Escape to Explore: Reflecting on Effugium
Over the last six months, my colleague Jim Murphy and I have spent a large portion of our time and energy developing Effugium, an escape room bar concept. After several months of design, planning, and development, we held our first official opening to the public. The design, planning, and development phases were rewarding within themselves, but the go-live day has been something that has filled my mind for a while. “Have we planned enough..? Will people show up..? Will people like what we’ve created..? What are we missing..?” I couldn’t help but ask myself these types of questions because I’ve committed so much thus far. With that in mind, let’s just say I had some anticipatory excitement and anxiety prior to the event.
Fast forward to the day of the event. We had around twenty-five people sign up, which was a full schedule for our opening hours of 6:00 pm — 9:00 pm. At 6:00 pm, when people began arriving at the event, we ran into a small issue rendering some of the digital content built into the escape room. Our team kept cool and quickly resolved the issue without letting it impact the success of the event (which is a testament to the resilience of the team, and extensive planning.) After the event we received overwhelmingly positive feedback from our participants regarding their experience. People went so far as to point out specific elements of the puzzles that were breakthrough moments for them. Participants even shared stories of how collaboration and communication drove their group to success, and most importantly, they shared these stories with tangible excitement.
From a design perspective, it’s moving to think that several months ago the idea of this project didn’t exist — and between now and then an idea was created, designed, tested, and implemented. Further, the implementation was successful in providing real people a real experience. This concept of creating an environment (whether physical or virtual), and observing people enjoy their interactions with the environment is a meaningful concept for me as a designer. There’s something innately electrifying about it that I feel compelled to explore further; And explore I shall do.
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