Storyge — An introduction to Immersive Experience Design
Part B of ‘The Immersive Experience Designer’s Palette Introduction’
The best way I can describe Immersive Experience design is by comparing it to lucid dreaming 🌈💤
“ A lucid dream is a dream during which the dreamer is aware that they are dreaming. During lucid dreaming, the dreamer may be able to exert some degree of control over the dream characters, narrative, and environment.”*1
Now imagine dreaming…
Just where you are now, reading this, you are completely immersed in an environment right?
So now imagine you can move things around — mould and shape objects; make people talk, conjure up sounds, ⏪⏯️⏩ reverse, pause and fast forward time.
It’s almost like Matilda (The girl that could move things with her eyes) vs. Clockstoppers.
You have full control over the objects in your environment:
Let’s look at some definitions:
Experience design (XD) is the practice of designing products, processes, services, events, omnichannel journeys, and environments with a focus placed on the quality of the user experience and culturally relevant solutions.*2
+
immersive
adjective
1. noting or relating to digital technology or images that actively engage one’s senses and may create an altered mental state: immersive media; immersive 3D environments.
2. noting or relating to activity that occupies most of one’s attention,time, or energy: her many years of immersive sociological fieldwork.
3. characterized by or relating to dipping, absorption, or immersion.*3
=
Immersive design describes the activity of a new generation of designers who work inclusively across all story-driven media, from film and interactive media to live audience environments. Immersive designers deal simultaneously with virtual and dimensional environments and who and what they contain; and with time-based narrative and story space.*4
🆒
So from these definitions, we can conclude to say that Immersive Experience Design is —
The activity of a new generation of designers who work inclusively across all story-driven media, designing digital technology, images, products, processes, services, events, omnichannel journeys, and environments within which users are: completely occupied, absorbed, dipped or immersed; with a focus placed on the quality of the user experience and culturally relevant solutions. Immersive designers deal simultaneously with virtual and dimensional environments and who and what they contain; and with time-based narrative and story space.
Phew.
Made some progress, we have.
Now we can move on to the design part of the equation.
For this we will start by investigating what the Immersive Experience Design Workflow looks like.
You can read all about the ‘Immersive Experience Design Workflow’ in the next blog here.
Footnotes:
i_The artist statement for the ‘‘’n Grou Skemer Exhbition’: “Living in Komaggas, Namakwaland, Clive Meintjies struggles to support him and his mother. He becomes involved with friends’ illegal diamond digging missions to the closed Bontekou Mine in Kleinzee. On 22 May 2012, the mine unsuspectingly collapsed. Clive managed to escape. On the run with the diamonds he made his way to the West Coast where he unsuspectingly meets Bettie van der Merwe, a girl he once met in ‘Stilbaai’ on a faraway and unusual Christmas Eve. The story unfolds as Bettie, now old, reminisces over their relationship across the years. My methodology consists of a self-reflexive recontextualization of personal experiences into distant political contexts. Hereby I discover means with which to reclaim authority for the self within the skewed political interventions into the space of the individual. Locating my work in the field of film and media my art becomes a tribute to Jacques Rancière’s definition of art as social exchange.
