State of Awe Digest #16 | Haptics, audiotech, 100 true fans, persuasive psychology and the essence of play
The Latest Wonders in Experience Design, Festivals and Gatherings
October 25, 2020
Our aphorism to help with the times: That moment, that moment when the party lit up the stars, the music echoed off the moon and you embraced the blackness of the night not in dark fear, but through the light of the colourful energy of the friends you were with. That moment will come again.
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 Focus 🔮 Feature Article Thinking
With our recent foray into virtual gatherings, our use of audio-first, spatial auditory platforms like High Fidelity, and the explosion in popularity of gathering apps like Clubhouse, this very long feature piece from essayist, Matthew Ball, is spot on for those experience designers willing to ditch the visual connection.
While the opening chapters on the history of audio monetization are fascinating, it is the final chapter and the conclusionary insights that paint a dramatically changing picture for live sports, live concerts and virtual audio chat in general. It begs the question: where are the opportunities for audio only in your future gatherings, be it virtual or IRL?
Brief Obsessions 🤏 Haptics, Physical Contact and the Power of Touch
We laughed at the idea of a professional cuddler going virtual due to COVID-19. And then we noticed the largest ever global study on the influence of human touch was conducted earlier this year. 40,000 responded to the “Touch Test”, with 72% reporting a positive attitude towards touch and 54% stating they have too little in their lives. And this was pre-pandemic.
Touch does all kinds of beneficial and scientifically supported things for your mind and body.
In one study, touch predicted performance across all NBA teams. Those teams who had a deeper repertoire of positive touch, meant to communicate quickly and accurately, had increased success.
But touch, at a social distance? Difficult at best. Microsoft just revealed a haptic VR device to improve the virtual experience.
It reminded us of the invention we tried years ago, from one of our event speakers, Scott Novich. A haptic vest that translates touch through sensors around the torso (it was really neat).
But haptics is hard. The technology and its journey from wildly strange to accepted commonplace has a long way to go. Interested in the history? Long read this (really insightful).
The insight: the need to be seen is critical to our dignity and the need to be felt is critical to our humanity. We can been seen through technology, but to be felt? Still a long way from fruition. Yet our brief obsession might just unpack a few divergent ideas amongst the futurists in our midst.
Fads and Crazes 📱 Meaningful Virtual Experiences
The virtual gathering space has levelled quite a bit in recent weeks. Fewer innovations, unique showcases and a massive jungle of similarity to choose from.
Your quick hits on the latest craze:
💥 BTS, the K-Pop musical giants, crushed their pay-per-view live stream experience two weekends ago, drawing just shy of one million viewers and earning somewhere between $35-44m. An impressive average spend for a virtual concert.
🖥️ Game payments company Xsolla is launching Unconventional, a platform for holding virtual events with 3D avatars inside 3D worlds.
🤳 Zoom announced an event marketplace (currently only available in the US) to produce and market professional events on the platform.
☄️ The first massive wave of the virtual event technology investment boom has arrived, mirroring the 2002 online music platform explosion. Many swells to come.
⚡ The Academy of Country Music Awards scored a 10 on its delivery of their virtual version.
📉 Cvent releases an event industry report for September, and the insight? Crushing revenue losses across a majority of the gathering spectrum, with increasing uncertainty regarding when producers can properly execute hybrid event formats.
🙄 Yet advice on virtual abounds. 6 best practices, 8 success stories and 9 lessons.
➰ OK, so you need useful material? Here is a comparison of retention rates with online platforms to measure your return guest count against.
⛔ Moment House, a geo-fenced “forced local” virtual concert platform continues to be backed by celebrities. It is exploring a “scarcity concept”, going against the grain of one of virtual gathering’s biggest benefits (i.e. global scale). We are curious to see if this works.
🏛️ Fisher-Price, wields the powerful force of nostalgia (covered deeply in digest #10), opening a 100-exhibit virtual toy museum on Instagram.
The insight: Celebrity forces, nostalgic feelings and high volume experimentation will guide your virtual endeavours while the uncertainty of the future rages on.
Creators and Builders Coliseum 🔨 Trying New Things
So, you’re one of those upstart risk takers out there trying new things? Seeing what sticks? This section collects a few gems for you to consider as you forge new pathways.
Three factors for innovation. The ingredients? Necessity for change (check), incentives that drive that necessity, and a tolerance for new ideas.
Realistic or fantastical goals? Choose your stretch wisely.
Your 100 true fan roadmap.
The insight: every creator has felt it. Starting something new feels like a near impossible, death-defying, spirit breaking journey. What really matters is the energy you have for the fight. Huh, what’s that? Your gloves are up and you’re ready for a punch? Great, then dive into the nuanced insider details of how DARPA, one of the most successful invention agencies on the globe, produces world changing results (long and fascinating).
On Persuasion, Sales and Ticketing
Oh wait! You’ve already built something new? And just need the willing participants to join you for the journey? Well then, a few follow-up suggestions from our original highlights on “conviction-conversion” from digest #9:
🧫 Yes, this virus is hyper contagious. And the lessons are priceless. Think like a super spreader, and design for k-value. Tomas Pueyo, one of our favourite thinkers of the pandemic on epidemic virality lessons.
👀 Conformity influence is wildly powerful. Watch this vintage video on the Asch experiment showing how planted endorsement can be more mighty than reality.
🧠 Meeting resistance? Learn the three strategies for changing someone’s mind.
🦸 Drive a new social identity for your community. Membership in social groups, both inclusive and exclusive, shape a person’s view of self-identity.
The insight: “Long after a technology appears, what’s still lacking is the will to adopt it.” (source). A majority of the time, the hype and the application don’t arrive together. Instead of being contagious like a virus, the generation of hype requires, at times, a network of convincing touch points before the patient is infected. What does that spread look like? Complex contagion, and it represents the current state of virtual gatherings. If you’re working the space of virtual connection like us, focus on the basics: managed expectations, extremely high quality experience and intentional manufacture of old fashioned word-of-mouth. It’s the only way to grow huge.
Designer Data Drop 🧮 Chart of the Month
The 29 psychological trends that convince you otherwise.
Arena of Safety and Security 🦠 COVID Edition
Who out there is yearning for a real gathering? We feel you. Here is your series of innovation flashes and dampening setbacks from around the safety-first IRL sphere:
In case you missed it: the Flaming Lips take social imagery by storm by playing a concert from within real bubbles, to people also in bubbles. Priceless footage.
CommonPass, a certification app for coronavirus lab results, launches to help air travel return. Applications to large-scale events is an easy parlay.
In other airport news, London Heathrow begins rapid testing of passengers for $100. Wynn Resorts makes a big bet on testing too.
Insider thoughts on the restrictions in operating a live music venue.
An economically-minded look at the constant evolution of “drive in” experiences.
April 2021 now “off the table” for Coachella. Fingers are crossed for October.
Save Our Stages Festival raises close to two million for independent event venues in the US. We don’t think it will be enough.
Germany’s 10-point plan to salvage their events industry.
The insight: Our “return to IRL” mantra: testing, cure, vaccine, continues to develop in various ways. None of which are showing progress quickly enough to save every gathering. There will be losses. And the return may have significantly increased production costs for those who are left as we meet the health expectations of attendees.
House of Experimentation 📖 Experience Economy Stories
We have been inspired by the stories of hardship and innovation emerging from the pandemic. A freshly minted section of the digest, we are sharing three longer, storybook pieces. Enjoy the tales of contrast, one of hope and others of despair:
The story of The Bitter End, one of New York’s most famous clubs in Greenwich. Across the Atlantic, tales from Berlin’s pandemic rave nightclub scene. Both show the hardship of the arts, culture and live music gathering spheres underway right now. In Germany 94% of nightclubs are about to close, just as bad in other parts of Europe.
A first person walkthrough narrative of a soon-to-launch Minecraft nightclub.
Thinkers and Philosophers 🕵 Roger Callois
French intellectual and cross-cultural ambassador, Roger Callois (1913 - 1978) was a human experience philosopher who articulated a modern definition of our inner child’s most important habit: play. Pulling on the themes of mimicry (covered in-depth by the famous thinker, René Girard, featured in digest #8) and “virtual reality” building, Roger Callois’ game theory is an important thinking model for experience designers of all types. The importance of play in an adult’s life cannot be understated.
⚽ Coming out of his book Man, Play and Games, Callois interpreted many forms of today’s complex social structures and behaviour as an adult version of play: sporting events, lotteries, stock market speculation, outdoor activities and even movie theatres. Play is central to the individual’s enjoyment of a majority of experiences, and the central tenets can be used in combination with one another to form deeply emotional outcomes.
🎯 He built up the concept of play using six core characteristics: it is free, separate from reality, uncertain, unproductive in it creates no wealth, it is governed by rules, and play is always make-believe.
🧞 The Callois tenets are the four fundamental categories of play: agôn (competition), alea (chance), mimicry (simulation), and ilinx (vertigo). These are further classified by paidia, a more playful form of activity, and ludus, a play that is structured with rules.
➕ He further outlined an experience design playbook by showing how categories could be combined for enhanced effects. Competition and chance amplify rule sets; simulation and vertigo together demonstrate a free act of will, and the feeling of achievement in overcoming imaginary obstacles. The pillars are powerful tools.
The insight: play is a basic human need (even when you’re an adult). Yet it materializes in adults with distinctly different preferences. How might you combine the Callois tenets into your next gathering, transporting us to the realms of our wildest imaginations? As one of our favourite gathering philosophers, Priya Parker always champions: rules (ludus) allow the creation of alternate realities. And we believe human joy comes pouring out within those new imaginative spaces. Remember to play.
Beautiful event instas to inspire your next project (from a diverse group)
🎥 Projection ceilings at the insanely beautiful, Atletier des Lumieres.
🌹 Contemporary floral immersive by the talented, Albero Doro.
🏰 Tuscan farm meets palatial tastes by Angela Mugnai.
🎂 Whoa level cake by Julián Ángel.
🛁 Plant baths by Dee Campling.
🌊 Need an escape? How about socially distant dinner in the ocean by Paul Milinski.
Hot morsels to ace your next event conversation
🌰 Seed Card, a tool for experience design thought starters.
🔪 Looking for more gaming ideas at home? Check out the super successful “Hunt a Killer” mail puzzle series.
🧊 Dropbox goes “virtual first” in the work-from-anywhere war, but does so inclusively without forgetting both human connection and the importance of equality of opportunity.
✈️ Singapore Airlines' launched an Airbus A380 restaurant, and tickets sold out in 30 minutes.
⛰️ The US election is coming. Not into it? Can’t handle the uncertainty of the result? It’s ok, you can hide under a rock that night.
🏨 Las Vegas will be home to the first Atari Hotel, another great example of a nostalgia market play. Check out the renderings. Meanwhile, Universal Group launches music hotels.
📸 Google AI will print 10 of your best photos and send them to you every month, expertly blending the digital and the analog in creating stronger memories.
End note
This was the sixteenth edition of the State of Awe digest. In a time of social distance, we are working diligently in the background on community building in this new era. We feel this has raised importance in the context of the experience economy, particularly when experienced-based businesses are failing rapidly:
Speaking of community, ours is growing. And we owe thanks to the many of you who are sharing our digests. Keep it up, and if you haven’t yet done so, please consider forwarding this letter directly by email to two colleagues in the experience economy. Direct them here.
As Ever,
Jordan + Tyson