Erik Bär and Stan Boshouwers, founding partners of Tinker imagineers, are publishing the first handbook on Experience Design. Modern organizations are increasingly looking for ways to engage their customers with authentic and heartfelt experiences. The book Worlds of Wonder is a manual for everyone who wants to turn this into reality.

Experience Design (XD), the enterprise of creating immersive worlds around people seems to be the creative industry’s biggest star in the marketing firmament of today. From museums to theme parks and from A-brands to governments, everyone wants to use the art of creating spaces that tell a story. And no other medium is more promising in connecting people to stories, places and ideas. What is the story behind this movement? How did it evolve and what is the best way of navigating in this sector?

This revealing book is written by the founders of Tinker imagineers, one of the leading experience design agencies in Europe. In Worlds of Wonder the two pioneers reconstruct the past 25 years, showing how designed experiences came to be central in our lives. Spatial storytelling is as old as architecture itself and modern media technologies have given an impulse to its scale and expressive powers. The bigger the online world grows, the stronger becomes the need for actual spaces of wonder and imagination. People seek out those spaces to indulge in immersive experiences and social interaction. This book contains many examples, with the intention of giving a sense of what works and why, from the psychological foundations of consumer behaviour to practical steps to action. Larded with the light-hearted history of the authors’ own XD-firm Tinker imagineers, one gets more than a feel for this way of work.

“Decades into today’s experience economy, experience design remains very much an art rather than a science. Worlds of Wonder exemplifies the state of that art, providing a beautiful, insightful, and wonderful view of the design of experiences that engage, inspire, and even transform.”

—B. Joseph Pine II —
Co-author of The Experience Economy, Work is Theatre and every Business a Stage

The book is intended for everyone in the process of exposing their brand, art, history, or ideas about the future. And since it contains a first person account of discovering what XD is, Worlds of Wonder is of high value for students, professionals, their managers and clients active in experience design. 

About Tinker imagineers

Erik Bär (1969) and Stan Boshouwers (1968) studied Cognitive Artificial Intelligence at Utrecht University in The Netherlands. In 1991, they founded Tinker imagineers, now one of the leading experience design agencies in Europe. Being around for more than 25 years, they witnessed the rise of the experience economy, and made significant contributions to it by delivering many international award winning designs and concepts at home and abroad. Experience design has a become an important part of the well-known Dutch Design. 

Examples of Tinker’s portfolio are amongst others the scenography of ‘hidden’ museum Tirpitz in Denmark (2017); ‘Nest’, Nestlé’s open house in Vevey, Switzerland (2016); the distractive interactive interior of the Juliana Children’s Hospital in The Hague, Netherlands (2015) and the underground archaeological experience DOMunder in Utrecht, Netherlands (2014). Recently Tinker won the tender to design the Natural History Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen for an area of almost 4900 m2.

Title: Worlds of Wonder
Author: Erik Bär and Stan Boshouwers 
Paperback 
272 pages
27 x 21 cm 
ISBN 9,789,063,694,647
Price: €39.00 
Pub. date: 21 November 2018

Viewing copy via ISSUU

For further information, a review copy and/or visual material, please contact the Press Office of BIS Publishers through: [email protected] or Petra Dijkstra, PR Manager of Tinker imagineers through: [email protected]/0031 (0)30 2300405. Or reply to this email. 

Save the date
2019, February 1st. International book presentation of Worlds of Wonder with American author Joseph Pine at former warehouse Pakhuis de Zwijger in Amsterdam: ‘Experience Economy: Where are we heading to?’ Livestream available. Invitation follows.