Entertaining Design
Applying these entertainment-based strategies will ensure attentiveness and compel audiences and users to lean-in to the content.
Compete With Pop-Culture
Use production methods and genres, such as animation, live-action video and games, that can compete with entertainment media in popular culture.
Build Expectations
Include a brief, early introduction to the material that sets the overall emotional tone and builds expectations.
This will create a dynamic 'expected experience' that will blend with the 'actual experience' to create a more engaging 'perceived experience'.
Write To The Audience
Create content narratives written from or to the point of view of the target audience.
Maintain Anticipation
Maintain an anticipatory state in the user or audience by creating ongoing new and novel experiences through variety in production styles, narrative surprises, achievements and novel interactivity.
Use a Story Structure
Stories are a tried and true method for wrapping context around information in a way draws an audience into a deeper level of engagement. Nearly any material can be organized into this fundamental, structural core, of story-telling.
Life in balance: define the world in its natural, normal state. This should include a protagonist and antagonist (which could be a character, the self, an environment, a quest, a puzzle, a situation, etc).
Set-up: Present a problem or conflict that is caused by the antagonist
Body: the problem or conflict becomes more difficult to overcome due additional antagonists.
Resolution: the problem is solved and balance restored... or not.
Include a Moral Conundrum
This is the single most common element that is included in nearly every blockbuster film and book. It taps into our most intimate emotions and mirrors the one of the most complicated human experiences that we all share.
Presentation
Use this Slideshow to present a summary version of the Entertainment Design framework to your class or group.
