Notes on Pervasive Media and Experience

This morning we had another of Jon Dovey’s weekly Pervasive Media KTF project discussions. Here are some of my notes and thoughts, and my attempt to contextualise it within the scope of my research.

As a group we all had problems with the terms Pervasive, Media, Experience and Design. A pity there is no hyphen to take issue with. Perhaps less so design, but certainly the other three.

Pervasive Media (PM) is not really a new thing, it opens up new avenues, but doesn’t create the possibility for Completely New Experiences. Maybe PM becomes a toolbox for new forms of experience design.

When we’re describing Pervasive Media, we’re actually talking about Pervasive Media Experiences… or perhaps even more simply Pervasive Experiences. However this starts to make less sense. The term ‘Media’ is more than a little problematic when we’re talking about activities and experiences. Experience design would seem to be core to the creation of Pervasive Media because of this experiential angle.

There was a lot of discussion about what experience is and what experience design might be. Sam K brought up Deleuze’s philosophy of events, bringing in activities, affect and ethological type thinking. This chimes with my reading of experience and behaviour from Victor Turner’s chapter in The Anthropology of Experience. Turner uses Dewey and Dilthey to explain that we can’t experience other people’s experiences, so we are stuck with just observing behaviours and making an informed judgement about what their experience might be. So when we talk about experience design we’re really talking about behavioural design.

Unsurprisingly Disney came up and quite a bit of the discussion revolved around the total experience (behaviour) design they are masters of in their themeparks. The interesting thing that this lead to some thoughts about managing the “gaze” in pervasive media. Where is the attention and how is it lead, managed, engineered? Later on everyone agreed that one of the core descriptors of pervaisve media is that it is interleaved with the everyday/real world and not heavily stage-managed, controlled and locked down in the same way as a themepark or a curated experience. That a mixing of the experience and context is an important aspect. Towards the end we did again bring back in the idea of mindfulness verus having one’s mind elsewhere. How does being distracted break the experience, or how can this be worked into the experience? I (jokingly) brought up the (debunked) notion of the aesthetic stance and suggested that maybe what we were talking about was pervasive participants needing to have a pervasive stance to appreciate their experience.

Unlike other media or experiences the observer of PM has not yet been constructed. Things like TV, cinema, etc needed to construct an observer and create an audience. The norms and behaviours required to consume the media are not natural, but constructed.

With respect to (at the very least) theatre-like pieces. They need to “Sit comfortably in a reality that is good for [the player/participant].” That is the real world situation and the narrative of the piece need to be diegetically interwoven, so that things like the presence of all the participants is explained through the piece.

Much of the work in the studio comes from a design perspective and the term experience and experience design comes from that as a discipline. Art, although obviously implicitly experiential, isn’t as concerned about the term. Or more likely has moved beyond it into a more nuanced understanding of the aspects of experience that are specific to the capabilities, possibilities, affordances and constraints of a particular medium.

Is experience a verb or a noun? Should we be using it one way or the other? Using experience as a noun tends to commodify it. A problem with experience design as performed in a commercial and mass market product setting.