Envision a future where the physical and digital become seamlessly intertwined producing unbounded possibilities from interactions with autonomous cars to the advent of smart cities. Tools and methods to explore the design and development of such emergent hybrid spaces will need to be highly inclusive involving engineers, social scientists, up to citizens. Such methods and tools might support the so-called fictitious scenarios in form of digitally augmented physical prototypes set in a near-future reality. In this paper, we introduce the concept of "proto-tool": multi-purpose digitally augmented artefacts with no constraints and seemingly limitless uses (e.g. virtual and augmented reality devices, digitally augmented surfaces and objects, etc.) that will be modeled on current and fictitious scenarios able to interact both with physical and digital spaces de facto enabling rapid prototyping of Cyber-Physical Interactions.

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The creative industries are following the trend exhibited in other fields of economic activity by increasingly focussing on selling 'experiences' rather than 'objects'. Typically, this shift results in immersive products which include elements such as narrative, space, media and/or performance within an overall presentation characterised by audience agency and an aim of sense-making.Experience Design, the planning and production of these experience-centred, immersive productions, is a new and essentially interdisciplinary academic field meaning that almost all current practitioners originally trained in a different (albeit related) single area (e.g., architecture, theatre, UI design, etc.) and have developed their interdisciplinary expertise through a process of individual research, experience and reflection. This necessarily limits the availability of suitably skilled practitioners and there is a growing sense that appropriate training needs to be developed to support the continued expansion of the sector. This paper aims to support this pedagogical development process by examining a range of planning processes and tools used the disciplines which contribute to experience design together with recently developed tools from the experience economy. Suggestions of ways existing tools might be extended to accommodate the wider range of media and contexts typically encountered in an experience production are presented. An 'experience model' is proposed to support the analysis and identification of key elements of immersive experiences and the paper concludes with a provisional identification of a core set of key design tools and techniques which experience designers might employ across the range of current immersive practice. Digital media design. Experience design. Interdisciplinary practice. Planning tools. User-centred design.

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The paper suggests that one of the aspects of the pre-Covid world that is most missed in the 'new normal' is the social experience of crowds and that immersive media might compensate for this. The nature of crowds is explored with a view to identifying the parameters for successful crowd simulation. There is a brief survey of computer crowd simulation which identifies some of the challenges together with descriptions of some recent games which feature crowds as a significant element. The paper then describes a method using real-time searches of social media content derived from Twitter as an extended data set which can be used to produce variety in the individual agents making up generated crowds and so provide a closer simulation of the crowd experience.