IRL Experience Design

Intro Music Is Not A Song

Note: this post was drafted on 6/24/2021 and finalized today.

Current Status of The Eurkea Room

The new design for the end-to-end Eureka Room experience now has a waiting room with a tropical feel. It’s mellow bossa-nova-esque. Visitors watch a video that explains the logistics and then we go down a tunnel into the Eureka Room. I’ve very excited that I’m adding some more pizazz to the Eureka Room experience and to be able to be considering the whole experience: from when they first learn about it until they forget they ever went.

So when they go down the tunnel (the tunnel is just a 10 foot long sheet over two wires, created so that they don’t have to see my living room and personal stuff), the anticipation is built up pretty good.

The tunnel, partiall down so you can see context.

Ideally, I’ve got them thinking “Alright! We’re doing it!” as they eagerly take their places in the Eureka Room.

At this point, in the EAST version, the lights go out. The logo appears on the front screen and an airlock sound, it extends out to the edges of the room. Then goes dark again. Then each panel lights up yellow as it dings and the logo comes back. Then it’s over.

It’s ok. But it’s really basic and a little too short. It’s basically “bam! you’re in the Eureka Room. Here’s the first program”. 

For the amount of buildup I’ve done with people in the waiting room, I think I need something more spectacular. I need to “awe them and honor them” as Priya Parker says. 

I think most people come into the room expecting to be wowed. I need to give them some wow. More moving lights.  Maybe the panels stay solid but drift up. Or maybe it’s a Turkey Volcano thing where stuff comes at them “3D” from the front screen outward.

And then there’s the sounds/music. That is what I got hung up on last night.

The Eureka Room Intro Music

What would this intro music sound like? I sat down at the keyboard and started to experiment. I went through many, many instrument tones and effects as well as musical styles., but I kept struggling. I dug through my pile of unused material. Nothiing jumped out at me.

The problem I kept having was that the music was too catchy. Well to me, at least. Even not to you, it still all has a feeling like it is going somewhere. Each song has a melody that calls for the next part.

Usually it’s good to be catchy, but if it has a beat and a good melody, then they get into it. After 15 seconds (the length of my envisioned intro) they might be really into it. And then…

And then I take it away from them in order to start the show. Like a podcast or radio show with a good intro song that is cut off by somebody talking. It’s pulling the emotional rug out from under my ears.

But there IS good intro music, right? I think of the production company bumpers in movies. A quick flare of trumpets or some other obviously-this-will-be-short music that ends where you want it to end.

So that’s my discovery of the day. Intro music is different than intro song. In fact, there’s a few ways I can create the intro:

  1. Self contained “song” that has a clear resolution it is heading toward so it doesn’t feel “cut off”.
  2. Musical notes (like I currently have with the yellow panels. Think of NBC’s ding ding ding)
  3. Sound effects that lack musical quality.
  4. Silence. This can be more dramatic than you might think. I picture the beginning of a Paramount movie as the stars wrap the top of the mountain in silence (or as the beginning audio of the first scene drops in)

The New Version

The new version does this:

  1. The 4 yellow panels go ding ding ding ding.
  2. The logo drops in. The font is now changed from “jurassic park” to a sort of hand-written printing that evokes the sort of MS Paint-styled drawings in the program. It also says (I hope): “This is local and homemade and special” and “This isn’t going to be perfect”.
  3. From there it all fades away into a slow moving starfield appears and you hear the sound of crickets. This is to inspire a bit of associated awe and relax and hopefully reset people. The same handwritten font shows them which programs they will be seeing. Then the first program is written larger on its own so that you know that THAT program is happening next.
  4. This starfield, crickets, and font are also used between programs as a “reset” and familar throughline. A sort of visual docent, if you will.

So yeah, ultimately I didn’t do music at all. I decided the “wow” can be this faux-camping nature universe vibe. It also continues one of the overarching themes of the Eureka Room: the natural world. I mean what’s more wow than the universe?

Maybe I’ll have some music come to me in the future, but honestly I like this. Simple and unassuming and a good juxtaposition with the craziness of the programs. Plus it will work with literally anything, like black shoes.

During my investigation I did come up with some great music that I want to use for new passive programs. So.. bonus!

The Eureka Room Principles

Why Stating Your Principles Matters

When you bring someone on board to work on an existing project it’s very important they get an understanding of the project: the mission, the tools, the tone, what it is and what it is not. Without this clarity new people will use a combination of guesses and assumptions influenced by past experiences to focus their energy and work.

The chances of them guessing right is very low and the chances of creating friction between the new and existing team members is extremely high. The new person wants to be helpful and acts in line with how they see the project. But because they haven’t been educated enough, the choices they make are not in line with the project. The existing team members start wondering things like “What in the world are they thinking?” or “Wow. This were a terrible hire”.

The problem is usually because there wasn’t enough of an onboarding. There’s tactical onboarding: “here is our company mission and values and the tools we use” There’s emotional onboarding: “here’s what we care about and why”. And there’s spiritual onboarding: “this is why doing this work can matter in your life”. This post covers the first of those.

The Evolution of The Eureka Room Principles

Over the years I have spent many hours writing out my thoughts of what the Eureka Room is and is not. A few of these principles were known from the start but most of them were discovered by reflecting on the decisions I’ve made over the years.

Sometimes you can’t verbalize the “why” at the time you make a decision and you may not even be consciously aware that you’ve made any decision at all. But if you look back over time and reflect, motivations can be more apparent.

Here is the most clear statement of the Eureka Room Principles yet. They are in no particular order other than the first being the most important.

The Eureka Room Serves A Mission

The Eureka Room has an important mission and looks to the mission to answer difficult questions and forks in the road.

The mission of The Eureka Room is:

To help people feel the joy of human connection through charming and absurd experiences.

The Eureka Room is Not For Everyone

While everyone is welcome at The Eureka Room, The Eureka Room – by design – is not for everybody.

The Eureka Room believes that great experiences have a disputable purpose (Thank you, Priya Parker for this wonderful term). If there aren’t at least some people that hate what you do then it’s probably too boring to attract people who love what you do. (“If everyone is your customer, then no one is your customer”.)

The Eureka Room knows that just a small percentage of people will love The Eureka Room. The Eureka Room only serves those people. It aims to attract only those people and at the same time to actively discourage all others from visiting.

The Eureka Room is Only For Grownups

The Eureka Room is designed for adults to feel the special joy of human connection that only adults have when experiencing an absurd and charming experience together. To be able to deliver those types of experiences for all visitors, the Eureka Room is ages 16 and up.

Being “only for grownups” doesn’t mean that it has “adult content”. In fact, most if not all of it is “G-rated”. It also should be noted that “only for grownups” is not explicitly stated in the mission and this principle might change in the future.

The Eureka Room Doesn’t Try To Be “Weird”

The Eureka Room understands that the language used by ideal visitors to describe The Eureka Room often includes the word “weird”.

The Eureka Room believes the word “weird” is not a classification or style but instead a judgment. The judgement should be left to the visitor.

The Eureka Room’s is trying to be absurd and charming and novel and engaging and fun. It’s not trying to be “weird”.

In most cases, The Eureka Room shies away from using the word “weird” to talk about itself, both for fear of becoming a caricature of “weird” and because it believes that it is up to the visitor to make the judgment.

The Eureka Room focuses on making great, absurd and charming experiences. The Eureka Room doesn’t care what it is called as long as the visitor is very glad they visited.

The Eureka Room Is About Human Interaction

The Eureka Room is best for people who like to participate and interact with other human beings.

This is one of the distinctions between The Eureka Room and most other immersive experiences.

Many of the current “immersive” experiences in the world are about witnessing amazing creations. (And there are many mind-blowing creations out there now that The Eureka Room recommends you go experience!)

The soul of The Eureka Room, however, has nothing to do with lights, sound, music, props, technology, actors, or the creative content.

The Eureka Room exists not for the visitor to feel joy by bearing witness to a creation, but instead to feel the joy of taking action with other people. The creation’s role in The Eureka Room is merely to be a catalyst, guide, and magnifier.

Safety Is The Primary Concern Of The Eureka Room

The Eureka Room is always concerned for the physical safety of its visitors. The room must be physically safe, both in structure and in the sound, lights, and other technologies in the room. 

The Eureka Room is always concerned about the psychological safety of its visitors. The programs may still be challenging but they shouldn’t cause any lasting negative effect on visitors.

The Eureka Room Does Not Feel Completely Safe

Though The Eureka Room is made to be safe it is not made to feel completely safe. The Eureka Room often purposely attempts to generate feelings of uneasiness, awkwardness, or apprehension in its visitors. Carefully designed experiences that integrate these feelings can create better emotional dynamics, surprises, and energy.

The Eureka Room is less like an entertaining fun house and more like a slightly risky adventure.

The Eureka Room Respects The Visitors

Trust. The Eureka Room does not abuse the trust of visitors and “make them do stuff” for our own enjoyment or the feeling of exercising power. We only invite them to do things we believe will bring them enjoyment.

Status and Vulnerability. We do not “mess with” the visitors by making them feel scared, uneasy, bad-anxious, threatened, etc. Visitors should never feel like we are taking status over them. There might be some programs that ask a lot from them and are awkward or challenging, but visitors should clearly understand they always have the final say.

Visitors must feel visiting The Eureka Room was worth it. They must get their money’s worth and their time’s worth.

All emotional asks must have a payoff that is worth it to the visitor. On a program level, if we ask something of the participants (eg, to take a risk, feel discomfort, be bored, put up with being confused, to be singled out), we must give them something in return that they will value even more.

The Eureka Room Has A Specific Design Motif

The term “immersive”, as relatively new as it is, already comes with some connotations and assumptions. To make sure there is a clear understanding here is a more pointed list of which motifs are used and which are not.

The Eureka Room is not the story of a parallel universe, aliens, dystopia, or other related sci-fi manifestations.

The Eureka Room is not a trippy psychedelic experience.

The Eureka Room does not aim to disorient the visitors via glitch, strobes, or erraticness.

The Eureka Room is colorful and beautiful.

The Eureka Room is a mix of clean lines to show it can be serious and professional and hand drawn sketches to show that it can be real and personable.

The Eureka Room embraces many elements of the natural world.

The Eureka Room makes use of darkness in the way that musicians make use of silence.

The Eureka Room Uses Feelings-First Design

The Eureka Room is not about story. The Eureka Room believes that stories are the delivery truck, not the boxes inside the truck. The boxes are moments.

The Eureka Room is not about moments. If the delivery truck is the story, and the boxes are moments, then what’s inside the boxes are feelings.

The Eureka Room is about feelings. Each Eureka Room program starts with the question: “What are the feelings we want delivered?” From there, we work back to what packaging is needed and then back again to which truck is needed.

The Eureka Room’s Main Tool Is Play

Play is the most common tool in The Eureka Room’s toolbox. It is not “feel like a kid again” play. The Eureka Room creates play that leverages the more complex understandings and emotional capacities that only adults have.

The Eureka Room Uses Levity

The Eureka Room uses humor and levity to ease awkwardness, tension, and contribute to play. Juxtaposing seriousness and playfulness helps create dynamics in energy, emotion, and expectation.

The Eureka Room Believes Done Is Better Than Perfect

The Eureka Room believes perfection of product or service is important for a few important companies in this world, but for everyone else perfectionism just a fearful excuse to procrastinate.

The world needs The Eureka Room and doesn’t have time to wait on it to be perfect.

The Eureka Room Creates Opportunity For Challenge And Growth

The Eureka Room exists to expand realities and comfort zones so that people can better connect with one another. You can’t expand a comfort zone without reaching into what is not comfortable.

The Eureka Room believes that absurdity is a great vehicle to travel into the unknown, especially when there are others on the same bus.

The Eureka Room believes it needs a better metaphor than the one just stated.

The Eureka Room Values Surprise

The Eureka Room creates delightful surprises for visitors and times them at the best moments possible.

The Eureka Room Involves Fans In The Creation of New Experiences

The Eureka Room programs are developed with ideal visitors through testing and feedback using the Design Thinking process.

The Eureka Room Knows That Tools Are Just Tools

The Eureka Room does not let tools lead the design.

The Eureka Room does not let itself get distracted with shiny new things.

The Eureka Room is not here to serve tools, it is here to serve its mission.

The Eureka Room Does Not Confuse “fun to make” With “fun to experience”.

The Eureka Room knows that the enjoyment of creating a thing has very little correlation with whether or not someone else will enjoy experiencing it. The Eureka Room maintains tight vigilance for this easily-manifested conflation.

The Eureka Room Does Not Create Competition Between Visitors

The Eureka Room is a collaborative or parallel experience, not a competitive one.

Some programs might have the guise of competitiveness, but no visitor should feel that losing or winning matters.

Why learning from books is better than learning from the internet.

The internet is great to learn specific things. Such as: keyboard shortcuts or how to fix a toilet.

But the internet is probably at its least useful when you are trying to learn a lot about a subject that you know nothing about and you want to gain a better overall understand of a domain.

Besides the obvious – annoying ads – here’s some more reasons to consider paper books to get you learning faster and easier:

  1. When you buy a book the book was made for the customer. Most of the “free” articles you find on “how to” were written to sell ads, not to help you. The information is designed to get to the top of google search results – it’s not designed to help your understanding. The quality is great for search engines and ads – the quality is not so great to help you. Remember – if you’re not paying for the product then you are the product.
  2. A book has put everything together for you already. Web pages are typically 1000 words or less because they are targeted at a specific google search. If you want to learn a lot on your new subject, you’re going to have to piece a bunch of google searches together.
  3. A good book isn’t going to repeat itself and you can get the knowledge faster. With the “internet method”, each time you search, the results have a chance of containing information you already learned from your last search. As you do more and more searches you create more and more redundancies.
  4. Books that cover a topic in depth will introduce to things you would never know to google for. Unless you know what you don’t know, how do you google for it? When I bought a book about using Instagram I found out about other features and strategies I might never have found.
  5. Books easily go at your pace. Videos are often slow. (It might not be obvious but this is because the longer the video the more money they video maker gets from ads.) With a written text I can skim to the parts I’m not familiar with, stop and reflect on parts that are harder to understand and easily go at my own pace. These things are possible, but much harder with video.
  6. You can’t make notes on someone else’s video. I can make all the notes I want in my book. Sure I can make notes while I’m watching a video, but they’re not tied to the information. If I look through my annotated book, it’s right next to material that refreshes my memory. If I look at the notes I took while watching a video or hearing a lecture, the tie to the source information is gone – I might not even know what my note means anymore.
  7. A good book is written, edited, fact-checked, and organized well – the internet is knot. A good book from a professional publisher has almost certainly been edited for clarity and fact-checked. The web is only edited to get to the top of search results. The information goes in my brain faster when it is written, edited, and organized well.

But not all books are going to be great or work for you. Here’s a few tips on how to find the right book:

  1. Beware of hype and overpromises, especially on the cover. Flip through the book some before you buy it. Is it filled with specifics or does it endlessly talk about the results you will get or does it show you how to do it? Does it have lots of success stories or does it show you how to be successful?
  2. Beware of bloggers who have written books. The books are often just a collection of their posts, not a synthesized and logical progression of information. Just regurgitated articles written for the google search algorithm, not for humans. Read through reviews to see if this is a common theme. Flip through the book or look at the table of contents to see if it has a logical structure or just seems like a bunch of blog posts.
  3. Beware lots of graphics. This is a bit of a personal preference, but I find lots of illustrations very distracting and a waste of trees. Graphs and charts and screenshots are fine. But if it looks like something a 4 year old might be enthralled with then I just say no. Pointless colorful illustration is a sales tool to trick you into thinking learning will be easy. Learning takes work so don’t fall for it.
  4. Beware free or cheap e-books. You get what you pay for most times. Often these are just ads for their services disguised as books.
  5. Choose a book by a known publisher. Publishers go through thousands of aspiring author submissions and find the best they can. Let the publishers vet the writers for you. (There are always exceptions, but I think this is a good general rule of thumb).
  6. Look at the table of contents. Does it seem like the sort of stuff you’d want to learn? Is it too broad? Too narrow? If you just want to learn more about Instagram marketing , you don’t need to buy a book that covers seven social networks, each in a different chapter.
  7. Don’t look at the Amazon reviews until you sort by date. Publishers game the system by getting lots of good reviews into the system on release day. Sorting by newest will show you closer to what the truth sentiment is toward the book. If the reviews average 4.8 stars but the last 5 reviews are negative.. be wary.
  8. Don’t buy a new release. Related to the last point, be wary of books that just came out. Publishers do everything they can to make this new book look like the best thing ever.

There’s exceptions to be made for all these rules, but I think if you keep them in mind when digging into a whole new area that will take more than a few hours of study, you’ll get more for your efforts faster by going with a physical book.

The Museum of Stuff You Really Want to Touch But Can’t.

Note: This post is part of my “Museums Project“, a collection of 200+ high-concept ideas for museums.

I’ll admit up front that this museum is emotion-specific: It’s created to trigger the feelings like annoyance and longing. It is not a museum for those without much self-control or those with an obsessive compulsive disorder.

The Inspiration

A while back, I was at an art show which had some art made of little wooden 2” square cubes. Each face of each cube had a different design on it.  About 20 of them rested on three different shallow shelves positioned at about eye level.

One of the people I was at this show with reached out and picked up a cube. At first it didn’t register with me, but another person with us scolded, “that’s ART, you can’t touch it!”

It was true. And it was obvious – nothing else in the space had even the slightest call to be touched. Everyone knows you don’t go around touching stuff in an art gallery. 

But the more surprising thing was that while I was at that show I witnessed many people doing the exact same thing.

These cubes – reminiscent of a sort of children’s alphabet blocks – just beckoned all passerby to reach out and touch it, inspect it, rearrange it. There was something about this art that was special.

The Museum

That exhibit – and particularly inviting furry coats – are some of the inspiration for The Museum of Stuff You Really Want to Touch But Can’t. 

Everything in the museum cries out to be touched – but none of it can be.  I don’t know if there’s any other museum that would purposely trigger the emotions this one would and I think it would be interesting to see if strangers bond and talk about their desire to touch these things and how annoying the whole place is. But hopefully it’s annoying in a good and fascinating way that inspires reflection.

The museum would play on tactile semiotics: We taken cues that commonly mean “touch” or “pull” or “push” and we try to get them to mindlessly engage just as the woman in the gallery engaged with those blocks instinctively.

It could be as obvious as a red button that says “press me” on it, but there’s a sign above the exhibit that says “Please do not press”.  

A puzzle, completed except for one piece. That piece is positioned over the last remaining hole, just waiting to be pressed down in victory. 

Lots of fuzzy and shaggy stuff.

Live baby chicks and kittens everywhere.

A bookshelf with one book that is falling out.. just a bit. 

A sweater with a loose thread.

Things that are clearly out of order that could be easily fixed.

Fragile vases and dishes dangling over the edge of a table.

A marquee with two transposed letters.

Telescopes and microscopes that you can’t look into.

Puffy looking soft stuff you want to sit in.

A gong or whack-a-mole you can’t hit.

Hundred dollar bills strewn all over the hallway floor. 

The Counterpart To This Museum

This museum might be part of a museum duo – the other obviously being “The Museum of Stuff You Really Don’t Want to Touch But Have To”.  Maybe once you’re inside, we cover the doorknobs with boogers and close you in. If you want to get out you have to touch the boogers.

I suspect that The Museum of Stuff You really Don’t Want to Touch But Have To would be even less popular than The Museum of Stuff You Want To Touch But Can’t.

What if we took this in a different direction? A more meaningful direction?

A More Meaningful Version

Maybe there’s a whole other take that shows you what you have been wanting or ignoring in life but can’t or haven’t touched. It might be called “The Museum of Stuff You Don’t Touch But Really Should”.

Garbage scatted all over the ground that you have to walk through and it’s next to a garbage can.

A life-size diorama of people suffering and the solution only visible to you, for example people in another country dying for lack of clean water next to a few bottles of evian (or more hamfistedly a water pitcher labeled something like “Americans Only”)

This idea deserves its own post, though.

The Museum of We’ve Got One of Those Too

Note: This post is part of my “Museums Project“, a collection of 200+ high-concept ideas for museums.

I find the idea of “authenticity” and “realness” curious. People go to great lengths to see “the original” of something even when there’s perfectly good ways to experience an identical replica.

This museum tells you up front that everything is a reproduction but then challenges you to value it equally with it was “the real one”.

The Inspiration

I would venture to guess that 99.999% of people who see the real Mona Lisa would not know it from a reproduction (I mean, geez, that little thing is under so much glass and surrounded by so many tourists I couldn’t hardly tell it from a bowl of fruit.)

The value of “the real one” is literally all in your mind. You don’t know the Louvre isn’t showing you some reproduction – you choose to believe what you want and the value of the experience comes out of that.

The Museum  

So this museum has all the most famous art in the world. And not only that, but you can get closer to it. We have the ability to make these things almost impossibly identical. So just do that, convince people that it is the same per every square nanometer.

And let them know that in our museum – The Museum of We’ve Got One of Those, Too – you can get up close and see what it really looks like. Perhaps – gasp – you could even touch it. 

I know this museum would likely not be as popular or well-received as I’d like, yet I don’t understand why. The desire to know you saw “the real one” is incredibly compelling. 

However, when I step out of my privileged shoes (I’ve been to the Louvre, the Uffizi, St. Peter’s, etc) it’s a different story.

I can see there are literally millions and millions of people – just in America – who for one reason or another – will never be able to see the originals.

Would they not care to see exact reproductions if it was easier and more affordable? This seems likely.

There are also those that have the ability to find their way to the “real ones” but aren’t interested enough to make it happen. But they are still *somewhat* interested. They interested enough to see a collection of identical “greatest hits”.

Other countries have replicated famous worldwide monuments. Even the US has – Vegas has both the Venice canals and the Eiffel Tower, and many Vegas visitors enjoy them.

Idea That Fits Nowhere Else In This Post

What if we told them that one of the art pieces was actually the real thing? How would that change the experience?