About

What does EIP Lab do?


EIP Lab constructs safe playgrounds for adults to experiment with emotional complexity.  We produce a variety of games, activities, and frameworks that are available for free.

Most of our products are meant to be used as emotional toys.  Like blocks or lifting weights, following the rules provides a foundation for the right brain to experiment with different activities.

Through this type of play, you will build instinctive strategies for handling complex situations with an emotional component via shaping, strengthening, and shoring up healthy emotional dynamics from your natural point of leverage.


Why play with emotional intelligence?

Play is an essential part of the learning process.  When we are children, we learn to use our bodies through play.  We practice coordination by playing on swing sets, with space by playing with blocks.  Play with a way for us to experiment with our facilities in a low-stakes way.  It allows us to try combinations we'd never otherwise try in order to discover hidden gems of understanding.  It allows us to make mistakes without more than scraped knees or a bruised bottom, and then pick ourselves up again and do it differently next time.

As adults, it seems that stakes are high everywhere we turn.  If we make a mistake in strategy, our careers might suffer.  If we make a mistake in communication, someone might take serious offense.  Instead of scraped knees, we stand to lose money, or opportunities, or relationships.

This is unfortunate, because the some of the best time for us to develop systemic emotional intelligence competencies is as adults.  Humans typically learn what's called formal reasoning, the ability to understand the world logically, in late teen years.  However, post-formal reasoning, the ability to understand the world as interrelated systems with multiple simultaneous points of view, develops in the time from when we are 20 to when we are 50.  It is in post-formal reasoning that the more complex aspects of emotional intelligence lie.

As young children, we are given a safe environment with which to build our understanding of the world-- our playpens.  As teenagers experiencing puberty, we once again have the safe, isolated communities of our schoolyards to experiment with building a more complicated social and intellectual universe.  But as adults exploring a world filled with conflicting narratives, simultaneous causality, cultural subjectivity, and challenges of identity and meaning, we don't have that luxury.  

That is the purpose of EIP Lab.  We aim to help construct safe emotional playgrounds for adults, places where we can experiment with things we would never otherwise do, make mistakes without hurting ourselves or others.  When we do this, we no longer need to follow proscribed internal processes in order to stay safe, such as a habit of not speaking up with new ideas in order to avoid giving offense to an existing plan.  Instead, we cultivate an inner robustness of emotional intelligence that is prepared to deliver custom answers to the wide, unexpected, and complicated problems that we face.


What does EIP not do?

• We do not promote active manipulation through regulation or cognitive/behavioral conditioning.  This means that our games do not involve any "gamification" scoreboards or tickers.
• We do not design "ideal" solutions that sound great, but that you cannot actually implement from your own current position.  While we occasionally switch to a bird's eye view for edification, most of our work takes place from a "first person" view.
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