HUMAN BRAIN

Before you choose a form, find a strong concept: a piece of information that is worth telling, interesting to your audience, and full of potential to become an experience.

Read the information as a designer or artist might read a material. Look beyond what it says to notice the qualities already present within it: a contrast, a change over time, a shift in scale, a rhythm, an accumulation, or a tension someone might be able to see, hear, touch, or move through.

Ask:

M could simply present the projected electricity demand and operating cost of the data center. The stronger concept is the gap underneath those forecasts: an AI answer feels instant and immaterial to the person asking, while the energy required to produce it accumulates somewhere else. That contrast is meaningful to the decision and has experiential potential.

If You Don’t Have Information

You may not have the source material in hand yet. Instead, you might begin with a hunch about what’s true or an argument you developed while sharpening your story.

Find the real material underneath that hunch: the dataset, the documented trend, the real quotes, the timeline that grounds your claim in something that actually happened. This “information” doesn't have to be a spreadsheet; it can be a set of real testimonies, one credible statistic, a change logged over time. Any found material with translatable texture will do.

The information must be found, however, and not invented. Resist the temptation to have AI generate plausible-looking numbers to make a story hit harder. A felt experience built on manufactured data isn't a sharper truth — it's a more convincing fabrication. If your story is genuinely speculative or fictional and you must use projected figures, make that clear for your audience.

HUMAN BRAIN

A story doesn't get felt in the abstract. It gets experienced by particular people, in a particular setting, with a particular amount of time and attention they can give it. This is about knowing what your audience can actually sense and attend to, in the setting where the experience actually happens.

Before you pick a form, clarify the five aspects of the situation your experience needs to work within.

Ask:

The underlying story stays the same, but the way M presents it — and the experience she creates — changes depending on who will encounter it, where they will encounter it, and how much attention they can give it. For her cross-functional planning workshop, facilities, finance, sustainability, and community engagement teams may benefit from a hands-on experience that makes the hidden energy behind everyday AI use easier to discuss. A neighborhood outreach meeting would require yet another approach, foregrounding local impacts, community concerns, and uncertainty.

Revisit Your Audience and Intention

You may already know some of these conditions from the story and world you developed in earlier lessons. Revisit them here with the sensory experience in mind: What can this audience realistically notice, understand, and engage with in this particular setting?

HUMAN BRAIN

In this step, you explore which medium could carry the meaning you identified in the information, and the experiential vision you had. The possibilities might include an object, installation, performance, game, interface, soundscape, meal, ritual, or another sensory or interactive experience.

Every medium has a superpower and a limit. Sound makes time, rhythm, and change easy to feel, but it's poor at precise comparison. Taste carries mood, memory, and ambiguity, but it's subjective; your “bitter” isn't mine. A physical object can carry weight, scale, and ritual, but not fine detail. A dashboard is less poetic but lets people audit exact numbers.

So the question is: what kind of meaning does your story need to carry? If your audience needs to audit details, use a form that holds detail. If they need to feel the stakes, use one that holds emotion. This also means you shouldn’t fight the medium into being something that it isn’t. Food that looks like a bar chart on a plate isn't using food — it's forcing a dashboard into dessert.

Remember that basic is not bad if it's right for the story. If a physical object is just a crafted dashboard with extra steps, a plain digital dashboard may be the better design choice.

There is no fixed pairing between a meaning and a medium. The choice has to fit your working interpretation and the situation you identified: audience, relationship to the information, time and attention, purpose, and setting.

For M’s workshop, one creative option is a bike pedaling game: in order to see an AI response, a participant has to pedal a virtual bike to generate the estimated energy required to process their prompt. This game isn't a full financial model, and it doesn't need to be. Its job is simply to make abstract energy costs feel real. When paired alongside traditional spreadsheets and forecasts, the game creates an emotional hook while the hard data handles the detailed analysis.

HUMAN BRAIN

Once you have a promising form, define the logic that connects the information to what your audience will experience. This is the rule: an explainable relationship between a change in the information and a change in the form.

Start with one sentence:

As X changes in the information, Y changes in the form.

In M’s bike pedaling game, the rule goes as follows:

As an AI response requires more estimated energy, the participant has to pedal longer before the answer is fully revealed.

This rule connects the hidden computational cost to an effort someone can see and feel. The estimate is simplified, but the relationship between the information and the interaction becomes legible: greater computational cost requires greater physical effort.

One rule is usually just the beginning of a system. In M’s case, the game could expand to contain more rules that highlight additional insights. Response tokens could determine the estimated watt-hours and energy target; generated pedal energy could correspond with how much of the answer appears; and reaching the target unlocks the full response.

A coherent set of rules makes the experience explainable rather than merely playful. As the single rule grows into a coherent system, that system is where rigor lives. It tells your audience: this wasn't random, and it isn't just pretty — someone interpreted the information, and there's a reason the experience takes this form.

Whenever you take a step back and evaluate your design decisions and AI's output, think about these two levels of coherence:

In M's workshop, the effort of pedaling makes an invisible cost tangible, while the forecasts and scenario models ground that feeling in the larger decision. The experiential and analytical artifacts reinforce one another.