Hyper-driving experiences
What a blast to co-design and facilitate the new #ExdLab for and with Hyper Island last week. Working alongside Maria Eriksson – a truly generous and deft facilitator. Hyper Island brought us all together with around 30 fascinating students (all practicing professionals, some having not designed before, and some with tons of experience) from all over Europe.
Our task? Create an experience design lab. Take them through a process of understanding what is experience design – what are the materials we use in this kind of design, and what are some of the fundamentals? Then add in a real brief, and shake until something interesting comes out.
Taking examples of participatory experiences from popular culture – Slingshot’s 2.8 Hours later, Lily Allen’s The Fear video project with Rumpus Room using Xbox 360’s singing game LIPS, we see how normalised this kind of work is now, and how looking at experience as simply UX misses a massive part of the potential of designing in this space.
A chance to bring in brilliant folk like Tom Metcalfe, taking them into the future of experiences, and Joe Macleod, making sure that we understand the importance of closure in the sequence of our work – as much as the beginning are the closing credits to people, and a whole new opportunity. We added some staged prototyping work of new experiences. A brief supplied by the folk at Skyscanner got us to really explore some new ideas.
What a wonderful way to spend four days!