Concordia Canvas is a speculative white-label platform for themed entertainment venues seeking meaningful immersion without large-scale technological investment.

Developed through thesis research, the project investigates the future of short-form immersive experiences in the United States. My process combined literature reviews, digital ethnography, social listening, and interviews with creative professionals from various themed entertainment practices. The research pointed to one central idea: memorable immersive experiences are often shaped less by technology than by human interaction. Guests remember the conversations they have, the people they meet, and the moments they create together.

In response, I designed Concordia Canvas as a modular attraction framework that blends the communal energy of rapids and teacup rides with the agency of simulator experiences. Participants collaborate in real time to create an outcome inside a themed world, with their decisions directly shaping the story and environment around them.

As a white-label system, Concordia Canvas is designed to adapt across different intellectual properties, narratives, and physical spaces, giving creators a flexible framework rather than a single fixed story.

Concordia Canvas was developed as both a platform proposal and a demonstrable guest experience. The final concept pairs a cinematic trailer with an interactive Figma prototype, using a fully developed sample world to show both what the platform could feel like and how guests would actually interact with it. 

For the demonstration, I created a post-apocalyptic terraforming laboratory where paired scientists collaborate to design cybernetic creatures capable of restoring an uninhabitable environment. The world is intentionally one possible application of Concordia Canvas—not the platform itself.

While the trailer communicates the atmosphere and potential of the experience, the Figma prototype demonstrates the system underneath it. Three connected flows show how guests receive complementary roles, collaborate through shared decision-making, and see how their combined choices affect the world.

At its core, Concordia Canvas follows one simple experience principle:

Guests enter a compact themed room built around a shared table and a screen-based “window” into the story world. Each participant receives a different role with access to only part of the available information or controls, making collaboration necessary rather than optional. 

Working face-to-face, guests make complementary decisions toward a shared creation. Their individual choices affect the same evolving outcome, encouraging conversation, negotiation, and shared authorship. Once complete, the creation is released into the themed world, where guests see the consequences of their decisions unfold through the window in front of them. 


THE GUEST JOURNEY
01: Enter
Guests step into a themed environment centered around a collaborative table and a view into the story world.

02: Take A Role
Each participant receives a distinct role, specialization, and set of limitations. No single guest has everything needed to complete the task alone.

03: Create Together
Participants combine their different abilities and make decisions toward one shared outcome.

04: Release
When the group completes its creation, they release it into the larger world.

05: Witness The Consequence
The surrounding environment responds, allowing guests to see how their collective decisions have affected the story world.

Because Concordia Canvas introduces a new interaction model within an unfamiliar story world, the experience also needed a clear visual language to help participants understand their roles, objectives, and relationship to one another.

The supporting brochure brings the platform, sample world, and guest experience together into a concise visual overview, while the role posters translate each participant’s specialization into an immediate character identity. Color-coding carries across the posters, prototype, and motion work, helping distinguish each player’s responsibilities while visually connecting their separate actions to one shared experience.

Concordia Canvas began with a broader research question: How can short-term immersive experiences create deeper engagement without losing the communal appeal, cultural specificity, and escapism that make themed environments memorable?

My research combined literature review, digital ethnography, social listening, and interviews with creative leaders and designers from Walt Disney Imagineering, Meow Wolf, Storyland Studios, @ANDYLAND Design, and Big Break Foundation. I examined how audiences experience themed environments, how different levels of participation affect immersion, and where technology strengthens or sometimes detracts from the relationship between guests and the world around them.

Across these different sources, several ideas repeatedly surfaced. Together, they shifted the project away from designing immersion around technological spectacle and toward designing an experience around people, participation, and consequence.

HUMAN INTERACTION CAN BE IMMERSIVE
Advanced technology is not the only way to make a world feel alive. Conversation, shared reactions, performers, and fellow guests can become part of the immersive experience itself. This led me to place participants face-to-face, making interaction with one another central to the attraction rather than incidental.

PARTICIPATION SHOULD HAVE MORE THAN ONE DEPTH
Not every guest wants to engage in the same way. Some prefer to observe, others participate casually, while others want to explore every detail of the story. The experience therefore needed to support different levels of involvement without making lighter participation feel like failure.

CHOICES SHOULD LEAVE A VISIBLE MARK
Participation becomes more meaningful when guests can see that their decisions mattered. Rather than ending when the task is complete, Concordia Canvas carries the guests’ shared creation into the surrounding world, allowing them to witness the consequence of what they made together.

FROM INSIGHT TO STRATEGY
These findings became the foundation of Concordia Canvas: combine the social orientation of communal attractions with the agency of interactive experiences. Guests face one another around a shared table, contribute different information and abilities, and watch the consequences of their collective decisions appear within the themed environment.