Pink guns, another abstraction example

Experience is less about slick, and more about abstraction. What experience, you may be asking.  It seems that increasingly the construct or ideas that we associate with experience has captivated marketers, educators and even policy makers have consciously begun to manipulate us by creating experiences.

My interest in the topic relates to learning. I'm always on the lookout for examples of  Frame-stretching ©2011 rk.  Examples that demonstrate an effort to move people beyond recognition or understanding and conjure an experience.   communicated in the message.  I've written about this before. On Adjusting Sensibility blog, the post Challenging the Norm describes the natural process and consequences of frame formation, or the filtering and sorting of sensory input that occurs unconsciously.

Rather than write about the process, I thought I'd share an example communicated via an app new to me, Fotobabble. The value isn't in the application, which adds a voice over to a still photograph, but in the creativity illustrated below.


The message maker of the pink gun asks us to toss aside the routine associations between machismo and guns by making them pink! What an incredibly simple, powerful idea.

How much did your face change its expression when you listened?

Did the image do it alone, or did you need the extra sensory, audio input to follow the suggestion?

At what point, if any, did you feel resistance, or cognitive dissonance?  how much further did your imagination take you?  Did you conjure up James Bond pulling out his pink pistol to disarm OddJob?  or perhaps you created an image of our soldiers running through the streets of Kabul with Pink rifles?  Wherever you did go, I merely hope you went somewhere.

This is a simple, but powerful example, of how to help people change their perspective, actually take in an alternative point of view.  Taking it in, does not imply endorsement.

If you want to know what it means to evoke an experience, further other people's engagement, or even better, wish to create a shared experience? Then you can appreciate the value Frame-stretching © offers.  I'd love to hear your responses to this stimulus.I'd also welcome alternative examples, tricks or tools you find persuasive, or put you off your routine, skip a beat in your thinking....