They might just be one of moments or moments that matters solely to you. Place the numbers 1-5 next to each of them in the order of their importance. Where would you say is the most critical area of your lifestyle? What is the least important area? On the second round, place a plus next to the areas that are well covered, and a minus next to the areas that aren't well covered. By well covered, I mean that they are activities and moments around this area that happen regularly. There is a dedicated space for these kind of activities. For example, if you say that cooking and eating together is well covered for you, it means that you have a ritual of sitting down together with your family and eating, or your host frequent dinners for your friends. Or you make sure you take time from your day to spend time cooking because it gives you great pleasure. There is enough time during the week and space dedicated to this area of your life. The point of this exercise is to resurface those areas that truly matter to you, but don't get as much attention and then lead you through a process in which you can find activities and the necessary space for them. Once we identify these sensitive areas, it's time to go deeper into this topic and really pinpoint moments under this area that genuinely matter to you, but don't happen nearly as often as they should. [MUSIC] 6. Identify the Moments : In this lesson, I would like to help you identify which home activities are lacking from your life. It would mean a great deal to you if they happened. Before we get into that, I like to talk a little bit about the timeframe of a moment. Depending on the stage of life in which you are in the family constellation that you live in, we will simply be different moments that matter to you. If you are a single, they'll be maybe dinners with friends or long past that will matter to you. If you live with a partner, then I suspect partner activities at home might be a priority. If you have kids, then activities with your kids will matter to you. Or maybe the few moments you can be alone will matter to you. If you are very young, you'll be inclined towards hand moments. If you are old, activities that will require less energy might take front stage. You see throughout the span of our life, the focus on the moments that matter to us shifts. What matters to you right now might not be important at a later date. Take into account the period of about five years when reflecting on making changes to your home and home decor, to support a specific moment. If you think something will always be important to you, like making dinners for family and friends then taking down the wall between the kitchen and the living room makes sense. If a game night with your friends is only going to be important to you for a very short period of time because you plan to have a family in a year or two, you might not want to decorate your living room like a casino just yet. If, however, your kids have moved to college in by all means go all in into your casino decor. Reflect a bit on the lifespan of a moment when it comes to designing your home around it. Some moments require more permanent changes, others can be supported by more temporary decor. Now let's go back to our exercise. In lesson 3, you identified some areas of your life that matter to you. The monthly top three most important areas you find the one or two that are in fact not well covered at home. There should be a minus next to them. Pick one of those areas and write it down on the dotted line. In order to narrow down the scope of this exercise, please select 1-3 moments connected to the area of your choosing. I think we will help you focus better if we narrow down the range of moments until you get how this exercise works. You can of course, come back to the exercise again and pick moments from other areas as well. If we look at the third exercise, the area of hobbies and activities is our most important area. In fact it has a minus next to it. We are going to write hobbies and activities on the dotted line. To help you jog your memory, I have written down a couple of examples of moments that matter under each area. Have a look and see what you can pick for the area you chose. For hobbies and activities. I'm going to choose family movie night, board games and craft projects made with love. I would like to thank my two students, Lyndsay Cavanagh and Marina Garzon Soto , for these suggestions. I'm going to focus on these activities for the following lessons of this class. If you want to have your question answered in one of my following classes, make sure you pay attention to the messages I send to all my followers regarding my upcoming classes or just drop me a message with a question and you might just see your question answered in one of my classes. Make sure to also personalize your moments. If you wanted to create those moments with other people, write which people? If it's a game, which type? Is the board game or a card game, a mind game? I'm just kidding. You'll have to be a little more specific. If it's a creative hobby like crafting, you might want to say which one, what tools, what materials, are we taking paper or textile here? How often should we take place. If it's family movie night? Which family members, how many people, what movies, how often should it take place? Try to add details to the moments you want because they will be useful in the next exercise. Do not leave them generic. Now that we know what moments matter to us the most but are lacking from our life, it's time to get dirty and really figure out ways to implement them. [MUSIC] 7. Assess the Challenge: In the previous lesson, we created the list with the moments that matter to us. Now let's get a little deeper into figuring out step-by-step, what is it that we might have to do to make sure that these moments actually take place. When trying to implement any moment in our home, we will run into three types of challenges. Number 1, coordinating with other people. This is especially important regarding activities with other people like family dinners, hosting parties, family movie nights, you name it. When we want a moment to take place that is reliant on the participation of other people and having their buy-in is highly important. You might have to send invitations. You might have to negotiate the time with your teenage kids. You need to figure out what the needs of the other people might be regarding making this moment happen. Number 2, planning and organizing. Creating a special moment might require some degree of organizing. If you want to cook with your friends, you might have to do a shopping list of ingredients and make sure you have everything before your guests arrive. Maybe you have to organize other areas of your life to make sure that some time is left for this moment. Some moments can be more spontaneous and others require a little bit more planning. Number 3, spatial challenges. Some moments require their special place in the home, which often might come with some amount of renovating or redecorating, which is a challenge. You might have to adapt a corner of your living room to make it more flexible or renovate a bathroom so you can have a truly spa moment at home. These two are challenges. For this exercise, I'd like you to write down all the challenges you see that might hold you back. While I'm going to let you write down the possible challenges regarding organizing and coordinating with other people, I'm going to go into some examples regarding the spatial setup that will most likely help you create this moment. Let's have a look at the three moments that we picked. I'm going to go for Lindsey's moment first, family movie night. I'm going to give you a second to write down the coordinating and planning challenges. Now, I believe the best way to make a family movie night special is to change the setup a little bit to make it look and feel like a cinema. The setup doesn't have to be expensive or elaborate, and you can use a lot of the things that you already have at home. Some things you might be able to rent or borrow, or possibly buy in a secondhand shop. The more special, surprising, or unexpected you can make this environment, the more likely it is going to create a lasting, beautiful memory in the minds of your kids, friends, and family. Let's assume that the place where you want to set up this family movie night is your living room. The first step to changing your living room into a cinema is to change the angle from which you typically see the living room. Instead of having everyone sit on the couch where you typically sit, why not sit on the floor? Looking at your living room from the floor angle is going to make the space look a little unfamiliar. Place blankets and pillows and a couple of poufs that you might have in your living room, and make a cozy floor setup for the kids. I suspect that some grownups are going to resist this idea and will complain about joint pains, so you can give them the couch or the chairs nearby, but the kids are going to love the floor. Secondly, nothing says cinema more like having the movie projected on a big surface. Again, if you can, don't use what you normally would, like your TV, have the movie projected on a wall, or a bedsheet, or even a projector screen if you have one. Projectors have come a long way and are widely used. You might also be able to borrow them from a friend or a neighbor if the moment is a one-off thing. But projecting the movie rather than showing it on a screen is going to make the home cinema fantasy more believable. Finally, adding a few fairy lights is going to complete the fantasy of the home cinema, making the entire space look more cozy. You might take them from your Christmas decoration box. Just hang them in places where they're normally not seen; around the projection area or over the seating area. To complete this night-believe cinema, you might want to print tickets and tell everyone they should bring their ticket to the movie night. You might make some popcorn for your guests. Any way you can add to the cinema fantasy is going to make that moment extra special and fun for its participants. If you want a family movie night to happen more regularly, make sure that all the props, blankets, and pillows are on hand so that you don't need that much time to create this cozy setup. The harder it is to create the evening, the more resistance you will find in recreating it again. The next two moments are picked by Martha, and I would like to discuss the board game night first. Just like the previous moment, you will have some challenges regarding planning, coordinating, and organizing. I'm going to give you a moment to write those down. What I want to talk about is how you might set up your space to make sure that the board game night happens more often and it's a wonderful experience for your family and guest. One idea you need to remember regarding turning a moment into a habit is that the more friction it is between you and that activity, the less likely it is to happen. If you want to play a board game in the living room but the games are in the attic, it's a very slim chance that this activity is going to happen. Or you want to play with your friends but coordinating the time is always a nightmare, then again, making this moment happen more regularly is going to be difficult. To make the game night happen, you have to make the games visible in the room and easily accessible. There should be no friction in starting a game on the spot. Now, I like a tidy room, and I like even more when all the game boxes can be stacked away behind doors, but I suspect that doing this is not going to be conducive to more but less play. Playing is often a spontaneous act, but if we don't have the cue in front of our eyes, other things might take away our attention. If you want to make board game night a regular habit, make some games visible in the room. Allow yourself to be reminded. Here are some examples where the games are stacked together on the shelves and create a colorful pattern. The next step in making your board game night more likely to happen is to make the whole vibe of the room a bit more playful. If you have enough space in your home, you can create a game room dedicating to playing. If however, that is not the case, and the place where you play games is also your living room, you can infuse your living room with more elements of the core that speak of play without changing the function of the rooms so drastically. For example, the game boards make for a wonderful pattern, which you can hang on the wall, where you can use morphic lamps to signal that a lot of mischief is happening in this room. You might pick bright pastel colors and neon lights to change the vibe of the room into a more playful one or you might use colorful puffs to create more seating for your guests and give your room the overall joyful aesthetic that it needs, that way, when you do get to a phase in your life where board games don't matter anymore, you don't have to change the look and function of your living room so drastically. But making the overall vibe of a space speak of play is going to encourage everyone to show more of their quirky and playful side. Let's have a look at our final moment, which is crafty projects made with love. Now, the question is, are these crafty projects a one-off thing that your kids have a crafty project at school once a month, or is it more the case that arts and crafts is a big part of your life and it's something that you practice often and you want your kids to be a part of that? If it's the second, then we're not going to talk about light the core elements, but finding the proper space in your home that you can dedicate to this activity. A place where you can be creative and messy and will not affect the rest of the flow of your home. A place where you can lay out your tools and leave your unfinished projects so you can come back to them. This is where the first exercise of our workbook comes in hand. Look at the spaces that make you less happy. Could you be able to transform one of them into your craft room? Would you create a clef in a wall niche or a small sewing space in a closet? Could you use this space in the attic or the basement? Could you use half of the living room or half of the bedroom? The more frequent you want to make a moment, the bigger the pressure to create a dedicated space for it. Really question how the spaces you currently have in your home are being used and don't be afraid to completely change the function of some of them in order to make space for something more important. Don't be afraid to turn your entire living room into an arts and crafts studio if you have to. The spaces that we have at our disposal are there to serve the kind of life that we want to have, not the other way round. Don't worry too much about it, you can change it back into a living room at a later date. Now that we have a list of challenges for each of the moments, I want you to move to the next lesson where we will question how easy or hard to implement these moments truly is. [MUSIC] 8. Question the Challenge: In the previous lesson, you made the list of challenges for each of the moments you wanted to realize. In this lesson, I want you to question the challenges that you think you have. Now I'm not saying that the challenges you listed are not real. But if you really think about it, the reason why we wanted to have certain moments is because we want to feel a certain way at home. We want to cook and eat together, not just to nourish ourselves with to share a deep moment of connection with our family and our friends. We don't necessarily want to take a long path. We want to feel relaxed and less stressed out. We don't want to spend 10 hours in bed, but a long sleep is the only way we might be able to feel truly restored and regenerated. It's not the activities that we want, but how does activities make us feel? With this realization in mind, you are able to question how difficult it truly is to achieve the feeling that you are looking for. The first question you might want to ask is, is this moment that I want to have, the only way I can achieve this feeling. If taking a bath makes you feel restored and installing a bathtub in the bathroom is a big ordeal. Maybe questioning how else you could derive with that feeling might be less expensive. Maybe a quiet moment in the morning helps you feel restored, or maybe meditating in the evening helps you feel that way. Whatever it is for you, you want to question the moments that help you arrive at that feeling. Another question you might want to ask is, how do I make the implementation of this moment less difficult? Let's presume for a moment that you think that hosting a dinner for your friends is this massive ordeal where you have to plan a three-course meal and sweat in the kitchen for an entire day. While you love seeing your friends gathered together from time to time, the idea of planning and making an elaborate dinner really makes you procrastinate, and that moment doesn't happen as often as it should. What you might want to start questioning here is, does it have to be so elaborate? Do my friends also have these expectations, or would they be happy to be there with me wherever it is on the table? Truly question what you are really after when you want to throw an elaborate dinner. Because having a connection with others, especially with good friends, has a very low bar of entry. To make things easier on you, you might share the organization's responsibilities with your friend, or you invite them to bring some food or some affordable seeds. If you think your place is too small and you are waiting to move into a bigger place to host a dinner party. Think again. People loved gram spaces because the lack of space gives them an excuse to be closer to other people and interact with them. The recap, we wanted to experience certain moments because they are the vehicle to a certain feeling. But that feeling can be achieved in many different ways. Not all of them have to be elaborate or challenging, so Find ways to get there that are achievable for you. [MUSIC] 9. Class Project: I hope that by now you look at your moments a little differently by breaking them down and challenging their difficulty, they look less menacing and more manageable. Still, if you selected more than one moment for implementation, in this lesson, I would like to help you pick one moment. Start by writing down each moment that you picked on post-it notes and place them from left to right in the order of their perceived difficulty, starting with the easiest moment to implement and ending with the most difficult one. Select the one moment that is located on the far left side. This should be the moment that is the easiest to implement. I want you to take this moment and make it happen in your home. Look at the challenges you listed out in Lesson 6 and go through them in your mind. In what time frame do you think you can make this moment happen? What are the most challenging parts? Do you need to renovate, shop for items, fix or repair things? Break the challenges that you wrote down in Lesson 6 even more. Share the one moment you selected and it's adjacent to do list with the class. Also, if you have any photos from this special moment, it will be great if you could share them as well. [MUSIC] 10. Final Thoughts: Congratulations, [NOISE] you have made it to the end of the class. I hope you learned some new things and already feel inspired to apply them. If you wish to expand your knowledge even further on this topic, [NOISE] I encourage you to go to my Skillshare Teacher profile, there you will find more classes on complimentary topics which I have no doubt you will love. If you're craving even more, I'd highly recommend that you explore the wealth of resources available on my website and within the attached bonus resources PDF, there you'll discover more classes, books suggestions, and free complimentary worksheets. Particularly the worksheets will help you deepen your understanding of the topics discussed in the class, and I notify the changes that will have the biggest impact on your personal well-being. If you're interested in more freebies or live classes, I encourage you to sign up to my newsletter. Each Sunday I send out home design ideas straight to your inbox, all tailored to promote a home that will help you become happier, healthier, and more creative. You'll be kept in the loop about my monthly Zoom calls and special events. That's why I had big free resources, book recommendations, and I'll let you know about upcoming classes. If you liked this class, I would appreciate the review. It tells Skillshare that you like my class and it encourages other people to discover my work. Please use the discussion section to let me know your thoughts and questions about the class. I'll be happy to help you clarify any concept to do not understand. Additionally, if you leave a class project, I will be able to help you with more personalized and in-depth support to encourage you to share your home design progress with me. We are at the end, See you in the next class.