This video is from an IRL Campfire at the home of WXO member Pixel Artworks.
WXO Campfires are usually digital, but they have the same collegiate atmosphere and collaborative energy.
Join the WXO, and you’ll be joining the leaders of the experience revolution – at Campfires, at PlayLabs, and in our private, members-only network site.
The WXO has now run almost 200 weekly virtual Campfire sessions to champion and challenge the pioneers at the forefront of this revolution.
Some of the world’s greatest thinkers in experience, including neuroscientists, directors, behavioural psychologists, CEOs, authors, investors, academics, technologists and beyond have shared their insights for our 630+ Members in 39 countries to dismantle and debate.
When you become a WXO Member, you’ll get full access to live and on-demand Campfires that will allow you to:
CONNECT with Experience Economy experts and strengthen your place in the experience community
LEARN how to stage more successful, profitable, and sustainable experiences
DISCOVER radical ideas about the Art, Science, Business, and Future of experiences – and share your own
LEAD the next stage of the Experience Revolution
We’ve designed 6 types of Campfire to best showcase emerging trends and insights from across the Experience Economy, and invite collaboration and connection. Here’s what to expect when you join us.
Techniques & Frameworks often – but not always – are insights from an experience design professional sharing emerging research that suggests directions for experience design. They might apply to a specific sector, multiple sectors, or all sectors. However, even if they appear to only apply to one sector, we try to abstract them to see how they might be applied elsewhere.
These are top-level principles that can apply to all experiences across all sectors of the Experience Economy. Some might be obvious; some might be overlooked.
Tools are where experience designers share the specific ways in which they design great experiences. They might not apply in every situation, but all add ammo to your arsenal that can be deployed in the appropriate places. Because the more tools we have – and the more precise and calibrated they are – the more likely that we’ll be able to build better experiences.
Real-world examples of how any of the above had an impact on how an experience was designed. Case Studies are where we get our hands dirty!
Rather than being led by a specific experience expert, on Open Mic nights we throw the floor open to members – to share their passion projects, challenges, or workshop solutions to a specific problem.
The ever-expanding WXO community currently includes over 630 Members in more than 39 countries worldwide. When you join us, you’ll meet experts from all experience sectors and from organisations including:
Season 10 of the WXO Campfires runs from April to July 2024.
Here’s a preview of who and what we’ve got lined up. To be first to know what’s on, sign up to the WXO newsletter today.
Ben Witten, placer.ai
Matthew Cross, OE Experiences
Donnacadh O’Briain, story architect
Michael Collins, Leisure Development Partners
We welcomed insights from iconoclast storytellers, digital pioneers, costume designers, operations masterminds and CEOs on topics from making money to making merch.
Read How To Build Better Experiences: Top 10 Lessons From The WXO Campfires Season 9 here and see a selection of our speakers below.
Season 8 of the WXO Campfires saw magicians, professors, performers and filmmakers share their hard-on wisdom on topics from neuroinclusion to fandoms to positive impact.
Read the 15 Experience Epiphanies From The WXO Campfires Season 8 here and see a selection of our speakers below.
Ready to join fellow expert experience creators from 39+ different countries as we lead the Experience Revolution forward?
Register your interest in joining WXO Campfires:
World Experience Organization Limited
Mission Works
41 Iffley Road
London W6 0PB
United Kingdom
Registered in England and Wales Company No. 13330317
For the latest news and views about the Experience Economy and WXO community
CEO, Rematch
Hear from the team behind Rumble in the Jungle Rematch, the immersive 2023 London experience that transported audiences back to Muhammad Ali and George Foreman’s epic 1974 clash in Zaire.
Learn how they combined theatre, sport and tech to evoke the sights, sounds and smells of the capital Kinshasa – as well as what they learned from the bumps and hurdles along the way.
Experience Economy Godfather
An author, speaker, and management advisor to Fortune 500 companies and entrepreneurial start-ups alike, Pine not only coined the term “Experience Economy”, he wrote the book on it, too. Runs management advisory firm Strategic Horizons with his co-author, Jim Gilmore.
He’ll talk about his latest work on Transformation and how to apply it to your own experiences.
Clinician and consultant
“Triggers” are widely understood – but few people know about their opposite, “glimmers”. These are small moments that spark joy or peace, which can help cue our nervous system to feel safe or calm.
Deb Dana, a licensed clinical social worker who specialises in complex trauma, coined the term in her 2018 book The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy. Hear how you might design for them in your next experience.
Head of Real Estate Strategy, Placer.AI
How can you mitigate risk by using data to shape, enforce and enhance your experience design?
Join Witten and Matthew Cross of OE Experiences as they explain how to use Placer.AI to vet attendance and visitation, understand the current demographics of a location, understand local and regional marketing, and provide confidence for investors.
Event & Experience Designer, LiveLife
Join immersive event designer Michael Gunawan in an interactive session that will help guide people on a wellbeing journey to find the HERO: Hope, Efficacy, Resilience, Optimism. A science-based approach meets ancient wisdom.
Creative Director & Story Architect
How does commercial inform, inspire, and change the creative of an experience?
Join O’Briain and Michael Collins of Leisure Development Partners as they unpack this crucial relationship using examples from past projects they’ve worked on.
Co-Founder & MD, Wake The Tiger
The inspirational – and refreshingly honest! – story of the “British Meow Wolf”.
After welcoming more than 250,000 visitors, they’ve now secured £2million more in funding and are expanding.
Former Head of Creative Apparel and Merchandise, Secret Cinema
Merch can enhance your audience’s experience, build brand and social engagement and ultimately provide an impactful income stream for your event.
In a world where ancillary income is vital to any business, learn how to create truly covetable, creative and quality products that your audience will love.
Founder & Principal, flora&faunavisions
New design tools and tech toys are allowing experience designers to paint in colours previously unimagined.
Learn how to create stunning interdisciplinary experiences that respond to and move with audiences, from a creator making magic on four continents.
Founder & CEO, Storycraft Labs
Belonging is a core human emotion and should be at the base of all experiences we create.
This project with Google’s Experience Institute explores how we might get there.
Director of Strategy, COCOLAB International
Ever been to Día de los Muertos? What can we learn from this phenomenal fiesta, and the Latin American approach to creating experiences?
Discover how to make more meaningful cultural experiences for locals and foreigners, with LatAm lessons from a Mexican experience pioneer.
Learning Experience Designer
Helps learners adapt to new cultural environments by staging challenging immersive learning experiences.
Catch them: exploring how to take a deep dive into your own culture and slip into the cultural skin of a stranger.
Author, Experience Designer, and Director, Odyssey Works
What does it mean to design experiences? Traditional design practices invite us to design things, and to use those things to solve problems. But experience is not a problem; it is life.
Experience designers engage with unpredictability and the unknown, partnering with their audiences to generate possibility and relationality.
Burickson will talk about how to create worlds, craft narratives that leave the page and enter people’s lives, and structure transformation.
Associate Artistic Director, Third Rail Projects
Nielsen-Pincus is a certified Body-Mind Centering® Practitioner, Somatic Movement Educator, and Somatic Movement Therapist. She is also a founding member of Third Rail Projects, performing and generating work since 2001.
In immersive theater, where connecting to an audiences’ experience is the driving force behind the narrative, it’s even more important that the culture of storytelling and interaction design be rooted in an embodiment perspective. Here, where we can celebrate all of the wisdom that our somatic intelligence has to offer.
Co-Founder & Technology Director, Spider Entertainment
Escape room Escape Hunt floated on London’s Alternative Investment Market for £14m in 2016. Compare that starter price to a competitive socializing venue: the original Swingers in London cost £500,000 to create.
Competitive socializing venues require more upfront cost, and therefore higher risk – but they’re worth it, because the returns are much higher. Competitive socializing brings in higher level investors, generates much higher revenue – and leads to higher valuations.
Williams, who some say coined the term in his weekly newsletter The Stinger, and who continues to report on competitive socializing trends and developments for the WXO and beyond, will share the latest on this exciting sector of the Experience Economy.
Producer & Performer, Ferryman Collective
Ferryman Collective creates live theatre in the virtual space to truly bring people into the story. They produce award-winning, hour-long immersive and heavily interactive shows for people and with performers from all over the world, which people can attend from home.
One of VR’s greatest assets is that people have the ability to truly connect with each other in a meaningful way that feels real and wonderful. Frank seeks to use these assets to preserve and amplify these feelings through the magic of theatrical performance in the virtual space.
Participants experience the beauty and wonder of the virtual world with intimacy, connection and emotional resonance, in an experience they can all share by helping, talking and being a little vulnerable. When we put this all together, what emerges is an experience that combines the best parts of film, theater, video games, and virtual reality itself.
Creative Director, Jack Morton International
Heitholt oversaw the IRL experience earlier this spring that opened the mansion from the popular mobile game Merge Mansion. Her team crafted a mystery so intriguing that the world’s best detectives and celebrity sleuths had to find out for themselves what was going on inside these walls.
Bringing together experts in the field of immersive theatre and world building, JFI Productions and Scout Expeditions, Heitholt built a truly magical experience that let fans into the universe of a cozy mobile game.
The team also used Midjourney and ChatGPT to help create the depth of detail needed to bring the mobile world to life. In this Case Study Campfire, hear how they did it without compromising human creativity, designing a world of IP alongside the creators of the original game.
Co-Founder & Creative Director, Campfire
In this Case Study Campfire, founder and creative director Mike Monello shared how they won both brand and fan love in The Street of Immortality, a fan experience designed for San Diego Comic-Con 2023. Fans were invited to explore an authentic recreation of turn-of-the-century New Orleans Storyville as seen in Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire.
