Every MIC experience is an act of consumption and interaction – yes? This means that you, the recipient, are doing something crucial to the experience. Even if that means sitting quietly and receptively, this requires some concentration and discipline. Even if it means cutting your steak with a knife and fork then chewing and swallowing, then adjusting your tempo and combinational strategies: A little more salt, maybe? Or perhaps deciding to save the tenderest part for the last – or eat that part first? (As you can easily see, most meals are designed experiences, with a dessert saved for the last, like a reward. There may also be a physiological reason for serving the cake at the end: A burst of sugar satisties the appetite, psychologically “filling you up” and finishing your desire to eat. As you get older, you learn to appreciate the choreography of sweetness and bitterness that comes when serving coffee with cake. That bitterness is also a “closer.”)

One lesson to extract from this: The act of consumption is anything but passive and merely receptive. Consumption is inherently interaction. Let us take another step: This interaction may be thought of as beginning before and after the mediated “meal,” so to speak. We get ready for mediated experiences and follow them with various rituals or protocols. These protocols may be so important that they overshadow the mediated experience itself: E.g. going to a movie on a date. The “success” of the date, however that is defined, is generally independent of the aesthetic quality of the movie. It may help the event of the date to attend a good flick rather than a bad one, unless it’s so bad that sharing the experience of watching it – or walking out of it – becomes more meaningful or successful as a human-to-human interaction than the human-media interaction of simply watching the movie, enjoying it, and then agreeing it was a good film. And once we start this conversation it becomes easy to see that many mediated experiences are simply there as a centerpiece in the larger banquet of interactions that may also include human-human experiences, human-machine interactions in other venues or platforms, as well as “consumer created content” that supplements the pre-made experience. As such, we should ask where could or should the designer of MIC experiences begin or end the design?