First of all I want to congratulate you on the way in which you succeed in confronting experiences from a number of very different angles. Especially the fact that you deal with experiences as texts that people read (interpret, give meaning to) is very useful in my opinion.
I, and this will come as no surprise to anyone who knows what I am working on, also fully agree with the importance of your question ‘So what is new about the experience economy if every economic offering has always been interpreted in a subjective way by the human brain?’

I think the novelty of real and meaningful experiences lies in the fact that the initiative is more on the individual’s side. This kind of reflects your part on the degree to which people can influence the plot and are put into a position to choose what happens. When the plot is ready-made and shaped in a ‘one-size-fits-all’-manner, there is still interpretation (human beings are sense-making creatures and will always look for the meaning of what they are confronted with) but the question is: what is the impact on the individual? Even the smallest emotion is the result of interpretation but I guess that most organizations want to make a bigger impact. I therefore like your description of the ‘activation of multiple existing stories in the mind’ because when multiple stories are linked to the present experience, the impact of the experience will increase. Dewey speaks about the change of one’s life horizon. The experience does not merely have meaning within that context, but by ‘activating more stories in the mind’ it also changes the meaning of other parts of the individual’s life.

But do we know the existing stories in the mind of people? I think (for the most part) not. So how can we know what the experience will be connected to? How can we know whether that connection will be positive or negative in the eyes of the person? I think here we have the dilemma of the experience industry. Business is still used to making things, managing the effects and keeping control over the process. The standardization and quantitative measurement of outcomes and procedures is inhibited when this dynamic, complex and not fully rational human being enters the ring. A human being with a mind full of prior experiences and existing stories, a human being who does not behave like the causal laws of physics tell us. When I drop a stone on the ground today, it will fall down; when I drop a human being, it will also fall down. These are causal laws of physics. But when I want to repeat the experiment tomorrow, the stone won’t mind, but I guess the human being will have learned from the experience he had yesterday and will choose not to participate.

Models, whether they are shaped like matrices, curves, formulae or theories, are simplified representations of reality and can thus only explain a part of what happens.
Experiences, human beings, learning and sense-making are much too dynamic and complex for any one discipline to grasp. This is why I started with my compliments to you for looking at experiences from different angles.

I want to finish with some theories I thought of when reading your article:
In relation to the fact that thinking and acting are the same for the mind, the research Michael Kubovy does on ‘pleasures of the mind’ might be interesting.
In relation to your explanation of fixed plots versus co-creation strategies, the ‘Flying Wedge’ of Brenda Laurel might be useful.
In relation to the difference between seeing a real war and seeing a war on TV, the distinction between secondary and primary experiences of Reed makes sense, as does the article of Stevenson on how the music industry stages experiences (simulacra) for tourists.

Under ‘Inspiration’ (click on Innovation in the right panel and then click on Inspiration) I have added some lnks and documents on the theories I refer to in my last reaction on Mark’s article.

Thanks for your comments! I’ll have a good look at the articles you mentioned. Experience and meaning is hard to grasp for modern science as causality does not seem to exist: Experiments do not seem to repeat themselves and causality seems nothing but an illusion occasioned when events follow each other with regularity.

Perhaps brain computer interfaces will one day give us more insight, but since we experience all the time and our Self changes after the ‘experiment’, it will be near impossible to pinpoint the effects of a single observation, e.g. an encounter with a MP3 player or TV, and rate the impact of the experience in order to use it on some kind of balanced score card. Perhaps the real issue here is that modern science and business with their specialist view is unable to cope with such a holistic concept as experience and that we cannot escape this mental prison. Still, business and science needs to respond because people are acting more and more in an experience-rational way.

So true Mark, but ‘modern science’ is not just a matter of causal relationships and other aspects of the physical sciences. For example the human and social sciences have vast amounts of knowledge on how to investigate subjectivity, like experiences and meaning.

It is all a matter of how you view reality (as an objective thing out there, like the positivists do, or as a (social) construction, like postpositivists do)? This influences how you think that knowledge about reality is created. The former argue that by studying, analysing and observing, the laws of reality can be discovered. The latter don’t see an objective reality that can be discovered and maintain that we have to interpret the construction (for example as we do with texts) and make our interpretation intelligible for others. It’s a whole debate between different schools, frameworks, perspectives, orientations and paradigms, which has not been solved obviously but more and more people are using strategies, insights and methods derived from the ‘other’ type of science, in fact this type of researcher is even being called the ‘researcher-as-bricoleur.’

To acknowledge that experiences are created in an interaction between a person and his or her environment, in other words: by inviting the individual into the equation, you will have to let go of the positivist worldview. This may be hard for some, some authors have even used the term ‘fetishism’ when describing the attachment of researchers to their preferred paradigms, but I really don’t see how positivist logic can help us in understanding (Verstehen, contrary to the positivist Erklärung) complex and dynamic processes of sense-making, learning, and experience. The traditional logic is focused on eliminating subjectivity but subjectivity is what we are trying to understand. We (or at least I ;-)) want to know about the individual’s point of view, therefore we need qualitative research.

It all depends on what we are researching, thát should determine how we will go about it, not some habit, traditional way of working, or fetish.

This whole issue became especially clear for me after reading Denzin & Lincoln’s ‘Handbook of Qualitative Research’, Ellis & Flaherty’s ‘Investigating Subjectivity’ and other publications on Interpretivism and Constructivism.

Mark… thx for such an inspiring article… I must admit you make some interesting connections. I can’t agree with everything you write.. but that makes it inspiring isn’t it =)

Some remarks:
To my opinion too many people write about a powershift as if we go from a 100% industrial push to a 100% consumer pull as a result of tech empowered individuals. In your article you write that experiences are not created in organization space but in individual space. Since it is often harder to work togehter than alone… it is that nuance, the INTERdependency (not INdenpendency) which is the challenge.

I think that experiences are the handshake between organisation and individual space… giving meaning that is where it becomes really individual space?!

For the same reason I think you can’t say Inside and Outside or internal or external world. Our internal world is built up by the symbols, stories, memes of the outside world. I’d rather speak of the dynamics of a view. Outside-in or inside-out. Many saga’s were created (even in the time of hunters and gatherers…) not to affect, control or shape our environment but to understand it…

A great change of post-industrial thinking is the convergence of the customer into the value chain… no more borders… so in this hybrid environment can we still speak as if an indivudal has an individual space and a internal world?

When reading Mark van Doorn’s article on the Experience Economy , I feel confined by his limited understanding about the relationship between interactivity and narrative. Not only does it fail to convey the relevance of separating the two, it also doesn’t do justice to the potential of Ambient Experience Design.

Although I agree with the author’s belief that there is a balance to be maintained between freedom and structure, I disagree with the apparent assumption that freedom equals interactivity and structure is derived from narrative.

While narrative and interactivity can coexist within the same ‘product’ (in the broadest sense of the word), they are like an emulsion, they don’t really mix. The moment control is taken from the user, and a narrative is employed, interactivity is lost, and the moment the user can steer things and make choices, we can no longer speak of a narrative.

The problem looking at an interactive medium with a ‘narrative lens’ is that it focuses too much on the outcome, which indeed could be seen as a form of narrative. However, this is just one of the possible outcomes, and it is the actual act of ‘playing’ (in lack of a more generic term) that should be the focus of research to create meaningful experiences.

For instance, take this fragment from the chapter “Ambient Narratives�, on page 8 of his article:

“When we strip the perceptual characteristics of these different forms of interactive narrative what essentially remain are complex, interrelated sign systems. These signs and symbols can be interpreted as text.�

By limiting his analysis to the (potential) outcome of the medium - by merely interpreting it as a text - the author misses the relevance of interactivity in this context. As Frasca noted in Simulation vs. Narrative :

“Traditional literary theory and semiotics cannot deal with these texts, [..] because these works are not just made of sequences of signs but rather behave like machines or sign-generators.�

Indeed, to the outside observer someone involved in an Ambient Experience might well ‘play out’ a narrative, but the active participant does not feel confined to the output. The act of participation and choice sets this medium apart from traditional, representational media.

Mark van Doorn continues the chapter with a few hypothetical examples of these so-called Ambient Narratives. Although the examples could all be (economically) viable applications of the technology he has researched, they are extremely linear, and at times so confined to a literary background that I feel the author fails to see the limitless potential the technology has to offer.

It seems the author is suggesting that by placing traditional representations of narrative on ‘a line’ for a participant to trigger, a greater degree of immersion is somehow realized. Although as noted by Newman , ‘narrative sequences can necessitate their own level of interactivity’ - for instance, by the memory of events that took place before or expectation of events yet to come - this type of interactivity does not make full use of the possibilities of the medium.

As a game designer myself, I prefer to view the workspace of Ambient Experience Design in light of Frasca’s simulation rhetoric. In Simulation versus Narrative Frasca describes different levels in simulations that can be used to convey meaning.

The first level is shared with traditional narrative and deals with representation and events, such as characters and backgrounds.

The second level is about the manipulation rules: what the participant is able to do within the model.

The third level is about the goal rules: what the participant tries to accomplish.

The fourth and final level deals with meta-rules. A meta-rule defines to what extent the rules can be changed.

When trying to apply this model to the Ambient Experience technology, interesting possibilities arise. One could, for instance, tag people as characters, mundane objects as items and buildings as property, all on the first level. Then define the way the characters can interact with the items and property on the second level, for instance, they can be traded or gathered, and used to build extensions to a piece of property, in order to raise its value. Finish off with formulating a goal rule or rules - that a player has to turn decrepit buildings into valuable property – and we have the first draft of a multiplayer real estate game.

The point, however, is not about the example. It’s the fact that by classifying these levels and using them correctly an infinite amount of interesting activities can be perceived that can be easily tweaked and expanded. I’m not saying that traditional narrative theory is not a good source of inspiration or a way to learn how meaningful experiences are realized, but hope to show that this view is too narrow and fails to encompass the real possibilities of the medium, which are boundless.

Thanks for your valuable comments/concerns. I did not know about Frasca’s theory, but it seems to have at least something in common with the neo-Aristotelian theory of interactive drama by Mateas and earlier work by Laurel in her book Computers as Theatre. I did not really focus on performance in this article because I wanted to highlight the pervasiveness of story (projection) at different levels of human cognition and culture. Participation and performance is of course key to interactive media (environments). In classical theatre you may say that the actors on stage write the text, whereas the audience reads the text. But when the audience becomes an active participant in the play, the lines between producing text and consuming text blur. This is why I believe both performance theory (broader than Western theatre) and literary is important for experience design and your comments/concerns about looking only through the narrative lens are very true.

The language we use to describe ambient narratives in experimental prototypes is in fact performance-based. The author can describe preconditions on stage (location), actor (user), performance (activity), prop (tangible objects and devices near user) and script (story values including goals and user preferences) and actions (rules) that must happen when these preconditions have been met. The story then emerges as actors interact with the environment. But at this moment it is only about making choices as in a traditional computer adventure game. Perhaps these can be seen as the first and second levels in the model you refer to.

Currently we are looking at ways how performers (end-users and actors/service employees) can not only make choices but also create their own fragments, turning them into both readers and writers at the same time. But to make this form of end-user programming feasible, you need to have a computional model underneath so that a computer programme can execute the programs (fragments) articulated/written by the end-user or expert user (experience designers like you). What we don’t want to do is to take the designer out of the loop. I am much more in favour of a co-creation model as you see in weblogs and wiki sites. Game designers (or expert players) can then add necessary plot material to the multiplayer real estate game you mention as the game progresses. Perhaps (part of) this plot material can be generated by computers, but I think you have to build a computer that passes the Turing test for that.