Electric Brooklyn: Experience Economy in Action

An electric SUV, Brooklyn Park, and a bridge everyone recognizes. This photo essay turns a 2022 Fisker Ocean pop-up at Domino Park into a quiet visual story about experience, emotion, and place, inviting viewers to feel a day in Electric Brooklyn through depth, angles, light, and texture.

A quiet Saturday at Domino Park becomes something more when a bright electric SUV appears by the river, turning a familiar Brooklyn view into the opening scene of a new kind of city experience.
When the trailer door drops and the Ocean touches Brooklyn pavement, the day shifts from ordinary plans to possibility, as if the future has taken a small but confident step onto the street.

Turning An Old Shoot into A New Story

The photographs for this project began as a personal archive, not an assignment. In 2022, during a visit to Domino Park for the Fisker Ocean pop-up, I took more than 150 images, simply to remember the day, the adventure around Brooklyn, which eventually led across the Brooklyn Bridge afterward. When reading about the Experience Economy, the Fisker Ocean pop-up visit in Brooklyn immediately resurfaced as a complete story waiting to be told. The idea that brands now stage experiences rather than just sell products snapped the memories into focus, and the Fisker event at a sustainable waterfront park suddenly looked like a textbook example. Seen through the lens of Kristel and Losowsky, those scattered photos revealed themselves as narrative fragments, small, honest moments that could be sequenced into a quiet visual story rather than a loud advertisement (Kristel, 2023; Losowsky, 2011).

Rolling into position beside brick, billboards, and passing traffic, the Ocean feels less like a showpiece and more like a guest, quietly asking what it might mean to belong in this neighborhood.

Shaping that memory into a coherent visual narrative required critical thinking and a different perspective. Instead of planning shots to match a script, the process meant working backward through the archive, reviewing every image and tagging moments that showed depth cues, authentic emotion, and the shift from product to place. Out of roughly 150 photos, only a carefully chosen set truly carried the arc from street arrival to the Domino Park encounter, to the Brooklyn Bridge exploration. Some technically strong favorites were left out because they did not advance the story. In the spirit of Kristel’s and Losowsky’s emphasis on sequence and implication, the final series emerges from that intentional editing work. Choosing which course concepts serve as a lens for selecting, grouping, and captioning old images in a new, purposeful way proved challenging (Kristel, 2023; Losowsky, 2011).

Seen at street level, paint catching the light, the car invites a first emotional reaction before any words are spoken, the kind of instant impression that begins to shape a story in memory.

Authenticity, Emotion, And First Impressions

From the start, authenticity and sensory emotion were the main design principles. Aarron Walter discusses “designing for emotion” to create connection and trust rather than just deliver information (Walter, 2012). The Brooklyn images aim to do exactly that. People gather naturally around the Fisker Ocean, talk, lean on railings, or stretch out on the grass. Nothing is staged beyond choosing where to stand with the camera.

From above, park paths, river, and roadway gather around the Ocean, turning the pop-up into a small stage where Brooklyn life continues to swirl while a new idea about driving settles in.

Don Norman’s three levels of design, visceral, behavioral, and reflective, were helpful mental models (Norman, 2003). Viscerally, the striking blue of the Fisker Ocean against the city’s muted grays and browns creates a strong first impression. Clean, graphic shapes and bold contrasts make the photos immediately visually appealing. Over time, the story could become a reflective design for viewers with memories of Brooklyn or a personal interest in EVs. They may look longer, noticing the bridge, the park, and the crowd, and start connecting the images to their own experiences.

On the grass by the water, groups talk, laugh, and watch the skyline, folding the electric SUV into an easy afternoon that connects clean design, green space, and the feeling of a shared city.
A quick snapshot with a member of the Fisker family turns a brand into a face and a name, fixing this moment in memory as more than a product demo, but a story worth retelling.

Framing Distance Into Human Connection

Following Montalto’s principles of visual storytelling, the images try to balance people, place, and purpose (Montalto, 2024). Framing and camera distance do most of that work. Low angles near the wheels of the Ocean give the vehicle grounded strength without turning it into a monster. Eye-level shots place the audience shoulder to shoulder with visitors in Domino Park or with walkers on the bridge, creating a sense of convergence. High angles from above the car and down from the bridge reveal patterns in the streets and architecture, reminding viewers that each moment sits inside a larger city system.

Later, wooden planks and rising arches guide curious feet away from the park, carrying the energy of the pop-up onto the Brooklyn Bridge, where the day widens into a larger city adventure.

Depth cues are woven throughout, such as linear perspective in the bridge planks and cables, relative size in the crowds, overlapping in busy park scenes, and soft atmospheric perspective in the hazy skyline across the river. These cues are not just technical; they support what HubSpot’s Santiago calls “inviting the viewer into the frame,” so they feel present, not passive (Santiago, 2024). Shadows stretching across pavement or slicing across the side of the car add another layer, pulling the eye inward and hinting at the time of day and mood.

High above the steady rush of cars, walkers move between boroughs with cameras and conversations, turning the bridge into a place where the idea of quieter, cleaner travel feels right at home.

Graphic Appeal With Emotional Weight

The photos fall into two connected categories: graphically appealing and emotional. On the graphic side, they use strong lines, repetition, and negative space, echoing examples of clean, modern visual narratives discussed by Santiago and in other visual storytelling case studies (Santiago, 2024; Losowsky, 2011). The trailer ramp, bridge beams, and skyline form visual scaffolding that keeps the frames organized.

Emotionally, the same compositions track what Local Measure describes as the “emotional customer journey,” capturing anticipation at the trailer, excitement and curiosity at Domino Park, and calm reflection on the bridge (Measure, 2018). Viewers see more than a car or a bridge. They see a sequence of feelings that move from reveal, to gathering, to exploration.

Experience Economy On The Waterfront

Underneath the visuals, the project is about the Experience Economy. Rao describes this shift as moving from selling products to staging memorable experiences (Rao, 2021). Fisker’s choice to host a pop-up in Domino Park, a sustainable green space on the waterfront, turns the Ocean from an object into part of a curated day. Visitors did not just show up to “see a car.” They traveled from across the East Coast to spend time by the river, meet other fans, and walk the city afterward.

By the time the view drops to bright umbrellas and a riverside ice cream stop, the electric SUV has become part of the background of a full Brooklyn day, its memory woven into small pleasures that linger long after the trip back home.

This is where behavioral economics comes in. ELVTR and Mejía both explain how context and emotion nudge decision-making by tying products to positive, real-world experiences (Elvtr, 2025; Mejía, 2023). In Brooklyn, the tactile acts of touching the door handles, hearing the quiet close of the hatch, and sitting inside the cabin are paired with the emotional context of skyline views, park energy, and bridge walks. That pairing makes the memory of the Ocean more durable and more meaningful than a spec sheet or a commercial.

A Calm Story With Lasting Resonance

In the end, the visual story fits with what Kristel and others describe as non-dramatic yet deeply narrative art, where each photograph is a sentence in a larger, quiet conversation (Kristel, 2023; Montalto, 2024). The day does not hinge on a single climactic event. It unfolds slowly from an industrial street to a sustainable park to a historic bridge. By combining visceral first impressions, authentic moments, depth-rich framing, and an experience-economy backdrop, the project aims to leave viewers with the sense that they have lived a day in Electric Brooklyn, whether or not they have ever set foot there.

At Domino Park, the Ocean drew me in, its design sparking curiosity as I walked around and sat inside. That impression stayed with me, and when it finally stood in my driveway, the same feeling returned, only deeper, because now it was mine.

Citations

Elvtr. (2025, June 4). How behavioral economics influences UX Design. ELVTR. https://elvtr.com/blog/how-behavioral-economics-influences-ux-design

Kristel, A. (2023, November 26). The art of storytelling: Narratives in visual art. Medium. https://atelierkristel.medium.com/the-art-of-storytelling-narratives-in-visual-art-7533af9fc320

Losowsky, A. (2011). Visual Storytelling Inspiring a New Visual Language. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/visualstorytelli0000unse/mode/2up

Measure, L. (2018, October 19). Mapping the emotional customer journey. Local Measure. https://www.localmeasure.com/post/mapping-the-emotional-customer-journey?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Mejía, M. (2023, November 3). Behavioral Economics & Designing for Change. Group 10240. https://sparks.learning.asu.edu/videos/behavioral-economics-for-designers

Montalto, M. (2024, January 25). The four principles of visual storytelling. amplifi. https://amplifinp.com/blog/4-principles-visual-storytelling/

Norman, D. (2003, February). 3 ways good design makes you happy. TED. https://www.ted.com/talks/don_norman_3_ways_good_design_makes_you_happy?language=en

Rao, S. (2024, August 12). Winning in the experience economy. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbesbusinessdevelopmentcouncil/2021/04/07/winning-in-the-experience-economy/

Santiago, E. (2024, September 23). Visual storytelling: 10 stunning examples to inspire you. Visual Storytelling: 10 Stunning Examples to Inspire You. https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/visual-storytelling-examples

Walter, A. (2012, April 12). Designing for Emotion (Aarron Walter). YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ks91vBm3oT8

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