The Experience Alchemists, Inc. (TEA), a public benefit corporation that offers experience design and consulting services for projects both large and small, has announced a series of educational events which will be taking place in New Zealand and Australia later this month.
Ed Rodley, The Experience Alchemists co-founder and principal, will share insights on immersive experiences, visitor engagement, and upcoming trends for the cultural sector.
Events in Wellington
Rodley will present the closing keynote address at the National Digital Forum (NDF) in Wellington on 21 November. NDF is a leading event which brings together those who working to enhance digital interaction with culture and heritage in New Zealand.
“As someone who’s worked in the digital part of the cultural sector for a long time, I have always been impressed with the sheer amount of innovative thinking and bold experimentation that happens in Aotearoa,” says Rodley. “Combine that with NDF’s commitment to inclusivity and willingness to talk about difficult topics, and you’ve got a recipe for a lot of eye-opening experiences and important truth-telling.”
He will discuss the current paradigm shift in the cultural industry, and consider its implications for developing visitor experiences in years to come.
In addition, Rodley will be hosting a half-day workshop on 22 November. Exploring Playful Engagement: Designing for Interactivity and Delight investigates playful engagement in cultural settings. The workshop will focus on four interconnected principles that are important to creating compelling, unforgettable physical, digital, or hybrid participant experiences: sensory immersion, emotional evocation, narrative transportation, and playful participation.
The session offers a structure for understanding the visitor experience in cultural settings and will recommend a model of playful engagement that will allow experience designers to visualize their mission more clearly. It will also investigate four concepts that can be used in the development of the next generation of compelling, unforgettable, and profound in-person and digital experiences.
Immersive exhibition masterclass
On 27 November, Rodley will join Lucie Paterson, head of experience, digital and insights at ACMI, and Ersin Han Ersin, artist and creative director of London-based experiential studio Marshmallow Laser Feast, for an immersive exhibition masterclass at ACMI (the Australian Centre for the Moving Image) in Melbourne.
This session accompanies the opening of the exhibition Marshmallow Laser Feast: Works of Nature, in a broad debate on the future of immersive experiences in museums. It will look to learnings from video game design and theme park design, consider the consequences for collecting and preserving, in addition to audience and societal outcomes, and ask how the sector can develop an ecosystem and talent pipeline to support this activity.
Attendees can expect some challenging and even divisive truths and thoughts on the next chapter in the sector’s “immersive turn.”
The Experience Alchemists, Inc. (TEA) recently collaborated with artists Bahareh and Farzaneh Safarani to develop a commission for the Akron Art Museum for a media-based artwork that connected and engaged with the Akron community.
Image kind courtesy of The Experience Alchemists
