Work Is Theatre at Design Week 2016

GIF of a curtain opening and the text "The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre"

The 3rd annual Sioux Falls Design Week has wrapped up! MJM hosted some of Sioux Falls’ curious minds for an interactive workshop and presentation. We explored key ideas behind the Experience Economy and the Freytag Pyramid, and how they inform the work MJM does on behalf of our clients. And in a twist nobody saw coming, we pulled back the curtain and revealed our intentional design of the evening’s activities.

GIF of the Freytag Pyramid

In the Experience Economy, businesses no longer seek to make products or deliver services, but rather stage meaningful experiences. Those experiences are made up of smaller interactions called touchpoints. Touchpoints take place over the narrative arc of an experience and each one affects the customer’s overall impression of the experience. At MJM, we believe each one is an opportunity to intentionally create moments of delight.

We shared an exercise called Customer Experience Mapping that helps identify key touchpoints. Some may be negative moments in an interaction and ripe for improvement—others may have gone unnoticed and unconsidered in the past.

Following the exercise, MJM demonstrated how we mapped the touchpoints of our Design Week presentation in advance to create a compelling experience. We built both positive and negative experiences into the event to demonstrate some of the key ideas. For example, as attendees entered they received a very poorly designed survey for them to fill out. The poor design was intentional, and it was pointed out later to demonstrate a negative touchpoint. While they were engaged in the presentation, our team was behind the scenes plugging in email addresses from the forms. As we ended the discussion, attendees had an email waiting in their inbox with further resources and an invitation to join us at another event later that evening—hopefully flipping the frustration of wrestling with a counterintuitive form into a moment of delight and surprise.