Challenge Half

Desmet and Hekkert speak of three core aspects of product
experience—the aesthetic experience, the experience of meaning, and the
emotional experience. In creating juiced!
and the advertisement for it, I sought to construct an aesthetic experience
grounded in taste and an experience of meaning grounded in the desire for the
modern kitchen—sleek, easy, clean. juiced!
is an automatic, electric citrus juicer and tea-brewer in one, with an
option to dispense a mixture of both juice and tea. First and foremost, in the
design of both the product and its advertisement, I sought to emphasize the
fundamental output of the machine—fresh juice. For many, the taste of fresh
juice in-and-of-itself imbues juiced!
with desirability, and for others, this aesthetic experience, combined with an
experience of meaning focused on ease (the machine has an
opening to insert citrus fruit into, which will be automatically sliced in half
inside, and each half pressed) lends juiced!
desirability because the aesthetic experience of the taste of fresh juice often
requires less ease—manual work— to attain. In addition, our advertising
employed multi-sensory cues, asking viewers to hear the sound of the tea as it
cascades over ice, and to feel the enlivening chill of a cold glass of Lemonade
on a blistering day. Desire for a modern kitchen, with polished stainless steel
appliances, is satisfied by the product’s contemporary visual design and simple
operation.

In all of this, our greatest hope is to draw an emotional
experience from both viewers of the advertisement and users of the product. We
hope individuals will recall Grandma’s sweet tea—and lounging in the shade on
her porch in Charleston. Or we hope they’ll recall Aunt Julie’s backyard in
Southern California, where they might’ve picked oranges at a ripe time of year
to bring inside and make orange juice with. These emotional experiences—ones of
happier days—will be catalyzed by an experience of meaning focused on making a
rare aesthetic experience more accessible. However, the emotional experience
for every individual may be different.

Challenge 1

In Challenge 1, we sought to craft a unique and intimate
emotional experience using familiar visual aesthetics that harbor associated meaning
and emotions, but placing those aesthetics in an experience of meaning that is
meant to ignite and reconfigure these juvenile emotions into a far more
encompassing emotional experience. Hence, we bring you Once Upon a Bar. In this immersive theatre experience, audience
members are bar patrons and stumble upon classic fairy tale characters
stumbling one-by-one into the bar to drink their woes away. As these drunken
twists on childhood characters begin to contort the plot, bar patrons must
determine how they should intervene, and whether they should steer the plot
back to normal course or allow it to diverge.

Challenge 2

(To be added, once
submitted.)