The Experience Drop #8

EXPERIENCE NEWS: BE AN ORIGINAL AT THE WORLD EXPERIENCE SUMMIT ??

ICYMI: we’re hosting the first World Experience Summit this June in London.

Since launch, experience experts from all around the world – and all along the alphabet – have bought tickets, including people in:

Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, England, France, Germany, India, Israel, Mexico, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Switzerland, USA…

(Okay, we’re still working on Z. But it’s only a matter of time!)

Limited Early Bird tickets are available now – and we’ll be announcing our event and hotel partners very soon, so you can start planning and get the free happiness that comes from anticipation.

Until then, our call for proposals for both WXO Members and non-members closes TOMORROW, Friday 31 March. Submit your idea for an experience workshop, TED-style talk, pop-up, or something else entirely now for a chance to stand among the originals.

Will you be one of the originals at the inaugural World Experience Summit?

EXPERIENCE TREND: 21 EXTRAORDINARY EXPERIENCES OPEN NOW & COMING SOON ??

Spring has sprung – and with it, the latest edition of our monthly Extraordinary Experiences round-up, including both murderous clowns and gamified Shakespeare. Here are a few themes we've spotted…

Immersive art is everywhere!

The classics continue to get an immersive revamp, as Picasso: The Collection In A New Light! opens in Milan, Eternal Mucha rolls into Paris, and the original Van Gogh behemoth lands in Singapore.

If you're looking for a contemporary immersive art playground, Otherworld in Philadelphia, Happiness Expo in Belgium, or TRANSFIX in Las Vegas might be more your bag.

Competitive socializing spices up your social life.

In the UK, there's a new DNA VR experience in Manchester and Somerset House prepares to open its doors to experimental gaming festival Now Play This.

Over in the US, rapper Drake is revamping Luna Luna amusement park as it tours across the country.

And in Australia, Hijinx Hotel opens a Melbourne sister for the original Sydney branch of the world's first "challenge-room hotel".

And we're seeing some more creative extensions of IP.

Mischief managed: The Harry Potter Studio Tour puts down its broomstick in Tokyo in its first outing outside the UK. Stranger Things: The First Shadow launches in London's West End, taking the blockbuster show to the boards. And Pennywise the clown escapes the pages of Steven King's novel and the box office smash movie to take new form in Las Vegas escape room Escape IT.

We’ll be sharing more Extraordinary Experiences every month in 2023. So if you’re working on an experience you’d like us to consider – or you think we've missed something – please share it here.

EXPERT INSIGHT: A PATTERN LANGUAGE FOR THE EXPERIENCE OF WORK ??

Work is the most consumed, yet least designed, experience on the planet.

Adults spend half our waking hours working. That adds up to more than 8 trillion hours per year across all of humanity.

Few experiences occupy such a prominent role in our lives. When asked to describe yourself, how quickly do you name what you do for a living? And yet, the design of this experience has been largely neglected. Why?

Dart Lindsley is Head of Process Excellence at Google and the host of the Work For Humans podcast. He has a radical idea for how to approach work, looking at it the same way we do a puzzle.

He argues that the root cause of our problems lies deep in a relic of the industrial age: the mistake of thinking of employees as things.

Instead, we should be asking what job you hire your job to do for you, examining the flawed mental model at the core of un-designed work, and recognising employees as customers.

Read more about how to move towards a pattern language for the experience of work – and what his radical idea means for experiences more broadly.

EXPERIENCE CASE STUDY: THE JEEP GRAND CHEROKEE TRAINING EXPERIENCE ??

Talking of creating more fulfilling work experiences, this week we’ve been hanging out with WXO Member Immersis on our first London Experience Safari, discussing just what makes a brilliant employee training experience.

This case study from fellow members Steve Tiseo and Yiming (Amy) Hua is one example of how it’s done. The Jeep Grand Cherokee Training Experience was an immersive web experience designed to help Jeep train its dealership employees remotely as their first launch in the COVID era.

The immersive website featured vignettes of the new vehicle model in different environments, each telling a story of how the car excels in that scene – for example, one showed the Jeep Cherokee traversing a variety of natural terrain, going up steep inclines, and fording flooded areas of the road. Even before the pandemic, Jeep employees wouldn’t have had the ability to actually see the Grand Cherokee in a remote mountain location. Now, they could get a sense of what the vehicle would do while interacting with the scene.

DEEP DIVE: THE ETHICS OF CARE IN INTIMATE EXPERIENCES ??

For our final WXO Campfire of the current season, lecturer and performer Joanna Bucknall – host of the Talking About Immersive Theatre podcast and one of the first in the UK to hold a PhD in the subject! – explained how to invite participants into an experience in a way that is consensual, ethical and agentive, but still has the potential to provoke, problematise and challenge.

Top takeaways ahead of the full write-up:

• Creator and audience come together to build the performance. There is no creative genius given to the audience to inhabit: they make it with us. Their perspective informs the work and also troubles our perspective.
• When you open up an invitation, you have to relinquish control – but care and ethics have to replace it.
• The performance is entirely different every time, as people bring themselves with them. It’s a holistic negotiation of frame, rituals, tasks, invitations, and gamification. A pregnant scenario: an empty vessel that the performance emerges out of.
• The dialogical structure consists of three parts: invitation/provocation, consent sought, and task/ritual/ask.
• This informs the overall shape of the performance, but is also repeated many times within it.

The WXO Campfires (and this newsletter!) are taking a two-week Easter break, but we’ll be back on Wednesday 19 April with Season 7 and the brilliant Katherine Templar Lewis and Robyn Landau , co-founders of Kinda Studios . See you then!

Have you got an experience, case study, or opinion to share? Tell us about it in the comments!

(And remember to subscribe to this newsletter! It's every Thursday!)