August 2005

The Esthetic Realm is all about passive immersion. You’re immersed, but you have little effect on the experience, leaving the environment untouched. A great example would be standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon – you are immersed in the huge cliffs and the beauty, but you can’t really change anything. Visiting an art gallery or a cool café might provide a similar (but much less grand) experience. At the café, there might be cool hip music, great smelling coffee, possibly a good book, and maybe other similarly-minded people. That sets up an esthetic experience.

Libraries can pull this one off – our buildings can set a mood or strike a pose. Our library staff can even help to provide this type of experience, either good or bad, via attitude. Our books do this visually with a look and a smell.

Our website can do this, too, can’t it? It can strike a pose and set a mood. It can give off good/bad vibes that set a (hopefully) positive attitude towards staff. This is seen in the look-and-feel of the site.

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Escapist experiences are sort of the opposite of pure entertainment – with escapism, you are completely immersed and actively involved. “Theme parks, casinos, virtual reality headsets, chat rooms, or even a game of paint ball” – all are examples of escapist experiences.

You might have noticed – many of these also involve entertainment. In fact, these combinations happen a lot with experience planning. Think about an IMAX theater – you get immersed, but in a big, entertaining way. Also, when participating in an escapist experience, you’re not neccesarily watching others do something – instead, you are the actor, and you affect the performance. Think Runescape again.

BThis is possibly the hardest realm for a library to create (hey Dave, how about Paintball at the library but not impossible. For example, my library is planning a haunted house type of event around Halloween. That’s escapist for you!

And let’s use Runescape again as an example. It’s an escapist experience, and I’ll bet that a third of our in-library computer users are playing it right now. And that’s not a bad thing. They are interacting with 60,000 other Runescape players, so there’s a lot of social interaction going on. On the techie side, they’re basically learning to chat/IM with each other – that’s cool. And they’re experiencing a “live” version of a basic fantasy novel (well, minus the plot, of course).

So – maybe we should do something to support our customers, like:

1. Create a Runescape page, or a gaming page with Runescape info as an offshoot. It could point to the game and other useful websites about the game. Maybe even give some basic “how to’s” to help interested customers.
2. Point to other avatar online games.
3. Point to related books/videos (probably books on topics like online gaming, chatting/IM, etc.)
4. Hold a Runescape Day at the library! Reserve some PCs for Runescape players, even have a librarian get online and have a virtual “meet and greet” with everyone.

And with that idea in mind, you can easily translate that into other areas, like Flickr, Furl, etc. Teach users about online social interaction, gaming, etc via on-site classes and web guide pages.

Just some pointers for starters.

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The realm of Education is also absorbed, like entertainment (discussed yesterday). But unlike entertainment, education requires the active participation of the person beign educated. Your mind has to be actively engaged to for this experience to click.

Again, libraries do well in this realm: reading can be entertainment, and it can be education. Technology classes or reference classes can be educational. Even things like author events can be educational.

We can also stage educational experiences on the library website. Examples? How about an audio version of an author event, for customers who couldn’t attend the live event? Or even a video version, if you have the equipment? Any type of “How do I find something” guides are educational opportunities. So this is an easy experience for libraries to provide on a website.

This gets more fun when realms are combined. Think “edutainment” – a good example of edutainment in Kansas City is Science City. Science City is built in our historic Union Station. Kids can dig for fossils, see how a tv station works, and learn how tornadoes are made – all in this great big, run-and-scream-built-for-kids area. The kids think it’s great fun, and they’re learning at the same time… or, as Science City’s website says “where play and education go hand-in-hand.”

Think – how can a library combine the two ideas, and create edutainment that sticks in kids minds, gives them a positive experience at the library and on the library’s website? that’d be the 10 million dollar question!

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We’re all familiar with entertainment – it’s something we all do for amusement. Entertainment involves passive participation, and absorption rather than immersion. We don’t usually influence the performance (other than with claps), and we tend to absorb it internally. Examples would be attending a concert or going to a movie.

Examples of entertainment in the library would be things like holding an event for or about an author, hiring an entertainer, or having a battle of the bands. It could also be reading…. a big one for libraries! For others, it could be people watching at the library.

This realm can happen on the web, too. It can take many forms, like a fun ad highlighting an upcoming event, a whimsical writing style, or a funny survey. Kid’s pages can include games. Teens can find fun facts about favorite movie characters. The idea is to take the information you want to present, and go “one further” with it. Add some neat pictures of an author to go along with a description of an upcoming event. Add links to the author’s books in the library catalog. Add links to his/her website. Etc.

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I have a few more thoughts about experience planning, gleaned from the book The Experience Economy, by B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore.

There’s a great illustration in this book (I’ve seen it other places too) that depicts the different parts of an “Experience.” Pine and Gilmore call the concept connected to the illustration “The Experience Realms.” I’m going to explain this concept, because I think it can work in libraries and on library websites. But first, here’s the illustration:

So let’s talk about this concept – what’s it all about? For starters, The Experience Realms focuses on two very important sets of properties, one horizontal and one vertical. The horizontal set shows the level of guest participation. One side represents passive participants, where customers don’t directly affect or influence the performance (like watching a symphony). The other side represents active participation, where customers personally affect the event or performance. Skiers, who create their own exhilarating experience while participating in it, is a good example of active participation.

The vertical properties help define the kind of connection, or the environmental relationship, that unites the customer with the event. One side focuses on Absorption. Absorption occupies attention by bringing the experience into the mind. The experience literally “goes into” the customer, like when watching TV – it’s absorbed inside a person.

The other side of the vertical line is Immersion, where you become physically or virtually a part of the actual experience. Instead of the experience going into the guest, with immersion, the guest “goes into” the experience. Think paint ball or Runescape here.

The exciting part of this concept is the stuff between each of these dimensions. This is where the four realms of experience come into play – that of entertainment, education, escapism, and estheticism.

Which I’ll start discussing in the next post – stay tuned!

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