The Role of Experiential Design in an Increasingly Disconnected Society

Designing for Connection to Self, Other and Nature.

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Immerse

17 min readDec 3, 2019

The invention of the telegraph, the telephone, trains, airplanes, social media, and the creation of cities all point at human need to be connected. However, the result of these inventions is an increasingly complex society that has given us more technological interconnection but less connection to our inner lives. There’s an assumption that because technology expands exponentially, then so too do humans, so we obsess over its growth, scale, advancement, and innovation. Technology as a tool increases our capacity to affect change in the world but does not necessarily increase the quality of our choices or equip us with the ability to make sense of the vast array of information at our fingertips. It does not necessarily make us exponential humans, that is to say, hone the innate technology built into our mind and body — our emotions. It has given us ways to manipulate our external world but in no way, empowered us to navigate our inner world.

Disconnection to Self

Emotions are a conscious awareness that something psychologically or biologically important is happening to you. They are built-in tools that allow us to investigate how we relate to ourselves. Another way to look at emotions is akin to the senses. Aristotle taught us that we have only five senses, but much research has proven we have 33 senses. For example, your sense of proprioception, how you know where your limbs are in space, your sense of your heartbeat is called interoception, and what about your sense of time called chronoceptor. We’ve evolved with our senses to help us navigate the space outside ourselves, and equally, emotions are similar tools that help us navigate our inner world.

Emotions are navigation tools for the inner world the way senses are for the outer.

These tools I refer to as innate technologies that humans can advance, and when we do so, in a balanced way, we come into a better relationship with ourselves. While there’s evidence of 33 senses, it’s unclear as to how many universal emotions humans have because most research doesn’t transcend socio-cultural factors. Right now, the field has established somewhat distinct bodily responses for about 15 emotions in peer-reviewed research. Studies using MRI scans have shown that when a person feels an emotion in their gut, blood moves to that area of the body. The body and the mind are linked in this way, sharing information back and forth continuously — for example:

Anger: heart rate elevation, blood flow increases to the hands, presumably to distribute resources to the hands to aid in combat.
Fear: heart rate elevation, blood flow is reduced in the hands.
Disgust: heart rate deceleration.
Awe: the chills/goosebumps.
Shame: blushing.
Amusement: deepening of respiration.
Contentment: complete bodily relaxation.

Today we are coaxed by a flood of tools that focus mostly on the external relationship with the world. It exploits how we relate to our emotions, removing us from the driver seat and hijack how we ought to use emotions for navigating our inner world. Technology is a very heady affair, always locking us into the mind, and that compounded by the fact that language, our primary mode of communication, plays a similar role in locking us into structured thought. The result is a disconnection from the intelligence of our bodies and is a problematic divide, given that our brain uses our body to experience the world around us. We must learn and develop the skills to relate to our emotions. In doing so, we get to know ourselves, which then improves the quality of how we relate to ourselves. Despite starting with the intent of creating a connection, most technologies have failed at empowering us to develop these skills.

Disconnection to Others

Facebook, a company valued $556.38B, built its social media empire on a promise to make the world more open and connected. Their success is a testimony to how important and valued connection is to humans. We traded attention for the promise of connection, and for a while, we thought that was what we got. Despite their economic success, a 2018 study, published by the global health service company Cigna, found that 46 percent of US adults report sometimes or always feeling lonely and 47 percent report feeling left out. Cigna calls those “epidemic levels.” That’s precisely what Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a professor of psychology at Brigham Young University, states, “many nations around the world now suggest we are facing a ‘loneliness epidemic.” Some studies have even found that loneliness and social isolation may lead to an early death. Instead of bringing us closer, Facebook was able to pioneer ways to hack our attention, keeping us peeled to our screens — and create an addiction no different from that of heroin or alcohol.

“The average person checks their phone 150 times a day. Why do we do this? Are we making 150 conscious choices?” — Tristan Harris

Facebook’s failure doesn’t mean that connection isn’t the answer to our collective and individual challenges. It only means that their understanding and definition of what human connection is about were incorrect, and therefore, the tool designed would inevitably be the wrong one. Research has shown that connection can be the antidote to addiction, loneliness, or depression. Our epidemic of loneliness isn’t just disastrous for health. It also undermines empathy and makes us vulnerable to extremism. So we need to feel like we belong to a larger collective, but radically inclusive one, rather than defined in terms of in-group versus out-group. Social Media companies, along with the general public, are waking up to these realities. Instagram is now removing metrics around likes. Facebook, in 2017, changed its mission; to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. We can see it reflected in changes toward Facebook Groups and Events. They do have their work cut out for them.

Disconnection to Nature

Our experience is not just disconnection from ourselves and each other but also a disconnected relationship with nature as a consequence of an anthropocentric viewpoint that gained popularity as a result of the scientific revolution that took place between the 16th and 17th centuries. As a result, anthropocentrism quickly became part of prevailing Western thought through a process of unconscious socialization. Globally, 55 percent of humanity now dwells more within urban rather than rural locations where once affiliating with nature directly afforded survival opportunities. This may no longer be the case, causing a further disconnection with nature to occur through the extinction of nature experiences. A survey in 2016 found that 74 percent of children in the UK now spend less than an hour a day playing outside, less than the UN-mandated minimum for prison inmates. Another survey found that children in the UK are more able to identify Pokémon characters than common wildlife species. According to the EPA, the average American spends 93 percent of his or her life indoors — 87 percent of that time is spent in buildings and 6 percent in automobiles. Given that humans have an innate desire to connect with nature as a result of our evolutionary process, isolation from it can have far-reaching implications on our mental and physical health. The lack of nature exposure increases the risk of mental illness, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and stroke. (14, 15, 16, 17). And yet we’ve used our technologies to shape our urban spaces to be largely devoid of nature, removing us from its healing powers. This disconnection from nature has a direct correlation to our social and environmental crises.

Just being, without doing anything, in Nature, is scientifically proven to lower our heart rates, boost our immunity, increase our sense of contentment, connection, and creativity and increase our sense of awe.
— Julia Plevin, The Healing Magic of Forest Bathing

Defining connection

Connection is, in the words of NASA Astronaut Gene Cernan describing his experience in space, “That’s humanity, love, feeling and thought. You don’t see the barriers of color and religion and politics that divide this world.” This is referred to as The Overview Effect, coined by Frank White, who interviewed NASA astronauts and found this to be a common response in their space-flight experience. The Overview Effect is a shift in perception catalyzed by the understanding of unity and interconnectedness of life on Earth. It is perhaps the most in-depth insight we have on a more profound and broader sense of connection.

The feeling of unity is not merely an observation. With it comes a strong sense of compassion and concern for the state of our planet and the effect humans are having on it. It isn’t important in which sea or lake you observe a slick of pollution or in the forests of which country a fire breaks out, or on which continent a hurricane arises. You are standing guard over the whole of our Earth. (Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Arty- ushkin, as cited in Jaffe, 2011, p. 9)

Connection isn’t merely an experience; it is an altered state of consciousness. Frank White’s work at NASA has inspired many scientists, designers, artists, and now experiential designers to inquire about creating The Overview Effect right here on Planet Earth. Creating The Overview Effect on Earth seems unlikely, and that’s because the conditions aren’t the same back home. However, what is possible is looking at what generated the experience designing for those outcomes.

There are several characteristics of The Overview Effect:

Experiencing Awe: Social psychologists characterize awe as an intense emotion resulting from the perception of something vast, as well as the subsequent need to accommodate the experience. Awe is considered part of a larger class of positive emotions that influence mental processes beyond simply providing enjoyable feelings. The “broaden and build” model of positive emotions emphasizes how positive emotions can result in a broadening of attention and a building of psychological and social resources.
Self Transcendence: The overview effect may trigger more powerful subjective states, most notably “self-transcendent” experiences (STEs). STEs are temporary feelings of unity characterized by reduced self-salience and increased feelings of connection.
Perspective and Identity: According to Schweikart, “When you go around the Earth in an hour and a half, you begin to recognize that your identity is with that whole thing” (White, 1987, p. 11). Similarly, Mitchell asserts, “in outer space, you develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it.” Reports such as these suggest that extreme subjective experiences — and the altered states of awareness that they evoke — can shape the ways in which individuals understand and approach new concepts, and even affect the salience of familiar concepts.

We’ve run our experiments and we’ve seen the results — technology alone is hardly the tool necessary to provide human connection. We must now ask, what’s the next chapter in human creativity that can deepen and broaden the spectrum of connection? How do we iterate on what we’ve learned to design for what we need?

Can we design for outcomes like overview effect? Let’s explore.

The function of Experiential Design towards Live Experiences

An experience is an immersive and participatory unfolding of consciousness through space and time in an embodied state. That’s essentially life! Different sensory experiences show up in brain imaging as patterns of neurons firing in sequence. Neuroscientists are trying to reverse-engineer experiences by stimulating the neurons to excite the same neural patterns. The most significant advance in this research is “the ability to control neurons precisely in space and time,” says Nicholas Picard, one of the first authors of a paper in Nature Neuroscience today. “In other words, to shoot the very specific sets of neurons you want to activate and do it at the characteristic scale and the speed at which they normally work.”

At the center of consciousness is attention, and for you to experience anything, attention is required. Attention begets presence. Sam Harris states, “the truth is, just having a concentrated mind — that’s not getting lost in thought — is just intrinsically pleasurable. It’s intrinsically blissful. It’s the emotional bass note of all the good psychedelic experiences.” It is why the most addictive technology products are great experiences; they hijack our attention, so their products are a seemingly better experience than real life. In a state of presence, we open up, tune in, connect, and in the real sense of the word, experience. It’s what social media products have been employing with their designs. To design meaningful and engaging experiences, one must fundamentally be designing ways to drive our attention to here and now.

In other words, presence is the emotional bass note of all meaningful experiences.

Experiential design is the process of manipulating time and space to captivate a participant’s attention for a specific and or improved experience. We do this all the time; a retail store, a movie theatre, a shopping mall, etc., these are all experiences. It is an experiential mindset towards shaping how your experience unfolds in time and space. It’s the careful thought towards what you might see, smell, hear, and, most importantly, how you will feel. It can alter the context in which you’re accustomed to receiving information and as a result, give new perspectives. The individuals who think about improving the quality of how humans interact with space and time to determine their experience will have an important role to play in our futures — to connect and shift our perspectives.

Take as an example, “The Privilege of Escape,” a new public art project by Risa Puno at Onassis USA, the escape room turns from a high-stakes thriller into a disarming demonstration of social inequality. In 2008 Ms. Puno built “The Course of Emotions,” a mini-golf course with holes based on negative feelings like jealousy and frustration. Earlier this year, she created “Risk Management,” an original carnival-inspired game that makes its players vulnerable to self-sabotage in their attempts to beat one another and win. For Ms. Puno, play spaces offer safe environments for pushing people to confront complex questions about how we interact.

When an experience can shift perspective through participation, it can motivate behavioral change. As one of the lead experiential architects of Planet Home’s Experiential Village, we designed to promote solutions that can shift behaviors into equilibrium with the planet. We curated 20+ immersive experiences that taught people about the problems contributing to climate change and introduced practical solutions they can adopt to change how they consume.

Another excellent example is The Abramovic Method, developed over decades of research on performance and immaterial art. Created by Marina Abramovic, the Method is an exploration of being present in both time and space. It incorporates exercises that focus on breath, motion, stillness, and concentration.

These are the more innovative approaches we ought to be thinking of because we’re designing for specific outcomes. Ms. Puno’s project aims to playfully illuminate the concept of privilege, thus offering perspective. Ms. Abramovic’s Method is designing for presence. At Planet Home, we are creating for individual adoption of solutions for climate change. Intrinsically, behavior change towards human flourishing is the core value of experiential design.

We can design for The Overview Effect by focusing on outcomes — awe, STEs, identity, presence, vulnerability, or any other skill that is required to engage with our emotions.

The design of experiences is likely to have a profound impact on our species because it uses technology, art, and story to engineer spaces and move us through time. None of these tools alone can do it, but Experiential Design might be the tool of tools that lets us engineer spaces that put us in the driver seat of our consciousness and therefore empowers us to transform ourselves.

A shift towards experiences

We are beginning to understand that our identity is shaped more by the totality of lived and shared experiences than by what we own, that it can be a pathway to personal growth and transformation and, therefore, a better tool to help us make sense of our world. Live experiences provide deeper, meaningful connections, something that is becoming more and more difficult to have and, even more so, the sharing of it in a digitally connected world.

An Eventbrite and Harris Poll found that 80 percent of millennials say their best memories are from live experiences in which they participated and 69 percent believe attending live experiences help them connect better with their friends and 78 percent would rather spend their money on experiences (concerts, festivals, etc.) In May 2019, Disney launched its 1 billion dollar immersive ‘Star Wars’ theme park called Galaxy’s Edge, where guests will participate in a battle between the First Order and the Resistance. In 2016, Universal Studios released the ‘Wizarding World of Harry Potter.’ In their previous year, attendance had a 13.8% drop, and in the following year, 1 30.2% increase in attendance. It’s not just the twenty thousand pound gorillas, new incumbents like the art collective Meow Wolf has garnered 1.5 million visitors to their exhibit The House of Eternal Return in Santa Fe and fundraised 150 million dollars in 2019. Welcome to the Experience Economy.

From a cultural context, there is a shift in our consumption patterns away from the owning of material goods and digital to in-real-life (IRL) that fulfill the need for sheer presence that takes us deeper into moments and people. While technology increases our impact on the world, thoughtful design of live experiences can enhance the quality of our interactions. It brings our attention to our inner world, empowering us to navigate this realm of our emotions to connect to self. Live experiences give the freedom to explore what profoundly matters most, the experiential or whole-bodied reflection of it, and the responsibility or ability to respond to, act on, and apply it. The more we can do so, the more we can relate to our emotions, the more we become connected to ourselves. It is when we connect with who we are can we connect with others.

If we want to empower people to create communities and bring the world closer, Experiential Design is the single most effective way to do so. When we take an intentional approach to design an experience around a shared interest, then the inevitable outcome of that experience is a community. Take, for instance, The Get Down, a dance experience by Tasha Blank in New York City that brings people together around the interest of dance. Tasha’s design approach is to simplify and focus on a singular interest, and for a few hours, nothing exists outside the fact that we came to dance. The repetition in this experience causes the natural result of community and integration. What is similar to this? We believe that gathering every week in a building to worship an unseen entity was the point, but what kept us coming back was community and connection. These experiences give a sense and feeling of belonging, and shared experiences often create that. In the end, experiential design doesn’t need to connect the world, only make communities more integrated.

Here’s a thought experiment: who’s one of your favorite humans? What makes them your favorite person? I’m going to guess you’ve spent a lot of time with that person — conversations, movies, travel, dinners, and so on. Presence is at the center of those shared experiences that create a meaningful connection. The more shared experiences, the deeper the bond we share.

Dark patterns of Experiential Design

Right now, the world is in transition in more ways than one. Among them is moving from a service economy to an experience economy, and with that comes challenges. We must be cautious about the habits we’ve developed in the passing economy. We’ve picked up especially unhealthy behaviors that have created a consumerist society. Part of the function experiences will play is reversing and reminding us of what matters most to us. What we want and desire most is not in the outer plane but rather the internal — a connection to self, others, and nature.

Consumerism is not entirely a natural behavior of humans. American society initially consumed based on needs, but that didn’t mean factories would stop producing products. That’s not how capitalism works, so these companies needed to figure out how to get us to buy what we don’t need. There begins our unhealthy relationship with consumption. Edward Bernays, the nephew of Freud, used his uncle’s work on the subconscious to invent public relations and gave birth to advertising for consumption. Buy. Consume. Buy. This societal design of blindly consuming was scaled and deepened with technology at an exponential rate and thus contributed massively to the existential threat we face with dire consequences to our minds and environment. When we consume experiences, then we cease to experience and continue our superficial relationship with our experiences that deepen the toxic behavior of consumerism. Consumption is the distraction that has given rise to the experience economy.

The reason to be aware of a consumeristic society is having the mindfulness of how it can corrupt our best tools. The creative minds that can design experiences are commissioned to do so to perpetuate this societal design with the advent of experiential marketing and Instagrammable “museums,” “factories,” and “mansions.” The most recent failure of design occurred with digital product designers who were unknowingly co-opted to design an internet landscape that hacks our attention for capitalistic gains — count me among those designers.

Only recently have the design community started discussing this as a dark design pattern. However, these patterns are now the culture of how we build, making it challenging to course correct. Similar to product design, experiential design is a new function of design that’s ready to disrupt for or against human good, and similarly, experiential designers can be co-opted to do the same thing, and history repeats itself. When B. Joseph Pine II coined the term Experience Economy, he did so from the context of businesses and their capitalistic needs. Here I’m proposing we look at this through a socio-cultural context and usher in experiential design for human good as opposed to reinforcing the toxic behaviors of our society.

“Are you not entertained?” — Maximus Decimus Meridius

Take, for instance, the Museum of Ice Cream, an immersive experience that is designed for its guests to take Instagrammable photos for their social media profile. It reinforces our toxic relationship with our digital devices. In pioneering a business model for such spaces, they’ve inspired a wave of copy cats. I point to these instagrammable experiences, not to bring them down but inquire whether we can be more intentional in their outcomes. Could we design for presence, awe, connection, or to give new perspectives? Many designers recognize this; for example, Valentino Vettori created Arcadia as an immersive experience with a message of the environmental challenges we face and the behavior changes that are part of the solution. I recognize that these models are paving the way for other models of immersive entertainment and that we cannot repeat the mistakes of our design colleagues in the digital landscape.

What could dark design patterns for the experiential community be?

How might we design experiences to foster a truly connected society? How do we create a feedback loop of experiential design to expand our awareness of how we relate to each other? Or will we be content to design experiences for mere entertainment? Will we put our creative prowess towards experientially hacking the human mind to consume, consume, consume or use this ability to foster deeper connections between each other, with ourselves and the planet to build meaningful communities?

I believe that fostering connections should be the exclusive function of experiential design or that we start there because it’s our immediate problem. If we can use it as a tool to cultivate deeper human connection, then we can establish the behaviors that allow us to relate better and become exponential humans. Exponential Human is the equivalent of exponential technology, where we’ve developed the innate technology of the body and mind to navigate our realities better. This mindset is incredibly important because as technology advances at an exponential rate, we’re required to equip ourselves with better sense-making tools to understand the realities technology continuously create. The lack of these tools is at the core of our problem playing out in the social, economic, and environmental realities. I view experiential design as one of the tools that can help us, should we choose to use it correctly. It is the responsibility of the creators, artists, technologists, investors, and entrepreneurs to usher in this new economy mindfully.

As an experiential designer, what outcomes are you designing?

My name is Damian Madray, and I’ve been researching and studying the design of experiences for human connection over the last six years while being in the heart of technology, that is, San Francisco. My research was funded by over a decade in the technology sector as a product designer (UI/UX). I am pulled to this topic because I experienced community created by experiences and that in those communities, I was not lonely. I found a great deal of connection and personal growth. I believe everyone should have access to such communities. Two years ago, I founded Presence to make connection accessible with curated experiences that share these values in how we gather. I’m also designing a location-based immersive experience that is explicitly for connecting to self, others, and the natural world.

I’ve started EXPDSN, a community that features pioneers in Experiential Design, to discuss how we can use it as a tool to expand consciousness. If you’re an artist, designer, producer, engineer, or investor in this field and would be interested to explore this topic, please do reach out.