The second (vertical) dimension of experience describes the kind of connection, or environmental relationship, that unites customers with the event or performance. At one end of this spectrum lies absorption—occupying a person's attention by bringing the experience into the mind from a distance—and at the other end is immersion—becoming physically (or virtually) a part of the experience itself. In other words, if the experience “goes into” guests, as when watching TV, then they are absorbing the experience. If, on the other hand, guests “go into” the experience, as when playing a virtual game, then they are immersed in the experience.
Figure 2-1: Experience realms
People viewing the Kentucky Derby from the grandstand absorb the event taking place before them from a distance. Meanwhile, people in the infield are immersed in the sights, sounds, and smells of the race itself as well as the activities of the other revelers around them. Students inside a lab during a physics experiment are immersed more than when they only listen to a lecture; seeing a film at the theatre with an audience, a large screen, and stereophonic sound immerses people in the experience far more than if they were watching the same film at home on the family room TV.
The coupling of these dimensions defines the four realms of an experience—entertainment, educational, escapist, and esthetic, as shown in figure 2-1—mutually compatible domains that often commingle to form uniquely personal encounters. The kind of experiences most people think of as entertainment occur when they passively absorb the experiences through their senses, as generally occurs when they view a performance, listen to music, or read for pleasure. But even though many experiences entertain, not all of them are, strictly speaking, entertainment, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the action of occupying a person's attention agreeably; amusement.”3 Entertainment provides not only one of the oldest forms of experience (surely jokes have been around at least since the beginning of humankind) but also one of the most developed and, today, the most commonplace and familiar. (The “unproductive labourers” Adam Smith singled out were all entertainers: “players, buffoons, musicians, opera-singers, opera-dancers, &c.”) As the Experience Economy gears up, people look in new and different directions for increasingly unusual experiences. At the same time, few of these experiences exclude at least momentary entertainment, making people smile, laugh, or otherwise enjoy themselves. But there are also opportunities for those enterprises staging these experiences to add to the mix components of the other three realms of experience: the educational, the escapist, and the esthetic.
The Educational
As with entertainment experiences, in educational experiences the guest (or student, if you prefer) absorbs the events unfolding before him. Unlike entertainment, however, education involves the active participation of the individual. To truly inform people and increase their knowledge or skills, educational events must actively engage the mind (for intellectual education) or the body (for physical training). As Stan Davis and Jim Botkin write in The Monster Under the Bed, “The industrial approach to education … [made] teachers the actors and students the passive recipients. In contrast, the emerging new model [of business-led education] takes the market perspective by making students the active players. The active focus will shift from the provider to the user, from educat-ors (teachers) to learn-ors (students), and the educating act will reside increasingly in the active learner, rather than the teacher-manager. In the new learning marketplace, customers, employees, and students are all active learners or, even more accurately, interactive learners.”4
Judith Rodin, former president of the University of Pennsylvania, also recognized the active nature of education, as well as the fact that learning is not limited to the classroom. In her 1994 inaugural address she proclaimed, “We will design a new Penn undergraduate experience. It will involve not only curriculum, but new types of housing, student services, and mentoring, to create a seamless experience between the classroom and the residence, from the playing field to the laboratory. I am committed to having this in place for students entering Penn in the fall of 1997. That class—the Class of 2001—will be our first class to have an entirely new experience—the Penn Education of the Twenty-First Century.”5 Before leaving Penn in 2005 to head the Rockefeller Foundation, Rodin followed up her plan with a report outlining the progress made in successfully enhancing the educational value derived from all of campus life.
Although education is serious business, this doesn't mean that educational experiences can't be fun. The term edutainment was coined to connote an experience straddling the realms of education and entertainment.6 Blending learning with fun occurs at each of the writing and tutoring centers affiliated with the nonprofit educational organization 826 National. Beginning with the first 826 location that opened in 2002 in San Francisco as 826 Valencia, each center features a uniquely themed storefront that acts as a portal of fun through which children (ages six through eighteen) must pass on their way to one-on-one tutoring, writing workshops, or other educational events. Each portal operates as a fully functioning retail store, exclusively selling merchandise in keeping with the location-specific motif (with proceeds helping fund the core learning sessions). At the original 826 Valencia, it's simply the Pirate Supply Store. Subsequent stores offer much richer edutainment: Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co. (“purveyors of high quality crimefighting merchandise”) at 826 NYC; Echo Park Time Travel Mart at 826 LA; Liberty Street Robot Supply & Repair at 826 Michigan in Ann Arbor; The Boring Store at 826 Chicago, Greenwood Space Travel Supply Company at 826 Seattle; the Bigfoot Research Institute at 826 Boston; and the Museum of Unnatural History at 826 DC in Washington, D.C. By emphasizing creative and expository writing as the active measure of successful tutoring (many locations publish student material in bound book form) and by absorbing fun with each visit, students find that tutoring, formerly a dreaded experience, becomes much-desired learning.
The Escapist
Memorable encounters of a third kind—escapist experiences—involve much greater immersion than do entertainment or educational experiences. In fact, escapist experiences are the polar opposite of pure entertainment. Guests of escapist experiences are completely immersed in them as actively involved participants.7 Examples of essentially escapist environments include generally artificial activities—trekking about in theme parks, gambling at casinos, playing computer-based games, chatting online, or even participating in a game of paintball in the local woods—as well as more natural ones, like the “thrilling escapes” featured in Peter Guttman's book Adventures to Imagine. Rather than play the passive role of couch potato, watching others act, people become actors, able to affect the actual performances.
One might enhance the inherent entertainment value of a movie, for example, not only with larger screens, bigger sound, cushier chairs, VIP rooms, and so forth, but also by having customers actually participate in the thrill of movement. Myriad companies now bring such experiences to a neighborhood near you via motion-based attractions.8 Early stars of this genre include Tour of the Universe, a group flight through outer space from SimEx of Toronto; Magic Edge, a simulation of a military dogfight for multiple players in Mountain View, California, and Tokyo; and Disney's Star Tours, a simulation of a heroic battle for galactic domination based loosely on the Star Wars movies.
Most such escapist experiences are essentially motion simulator rides based on popular adventure or science fiction movies. Additional examples include Back to the Future: The Ride and Terminator 2: Battle Across Time hosted at Universal Studios in Orlando and Aladdin's Magic Carpet at Walt Disney World. These rides perfectly express the shift from the Service to the Experience Economy. It used to be, “You've read the book, now go see the movie!” Today, it's, “Now that you've seen the movie, go experience the ride!”9
Despite the appellation, guests participating in escapist experiences not only embark from but also voyage to a specific place and activity worthy of their time. For example, some vacationers, no longer conte
nt to only bask in the sun, go rollerblading, snowboarding, skysurfing, white-water kayaking, mountain climbing, or sports-car racing, or they take part in other extreme sports.10 Others try their hand at the time-honored art of gambling not only to forget all their troubles and forget all their woes but also because they enjoy the visceral experience of risking their money in opulent surroundings for a chance at greater fortune. Others want to escape their fortunes to see what it's like conversing with the common man. Former Dallas Cowboys quarterback and TV commentator Troy Aikman, for instance, once told Sports Illustrated why he frequently visited America Online: “I like to go to the Texas Room and chat with people. It puts us on the same level. It's nice, too, having a normal conversation with somebody without them knowing who I am.”11 While celebrities may value an experience that turns them into ordinary folks, many escapist experiences, such as computer-based sports games, let the average person feel what it's like to be a superstar.
The Internet has indeed become a great place for such experiences, but many businesses still don't get it. They're heading into the commoditization trap, only selling their company's goods and services over the World Wide Web, when in fact most individuals surf the Internet for the experience itself. Surprisingly, Pete Higgins, vice president of Microsoft's Interactive Media Group, told BusinessWeek, “So far, the Internet isn't a place for truly mindless entertainment.”12 But who wants it to be? The Internet is an inherently active medium—not passive, as television is—that provides a social experience for many people. Interactive entertainment is an oxymoron. The value people find online derives from actively connecting, conversing, and forming communities.
Formerly the domain of mom-and-pop outfits like The WELL, cyberspace was first brought to the masses by Prodigy, CompuServe, and America Online (mistakenly dubbed online “service” providers). AOL won the initial battle for members primarily because it understood that they wanted a social experience; they wanted to actively participate in the online environment growing up around them. While Prodigy at one point limited the amount of e-mail its members could send and CompuServe limited member identities to a string of impersonal numbers, AOL allowed its members to pick as many as five screen names (to suit the several moods or roles they might want to portray online).13 AOL also actively encouraged the use of features that connect people: e-mail, chat rooms, instant messages, personal profiles, and “buddy lists,” which let users know when their friends are also online. Even before AOL went to a flat-rate pricing scheme in late 1996, more than 25 percent of its 40 million connect-hours each month were spent in chat rooms, where members interacted with each other.14 AOL proved no match for the social media that soon followed—MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and myriad specialty sites such as ChatRoulette—let alone the explosion of “apps” providing other escapist experiences via smartphones.
For some people, the Internet provides a welcome respite from real life, an escape from the humdrum routine and the harried rush. For many others, we suspect digital life has become the new distracted reality from which they increasingly seek to escape to an alternative, unplugged existence.15 It is still unclear how the near ubiquity of the Internet will ultimately alter the need most people have had for a physical place set apart from home and work, a “third place,” in the words of sociologist Ray Oldenburg, where people can interact with others they have come to know as members of the same community.16 These places—pubs, taverns, cafes, coffeehouses, and the like—once seemed to be on every street corner of every city, but the suburbanization of society has all too often left people too far apart to commune in this way. Some people now look for community in cyberspace, while others use vacations at themed attractions to connect with large masses of people.17 Still others find a middle ground at Starbucks or other such cafes.
The Esthetic
The fourth and last experiential realm we explore is the esthetic. In such experiences, individuals are immersed in an event or environment but have little or no effect on it, leaving the environment (but not themselves) essentially untouched. Esthetic experiences include standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon, beholding a work of art at a gallery or museum, and sitting at the Caffé Florian in Old World Venice. As mentioned earlier, sitting in the grandstand at the Kentucky Derby also qualifies. While guests partaking of an educational experience may want to learn, of an escapist experience want to go and do, of an entertainment experience want to enjoy, those partaking of an esthetic experience just want to be.18
At a Rainforest Cafe, for example, diners find themselves in the midst of dense vegetation, rising mist, cascading waterfalls, and even startling lightning and thunder. They encounter live tropical birds and fish as well as artificial butterflies, spiders, gorillas, and, if they look closely, a snapping baby crocodile.19 Note that the Rainforest Cafe, which combines a dining room with a retail shop and bills itself as “A Wild Place to Shop and Eat,” is not out to simulate the experience of being in a rain forest. Rather it aims to stage a certain esthetic experience that is the Rainforest Cafe.
Another wild place to shop can be found in Owatonna, Minnesota, at Cabela's, a 150,000-square-foot outfitter of hunting, fishing, and other outdoor gear. Rather than add elements of entertainment to the store, Dick and Jim Cabela turned it into an esthetic experience, centered (literally) on a thirty-five-foot-high mountain with a waterfall and featuring more than a hundred stuffed taxidermic animals, many of them shot by the two brothers or other family members. This part of the store represents four North American ecosystems. Elsewhere, two huge dioramas depict African scenes that include the so-called Big Five big-game targets: the elephant, lion, leopard, rhinoceros, and cape buffalo. Three aquariums hold a number of varieties of prized fish, while almost seven hundred kinds of animals are mounted in every department of the store. Truly, as Dick Cabela told the St. Paul Pioneer Press, “We're selling an experience.”20 So much so that more than thirty-five thousand people visited the refurbished store on the day it opened, and the company draws more than one million visitors every year.
The esthetic aspects of an experience may be completely natural, as when one tours a national park; primarily man-made, as when one dines at the Rainforest Cafe; or somewhere in between, as when one shops at Cabela's. There's no such thing as an artificial experience. Every experience created within the individual is real, whether the stimuli be natural or artificial. Extending this view, renowned architect Michael Benedikt discusses the role he believes architects play in connecting people to a “realness” within their created environments: “Such experiences, such privileged moments, can be profoundly moving; and precisely from such moments, I believe, we build our best and necessary sense of an independent yet meaningful reality. I should like to call them direct esthetic experiences of the real and to suggest the following: in our media-saturated times it falls to architecture to have the direct esthetic experience of the real at the center of its concerns.”21
While architects may lead, it falls to everyone involved in the staging of esthetic experiences to connect individuals and the (immersive) reality they directly (albeit passively) experience, even when the environment seems less than “real.” Benedikt would likely deem the Rainforest Cafe and similar venues “non-real” and insist that its architects address “the issue of authenticity by framing [displaying the inauthentic as inauthentic], by making fakery honest, as it were.”22 To stage compelling esthetic experiences, designers must acknowledge that any environment designed to create an experience is not real (the Rainforest Cafe, for instance, is not the rain forest). They should not try to fool their guests into believing it's something it is not.
Architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable makes a similar distinction when she says, “It is becoming increasingly difficult to tell the real fake from the fake fake. All fakes are clearly not equal; there are good fakes and bad fakes. The standard is no longer real versus phony, but the relative merits of the imitation. What makes the good ones better is their improvement on r
eality.”23 To illustrate the difference, we'll consider two invented environments Huxtable spends considerable time critiquing: Universal CityWalk and almost anyplace Disney.24
CityWalk in Los Angeles is a collection of retail shops, restaurants, movie theatres, high-tech rides, and low-tech kiosks, each with a distinctive façade. Controlled exaggeration abounds, as in the four-story guitar adorning the Hard Rock Cafe. Visitors lazily stroll through a water fountain that shoots up at well-timed intervals. Guests pay an entrance fee for parking (nobody walks to anything in L.A., so here they pay admission to walk around) that's reimbursed only if they spend money at a dining or movie experience (purchases of goods merit no reimbursement). Part theme park and part public square, CityWalk primarily imparts an esthetic experience, Huxtable confirms, because it “is being used for its own sake.”25 The realness of its fakery evidences itself from the very moment you park your car in the ungarnished lot. The back of the buildings greet arriving guests, who thus see the unadorned undersides of the façades as they walk in. Outside you see the inside of the mask; inside you see its outside. Adjacent buildings, not associated with CityWalk, remain visible through alleys and other offshoots to the main drag. Its esthetic acknowledges its fakeness. Through framing, it's truly a real fake.
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