For my exams, books were mandatory. But aside from that, I found interesting lines in them that support my research. This might be a pretty long read, but these are the highlights in my literature study.. all in defence of my project.

“A new view on the experience economy” starts of with some cases where they prove we are evolving to an experience economy. They refer throughout the book to other literature that states we are evolving to an entertainment economy, and products without entertaining content won’t have a chance in the future. (The entertainment economy 1999) As far as I understand the author doesn’t agree with this, and underlines throughout his writing it’s about “ engaging” the consumer.

Also the term attention economy is covered by explaining it’s about retrieving the customer’s attention. Because of the overload of information people get nowadays, they start filtering and it will be very hard to achieve this goal for advertisers. This is an interesting read since my research tries to find a solution and this theoretically supports everything in the creation of my concept.

As the book goes on, another question pops up. What should be the focus of my interactive concept? The goal is informing people, but what do I put in the middle? Emotion or experience? Probably this is something that will be case-dependant, but Susanne Piët (The Emotion Market) tells us luck can be made. Emotional needs can translate themselves into markets of security, romance, identity, meaning and authenticity. Interesting stuff to think about.

One chapter is about the experience process. There is direct relation between the senses and experiences, and points to a difference between “higher” and “lower” senses. But that doesn’t mean we can exclude one of them. For example: Beholding is not always just seeing. History taught us that many new food products fail because producers did insufficient research to one of them. The influence of both lower & higher senses reflect on our emotions, and that’s why they are both important. This was a good read to see if it would be useful to implement multi-sensorial interaction.

As for communicating information; the writers explain in their book that the top down communication company’s used to have with their consumers will be breached in our new economy. The consumer feels the urge to personally interact with the company, and I see an opportunity in my interactive concept to do this when requested. Think for example that I would hook up the narrowcasting panels to the internet or a local database, and would use a touch screen instead of a regular screen. Possibilities are endless. Information like consumers passing by & interacting with the panel are numbers which are obviously easy to obtain by any type of interactive narrowcasting, but by adding a touch screen, we could aim for a marketing outcome and be able to get more info and personal details about someone right away by requesting his input.

To end my defence I found a nice definition of an experience by Dewy, 1938: An experience reflects on the sum of all interactions from people with their environment and others. Experiences are therefore a subset of an “adventure”: they are fixed to context and time.

Literature Links (Dutch):
- Een nieuwe kijk op de experience econmy
- Van massamerk tot mensmerk
- De emotiemarkt