This is why we need someone nimble, adventurous, who loves to experiment and play with new technology! Thus far we’ve been working with Actionscript, Processing, PHP, TUIO and Max MSP. We’ve been hacking apart the Kinect, Arduino boards and basically anything we can get our hands on. But, we’re growing so we need help. If you have experience in the above listed languages or feel like you could contribute even more, please email Garrett Fuselier by June 1st (11:59 pm) with a sampling of projects you’ve worked on, and 2-3 paragraphs about how you feel you could contribute.

We’ll go through a selection process, and the interns will begin on July 1st.

Simply put, we’re growing, and we need more design collaborative brainpower to move forward. You must be willing to experiment and work within the applications of Flash, Illustrator, Photoshop and AfterEffects. Google SketchUp experience is a huge plus as well!

You’ll be working on real projects, doing on site visits of spaces and helping design the experience from beginning to end.

If you feel like you would work well in an active environment, please email 6-10 examples of your work along with 2-3 paragraphs of how you could contribute to Garrett Fuselier by June 1st. Not to belittle any of your print skills, but we’ll be primarily looking at digital work, so be sure to weight your sampling appropriately.

We’ll go through a selection process, and the interns will begin on July 1st.

We love Google products and it was hard to pick just one. But we did. We chose Google Voice, a service that allows you to mask your phone number with another (or to route your calls from a variety of different numbers to just one number) and it also helps you keep track of your voicemails and texts. Well, we posted photos of our maintenance man dressed as Santa all over the city (see attached photo) and invited people to call Santa and let him know what they would like for Christmas. Haha!

The project was intended to be an absolute joke and fit right into the Google Slam video collection, but we also figured we’d wrap it up by making someone’s wish come true. It was great. We got a week’s worth of totally goofy texts and voicemails. People phoned in and left messages asking for everything from fire trucks, rainbows, college-themed sweatpants, the Chucky series, and the list goes on. We were even going to figure out how to deliver a couple of these items in a really weird and funny way. But then, one voicemail in particular changed everything – the one below.

The laughter subsided and we realized our campaign had turned in a completely different direction. It was no longer about goofy messages and being silly, it was about someone real. And someone who really needed our help.

We talked it over decided as a group that we wanted to help Stevie Joe. We called the Kansas City Rescue Mission to make sure he was the real deal and then we asked our staff and friends who were interested in donating money to help out. Our CEO, Teri Rogers, agreed to match whatever the staff collected as donations and all told, we ended up raising about $500 to help Stevie Joe and grant his wish to get back to his children and family.

Once we had the money, we called Stevie Joe, but his cell phone was turned off. We finally managed to reach him and made arrangements to meet him outside of the KC Rescue Mission. Of course, he was curious, yet very happy to see us. He told us about the recent turn of events in his life; how he lost his job in July, how his wife left him and how he was separated from his kids and family who were living several hours away. He wanted to go home, but he had no means to make that happen.

When we handed him the envelope with the money we’d raised in it he was ecstatic. And in shock. And so happy that he would finally be able to see his family again. Check out the video ….

Doing something creative and goofy is really fun. Doing something that changes someone’s life at a moment when they need it the most is even better. Thanks, Stevie Joe, for being a part of our lives this holiday season.

One group I liked a lot was Squid Soup, whose interactive installation allowed children to control the topography of a bug’s environment. The bugs were projected onto a sand box. Using a depth map, the bugs would naturally crawl toward lower relief spaces.This gave kids the opportunity to block them off, creating dwellings and walls that could easily be knocked down. What emerged was a true collaboration among people to control the bugs, allowing them to collide into larger bugs. Not only were the projected bugs part of the finished piece, but what people left behind, by manipulation of the sand medium, was just as important. It leaves behind a history and energy of successful and failed attempts.

Certain behavior is also a form of emergence. In a talk with Squid Soup, they were intrigued by adult/parental influence in the children’s efforts. In some photos with adults and children participating, they noticed walls were constructed. But, in other photos – those done without the involvement of adults, the walls had often been knocked down. This could be indicative of the differences in adults and children and how their perceptions of manipulation and play differ.

What your audience can take away from an experience is incredibly important, but what is equally as important is what they can contribute back. Experiential design is the closest connection that digital, interactive media has to people. To maintain that connection and build a lasting memory, the experience has to accept just as much as it gives. Fascinating? You bet — and I’m not the only interactive geek at SIGGRAPH 2010 who thought so!

The Fun Theory is a competition itself where people can upload ideas designed to make mundane tasks interesting. Take the winning submission for example:

And the Nike Chalkbot was a machine that would imprint hopeful messages along the Tour De France– submitted through texting, Twitter and a website. The Chalkbot received some 23,000 messages to be chalked on the roads of France, so it was truly a viral experiential phenomenon.

What’s fantastic about these two projects is that they both incorporate people. They’ve humanized their brands by bringing the individuals who interact with them to the surface. And, what they’ve created is an artifact of real-time interaction. Volkswagen, instead of creating the experiences themselves, created a space to give others a chance at pure creativity — people designing for people. The Chalkbot allowed the community to be a part of spreading a message during the Tour de France, and this made people the world over feel as if they not only had a voice, but as though they were a part of the experience.

What’s even more interesting is just how invisible the brands tied to both of these pieces are. These are proof that you don’t always have to slap your logo onto a piece of experiential design to get the point across. Experiential design lends itself to a conversation. Through a good experience, your brand will be represented, and the people you’ve designed it for will have a new-found understanding of what you stand for.

The National Agri-Marketing Association (NAMA) annual convention was hosted in Kansas City this year, and featured, as always, marketers specializing in agribusiness from all over the United States. Sullivan Higdon & Sink, a local agency with a track record of creative genius and with whom we work on a regular basis, wanted to do something unique and make a big splash at the event. Their strategy was to get people to focus on their clever tagline, “We Hate Sheep” — which really means they love trailblazers and scorn those who choose only to be followers. Our team at the T2 Experience Lab began collaborating with the SHS team on a grand experiential piece that we hoped would put to shame the conventional trade show “booth.”

After doing some due diligence and scoping out the event space in the Hyatt, our vision was to set up an interactive installation right in the lobby, so we set about working together to design something that would be impossible for convention goers to resist getting a closer look at.

The SHS creative team and our Experience Lab team devised the Sheep-A-Nator 3000, which literally gave conference attendees the ability to launch their own sheep. It was priceless and a perfect visualization of what SHS is all about – hating the sheep-like mentality that is so prevalent in society today. We projected a scene onto the wall of clueless sheep grazing in a pasture. In front of the projection, and irresistible to passersby, was a bright yellow foot pedal that just begged to be stomped on. If a sheep was so unfortunate as to be on the platform at the same time the pedal was pushed, the sheep was summarily launched over the fence to join its bunch of loser friends. The crowd’s initial curiosity about what was going on in the SHS booth and the excitement about pressing the pedal soon turned into an experience centered around the excitement and the competitive element of the crowd, vying to see how many followers could be launched into the distance!

We built the pedal using an Arduino board that was tied to the computer system by a simple USB input. The sheep were displayed in a Flash application that we programmed, which was directly communicating with the pedal itself.

All in all, it was an exciting project for our team at The Experience Lab to collaborate on with SHS. And, as anticipated, they had a large number of people flocking to their booth to engage in the process of “hating sheep” with them. Most importantly, they did what a lot of smart marketers are doing these days and looked beyond the brochure, beyond the static website or the PowerPoint presentation. What they allows us to collaborate with them on and create was an even more powerful marketing tool – it was a memory. And an experience. And one that the marketers who had the chance to participate in are sure to not only remember, but talk about for a long time to come.

Which would you rather create?

I can see why people are apprehensive about new technology. It’s expensive. It’s potentially life-changing. It’s easy to drop and break. Oh, and it’s maybe even because they’re scared. That’s right…. they’re absolutely terrified that a device – something like the iPad – might actually change their life. And most of us don’t really love change.

Well, the iPad isn’t for everyone, that’s for sure.

But for those of you who, like us, are gadget geeks, technology nuts and early adopters, we’d rather talk less about why the iPad is so terrible for society and MORE about why it’s so freaking amazing! I’ll give you 5 things I’ve heard from iPad haters, and follow with my counter reaction.

1.

Haters say: It’s just another “screen” in my life.

T2 says: The quality of the display is absolutely fantastic! The screen crams 132 pixels per inch, making it similar to print resolution. When it’s laying on your desk, at a glance it can almost be mistaken for a piece of paper. This is fantastic for the progression of print material into a digital realm!

2.
Haters say: Oh, it’s just a big iPhone.
T2 says: Well, it’s not. Yes, the app developers out there who are just scaling up their apps are supporting these haters’ accusations of the iPad being an imposter. With good design comes the knowledge and awareness that the larger your space becomes, the more information you can display. Also, it allows almost all 10 fingers on the screen at once, offering a truly “hands-on” experience. Your fingers aren’t crammed for space, and it allows more opportunity to allow them to rest on the extra surface.

3.
Haters say:
Why do I have to download all of my apps again?
T2 says: That’s because there are a lot of apps that you feel should exist in both realms. But, the apps that are going to be truly successful are the ones that allow the iPad to integrate with your other systems, instead of merely duplicating their services. From a gaming perspective, the new Scrabble app does just this.
The iPad serves as the board and by having an iPhone, you can have your own personal tile rack. Flicking your pieces out of the iPhone will add it to the board, creating a truly fun and engaging public and private experience.

4.
Haters say: I don’t want it to replace all of my favorite magazines?
T2 says: Yes, it’s probably true that the iPad will replace your magazines. Is that REALLY such a big deal? First of all, there’s the whole green thing and how many trees it takes to produce all the magazines that you hold so dear. But being eco-friendly aside, why wouldn’t you want to have a truly richer experience such as including video, animation and live content? Isn’t that what magazines are all about? There’s a certain editorial delay to magazines that is quickly fading. This is a whole new playground for T2, and we’re really excited about integrating our love for motion and interactivity into a realm that’s been static for too long.

5.
Haters say: I can only run one app at once!
T2 says: Yes, at first I was on this bandwagon of disappointment as well. But I’ve slowly come to terms with it. The iPad isn’t going to replace my laptop, and in no way is it designed to mimic the multitasking capabilities. It’s merely the bridge from my external workflow. There are certain tasks that I just wouldn’t want to limit to touch based input. It’s just another tool in a suite of systems!

I know I probably haven’t convinced everyone. But I also know this. For us to progress as society, there have to be periods of huge technological leaps and periods where we have to ease into new ways of thinking. This is clearly that period. The iPhone was a truly revolutionary device, simply because there weren’t any devices like it. The iPad would have to break our perceptions of a tablet’s capabilities, which it has already done. We’re simply taking things to the next level, because very, very soon, Apple will blow our minds again. Don’t be a hater!

So, this week Michael Ong and I took a journey to Las Vegas for exposure on new mediums for experiential content. We thought it would be great to start at the Digital Signage Expo in Las Vegas! We saw some fantastic displays, and some interesting new trends in digital signage. Here are a couple of the main trends that we saw.

Transparent Displays

Having displays blend into the environment appears to be quite an achievement. We saw a lot of transparent touch screens, still in conceptual development. Yet, I was surprised to see that these were all achieved using projectors, instead of some sort of transparent LCD screen. In fact, there was even a product called Goo that could be applied to any surface to make it projector friendly! Perhaps the technology isn’t quite to the point it needs to be, but still the effect is pretty intriguing. This could be quite fantastic in retail environments, where the display could be integrated with a pane of glass, turning on and off when necessary.

Interactive Surfaces

I was quite impressed with the companies that were pushing new interactive surfaces. GestureTek was adept at making table and floor based turnkey systems. They have also developed a neat input device that allows you to control a cursor using hand gestures.

Face Tracking

Yes, face tracking is in. A lot of the displays that we saw had a camera integrated into them that could detect information about the viewer demographic. In other words, it could detect your race, gender and approximate age. A bit creepy if you are skeptical with what they’re doing with the information. But, they claim that it’s a form of anonymous analysis. The systems are very intuitive and that was pretty cool to see. For example, in some cases, the interface would shift down depending on the height of the individual looking at it. Or, if it was a female viewing the screen, it would show a makeup ad and then switch to a shaving ad if it was a male viewing the screen.

All in all, the show was amazing. We learned a lot, came back with some new ideas and lots of inspiration.

What’s also amazing is that they decided to reproduce this effect-but live! Teaming up with Beardyman and holographic projectionists Musion, they were able to sync live video with each sound. I love this piece because it treats video as separate objects, specific for the context. Although cross platform content is great, there is still a lot of design and craft decisions that have to be considered when changing the vehicle in which you are presenting the material. I’ve heard people say crazy things like, “Oh, let’s just take a commercial and reuse it for our in store video displays!” I understand that we’re at point where we often have to cut as many corners as possible these days to satisfy a budget. But, there also comes a moment when designing an experience where video content loses its effect/messaging when trying to repurpose.

Successful executions exist when you cannot possibly imagine a piece without the video content. Perhaps this can be shown through unconventional displays, where the content has been specifically designed for the context. My colleague and fearless leader, Teri Rogers, proposed a thought in a recent post that “content is king” for 2010. And, in my opinion, if content is king, then context is queen!

That’s why I really enjoy this piece as well, designed by Tokujin Yoshioka for Maison Hermès, because it utilizes video as an integral part of the presentation. The video content adds another layer of character to the sound and would have a difficult time standing alone. Fantastic!