Experience Manifesto

ETC 20TH Anniversary

Last weekend, Jim Ackerman and I had the chance to go down and help the Entertainment Technology Center at CMU celebrate their 20th anniversary. The Brand Experience Lab is starting to work with them on a number of initiatives and hope to have some of their most exciting technologies here in our space in Jersey City early next year.

Some 20+ years ago, I had the great fortune to meet Don Marinelli, then the Associate head of the drama department at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh and and Scott Stevens, then with the computer sciences department at CMU. At the time, he and other CMU colleagues were working to develop a new program there, combining theater and tech into one program, the Entertainment Technology Center. As described on their website:

The Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) was founded in 1998, and admitted its first class of graduate students in the fall of 1999. The ETC is an interdisciplinary research center offering a Master of Entertainment Technology (MET) that is a joint venture between Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science and College of Fine Arts. In the spirit of the ETC’s interdisciplinary focus, the center had two co-directors; Randy Pausch, a CS professor (who later delivered his inspirational Last Lecture), and Don Marinelli, a Drama Professor.

To this day, the ETC looks to continue being one of the most inventive and impactful programs in the world. Randy Pausch liked to say that the ETC is the world’s best playground, with an electric fence. Or in other words, the ETC provides the contexts, processes and best practices for the design and development of creative experiences. Since our first class, we have graduated a substantial and successful group of over 700 alumni, that help illustrate the solid basis of the ETC’s curriculum, which balances educational goals, professional development, and engaging experiences, or learn, work and play.

As always, we saw some great projects from the students, both full semester work as well as projects done in just one or two weeks. We were particularly drawn to experiences like Face2Face, where two people have to create one face and then follow a series of patterns by raising an eyebrow or puffing up a cheek. The fact that two people had to work together made it fun, as you can see by the short video below.

Another favorite was Goal in the Wall, a Kinect-based game with the twist of telling you the body part you needed to use for that specific round. Although Jim beat me all three games, we both had a fun time.

Back in the late 90's, when I first met Don and Scott Stevens, I was working with an agency and building one of my first experience environments and they work that they were doing at the ETC fit in quite well with what I was building. One of the first things I showed was a Synthetic Interview, a technology developed in the late 90's and we pretty quickly ended up doing a Synthetic Interview for GSK's Nicorette brand, letting you talk to Arnold Palmer and asking him questions both about why you should stop smoking and about his long experience golfing.

When we opened our first playground in NYC, technologies from the ETC were front and center in our experience. One of the first things we brought to our space was a very cool, audience interactive experience. The very first game I saw was the Baby Game, but we knew it would be something we could do a lot with.

We eventually turned it into a successful product that I called AudienceGames. We did very successful programs for Orange, Volvo, which won a Bronze Lion at Cannes and, it all started with msnbc and a program called Newsbreaker Live. That program traveled for the summer of 2007 and was called one of the best marketing ideas in the world. We had a great deal of fun working on this program and it was really great to bring one of the ETC technologies into the world.

We also had a Jam-O-Drum in our space, really one of my favorite experiences from the ETC. I loved that it was multiplayer experience that required 4 players to make the game work. Now that we're spending so much time in our individual worlds, this very social game experience is much more relevant if you're building physical spaces than it was when it was first introduced.

Lastly, the ETC created Quasi, an interactive robot that became the mascot for Give Kids the World that my daughter absolutely loved at the time. He came to NYC several times and traveled quite frequently, even making an appearance at the Super Bowl.

Bucknell MIDE Program & The Future of Retail

Earlier this summer, after Sydney was accepted to Bucknell, we learned about a program in the business school there called MIDE, their Markets, Innovation & Design program. I thought it was a pretty cool program and reached out to connect during one of our visits with Sydney. That started a conversation about ways we could work together during the school year.

Later in the summer, once we had the folks from Jisp move in, that started many conversations about how the store of the future would be designed if you didn't need cashiers and checkout lines, particularly at grocery and convenience stores. Our internal teams started thinking about it as well, exploring the entire checkout process that exists today and what would be done with that space once the checkout lines were removed and it spurred some great conversations.

In late August, I had the chance to meet with Collin Smith and we both thought that the idea of recreating the front end of a grocery store would be a great project for his class. Since they had to explore a topic and then actually design and build something, the ability to use our manufacturing resources at Unified to actually build some prototypes was pretty exciting.

Collin described the class and its process:

“Creative confidence is about believing in your ability to create change in the world around you....the ability to come up with new ideas and the courage to try them out.” - Tom Kelly, IDEO

Our design studio at Bucknell's Markets, Innovation & Design program is building creative confidence by having students bring new ideas to life through prototypes people can actually experience and interact with to really feel what the future might really be like. We fill our studio space with supplies for very rapid and rough prototyping (ex. pipe cleaners, felt, fun foam, Play-Doh, popsicle sticks, tape, hot glue, etc.) so our design teams can think with their hands and physically build on each others ideas.

This collaborative project with Brand Experience Lab builds on these making experiences by giving these students real opportunities, tools, and mindsets to envision, design, and demonstrate possible futures of retail experiences. By bringing these ideas to life through low and high fidelity prototypes these students will be able to really ensure that what is designed makes sense in the future lives of people, bringing truly meaningful and differentiated consumer value.

Let’s make the future awesome, together.

I had the chance to meet with the class in late September and kick off the process with them. Throughout the semester, we'll introduce them to other designers and technologists who will give them more ideas to work with over the semester. There will be a variety of times throughout this process to see what the students are doing and we will update the blog whenever we can.

You can email me if you'd like to know more about the program and participate either as a technology or retail partner. We anticipate this to be the first of many programs and we couldn't be happier to be partnering with Bucknell on this first initiative.

More on MIDE:

As a Bucknell markets, innovation & design major, you'll learn to recognize what consumers want — before they even know they want it — and build a career developing the products, brands and messages to meet those desires. But you don't need to wait until graduation to get started. Whether you want to help entrepreneurs launch their first websites or start your own magazine, you’ll have freedom to follow your passions here. When you are ready to enter the job market, those experiences in and out of the classroom will make you stand out. Leading employers around the world actively recruit our graduates, who hold jobs with organizations as diverse as Tommy Hilfiger and the Philadelphia 76ers.