People often talk about wanting to make their shop, venue or attraction an ‘experience’ for visitors. But what does that mean? Experiential design is an oft-misunderstood term, so let’s try and explain what it entails and the benefits that spaces designed with an experiential approach deliver.
Experiential design is often used when creating multisensory experiences to transform an environment or to elevate a message and create a lasting memory that the visitor will take away with them. To make a real connection with the visitor. Doing this requires work across many disciplines – sight, sound and touch, but can even include things like smell.
Typical examples of this sort of space are used in museums or visitor attractions, but corporate clients also might want to create an experience that communicates their history or their values. Retail stores might wish to provide more customer interaction for a more engaging experience.
There are specialist companies that help deliver that vision. Their initial work will be about the messaging and the environment that the client wants to create. In the initial stages, the technology is not even discussed. The system design and the technology used faciltate the outcome, not the reason to do the work in the first place.
Many in the industry struggle to move from being someone who supplies solutions to supplying experiences. Our industry is dominated by technology and features to sell equipment. A solution is just a collection of equipment. Experiential design is about defining the experience first and then finding the equipment to enable it. Fundamentally, you are seeking a design that is based around how human beings interact with the space.
It is particularly challenging to create experiences in the commercial sector, where it can be more difficult to envisage everything working together to create something memorable.
Creating experiences is something that makes our industry exciting, a chance to make a real difference. Some companies are even rethinking the normally mundane meeting room space to make the experience more interesting and engaging.
Design of experiences involves combining lots of different disciplines that all relate to each other, so designers have taken to using tools such as Unreal Engine or Unity as part of the creation process. These tools started as gaming engines but are now used to create virtual walkthroughs by designers. They can then see what the end result is going to look like. They start by importing their Revit 3D CAD files of the space and then build a virtual version of the experience from there.
In addition, these same tools are used for creating extended reality – XR stages. CEOs can use this when presenting to their employees, to have them appear and talk about different parts of their business. They can appear on the production line, explaining a new process and then in a lab, talking about their R&D efforts.
Audio plays a huge part in all this, but it is the most difficult to plan and simulate in advance. Audio elevates any experience and plays a huge part in impacting how people perceive the whole experience. Research has proved that people think images look better when there is associated audio.
More directional audio technology delivers directional audio for improved coverage within the space and can be used to reduce interference between different elements of an experience. Immersive audio systems are becoming more frequently used to alter the visitor’s perception of each environment.
Experiential design is set to grow as the cost of technology goes down, especially with the ability to be able to put video on almost every surface. AI and machine learning will start to deliver more personalized experiences for each visitor. More advanced audio technology works hand in hand with all these other disciplines to enable this. Expect to see more of this as owners of spaces want to communicate better with customers by delivering more engaging and memorable experiences.
