State of Awe | Digest #3
The Latest Wonders in Experience Design, Festivals and Gatherings
April 26, 2020
Our aphorism to help with the times: Collective strain unites us later in wonderous revelry
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: is that 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, lighting up this circle of experience. Encourage others to join the club. Long live the spectacular.
Arena of Improvement, Self-Love and Betterment 🦠 COVID Edition
🩺 So, how is your quarantine? With socially distant cultural norms having been in place in most regions for well over a month (we have been in imposed isolation for 7+ weeks), we think it is time to share creative thinking on the best improvements to your environment. For this, we pull learning from Stellar Amenities, a space architecture startup and their manual “How to Thrive in Isolation”. In it, the five recommendations are unique, triggering psychological shifts by changing the environmental elements of the same room. The suggestions include using visual triggery, changes to the air, plants, light and temperature. By focusing on the details of a space, and rebalancing these five elements, a complete transformation can take place. The insight and inquiry: as experience designers, what changes are you making to your spaces to mix up your routine? For your next virtual event, how can you ask participants to change their environment to fit your theme?
🎧 Zoom everything. If you have a mobile phone that reports your weekly app usage, you have likely noticed a massive spike in the hours you spend on the video platform of your choice. While these platforms were designed primarily for “talking head” meetings, we have learned a surprising number of hacks (hot keys, gathering meeting attendee information, see here). But after hosting a large-scale virtual social event this past week, this tutorial on audio settings was so helpful for hosting a Zoom meeting with background entertainment audio playing. It might help you too.
💉 An incredible article by Eater outlining what restaurants have to do to survive this pandemic. We think this is particularly relevant to any event organizer, producer or gathering business model as well (being people-driven, socially connected businesses). The piece outlines two main questions restaurants need to answer: first, who are the customers that will be willing and able to buy from the restaurant for the next 18 to 24 months? And what can it sell these customers that they will want, while being economically and practically viable during both intense and less-intense lockdowns? The insight and inquiry: how are you preparing to shift your long-standing experiences to give your brand a shot at surviving long-term social distancing measures? Are you preparing for 18+ months, now?
Fads and Crazes 📱Meaningful Virtual Experiences
⚔️ Over the course of the past two weeks, we were personally witness to a digital arm wrestling match between two global festival organizers. One the one hand, we witnessed one organization try to shut down multiple unofficial large group WhatsApp threads in an attempt to bring all conversations under one roof, on Slack. And in response, we witnessed another organization, who was naturally part of these message threads, push back on the principle of organic community. Witnessing this battle, brought to mind the question of centralized “performative” showmanship, versus decentralized community-based creation. Which model provides the best chance for an authentic community to flourish? Let’s explore (with three questions to ponder).
🎭 One of our favourite event philosophers of the day is Priya Parker, who just launched a new podcast with the New York Times in the past couple of weeks, “Together Apart”. In one of the recent episodes, Priya covers off one of the most important principles: be more than performative, and move toward meaningful, decentralized engagement. As Priya stated, “when a gathering stays at the performative level only, it often becomes this sort of disorganized, people-talking-over-each-other, going-through-the-motions of singing thing, watching each other eat, and after a bit, waving bye and peacing out.” Her argument is that decentralizing the participation in a radical way, “bonds people together, creates a shared experience, and makes people feel seen, supported, and in it together”.
👐 The insight and inquiry: this tug-of-war conversation, witnessed by a group of experience-minded friends and colleagues, sparked a debate: which model is better? One astute observer remarked, that the decentralized organization offered the promise of true inclusive acceptance, in a community with aspirational ideals. While the organization trying to kill the organic conversations, “offered the feeling that you’ve ‘made it’ up the ranks and into an inner echelon of aspirational peers.” The question we are considering: knowing that decentralization breeds creativity and centralization spawns exclusivity, which of the two do you think builds more authentic communities?
Creators and Builders Arena
🦺 Marc Andreessen, the inventor of the first graphic interface web browser and author of one of the most prescient articles predicting a new era, "Software is Eating the World" released an essay last week that polarized the echo chambers on Twitter, titled "It is Time to Build". Have you read it, and do you think this rally call predicts a new era that will dawn in the years ahead? His last formative essay predicted a 10-15 year period of software explosion. His current argument is a creation-based approach to reboot the “American Dream”, reducing the price curve through increased supply of our most desired items. But what if our desire is to love ourselves and enjoy our neighbours, rather than in ownership of physical items?
Well, our insight and inquiry: How might we, as experience-first minds, embrace the “time to build” to reduce costs of gatherings and reduce barriers to entry? What might our society look like if gatherings were prioritized over material items by a larger number of our population? What are you building for?
Designer Data Drop 🧮 Chart of the Month
🧙 Stories make us feel like part of something bigger than ourselves. And as such, narrative is a critical part of any experience designer’s toolkit. And one, if not the most powerful story structure we have, the hero’s journey (articulated in full in Joseph Cambpell’s 1949 book “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”), is so wildly useful because we connect so easily to this format. Not only is it familiar to our brains, but it is also a story format that easily allows us to personally identify with the story protagonist, putting ourselves mentally into the story itself. The snippet below, linked in full here, symbolizes this story format with 6 famous examples. The insight and inquiry: how can you use portions of the hero’s journey storyline in your next experience?
Arena of Sport, eSport and Gaming
🎤 The thrill of victory, the agony of defeat; these missing emotions. With a complete lack of sporting events taking place across the globe, we have collected a few new examples of wins from the gaming environment in this section. For one, Travis Scott’s live virtual concert, within the video game, FORTNITE, garnered a record-setting 12.3 million viewers. You can catch a 2-minute clip of the concert here. The insight and inquiry: if you don’t think now is the time for virtual experiences, do these numbers change your mind? Do you feel as though virtual events are as relevant to older demographics, considering the average age of a player is under 24 years-old?
🤹♀️ Move over virtual NASCAR races (featured in State of Awe Digest #2). And welcome our newest contender for COVID quarantine racing supremacy: marble racing. All it takes is a couple minutes viewing this, commentary included, to get hooked. With the New York Times, New York Magazine and Washington Post all featuring “the sport” in past weeks, who is ready for the Marble Games to begin again this June?
🏇 Kentucky Derby announced this past week a full day of online festivities planned for their original race day on May 2 (now postponed to September), designed to encourage the perfect interactive Kentucky Derby party at home. NBC will broadcast Churchill Downs’ first ever virtual horse race, a computer-simulated version of a race that will feature the 13 past Triple Crown winners and use data algorithms to determine the probability of their potential finishing positions.
The insight and inquiry: again, more examples of “in real life” experiences going virtual. Races, concerts and gatherings of all types. But the biggest question might be, with a void of traditional forms of sport, gaming and celebration, what new forms of entertainment might take hold? The current environment leaves room for niche hobbies to explode into popular culture. What niche game might you make a raging cultural success?
Arena of the Environment
🌎 This past week, Earth Day celebrated its 50th anniversary. Looking back, it was a peaceful protest effort inspired after a 1969 oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara in California, that pulled activists and politicians together for the first rally. Bringing out 20 million Americans, the country’s Environmental Protection Agency was born from the widespread engagement.
✨ While we created a small, virtual #EarthDay50 gathering to celebrate, many others were doing the same. With social distancing still the cultural norm across the planet, organizers and producers needed to get creative. There were digital Minecraft art contests, a stay-at-home mural festival, environmental film screenings, and of course, Earth Day Live was hosted by the official organizing party.
🕹️ But the concept that grabbed our attention the hardest, an experience not associated with Earth Day itself, came from the Faroe Islands. Instead of welcoming travellers, this tourism-heavy destination is allowing virtual explorers to take control of an “in real life” resident for 1-minute each. The concept is wildly unique, and we would encourage you to try it out.
The insight and inquiry: is virtual tourism going to stick (sign in required) after our periods of quarantine are over? Can we drastically reduce our carbon consumption and cultural impacts on destinations by engaging in participatory digital travel? And most importantly, regardless of our IRL versus digital preferences, how do we offset our experiences in the future to make them carbon negative?
Beautiful event instas to inspire your next project
🍧 Sam Bompas and Harry Parr’s gut-brain axis fermented foods and wild lightning cooking.
🟡 Colour Factory’s very yellow ball pit.
💨 Sakchin Bessette’s (Co-Founder of Moment Factory) Whispers installation.
🤍 % Arabica Coffee’s minimalist, all-white, design forward stores are, wow!
💐 Ken Fulk’s couture floral headdress, made for Kendall Jenner.
Hot morsels to ace your next event
🤳 10 Standout Virtual Event Ideas From Around the Industry (and they really are).
🎡 Maybe it is time for all of us to implement the “Wheel of Zoom” during your next video meeting.
🎟️ Ticketmaster in tough with consumers.
❌ Cancelling your event? Here are 8 leading examples showing you how.
⛪ Worship from your car. How Easter prayer was done around the world. What experience can you shift to a parking lot?
🐀 Small is the new big. A trend that is only increasing in our times of COVID-19.
⚡ One of the best contests we’ve ever seen (with 65,000 entries before closing).
👀 List of events affected by the 2019-2020 coronavirus pandemic (updated).
End note
This third State of Awe digest is likely our final experiment before we take the concept to a larger audience, asking those in the industry to subscribe to this bi-monthly variety publication. Over the past 6 weeks of experimenting, a lot has been learned, and we are very grateful for the feedback provided by so many trusted colleagues.
Over here, we are preparing for a “new normal” in the experience space. And following along while experts make predictions of the future. But ultimately, focusing on the question “what can we do today to keep our event gatherings relevant and alive?” Hope you are too.
If you liked this edition, and think others would too, share with us your candid feedback. It would mean a lot to us, particularly now that we are committed to taking this to a much wider audience.
As Ever,
Jordan + Tyson