Imaginary Forces

Leading design website, designtaxi.com, recently sat down with IF's very own Peter Frankfurt and Chip Houghton to interview them for their Design Leaders column.  They discussed IF's history, inspiration, and take on the practice of Experience Design. Below is an excerpt from the interview.

TAXI >> Hello Chip and Peter. Imaginary Forces is acknowledged as a leading practitioner of experience design. Chip Houghton said this holistic approach "is all about releasing the brand from static representation and setting its story in motion." What drives experience design then?

Imaginary Forces>> We've been involved in experience design since 2001, where we got our first opportunities, and it's really evolved from both of our understanding of it and also what clients are coming to us for. It's really a combination of architecture, technology, media, brand and it's looking at that as a whole and trying to figure out what it is clients need, what are we trying to do with this, and trying to tell a story. And each one of those is completely unique, each one of those has their own goals and objectives.

One interesting way of thinking about that question is to think about our own history and process of the company. We started doing main title sequences, and if you think about it, movies are the first examples of experience design where you get a whole group of people in a dark room and get them to suspend disbelief, and they are expecting a story so you better tell them a story. Where we've gone is say, let's take that scale of story and tell them in a different medium or platform - sometimes where stories are expected, sometimes the story's a surprise and maybe a delight - that's how we started. Some of our first projects were programming a football stadium, and during a project with IBM where we were creating something for client briefings which was traditionally very dry and all business, we took the whole expectation of IBM customers from the minute they got into the elevator by using design and architecture because architecture is an extremely valuable tool in story telling - that was a kind of revelation for us.

There are a lot of different ways to look at that question - what drives experience design is just the way people are experiencing messages and stories and brands. We come from the filmmaking title and the marketing of those films. We come from commercial production working with traditional ad agencies and what we have seen is that - oh my god - there's so many other ways of interacting with the audience so we'd better think out of the box because if we just look at a computer screen or movie screen or television screen, we're really limiting ourselves in terms of both expressing a brand and telling a story and interacting with those audiences. We were attracted in terms of exploring this idea of combining architecture and the medium of storytelling and idea of scale because a movie screen is big but stadium is bigger, and why just have a screen when you can have an entire building or exterior or interior of a building? The other thing that's happened is attracting people's attentions and technology and changing so many of the tools for showing media and delivering stories, is that it could be the inside of a building, or the exterior of the building, it could be a weather balloon that's showing the image, it could be a giant hologram or a water feature - it's anything and everything.