Try a Little Tenderness

What inspired you to come up with the Department of Tenderness?

We were thinking about urban design, and reading some of the wonderful pieces on the Romantic Urbanism site when we thought: “What would it actually look like if there were a governmental agency tasked with regulating love and affection?”

Love is an organic, bottom-up feeling; it’s often contrasted with logic and reason, with the implication that love lives outside of those boundaries. Bureaucracy and government agencies on the other hand are very explicitly and hierarchically organized. We thought exploring the tension between these ideas would lead to some interesting results!

In many ways, greater centralized government control and management can lead to some real quality-of-life improvements and get important initiatives off the ground. That said, we can all think of recent examples where too much power was placed in the hands of agencies that have misused it. We wanted to find out if the Department of Tenderness would be a force for good, a dystopian nightmare, or something in between.

The aesthetics of city agencies also really called to us. In New York City, bureaucratic iconography covers everything from transit to the public pool. We thought it would be fun to use that instantly recognizable design schema to build an agency that could be mistaken for being real. Agency logos are like city flags, some of them are strikingly good but most of them are pretty dull. The best ones immediately tell you what the agency is for: Think about the EPA’s stylized daisy, NASA’s red triangle soaring through the stars, the huge leaf for Parks, or the MTA’s logo, which looks like it’s about to take off from the station. We were lucky that the actual DOT’s bubble letters were easy to modify, all we did was add a heart and make it pink.

As a speculative agency, the Department of Tenderness (DOT) toes the line between a parody of bureaucracy and an earnest exploration of how cities can help facilitate love. How do you navigate that tension in the design of your events and materials?

During our first event in October 2024 on Brooklyn’s Church Avenue, I wasn’t sure how it would go, but our goal was to see if we could actually get people to open up and be vulnerable within the context of a bureaucratic agency. What would it take to lead to a tender moment at the DMV? One might imagine, rather a lot. But it was always important to me that we have some sincerity and earnestness within the DOT.

We were able to get people to really open up at the Romantic Management Consultant booth. This was a small tent where people could fill out forms about their romantic problems and seek my advice as Executive Commissioner of the DOT. Many people came away saying they felt helped! By a fictional official at a fictional agency! But it was only within the context of the event, by taking the idea with exactly as much gravitas and seriousness as an executive commissioner at a public agency would take it, that people felt comfortable opening up.

There is a reason bureaucracy exists: We need standardized systems to not only operate efficiently, but to make sure people have a standardized set of expectations, whether societally or individually, for how they can interact with each other and their government. Where bureaucracy becomes odious is when the human aspect of it is completely absorbed and only the nameless, faceless agency remains.

The DOT website (which is based on the official Department of Transportation website), the forms, and signs were some of the ways that we balanced the utopian and dystopian aspects of the project. Early on, Schuyler said: “Forms are the language of a bureaucracy.” So forms became an essential format to imagine the identity of the DOT. We wanted the forms to cover the breadth of the potential activities of the agency. They include:

– Form ILU-2: Census of romantic and platonic relationships
– Form A4-f: Platonic conflict reporting form
– Form A4-L: Romantic problems report
– Form F-U2: Situationships and “will-they-won’t-they” report
– And finally: Application to receive support from a Romance Management Consultant (RMC)

The “relationship census” form is an example of the sinister and dystopian elements that could sneak into a project like this; the systematization of affection that diminishes the mysterious nature of love and categorizes people into boxes.

Conversely, the intermediary role that the DOT could play in interpersonal conflicts, which people often need but can’t access, is also part of the forms. Forms A4-F and A4-L allow participants to articulate the problems they were having with other people in their lives, and the Romance Management Consultancy led to a lot of interesting and deep conversations.

The signage, which we tried to make as official-looking as possible, reflects a lot of our value judgments, from promoting non-platonic interactions, to reserving space on the sidewalks for couples and families. Policy makers are people, and every person has their own conceptions of love. Without proper precautions, those conceptions could become normative. For us, this prompted ongoing questions: On what grounds do city agencies determine priorities? How are we investing agencies with this power? After all, those kinds of value judgments are not confined to just love.

What has surprised you most during your DOT activations? Were there any new insights or unexpected moments that stood out to you?

The first public event we put on ended up looking and feeling very much like what I anticipated, which as an artist is something you can never be sure of, and was a lovely feeling!

I was stuck in the love advice booth dispensing advice on all things tender, and matching soulmates until we closed — that we could have such an enthusiastic reception is what surprised me most. We ran through a lot of forms that way.

I was surprised by how many people really took the vision we presented as wholly positive. We had a few people who thought we were a real government agency and were very confused, but by and large the general response was that people have a lot of goodwill and hope when it comes to things related to love and affection. The ease and openness with which people approached the love advice booth was also surprising to me, but not to Schuyler. People will jump at any opportunity to feel heard and listened to.

Lastly, a surprise was how easy it is to get a high-quality metal sign of almost any shape or size printed. You could really do some interesting guerilla traffic design and wreak havoc with the right signs.

What do you hope people take away from your events?

I have always thought of art as a mirror. You hold it up to your life, and it shows you something that looks a bit like that life, but different in important ways. Or maybe even nothing like your life at all, but through the mirror you can see how it could be your life.

I hope the mirror we were holding up showed a clear picture: that the Department seemed internally consistent and coherent, that people could understand how it works and what their lives might be like if the Department of Tenderness was in it. I make no judgments or presuppositions for whether people would like the idea. But we do want them to think about it and extrapolate a little from their experience, to daydream. Art is like watching the clouds and finding the animals in them!

Also, I legitimately wanted to be able to help people with their love problems, so I hope I did that. One of the forms to fill out at the Romantic Management Consultation booth was the Soulmate Matching Initiative (Form RMC); I’m still trying to match people up as soulmates!

I was hopeful that participants would think about how urban design already influences our ability to love and care for each other. I hoped that people would leave their encounter with the project a little happier than when they walked in. People seemed especially pleased to fill out the love landmark forms and hang them up. Sharing something important to you with others is one of life’s great joys.

That’s not something you want from every project, but to generate a small shift in mood or perspective is my goal whenever I do something creative.

How do you think this project might evolve in the future?

Any project that makes people feel seen can grow and evolve, has legs. People are dying to be seen! I think it’d be fun to go around and hold more love advice and soulmate matching sessions. I’d also like to delve a little more into the love landmark idea by having some sort of website or digital place where people can submit landmarks and view other peoples’ landmarks. I like anything with a little participation and collaboration.

I’d be eager to bring the DOT to other boroughs, showcasing different activations that play on the central concept, and to maybe even travel to another city. The aesthetics of this project are so NYC-specific, and it would be interesting to see how those might be scrambled in Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami. What would a Paris DOT look like?

We’ve had a chance to expand the DOT a bit locally through events with Public Sector Office and Urban Omnibus. Daphne and Louise suggested we do a sign making activity, which has really taken off as a form of audience engagement. While it’s not as far as Paris, we did take the DOT on the road to Newburgh on the invitation of the Winter Ours show at the ADS warehouse. Getting a chance to share our signage and form activities with a different audience was exciting, and we came back with lots of great new sign ideas (and our very own DOT flag).

Now that you’ve gotten a taste of running a government agency, do you have any ideas on how the real DOT or other city agencies could incorporate love-centered policies into their operations?

Oh gosh . . . I think with love, people know themselves best, even if it takes them a while to figure it out. Or rather, there’s no one else that can know it but them. You have to be willing to sit quietly and listen and help them find themselves. I’d say the city should provide a Universal Basic Love Allowance to be spent on stuff like flowers, picking up another person’s coffee for them at the coffee store, that sort of thing. Let the power of love lie with the people!

Honestly, providing more parks, public spaces, and festivals for people to go to with their loved ones would go a long way to making the city a more tender place. One of the most valuable things the library system provides is training and seminars on important skills, and an agency focused on tenderness could probably expand that purview to include things like how to take someone out on a nice date or spend the holidays with your family. But of course, that puts you on the slippery slope of legislating how people should express love and affection to each other. It’s complicated! The last thing we’d ever want is some kind of “love Robert Moses.” In a city of 8 million people, there’s at least as many ways to love.