Experiential Design for the Unknown Future
by Bluecadet
How do you design for public spaces and shared interactions at a time when these behaviors might not be safe? No one quite knows yet. But we can develop approaches that consider the visitor experiences in new ways.
At Bluecadet, we’re always exploring different methods for integrating digital products into public space. Now, there’s a new urgency as we’re tasked with integrating aspects of public space into our digital products. Our ongoing R&D projects are becoming ways for us to support new public health and safety concerns. Like a lot of design agencies, the crisis may have blurred our vision of the future, but it's sharpened our focus on the task at hand.
We’ve concentrated on the impact of four categories: overall digital strategy, spatial design, input methods, and the extended experience. These categories aren’t mutually exclusive and, indeed, are most effective when employed together. We believe redundancy and flexibility will be essential moving forward. To put it another way, don’t just design experiences, design affordances–tools and spaces that can be used in a multitude of ways. We can anticipate and plan for some uses but there are many, many others that we can't. The following observations emerged from recent conversations and workshops with our teams and our clients.
Develop a Comprehensive Digital Strategy
A strong multi-channel digital content strategy—and accompanying infrastructure—is a good foundation for flexible and resilient design. This is true anytime, but all the more so during a crisis. What does that mean exactly? For starters, it means ensuring the same core content can accommodate multiple experiences–communal, in-person experiences and at-home exploration. This isn't something that can be achieved on an ad-hoc basis. It requires thoughtful planning and the ability to understand how content will work in different contexts.
Helping clients create this kind of integrated flexibility will become a fundamental part of any practice. Generally, we like to think about content in terms of platforms, rather than single activations. For example:
Create a complementary online experience that builds on an in-gallery activation and doesn’t just reiterate it.
Turn long-form stories about an artifact into highlights that can be brought to life via augmented reality (AR).
Create a parallel audio experience for written or visual content. Ensuring your experience is equally available to everyone is a great way to create some built-in affordances, including during times of crisis.
Design Healthy Spaces
Re-opening public experiences will bring some clear, practical concerns, like how to space out crowds and clean surfaces. At a very basic level, we might see a greater emphasis on cleaning routines, more hand sanitizer or mask dispensers, and visual cues that encourage social distancing. Interior layouts and exhibition designs may incorporate new options for circulation or display, while technology may help manage occupancy and guide the visitor experience. These could include:
More granular and dynamic crowd management.
Sensors that automatically restrict access to a space when occupancy limits are reached.
Replacing queues with notifications and SMS to let visitors know when they can enter.
Use Alternative Inputs
Interaction isn't going away. But we will have to reconsider how people control digital experiences. For more than a decade now, touchscreens have been the default solution to bring digital experiences to physical spaces. From doctors offices and banks to movie theaters and museums, there's hardly a transaction these days that doesn't use a touchscreen. But interaction doesn’t mean touch, and we’ve been growing and refining alternative inputs.
Connect directly to a visitor's personal device using QR codes, SMS, and web socket connections. There are two approaches: one path pushes the experience to the device, like adding a layer of content or media; the other makes the device (or multiple-user devices) a controller or interface to the experience.
Gestures and body tracking. Simple, intuitive experiences work best using these inputs because the precision of the input can be affected by so many factors.
Threshold and proximity. Using sensors or geofencing to trigger location-specific content creates responsive environments with an ambient awareness of the person’s presence.
Disposable Stylus. A simple and cheap solution for times when touchscreens are an essential element of an exhibition, experience, or transaction.
It's important to note that adapting these alternate input methods will often require adjustments to user habits. Touchscreens have habituated users to a vocabulary of precise gestural inputs, and some of these non-tactile alternatives will require time to build up a similar vocabulary. But creating redundant or overlapping controls will allow users to drive an experience however they want—by moving their entire body, or just their hand. Don’t prescribe new behaviors, allow for multiple existing behaviors.
Extend the Experience
The societal response to COVID-19 has pushed many interactions online, and may result in renewed interest and innovation in different ways of extending a public experience. These are a few ways to bring the physical experience into a person’s private space.
Create new virtual spaces. VR and AR continue to be promising arenas for exploration, though the same old barriers to adoption remain: access to hardware and an intuitive user experience. Hardware companies seem to be making incremental progress—see Apple’s latest iPad Pro, shipping with a Lidar scanner. In another generation, this will probably be standard on high-end phones and tablets. And we’re excited by the possibility of tools like Reality Composer and SparkAR, which make it easy to create, share, and view AR experiences.
Meet people where they are. Minecraft is already home to students recreating their schools and journalism projects like The Uncensored Library, which publishes censored articles within the game’s world. In a similar vein, Animal Crossing: New Horizons players are using the game to celebrate weddings and birthdays. These situations grew organically, with users appropriating platforms for uses other than they were created–uses that didn't exist until a month or two ago.
AI and Online Archives. Many museums with comprehensive digital strategies (see above) have already publicly released portions of their collections online. Applying machine learning models to these collections can help visitors as well as curators, researchers, and conservators explore them more effectively. (As an example, here’s how Bluecadet has started to use AI in our work.)
This crisis might spark some innovation or new public interest in this space—many collections are already too big to be shown or even housed on site in a public space. The possibilities of an online or virtual venue, however, are almost limitless.
Going Forward
What new forms and social patterns will emerge, and how will designers and makers react to those changes? Because we don’t know, there’s a strong temptation to overreact, and to bet big on one of the approaches mentioned above. Maybe instead bet small on a few different options. Prototype and test them with your users. Allow and encourage them to interact in the way that they want; in the way they feel safest. There's so much we don't know, but there's a lot we do know: we know the elements of good experiences won't change. We know our audience–their goals, expectations, and desires. We know that creating engaging high-quality experiences can grow that audience and strengthen our communities.