How to Create a Transformative Experience // A 2017 Keynote

Dearest Humans of LinkedIn-

I’ve been writing "everydays" ala Beeple over on Medium, exploring my typical mix of philosophical metaphysics with a hint of immersive design and some poems for good measure. I'll take the best of these and do a weekly digest here on LinkedIn's new writing feature. Come along for the ride!

Recently I've been focused on the Principles of Synchronicity Architecture, focused on the idea of generating synchronicity by design. Maybe you guys aren't ready for this yet, but... your kids are gonna love it.

I’m taking a pause and jumping into the Delorean to specifically cover the topic of “Transformative Experiences”, namely with a transcription of a keynote I gave at DesignUp India in November of 2017. This keynote is a bit old now, some five years ago, and I’ve evolved my thinking on some nuances therein, but the overall story remains the same. I’ve included most of the slides from the presentation into this transcription to help illustrate the points. Enjoy! ~jb

Keynote Transcription // DesignUp India 2017

My parent’s and previous generations were obsessed with obtaining?things?— cars, yachts, a big house, a well kempt yard.

The “era of things” is officially behind us so, wave goodbye things — say hello to experiences! The millennial and Z generations have completely changed the commercial landscape. These rapidly rising generations have proven time and again that they prefer experiences over things.

I’m sure you’re all well aware but brands and bands and promoters and the concert industry, the festival industry, the wellness industry, the travel industry, the lifestyle industry, the retail industry all have clamored to get into this experience space.

But what I really want to know is,?are you experienced?

So with this massive new opportunity at hand I’d like to zoom out and look at the nature of what experience is and furthermore what we mean when we talk about a transformative experience. We hear this word all the time, “we’re having a transformative experience,” but when you press transformative experience creators they often can’t articulate where you’re transcending from and where you’re transcending to. It’s almost like there’s no real map for us to understand what transformation really means.

Everyone wants transformative experience. Brands want you to transform so they can get their message into you. Live performers want you to have a transformative experience so you can all feel connected to the performance. To design a truly transformative experience, the framework has to be integral or holistic. So today we’re going to look at the four “spheres” that compose a transformative experience.

Those “spheres” are as such — I have to throw a nod, I am completely stealing from the work of American philosopher Ken Wilber with most of this stuff, who has created essentially the comprehensive or “integral” map of consciousness. He calls them “quadrants,” I’m calling them “spheres” — the four spheres are: the I, the We, the It, and the Its. On the left-hand side you see we’re talking about the subjective [Justin pointing to the “I” and the “We” spheres”. This is the internal.

On the right-hand side we’re talking about the objective, the external [Justin pointing at “It” and “It’s]. On top we’re talking about the individual [Justin pointing to “I”, “It”], and on bottom we’re talking about the collective [Justin pointing to “We”, “Its”]. So you can see here that all four of these words arise in every single language on earth.

What connects them all together? What’s the screen that these four spheres are projected upon? Some call it God, some call it Brahman, some call it nothingness, I?call it The Beatles, [the crowd laughs] but I also call it something more fundamental and I am indeed a love extremist — I call it LOVE.

Do you come from a place of love or do you come from a place of fear?

This is what we have to ask ourselves [Plays a clip from a song on The Beatles’ album “Love”] Okay so let’s look at the “I sphere” — everyone’s favorite sphere. Remember this is the internal subjective. This is the psyche, this is what it means to be me. Only I experience the subjective individual self. This is my why, this is what makes me who I am — and the I is evolving if it chooses to — we’re gonna get into that. I is the realm of truthfulness. Are you being true to yourself?

I mentioned how the I is evolving and there are many different maps that show the evolution of consciousness — Jean Gebser first explored this in 1949?with a book called?The Ever-Present Origin.?His map goes: archaic, magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic, and integral.

It’s a really heavy book but if you can find it, it’s really extraordinary stuff. You have all of these different maps of consciousness, yesterday Alicia showed us Maslow’s hierarchy which is another example of consciousness evolving into more inclusive compassionate and empathetic stages, and no matter what race, creed, skin color, ethnicity religion you come from — we all have to pass through the same stages of development.

If we’re able to see this map and understand how these stages interplay with one another we have a much more inclusive understanding of how reality works. I could do an entire hour or six on this alone but I’ll spare you. The big takeaway here is that there’s many different ways to say the same thing which is that I, what it means to be me, the perspective, the lens, the filter through which I experience reality is evolving or can be evolving, should we choose.

It’s very important to talk about the difference between stages and a state. A state, which is what we are always trying to go for when we create experiences, is fleeting. A state is temporary. A state does not last. A stage is more like your center of gravity, it’s more fixed — it’s dynamic. You’re not at a stage necessarily but again this is your filter it’s your viewpoint through which you experience a state.

A great example of this would be — let’s say you have a near-death experience because you’re in the third lane in India and you experience this transcendent oneness — the stage you dwell within will interpret that experience through that stage. So if all I’m reading is the Bible I will interpret that as seeing God or as seeing Jesus.

If all I’m doing is watching Fox News, I’ll probably end up voting for Trump. [The crowd laughs]

So remember: state temporary, stage filter. [This is] very important because ultimately we’re trying to create states at experiences and the ultimate state is the “flow state” — the state where you feel connected, where you’re not even thinking — it’s effortless. The flow state is what we’re all striving for when we create an experience.

So we covered the internal subjective, now we’re going to cover the external objective and this is the It realm. This is now physiology. This is your behavior. This is how you act as opposed to how you feel. Again, this is externality this is about your performance and this is about truth.

If I subjective was about what it means to be truthful — are you true to yourself? — this is: is it objectively true? Can we use logic to prove its truth? Can science point to it as true?

Oh boy, here she comes, I’m sorry I never thought that this would happen [crowd laughs at an image of Kim Kardashian taking a selfie being projected on the screen] This is the result of what happens when we focus too much on one sphere, namely the It sphere.

This is all about externality, it’s all about what you look like, it’s all about what kind of car you drive, it’s all about who you’re married to. The point I want to reinforce here is that we get ourselves into trouble when we focus too much on one sphere.

If all we focus on is the It sphere, then we get into a culture where this becomes the most influential sphere of being and I think, should be pretty obvious, that there has to be something more than this. That more is in getting all four of these spheres to dance together.

Now we have the It’s sphere, remember this is the external collective. So now we’re talking about sociology and more importantly we’re talking about systems. As technology and artistry and design all confluence together, It’s becomes more and more important to understand how the interplay — the Internet of things — works together. Just like I and It, It’s also evolves.

It evolves externally, it evolves into ever more complex and more subtle systems. This sphere is all about function. It’s all about economics, again sociology, it’s about the interplay of media and communication.

It becomes exceedingly important to be able to understand systems when creating an experience and again, and hopefully you’re seeing a pattern here, where we get ourselves into trouble is if we’re just focused on this sphere over all the other spheres.

Then you get that tech-for-the-sake-of-tech where there’s no emotional resonance, there’s not that internal sphere there’s only this thing or this experience and it just doesn’t grab your heart like an emotionally balanced experience would. And so this is a system of systems that we have to understand.

Last but certainly not least we have We.

This is the sphere of culture. If It’s was the sociological sphere, what it?is?to be a part of the collective, the We is what it?means?to be part of the collective. This is about justness and mutuality and understanding, this is about our tribe, this is about our religion, this is about our family, and it’s about our rightness.

This is what it means to be part of a collective and again, just like all the other spheres, this sphere: the We cultural sphere evolves –and (not-so) happenstantially it evolves in the same stages that the I evolves in.

This is a phenomenal website:?Scaled in Miles. It explores Miles Davis’s music from the nifties through the nineties and where I come from there are few better examples of how culture evolves through creativity and artistry than jazz. There is a definitive sequence from one stage to the next — from Bop, to hard bop, to free jazz — and then when jazz synthesizes and starts to bring rock-and-roll and funk and all these other elements together.

You have to remember that we evolved We, and more importantly that all of these spheres arise together from love. We is in fact Me [projects a graphic of the word “ME” upside-down on top of “WE” so that the words are mirror images].

Now why am I talking about jazz? Because jazz is the quintessential metaphor for how to you get all of these spheres to dance. People ask “well do you want to balance all the spheres?” and I don’t think balance is really the answer because balance is kind of boring and stale.

I think the way to look at this is through: you bring your practice to the table, you know your scales, you know your modes, you know your key structures, and then when the moment comes, when you get to that experience, you have to be able to throw all that stuff out the window and improvise. Rather than a balance, I’d like you to think about getting all these spheres to dance, creating a garden or creating a framework that allows all these spheres to inter play.

There’s this really cool idea of a “Holon”. A Holon is a whole part or a part whole. There are no wholes and there are no parts there are only Holons. For instance each sphere is a whole sphere in and of itself but it’s simultaneously part of the greater spheres.

Then that’s a part of a greater whole and this goes all the way up to the universal level and all the way down to the nano-level and even smaller than strings — we have Holons.

I want to bring this to life through a quick video of one of my favorite jazz trios and that is the Vijay Iyer Trio.

What I want you to listen to here is how each member of this trio stands as an individual, yet is part of a greater collective, and how when they’re improvising they are playing off this theme together as a greater whole but still individuals.

So that dance that tension and release that comes when you allow all the spheres to integrate together is the stuff of magic and it’s the stuff of the transformative experience so let’s check this out — [The Trio playing in the background] It’s almost like one mind working together but it’s three dudes. I mean those guys are the manifestation.

Okay, so that was the Meta realm. That was the realm beyond. That was the realm that you can’t necessarily see that connects all these things together and now we’re gonna talk about Meta. Oh wait is it — oh I guess it’s all the META realm, and we’re gonna talk about?The Art of Being There. I’m going to show you now how we take that framework and apply it to the experiences that we create.

We are, first and foremost, an experience product company. We’ve come to the era now where experiences are the new things, so we have created a way — by focusing on getting all those spheres to dance — where the art remains art and the commerce remains commerce, but they’re able to dance together.

The artists are happy the clients are happy. Meta experiences ignite the human spirit, which is bold for a reason because that’s the game here, with technology, design, and storytelling. These are our core competencies: festival activations, interactive installations, virtual reality, augmented reality, stage design, live content design, projection mapping, interior and architectural, and fashion shows.

So, as you can see, we have a pretty wide palette with a lot of different colors on it. Rather than focusing on just one color or the other our mastery is in essentially strategically blending the right colors at the right time. Oftentimes you’ll have clients come and say “Hey we want to do a Hololens experience” and we say “Why?” and the client says “Well I don’t know because someone said I had to” and that doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s the right color with which to paint.

So the company was founded about eight years ago on this premise, originally it was called the Meta Agency, and the premise of the Meta Agency was that because technology has gotten so fast and so small we’re able now to create experience in real time, and that has birthed a whole new type of talent.

To this day, some eight or nine years later, that type of talent is still the coolest and most underrepresented talent in the world. When you go to some amazing immersive experience and there was all the projection and sound design and interactive installations of all this stuff, you’re not necessarily walking out being able to name who created those things. So the mission of the Meta Agency was to give a voice and to give a name to this new type of talent.

What defines what we call X directors or Experience Directors is the blend of: design, technology, storytelling, and artistry over time. We create Mandalas, that’s the art of being there, nothing is more profound than the feeling of connecting with hundreds of other human beings in real time. We like to say that we virtualize reality rather than just do virtual reality, and we couldn’t do it without our Experience Directors, they really are the stars of the show. Let’s check out the Meta real [Video of people experience Meta productions.]

My KPI, my key performance indicator, is the looks on people’s faces. We are here to create joy. We are here to create that sense of connection — that’s our goal. The technology isn’t the goal, the emotional resonance is our goal and so that’s always what we’re going after. We’re always looking to balance those spheres together. Now let’s talk about one specific experience that were most well-known for at this point which is?The Lab at Panorama.

The Lab launch, it’s a Goldenvoice initiative who produces Coachella and it’s their foray into the New York City festival scene. The Golden boys came to us now almost three years ago and said “we want to create this future thing that’s tech in art but very specifically about the New York City creative technology community” and we created a strategy that would have three main elements to it: the facade that you see here the projection mapped element, then an exhibition that wraps all around that has seven or eight different interactive experiences, then at the at the climax you have the dome.

In the first year we did a sixty-nine-foot dome with about one-hundred-fifty people and this year we did a ninety-foot dome that had 260 people.

We love doing domes, because domes really are the manifestation of everything that we’ve talked about. Opposed to virtual reality, which is one person having a singular experience, this is now hundreds of people having a virtual reality experience together. You get goosebumps together, you can cuddle up in the seats, you “oh” and “ah” all together and all those things are the spheres dancing together.

This year’s theme, again came back to getting the spheres to play jazz — this year’s theme was?The Synchronicity Supercollider. So we asked, like the Hadron Super Collider that shoots particles in a circle and gets them to smash together to discover dark matter, well what if we create the synchronicity super collider that gets humans to come together and smash together and generate synchronicity. Here’s a peek at the lab 2017 [More video of people experiencing the Lab].

Let’s talk about the future. A really interesting thing has happened with Meta, we’ve been doing this for almost a decade now and we’ve been at the forefront of a lot of the technology and the arts movement, and as we’ve produced more and more work, and as the landscape has becomes more and more competitive, interestingly enough — Meta has become essentially an industry resource for competition to come and not necessarily hire us.

So I’ve spent the last couple years with the most current iteration of Meta, really struggling with this and trying to fight against it in trying to control the information. We represent all these directors, we have all these amazing relationships, we’ve been doing this for a long time, but I have friends at agencies tell me that people go to our site as a resource to just take. As the founder and someone that has put their entire life into this — is really hard.

But pretty recently I had a revelation, and it felt like a windfall, and I haven’t announced this at all to the public and I don’t want to say too much about it but basically the realization was this: rather than fighting against being an industry resource why don’t we just become that? Why don’t we become the definitive platform for experiences? Because that does not exist.

There isn’t one place to go if you’re an experience creator or if you’re an experienced consumer. Imagine, instead of having 20 directors we have 2,000 directors, and they’re all over the world. Some we represent, some we feature, and a lot are just the next generation who build a profile on our site and want to be a part of what will be a vast Meta platform.

Also, we are going to offer a tool kit where if you’re a developer and you create digital plugins you’ll be able to offer your wares on the meta platform so experienced creators can come and build out their toolkit — “I want that director and that installation and that digital ROI technology…” and combine them all together.

Rather than try to control this we’re just gonna let it fly. It’s really who we are more than anything else and it’s what will allow us to really ignite that mission of making experience directors the next stars of the show.

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