State of Awe Digest #10 | Nostalgia, vertical concerts, fundraising, future of sweat, realms of the experience economy and much more
The Latest Wonders in Experience Design, Festivals and Gatherings
August 2, 2020
Our aphorism to help with the times: Design experience to be persistently vivid. A vivid experience is one that channels emotion well beyond its lived moment.
State of Awe is a regular trend briefing from experience designer, Jordan Kallman and event brand curator, Tyson Villeneuve at The Social Concierge. This periodic letter covers the latest wonders, most influential psychological movements, emerging ideas, tactile designs and hottest patterns keeping attendees, producers, designers, operators, sponsors, organizers and leaders engaged in the experience economy.
OUR BELIEF: Depth of experience ignites culture, culture values beauty, beauty triggers emotion, emotion deepens understanding, and understanding gives us words for things we had felt but had not previously grasped. Belong and repeat. This loop creates a more beautiful life, well-lived, deeply remembered. We must popularize the way to people’s hearts, charging bonds and linking character, lighting up this circle of experience. Encourage others to join the club. Long live the spectacular.
OUR INTENTION: A long-form digest, this letter is meant as a “Sunday read”, skimming between topics, links and references you find interesting. We summarize insights and lines of inquiry to highlight possible outcomes. Our intention is to serve you trend-driven idea candy that inspires divergent, lateral or combinational creative thinking for your own gatherings.
For new subscribers, you can find all previous digests here (certain ideas are timeless).
House of Experimentation 🔮 State of Awe Channel Topics
Thank you to everyone in our growing readership circle contributing in unique ways. This might be as simple as dropping in a comment (approved vaccine guesses in Digest #9), replying directly to us with your feedback (so valuable) or the holy grail of gifts: recommending the digest to others.
We continue to listen to suggestions on how to improve. Which got us thinking: is there a topic area at the intersection of gatherings and ________ that you would like to see covered? If so, cast out a comment or hit reply to this email.
🙏 Suggested by a reader, here is a directory of current (and possible future) topic areas for the digest. See anything you like?
The Nostalgic Force
Do you get warm fuzzies when thinking about childhood? Does your memory flirt back to easier days when you hear that one song? What about a passing fragrance that floods the memory bank of someone you cared for? If your lived experience requires energy to forge the future, memory is the reactor and nostalgia the fission. A controllable fuel for emotional outcomes:
🤒 Until recently, nostalgia was considered a negative malady. Combined from ancient Greek, “nostos” — a longing to return home, and the accompanying pain, “algos”, the word was rooted in bitter effects until Constantine Sedikides, a researcher at Southampton, uncovered its positive side effects after 1999 (his research created the “nostalgia scale” to measure it).
🥰 "Nostalgia makes people feel loved and valued and increases perceptions of social support when people are lonely." explains psychologists, amongst many other positive impacts that reduce anxiety and depression.
📿 There are types of nostalgia that don't romanticize the past as tragic and heroic, or simply trivialize it as trite and silly (looking at you marketers). The strongest nostalgia forces us to interrogate our ghosts in search of meaning — and the inexorable way they slip our grasp.
💡 Even more recently, and extremely important to gatherers of all types: nostalgia does NOT require real memories. This newly discovered memory paradigm has its own word: anemoia, defined as “nostalgia for a time you’ve never known”. Dive deep into this feature article that unpacks the phenomenon.
✍️ 25 useful principles, with examples on how to use nostalgia to enhance design.
The insight: tradition is smarter than you are. It sticks around longer when it is adaptive, and being core to our survival, is extremely hard to replace. Looking for help in increasing the appeal of an event to a larger audience? Designing a ceremony? Wield the force.
Arena of Safety and Security 🦠 COVID Edition
We are creeping back to IRL. Innovation is starting to really pick up. Testing protocols are getting better. Certainty is seeping in. A few examples:
Innovate with existing space. Vertical hotel balcony concerts.
Scientists and 4,000 music fans in Germany will run experiments to study how the virus spreads at concerts.
Lessons from the IRL return of Supercross.
A “socially distant” Chainsmoker drive-in concert, followed by the cascade of criticism and an investigation. Organizers insist they met guidelines. The vision and premise is solid, but after attendees have two drinks, does it work?
Tokyo Olympics looking at ways to save their embattled event (sign in access). Might they require mandatory negative virus tests for spectator entrance?
The insight: Safety protocols are developing, and risk-takers are experimenting. So far, it isn’t working out very well in the arena of public opinion. But this will obviously change as we progress. We think it might start with “quarantine bubble events”. Read the in-depth, gritty details on how this works from the film industry here.
Fads and Crazes 📱 Meaningful Virtual Experiences
This past weekend, the infamous Tomorrowland festival held its much anticipated virtual event for 2020. The results were stunning, including multiple 30+ camera, computer generated stages each with wild designs, populated with world famous DJs. But the experience also embraced a mystical virtual world to explore. A bit of insight into the production and how they built it.
Aside from the impressive experience, the results were also pretty staggering: one million viewers over the course of the weekend, not including replay tickets available for on-demand viewing.
In the spirit of event designers making virtual events work, even when they don’t want to, here are your quick hits:
One of the best guides to virtual live streaming from our very experienced friends over at Junction.
Virtual events projected to grow 23% annually into a $404+ billion market in 2027, from its $90 billion position today.
How agencies and producers are selling advertisers on virtual events.
Deeply insightful facilitation techniques for online events that you can apply in any virtual space, by one of our faves, Priya Parker.
A seriously deep playbook on Zoom, with a table of contents that can take you to helpful checklists, laymen feature summaries and other goodies (Zoom is still very relevant).
A nice reminder post on creating content for virtual events, broken down by pre-, during- and post-event phases.
What is missing from the virtual event technologies? Social connection, data from connections and a revenue model. Could they be one-and-the-same?
Feel like screaming right now? Cool. Us too. Go here, record your virtual scream, and a nice Icelandic friend will let it out in nature for you. Innovative virtual. Also, we feel better.
CES, one of the biggest consumer shows on the planet will go virtual in 2021. Due to the scale, this shouldn’t be ignored. And will spin up incredible innovation as exhibitors find ways to showcase digitally.
7 interesting stats of virtual events, learned since March.
Ernst and Young reports 94% of brands are exploring the sector of digital for the purpose of improved consumer attraction and retention in the new normal (great trend report here).
The insight: There is a lot to be learned from a virtual experience like Tomorrowland. This article outlines a number of great ideas, including scaled artists fees based on viewership. How can you use this unique time to peg your cost centres to ticket scale?
Designer Data Drop 🧮 Chart of the Month
Extended reality (a blend of AR, VR and other digital realities) is expected to grow eightfold, reaching an estimated market size of more than $209 billion by 2022.
Odeum of Event Fundraising
As fall events begins to appear, charities, nonprofits and for-benefit organizations are asking themselves (and us), “how do we authentically engage our donors?”
📉 Giving plunged 6% in the first quarter, 11% in March alone. Science pays the price. Can non-profits find genuine ways to bring donors back to the table?
🤵 It really comes down to two options: virtual galas and auctions, or non-event fundraising. The choice of many organizations to avoid the virtual, might also avoid overcrowding during the classic fundraising event seasons of fall 2020 and spring 2021. It’s go virtual or go long.
✨ If you do choose virtual, a nice read that underpins a number of great principles (with solid examples).
🎟️ Further proof that the fundraising world is split on the debate of virtual gala vs exclusive donor relations. A perspective from non-profit museums.
The insight: With the raging success of the sweepstake and auction challenge platform, All-In, the rising dominance of Cameo as a way to integrate celebrities, and the recent launch of talent competition platforms like Orbiiit (from friends here locally in Vancouver), the decision might not be so cut-and-dry. What new emerging engagement ideas are out there that don’t fit into the gala or traditional donor box?
Stadium of Sweat 🤸 Experiential Athletic Pursuits
In our neck of the woods, Vancouver-based athleisure titan, lululemon, made its first-ever acquisition by purchasing fitness technology start-up, Mirror. In an interesting article on what this might mean for the future of fitness, it is obvious that the already experientially-focused company is making a big bet on the digital sphere and fitness-at-home, while doubling down on their global ambassador (i.e. influencer) programming. In spirit, a few quick supportive hits at the intersection of sweat, participation and experience:
🧘 “It took two years to become commercially successful.” The story of the patron saint of YouTube quarantine yoga, Adrienne.
😷 While “pod dining” is debatably successful, it looks as though domed fitness is rising to join the conversation. Pandemic theatre or here to stay?
🔥 With at-home experience the new norm, it is going to take a real convincing draw to bring us back to the gym. This redesigned outfit in New Zealand might have cracked the code (hint: it is sexy).
🏡 “Hospitals, grocery stores, and warehouses have held on to clear functions, but for everything else, there’s your apartment.” A long, insight-packed read on fitness, digital experience and the future of physical space.
💪 “The change would be permanent. The industry would never be the same.” says a luxury gym owner.
🍻 And for those of us less than inspired by the insights from the sphere of fitness, don’t fret, there’s always drunk yoga.
The insight: 66 days and a habit becomes automatic. How can you leverage the obvious digital, at-home habits that are forming in new ways? Further, how can you design for authentic influence, injecting personality, persuasion and celebrity into the mix?
Thinkers and Philosophers 🕵 Joseph Pine II’s Experience Economy
In your life, has there been a piece of writing that inspired your purpose? For us, reading Joseph Pine and James Gilmore’s seminal July 1998 HBR article, “Welcome to the Experience Economy” on our first day of university would have been that piece. It was prophetic, as it clearly summarized how our economies were progressing towards advancing value through layered, immersively lived moments. Essentially: an exchange of money for feelings.
22 years later, Joseph Pine has remained a contemporary thinker who provides deep insights in the spheres of behavioural economics and customer value. And while much of his research is modern when compared to other thinkers we have profiled, you can’t help but see the timelessness in his principles:
⛰️ “The Four Realms of an Experience” of entertainment, educational, escapist and aesthetic measure experiences on a spectrum of engagement (passive vs active) and immersion (removed vs engulfed).
🎭 Every business is a stage. The five stages of drama give us a clear sequence to view the design of experiences through: entice, enter, engage, exit and extend.
😇 In the years since the initial articles and book, a further category of economic progression has been added. That of “transformation”, or charging for the net benefit to the consumer.
⚡ As consumers increasingly experience the world through their digital gadgets, experience and transformation are limitless in the digital sphere, he argues in a follow-up to the original thinking.
💰 Money value of time: commodities you charge for stuff, goods you charge for things, services you charge for activities, experiences charge for time spent.
The insight: How can you combine existing goods and services to leverage the value of their connection over time? Goods are the props, services are the stage, your combination is the theatre. In designing experiences, you are charging for time well spent. Disney theme parks net out around 20 cents per minute. So, are you at the level of the Disney theme park? A nice measure of experiential value for the virtual space.
Beautiful event instas to inspire your next project (from a diverse group)
📹 Super homey looking outdoor movie night with Bespoke Events London.
👰 Simply wild wedding design with Walid Baz.
🪁 That paper airplane ceiling though, by Majeda Kassir Bisharat.
👗 Conoravirus anxiety wardrobes by couture designer, Viktor&Rolf.
🧊 Ice block seafood station by Flavia Lamoglia.
🥃 Camping’s ultimate rustic circle bar by Revelry Event Designers.
🇫🇷 Centre Pompidou purposed for the Louis Vuttion Fall 2019 fashion show by La Mode en Images.
🌾 Jacquemus “L’Amour” SS21 in a wheat field, socially distanced by Bureau Betak.
🏀 Stunning event entryway for Nike NBA All Star Weekend by Ruf Project.
Hot morsels to ace your next event conversation
🙄 Can you Amazon your business model? Just turn every major cost centre into a revenue source and you got it made.
🍿 Watching closely: movie release dates in limbo. Seems like the fate of the movie industry rests on one Christopher Nolan film.
🛺 A Thai tuk tuk drive-in movie theatre.
🟦 Lisbon’s pedestrian only streets painted blue. For effect or clarity?
🏆 The Emmy Awards go virtual for September 20.
🔥 A drive-thru Burner festival.
🏒 In spirit of hockey’s first weekend, how NHL games look and sound.
😷 Emirates Airline will pay if you get sick (unique “travel insurance”).
End note
This was the tenth edition of the State of Awe digest. We are approaching our 6-month anniversary (digest #12) and looking forward to providing something unique around that time.
We would love it if you spread the word. Share with your colleagues and contacts (you can direct them here, or just share this post). It would mean a lot to us.
And remember, let us know if there is a topic you want to hear about.
As Ever,
Jordan + Tyson