When the extraordinary becomes ordinary
At birthday parties when I was growing up in Buenos Aires, we had cheese puffs and crunchy breadsticks. The piñata was a giant balloon, and we popped it with a knife. Yes, a knife, and we were kids. We played musical chairs and pass the parcel. Someone would come to entertain us, usually a teacher or sometimes a clown, lead a few games, and that was that.
There were a few balloons here and there, a couple of garlands. The cakes were simple: frosting in one color, a little decoration, or “Happy birthday, Sol” written on top. You could throw a birthday party on very little money. You’d leave thinking what a great party, and that was the end of it. What strikes me most now is how little it took for something to feel special.
I was talking about this with a friend recently. These days, a kid’s birthday party can look like a full production: sets, branded activities, sometimes even a spa. The pressure to put on something spectacular reaches families with ordinary budgets, too. I see it here in the US and in Argentina. And I wonder how spectacular a birthday has to be for anyone to notice. A spa would once have been the party of the year. Now it can be just another Saturday.
Every party that raises the bar also changes what we expect from the next one. Something that once surprised us starts to feel completely normal. That gap interests me: we can have more and more things to marvel at while needing more and more to feel anything.
Something similar happened to me with installations. During the boom years, I went to so many: in Mexico City, Dallas, New York, San Francisco, and twice to the same one in Miami. At first, each one felt like an event. Then they started to look alike: the ball pit, the pink wall, the room built for the photo. Everything was still eye-catching, but it got harder to find something that belonged only to that particular place.
In 2021, it got almost comical: five different immersive Van Gogh shows were touring the US. Their names were so similar that people bought tickets to one thinking they were going to another. One producer said they were getting hundreds of emails from confused customers. The confusion started before you even walked in. You hadn’t seen a single sunflower yet, and you already had to work out which Van Gogh you’d paid.
Anyone who has lived through inflation, and Argentines know a thing or two about that, knows the feeling of needing more and more to get the same thing. Sometimes I think something similar happens with wonder. The experience we found incredible yesterday becomes today’s starting point. The next one has to add something: bigger, more immersive, more spectacular. And it can still leave you exactly where you were. A kind of wow inflation.
In the middle of that wave, two places blew me away: Meow Wolf in Santa Fe and Omega Mart in Las Vegas. Omega Mart looks like a grocery store until a door takes you into another world. I love anything surreal, but what hooked me was having a story to discover. I wanted to keep looking, to understand what was happening in there. I already wanted to make something like that, and those visits made the urge much more concrete. That’s where my first fully immersive installation came from. I wanted it to look beautiful, of course, but above all I wanted to tell a story through space.
That’s a distinction I care about as a designer. A ball pit can be reproduced. A world of its own involves many more decisions to understand: why it exists, what it lets you discover, how one thing leads you to the next. You can copy its appearance and lose whatever made you want to stay. Specificity has value because it gives you a reason to be in that particular place. And that reason can still hold up after the initial surprise has worn off.
Saturation shows up in much less extraordinary situations, too. Standing in front of the ice cream freezers at an American grocery store is an experience in itself. You want Rocky Road, but with Reese’s rather than M&M’s, and somewhere among all those glass doors you start thinking: where do I even go? Something similar happens with clothes. My mom used to tell me that getting dressed was simpler in the sixties and seventies, and I feel the same way about the eighties and nineties. There may be plenty of nostalgia in that. But I recognize the feeling of having so many choices in front of me and less and less desire to choose.
At the perfume counter, there’s often a little jar of coffee beans. Between fragrances, someone holds it out: here, smell this, it’ll reset your nose. I like the gesture. But after a few perfumes and a few trips back to the jar, the same thing always happened: I got dizzy, I needed to leave, and I didn’t want to buy anything anymore. A 2011 study tested that practice and found that smelling coffee beans didn’t help people identify a new fragrance any better than breathing air. It made me think of something much simpler in my own experience: what reset me was the door.
I think of this as a question of composition. When everything demands attention at once, it gets hard to tell what matters. In a space, as in an image, each element changes depending on what surrounds it. Something might need more room; something else might need to go. A pause can change how what follows feels. And adding something spectacular can end up burying the very thing you wanted someone to discover.
It’s the same with wow. When everything is extraordinary, the next thrill doesn’t always rescue you from the last one; sometimes what brings your appetite back is stepping outside for a bit, taking a breath, and coming back. For those of us who design experiences, that’s part of the work, too. Deciding what deserves attention, how long to hold it, and when to stop adding. For anyone who designs, the job includes figuring out where the door goes. //SC