13
From Design to Deployment
ACT INTO THE FUTURE

Infinite possibility holds the danger that the cosmos of our imagination become so vast that, like David Livingstone in Africa, you become lost and succumb to despair at ever finding a way out. If, however, you keep your focus clearly on creating customer value and persevere in your ideation expeditions, you should have a rich pool of ideas for third places that fuse the real and the virtual. From these you can then select those that would create the most experiential value for your customers, and the most economic value for your company. You next must take these selected ideas down the path from design to deployment.

In taking the next step, design, understand that whereas the Multiverse provides a new sense-making guide to discovering never-before-realized value, viewing any Multiversal offering through the format (and lens) of the Experience Design Canvas—versus just the eight-realm Multiverse itself—will prove fruitful. So encompass a full complement of variables by mapping your offering onto the Design Canvas and then examine it variable by variable, seeking to make it more robust by dialing up or down the right variables to create the right experience.

Experience Design

Of course there is still more to do beyond that exercise. The path of experience design remains well-worn with many ideas, tools, and frameworks to help you do it effectively and profitably. Although experience design, particularly of the digital kind, is still in its infancy, we especially recommend the following books to assist you in your endeavors: Nathan Shedroff’s Experience Design 1 (with Experience Design 2 published in 2011), Mark Stephen Meadow’s Pause & Effect, Jesse Schell’s The Art of Game Design, Dan Saffer’s Designing for Interaction, and David Lee King’s Designing the Digital Experience.¹

And two more books (Joe writes humbly): The Experience Economy and Authenticity. For designing Multiversal experiences fits the overall worldview contained in these books (with an updated edition of the former published in 2011 shortly before this book). They therefore offer great help in designing experiences encompassing not just Reality but the entire array of the Multiverse, experiences that are not just robust but cohesive, rich, individual, authentic, and compelling. We encourage you to read these books in full, paying particular attention to these design principles, each with their own framework:

∞ THEME the experience: In order to make it cohesive, establish the organizing principle that binds the experience together, enabling you to determine what is in and what is out of the experience.²

∞ Hit the sweet spot: Every rich experience must appeal to all four aspects: entertainment, education, escapism, and esthetics—the 4Es—to engage customers in a multiplicity of ways, draw them in more fully, and get them to spend more time.³

∞ Eliminate customer sacrifice: For an experience to engage each and every individual, understand the difference between what a customer settles for and what he wants exactly—his customer sacrifice, as mentioned in Chapter 11, “Offering Depiction”—and then mass customize your Multiversal experience in order to efficiently serve customers uniquely, meeting each individual, living, breathing customer’s wants and needs.⁴

∞ Render authenticity: For customers to perceive your experience as authentic—and here we are contrasting the real and the fake, not fusing the real and the virtual—requires recognizing how you meet (or not) the two key standards of authenticity: Is the offering true to itself? Is it what it says it is?⁵

∞ Finally, embrace dramatic structure: To make your experience compelling, understand that for today’s Experience Economy, work is theatre, and therefore in order to grab people’s attention and hold it, experiences must have a dramatic structure that draws them into the experience, engages them, provides a payoff, and concludes.⁶

Even a totally virtual experience with no live workers must understand and embrace theatre in order to truly engage and connect with guests. That’s why literary scholar Marie-Laure Ryan relates narrative to the three dimensions of the Multiverse when she notes in Narrative as Virtual Reality that virtual worlds “are mentally constructed by the reader as environments that stretch in space, exist in time, and serve as habitat for a population of animate agents. These three dimensions correspond to what have long been recognized as the three basic components of narrative grammar: setting, plot, and characters.”⁷

If you follow these principles, you cannot help but excel at creating customer value on the digital frontier through innovative experiences that effectively fuse the real and the virtual.

Game Design in Learning, Work, and Life

Of course, as you have probably gathered from our realm discussions, the greatest impetus for ongoing innovation throughout the Multiverse is games (and not, as is so often said of new technology, the pornography industry). Gaming infuses every realm. Game design, therefore, has become a major subset of experience design. It not only can inform greatly the design of all sorts of experiences, it already is doing so. Often going by the awkward term “gamification,” companies today apply game design to many facets of learning, work, and even life.⁸

We have also seen this throughout the book, as businesses take what they have discovered in gaming and expand it to encompass other environs. Think of Quest to Learn, the school in New York City mentioned in Chapter 12, “Third Spaces,” that treats the classroom as a yearlong video game.⁹ Consider Jane McGonigal’s appeal in the Harvard Business Review to apply Alternate Reality to training, strategy, innovation, and other business pursuits to effect “the New Business Reality”; Byron Reeves and Leighton Read’s plea to use multiplayer Virtuality games in redesigning work itself; and our own thoughts on how Augmented Virtuality could make work as engaging and intrinsically rewarding as play. Recall also how Augmented Reality can be used not just to inform our travels but transform our lives through sensory prosthetics. And contemplate how Mirrored Virtuality gives us topsight to enhance our learning, enables us to track everything going on in our business, and allows us to quantify the activity of our bodies and our minds to improve both. Remember, for example, the new Ford SmartGauge with EcoGuide mentioned in Chapter 9, “Mirrored Virtuality,” which adds a virtual green vine to the dash that flourishes with efficient driving but shrivels with speed demons? It’s a perfect, albeit simple, example of applying game mechanics—every driver desires to see his leaves grow and sprout rather than wither and die—to transform our behavior and thereby enhance the world.

Although many companies now incorporate into their offerings such game mechanics as points, rewards, badges, levels, and so forth, Amy Jo Kim, an expert in online social architecture and cofounder of game designer Shufflebrain, was quick to point out to us how short-sighted that is: “It’s like putting the right ingredients in the refrigerator and thinking that’s all it takes to make a great meal.”¹⁰ No, there are many other elements and tasks to create a great experience based on gaming, foremost among them, Kim said, was “the unfolding power of story.”

Jesse Schell, professor at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) and CEO of Schell Games, echoes this in his aforementioned book The Art of Game Design through what he calls the “Lens of the Elemental Tetrad” (the seventh of one hundred lenses for designing games). In it he identifies the four elements of a game: mechanics and story comprise the first two, and aesthetics¹¹ (“how your game looks, sounds, smells, tastes, and feels”) and technology (“the medium in which the aesthetics take place, in which the mechanics will occur, and through which the story will be told”) complete the Tetrad.¹²

One more element seems crucial, however. In a conversation with Schell he talked about how whenever you apply game design to broader environs than gaming, you must be very careful about tackling incentives and motivations, and he put us onto Alfie Kohn’s book Punished by Rewards. Kohn rails against traditional carrot-and-stick methods of parenting children, teaching students, and managing workers, and among his prescriptions one item stands out: purpose. As he puts it:

What is a good job? Let us start by aiming high: at its best, it offers a chance to engage in meaningful work. The sense of doing something that matters is not the same as a feeling of intrinsic motivation. It isn’t just that the process of working provides enjoyment, but that the product being made (or the service provided [or experience staged, or transformation guided]) seems worthwhile and even important, perhaps because it makes a contribution to a larger community. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who has spent much of his career describing the pure pleasure of “flow” experiences, points out that beyond such enjoyment “one must still ask, ‘What are the consequences of this particular activity?’” The question is not just “Are we having fun yet?” but “Are we making a difference?”¹³

So in addition to mechanics and story, to aesthetics and technology, in whatever experience you design be sure to embrace purpose, to understand the meaningful ends to which your experience is but the engaging means.

In doing so, you will find yourself going beyond experiences to transformation offerings. All applications of game design to learning, work, and life—all “gamification”—occur only when the customer seeks change or when such change is sought by someone else (not just businesses but teachers, managers, parents and spouses, doctors, and all others responsible for or concerned with the well-being or productivity of others). You (whether corporately or personally) must take special care in this latter case, morally speaking, that (1) your desire for change in others edifies (builds up, not tears down) and (2) the means (the experiences by which all transformations occur) are justified in full.

Game design, appropriately done with a proper sense of purpose, can certainly inform the means of experiences. Back in 2002, I (Joe) gave a talk on the Experience Economy at PopTech, a popular culture-meets-technology conference held every year in Camden, Maine. I was paired with General Paul Gorman, retired, under whose command the United States Army created its rather effective recruiting game America’s Army. During the Q&A portion of our time, an audience member stood up and asked when someone was going to make a game that would help make the world a peaceful place, rather than one that encouraged them to be soldiers. The place erupted in spontaneous applause.

The moderator was about to go on to another question when I stopped her, pointing out to everyone that there had been only two times during the entire conference when the audience clapped spontaneously to a remark. This moment, and the day before when an earlier speaker railed against “those Republicans” in Congress who had the temerity to contend that violent games affected people. When that speaker in essence called out “Hogwash!” nearly everyone clapped. So now I asked, “Which is it? You applaud when someone says games can’t possibly change people, and then you applaud when someone suggests we should have a game that changes people!”

Although many do not like to admit it, the truth of course lies in the latter.¹⁴ Games can and do change people, as we are all the products of our experiences. That is exactly why game design has escaped the bounds of mere play to affect, and effect change in, all facets of life. It is also why you should embrace its tenets—mechanics, story, aesthetics, and technology—in designing your experiences, but only when you couple them to a core purpose, not only for how your customers themselves benefit from your offerings, but for your company itself. Are you making a difference?

Exploring as a Way of Life

Even though unlimited opportunities to make a difference await companies who go in search of them, the future’s uncertainty, unpredictability, and mystery make for an intriguing, if not baffling, management puzzle to solve. The way forward is to act into the future.¹⁵ Only through action do you turn speculation into knowledge, discover otherwise indeterminable consequences, and encounter the serendipitous opportunities that inevitably emerge. Pushing your way into the future with comprehensive plans to be achieved at all costs only serves to frustrate. As no one knows what the future holds, extensive plans based on conjecture, strictly adhered to, blind your company to the opportunities and issues revealed while you proceed according to plan.

Instead, pull your way into the future by learning to act, and acting to learn. You then evolve your company as well as its offerings with every step forward. Do not view this approach to discovering and creating the future, this exploration and exploitation, as a once-and-done exercise, of course. Innovation must be an ongoing activity of all thriving businesses, lest you get in the position of not having the next big thing designed as your last big thing starts its inexorable decline, or even worse, find yourself failing to exploit what you have already discovered.

Exploring cosmos incogniti in order to look into the possibilities they hold only serves your company’s purpose well when pursued as a way of life. When done as an occasional project or as a response to immediate crises, inevitably the pace of your company’s evolution lags behind that of its ecosystem as planned, directed, periodic explorations prove less dynamic than that of your collective competition (especially startups).

Only by engaging your people in ongoing exploration and exploitation orchestrated to continually rejuvenate your company’s offerings can you hope to perpetuate your company, and seek to pursue its purpose, indefinitely.¹⁶ Only a virtuous cycle of perpetual exploration and exploitation produces a persistent competitive advantage.

Being Good

As you go about this, you also cannot help but run into a number of issues and implications that rise to the fore when shifting offerings from Reality to the third spaces that fuse it with Virtuality. Every new technology of note raises the ire of someone, for inevitably something valuable gets lost and many someones get left behind as the ground shifts underneath them, causing inevitable longing and heartache. This is especially true of digital technology, for as we have seen throughout it may very well be the most sweeping, significant, and revolutionary set of technologies ever invented. And it’s not all anti-technologists; you don’t have to be a Luddite to be concerned about what escaping the stability of Reality for the vicissitudes of Virtuality is doing to mankind. Even the most diehard of geeks, hackers, gamers, and all manner of technological enthusiasts may have legitimate qualms about the implications of infusing every aspect of our lives so thoroughly with digital technology that we cannot escape it, even for a moment.

So you would be wise, as you advance from experience design to offering deployment, to not only be aware of the potentially deleterious effects but to take them into account in your offerings, in your business purpose, and also in your life. We cannot of course deal here with everything negative that anyone has ever said about digital technology and its effects on our lives; others have, you can be sure, and we trust will continue to. But let us address the eight key issues that we think most affect experiences of the Multiverse, with our thoughts on how you should approach them. Some of these are valid issues that can be ameliorated. Some are false ideas, or generally so, but they reflect a real concern that must be handled. And some are implications of the Multiverse both true and false, depending on the circumstances, or problems where we remain unsure of the final outcome but still can and should be taken into account. We do encourage you to think on these things.

We are in a constant state of information overload, always on and never off. This so often is the case. Do we really need even more bits in our lives? Surfing the Web, reading blogs, answering your e-mail, updating your Facebook page, having the Twitterverse wash over you—each and every one in and of themselves can be a good thing. You learn, you inform, you connect. Recognize, though, that even on the negative side hype often exceeds actuality. University of Texas professors Craig Watkins and Erin Lee found that “Facebook is not supplanting face-to-face interactions between friends, family and colleagues.” Rather, they believe that “there is sufficient evidence that social media afford opportunities for new expressions of friendship, intimacy, and community.”¹⁷

But we only have twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. The key here, then, is one of balance, a viewpoint eloquently encouraged by William Powers in Hamlet’s BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age and, earlier, by Thomas Hylland Eriksen in The Tyranny of the Moment: Fast and Slow Time in the Information Age.¹⁸ When, where, how, and how often we access third spaces is a matter of personal choice—something for you to consider both with your offerings and in your personal life. As with any good and engaging activity, some will go overboard, even become addicted. Unless you actually design your offerings to be addictive—not a far-fetched idea when it comes to gaming, and something that alone would flip the switch, in most people’s minds, from good to evil—recognize that you must compete with all the other ways people may spend their time, and you must compete well in order to create value. Recognize, too, the value to be had in intentionally making offerings less addictive, freeing up actual time to be spent elsewhere in the Multiverse on more enriching and edifying experiences.

Digital technology encourages us to provide information that should remain private. This, too, is oh so true, and many young people in particular will come to dread how much information about themselves and their activities they have put online, seemingly forever.

But recognize that they do so because it has value for them today. Not a day goes by without warnings about this issue or stories of someone who has been bit by it, so it most likely will be like a pendulum, which once it swings too far in one direction naturally falls back toward the center. In your business, never ask anything of your customers, nor collect any piece of data of their activities, that you do not intend to use on behalf of that same customer. Always protect that data you do collect, no matter what. Do not allow customer data to seep out of your hands into others, regardless of how profitable it may be to you, without explicit customer approval. Teach your customers to be smart about it. And on customer request, provide the means for their own data to be erased—permanently, thoroughly, and utterly. In short, be good.

Digital technology, with videogames and the Internet itself at the top of the list, is bad for us, turning our brains to mush. This is more than every generation’s complaint that the next generation is going to pot (a cycle of life going back at least as far as Plato), for again digital technology is different than all previous technologies—more enticing, more customized, more immersive, less expensive, more ubiquitous. IT curmudgeon Nicholas Carr complains in his latest book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, that, well, the Internet is doing not good stuff to our brains.¹⁹ Journalist Maggie Jackson asserts in Distracted that our ability to focus is being so degraded we risk a new “dark age.”²⁰ Emory University professor Mark Bauerlein even goes so far as to call young people growing up amid all of today’s digital technology the “Dumbest Generation.”²¹ Of course, for every book bemoaning the effects of digital technology there seems to be ten extolling its virtues, notably including Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, David Shaffer’s How Computer Games Help Children Learn, and James Paul Gee’s What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy.²²

Where does the truth lie? Probably in both camps, with harmful effects predominating for some people, beneficial effects for others, and with most people somewhere in between. For society overall, we firmly believe the genuine benefits far outweigh the valid detriments, and in any case, at this point there’s no turning back. The question is what we do with digital technology in general and the Multiverse in particular that matters. Forget about which camp you are in, or the desire to be proven right; which camp is made more likely by your offerings, and if the first, what will you do about it?

We are amusing ourselves to death with all these experiences. From the title of Neil Postman’s 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, where the late cultural critic joined many others in bemoaning how electronic media—most notably television, but the point certainly applies to all of the Multiverse—was reshaping our culture, turning everything, “politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce,” into “congenial adjuncts of show business”²³ with few, if any, redeeming qualities relative to the written word and internal reflection.

There certainly is a lot of truth to this, although one man’s mere amusement is another man’s engaging experience, and as book authors we certainly believe people should spend more time with the written word and reflecting on what they have learned. Selah. Later, in 1992’s Technopoly, Postman encourages us to consciously choose or deny technologies, recognizing that “every technology is both a burden and a blessing”; when, therefore, “we admit a new technology to the culture, we must do so with our eyes wide open.”²⁴

Although he was talking more culturally than individually, it again comes down to informed choice. As individuals, we should choose carefully what technologies we use, what offerings we consume, in what experiences we partake—and just as importantly as what, we must choose when and for how long. As a society, we should open our eyes to the natural effects of new experiences, new offerings, and new technologies—which are not neutral but bias action and thinking in particular directions, not always foreseeable—to counter the deleterious and promote the edifying. As a business, you should understand those effects in your own commercial output and strive to go beyond mere amusement to making a positive impact on your customers, and on the world.

Digital technology, and social media in particular, fragments, regurgitates, and impersonalizes not only text and ideas but people as well. In You Are Not a Gadget, a far-ranging diatribe to which the sentence above does not do justice, Jaron Lanier rails against “the worship of the illusions of bits” that has resulted in “this widespread practice of fragmentary, impersonal communications [that] has demeaned interpersonal interaction.”²⁵ He echoes others in this regard, but as the foremost popularizer of Virtual Reality, his words have a weight others do not.

All of this can be true, and too often is the case, but it need not be—else Lanier would not have bothered to write his manifesto. So always examine the consequences of your offerings, the directions in which it encourages humanity to go. All commerce, not just digital offerings, involves moral choice.²⁶ What choices are you making? And what choices are you encouraging your customers to make?

Virtuality goes so far as to fragment personal identity. Online, you can be whoever you want to be. In Facebook or LinkedIn, your profile represents who you are—but perhaps very differently on each. In virtual worlds, you create your avatar’s appearance and build up from scratch its characteristics and behaviors—your Virtuality personality. Are these all merely representations, with greater or lesser relationship to who you really are? Are these multiple personae manifesting themselves in different arenas? Or are these presentations of a “protean self,” in the phrase of psychologist Robert Lifton, that “is multiple but integrated … a sense of self without being one self”?²⁷ And what does it all mean for the authenticity not of economic offerings, but of us as human beings?

Although we are unwilling to give up on the concept of a unitary self, we understand that, after Erving Goffman,²⁸ all of us present ourselves differently in front of different people; these distinct presentations may or may not be authentic to who we really are. It is clear that the Multiverse multiplies the opportunities for individual multiplicity, and as individuals we should embrace the view that Sherry Turkle, founder of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, expresses in Life on the Screen: “Without a deep understanding of the many selves that we express in the virtual we cannot use our experiences there to enrich the real. If we cultivate our awareness of what stands behind our screen personae, we are more likely to succeed in using virtual experience for personal transformation.”²⁹ As corporations, you should seek to use your offerings to help individuals enrich the real and guide them to transform.

Technology causes alienation, interceding in and replacing human relationships. This has been an issue at least since Karl Marx used it as the pretext for his theories (with capitalism as the alienating technology du jour), but again there is no doubt that digital technology exacerbates the problem. As noted above, we can be always on and never off, which so often means not with the people with whom we share this space in Reality, here and now. When sharing space in Virtuality, we effortlessly can represent ourselves falsely, should we so choose. We so easily slip into different online personae that some may feel their identities pulling apart into multiple selves, as Turkle found. And so thoroughly, immersively, and constantly can we be engaged by third spaces that many can become alienated from that first space, from real life itself, and the human companionship that makes it, well, humane. It’s not without reason that many decry the increasing use of humanlike robots in classrooms and soft, cuddly, animal-like robots in nursing homes or, increasingly in Japan, the personal homes of the elderly.³⁰

But particularly in the case of the elderly, these robots are not replacing a human connection; they are filling a human void. As long as such voids exist, people should seek to fill them in person, but businesses can and should ameliorate the rest—including helping people form real relationships and connect on a personal level.³¹ As we wrote in Chapter 2, “Reality,” if technology is not used to make a human connection— a positive and enduring one—with and especially between your current and prospective customers, what is the point?

People desire to keep in Reality that which they hold most dear. Whereas the previous issue, as with many others, stems from an age-old problem intensified by technology, the final issue we address here is wholly new, emerging from the propensity of Virtuality in general, and simulations of Reality in particular, “to make some things seem more real,” in the words of MIT Professor Turkle.³² In her fascinating study of how faculty members across a variety of disciplines embrace (or not) simulations within their domains of expertise, Simulation and Its Discontents, Turkle found that people tended to want to hold back what they held most dear, to make some “sacred space” a “simulation-free zone” that was “off-limits for the computer.”³³ For architects it was drawing; for civil engineers it was structural analysis; for chemists, the lecture hall; for physicists, experiments.

As we ponder the Multiverse itself, this is the question we ask you to consider and reflect on: When it comes to the domain of humanity itself, of what it means to be human, what do we hold most dear? Selah.

Into the Future

As Lanier tells us, “the most important thing about a technology is how it changes people.”³⁴ Digital technology changes people, individually and collectively. We are not sure how it will wash out, as all these issues—and more that could have been covered—weave together, extend, and amplify each other in unforeseen ways. The primary thing to do as you act into the future, designing and deploying experience offerings inspired by the Multiverse, is be aware. Don’t just let all these changes wash over you, unthinkingly. Examine not only your self but your business, and our society. Then and only then can you be prepared for what the future holds, and perhaps be one who makes it happen.

Now, we are not futurists. We do not tell you what is going to happen; we tell you what is happening, right now, that perhaps you do not yet see. The Multiverse is such a sense-making tool for perceiving the present in a new way. As with any tool, it can be used wisely or unwisely, in edifying or deleterious ways, for good or for evil. Be wise. Choose good. And then imagine what could be.

It’s oft been said that the mechanization that came with the Industrial Economy caused us to view ourselves in terms of machine metaphors—the brain as a determinant mechanism, for example. With the rise of the Service Economy and its dependence on information technology, computer metaphors abounded, with the brain as information processor. With the emergence of the Experience Economy and the Multiverse, we hope to see the concomitant rise of metaphors of imagination—the mind as limitless imagineer. We are not mechanisms or processors; we are ones who use the tremendous resources of digital technology to create what we imagine. We now truly are limited only by our imaginations, which stretch out to embrace infinite possibility.