Framing Layers

“Because that's what we need to add to so many things, to give them that extra necessary magic. A pretending layer. So it's not just a useful or beautiful or functional object - it's got some little nod to who we're pretending to be when we're using it.”

The pretending layer is the way in which you experience something, not necessarily what you actually accomplish.

Seems rather fundamental really.

I need to buy clothes. I buy Diesel because that’s my pretending layer. I get to be like the model in the store. Or that guy in the band that looks cool in jeans. Meaning we can’t just identify a person that needs jeans, but the projection of who that person wants to be when they wear them. Which seems rather simple and obvious when we’re creating an advertisement for a thing rather than making the thing itself. It causes a forced separation between what it does and what it represents.

But now we’re spending way more time doing stuff rather than advertising stuff. Or as Gareth aptly put – making ideas to be advertised rather than advertising ideas. But as we make the thing – it’s easy to get caught up in the function or utility of it rather than what it can or should mean.

And that’s what the pretending layer does. It’s the added bit that describes how the audience experiences something while allowing us to shift focus from the function a bit.

Take for instance your basic grocery store loyalty program. The core thing is the grocery store experience itself, and what most have done is to simply add a very functional layer to an already functional experience. Buy the right item, get a few cents off. While most tell me how much I saved on the receipt, that’s pretty much the end of it. I can’t access my points or trade them. I can’t show them off to prove my skills. There’s no magic to the experience, just essentially an extension to the coupon.

But then take Chromaroma, the London game based upon where and how much you swipe your Oyster (transit) card. They could have offered deals and been done with it.

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/22023369 w=525&h=295]

But they added a pretending layer by making commuters feel like explorers. They added a social layer by rewarding you for meeting new people and working in teams. As you peel apart the experience, you get complementary pieces working together in harmony rather than just chunks of one single thing. Slicing into layers may help us construct a whole in much more interesting ways.

photo via erinpurcell