Spatial Experience Design

Forthcoming in Sundbo, J. & Sørensen, F. (eds.) Handbook of Experience Economy. Edward Elgar Publishing, Incorporated

16. Experiencing Spatial Design Connie Svabo, Jonas Larsen, Michael Haldrup and Jørgen Ole Bærenholdt

1. Introduction A central feature of the experience economy is that places are designed for experience. Place is a commodity for consumption and it is designed to stimulate growth (Urry, 1995). There is an attempt to boost cities and regions in development strategies’ investment in cultural events and institutions while multinational firms construct dazzling brandscapes to provide an entertaining and seductive environment for selling their products. The touristic gaze is no longer reserved for spectacular or extraordinary space-times, but has become part of an experience-seeking everyday life. Indeed, the central arguments for an economy of experiences were prefigured by Lash and Urry (1994, p.259) who almost 20 years ago argued that in postfordist capitalism, touristic forms of cultural consumption disseminate into the spheres of everyday life. Towns, cities and municipalities, challenged by population decrease and lack of commercial production, look to ‘the experience economy’ for revenue and potential attraction of citizens and visitors. The reinvention, rebuilding and rebranding of places (Nyseth et al., 2009) has become a (perceived) necessity in culturally driven urban and regional development. Florida’s work (2002, 2005) on creative labour and urban competition has been particularly influential. Places are articulated as being in

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competition with each other for visitors, financial investment, residency and tourists. Throughout the first decade of the new millennium, the idea of the experience economy has spread into a broad range of commercial fields (Landry, 2006; Bell, 2007), and furthermore forms part of a wider policy interest in developing a new ‘cultural economy’ (Löfgren, 2003; Gibson and Kong, 2005; O’Dell and Billing, 2005). When seeking to revitalise decaying places and commercialise cultural institutions (such as theatres and museums), policy makers, urban planners and architects attempt to create attractive ‘experience-scapes’ (Hayes and MacLeod, 2007). Cities and regions compete with one another to attract tourists and they are evaluated for their ‘experiental’ qualities as tourist destinations and as interesting places to live, work and locate businesses. So places may stage events and performances and invest in new eye-catching buildings for cultural consumption. Given all this energy put into designing spaces for experiences, a crucial question becomes one of how such places work in practice. This chapter is concerned with discussing how physical environments are designed to provide experiences and not least how visitors in practice experience them. The first section briefly contextualizes the experience economy as part of a post-fordist cultural economy of signs. The second section focuses on what is distinctive about architecture and spatial design in the experience economy. The third section moves from design to how places actually are experienced. The fourth section provides ethnographic accounts of how users experience three distinct places: a small city harbour, a museum and a mass tourism resort. Together these accounts show that experiences of a particular place emerge through the engagement with other designs and the specific social group that one travels

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with. Our overall argument is that while architects, designers and guides are powerful in framing experiences they do not determine how experiences actually take place.

2. The Experience Economy The experience economy forms part of a ‘cultural economy of signs’ where culture and commerce are intricately bound together. This ‘economy of signs’ is characterized by de-differentiation: borders have been erased between high and low cultures, as well as between various cultural forms, such as shopping, sports, architecture, music, television, photography, art, education and tourism. This effaces distinctions between culture and life, high and low culture, auratic art and popular pleasure, and between elite and mass forms of consumption (Lash and Urry, 1994). This de-differentiation is evident with many new buildings. In Designing the Experience City, urban design scholar Gitte Marling et al. (2008) write about hybrid buildings. A hybrid art museum, for instance, exhibits art, makes art and sells art and may be an architectural icon, a motor for urban renewal, a shop and a space for performance. This affects curatorial activity. In order to attract visitors and media attention, curation becomes less about documenting and communicating the topic on display and more about creating an attractive space for hanging out with an exhibition space as an appendix. Moreover, as urban environments are vitalized by constructing museums and galleries, museums are subjected to entrepreneurial imperatives to become cultural drivers of urban development. At the same time museums themselves have become more like commercial businesses in which visitors treat their experiences as ‘a matter for consumption – something akin to shopping and tourism’ (Macdonald,

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1995, p. 25). The growth of theme parks, shopping malls and heritage centres have forced museums to compete and become more market-oriented, with cool shops, trendy cafés and spectacular displays. Such processes may also be seen in de-differentiated exhibition aesthetics. Shops, for example, can now look like museums with elaborate displays of designer goods. One example is the Prada store Epicenter in New York designed by celebrity architect Rem Koolhaas (Klingmann 2007, pp. 126-7). In the next section, we discuss in more detail the symbolic and physical spatial design of de-differentiated experience environments.

3. Spatial design in the experience economy Part of the experience economy is a scenographic approach to the physical or built environment. Architecture and interior design are strategically used for staging ‘experiencescapes’ that afford corporeally immersive experiences (O’Dell, 2010; Riewoldt, 2002). Urban design scholar Anna Klingmann links the experience economy and architecture: ‘f[F]or architecture, in the experience economy, the relative success of design lies in the sensation a consumer derives from it – in the enjoyment it offers and the resulting pleasures it evokes’ (2007, p. 19). Whereas modern architecture was largely concerned with forms and function, Klingmann argues that design in the ‘experience economy’ focuses on experiences and engenders affective sensations. It is no longer the formal design of a building that determines its quality but rather its powers of affecting and engaging users, emotionally, bodily and mentally. The key becomes what a building does rather than what it is (Klingmann, 2007, p. 317). The built environment is designed to be experienced by the senses and to generate affective

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and emotional impact. The transitional and performative powers of architecture are central, and architects increasingly come to think of themselves as choreographers of dynamic themes and situations (Klingmann, 2007, p. 214). Klingmann stresses that to consumers in the experience economy ‘…the value of a commodity is therefore appraised no longer by its actual use and exchange value, nor solely by its representational value, but by its ability to transform the sensation of the subject’ (Klingman 2007, p. 6). In particular, the architectural style of what Urry and Larsen term ‘consumerist postmodernism’ demonstrates the design paradigm of the experience economy (seeUrry and Larsen, 2011, p.120). This architectural style celebrates commercialism and postmodern ‘theming’ (Klingmann, 2007, p. 194-205). Previous elements of high culture are resampled and no longer signify a single style; rather it is an architecture of surfaces and appearances, of playfulness and pastiche. It is mannerist – the past is an ‘inexhaustible repertoire of forms, “styles’’ that everyone could re-cycle’ (Ibelings, 1998, p. 21). Historical styles and conventions of architecture are endlessly drawn on, juxtaposed and fitted together at will. The consumerist postmodernist architectural style aims to ‘learn from Las Vegas’ (Venturi, 1972; Jencks, 1977; Ibelings, 1998), and Caesar’s Palace, Luxor Las Vegas, The Bellagio and the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas are icons of this architecture. The visual spectacles of Las Vegas and many tourist sites show how architecture can be liberated from the deadness of modern architectures ‘pure forms’ as well as ‘local references, architectural styles or cultural icons. Postmodern theming no longer respects local ‘semiotics’ and styles but has become ‘global’; what Castells calls ‘an architecture of the space of the flows’. It expresses: ‘in almost direct terms, the new dominant 5

ideology, the end of ideology: the end of history and suppression of places in spaces of flows. Because if we are at the end of history we can now mix up everything we knew before. Because we do not belong any longer to any place, to any culture, the extreme version of postmodernism imposes codified code-breaking anywhere something is built’ (Castells, 1996, p. 419). The heightened symbolism of this architecture builds a fictional fantasy landscape. It is an architecture of signs, styles and materialized narratives that liberates architecture from its visual silence by turning it into an imaginary world of appearance. One lesson learnt from Las Vegas is that pleasure-zone architecture should have a narrative structure with the power to engulf people in an imaginary role (Venturi, 1972, p. 53). We can take as an example, the spectacular shopping mall Trafford Centre near Manchester where there is a de-differentiation of the gaze of the shopper and the tourist as the visitor is invited on an imaginary world tour (see Urry and Larsen, 2011, pp. 129132). This is how Urry and Larsen read the place as an example of ‘consumerist architecture’:

The Trafford centre looks like a mix of a Classical Roman building and the Taj Mahal. Having stepped into a granite colonnaded atrium space with sculptures, fountains and decorated benches, palm trees and an ocean liner invite visitors to go on a ‘great tourist escape’. The Trafford Ocean liner is no pale imitation of a ‘real’ ocean liner. It has all the appropriate props and set pieces: lifeboats, lifebelts, port holes, a swimming pool, and a white surface with reddish-brown spots showing many years at sea! The main deck is a 1600-seater food court where customers are entertained by live-performances, ‘Trafford-TV’ or gazing at fellow cruisers. There

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is a spectacular sky-effect ceiling that takes visitors from day to night and back again via dusk and dawn by-the-hour. From the leisure of the ocean liner, visitors can comfortably step into different worlds: China, Italy, New York and New Orleans. In the New Orleans French Quarter one is welcomed by a statue of four smiling black trumpeters and restaurants with ‘outside’ tables. Laundry is hanging out of the windows and the balconies proliferate with flowers and ornamentation. Once New Orleans is consumed (with no hurricanes in sight!), the journey continues into the shopping streets. Regent Crescent gives the feeling of Ancient Rome and Greece with its neo-classically inspired ornaments, while the Festival Village is themed as a traditional English market (Urry and Larsen, 2011, p. 129).

Urry and Larsen (2011, p. 129) argue that:

The Trafford Centre has learnt lessons from Las Vegas and Disney. First, the Centre is virtually nothing but surface effects, images, decorations and ornaments. It is a glossy visual feast: an ecstasy of looking. Secondly, it quotes vicariously from historical forms. However, classical greatness is here invoked with touches of both nostalgia and humour – as part of a narrative. This is not architecture as art, but as popular storytelling, a story about the world as nothing but the ‘tourist’s oyster …’.

What such postmodern experience architecture affords is staged environments, themed experiences and a particular ambience as much as consumer goods. To cite Klingmann: ‘within a generation, shopping malls have gone from functional shopping machines to highly immersive environments where lighting, music, and a careful 7

selection of materials not only displays the merchandise as such but provides the right ambience’(2007, p. 36, our italics). In contrast to the supposedly alienating and soulless architecture of the modern era, postmodern architecture is about providing the right ambience and affective state. Postmodern consumerist architecture is said to be an ‘inclusive’ architecture for ‘real’ people (Jencks 1977, p. 8). Urry and Larsen cite the Public Relation Manager of the Trafford Centre:

We have gone out to create a building that is warm, where you feel protected, feel part of it. It is not somewhere that is contemporary or modern or clinical. The whole building has been built to be a huge stately home. The architectural details go back to neo-classical design that gives a sense of warm feeling … it has a nice ambience and a nice atmosphere.”

Such postmodern ambience and ‘inclusive public space’ is arguably also seen in relation to the Sony Centre on Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz. The geographer John Allen argues that this place is designed to attract people in seductive ways, through atmosphere:

‘Sony’s forum […] seems to be more about an emergent economy of affect, rather than the more familiar economy of commodity sales and profits. It is as if it is the experience of the space itself which provides the commercial offering…’ (Allen, 2006, p. 450).

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The brand space works through what Allen calls ambient power: ‘This is a modest form of power, which is suggestive rather than directive, and utilises elements of the built environment to soothe and guide people’. He describes it as affective: ‘a particular atmosphere, a specific mood, a certain feeling – that affects how we experience [a space] and which, in turn seeks to induce certain stances’ (Allen, 2006, p. 445). Allen’s analysis points to how an urban space can work through difference, seduction and experience. He seems to find that the design is successful in encouraging combined activities of hanging out, browsing and shopping and that this form of ‘ambient power’ is becoming increasingly important in the management of urban spaces. Neither Urry and Larsen or Allen explore ethnographically how people experience, that is, ‘do’ and feel such designed places. There are few studies that explore how designed experience economy places are used and experienced. As Degen, DeSilvey and Rose point out: ‘Although many authors acknowledge that, in theory, such encounters between human subjects and designed urban environments are richly various and unpredictable, few studies have examined this empirically and learnt theoretically from these encounters’ (2008, p. 1901). Degen, DeSilvey and Rose examine, ethnographically, the fissures and cracks between the design intent of a shopping mall in Milton Keynes, in the UK, and the experiences people have at this place. Rose et al point to three co-existing practices: shopping, socializing and caring, and while Allen (2006) in his example of the Sony Centre at Potsdamer Platz does not account for how people ‘opt out’ or ‘walk away’ from the affect of a building, Rose, Degen and DeSilvey tackle this question explicitly. They make the point that the affective power of the building is not consistent. The intensity of affect varies and the building’s affect is

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disturbed by other affective constellations: talk, food, laughter, phones, children (Rose et al, 2010, p. 344). The malls’ affect can be reduced, for example, by social interaction (Rose et al., 2010, p. 344). As they write with regard to visiting the mall with children:

When one is in the mall as a carer with children, eyes and bodies are responsively attuned to the bodies and movements of the children. The mall and its sensory stimuli (windows, music, street furniture) fall into the background as the children’s bodies are followed and the mall’s geography turns into a (sometimes dangerous, other times fun) playground…with two mobile kids, enjoying being with them, my eyes and ears and hands were tuned into them, focused on them, and not so much on the wider space. Where were they, what were they saying, what were they doing. This was in relation to many material objects, of course, and also to other people. Sometimes it is possible almost to see and sense through the eyes of the children. We attune our perceptions to those of a child and read anew the affordances of a place as we learn that a public sculpture becomes a skeleton to climb on, the edge of a fountain a running track (Degen, DeSilvey and Rose, 2008, p. 1911). The experience of the mall’s spatial design is transformed by the presence of children. The attention of the parent goes to the children, and the mall seems to be experienced almost through the children, through their eyes and bodies. The parent thus experiences the building through a kind of extended sensory engagement; through the perceptive and locomotive capabilities of the child. With children the design of the mall

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turns into a playground (2008, p. 1911) – sometimes fun (you can climb sculptures), sometimes dangerous (you can fall off sculptures).

4. Towards spatial practices, relations and processes (theoretical intermezzo) We have discussed how spatial design in the experience economy stages symbolical and physical environments that afford experiences and guide people’s movements, interactions, purchases and experiences. But architects, designers and planners do not exclusively decide how and whether such design actually works. We discussed the ethnographic work of Rose et al. (2010) to highlight how experiences emerge in practices of use, that is, how people actually ‘do’ these places, here-and-now and over time. There is no objective perception or evaluation of designed places and different people engage with them in different ways. Spatial design is interpreted, stretched, and mutilated in practices of use; it is continuously (re)worked, negotiated and transformed. Although the ‘real’ version of a design may be presented as being the intended meaning and use of the design, ethnographic design research also highlights unintended meanings and practices as part of peoples’ everyday life. Exploring how interactions take place and what users do, is central in order to understand how spatial design works in practice. Such inquiries move focus from the perspective of the ‘sensegiver’ to the ‘sensemaker’ (Pratt and Rafaeli, 2006, p. 284) and, more broadly speaking, to spatial practices, relations and processes. Many geographers argue that places are made and made sense of in relations and in processes of practice (Massey, 2005; Murdoch, 1998; Simonsen, 2005; Thrift, 1996).This understanding disturbs the understanding most people probably have of

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space: what we in everyday terms would understand to be one space, suddenly multiplies, it becomes many spatial practices and practiced ‘spatialities’. Space is generated in interactions, and for this reason one environment may be enacted in numerous coexisting spatial practices. A practice-orientation brings together the mutual constitution of human and material objects (small or big) and furthermore considers bodily activity, mental activity, the use of things, knowledge, emotion, know-how and more. Space is viewed not as a container, but as a consequence, as an emergent effect, ‘the result of inter-action, consequences of the ways in which bodies relate to one another’ (Latour, 1997, p. 174). Space becomes a consequence of the ways in which heterogeneous entities interact and relate. Space is practiced, performed or enacted. As argued by a number of tourism scholars, this means that a shopping mall, a museum or a tourist site is co-practiced or co-performed by visitors and the many objects and information (e.g. cameras, guidebooks) that are part of performing places (e.g. Bærenholdt, Haldrup, Larsen and Urry, 2004; Coleman and Crang, 2002, Edensor, 1997).These studies show how visitors experience designs and they portray experiences not as the effects of singular designs, but as enacted engagements with cross-combinations of designs, as negotiated bricolages of design, intentions, forces and wills, between people and things. This is an important observation. For instance, the experience of a museum is affected by technologies (such as chairs, strollers, cameras, maps, guidebooks, footwear and clothing), atmospheres (e.g. room temperature and noise) and fellow visitors such as one’s companions (as shown below).This complexity of related objects and socialities are always at play, so we cannot push them to the background and talk simply of the relations between a, so to say, naked, solitary experiencing subject and a physical

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environment. Places, buildings and objects are constituted in complex and heterogeneous interrelations - as are humans. Focusing on the messy interconnectedness and entanglements of practice helps avoid a narrow-minded subjectivism or falling into the trap of either social or architectural/technological/material determinism (Latour, 2005). In contrast, we argue that the focus must be placed on the emergent relations between hybridized people and specific physical environments. This has implications for how experience is conceptualized and studied. What is inquired is not experience in the abstract, but specific, situated, enactments of experience. Experience is ‘taken out’ of the human subject and is stretched out as a relational occurrence constituted in the conjoint actions of heterogeneous entities (Crang and Thrift, 2000, p. 19). Experience does not belong to human beings, it is not located in the human, but is a relational accomplishment. Experience is a process where people undergo the influence of things, environments, situations and events, and a wide range of materials play active roles as mediators of experience (Svabo and Strandvad, forthcoming). In relation to music, the sociologist Antoine Hennion discusses this understanding of experience, he suggests that seeking pleasure is an activity where we seek to make something affect us: ‘It is an active way of putting oneself in such a state that something may happen to oneself’ (2007, p. 109). Listening is an activity where the influence of the ‘object’ (music) is explicitly sought. This is in line with the tradition from the American pragmatist John Dewey (1934/1959) who describes the experience of art as a mix of doing and undergoing. Experience is a combination of engaging with and subjecting to an influence (Strandvad, 2012).This understanding may be related to experience as both active appropriation of the world, and receptive sensory engagement (Löfgren, 1999, p. 95; Bærenholdt, 2007, p. 8).

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In this relational and processual approach to experiences of design, explicit attention is paid to the body, technology and place as they meet up in specific encounters, in doings and enactments (Bærenholdt, Haldrup & Larsen, 2008, p. 178). For this reason, we now proceed to such doings and enactments involved in experiencing spatial design. The next section provides three ethnographic vignettes of engagements between people and places in order to unfold enacted experiences of spatial design in the experience economy. These ethnographies are constructed through in-depth participation observation and interviews with tourist staff and especially tourists. The three places reveal different aspects of spatial experience design and they are also performed in very different ways. The first study takes us to a quiet, romantic harbour, the second one visits a busy museum and the third one a themed beach resort. Together they give a sense of the variety of designs and experiences of spatial design in the experience economy.

5. Experiencing spatial design 5.1 Experiencing a small town harbour The central role of visitor performances in making places is found in an ethnography of Allinge Harbour (Allinge Havn), a small intimate harbour on Bornholm, during the tourist season (this draws on Bærenholdt et al. 2004, chapter 3). While it used to be the base for many fishing vessels, producing an all the year-around sequence of life, it is now mainly a harbour for strolling tourists. While little spatial experience design has been carried out on the macro scale, there are, nonetheless, some smaller businesses with ‘a nose for the experience economy’. So around the harbour, shops sell designer souvenirs, arts and clothing, big ice creams thrill children, and cafes and restaurants

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afford a spectacular view over the harbour and the sea. The nearby smokehouse is an attraction in itself and people go there to eat the iconic open sandwich ‘Sol over Gudhjem’ (an open sandwich with rubric, smoked herring, chives and a raw egg yolk (‘the sun’ on top), this can be literally translated as ‘sun over Gudhjem’. Gudhjem is a town situated on Bornholm and the island Bornholm is very well known for its oldfashioned smoking houses. Allinge harbour is also the home to cultural events such as a well-established annual jazz festival and, since 2011,a much-hyped political weekend event where Danish politicians meet and debate with each other and ordinary people. Tourists perform this as an embodied, social and remembered place. Tourists inhabit public benches, cafes and bars. Corporeal experiences involve eating iconic ‘Sol over Gudhjem’ open sandwiches and strolling around (often with an ice cream in one hand and a child or partner at the other). Middle-aged couples in particular say they ‘browse around and look for an open sandwich… you know, a beer in a café, drifting around, isn’t that what it’s all about?’ (cited Bærenholdt et al 2004, p. 40). Particularly strong experiences occur when the ‘tourist gaze’ (Urry and Larsen, 20011) is performed with a beer or glass of wine and on a terrace or balcony with a view over the harbour and sea. Such embodied gazing, strolling around, shopping as and well as in- and out-going boats and ferries produce an ambient atmosphere that is supported by the close intimacy of the physical environment and the slow rhythms of the place. While Allinge harbour is not a spectacular place, the interviewed tourists enjoy its perceived authenticity and laid-back atmosphere and this makes this otherwise ordinary place somewhat extraordinary and therefore a place of touristic experiences (Bærenholdt et al. 2004, p. 41).

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Allinge harbour also facilitates pleasurable sociality performed by tourists in various ways. People move around in relaxed ways, they come together collectively when events take place, they bump into old and new faces and meet up with friends and family members. People notice and talk about how the place has changed compared with earlier visits and they enjoy doing the same things as last year, such as buying fresh fish, interacting with shop workers or talking with the harbour master or ‘known’ local people. All of these social performances criss-cross and work ‘in concert’ to make the feeling of a comfortable crowd. The sociality of place is highly connected to place as memory. There is the history of the place embedded in buildings and harbour structures. But memories are primarily associated with earlier visits. Many tourists to Bornholm tend to visit the same places again and again, assuring themselves that the place is still there. This is especially important when places are associated with childhood memories, or of family members who are no longer alive. Memories are associated with events, with eating ‘Sol over Gudhjem’, sea and weather conditions, shops opened and closed, and trips by boat or ship. Every year, one middle-aged Swedish couple visits the island by yacht.–This year they have brought friends with them in order to share Bornholm’s attractions, which are described as ‘the smoked herring, the quiet, the sea, small fine harbours, the picturesque’ (Bærenholdt et al. 2004, p. 44). Performing memories along with such attractions are of great importance to people’s experience of places. Although Allinge Harbour is very different from Berlin’s Sony Complex at Potsdamer Platz and the historical processes of their design are far from each other, both places owe their atmosphere to those visiting the place. These are places which people

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more or less take possession of, at least during a short visit and through memories, photographs, and so on.

5.2 Experiencing a museum exhibition The idea that experience emerges in the intersections between various affects, rather than as a blue-print of one overarching design intent, is also evident in the following study of visitor experiences of children in a modern museum of natural history(for more details, see Svabo, 2010). Naturama is designed to achieve a specific aesthetic. The name, Naturama, is a combination of nature and drama and the museum stages dramatized nature, predominately for children. The permanent exhibition is divided into three levels: Air on the top floor, Land in the middle, and Water on the ground floor. Exhibited animals are mounted on minimal podiums resembling catwalks. The exhibition design is the result of collaboration between the museum, a theatre scenographer, exhibition consultants and an architectural firm. Tools for scenic dramatization are built into the exhibition. Exhibition walls, floor and ceiling hold large amounts of audiovisual equipment providing multimedia possibilities equivalent to those of a well-equipped TV-studio. The museum also uses dramatization in their guided tours and other education and communication activities. The management has considered employing actors and teaching them about nature, rather than –as has been the case until now–employing biologists and teaching them how to entertain visitors. Experiences of dramatized nature can be enacted by using animal costumes: on their way through the museum, costumes and a sign invite young children to get dressed in 17

animal costumes: “Do you want to be… an unseen owl, a wild boar, an icy polar bear, a hopping hare, a brumming bear?” Costumes are highly successful in creating experiences of dramatized nature. Once bodies and costumes are fitted, animal children flesh their way through the exhibition. Costumes inspire visitors to be animal. A boy wearing an orange fur fox head runs across Land. He spurts past the wild boar, the badger, the elk and the brown bear. He dashes for the stairs, the fur hanging down his back swings from side to side as he climbs the steps at an infernal pace. When children wear animal costumes they possess the exhibition space. They make it into a territory for hunting down each other. The exhibition presents itself as spatial impulses; it is a landscape with a topography for movement, it goes up and down. The stairs assume the form of hills that one can run up, and winding paths that one can run down. The exhibition is experienced as a sensuous landscape where eyes, ears and skin are engaged and in movement; it is experienced kinesthetically and as flows of sound and light. The children sense the ‘natural’ drama of the earth and sky, they are embedded in it and it becomes part of their imaginary world. Children are adorned, draped and veiled. They feel fur stroke against a cheek. The child disappears, dissolves and shimmers into animal form. Costumes inspire children to use their bodies and imagination in performing what they perceive as nature and animal realities – and frequently this entails hard, physical meetings. Children scratch, push, and butt each other and fellow visitors, and adult visitors frequently play along. An adult who is under continuous attack from a couple of bears playfully says:

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Ouch, ouch, ouch, you are scratching me”, and later, “Ouch, ouch, ouch, I want to go home to my Mommy, they scratch, these animals, Oh, Oh” – “or maybe I will have to go down there and put on the wolves clothes and then I will come after you!” Animal costumes permit a specific way of acting – also for grownups.

The experience of the exhibition is supported by costumes. Costumes are mediators that help visitors experience dramatized nature, but these engagements do not stand uncontested. Considerable negotiation occurs about how the exhibition should be experienced. Museum staff does not equivocally support costumes. Costumes create wild animal children that affect how other visitors experience the exhibition – collisions take place. Furthermore, specific negotiations take place between costumes and another kind of experience mediator: family trails. Almost one third of the children visit Naturama in the company of a family trail. Staffs suggest that visitors purchase pamphlets (1½ euro) which are designed to influence how children engage with the exhibition. Pamphlets direct users to find specific locations where they are instructed to find answers for facts-oriented questions about biology – either on computers, signs or by looking at exhibited animals. With such pamphlets, the exhibition takes on the form of information deposits and treasure hunts. Information is stored at different locations and the visitor moves information from one depository to another in performances of scholastic learning. Pamphlets are even used to dispossess visitors from the grasp of costumes; transforming them into more orderly beings. Three children, nine-year old Johannes, his sister Ann (aged 12) and their cousin Sara (aged 13) come across the row of costumes:

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“Aah, do you wanna get dressed up Johannes?” Ann asks. No reply. “Do you wanna get dressed?” “Yeah.”

The children all work together on transforming Johannes into various forms of nonhuman animals.

“Now I am going to be an elk as well,” says Johannes, as he is being clad in the third costume. “Woawoo”, he says, about to fall. “Johannes, concentrate,” says cousin Sara. “These are my hooves, these are my hooves,” says Johannes. His sister puts the headgear on him and closes the Velcro. The boy gets down on all four, crawls. Animal Andreas crawls around on the floor. He butts his sister Ann with his forehead.

“Aargh, my leg, man,” she cries out. “What is it?” asks the children’s mother, who has just joined them. “He bumped right into my leg,” Ann says - and to this mother replies: “We need to get an overview of how far you have gotten.”

POOOF. The exercise pamphlet that Johannes had been doing earlier, but had forgotten all about, is now brought into existence again. Bye, bye animal costume. Bye, bye animal child. This example illustrates how experience emerges in combinations and cross-cuttings of designs and intentions. Experience emerges as sequences of interaction where visitors undergo the influence of different mediators. Experience is not constituted by a singular 20

architectural or interior design, but emerges as willing visitors undergo the influence of a variety of designs – small and large. This we will see as well, as we in the next case travel to a mass tourism beach resort in Egypt (this draws on Haldrup and Larsen, 2010).

5.3 Experiencing a Mass Tourism Resort Naama Bay has also ‘learned from Las Vegas’ (Venturi, Izenour and Brown, 1972). It has embraced the theming and reiterative quoting of architectural and cultural tropes to stage an exotic performance around sunbathing, shopping and consuming tourists. It is an example of what can be called a “light orientalism” that flavours tropical and subtropical mass-tourist tourist sites with a particular local, yet recognizable and universal “exotic” flavor (Haldrup and Larsen, 2010, pp. 97-8). One tourist we interviewed explicitly used the notion of an ‘Arabian Las Vegas’ to describe the atmosphere of this particular resort. ‘Oriental Nights’ belongs to the regular stock in trade of tourist entrepreneurs in Egypt and references to Palm trees, Bedouins, and belly dance are popular symbolic markers. The streets of this resort is full of ‘Oriental’ styled restaurants (yet serving ‘international’ dishes such as pizza, pasta and steak) and open shisha cafés (brought to you by Bedouin dressed waiters) with Oriental style plastic carpets and cushions around a bon-fire and flashing ‘palm leaves’. Materials such as plastic, concrete and neon lights used for staging the ‘light Orientalism’ of Naama Bay resonate more with Las Vegas than with an exotic ‘Orient’ (see illustrations in Haldrup and Larsen 2010, pp. 98-103). But why are tourist resorts such as this packed with tasteless concrete and plastic set pieces bathed in neon light? Are tourists cheated in their quest for authenticity and

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proximity with the Other? This overlooks the irony at play at the resort. “Welcome to Disneyland Egypt’” as a newspaper salesman at our hotel ironically greeted Michael on the first morning of his fieldwork in Namaa Bay. It seems that few tourists, workers, entrepreneurs and owners even attempt to escape the ‘kitschy’ character of an ‘Arabian Las Vegas’. We argue that the set-pieces of ‘the Oriental show’ (e.g. camels, Bedouins, desert/oasis, ‘Thousand and One Nights’) should not be taken at (sur)face (or rather ‘symbolic’) value. Rather than being merely representational markers of ‘the exotic’, they are fragments and materials for staging improvised play and, often, ironic performances and representations of ‘the Orient’. Moreover, the core of such performances is embodied enactment and experience. Thus, the performances of the Orient for and by tourists involve engagement and play, rather than pure simulation. The ‘Bedouin Night Trip’ – a ‘must’ for package tourists to Sharm el Sheikh – is illustrative. Here we “shadowed” (Czarniawska, 2008) a group of tourists on their journey into the Sinai Desert to experience a ‘real’ Bedouin Night. During the pick-up routine, participants are introduced to the theme of ‘real Bedouins’. The tour slowly enters into a blended geography of fiction and fact; myth and materiality. After a short drive, we leave the bus in the desert and children and camel drivers immediately offer us camels and to tie scarves around our heads – to avoid the sand or perhaps just for the fun of it! Once we all are safely placed on a camel, some wrapped in scarves, others trying to maintain balance in the saddle we begin the ride. After a thirty-minute ride, we approach the ‘Bedouin desert camp’ that turns out to be a concrete and steel construction, with makeshift shelters, carpets, cushions and low ‘Bedouin-style’ tablesand dismount the camels. A mint tea welcomes us and seductively wraps us in the ‘different’ fragrances and flavours, a bonfire is lit and flutes and drums entertain with an

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Oriental soundscape, perfect for dancing with the Bedouins and mind-travelling while gazing into the flames. The ‘drama’ of the Bedouin Night Trip then enables an embodied imagination of ‘difference’. Such ‘sensuous geographies’ enable tourists to take possession. By exposing oneself to ‘different’ moves, scents, flavours, sights and sounds, the tourist can enjoy and engage in ‘difference’ by incorporating it. Camels riding through the desert, Bedouin Dances, belly dancing lessons and laid-back evenings at shisha cafés are all rich and colourful components of a fantasised Orient materialized in embodied performances. Thus, they are illustrative of tourisms entangled and blended geographies of the virtual and material, the fantasized and ‘the real’, the embodied and the poetic. Thus, the ‘fantastic realism’ (Bærenholdt and Haldrup, 2004) of the Orient involves scenes, set pieces and accessories that afford ‘the Orient’ to be inhabited by immersion and incorporation. We have argued that such playful embodied performances do not need require ‘auratic’ qualities. Bedouin desert camps may be in concrete and iron as well as crowded together (for logistic purposes) but they still afford the play of the ‘Oriental Night’ to be enacted; they are an ‘authentic stage-play’ in which tourists can take part corporeally, by engaging in the dramaturgical environment afforded by the set pieces and accessories of the stage. This is further exemplified by the provisional character of many of the setpieces of ‘light Orientalism’, in bars, restaurants, hotel lobbies and streets. In that sense, notions of the ‘Arabian Las Vegas’ or ‘Disneyland Egypt’ may not only be read as derogative nicknames for a faked Orient but as metaphors of performance of play and make-believe. The props and set pieces of tourist sites is not ‘blue-printed’ by one overarching designer’s intent. While the tourists that engage in the play may simply experience an 23

overwhelming, smelling, glittering and noisy Disneyficated Orient; the creative scopes for creating the Arabian Las Vegas in plastic and concrete are wide. The spatial designs of the ‘Orient Night’ tour at Naama Bay enables tourists to experience another place and perform their own roles in the play. These experiences and roles do not emerge out of one single design processes – but rather through the contingent ‘bricolage’ of performative efforts by committed entrepreneurs and workers, also mobilizing the night environments, camels, fires and the like. Furthermore, it seems that the triggering aspects of the tour derives from these messy combinations and cross-cuttings of intentions, designs and projects, letting the tourist visitors escape a while from the more standardized tourists resort props of Naama Bay, though this is of course not an escape, but the fulfilment of the desired ‘light orientalism’ of the whole destination.

6. Conclusion We conclude with the argument that it is not possible to design experiences since they can never be fully predicted or controlled since they depend on coproducing performance of visitors and the interrelations of heterogeneous entities. Yet it is possible to design for experiences: Actual experience emerges as visitors (consumers/users) are engaged with spatial designs and with the social situations that ritualize and help shape experiences. We have drawn these more general conclusions from a number of case studies, with a special emphasis on our own field studies from Allinge Harbour, the Naturama museum and the tourist site of Naama Bay. We have shown that spatial designs for

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experience work through various forms of postmodern bricolage that enable visitors to perform a variety of experiences. One could argue that all this is due to the successful ‘supply’ of postmodern designs, which has persuaded tourists, visitors, urban strollers and consumers at large to act in accordance with designers’ intentions. But this is only partly right. The types of practices and performances we have examined have not only been produced from the supply side. In line with Pine and Gilmore, we suggest that these changes are partly consumer and visitor generated. They represent a societal generalization of the demand for experiences, which has for long been the trademark of tourist practices. For instance, in the tourist site of Naama Bay we have shown how tourists expose themselves to many stimulus and designs. Camel riding, belly dancing and so forth crucially depend on tourists’ own participatory performance. The liveability of the designs thus fully depends of the performance, partly scripted by tour organisers, but in the end only becoming a tourist experience through tourists’ engagement. The significance of tourist performances was also shown in our ethnography of Naturama natural history museum where we showed that museum, so to say, is a facility that can be used, consumed or experienced in different ways. From fieldwork with children visitors, we showed how the very same spatial design is translated into different experiences, depending on the visitors’ mediated engagements. The experience of the spatial design thus shifts when visitors alternate between experiencing the exhibition as it is mediated by pamphlets or costumes.These small-size mediators design the experience in instant time while visiting. This highlights the bricolage

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involved in experiencing spatial design. The experience of the exhibition is constituted by much more than the exhibition alone. To finally conclude, we have pointed to the contingencies involved in making and especially experiencing spatial design. We have suggested an open-minded approach that allows us to take notice of and acknowledge the multiple dimensions involved. And we have highlighted the role of visitors, since the experience of spatial design is not given, scripted or programmed once for all, but depends on the practices of use, remaking and remembering.

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