The framework
Every case study in the Handbook is described through four lenses. Participation structure describes how people relate to each other and to the experience. Emotional response describes what the experience produces. Medium describes how it is delivered. Type describes its formal category.
The lenses are fixed vocabularies. Fixed vocabularies make experiences comparable across domains: a memorial, a game, and a street intervention can sit in the same search.
How it evolved
The first version of the framework had three parts: scale, emotional response, and form. Scale ran from personal and private to cultural and public. Emotional response was a short list of about two dozen feelings. Form sorted experiences into four broad kinds: digital, physical space, art and design, and events.
Teaching with it and cataloguing hundreds of case studies exposed its limits. The framework changed in four ways.
Participation structure
Single choice. Who is the experience designed for, and how are they meant to relate to each other while having it? The number beside each value is how many case studies carry it today.
Designed for one person. Complete as a single-person encounter, whether or not others are nearby.
Choose this when A person enters alone, interacts alone, and the design does not need anyone else. A solo VR piece, a website, a wearable.
Designed for an encounter between exactly two people. The relationship between them is the core of the experience.
Choose this when It only works with two participants in direct exchange. A face-to-face performance, a paired app, a street compliments booth.
Designed for a defined, bounded group, usually 3 to 20 people who know each other or are assembled for a shared purpose.
Choose this when A clear group experiences it together. A dinner, an escape room, a board game, a class.
Designed for open or collective contribution. Strangers or mixed groups co-create it, and it changes based on what people do.
Choose this when It invites direct action from people who may not know each other, and their contributions shape what it becomes. A collaborative installation, a community charrette, an improv event.
Designed to be witnessed or received by a crowd. People are present together, but it does not depend on them interacting.
Choose this when People attend, watch, or move through it without needing each other. A concert, a theater performance, an immersive exhibition.
Designed for the general public as an open civic or urban proposition. No defined group and no event frame. It lives in the fabric of a place.
Choose this when Anyone passing by can encounter it. No registration, no group, no ticket. Public art, an adaptive reuse of a building, a street intervention.
Designed for asynchronous, distributed participation. It exists through contributions accumulated across time and place.
Choose this when Participants are never co-present. They contribute or consume at different times and places, and the aggregate is the experience. A collaborative map, a social media project, a crowdsourced archive.
Emotional response
Choose 2 to 4. The terms describe what participants feel during or after an experience. 91 terms sit in 11 categories. Select any term to see the case studies carrying it.
Positive energy, delight, and affirmation. Often celebratory, playful, or nostalgic.
Belonging, closeness, and shared identity. Includes pride in place or in others’ achievements.
Encounter with the extraordinary. Includes reverence, the register of awe tied to the sacred or historically weighty.
Learning, insight, and shifts in understanding. Illuminated means understanding genuinely changed, not just information received.
Agency, confidence, and capability.
Orientation toward what is coming. Excitement, suspense, eagerness.
Stillness, safety, and reduced arousal. Experiences that slow people down or offer sanctuary.
Grief, memorial, and bearing witness, oriented outward toward others. Use it when grief or commemoration is the primary register. Not when an experience is merely serious.
Passive destabilization. Unease, uncertainty, exposure. Includes Vulnerable and Intimate.
Active intellectual and moral challenge. Includes Implicated, the sense of personal accountability to what you have witnessed.
Withdrawal and being unaffected. These are valid research outcomes. Documenting disengagement is as valuable as documenting delight.
Medium
Single choice. The primary delivery channel.
Type
Multiple choice. The formal category of the experience. Use every value that applies.
Using the framework
The framework is versioned and keeps changing as the database grows. Terms can be swapped or reclassified as patterns emerge. Questions or disagreements are welcome through the contact page.