I wanted to post some comments left here a couple of weeks ago from a friend of mine, Morgan, just to make sure that they don't stay buried in the comments section of an old post, and because since then I haven't stopped thinking about some of the implications of Morgan's comments.
The comment related to two of my favourite things: the theory of flow and, surprise!, DJ'ing! Morgan had this to say about user experience, flow and DJ'ing:
As a digital media dude, flow should be of prime interest for you and everyone in your industry. When a Web 3.0 arrives, I would imagine that flow experience would be (or at least I hope it would, as I'm getting pretty sick of typing and mousing) the central driver of user experience.
An analogy that doesn't quite do justice to the complexity of flow: imagine working the web is like watching your favourite movie in terms of timelessness, getting caught up in emotional content, feeling the feelings of the characters, coming away a little transformed but - and here's the clincher for tech evolution online - being able to direct those experiences/co-construct the narratives as they're happening (much like you might choose what record to play or what track to lose it to) rather than in some reflective post-experience realm.
Morgan is a cultural anthropologist and bona fide music geek. He has done a lot of work in this field, and I'm utterly fascinated with the idea of making our digital experiences more "flow-like". I think this just scratches the surface of how to think about and design for flow (no, Firebrand is likely not an answer).
Russell has also been looking at some of these themes lately, specifically related to games, and lessons for marketers and communicators:
I suspect there's much the advertising and media business can learn from the games industry, not least because they know how to create something people want to spend time with, playing, interacting, hanging-out, learning. And we have to learn that or die, because we all know how expensive interruption is getting.The best thing we could learn is how to be mysterious and get people into a flow-state; that almost hypnotic feeling you get into as you're drawn through each new gaming puzzle and challenge. We couldn't do flow if ours lives depended on it, we blurt everything out in thirty-seconds and keep repeating it until they submit. And in order to ensure we're delivering the right message we've made a fetish of clarity, so we can't do mystery either.
So much of what I take for granted as a DJ (interaction with the crowd, getting myself and the floor in a flow-state, all of those things) are directly relevant to communications, and even user experience. So thanks to Morgan for making that a bit clearer (I usually hesitate to bring DJ'ing into the picture, and I'm not sure why).
I'm pretty excited about some of the possibilities with all of this, so if anyone has any interesting resources/articles related to flow, design and stuff like that, I'd love to hear from you.
In the meantime maybe I should corner Morgan some time for an interview here ;)
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