Experience as Material

The difference between two experiences can be as stark as the difference between the visuals found in a supermarket magazine and those found in the Sistine Chapel.

At one end of the spectrum, we find the soulless drudge of some agile innovation corporate workshop. An experience so unmemorable and inconsequential that the only way in which it transforms you is by making you a few hours older.

At the other end of the spectrum, we find the works of the Odyssey art collective. Each year, they help create one unique experience for one particular person. These typically span multiple days each and are tailored to the unique life stories of their singular audiences. They regularly incorporate the participant’s friends and family as actors, and are set in places of personal significance. Odyssey’s canvas is the eye of the beholder, they sculpt works made not of stone but of experience, that reside not in galleries but in someone’s psyche.

“You can’t go back to being a passive observer of your life after that. You realize your life is a series of choices that actually affect the people around you.” “The piece had successfully trained me to look at every human being with the intensity usually reserved for a protagonist. It turns the volume up on the world until the world itself becomes the art.” “For the first time in my adult life, the world felt like it was speaking directly to me. I realized then: The world is not indifferent.”

One could be forgiven for not expecting the handful of interface components available to app developers to lead too far. After all, how many different apps could you really get by recombining the same buttons, input boxes, toggles, icons, and a few other reusable components? Yet it turned out that these simple building blocks could compose in countless ways, many of which we encounter daily.

The canvas of designed experience beyond the screen is similarly generative. Think of how a handful of shared patterns across tabletop games can lead to an endless stream of qualitatively different experiences. The social deduction of not knowing who was picked. The interpersonal communication forced through artificial constraints. The strategic trading of scarce resources. And we might barely be scratching the surface because of how easy it is to conflate the canvas of screens or tabletops with the canvas of mind.

If a group of people take part in a workshop focused on contributing a new server to a cooperative datacenter, the output of that workshop is more than the terabytes of storage or the teraflops of compute that have been pooled in. The output also involves the fact that a handful of people have each gained a bit of the know-how and confidence necessary to reclaim technology. Just like raw hardware can scale to petabytes of storage and petaflops of compute, this qualitative output could perhaps scale to resilient communities that can genuinely look after themselves technologically.

Facilitators traditionally take on a lot of subtle responsibilities to ensure that the activities they moderate unfold smoothly. These often include keeping track of schedule, keeping discussions on track, keeping track of turns, keeping stock of available materials, presenting part of the content, answering miscellaneous questions, and so on.

It seems unthinkable to organize in-person events that designate no facilitator to keep a handle on things, as everything could devolve into chaos. This is a pity, as it turns facilitators into a major bottleneck to scaling any non-trivial group activity. After all, who trains the trainers?

A solution to scaling experience comes from the genre of “bring your own device” games, such as the Jackbox series. These video games can only be played in small groups that can talk to each other live. What is especially relevant is the fact that they solve the facilitation problem by essentially automating the facilitator. Through clever use of audio playback, visual cues, and randomness, game designers can drastically scale in-person experiences by equipping them with the ability to autonomously run themselves.

Addressing the facilitator’s traditional responsibilities requires some creativity. Keeping track of schedule can happen by moving to new segments automatically when participants are done. The media system can also keep track of whose turn it is and randomize the order, as well as narrate bits of content directly. And when it comes to tracking materials and answering questions, integrations with an inventory and knowledge base can provide the needed grounding.

In the same way as product designers focus on making products ergonomic such that they fit the user’s physiognomy like a glove, so do experiences need to be designed so as to fit the participant’s broader lifestyle and story. This starts with considerations of basic logistics, such as when and where things are happening in relation to their ongoing commitments. Yet it can go all the way to considering how experiences can interact constructively with their audience’s self-image.

And just as physical products benefit from rapid prototyping methods that enable designers to quickly move from one revision to the next, so can experiences benefit from methods of efficiently “playtesting” better ways in which activities could unfold. In particular, taking an interactive media system and making it easily configurable and parametric can drastically lower the bar to trying out variations to previous formats.

There are a few scripts worth flipping when it comes to the interaction between knowledge and authority. The first is concerned with the ritual of the one-way lecture, wherein a venerable expert is appointed to impart wisdom onto the other participants. In many cases, each participant can bring meaningful experiences to the table, turning the diverse group as a whole into one well-rounded expert.

In this frame, facilitating the diffusion of knowledge across participants becomes a matter of identifying that latent expertise and actively unlocking it. It becomes all about creating the space to welcome participants in contributing their know-how, and less about the efficient broadcast of truths. A live quiz, for instance, can be used as a mere cue for welcoming experienced players to share relevant stories as opposed to being used as a measure of fact retention.

The second script is concerned with contacting a disinterested customer support when lacking the knowledge to address an issue with a product. At its best, seeking help from someone more knowledgeable when things go sideways can be an opportunity for genuine interaction inside a community, an opportunity to bring members closer through shared experience. It also represents a chance to diffuse that knowledge ever so slightly in a way that can later benefit others.

It is quite tragic that most of contemporary experience, the most “kilograms of qualia” being produced today by people in industrial economies, are spent on laboring for employers for the main purpose of making ends meet. The fact that most person-hours of waking experience across our society are still being sacrificed to unlock access to basic necessities feels like a self-inflicted crime against humanity, especially when automation and the global economy have skyrocketed over the centuries. Deprivation of one’s liberty is a tragedy, but 80,000 hours in the workforce per person is a statistic.