Phenomenal Work

BE PHENOMENAL

A New Translation of an Old Idea about Design & Audiences

I’m living at the end of the age of objects.  As bits continue to replace atoms, the things I make have never been less material. And yet, I find that the experience of an e-book is like a paperback, an MP3 like a vinyl disc, and social media like being together in person.  Many different phenomena emerge from the potential of what I make, as different as the experience of watching a movie in a theater, on a television, a phone or the seat back in front me. I want to create meaningful experiences for people. They are why I create.  I choose to put the audience, instead of the object, at the center of my work. 

I admit that none of this is new: if I pick up “Moby Dick” today I will have a different experience than I did in high school – not because the book has changed, but because I have. If I read it again in twenty years, it will be a new experience yet again. I choose to embrace that the audience creates the meaning of my work.

I will resist the urge to make fake objects out of phenomena. I know what it means to socialize with other people, and I know a whole field (sociology) exists to study that. I don’t need a new phrase like “social media” to describe the act of being social online.  I pick being social over having a social media presence and being a person over having a personal brand. I need new ways to talk about my work, not new words to describe it. I choose to stop tying myself into knots.

I’m liberated by these choices. They lead me to recognize when other creators made similar choices and to realize the techniques they used are also useful to me (even if we work in such different disciplines as architecture, poetry and game design). I’m excited that because these techniques are based on how people experience anything and everything, they are the most universal principles of design.  I’m part of a heritage of artists, philosophers, scientists and designers who have been inspired by this idea, called phenomenology, for more than a century. I choose to follow in their footsteps and re-awaken people’s sense of wonder.

I suspect you feel this way too. I see these ideas at play in your work as much as mine.  We’ve talked around these concepts for years. Now, we only have to choose to do something about it. We don’t have to change what we call ourselves. We don’t have to start a new industry, claim this is a new art form, or invent a new buzz phrase like we’ve tried in the past. We only have to put the audience at the center of our work and embrace that we craft phenomena as much as we do objects. We only have to choose to be phenomenal. 

Stelarc (1946 - )

American philosopher of technology Don Idhl has written extensively on postphenomenology — the study of the phenomenology of technology. He divided our relationship with technology into three major categories: embodiment as an extension of our bodies (like eyeglasses we forget we’re wearing), hermeneutic as an extension of perception (like the microscope through which we see what would be invisible), and alterity as an expression of other (like when we curse at our computer like it was a person).

The work of Australian performance artist Stelarc explores those concepts through the lens of post-humanism, the idea that our bodies are obsolete and waiting for us to create better ones. He talks about our bodies being made up of new kinds of flesh: circulating flesh (the blood in my veins might end up in another person), fractal flesh (the controlling of a body by impulses from somewhere else), and haptic flesh (senses that are extended beyond the body). Stelarc just isn’t afraid to push those boundaries further than most of us would ever consider.

His early work in the 1960s focused on suspensions — hanging his body from hooks through his flesh, sometimes counter-balanced by weights and then (later) connected to industrial servos that moved his body for him. He’s best known, though, for his technology work: he built a third hand controlled by the muscles of his abdomen capable of independent action from his other two hands and exo-skeletons that held his body and acted as an extension. In 2007, he made news when he had an ear grown from his own cells and implanted in his forearm as a third ear. 

Stelarc’s work is deeply rooted in phenomenology, even if he’s pushing that beyond the Uncanny Valley into areas uncomfortable for an audience. In a 2007 interview, Stelarc argued: ”There are no ideas inside my head. There are no images inside my head. There are no memories inside my head. These are generated by my interaction with the world.”

Even if we aren’t ready to stick hooks in our flesh or let our bodies be controlled by alien impulses, Stelarc’s description of his artistic process can still provide us all inspiration: he’s embracing the risky unknown full of emergent possibility. He argues that’s what all artists have always done. “Artistic practice is the realm of exploring, experimenting and exposing,” he wrote. “It is about ambivalence, ambiguity and the slippage between intention and actuality. It is not simplistically an act of affirmation but of generating anxiety and uncertainty. Of accidents and surprises. That’s what artists have always been doing and will continue to do as an integral part of being curious and creative.”

Johnny Meah, the Czar of Bizarre (1937 - )

Johnny Meah is the last living master of a dying American art — sideshow circus banner painter. In the mid twentieth century (and before), traveling circuses in the United States often had a “show on the side” from the main tent packed with oddities, freaks, blockheads and geeks. In the busy fairgrounds of the circus, the sideshow developed sales techniques based upon showmanship, centered around a stage just outside the tent called “the bally” that was usually flanked by lurid banners exaggerating the acts you might see inside (called “the banner line”). Usually, when the circus moved on to the next town, those banners were tossed in the trash and new ones were painted in the next town — such is always the curse of commercial artists.

Just like the transmedia crowd of today, American sideshow carnies had a language all their own to describe the phenomenon of the bally: they needed to pass on the art of “creating a ballyhoo” from one carny to another. Today, the phrase ballyhoo is part of the general lexicon (“extravagant publicity or fuss; praise or publicize extravagantly”) but the art of how to create the phenomena is in danger of being forgotten, discarded like the banners that were a part of it.

The Showmanship is the Salesmanship: How to Work the Bally

Imagine you’re “the talker” — the carny standing on the bally, looking out across the sea of circus-goers milling about. Your job is to entertain them (by which I mean “part them from their money”) and get them into the paid show. The carnies called that crowd “the tip,” and here’s the four steps the older more-experienced carnies have taught you:

Step one is building the tip — you’re going to have to make a ruckus to get their attention. But that’s all you have to do at first: get them interested and willing to pay attention, and start moving them towards you at the bally so you can convince them to part with their money. You’ll probably announce a “free show” there on the bally, the “one you’ve all been hearing about”. Something is just about to happen, and they wouldn’t want to miss it. You did mention it was free, right?

Step two is freezing the tip — you want to mesmerize and immobilize them. Tell them “step right up” and get closer to the show, so that they are bunched in a crowd and can’t easily move away physically. Mesmerize them with something startling so they forget whatever else they were thinking about (veteran talker Ward Hall suggests “Daytime, a beautiful girl in a revealing costume holding a big fat snake. At night: fire eating with a fire blast, fire juggling, or even better, a strong freak.”) As soon as you start to draw a small engaged crowd, others will get drawn in as well (“what are they all looking at?”) but you have to keep them entertained enough so that they don’t drift away. Then, when the tip has gotten big enough, you strike.

Step three is the pitch — this is where you pour on your commanding voice and your salesmanship, describing the show with as much hyperbole as you can muster. Talk to them as if they’ve already bought a ticket — tell them what they will see, how they will react, what they’ll tell their friends about the experience later. Strain credibility to the point of inviting criticism, and then encourage them to see and judge for themselves. “The bally is both practiced and improvisational. Reading the crowd and reacting to them is an art.”

Step four is to turn the tip — this is where your sales pitch becomes a call to action with a sense of imperative: time is running out, tickets are limited, move to the ticket booth now because I want you to see this show. This starts a phase of the bally called “the jam” because, if you did your job right, that frozen tip is now rushing like a herd of cattle to buy tickets. But you’re not going to let up on them for a second, because you’re focused now on “the grind” — tickets are going fast, the show starts in just three minutes, everyone else is already moving inside, the show’s about to start and you don’t want to miss it!

If the talker did their job right, the sideshow tent is now full of people who have already proven they will open their wallets. A lot of them probably didn’t even think they were going to see a sideshow today, but the energy carried them in (and opened their wallets.) As the talker, you’ve probably handed off your duties to a similar carny inside who’ll walk the crowd through the exhibits called “the lecturer” — but don’t think for a second that the salesmanship has ended.

Step five is the blow-off — something extra special, an extra exhibit not suitable for everyone, a chance to go behind the screen with the tattooed lady to see everything you’d want to see, all for just $1 more. This money was even more valuable to the sideshow performers than the ticket price (because they didn’t split this money with the “front office”). Once you got behind that screen with the tattooed lady, she might give you a blow-off too by telling you that all she really made was tips and would appreciate another dollar.

There are lessons for all of us in this, because most of us (whether we like it or not) also need to turn a tip somewhere in our art. You can do this as a part of the show by letting part of the show spill outside the tent. You should get their attention, freeze them in place and THEN make the pitch — always in that order. And then, once you know they’ll open their wallet for you, don’t be shy at finding out how much more you can get. You see elements of this formula around you everyday, but nowhere is it boiled down to such essence as on the bally. 

William Castle (1914-1977)

In his day, William Castle was known as the King of Gimmicks. Even though his body of work included assistant directing for Orson Wells (The Lady From Shanghai, 1947) and producing for Roman Polanski (Rosemary’s Baby, 1968), he’s best remembered as a B-movie shock filmmaker with a flair for promotional stunts. Here’s a few lessons in phenomenal work that can be learned from his films.

The movie starts with the first bit of marketing. The trailer for his 1958 film “Macabre” is a great example — you don’t see a single frame of the film, but you’re told that people who attend the film will have their lives insured by Lloyds of London for $1,000 against death by fright (unless you had a known heart condition or committed suicide during the screening.) His trailer asks you to imagine a movie so scary that you might spontaneously die in the theater, but like most good marketing he’s actually asking you to imagine already having bought a ticket.

Never be afraid to break the fourth wall. In his 1959 film “The Tingler,” a strange monster that lives in your spinal column can emerge and kill you unless you scream really loud at it. In the film, the Tingler escapes the screen, kills the projectionist in your theater, and proceeds to terrorize the audience. Castle developed a gimmick he called “PERCEPTO” — essentially, something similar to those “shocking handshake” buzzers, but installed under some of the seats of the theater and activated by the projectionist once the crowd had started to work themselves up into a frenzy.

Interactivity is mainly an illusion. My favorite Castle gimmick was for his 1961 film “Mr. Sardonicus” — the audience were handed out little cards with a glow-in-the-dark thumb that he called The Punishment Poll. Near the end of the film, the audience had a chance to vote: thumbs up if you want to show Mr. Sardonicus mercy, and thumbs down if you want to see him punished. The audience was picking the ending of the film. Except, Castle says the “mercy” ending was never once shown, as the audience always voted for the punishment. But Castle was having a gag on all of us, as TCM explains: “Although Castle asserts in his book that there was an alternate ending filmed — one where Sardonicus lives — the consensus among horror film scholars is that it wasn’t actually filmed. No different ending has turned up, even in these days of unearthing every scrap of unused material in extra features for DVD releases.”

William Castle definitely thought about the phenomena of theatrical experience (one could argue to the deficit of his actual filmmaking) and realized that this kind of showmanship could translate into profits at the box office. He inspired many filmmakers who came after him (including John Water’s Smell-o-Vision gimmick Odorama for the 1981 film “Polyester”.)

Centering on the Audience

Despite my love of dead German philosophers and obscure art theories, I’m a pretty practical guy (for a mad scientist.) I don’t see a phenomenal work mindset as an abstraction; I see it as a framework that actually makes real work better. I look at the way these ideas revolutionized art and science and philosophy, I read the words our predecessors have written about how it changed the way they thought about life and art, and I wonder: isn’t it time for the Networked Age to absorb in those same concepts? All it takes is another translation of phenomenology in a way that makes sense to the now, so let me start with a provocation and then humbly offer up a translation of minds greater than mine that left these gifts for us we’ve failed to unwrap.

As a community, we spend far too much time talking about the form of work, as if it were the central innovation of Networked Age – look at all the “new” things we can make, all the “new” ways we can stick them together, all the new words we need to describe all these new things. This is natural, because as creators we spend a lot of time thinking about how to make things and what to make (and should.) Perhaps we can get further if, just for a moment, we focused on the real innovation of the Networked Age: audiences will never be the same again, but human nature hasn’t changed.

Somewhere in the world, a person encounters a designed thing – they see the architecture, they load the webpage, their eyes glance at the billboard, whatever. We’re witnessing a moment in time when what we’ve designed meets the people we designed it for: the phenomena of the work in context with both the world and the person.

As creators, we rightly spend a lot of time talking about that designed object and what we believe it means: brand strategies, story bibles, authorial intent, etc. But, we must acknowledge to each other that all of that stuff is invisible to audience – it lies beneath the surface of the world of experience. We can imagine the “serious artist” who’s work is unintentional (and tragically) ironic, the Internet is full of that kind of work, and use that as an example of just how irrelevant that hidden strategic structure can be to what the design actually means to people.

Thinking about the phenomena of our work means focusing on the context of how people experience it. Left to chance, some of that context might distract from the moment of meaning and some might enhance that moment of meaning. Phenomenal work asks you to think of the context of the experience as something that can be designed as part of the work. When people in the Networked Age talk about designing for relevancy or discovery or surprise or “shareability” they are describing aspects of the phenomena of work. When these factors work together well, the experience of the person with our work becomes richer and more meaningful … and that unlocks the most magical of all effects.

We only know about the world (or ourselves) because of our experiences, and we only understand those experiences when we craft a story to describe it to ourselves: this is the moment of meaning. Because we’re social, we’re also wired to share the stories of our meaningful experiences with each other and we’re wired to find the stories of other people’s meaningful experiences as valuable as actual experiences. Science has confirmed this: what happens in the brain during an experience, when we’re telling the story of an experience, and when we’re hearing the story of an experience are remarkably similar. I think it is one of the magical things about the human experience.

And that’s exactly the part of us amplified the most in the Networked Age, the part that surprised Internet creators so much they felt they needed a phrase like “social media” to describe it. Never in human history have our stories of meaningful experiences been as universally available to each other as they are right now. Tomorrow it will be even better. And all of that starts with the meaningful experiences that we could be designing for each other, because all storytelling emerges from the phenomena of experience. 

I didn’t make this up and I didn’t invent this. I only re-discovered it and re-translated it. And in the coming months, I need to prove how practically useful it is for predicting almost every phenomenon of the Internet we’re grappling with as creators. And I have to do that by October, when I’ve committed to unveiling this idea in front of a large audience to try to provoke a meaningful new conversation.

More than One Kind of Phenomenal

Artist Shepard Fairey once wrote, “The FIRST AIM OF PHENOMENOLOGY is to reawaken a sense of wonder about one’s environment.” Fairey’s view of what that means for an artist was most heavily influenced by Martin Heidegger and his view of phenomenology as “the process of letting things manifest themselves.” This is the world of designed objects that are more like the “Andre the Giant Has a Posse” stickers that attempt to wake you up to YOU and to the very real experiences around you. That stands in contrast to what Guy Debord called “the spectacle” – the world of images that attempt to replace real experiences and are designed to distract and coerce rather than empower.

This wasn’t at all the way Husserl thought about it as he was first forming his theories of phenomenology, largely revealed through a letter he wrote to German artist Hofmannstahl. For him, art and the “aesthetic intuition” of the viewer were meant to be removed from mundane experience – that, in fact, if a piece of art only reminds you of the real experiences around you, it isn’t “pure art”. 

Now, here’s a contrast artists of any stripe can get their arms around! Are you making work because you want to “wake people up” to reality, or because you want to “transport them away” from reality? 

One of the great joys of having over 100 years of thinking and writing by philosophers, artists, psychologists and sociologists on the subject of phenomenology to explore is this: they are not of one mind, there are more than one frame for thinking about how experiences work. Personally, I believe either path can equally lead to phenomenal work – because, as an artist, you’re asking yourself about the subjective experiences you want the audience to have. Those are the right questions to be asking yourself, as that’s the road that leads to phenomenal work.

What you can learn from meeting theater

One morning in a hotel lounge, I caught one of the best idea pitchers in advertising busily scribbling notes in the corner of a print-out of a PowerPoint presentation we’d be giving in a few hours on a multi-million dollar project pitch. He was writing jokes, jokes that he might use to “get out” of a slide if it wasn’t well received, or to soften the delivery of the slide before it even came up on the screen. He wasn’t rewriting the presentation, he was thinking through all the ways the presentation might go in the room (and how he might adapt to those situations.) Most of those he didn’t even use in the room, but a few of them he did.

As a creator, you’ve probably been in pitch meetings before too, meetings where the outcome is very important to you (and your project.) This means you’ve probably encountered the concept of “meeting theater”.  Meeting theater is not the presentation itself, but the pageantry around the delivery of that presentation in a room full of real people whose reactions you can’t entirely predict. It is also one of the simplest examples of phenomenal work – thinking about not just “the object” but also “the experiencing of the object”.

In just advertising (as an industry), I’ve seen remarkably subtle and intuitive experience design from pitch teams. They take into account the temporality of the situation – you tempo a 9AM Monday meeting very differently than a 4PM Friday meeting. They take into account the optics of team – who’s in the room, how are they dressed, what do they say about the nature of the agency? They take into account history – is the client currently in love with you, or are you going into this meeting after a series of painful ones? 

Why? Because they are deeply invested in that moment of meaning, and they understand intuitively that the meaning (and reaction) is going to emerge from the client’s mind not theirs. And because they understand they can design those aspects of the experience to enhance the meaning, they don’t just have to leave them to chance. Even the use of the phrase “theater” to describe the thinking is a fascinating admission that the theater of a meeting is different than the content of a meeting.

If thinking about the theater of a meeting is so common, why can’t we think (and talk) about “website theater” or “television theater” or “Kickstarter theater” or “conference presentation theater” with equal ease?

The Audience is a Verb

Buckminster Fuller, while contemplating the nature of humanity and existence, once famously wrote, “I am not a thing – a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process.” Bucky was, in fact, arguing that we are all verbs, that we’re defined by our actions and come to know ourselves through those actions. This is the heart of the phenomenological concept of intentionality, retold in a more poetic way.

Sometimes, we might think of the audience as someone we can strap into a chair and force to witness our work, like poor Alex undergoing the Ludovico technique in “A Clockwork Orange,” like an empty vessel that we can fill with meaning. Meaning doesn’t actually come into being that way, shoved from the media object into the brain without interpretation or synthesis or reflection. Instead, if we treated them as a verb, we might help them get to that realization that Fuller was describing with “I seem to be.”

Shepard Fairey is a great example of that perspective, all the way back to his earliest “Andre the Giant Has a Posse” stickers. In his 1990 manifesto, he explicitly called his work phenomenological and described it as:

“The sticker has no meaning but exists only to cause people to react, to contemplate and search for meaning in the sticker. Because OBEY has no actual meaning, the various reactions and interpretations of those who view it reflect their personality and the nature of their sensibilities.”

Parse the words of Fairey, and you know exactly the verbs he was hoping to help bring to the surface: react, contemplate, search for meaning, interpret, reflect. The language of those words is very different than what you often hear among designers, who are more likely to talk about use, watch, view, click, listen. 

Before the age of interactivity in design, this would have been an obscure philosophical dialog, but today it isn’t. Today, I can see the verb of the audience clearly. I can see them react and interpret and search for meaning, on Twitter or their blogs or the Facebook posts. To create phenomenal work, we have to think more like Fuller and Fairey, and embrace that we are all verbs.

A (rough) definition of “Phenomenal Work”

In a prior entry, I talked about the idea that your work only really exists when an audience is experiencing it. To really get to the heart of phenomenal work, though, you have to embrace the central concept of “intentionality”: your audience only knows who they are (or that they are) because of what they’re experiencing. This is why work can be transformative.

This was the radical new idea from Edmund Husserl – that consciousness is always consciousness of something: a perception, an emotion, a memory, a fantasy, an equation. The two cannot be disentangled in any meaningful way. Jean-Paul Sartre, as a creator and philosopher, argued that this “restored to us the world of artists and prophets” through a simple truth: “We love a woman because she is loveable.” Sarte could have just as easily said, “The woman knows she is loveable because she is loved.” The thing and the consciousness of the thing are inseparable and the object is “evidenced” by consciousness into meaning.

Phenomenology uses “intentional” different than everyday usage — if you trip and fall, that’s still intentional, because you are conscious of the experience of tripping and falling (and you derive meaning from it). Similarly, “evidence” means something broader and more nuanced than you might expect.  As Robert Sokolwski phrased it, “Evidence is the successful presentation of an intelligible object, the successful presentation of something whose truth becomes manifest in the evidencing itself.” If I show you a poem in a foreign language you don’t speak, I have not successfully presented an intelligible object. If you see the snow falling, it is snowing. If you didn’t experience that the woman is loveable, you do not love her.

Phenomenal work, then, is the successful presentation of an intelligible object, the moment when meaning is created from the experience of the work. That’s the untranslated version in the native Phenomenologesse, and what we really need is a translated version that is easy to absorb for anyone who makes “intelligible objects” (storytellers, designers, filmmakers, programmers, product designers, etc.). That’s the central question of phenomenal work: not the nature of the objects, not the channels of those objects, not the nature of the truth, not the artist’s intent, but the “successful presentation”. That’s the job of a manifesto: the “intelligible object” is the specialty of your design discipline, the “successful presentation” is universal to all disciplines.

That then lets us get to the question, “How do I create phenomenal work?” My premise is that there are gems of answers to this question hidden down in the core assumptions of every design discipline, and that phenomenology gives you the framework to make any of those “trade secrets” universal to any “intelligible object” created in any discipline because “intentionality” is the systemic fabric of both experience and consciousness that we all design against.

What belongs to the audience?

The search for an audience-centered framework of discussion raises some interesting questions: just how much of all this “magic new stuff” actually belongs to the audience and not to the storyteller? 

For a moment, let’s think of our work the way a phenomenologist would. A person, with a rich full experience-laden “life world”, encounters some object that we’ve designed. We, as creators, have tried to pack all this potential for meaning inside that object, but it is just that – potential. If we did our job well, that meaning is intelligible – a person can find that meaning inside the object – and, to some extent, reproducible – different people will find similar meanings. All of that, though, happens in the context of that “life world” the person inhabits and, as creators, we have all kinds of words to describe when those integrate well: zeitgeist, relevant, timeless, universal, etc.

I can remember when I took our film Nothing So Strange to SXSW in 2002. It had a provocative premise packed into a “reality hacking” faux documentary inspired by Medium Cool and intended as a serious piece. Most audiences experienced it that way, but not at SXSW, though. There, the audience at the Alamo Draft House was shown a comedy short about conspiracy theories right before our feature, and they interpreted our film as a Christopher Guest comedy. They belly laughed where audiences had never laughed before and happily quizzed me in the filmmaker Q&A as if it were a hilarious comedy full of pitiful characters. They had a great experience, but not at all the experience we had intended, and both the success and disappointment of that were outside of my control.

The phenomenon of the work we make, that moment when an audience is experiencing it, is largely the creation of the audience. A “story world” is an abstraction, it isn’t something that can be experienced, it is just an elaborate description of your intent in making an object. As soon as the audience lets that into their “life world,” it actually belongs to them: it is part of the experience of their lives, and its meaning derives from the interaction of our work and their lives. In the “transmedia” discussion, this role of the audience is left largely unexplored, but I believe it is implied that if the storyteller is the one “dispersing the story” through multiple channels, it is the audience that is choosing (or not choosing) to unify it and turn it into something meaningful.

The non-interactive movie theater experience (for the most part) tries to solve this difference between object and phenomenon by attempting to shut off as much of the life world of the audience as possible by creating a ritualized space around the object: a dark room, turn off your phones, please don’t talk, pay attention to nothing but the screen, please exit briskly at the conclusion. That same object, though, will eventually be presented in less ritualized spaces like your living room television or your phone during an airplane flight. I don’t think this is an abstract difference, either: part of the fun of Avengers is the way the rest of the audience reacts (and thus drives your emotional context), and that will be lost when I’m watching it on my television alone. I wonder if I’ll draw different meaning from it then.

One of the many interesting innovations packed into Theater of the Oppressed is the way it makes the “story world” and the “life world” the same thing: audiences are unshackled and embraced as both spectator and actor, they join the stage and rewrite the tragedy and collectively explore how the story and their life experiences interact, and the meaning comes from that co-authorship. All without technology. Augusto Boal, who developed these theories and practices starting in the 1960s and 1970s in Brazil, even understood that this was connected to both the concept of “exercise” (inward facing) and “game” (outward facing) and is probably most famous for his book “Games for Actors & Non-Actors”. Some of the video game titles that excite interactive storytellers the most share those attributes, embracing the co-authorship of meaning by acknowledging that the story emerges as meaning from the phenomenon of experience, even an experience in Skyrim or as part of an alternate reality game.

You can only really get to these kinds of questions, though, from an audience-centered framework.