From output to emotion: Creativity beyond the screen

Most of what we still call storytelling occurs within a frame; a phone, a monitor, or a cinema screen. 

Their edges have defined how we think and work; safe, familiar, and controllable, but outside of these boundaries, something more alive is happening.

Much of today’s most exciting work isn’t limited to the screen at all. 

Much of today’s most exciting work isn’t limited to the screen at all. Think of Viola’s Room, a whispered walk-through dream, Wake the Tiger, a living art labyrinth, or The Wizard of Oz at Sphere, a sensory reimagining of cinema. Each is built around people, shifting as they move through it, changing with where you stand, who you’re with and what you choose to do. It uses technology not as an endpoint, but as an invitation to step inside, to feel something real, to co-create or share a moment.

Above: Spotify's This Is An Oasis Fan experience was an immersive retrospective gallery dedicated to Oasis and their fans at London's Outernet. 

For over a century, the screen was the laboratory for visual storytelling. We learned how to compose, edit, score and direct emotion. AI is accelerating that mastery. Today, we can conjure entire worlds in seconds, create without production barriers, and visualise ideas that once lived only in our imagination. The next creative frontier isn’t about what we can show people, but what we can make them feel when they step beyond barriers.

Screens have trained us well in the language of attention, but they’ve also conditioned us to expect a passive audience.

As the borders between film, design, technology and space continue to dissolve, the real question for creatives is no longer what medium are we working in, but how do we want people to experience the idea? More importantly, how do we reward their willingness and participation with something that feels truly meaningful? 

Screens have trained us well in the language of attention, but they’ve also conditioned us to expect a passive audience; people who sit back and watch a story unfold. The world that’s now emerged is participatory. People want to remix, share, interact and explore. The most resonant work now welcomes that impulse, giving audiences room to move through an idea, not just observe it.

Above: The Sphere, in Las Vegas, is reimagining The Wizard of Oz as a more interactive experience than ever before. 

When creativity expands beyond the screen, space becomes the new composition. Sound, movement, light and time become the raw materials of storytelling. Every surface, every texture, every silence becomes an opportunity. Everything is a canvas. Once outside the rectangular frame, we begin to see how much narrative power exists in the world and how a story can unfold in all directions and dimensions at once.

When creativity expands beyond the screen, space becomes the new composition.

That’s the beauty (and the fun!) of experiential work; its impact lasts because it’s lived. Standing inside an idea – whether it’s an immersive projection, a reactive environment, or something entirely analog – creates an emotional memory that traditional advertising rarely touches. For brands, that connection is almost impossible to measure and equally impossible to forget.

It also reconnects creativity with community. For the last decade and a half, much of our industry has optimised for isolation; one person, one feed, one screen. Experience design flips that dynamic. It asks people to gather again. You can’t scroll past it or close the tab. You have to be there. And if you’re focused on how you look in the selfie, you’re probably not entirely immersed. That requirement of presence makes the experience more resonant and, in a noisy world, that’s powerful.