Phase 2: Designing an Experience
Now that you have interviewed your partner, it is time to develop an experience for them. Discuss with your consulting partner what you've learned and how you might incorporate these details into your design (though be careful to respect the privacy of your partner if you have touched upon anything sensitive).
By the end of today’s workshop you should have at least the overall structure of an experience created for your partner. You should also have a time for the event (worked out with your partner) and a duration. If you have time during the workshop, begin writing out the experience as a series of numbered steps so that your partner can perform each step one at a time. Your experience design is due to your partner within 24 hours! On the top of the document you send (be it email or PDF) list the duration, starting location, and any necessary materials.
The most important question our team always asks when designing an Odyssey is:
What do you wish for your partner?
What is the experience you wish to create?
After interviewing your partner, you will create an experience that combines online technologies with a choreography of activities in their physical environment. It should last 30min-3hrs and should take place sometime over the next two weeks. You should have a good understanding of what is possible and safe for that person, and you should figure out whether to run the experience live or make it automated. Either way, schedule a time for it with your partner. The experience may span analog and digital technologies and should address the world the person is living in. Find out if that person has, for instance, a TV, a music playing app, a printer (color? B&W?) a smartphone (which kind?) etc.
Experience Structure
We will be working with a 5 act structure. They are all important, though some may be longer or more complex than others
Act 1: Opening. Crossing the Threshold into the Frame of the Experience. Here you consider what it is that signals that we are inside the experience. Is there an "opening bell"? Does your participant enter or leave a room? Is there an inciting event?
Act 2: Worldbuilding and Theme. Reconstructing your partner’s environment to support the experience. You will be writing this experience into your participant's current world, but you will be focusing on particular elements relevant to the theme of the experience. Then you will add or remove elements to sculpt the world of the piece. You may add audio or video from the internet, or text you supply. What will you add? What will you remove?
Act 3: Action. The choreography of experiences you will design. This is most of what you will be designing. Here, your participant will follow your directions for a specified period of time. You may bring in additional material. You may involve yourself if the schedule will work.
Act 4: Closing. The inverse of Opening; how to return to ordinary life. At the end of a journey, the hero returns home, but brings with them something beneficial to themselves or their community.
Act 5: Integration. Taking material from the world of your experience into the ordinary world. This may take place directly after Act 4, or over the following several days. This may involve reflections, notes, revisiting elements of Act 3, contacting you (the designer) or something else
Download the PDF worksheet to help you build your experience into a 5-act structure
Structural Parameters
Who: Who, if anyone, might be involved in the experience with your partner? We recommend limiting it to your partner and one other person so that the experience doesn’t get swallowed up in logistical planning. Probably whoever is living with your partner during this time is the best option. You may also be a good option. Anyone else is likely too much.
What: What materials or preparations does your partner need?
Where: Where will this begin and end? While this is likely to be at home it may move outside to safe areas. Also, the home has a geography of its own. Perhaps begin to map that in order to design this experience.
When: We recommend this take place within the next two weeks, if possible, so that what you’ve designed is still relevant to what is going on in their life.
How: How might you insert your own expertise or artistry into this?
Materials
You may use a combination of preexisting media and materials you create. We have, at our fingertips, a world of media. Usually we consume that media in limited ways. You may redesign how that media is experienced. Spotify, Youtube, Google Maps Street View, Google books, and many of the other tools we use in a limited way on a regular basis are great for creating multisensory experiences for your audience. You may also find more esoteric online tools, like radio aporee, which maps soundscapes around the world, or what three words, which assigns three words to every spot on the planet, or mixlr, which allows you to create your own streaming radio station. The list is as big as the internet.
But your best materials are those inside your partner’s home. What books do they have? What foods? What tactile possibilities? Could the experience take place in a bathtub? On a fire escape or a porch? In the backyard? Could you involve objects of particular importance in their lives and could you ask them to prepare their living space to become the perfect environment for what you are creating?
The main product of today’s workshop is the set of instructions for your partner to execute. Those instructions may involve you, if you are planning to run the experience live, or they may not. Either way, the beginning of the instructions should involve preparation for the experience, and that preparation may need to happen on the same day or days ahead of time. If the experience is to involve other individuals in addition to your partner, preparation should happen at least a day ahead. At the end of today’s workshop you should have the general arc and purpose of the experience mapped out. The set of instructions is due to your partner within 24 hours of the end of the workshop.