Advertising and experiential
About the framework
I made this to find the method in the madness.
I'm Sermad, a creative director. After about twenty years in advertising and experiential, I kept finding the same questions underneath wildly different projects. E.M.O.T.I.O.N.A.L. is my loose, practical way of carrying those questions from one experience to the next.
Story-led, location-based work
Fandom, detail and participation
WXO Campfire
Why I made it
The projects changed. The questions kept coming back.
My sweet spot is taking a world people already care about and turning it into a story-led, location-based experience. That has taken me from Squid Game and BravoCon to Airbnb's Up House. The briefs looked nothing alike. Underneath, I kept asking the same things.
What does the guest need before they can join in? Why will they take the next step? When does the real world fall away? What detail proves we understand what they love? What will they still carry when the room is gone?
I made the framework to give those questions somewhere to live. Not to claim I had invented experience design. Not to make every project look the same. To make the useful parts of the process easier to remember, share and put to work.
The simple belief
I want to be moved.
That is the simplest reason I made it. When I walk into an experience, I want it to change my state somehow. I want to feel recognised, surprised, transported, implicated or delighted. If nothing moves, something has failed.
But “make it emotional” is useless on its own. Feeling has to survive the real work: budgets, venues, accessibility, staffing, safety, timing, client needs, queues, tired guests and the people operating the thing every day.
The framework connects the emotional ambition to the decisions that make it real.
The Dual Lens
The guest feels it. The team makes it true.
The longer I do this, the less interested I am in treating production realities as enemies of creativity. Money, time, venues and operations will change the work. That does not automatically make it worse.
The useful question is what must remain true when the form changes. That is why the Dual Lens sits under every letter.
What does the guest feel, need, understand, choose and remember?
What must creatives, producers and operators actually build and sustain?
What I believe
Six things I keep coming back to.
An experience starts before the entrance and continues after the exit.
The queue, corridor, rules and goodbye are creative material.
Care shows up in the detail, in accessibility and in who is making the work.
More intensity is not the same as more feeling.
Guests need permission to play, not instructions to perform.
A world feels real when it seems to exist beyond the part we can see.
What it is not
This is deliberately loose.
There is no neuroscience lecture here. There is no fixed order. The nine letters are questions, not a scoring system. Start with the one that exposes the problem. Use the parts that help. Argue with the rest.
Playtest early. Listen to the reluctant guest. Build the right team around the world. Leave room for people to make part of the story themselves.
If the framework helps a team make one clearer decision about how someone should feel, it is doing its job.
Use the framework
Start with the letter that makes the problem clearer.
Explore the nine lettersCreated by Sermad. First shared at WXO Campfire.