State of Awe | Digest #5
The Latest Wonders in Experience Design, Festivals and Gatherings
May 24, 2020
Our aphorism to help with the times: Wake yourself from that sensible slumber of reality by regularly setting an alarm of absurdity. Every good gathering has a touch of madness. It is what makes it memorable.
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.
Arena of Safety and Security 🦠 COVID Edition
Tomas Pueyo, a previously unknown author, emerged as a runaway communicator in the early stages of the Coronavirus pandemic for his long-form, visual heavy, fact laden explanations at the intersection of the virus, politics and behaviour. The articles on his Medium channel skyrocketed into the tens of millions of views. And early on, his article “The Hammer and the Dance” perfectly explained the strategy that regions faced on the road back to normalcy. Part 5 of his “Learning How to Dance” series outlines fascinating cost-benefit methodologies (illustrative only) to reopening both events and travel. The road ahead is long and twisty.
🔫 Habit triggers have been pulled. New habits are forming. And habits are sticky things. Accenture notes that spending patterns will change permanently (source), Facebook released a report that shows a majority of businesses are increasing online interactions with customers (source), McKinsey notes radical changes in online behaviours taking shape (source), and the City of Vancouver’s COVID-19 Impact Report highlights that between 55-60% of respondents won’t attend live music or sporting events until there is a vaccine (source, page 12).
The insight and inquiry: depending on where you create, you are likely in a region “doing the dance”. Yet it is clear that indoor, high contact events and travel could be “under the hammer” for quite some time. The cost-benefit decisions of reopening social experiences are going to be difficult to overcome. What new habits in events and travel do you think will stick?
Arena of Economics 💰 Virtual Experience Pricing
So then, we forge ahead and “digitize the live experience”? Looking back on how this historically developed in music, in media, in writing and film (and now happening in healthcare), the “digitized experience” of these content mediums dropped the value of the artistic product to near zero, before new economic models resurfaced (with massively changed implications for the creators). Will the combination of technology and new behaviours drive the cost of live art to zero? In states that have started to reopen, customers have not yet flocked back to establishments of the experience economy. The insight and inquiry: the digital shift moment may have come for live and consumption value may plummet. What can you do to protect your economic models?
💣 The digitized disruption is almost cliché. But history has a way of rhyming, as Mark Twain said. "Television won't last, because people will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night,” Darryl Zanuck, the founder of 20th Century Pictures, infamously predicted in 1946. Yet today’s disruption looks a bit different. As detailed in extensive depth on the Stratechery blog, their aggregator theory explains how traditional distributors have had their competitive plane fundamentally upended by digital aggregators who drop content transaction costs to near zero. The insight and inquiry: could an aggregation platform emerge and make life challenging for live experience distributors too? What segments of the experience economy could this transform? The fog-of-war is thick and pervasive, and may lay at ground level for some time still.
💸 Yet there is no doubt the consumer is willing to pay less for virtual experiences. The perceived value hasn’t been balanced with outcomes, yet. Free tickets are still the norm, with “pay what you want” and extremely lenient refund policies the new standard (reference source). That said, unique approaches are materializing. Take “share of wallet” as a potential gold standard example. Virtual experiences cost less to produce, cost less to attend, but can the monetary dollar margin remain strong?
The insight and inquiry: how can you evolve your fundraising events, ensure sustainability and protect “share of wallet”. Gallus Events put together a 5 phase strategy that might be helpful.
Fads and Crazes 📱Meaningful Virtual Experiences
Creating new virtual experiences? Learning the ropes, like us? A few quick hits.
👰 Yes, virtual weddings can be more than a Zoom room. Long read this.
🧑🔬 A grand unified theory of digital? Unlikely, but their principles are pretty strong.
🦸♀️ Reach for celebrity involvement? Costs are lower than ever, and it works.
🤝 Coming soon: the hybrid experience problem. The shift ‘back to normal’ will be gradual, starting primarily virtual, through a 50/50 scenario, to physical events augmented by virtual guests.
🎥 Could events learn from the film industry? A few learning lessons.
🧠 The psychology of virtual? Humans are irrational, inattentive and emotional. Make it simple, control attention and appeal to the emotional brain first (source, page 17):
Unveil a secret speaker for your event;
Have a game or a quest built in and incentivize participation;
Your content needs to trigger emotions by telling stories visually and audibly.
🛀 Don’t forget that live experiences introduce randomness, intimacy and absurdity into our lives. Examples of virtual absurdity? Intimacy? How about the audio-only bathtub event or the suggestion of a virtual group “hot tub”.
💥 High Fidelity, one of the hot virtual gathering platforms we have been following closely recently beta launched. We recommend you give it a try.
Arena of Environment, Architecture and Installations 🌆 WFH Edition
Some predict a harsh future for urban environments. Others are holding strong to the contrarian perspective, predicting cities will continue to thrive. But there is a growing chorus of voices and leadership commitments to a permanent work from home corporate culture. Take @jack or @tobi as prime examples. Of course there are many contrarian opinions (with good logic). Does permanent WFH catch on?
📈 Global Workplace Analytics estimates that when the pandemic is over, 30 percent of the entire workforce will work from home at least a couple times a week. Before the pandemic, that number was in the low single digits.
🗃️ Work from home is more inclusive. It is changing corporate culture. But what does this mean for work-based gatherings? “Employees are being productive from home, but the sense of community and connection is what is most missed” (source).
🏝️ Is Work from Home (WFH) actually Work from Anywhere (WFA)?
🏗️ Is there a massive office reconfiguration about to happen? There’s a growing consensus that “employers may have fewer people on premises at any one time, but they may need more space per person” (source).
🍿 Even more powerfully, is there a physical space shift, in more general terms, on its way? Study shows 70% of consumers would rather watch new movies at home.
The insight and inquiry: The office is no longer a place, but an experience. How might event organizers and producers convince leaders and decision makers to integrate more frequent and diverse social experiences into the regular routine of operation? Done safely, there will be an obvious increase in desire.
Rituals and Ceremony ⚰️ Death, End of Life and Passing
Tradition, expressed in the form of long-standing rituals and ceremony, normally take extended periods, even generations to change with any significance. But the current global context is leaving no event untouched, including end of life. Of course, things were changing before COVID-19, with cremation rates increasing rapidly and a larger majority of the living wanting a positive, celebration of life.
😰 With certain regions facing extreme burial logistics, end of life gatherings being postponed more regularly, and online, live streaming funeral services popping up to service the new normal, we decided to uncover a few interesting thought starters on this often forgotten (until it is needed) style of gathering.
💀 Looking back, this category of experience is as old as humanity, with burial sites dating back some 60,000 years, urns being discovered as early as 7,000 B.C., embalming taking place at 3,400 B.C. and some of the most impressive architecture in the world being directly related to the burial of dead leaders. The rituals associated with these burial logistics are a bit fuzzier, yet history has seen a myriad of funeral traditions that still hold true today. The variety is fascinating.
🙌 Preparing for end of life has become a more positive, online experience than ever before. We met the Co-Founders of After at the TED Conference in Vancouver last year, and they have since launched a suite of digital experiences to help plan your end of life. Including an end of life festival on now until July 9th, that was inspired by OpenIDEO’s social good challenge network.
🏺 Solace, founded by designers from Nike, is redesigning the cremation process with a modern, straightforward, digital-approach.
📀 Music lover? How about your ashes pressed into vinyl?
🍽️ Death Over Dinner, uncovered that 75% of Americans want to die at home, yet only 25% of them do. Since 2013, they have hosted over one hundred thousand #deathdinners, and the stories are powerful. While The Dinner Party has 4,000+ active 20- and 30-something members who gather bimonthly in over 100 locations worldwide to share their experience and transform their life after the loss of a loved one.
The insight and inquiry: Are we dying as we desire? Are we being remembered by the living in the ways we intended? Do our celebration of life ceremonies, our burial rituals, represent the best approach to the end of our lives and give our loved ones the outlet to proceed without us? The trends changing our end of life gatherings are underpinned by the same trends we see across other intimate gatherings (for the living, not the passed): design-forward solutions, digitization, a desire to share and connect over a mutual experience, and a push to recognize our vulnerability through transparency and openness. What are your thoughts?
Designer Data Drop 🧮 Chart of the Month
🛬 Travel and leisure travel, due to border restrictions and quarantine measures, has been decimated. We wondered, who might this impact the most? The chart below (which can be seen in full here), outlines the stark reality for certain economies. Watch for travel experience features in future editions of this digest.
The Catwalk 💃 Fashion Gathering Futures
Style-based experiences! You know, those pompous runway shows, the celebrity-dripping galas and the destination-driving fashion week celebrations. Our insight search returned quite the creative map of innovations.
👸 As is normal in the fashion world, the power of celebrity, influence and “imitation culture” still reigns supreme in attracting numbers to any gala (side note: mimetic rivalry may be a feature of a coming “Thinkers and Philosophers” section).
💻 A number of fashion brands jumped into the digital divide, quite possibly, faster than any other event organizer. The creativity is pretty stunning. Living room catwalks, see-now-buy-now functionality, computer generated virtual clothing, and virtual reality fashion weeks to name a few.
📽️ Vogue Business featured two very striking and strategic articles of innovative thinking. Notably, viewers need to be transported from simple storytelling to “story living” (exceptional article). The audience needs to be part of the emerging story. And a recognition that producers need “more immersive, interactive and profoundly explorative camerawork” to keep the broadcast interesting and dynamic.
The insight and inquiry: fashion brands are making quick moves into the digital sphere. Not a surprise, as these agile designers have been increasingly comfortable with seasonal change and “fast fashion”. An industry of innovators, virtual event standards may come from this group of professional gatherers. Watch for a landslide of emerging ideas coming from this space.
Beautiful event instas to inspire your next project
👗 Kristin Banta’s fake crowds.
🧂 Costas Spathis’ aerial “salt shaker” photograph (the proximity of humans is worth a thousand words).
🧚 Bassett Events’ Fairy Couch.
🌏 Arcadia Events’ ‘Instagram museum’ for our environmental crises.
🌈 Tom Fruin’s beautiful water tower.
Hot morsels to ace your next event
📇 50 ideas, principles and theories that could change your intellectual life.
😎 A credible leak on Apple’s coming Augmented Reality Glasses. How is AR going to change live experience? We think massively.
🧲 A hot pack of design ideas and principles from LA.
👋 Missing random new connections in your life? Check out the concept called Britain Connects 2020. Will this work?
🔩 A kit of parts for rapid outdoor dining deployment.
🍩 Mini-doughnut drive thru, anyone?
🖌️ An art project that reimagines history’s liveliest paintings integrated with modern technologies.
🟣 Remember when we featured marble racing (digest #3)? The Marble Racing League gets a John Oliver sponsorship. The future of sport?
📯 A platform for easy-to-produce tribute videos.
👅 Recreating any flavour by licking… An electrode? An experience we want to try.
👀 List of events affected by the 2019-2020 coronavirus pandemic (updated).
End note
This was the fifth edition of the State of Awe digest, the first on the online platform we have selected as the future home. As always, critical feedback is welcome and appreciated.
If you liked this edition, and think others would too, share with your colleagues and contacts (you can direct them here, or just share this post). 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