CSM, March 12–14, 2026.
What I expected
I expected to have to invite people in, to corral and convince them to try. Betty had warned me that participatory work needs active elicitation – that you can’t just leave something and hope people engage. I’d planned to be present on opening night to seed the first responses and get the ball rolling. Jonathan even suggested that I pretend to be a guest taking part in order to manufacture some curiosity myself.
What actually happened
The opposite. Dozens of people tried the exercise on the first evening completely of their own accord. After just an hour I had to top up the survey question cards as they had run out – I was definitely not expecting that.
I didn’t have to persuade anyone to participate – people walked up, stepped into the booth, and did it. On many occasions during the evening there was a queue of people waiting to try.
The booth worked. It seemed like the fabric curtain with “THOUGHT COUNTER” split across it drew people in.
They took photos of the headline and subtitle text on Side 1 and read and engaged with the pre-completed responses. They seemed to take the task seriously – the handwritten responses show real reflection, not throwaway answers. A few used the earplugs and nothing was stolen or damaged.
What people said
Some of the direct feedback:
- “The choice of font, material and colour makes the booth feel inviting – like a sort of Japanese reference or style.”
- “It’s interesting, really makes you think in a different way.”
- “It was nice to have a project where the attendees can participate at the show themselves.”
- “I think it’s a really cool idea to develop further…”
- “The audio could be a piece on its own.”
What the survey forms revealed
I now have 80+ completed survey responses from the weekend to analyse in detail. The open-ended question, “in your own words, what did you notice?” continues to generate the best material.
It’s really interesting to read through the responses and people are writing honestly and many at length. The prediction vs actual count data is accumulating into a dataset large enough to start drawing patterns from and the question about whether they’d try noticing their thoughts for one minute tomorrow is getting a lot of “yes” responses. That bridge to action that was missing before.
Full data analysis will follow in a separate post.
What I’d change
The reflection questions need some further refining. In fact, as I needed to print some more cards after the first night had run out, I decided to add an additional prompt after the final question (6) – with the aim of eliciting even more expansive responses.
I wasn’t able to source a deposit box I was happy with in time so I used a transparent tray from Muji as an alternative. Aesthetically it looked good but I noticed some people placed their responses face down which gives me the impression they might be self conscious and there might might be even more honest replies if participants know their responses are not visible to the next person?
What was challenging
The noise. The exhibition space especially on the opening night was busy and loud, which is actually useful data – how does ambient noise affect the experience? Some participants used earplugs, most didn’t.
I also trialled using the speaker nestled at in the middle of the A-frame. Katie’s voice loop – the monotonous stream of other people’s thoughts about their thoughts was noticed and commented on independently of the booth experience.
I decided it was potentially too distracting to participants counting thoughts. However, someone did comment that “The audio could be a piece on its own.”
What was exciting
The proof of concept is validated. People will voluntarily close their eyes for 60 seconds in a public space, count their thoughts, and write honestly about what they noticed.
The key difference between the show and my earlier experiments is that here, nobody was asked. People chose to do it without explanation. That tells me two things: the topic genuinely interests people, and the copy is doing its job.
That changes everything about what comes next.
The elevator pitch
I used this in a few conversations on the night when people asked how the project came about and it seemed to resonate:
“Research claims we have up to 60,000 thoughts a day. What else do we have 60,000 of per day? Apart from our breath, nothing. Our thoughts are the single most impactful thing in our lives – but we don’t put enough attention on actually noticing them.”