Day 7: [XD]

Harvard Professor of Psychology Daniel Schacter defines perception as, “the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the environment.” This definition leads to the question: what is magic? That’s right…what’s magic? Magic is when someone designs an experience that scrambles your perception process – leaving you flabbergasted, dumbfounded and begging for an explanation. Your senses failed you…did they? Or does the magician know enough about your senses to have them organize, misidentify, and misinterpret the information presented to them? What if the same process was applied to an interactive installation?

Experience design is often associated with event planning, product design or programming. But this emerging field now finds itself as one of the sexiest multi-discipline art forms. How can we create a culturally relevant, immersive art form that communicates to people and uses cognitive science to produce benefits and measurable change? Could this be an option as to how the arts could find a new presence and gain value within contemporary culture?

JT