Developing idea's by building a narrative around your concept or ideology is HARD !!, something i discovered through much deliberation and personal struggle. After three months of thinking, researching and numerous considerations, i came to the conclusion that in the field that i am specializing in i.e. event design, being able to create ‘Experiences’ counts more than finding the right audience for them especially on an academic level. It is the capacity of developing concepts in such a way that they are able to build an environment and reach out to an audience within a space in an interactive way is what is to be studied and understood rather than limiting the experience by defining audiences. Events are inherently designed to re create moments or define new ones for particular purposes; sometimes the audiences are targeted, sometimes they are not but that should not hinder the process of design development.
Event design is a branch of ‘Experience or Experiential Design’, which focuses on the relationship between the event and the experience of its participants. It explores and analyses the event experience of the individual and how it can be controlled or enhanced through design. It is the art of designing a memory, of enhancing or developing perception. In events, experiences are designed with real and measurable consequences using time and space as a medium. The mission being; to persuade, stimulate, inform, envision, entertain and forecast through influencing senses, meaning and modifying human behavior. In a way it is similar to installation art, the difference being that an installation can be a part of an event or an event can be based around an installation.
There is an ongoing debate in the field of art and design which argues that when experience designers describe people only as customers, consumers and users, they risk diminishing their ability to create environments that are true to not only their aesthetics but also to the spirit of experience. However, experiences are to a large extent affective and subjective. Hence, there is a strong element of a personal process involved in an abstract and subliminal way. Thus, designing an experience whether it be through an event, an installation, a space, theatre or film is rather a more narrative and transformative area of design that a deliberate one. Every designer who caters to the creation of experiences, for groups and individuals alike, is living the experience through his or her reactions and thus to him or her the approach is merely semantic rather than specific.
The initial purpose of my project was to create a space that gets a reaction or a response from someone who decides to enter it and thus the space being an experience for the person. Whether the reaction is positive or negative is not as important as the relevance or relation of the experiential space with the participant. The ideology being that the space is like a window into something; an idea, an emotion, a thought or a combination of all three. This notion is based on the fact that every once in a while we disappear or need to shift into a different pocket of time in order to either confirm or change our perspective. Keeping the above in mind, I decided that I, myself should be my audience and develop a space through a narrative based on a personal experience.
All human beings have certain experiences in common e.g. the feelings and emotions one experiences when going through a particularly hard or challenging phase in life. The stages of denial, anger, acceptance and the eventual breakthrough or evolution are patterns which most of us have experienced in our lives. These are the pattens that i will explore for my project because the basic aim of my research is to study the relationship of audience and experience rather than designing an experience for a defined audience. Therefore, I will contextualize a personal experience in order to create a mass experience that could or could not be common to people entering the space but in both scenarios the experience would aim at developing greater engagement between the environment and the participant by incorporating audio/visual and design techniques which enhance the intensity of their experience.
Creating through personal narrative is an extremely powerful tool of communication as far as designing a memory or experience is concerned. Stories vary from person to person as far as the specifics are concerned but collective experiences are something that hold evocative power as they claims a new place in the memory of each listener or participant, becoming one more subconscious association – a new fiction that holds it’s own truth because time in relation to experience is just another kind of space. You can step into an experience like you would in a dimension and come out with a different perspective or emotion to define it.
Over time a story, though or experience continues to hold its evocative power as it claims a new place in the memory of each observer or participant, becoming one more subconscious association - a new fiction that holds its own truth. Hence, suggesting that time in relation to experience is just another kind of space. My research is an attempt to understand the relationship between space and audience through the power of narrative and experience.
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