For sixteen years my family lived in a quiet suburban neighborhood outside Washington, DC, surrounded by the kind of tall trees that naturally inspire childhood dreams of building a treehouse. We talked about it often. Usually over dinner, or during long summer evenings in the backyard. Like many family projects, the idea started simple and then quickly became complicated, because everyone imagined something completely different.

My eldest wanted a castle. Towers, secret passages, hidden ladders. For her, the treehouse was pure adventure. I was imagining something closer to a laboratory, a slightly chaotic mad scientist workshop where experiments, inventions, and questionable engineering decisions could happen. My youngest wanted something much simpler: a quiet hideaway above the ground, where the world could temporarily disappear. And my wife, who has infinitely better aesthetic judgment than the rest of us combined, insisted that if we were going to build it, it had to look like it belonged in the pages of Architectural Digest.

We never actually built the treehouse.

But years later, working in immersive design, I realised we had unknowingly recreated the exact framework described by Joseph Pine and James Gilmore in The Experience Economy (1999).

Entertainment. Education. Escapism. Aesthetics. Their model describes four fundamental realms of experience based on how people participate and how deeply they immerse themselves.

Pine and Gilmore’s framework remains one of the clearest ways to describe how experiences work. Entertainment is about watching or listening. Education engages curiosity and learning.

Escapism allows people to step into an alternative reality. Aesthetic experiences immerse us in environments that are simply meant to be appreciated.

The model is elegant, and more than two decades later it still holds up remarkably well. But it was published in 1999.

At that time, immersive technologies were limited, online communities were only beginning to form, and the idea that audiences might meaningfully shape an experience was still unusual.

What has changed since then is not just the technology around experiences.

It is the behavior of the audience. And that change has important consequences for how we design them.

When people talk about immersive design today, the conversation often focuses on participation. Visitors want to interact, they want to influence outcomes, they want to be part of the story. All of that is true, but participation alone is not the real shift, we have had participatory experiences for decades.

Escape rooms are participatory. Interactive theatre is participatory. Theme parks have been inviting visitors to play along with stories for generations.

Participation by itself does not fundamentally change the nature of an experience. Something deeper is happening. The most powerful immersive environments today do something different. They create spaces where people begin to see themselves as part of the experience. Not just participants. Participants can leave, but when identity becomes involved, the relationship changes.

People begin to return, they bring others, they talk about the experience as something that belongs partly to them. That is the moment when an experience starts becoming something else entirely.

Identity investment is subtle, but once it happens, the dynamic between audience and environment changes completely.

Visitors are no longer just consuming an experience, they begin forming a relationship with it.

You can see this across many of the most influential immersive environments today.

Narrative universes like Meow Wolf encourage visitors to explore, theorize, and collectively decode their stories, digital platforms like Fortnite or Roblox host experiences that communities reshape over time. Even physical spaces—from immersive art environments to mixed reality venues—are increasingly designed with the expectation that audiences will return and deepen their engagement.

The important thing is not simply that people participate, it is that they begin to care.

When that happens, the experience stops being a moment, and it becomes part of someone’s personal narrative.

This shift changes how immersive designers think about their work. Traditionally, experiences were designed with a beginning and an end.

Visitors entered, moved through a sequence of moments, and then they left.

Success was measured by how memorable those moments were.

Today the design challenge often begins earlier and ends much later: how do people discover the experience? What invites them to step inside? What makes them want to return? What happens after they leave?

Designing immersive environments increasingly means thinking about the relationship between people and place over time. Not just the event itself.

When identity investment occurs, the lifecycle of an experience changes.

People begin revisiting the environment, they introduce it to friends, they discuss theories, memories, and interpretations.

The experience continues evolving through those interactions. Designers cannot fully script this process but we can create the conditions where it becomes possible.

Looking back, the treehouse debate in our backyard was actually a small-scale version of the challenge immersive designers face today.

Each of us imagined the space differently because each of us imagined using it in a different way. The castle represented adventure. The laboratory represented curiosity. The hideaway represented quiet escape. The architectural vision represented beauty and care.

At the time we thought these were competing ideas. What immersive design has taught me since then is that the most meaningful spaces often allow all of those possibilities to coexist.

People enter them for different reasons, and over time they discover their own way of belonging inside them. Perhaps one day we will finally build that treehouse. If we do, it will probably still include a castle, a laboratory, a quiet hideaway, and something aesthetically respectable enough for my wife to approve.

But I suspect the real success of the treehouse will not be the design itself, it will be whether the kids—and maybe even the adults—start thinking of it as their place.

Because that is the real evolution beyond the Experience Economy: environments where people feel, even briefly, that they belong.

Alla prossima.