Provide photographers so participants do not have to.
technique — attributed to Michael Cirino
Cirino's hundred-course event explicitly told participants they did not have to take out their phones because photographers were documenting every dish. The reframe shifts the participant's role from documentarian to experiencer. Most events default to the inverse: participants take photos because the host did not, and the participants are now half-present, looking at their screens instead of the food, the room, the people. Investing in photographers is operationally cheap and produces a qualitatively different experience. The participants who would have spent fifty percent of the evening behind a camera are fully present instead.
For event hosts, experiential designers, and immersive producers running events whose value depends on participant presence. The technique is most useful for events with strong visual content that would otherwise demand documentation.
photography, presence, phones-down, experience-design