“Technology + Cardboard = Reality”.

Koolhaas (1978, p.42), describing the design of Luna Park on Coney Island in 1901.

The Edinburgh Festival runs for four weeks every August, and 2022 has seen the return of in-person audiences for the first time in several years. This has enabled a host of immersive and interactive shows, and it has been fascinating to attend performances that pack small, but play (and immerse) big — including a variety of shows staged inside shipping containers.

‘Temping’ is a one-hour show for a single audience member (or ‘participant’) produced by Dutch Kills Theater and created by Wolf 359. It involves the participant adopting the role of a temporary employee working for an actuarial firm. On arrival at the ‘office’ (shipping container), the participant is greeted by a staff member who asks them to read and sign a long, jargon-filled employment agreement. The form is used surreptitiously to collect the participant’s name, which is later used repeatedly throughout the show.

The set comprises an office cubicle with a desk, chair, desktop computer, phone, printer, etc. Personal items scattered around the cubicle include a cardigan hanging off the back of the chair, sneakers on the floor, a busy bookshelf, stress balls, etc. The desk drawers contain items such as a hairbrush, snacks, and other non-work objects; and work notices, cartoons, personal photos, and post-it notes cover the cubicle’s walls.

As the show starts, the participant begins receiving emails asking them to modify various spreadsheets, perform actuarial calculations, and email data and results to customers, etc. Voicemails accumulate on the corporate phone system. Cryptic, unsolicited messages emerge from the printer. And after specific actions, the office lights dim, music plays, and other events occur.

The information environment is responsive to the participant’s actions. Emails sent by the participant receive replies. The participant is at first prompted and then chased actively if they do not provide the information requested. And if the participant pauses for too long while completing their tasks, the phone rings, and additional voicemails soon mount up.

Without revealing the plot, the participant rapidly finds themselves immersed in a web of office politics, interpersonal relationships, and unfolding mysteries and dramas. They are forced to confront the real-world consequences of their abstract spreadsheets, and, eventually, their own mortality.

It is staggering how such a simple environment and sequence of tasks can create such a deeply engaging, moving, and on occasion, unsettling experience.

After the show, I had an opportunity to go backstage to meet its designer, Asa Wember. It was surprising to see how one person (albeit one person armed with a database of pre-drafted emails, templates, prerecorded voicemails, a CCTV feed, and a mirror of the participant’s screen) could create and control such a captivating and responsive environment.

Other immersive shipping container experiences at this year’s Festival included ‘Flight’ (a genuinely heart-pounding simulation of a plane crash), ‘Séance’ (held in the pitch black, where summoning spirits goes horribly awry), and ‘Eulogy’ (a journey through a dreamlike, labyrinthine hotel that exists only in participants’ minds) — all productions by innovative experiential company Darkfield. It is also well worth checking out their ‘at home’ audio experiences.

These environments reflect principles I learned while designing immersive exercises to train and evaluate military planning teams. Similar ideas were conveyed on a course run by Punchdrunk that addressed the principles and practice of site-sympathetic theatrical design.

Simple environments and basic interactive tasks can, with some thoughtful design, enable deeply immersive experiences. Verisimilitude is achievable at relatively low cost and suspending a participant’s disbelief (even if only temporarily) is surprisingly easy.

Five Principles for Small-Scale Immersive Design

The following principles can help deepen a participant’s sense of immersion:

1. Engage multiple concurrent senses. In addition to enriching the participant’s experience, when they are forced to process information across multiple senses, fewer cognitive resources remain to critique the environment. Greater immersion can thereby be achieved with less fidelity.
2. Dress the environment with realistic and interactive props, rich information, personal items, functional items, and residual traces of prior activity and inhabitation. These features create a sense of place and function and help to situate the participant.
3. Provoke curiosity and (where possible) encourage the participant to explore the environment to fill gaps in their knowledge and understanding. While the participant’s actions are, in reality, constrained, the apparent freedom of action enables them to build experientially a mental model of the environment rather than having one artificially imposed upon them. This serves to more deeply engage and immerse the participant.
4. Enable and supply representative tasks and interactions, including play elements. Give the participant something to do to help them navigate the experience.
5. Provide adaptive feedback in response to the participant’s actions. This will prevent the participant from feeling like they are moving passively through the experience ‘on rails’. It further creates the potential for each participant to have an entirely different experience.

References

Koolhaas, R. (1978). Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. The Monacelli Press, New York.