Your brain is a bastard

I wanted to share a few thoughts on a great workshop with Kim Plowright – producer & new media consultant for Channel Four, Hide&Seek and Storythings. The workshop focused on digital projects and the importance of ‘user experience’. Firstly, I think Kim is  a great speaker, her frequent use of profanities totally resonated with me. I like clever people who swear, ultimately it makes them so much more human.

We talked a lot about designing an experience for your audience. It’s easy to get extremely hyped on an idea simply because you love it and assume that the rest of the world will love and understand it just as much as you do. Kim mentioned something that in my opinion, is extremely important to keep in mind when thinking of user experience. Your brain is a bastard- it does not show you objective realities, each thought is a narrative created based on your experience. And the experience itself ? It is simply an ‘average’ your brain calculated based on the feelings experienced at the most intense moment and how you felt after the event. #CompleteInabilityToObjectivelyJudgePastRelationships anyone ?

Don’t think about it too much though, as it may just make you question and undermine every single feeling you’ve experienced. The Matrix becomes a little to real and you end up crying in the shower realising your life is just one huge projection.

Coming back to user experience- think of every single step of the journey you want the audience to embark on with you and ask yourself how would you want people to feel afterwards ?

Here’s a mildly related gif referencing an indie film. Because we are young and talking digital.

source: http://phatnappy.tumblr.com/