What Katrina Lat helped WXO members understand about technology, quality and immersive experience design.
Speaker: Katrina Lat
Campfire: ‘High Tech, Low Tech, No Tech: Lessons Learned From 900+ Immersive Experiences’
Date: 27 May 2026
Format: Framework
Core question: Does more technology necessarily mean a higher-quality experience?
The Signal
Katrina Lat’s Campfire challenged one of the more persistent assumptions in immersive experience design: that more technology means more quality.
Drawing on a personal dataset of 996 immersive experiences seen over roughly a decade, Lat plotted technology against quality and found no meaningful correlation. The point was not that technology is bad. It was that technology is not evidence of quality by itself.
Her argument was more useful than a simple anti-tech stance. High-tech experiences can be excellent when the technology is structurally necessary. Low-tech experiences can be excellent when the world, ritual, agency or craft carries the work. The issue is fit.
For experience leaders, the practical takeaway is clear: stop asking whether an experience has enough technology. Ask what work the technology is doing, what would be lost without it, and what new risks it introduces.
The Useful Idea
Technology is not a proxy for quality. It is a design decision that has to earn its place.
Lat’s data showed an almost flat relationship between technology and quality. Some high-tech works were excellent. Some low-tech works were excellent. Some technology-heavy works were weak.
That matters because technology is often treated as an easy answer to harder questions. It photographs well. It reassures stakeholders. It makes novelty visible. But none of that means it creates a better participant experience.
The sharper question is not “should we use technology?” It is “what burden are we asking this technology to carry?” If it advances agency, world-building, resonance or craft, it may be essential. If it is only there to signal innovation, it may be weakening the work.
Why it matters
- For strategy: It gives experience leaders a clearer way to challenge technology-for-technology’s-sake without sounding anti-innovation.
- For design: It shifts attention from tools to consequences: agency, world, emotional landing and craft.
- For stakeholders: It helps teams explain why a lower-tech solution may be stronger, cheaper and more robust – or why a high-tech solution is genuinely worth the investment.
How to use this in your work
- Audit where technology is doing genuine experience work.
- Ask what would be lost if the technology disappeared.
- Challenge any brief that treats technology as a substitute for agency, world-building, resonance or craft.
Best line from the Campfire
“Technology is a tool. And like every other tool, it can be used well, and it can be used poorly.”
Three useful questions raised
- When does technology genuinely deepen immersion, rather than simply making an experience look more advanced?
- How should teams judge quality in a field where audiences rarely share the same baseline of experiences?
- What should experience designers do when clients ask for technology before they have defined the experience problem?
Want the full session?
This Campfire Signal is a snapshot of a recent members-only WXO Campfire.
WXO members can watch the full recording on demand, read the transcript plus download the presentation inside the membership hub.
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