IRL Experience Design

Laughter 2.0 (2/18 Update)

Note: This post was drafted on 2/18

Warning: Spoilers. If you are planning on visiting the Eureka Room, you may want to wait to read this until afterward. However you if you like to give feedback, by all means read ahead.

I’ve been re-working the “Face it til you make it” mindfultainment program. Originally participants were cued to make certain faces (lots of smiling) or laugh in certain ways based on faces and words shown on the screen. 

I’ve taken out the faces part and kept the part where you see a word (usually “ha”) and you say the word. The thing earlier testers responded to was that the placement of the word effected the tone. If you saw “haaaaaaaaa” at the top of the screen, then you made a higher pitched “haaaaaaa”, lower was lower pitched. There was an accompanying “haaaaaa” from a narrator so that most people would land on the same pitch, more or less. (See this at the beginning of the video at the bottom of this post)

Here’s some of the ideas I’ve been playing around that I’d thought I’d share. 

Music 

If you watch the full video, you’ll see that I experimented with different tones of music, including:

  1. Fun and joyous
  2. Energetic and rock and roll
  3. Calm and Meditative
  4. Odd and unmetered

Visuals 

The visuals are the first thing people notice and often what they came to see, but they really aren’t the core of what the Eureka Room is about. While I think that the core/heart/soul is the first thing, I think playing around with visuals can sometimes help discover tone and inspire creative breakthroughs that reveal more of the core/heart/soul. That’s what why I’ve experimented here.

There’s a ton of visuals here, but one I’ll point out is the mandelbrot zoom. 

This is the trippy psychedelic one. I’m pretty confident that 95% of people will see it and say “whoa! use that one!” It’s compelling and cool, I agree (it’s currently borrowed from the internet), but I’m not sure it’s right for this program. I’m wondering what is the best for *this* program. Don’t worry, if you love it, I’m sure I’ll use it somewhere. 

Mechanics: Stimulus-Response 

Here’s how every program in the Eureka Room works: Something happens and then people have a response. 

What stimulus and response aligns with the mission “charming absurdity”? What is fun? What will people find rewarding? Or, too big an ask?

Visual Stimulus:

  1. They could actually see the word.
  2. The phrase is assigned a color or other abstract visual at the beginning. 

Auditory Stimulus:

  1. They are cued by music, sound effects, voiceovers or a combination of these. 
  2. They could be cued by each other somehow.

Possible Responses:

  1. Word/Phrase. They could have one word/phrase or multiple word/phrases.
  2. Tone. They could say it with a certain tone based on vertical position of the visual
  3. Body movement. They could point to a visual or another person. They could make bird arms.

Mechanics: Interaction 

Guests can interact with the room, each other or with props. Here’s a few options I considered for this program:

  1. Person-Room
    1. Just stand there and look at the front screen (like originally planned).
    2. Move the target around all the walls or have multiple targets at once.
  2. Person-Person
    1. Assign each person a color. The color appears every once in a while around the room. When you see your color you have to “caw” at the person closest to the color.  To allow the same program to work for different numbers of people, I would probably limit the colors to 2 or 3, maaaybe 4 and then split people into teams.