NBC News has an update on the phenomenon of pop-up experiences seemingly engineered specifically for the perfect viral selfie—things like the Museum of Ice Cream. They call them “Instagram playgrounds,” which is the best possible way to describe these places. “You can huff and buff all you want and say, ‘I can’t believe how self-obsessed people are’, but if you’re not designing things in 2018 with the hope that it is shared on social,” said Paige Solomon, CEO of “Dream Machine” in Brooklyn, “then I feel like you’re doing a disservice to yourself as a creative, an artist, a business owner.”
It appears that Instagram-ready “experiences” are here to stay. Perhaps, then, we could make some humble requests?
Themes already tackled include “A sunflower garden, a caviar pool and a psychedelic laundromat.” So then, what’s left? Some ideas:
- An interactive potato chip experience, inspired by some truly incredible bacon-wrapped jalapeno popper flavored Wavy Lays that Megan brought to the pod yesterday, sponsored by any of the many potato chip brands always trying to catch America’s attention with weird-ass flavors. I’m seeing myself frolicking in a giant ball pit filled with plush potato chips.
- A Masterpiece Theatre playground where I get to dress up in period garb topped off with a really fetching fichu and parade around on cliffs (created via green screen is fine), looking moody as I am gently spritzed with seawater through a complex series of pipes in the ceiling.
- A literal playground, but you rig cool lighting and sell $45 tickets to adults (and then use the proceeds to upgrade the playground for local children).
- Two words: SHARK TANK.
- Another word: KNITTING.
- Okay, three more words: Old Hollywood scandals.
- An actual museum with genuinely good shit in it, but presented like one of these playgrounds, with lots of pink lighting. Maybe a ball pit in the Met fountains? Just spitballing here.
- Flower show rebranded for millennials.
- A book version that functions as a truly terrifying haunted house when the realization gradually dawns that organizing your bookshelves specifically for Instagram likes is—I’m so sorry—some serial killer shit.
- An abandoned mall originally built in the early 1980s that perfectly recreates the mall as it looked when it opened, complete with B. Dalton and Baskin Robbins with those old creepy pastel posters of children enjoying ice cream and of course a thriving Sears and J.C. Penney BOTH, thereby collapsing completely every older millennial’s sense of time and resulting in mass hysteria.
Do it for the ‘gram, baby!