Ideas people can enter.
Some ideas are best understood by taking part in them. ExCo Studios brings that approach to work with brands and organisations: shaping experiences, cultural projects and content around the people involved.
Format: Experiences and cultural collaborations · Focus: Participation, story and community · Part of: Experience Co.
The question
How does an idea become something people can participate in?
A brief might begin with a word: friendship, pause or adventure. The interesting work is deciding what that word asks of an actual experience.
Who is invited? What happens when they arrive? What do they do together? And how does the story connect to something they genuinely experience, rather than only something the brand says?
Selected collaborations
McDowell's — Yaari Villa
The brief was to bring the villa from McDowell's advertising into the real world.
Experience Co. worked with Diageo on a gathering around the brand's theme of friendship, bringing creators and consumers into a shared setting. Conversation, exploration and music were part of how the idea became an experience.
The design question was not only how to make the villa look right. It was how to create reasons for people who knew one another through a screen—or did not know one another at all—to actually spend time together.
Corona × BHX — Pausebilities
This collaboration connected Corona's idea of taking a break with a BHX residency.
The work included a film made around the experience: the people, the pause from routine and the moments available inside it.
The useful question for me is how content can grow from something lived, rather than requiring the people in it to act out a brand proposition.
A few decisions behind the work
Translate the brief into participation.
Start with what people will do together. A message becomes more concrete when it influences the invitation, the setting, the programme and the way someone takes part.
Keep the experience and the documentation in balance.
A shoot can support the story, but it can also interrupt it. Decide what needs to be captured, what needs permission and what should simply be experienced. Not every meaningful moment belongs in a campaign.
Let the brief shape the experience.
Friendship and a pause from routine need different kinds of gathering. The invitation, programme and atmosphere should respond to the purpose—not begin with the same event format every time.
What this taught me
A brief gets more interesting when it becomes a question about people.
What will make them curious? Where could they participate? What might they remember? Those questions connect creative intent with the work of making something happen.
Made with
These projects were made through Experience Co. with client and programme partners, the production team, artists, creators and local collaborators.