Using Experiential Design to Expand VR Presence Theory

Voices of VR Podcast – Episode #557

Jul 19, 2017

Moving to An Experience Economy

Finally, I think it’s important these two experiential design frameworks are independent of virtual reality, and they can be applied to creating any human experience. Pine & Gilmore wrote a prescient article “Welcome to the Experience Economy” in the Harvard Business Review in 1998, and they say, “We expect that experience design will become as much a business art as product design and process design are today. Indeed, design principles are already apparent from the practices of and results obtained by companies that have (or nearly have) advanced into the experience economy.”

I say we're moving from the Information Age to the #ExperientialAge.
But what's that mean?
Here are some metaphors & emergent properties: pic.twitter.com/AnDSXLu7wB

— Kent Bye VoicesOfVR (@kentbye) June 6, 2017

I’ve talked before about how Snapchat shows how we’re moving from the Information Age to the Experiential Age, and this article from 1998 lays out some of the economic trends that led experiential design paradigms used by companies like Starbucks and Apple. Here is a graphic from Pine & Gilmore’s article that describes the fundamental characteristics of this new experience economy that is moving from delivering intangible & customized services on-demand to staging memorable & personal experiences that are revealed over a duration of time.

Virtual and augmented reality technologies are driving our culture towards having more and more immersive experiences, and learning how to holistically create immersive and memorable experiences is going to continue to become a vital part the future of our economy and our culture.