State of Awe Digest #13 | Rapid adaptation, game theory, virtual BRC, kid gatherings and coffin confessors
The Latest Wonders in Experience Design, Festivals and Gatherings
September 13, 2020
Our aphorism to help with the times: You have a choice in life. Attend certain, small gatherings of well-known friends and family, receiving familiarity and comfort in return; or trade your certainty for large collections of weird strangers and unknown personalities as the price for an abundant gain of wonder, connection and pleasure.
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). A catalogue of current and future topic areas can be found here.
House of Experimentation 🔮 Feature Article Thinking
Adaptation is the essence of Darwinian evolution theory, a natural process that integrates future function and present purpose to improve survivability, occurring on an invisible timescale that values generations. Until, of course, catastrophe hits. When the need to stretch rapidly into unique future function truly shows who survives in the animal kingdom. “The risk of death alters the ways organisms allocate resources for survival”, now called rapid biological evolution.
Enter an experience economy crisis, and a new universal jungle. We all need to rapidly adapt in a timeframe that challenges realism. This digest, we highlight a really nice playbook from Harvard Business Review on how to evolve hastily.
The insight: step one, where are habits changing? Step two, how likely is the change to be permanent? Three, what is the data saying and where are my blind spots? Four, move. Find your future function and evolutionary value. If not, your experience, be it a festival, a venue or conference may not survive.
Arena of Design Thinking 🔎 Game Theory
Tabletop games, a traditional analog pastime, is having a moment. Growing at 9% per year, the pandemic crisis has slammed the throttle down. Chess.com, a strategy site for the most classic of table games, doubled in the first half of the year. Take a dive into this insightful read to understand how digitization is exploding popularity (great read, deep links).
A few additional signposts:
Cool, Gen Z influencers are using TikTok to grow the popularity of the “once nerdy in the 90s” Dungeons & Dragons.
Remote work may break to give rise to remote play. Will corporate budgets shift towards virtual social games to bring people together?
Collectible gaming assets are going digital, quickly. How could collectibles work to drive participation satisfaction in social events?
The insight: gaming adoption and participant joy is diverging from tradition in four key ways: live streaming, user-generated content, audio-first experiences, and online community platforms. If you’ve followed the State of Awe digests, you can see the blend of these core tenets becoming increasingly used in the most successful virtual experiences. We may be witnessing a collapse of game theory and social gathering. And this may point to the positive psychological effects that producers and organizers need to be designing for.
Fads and Crazes 📱 Meaningful Virtual Experiences
A long, observation-laden, data-driven case study trend report on the emergence of the virtual economy (must read).
Your quick hit side dishes to go with the main meal:
🤕 The eight pain points of virtual, and ways to overcome them.
🎤 Fortnite continues to charge into “extended reality” experience, with a live performance yesterday.
👇 Interactivity > entertainment. Why excessive format control needs to give way to authentic interaction.
🎟️ Five experts on how to run virtual events.
🟩 Green screen filming, from the eyes of a Japanese electro musician.
🎪 What do you do without live audiences? The show must go on.
🧍 Was virtual Burning Man the internet’s ultimate test? Not in our opinion. But the eight multiverse virtual realms came with learning lessons and some fun enjoyment:
A feature from Wired on BRCvr that we agree with. Of the eight spaces this VR-forward experience had the most depth, participation and interactivity.
A look inside The Infinite Playa, the only ticketed multiverse space, and one we thought lacked other participants. Charging $10 per hour might not have been the correct approach.
A few artists created their own virtual experiences, outside of the multiverses. Jump in for a tour.
For some, apparently Burning Man needed to be IRL in 2020. Photos from “secret playa gatherings” to an uproar over hundreds celebrating on San Francisco beaches.
The insight: experimentation is the best course of action, even when the virtual replications of IRL events lack impact. Possibilities are being shown. As friend, Jenn Sander wrote, we need to create permissible places to expand the opportunity for play. Just make it interactive, will you?
Arena of Safety and Security 🦠 COVID Edition
Winter is coming. And with outdoor environments 20 times safer than the tight indoors, most northern hemisphere locations are going to find gathering options limited. A few highlights toward “testing, cure, vaccine”:
Here in BC, nightclubs were recently forced to close. Gatherings above six in the UK are banned. Events in the fall are going to be tough.
But preparations for the future are important. Here is a reopening guide for nightclubs and nightlife.
Five ways to COVID proof an environment.
Restart-19 is the German study testing different live models. Although bad news appeared, the Bryan Adams restart show was rescheduled due to increased infections.
In our region, the British Columbia Meetings and Events Restart Guide was released.
The UK is floating the idea of a “COVID Pass”, otherwise known as an immunity passport.
Keep your eye on Jonathan Rothberg, and his novel, inexpensive at-home COVID-19 testing kit that is close to FDA approval.
The insight: super forecasters are predicting with high confidence, an approved vaccine before March 31, 2021. The numbers and the distribution will be a further issue (and are fascinating). Of course, there will be defiant rebels. The realists amongst us need to keep the faith for summer 2021.
Designer Data Drop 🧮 Chart of the Month
Inspired by digital adaptation, a look at the rise of a billion dollar market. The economic opportunities are abundant:
Arena of Sport, eSport and Gaming🌆 IRL vs Virtual
What if the Olympics never come back?
🏟️ A model that has been under siege for many reasons, COVID presses in. Although Tokyo states that 2021 will go ahead at any cost.
⚡ And while the debate rages, LA 2028 releases a very inspiring identity set that captures the essence of its people (and also nails user generated trends in general). Let’s be honest, it beats the hell out of the Expo 2025 logo.
🎈 The good news is that sport league bubbles work to keep the players safe and fans engaged. Even though fans are still skeptical. At least the leagues are blasting real crowd noise.
📈 While IRL anything is down dramatically in growth, home entertainment in the over-the-top (streaming, video games) categories are up 18.6% in 2020 alone, according to PwC. Live will make a rebound by 2022, but will the habits of today drop away?
📺 How sport streaming fans are hacking the online world to get their dose. Sporting leagues need to catch up.
💣 eSport is booming. A dedicated video game TV network plans to launch. Need a reminder of the underlying motivations of game players?
💂 The US Army is recruiting cyber soldiers through eSport.
❗ Just want IRL sport to return? While you wait, at least enjoy this weird and wacky video of the Japanese sport of Boutaoshi (meaning "bring the pole down").
The insight: The fall is here, signalled by the return of the NFL this weekend. To match, we had a few spirited discussions this week about the future of watching sports, production values, virtual reality and how fast streaming and digitization will be picked up by professional leagues. We believe there is a confluence coming, and the tussle between the virtual space and IRL fans will be an interesting one to keep our eyes on. Traditionally, sporting leagues are very resistant to change.
Department of Kid Gatherings
As parents prepare to have their children go back to school, we figured it would be an interesting moment to shed some light on experiences within the family unit, and gatherings for our younger attendees. A few varied thoughts:
👨👩👧👧 What constitutes a family? Put another way, can the rising value of non-traditional family circles compare to traditional familia bonds? Are we here to “love whoever is around to love”? An interesting piece on relationship networks.
⭕ The different high school cliques that exist today, and how they differ from year’s past. How are these changing in today’s wild times? We resurface an essay on nerds to further highlight behaviours of the younger variety.
🛌 (Adult) kids are moving back into childhood rooms and finding more than just nostalgia.
🧑🏫 The kids are in charge. A channel focused on at-home school learning for kids might help you suggest a new virtual experience for your “do gooders” at home.
📲 Kids now spend nearly as much time watching TikTok as YouTube.
🎨 Teens are finding new hobbies and new (virtual) circles to battle their social distance loneliness.
The insight: childhood satisfaction, as measured by the World Economic Forum, is hugely impacted by the degree of support teenagers receive. Put another way, positive social spheres, both at home and within their community, increases understanding and reduces negative identity issues that can be a leading cause of distress. The experience of kid social spheres is worth giving a deeper design.
Rituals and Ceremony ⚰️ Death, End of Life and Passing
Think of your weirdest, most memorable experience. We honestly don’t think it would compare to being at a funeral when this paid confessor arrives to deliver news from the grave. Surrounded by the spectre of death in the news, a few follow-up thoughts to our original section on rituals and ceremony (digest #5):
Sci-fi turns sci-reality with the emergency of digital embalmers, those responsible for your digital afterlives. Have you thought about your digital legacy?
Preparing the recipe for your last meal? You’re not alone. In this Swiss town, residents spent a lifetime aging a wheel for their funeral.
We’ve all lost something in the past months. Understand the five stages of grief, and how you might celebrate, instead of falter within each one. Our friends over at Ceremonial are launching a toolkit to honour big moments through the art of ritual. Check them out.
The insight: when done right, planning a ceremony or turning the mundane into a sacred ritual can channel deeply negative emotions into positive outcomes. As an experience designer, the art of ritual can be a powerful tool, even when it is a smaller part of an overall, larger event.
Beautiful event instas to inspire your next project (from a diverse group)
🍭 The call for final summer popsicles by Michelle Leo.
💐 Surreal floral ballroom landscapes from traditional designer, Daniel Machado Cruz.
🎉 That illustrative travel poster style that is irresistibly enjoyable by Neil Stevens.
🤩 Rugs on acid by Faig Ahmed.
🔥 The socially distant Man burnt by Burning Man.
⛺ Shelter in place? Only if there is a big top tent by Shelter Co.
🧀 A grazing table inspired by ancient times, by Bibi Hayat.
🏞️ An Ewok forest DJ booth by Bash, Please.
Hot morsels to ace your next event conversation
🧚 The Rolls Royce rebrand. Fan or critic?
😷 No surprises here. Lady Gaga outperforms, pandemic style at the VMAs.
🌠 Event Marketer recently wrapped up their Brand X Challenge, a national student design competition that highlights the opportunity of experience as a career path.
🍡 The Fluff Festival? A celebration of the sticky marshmallow ingredient that includes fluff jousting, gooey fashion and a host of games and performances. Weird and amazing.
🛣️ A choose-your-own-adventure storytelling platform is launching. One part game, one part storybook, one part social experience, Dorian, empowers fiction writers. Or check out Twine, the backbone planning platform for the audience choice, interactive Netflix film, Bandersnatch.
🌆 Blade Runner 2049 in real-life San Francisco.
👸 A donation event for the Democratic Party in the US, ‘The Princess Bride’ Cast to reunite to table read the movie together.
🤳 Still trying to figure out TikTok to integrate your event brand? A deep essay that explores the history and appeal.
🏛️ The winning immersive museum designs were announced, and they show the power of themed entertainment.
End note
This was the thirteenth edition of the State of Awe digest. And as the summer draws to a close, we are feeling fulfilled even without a season full of wild social experiences.
After a decade of writing about it, Guardian author, Oliver Burkeman sums up what he believes fills your life tanks. This year, we’ve both been stumped, and we have tolerated serious discomfort in the change, yet somehow the new path ahead has “enlarged” our future. Interesting perspective, and one we are excited about.
As always, please share with your colleagues and contacts (you can direct them here, or just share this post). It means a lot to us :)
As Ever,
Jordan + Tyson