Experience Design
By Elizabeth Fiting | Chief Learning Officer
A few weeks ago, my husband and I watched a Netflix documentary called In Bright Axiom. For those who are unfamiliar, it tells the story of a secret club, called the Latitude Society, located in the San Francisco Bay Area. After a few successful years, the Latitude Society imploded, taking with it a way of life that many of its members mourn to this day.
Without giving too much away, first exposure to the Latitude Society was to receive a white scan card and an address to a warehouse in San Francisco’s Mission District. Upon entering the building, participants see a beautifully-carved wooden mantle. Where a fireplace would be, there is a slide going down...into the unknown. Choosing to go down the slide kicks off a series of clues to follow, which takes the participant all over the city as they piece together what it is they have gotten into. (A note to the spoiler police: This information is all in the trailer for the documentary, so please don’t @ me.)
I am in no way endorsing the documentary itself. I actually find the tone and rhetoric in the doc a bit suspect. But what captured my attention and imagination at the time, and continues to percolate in my mind today, are the experiences that the Latitude Society created.
Because fundamentally, experience was the Society’s purpose. Fully-fledged members were empowered to band together to create other experiences, many of which were ritualistic in nature. The power of these experiences, both participating in them and designing them, was both a form of artistic expression and a form of community. Through these experiences, alliances were formed, friendships were made, even romantic relationships blossomed.
So what is the point?
What struck me about the Latitude Society is how passionate it’s members could become.These questions began to swim in my head:
What about these experiences cause alliances to form?
What is the source of the power behind the experience?
And most importantly: How can we replicate these feelings when we create learning experiences?
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The motivations for learning are different when you are an adult versus when you are a child. Where one of the primary goals of educating children is to engage them in wanting to learn, adults usually engage in learning because they are trying to accomplish a goal: how to fix a clogged sink, how to create a pivot table, how to give great feedback. Learning for enrichment’s sake usually comes in other forms: watching documentaries, listening to podcasts, reading non-fiction books. In order to engage with non-essential learning, adults usually need a dash of entertainment.
How to bridge those two things--learning to accomplish a goal and learning for enrichment’s sake--is the holy grail of the learning experience designer. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard a stakeholder say some form of, “they should want to learn how to sell more of X, because it makes them better at their jobs,” without a real appreciation for or acknowledgment of the fact that you can’t make someone want to learn anything. You can make learning mandatory. You can turn on forced-order in your eLearning course and stick a required assessment on at the end to make sure learners have engaged with the information.
But you can’t force a desire for knowledge onto another person, any more than you can force someone who doesn’t like Brussels sprouts to suddenly enjoy eating them. You can’t make someone want something that they don’t want.
But what learning experience designers can do, and what we want to do, is create conditions for learning that spark motivation and engagement.
Which brings me back to the Latitude Society. Fundamentally, I think there are two reasons that the Latitude Society worked, at least initially: 1) They were exclusive; 2) The experiences were entertaining. People engaged with them because they presented a puzzle to solve, a ritual to complete, or a community action to engage in. The experiences had a sense of choice. There was secrecy and challenge, which made the members who “made it” feel a particular brand of belonging: You completed a quest that only a few other people have completed. You have unlocked a secret that only a few other people know. You did something special.
In other words: People were entertained.
Well…..technically, many people were entertained. If you do some research into the Society, you’ll discover that some people were given cards that they never used. Some people completed the first experience and then never returned--it just wasn’t for them. Some people enjoyed it enough to become casually engaged with the Latitude Society, but never to become deeply involved.
And that was….okay.
I have to assume that the creators were able to surface this risk early on: What made the experience work was also what could make it fail: personal autonomy. The designers of the experience created the conditions for it, gave the participants a goal, and then...stepped back and let it happen. There wasn’t someone there to guide you, beyond what was part of the experience. You could bail out pretty much whenever you wanted. You could choose how much, or how little, you would engage.
And if you walked away not having the experience that they designed for you, the creators were fine with that. They understood that this experience wasn’t for you.
So, one other question to ponder is: How do we apply the principles of creating entertaining content to the creation of learning experiences?
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When L&D professionals create learning experiences, the tension we often encounter is in trying to serve the learner’s need to get the information and the subject-matter expert’s need to share the wealth and breadth of their experience, to help contextualize the learning. To be frank, one of the worst enemies of the creation of good learning experiences are the people who have so much knowledge about the topic that they trip over themselves to provide all of the context, all at once, in the hopes that their 30 years of experience will translate in a 30-minute eLearning course.
I think another thing that appeals to me about this idea of experiential learning is that in order to work, it must flip the traditional paradigm: Instead of relying on the experience of the “expert,” it relies on the experience of the learner.
Take escape rooms: They rely on some basic abilities on the part of the group: Problem-solving. Teamwork. Observational skills. Inevitably, some people in the group will be better at some components of an escape room than others. More experienced escape-room enthusiasts may manage a room faster than those less experienced. But ultimately, the fun of escape rooms is combining what you know and what you assume with what you learn while you solve the problem.
So what does this all mean, and how do I plan to put a bow on this topic? Right now, I don’t know. That’s not the purpose of this blog post. What I want to do is engage in conversation with you, my peers, my colleagues, my design nerd potential-future friends.
So:
How do we apply the principles of creating entertaining content to the creation of learning experiences?
What about these experiences cause alliances to form?
What is the source of the power behind the experience?
How can we replicate these feelings when we create learning experiences?
Let’s discuss!
Author: Elizabeth Fiting, Chief Learning Officer | Studio 5 Learning + Development
