Creating Engaging and Immersive Experiences

Session Description: This session will introduce and apply emerging and meaningful approaches to programming, through the concept of designing structured experiences for program participants. Experience design is an extension of traditional programming that focuses on the participant experience through absorption, immersion, passive and active engagement.

This session introduces the foundations of experience design and how to transform an agency’s programming to emphasize contemporary program planning and co-creation of participant experiences. Since the introduction of the experience economy by Pine and Gilmore (1999), researchers in the U.S. and abroad have begun to develop theories and the application of experience design to recreation and leisure settings. Our profession is now at a stage where experience program design can be implemented as a new process of program planning. The presenters have used their cumulative background in program planning to develop a sequence of steps that attendees will be able to implement with their agencies.