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Space Machina creates automated and interactive multi-sensory experiences.

Principles: creative vs smart automation

  • Entertaining vs Functional

  • Staged vs Decorative

  • Experience centric vs Technology centric

  • Surprising vs Expected

  • Interactive vs Reactive

  • Emotions driven (surprise, curiosity, intrigue, delight, amusement, introspection) vs Comfort inducing

  • "Time well spent" vs "time well saved"

Design for the Heart: Emotional Palette Design

Includes "Negative" emotions, that can paradoxically be desirable and transformational:

  • Pleasurable fear

  • Healing sadness

  • Uncertainty leading to introspection

  • Deflected anger

 

See : The Uses of Enchantment: the Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, by Bruno Bettelheim​

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Diagram : The Happiness Track, by Emma Seppala, in HBR article

Physio-Emotional Design:Frisson

  • 55 to 86% of population experiences this pleasurable esthetic chill as a reaction to emotionally moving stimuli

  • Measured by galvanic skin response : elevated electrodermal activity (EDA)

  • Influenced by temperature, humidity

  • Listeners who experience frisson also scored high for a personality trait called “openness to experience.”

  • Arousal is created through positive violations of listener's expectations: suspense, musical passages with unexpected harmonies, sudden changes in volume, entrance of a soloist or choir, speeches' unexpected lessons

Functional Design:
Designing for Modes and Moods

  • Experience consent should not be implicit

  • Memorable positive moments are created when the time is right: a person's "mode"* should be respected

  • Vulnerability in intimate spaces (bodily function, bare skin, isolation, respite, self examination) is an opportunity for self examination: invite participants to choose the mood they want to indulge in.

*Cf Joe Pine/Norton HBR article: Are Your Digital Platforms Wasting Your Customers’ Time?

Perception Design:

Optical illusions

  • Negative after image: complementary colors are seen when closing your eyes. 

  • Positive after image: a positive afterimage appears in the same colors as the image in front of you.

  • Flickering light hallucinations (Brian Gysin's dream machine principle)

  • Pepper's ghost effect

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