State of Awe Digest #19 | Why we really go to restaurants
The Latest Wonders in Experience Design, Festivals and Gatherings
December 6, 2020
Our aphorism to help with the times: I trust this email… finds you consumed by dreams of group hugs.
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
How long it has been since you’ve been to a restaurant? No wait. The question to really ponder: how long has it been since you have really enjoyed being at a restaurant? Live pandemic experiences, even when they look like they should, just don’t materialize the same immersive feelings.
Kickstart your Sunday with a long read story that explains in pre-pandemic terms, why we really go to restaurants. Tactically, yes, to eat. But truly speaking, it isn’t for the food.
The insight: the read is loaded with clever truths. How might you apply them? Conjuring an enchanting atmosphere requires a cocooned environment design that projects a sense of timelessness and transports the user. The best restaurants sell a fantasy, an escape, an altered reality. One that makes “a spectacle not of the individual, but of the ensemble”. Experience designs are very typically masterful works of art with uncountable layers. The effort to get to this outcome is painstaking: the menus alone require “ten drafts before being finalized”. We always like starting with a piece that espouses classic design tenets.
Or biggest takeaway: enshrine the freedom of choice inside a believable, imaginary world. What you receive in return is a loyalty that forms through expression.
The Boutique of Food and Beverage
While we are on the topic of food, a few notable pandemic changes taking shape:
The shifting sands of event catering: buffets are out, safety is in and meal kits are here to stay.
Third-party delivery will continue to disrupt restaurants heavily, and fast food outlets will look very different.
“Restaurants as marketplaces”. Something the mid-market, independent restauranteurs need to embrace? How might a restaurant break out of the “four walls of service”?
Outdoor dining environments are rapidly developing. Twelve innovations from middle America.
Best-in-class virtual event delivery boxes.
The insight: this was the year that changed restaurants. What happens next? … (stat-laden story, great read) … Heavy ashes before the phoenix rises, there’s no doubt. While we wait, here is a feel good alert. And a nice thread behind the creative insight of star chef, Rene Redzepi and the world’s best restaurant, Noma. Forced limitation is the seed that grows innovation.
Fads and Crazes 📱 Meaningful Virtual Experiences
To make room for things we found more interesting within this digest, a shorter-than-usual list of quick hits in the virtual gathering space:
🙅 You’re thinking about virtual events all wrong. We agree.
🙌 The latest and greatest: Pinterest tests online events, BTS, Studio 2054 and Amazon Explore. The 9 coolest virtual stages and Rival Peak launches, a Survivor reality show featuring AI characters that you can influence.
✍️ Lesson plans: how to venue livestream pivot, how to virtual scavenger hunt, awesome do’s and don'ts, a comprehensive cheat sheet for all producers and a long read from bonafide experience.
The insight: free yourself from what’s expected, make it interactive, and take insights from the video game industry: multiplayer mode works best when it is small. Social psychologist John Drury believes virtual can replicate, at least in part, the key emotional outcomes of events: validation (sharing the same emotions with others), recognition (being seen by others) and support (security in shared purpose). First principle design is powerful.
Brief Obsessions 🕳️ What Are We Missing?
We have been thinking since digest #12: if live entertainment is having its Napster moment, what are the big gaps that need to be filled before socializing virtually is actually enjoyable? How do we go from Napster to Spotify for remote gatherings, buggy-and-annoying to smooth-and-enjoyable?
As this “what’s missing” piece points out (very insightful), the “new normal” is missing something. Oh right. What does fun feel like again?
After nine months, it is obvious Zoom isn’t delivering the oxytocin. It reminds us of the days pirating MP3s as teenagers, spending more time frustrated at the computer virus we caught than actually enjoying freshly secured musical vibes. Yet technology iteration manages to fill holes quickly. And we were drawn in by this feature article by Wired (resource packed); platforms are making quick progress in making virtual parties fun (hint: it’s proximity audio, a topic we have covered extensively since digest #4). But there is still a long way to go.
So, what are we missing? Our frustration gaps for you to consider:
Gap 1: Understanding. In other words, what works best in producing the most positive range of human emotional outcomes? Well, a German team from Zeppelin University has created a study to measure exactly this (very cool). They will test six virtual streaming styles, collect physiological data and try and determine which format is most emotionally effective. They have a sister study on IRL concerts to compare results against too. We simply need more information on what formats best serve the audience.
Gap 2: Sensory voids. If John Drury argues we need to be seen, and the philosopher philosopher Martin Heidegger argues that to feel human we need to feel ‘being there’, then our hardware needs to replicate this for us. Our senses need to be filled. From an inability to simply make eye contact on video calls, to the feeling of another’s touch (digest #16 covered remote haptics) the gaps are both nuanced and obvious. There has been a long history of trying. Yet, the research is clear that tactile, olfactory and audio cues increase the user’s sense of presence and memory of the virtual. What small changes can technologists make now?
Gap 3: Fluidity and randomness. As this piece summarizing solutions to tackle “Zoom Gloom” states (design philosopher must read), we need to feel like we can “weave through time and space”. Yes, this includes progressively smooth interfaces, which will increase the fulfillment of randomness. Remember when you met your new best friend at the bar ordering drinks? We do, and we like that.
Gap 4: Consumer adoption and diffusion. Calm matters, and technology is best when invisible. And this last gap is a function of time. How quickly can the risk-taking designers improve accessibility? How long between big consumer adoption cycles, much like the explosive adoption of the smartphone in the last decade, or the growth of Zoom as the video call standard?
The insight: Bill Gates predicts an acceleration of technical capabilities will soon relieve our biggest remote social frustrations. What do you think? What are the biggest things we are missing from virtual entertainment? Drop us a comment below, we would really love to hear from you.
Designer Data Drop 🧮 Chart of the Month
The light is breaking in the dark, socially distant tunnel, and it is hard not to be excited.
In lieu of our regular section on event safety, covering the “holy trinity” of in-real-life return (testing, cure, vaccine), here is a deeply insightful timeline chart from Goldman Sachs on vaccine-based herd immunity by country (source).
All things going well, IRL gatherings will be back in scaling sizes starting in Q2 of next year. 🍾
Arena of Sport, eSport and Gaming 🌆 Viewership Valuations
With a big number of North America’s professional sporting leagues having awarded their “COVID-year champions” and now working through their off-season plans, we had to ask, how did the pandemic year affect viewership? When considering virtual engagement, we feel there are lines of inquiry to consider and behavioural insights to glean from the world of sport and gaming:
Across the board, from the Stanley Cup to the US Tennis Open to the Indianapolis 500 viewership of championship competition bottomed into all-time lows. Logical reasoners suggested an oversupply of sports to watch was to blame.
Yet months removed from the overlap of the summer, both the NFL and golf are down as well, with the Masters Tournament hitting near all-time lows (without much competition for attention). With everyone at home, doesn’t this seem counterintuitive?
Meanwhile, eSports continue to dominate viewership growth. Fornite broke a record last week with 15.3 concurrent players (breaking Twitch in the process). And as this sport-to-gaming comparison report suggests (with lots of data), video game viewing will only continue to rise against the backdrop of declining sporting viewership.
Other signals abound, from a sag in Grammy interest to an 80% drop in box office sales (no surprise there), record-breaking Twitch streaming to the League of Legends championship topping 100 million viewers worldwide. And Disney+ smashed subscriber expectations.
The insight: temporary glitch in the matrix? Or massively changing consumer preferences? We are voting on the latter, as the data shifts are incredible. What does this mean for experience designers? For one, everyone is gaming more (not just kids) and doing it in unique ways. Alternate reality puzzling games are hot (great feature). Experiences should take note, as these attention points will be important in future designs. But mostly, preferences and habits are changing dramatically, and as covered in digest #15, legacy institutions are imploding. What was once, may be past. And it is worth taking stock of your legacy expectations.
A Brief History 📋 5 Broad Lessons
There are two ways to learn from history: pull takeaways and find patterns between specific events, or find the more sweeping lessons that apply to a greater number of us. And as this digest wraps, we thought we would leave you with a feature piece that draws out 5 big, broad lessons (a keeper).
The insight: a thoughtful summary to keep in your back pocket. But for us, the best takeaway? That progress needs a balance between pure optimism and constructive pessimism. That the near-term can be riddled with setbacks and challenges, while the more lofty horizons tend to hold great return. Plan for 2021 risks like an optimist, but never lose touch that reality will find a way to make it difficult for all of us. Probabilistic thinking is a nice reality grounder.
Beautiful event instas to inspire your next project (from a diverse group)
📸 A wedding portrait from the future by Filosphi.
💐 Incredible “lay flats” by Éva Németh.
🔲 Night time, long exposure drone photography by Reuben Wu.
🏨 Jean Nouvel reveals designs for a mountain-carved hotel in Saudia Arabia, honouring past monuments carved from cliff faces (with video).
🏀 David Stark’s jumpman.
🪞 Cobble stone mirrors by Gradient.
🙏 Zen Garden building activity, ideal for remote and virtual, by Christina Manso.
🌴 Golden palms by Renny & Reed.
🗿 Humanity disappearing into sculpture by the iconic Yayoi Kusama
Hot morsels to ace your boring Zoom call conversation
📚 We found you the perfect Zoom call wardrobe: a puffy bookcase dress.
🛌 Need a video call distraction while someone rambles on too long? 25 surprising places to sleep, the weird and the wacky.
🌅 Or just need a nice vista? Here are the top shots from the 2020 International Landscape Photographers of the Year.
🎁 Cheat on your Zoom call with a solid gift guide for this very strange pandemic Holiday. You could always use DoorDash to gift a meal too.
🏆 Dezeen announced their annual architectural award winners for 2020. Exhibition and installation of the year awards were included.
🥫 All the things you can put into a vending machine to make an experience.
🤳 Using Discord yet? Their solution had a twisty path to stardom.
😔 Remember the Flaming Lips concert in actual bubbles? They had to postpone their follow-up show.
🧑🏫 Welcome, a new platform, launches with the goal for everyone to throw Apple keynote-style presentations.
📲 Text message-based marketing insights from the biggest shopping window of the year, for those of you in the communications game.
🎆 Walmart announces drone light shows, the ‘20s version of fireworks, for the Holidays to spread some joy.
End note
This was the nineteenth edition of the State of Awe digest. In case you’re looking, you know where to find us:
We would be very grateful if you took the time to forward this letter directly by email to two colleagues in the experience economy. Direct them here.
As Ever,
Jordan + Tyson