Designing Blended Experiences: Laugh Traders

O'Keefe, Brian J; Mastermaker, Michael; Flint, Tom; Resmini, Andrea; Chirico, Andrea; Sturdee, Miriam

Abstract

Digital transformation is increasingly blurring the line between what is software and what is the world, requiring designers to harmoniously blend digital and physical products, services and spaces if they want to orchestrate meaningful experiences that are specifically aimed at the interweaving relationships between people, places and things. Traditional approaches to product design, interaction design, and user experience design do not often take this new context into account. The pictorial details the results of a twelve-day workshop focusing on real-world audience and performer problems during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe: it illustrates how two distinct tools, the Blended Experiences Tool and the Evaluation Tool, focusing on the creation of a blended experience and respectively meant to provide a structured way to approach the generative and reflective stages of the design process, can be used to address this gap. This pictorial illustrates the theoretical framing supporting the Blended Experiences Tool; describes how the workshop produced Laugh Traders, a speculative experience centering on attending and reviewing comedy shows; provides a page-by-page pictorial storyboard of the Laugh Trader experience; introduces the Evaluation Tool and applies it to Laugh Trader to measure the relevance, complexity, and attractiveness of the resulting blended experience. Preliminary reflections conclude the pictorial.

Citation

O'Keefe, B. J., Mastermaker, M., Flint, T., Resmini, A., Chirico, A., & Sturdee, M. (2023). Designing Blended Experiences: Laugh Traders. In C&C '23: Proceedings of the 15th Conference on Creativity and Cognition (116-128). https://doi.org/10.1145/3591196.3593371

• Conference Name: 15th Conference on Creativity and Cognition
• Conference Location: Online
• Start Date: Jun 19, 2023
• End Date: Jun 21, 2023
• Online Publication Date: Jun 19, 2023
• Publication Date: 2023-06
• Deposit Date: Jun 27, 2023
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Pages: 116-128
• Book Title: C&C '23: Proceedings of the 15th Conference on Creativity and Cognition
• ISBN: 9798400701801
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3591196.3593371
• Keywords: Blended Experiences, Mixed Reality, Storytelling, UX