In the Magical Realm of Creating Physical Experiences

One of our Play & Experience Designers at Stupid Studio wrote this personal piece.

✨ Imagine stepping into a room. You don’t know what is happening behind the semi-transparent veil covering the door, but as soon as you walk through it, you feel it – softly, on your skin: The change of scene and the sudden realisation that this is something new. You clutch your golden ticket, afraid to let it go. This, you’ve never tried before. Everything around you is glowing and so bright that your eyes hurt. Still, it’s calm and peaceful; finally, you have arrived. ✨ 

The projects I am most passionate about at Stupid Studio involve creating physical experiences. I can use my storytelling skills, build worlds, and materialise journeys within the physical realm. These tasks are often combined with our strategic, future-oriented work for our international clients or our more visitor-focused work for cultural institutions like theatres and museums. 

Doing this kind of experience design is so much fun! But detecting the right story and emotional pull for a specific design brief and then creating a flow and a universe to go with it can also be quite challenging. Still, I feel like these projects make my head hurt in the best way possible. For us, creating physical experiences is very much about using our imagination and playing around creatively. Still, it’s also about understanding strategies, markets and opportunity spaces and ensuring that the journeys we create stick with the people venturing through them to move something in them going forward.

But what does all of this mean? What is a physical experience, and why is it one of our offerings at Stupid Studio? How do we approach creating one, and for whom, when, and where do we make it happen? 

First things first. What is a physical experience?

A physical experience needs a physical realm. There can be digital elements along the way, and often, these enhance the experience a lot – creating soundscapes, videos, interactive touchpoints, project mapping or other to go with the physical journey of moving from A to B (and in some cases from A to Z, or from A to B and back again). 

Another thing that the physical experience needs is a user or visitor—at least one, most often a human being (but we’re open to working with other kinds of users, like robots or animals, if you have any). No matter what, the experience should involve someone participating, experiencing it, or being changed by it. 

A physical experience should be sensed, able to open up to new questions, and/or provide answers. It also needs a well-planned flow to deliver on the client’s request and the user’s needs. We strive to do this in the most simplified, fundamental, yet surprising way possible, and we have developed the process, tools, and methods to make it happen.

Examples from past projects

So far, we’ve worked with, for example, The Danish Royal Theatre in creating a movable container-based experience taking children through the arts of ballet, theatre and classical music in playful ways, with Design Museum Denmark in creating static but immersive glass montres to make the visitor reflect on the future of our society; and with large international organisations in developing strategic future-oriented scenarios, that takes their colleagues or leadership through research-based stories to make them reflect on where the world is going and what that means to them as a company, before making decisions and driving change based on those scenarios. Lastly, we often make experience design a part of our workshops and facilitated sprints, where we take the participants through a small snippet of an imaginative journey to put them in the right mindset for the session. 

We have gathered a few case photos comparing our high-fidelity public experiences to the low-fidelity journeys we created internally for teams and organisations.

Creating experiences the Stupid Studio way – our approach and principles

Stupid Studio is a multidisciplinary team with various skill sets, meaning we use our colleagues differently throughout the process. Then, as you saw above, we also create many different types of physical experiences depending on the client’s needs: Does it have a strategic goal, is it about making more of an emotional story, or is it all about crafting an interactive, collaborative and gamified / play focused experience? Still, even with that, we use the same building blocks and methods when structuring the process – some of which I’ve tried categorising below.

01. Storytelling & Narrative

Use all senses when building a universe. 

Although it may not be possible to incorporate all five elements in the final experience, at least allow the user's mind to wander to the elements of tasting and smelling. Don’t just have the users hear, see, and touch something. 

Create an emotional pull.

Start with the ending in mind—what do you want your participants to feel or reflect upon when leaving the experience? How can you create that emotional pull right from the beginning? Think also about your overall narrative structure—what will surprise and delight people, make them curious and wonder? Which touchpoints of twists and turns can you introduce along the way?

Feel it on your own body.

What is your story, the narrative you want to tell? Craft the story, and then think about how you can make someone else feel that story as if on their own body. How can you create an experience of ‘walking in someone else’s shoes’? Make it real? Take time to get into another person’s mindset – through roleplay, persona cards or others.

Complexity vs. simplicity.

What is the main point of your journey, experience, and story, and how can you elevate it? Another way of saying this is: "Do one thing well." You might be working with a complex story or an experience with multiple layers and journey outlets, but what is the ONE thing the users need to get out of it, and how do you ensure that comes across no matter what? 

02. User journey & Experience flow

Intro–Experience–Outro–Outcome. 

The model we usually use when structuring a new user journey and its touchpoints is ‘Intro–Experience–Outro–Outcome’. Here, we look at the invitation into the experience, what happens in the experience journey itself, how the users are being led out of the experience, and with what – a physical takeaway, a reminder, a shift in mindsets, actions to change behaviours, or..? We do this to ensure that a red thread goes through the whole journey and that our storyline is present in all parts. 

A diverse set of users.

It is pretty rare to design an experience for only one type of user – you will most likely have to keep different experience flows in mind, making them fit a diverse set of visitors or participants. We often look to the model ‘Flow/Skill Chart’ to ensure we have different levels in our experience journey fitting various types of users. Sometimes, we create relevant (and quite the opposite – irrelevant) personas to help the design process unfold, but it’s rarely done in-depth. There are many biases to look out for when you do personas, so we tend to make more sketched-out versions, focusing only on diversifying the flow. 

Points of interactions.

An experience can be relatively passive (think about going to the cinema or the experience of listening to a podcast). However, we like to make our experiences more or less interactive. As mentioned earlier, to create strong emotional connections, we want to make the participants feel the experience on their bodies – making the journey actively engaging, immersive and participatory. To do so, we first analyse the overall story and flow before looking into specific touchpoints, trying to find the best places to add in-game mechanics, different types of play moods and/or activation points.

03. The Physical Realm

Designing the right atmosphere. 

Having nailed the intro-experience-outro-outcome and with the narrative all planned out, it’s time to link those two together and make it experiential. For each touchpoint and the overall story, how does it look and feel, and what will happen physically? Then, what material can you use to make it come alive and make the interactions work? Which touchpoints work best as digital, and which should be physical? Any items or artefacts that need to be present, and how lo-fi can you go with making the journey come alive? At Stupid Studio, we love to take regular objects but add a twist or something unexpected. We also enjoy creating entire universes and seamless transitions, looking to theatre for inspiration. 

Materialising the needed guidance.

We can’t expect users to know exactly what to do when, where to go, or how to act/behave in the experience. They need guidance – this could be wayfinding, an audible sound piece, or perhaps it’s personalised through a host of sorts. Maybe signage is necessary (which should always be made to fit the narrative and visual language of the world), or perhaps a physical and/or digital invitation, map and takeaway have to be materialised, making somewhat of a memory anchor for the whole experience. This can look and work differently, but it is essential to include it in your planning.

Of course, many other methods are needed when designing an experience—you won’t get far without ideating, making sketches, prototyping, and testing. Here are a few photos of our process.

And that’s about it. Or at least a tiny part of it. If you have any comments or questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out – we would love to engage in a conversation about how, when and why it makes sense to design physical experiences.