What is a Curated Meetup?

You’ve shared many great moments with people in your life; you know them when they happen. When you understand another person’s perspective and they understand yours. When you share a moment with someone together as ‘we’ not as ‘you’ and ‘me’.
Our Curated Meetups are experiences tailored for two people which give you the tools and the opportunity to share more of these moments, with more people, in more contexts.

Connect on a deeper level
Our Curated Meetups are a collection of designed experiences for you to share with a colleague over 45 minutes. We’ll help you to connect on a deeper level, whilst only taking a little time out of your day.
Frameworks designed for you
Based on you sharing deeper insights with one another, we design frameworks fo your meeting. This is a safe space where you can be open and inspire each other through carefully selected activities.


We’re better when we’re social
As well as making travel experiences better, we believe that forming deeper connections with more people in our lives can be transformative. That’s our aim with Curated Meetups.
The academic stuff
Through our years as artists working with with social sculpture, we’ve learned how powerful human meetings can be. Now we’re working with social science too.
It is common knowledge that success in individuals requires more than IQ. As human beings, our emotional intelligence (EI) is of high value too. Empathy is an element of EI that is increasingly recognized as the trait that is crucial to the success of human-to-human interactions. Psychologists developed an empathy quotient (EQ) as a self-report individual human-centred measurement of empathy. Curated Meetups are designed to increase your EI – and you can track this development with us too!
The benefits of high EI among people are both individual and collective – interpersonal relationships improve, teams become higher functioning, and communities are strengthened.
Evidence-based research even shows that companies that are able to apply EQ to a business setting, not least during product development, are the most successful. So these are tools that could benefit your projects too!

From the art world to the real world
Social Sculpture
Before we started Human Hotel, we spent many years as artists working with what’s known as ‘social sculpture‘. Our projects were about bringing people together in experimental frameworks designed to challenge and inspire the participants.
Through this work, we learned how powerful meetings can be, and how the right framework can elevate an everyday interaction into something much more significant.
We decided that turning our attention from the art world to the real world would let us make more of an impact. Now we use what we’ve learned to create more (and deeper) connections between people than ever before.
New Life Residency (2008) – participants lived and worked for one week in a completely dark exhibition space. Each participant was paired with a local blind or visually impaired assistant.
Bonus Balls (2012) – we sold candy containing the hair of bankers responsible for the 2008 crash.
Exhibitions & awards
We exhibited our social sculptures and participatory interventions at a wealth of institutional and non-profit venues including Artists Space, New York (2004), the Third Guangzhou Triennial, Guangzhou (2008), Manifesta 8, Murcia (2010), the Sixth Momentum Biennial, Moss (2011), Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, Gothenbrug (2013), Athens Biennial, Athens (2013) and the 55th Venice Biennial, Venice (2013) among many other places.
Our team was awarded The Future of the Present Award, Franklin Furnace, New York City (USA), and nominated for The International Award for Participatory, Art (Italy).
PHOTOGRAPHY BY
Shane Timm