Today we’d like to introduce you to Mike Michaels.
Hi Mike, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
There were multiple influences and interests that came together that resulted in my current work, The Eureka Room. It’s been an almost ten years journey at this point but here’s some of the main influences.
I am a big roadside attraction fan. When I travel, I like to find the most interesting and unique experiences a place offers. I’ve been fortunate to see a lot of interesting stuff and a lot of it has been very influential. I’ve always wanted to create one of my own.
For the last 16 years, I’ve published a wall calendar showing when events happen in Austin, so I have a pretty good idea of what types of things Austin has in abundance and where there’s opportunity for more activities and events to establish themselves.
Originally the Eureka Room was supposed to be things abomination I called “mindfultainment”. The idea was to make mindfulness and positive psychology practices more fun and accessible. All it did was confuse people. But my interest in absurdity had snuck into one of the programs and turns out that was the one people liked the most. So after spending countless hours on mindfultainment, I ditched it and went for the absurd playful stuff. It’s much easier and natural for me to do that, so it feels like that’s what I’m supposed to be doing all along.
In 2018, I premiered The Eureka Room in my house during the East Austin Studio Tour. It turned out to be pretty popular so I did it the next year as well. I was about to find commercial space in February of 2020 but we all know what happened then. All of a sudden no one wanted to be in a small room yelling with strangers. So it got put on hold.
Instead, I began reading all kinds of books related to IRL Experience Design and started a blog IRLXD.com. I was averaging a book a week during the pandemic and have shared some of what I learned there. There’s also posts about my work on other ideas, like The Stationary 5k, The Austin Messy Homes Tour, The world’s largest playable cornhole game, an event called “I got a bag of wigs. Let’s wear them” and other fun stuff. It’s up to almost 250,000 words now.
Last November, I started running it out of my house for just a couple showings a week as I looked for a commercial space to rent. It took a while to find the right fit, but I have a great location on the east side that keeps the “home version” feel but allows me to run much more often. I also made it 50% bigger. I just opened up July 17th and things have been going really well.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Well, there was the 2-year attempt to do “mindfultainment”. That was a flop but was one of those experiments that get you where you need to go. One of the harder things in the earlier days was sitting for hours working on this totally indescribable stuff that is just very absurd while fighting off the voices in my head wondering if I had lost my mind to spend all this time on this thing I couldn’t explain very well. Fortunately, after having 1600 people visit my house, I don’t have those concerns anymore. But I still can’t explain what it is to you.
Speaking of explaining, one of the hardest things is to keep what it is a secret but at the same time make sure that only the people who are going to love it show up. I want people to judge for themselves if it’s for them before they visit. But I can’t tell them much because a lot of it is about the surprise. It’s hard to market a product you can’t tell anyone about. But fortunately for me, there’s a lot of people out there who actually seek out surprises like this. I might have gone overboard in scaring people off, but I think it has resulted in some of the best visitors ever. Almost everyone who walks through my door I think, “Wow these people seem awesome!”
Obviously, the pandemic was a big obstacle. Going into a small room with strangers to yell a lot was not a popular activity in 2020. Finding a place to rent was extremely difficult.
It’s a cliche to say that being successful means saying no to a million things, but it’s also true. Everyone who enjoys the Eureka Room wants me to take it in this direction or that, but I have to stay focused on the fun human-interaction absurdity. That adherence to mission disappoints some people, but if I let myself get too broad of a scope I’m sure I wouldn’t be as far along as I am today.
We’ve been impressed with The Eureka Room, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
The Eureka Room is a boutique immersive experience room in Austin, Texas, where participants engage in curious, delightful, and absurd programming within a magical and intimate one hundred square foot space filled with light and sound.
A lot of the immersive experiences out there are mostly passive experiences. As a friend recently put it, “I looked at it and then walked away”. I’m not into passive experiences. I want to do something. So my take on immersive is “let’s do something in this space”. The Eureka Room is participatory fun.
So that’s it on the highest level. That’s the way I can describe it on a website and people get it.
But if you go a little deeper into my motivations, you’ll see I want to create something where strangers are invited to interact with each other. Asking people to take a bit of a risk to interact with a stranger is a risk but there’s way more reward in it because you took the risk. So as long as I’m doing my job right, visitors can get a better and more memorable experience here. That kind of participatory experience is not something everyone is into. But if you create for everyone, you create for no one.
But even that description – you’re invited to take a slightly larger risk and you’ll get a much better reward – isn’t the most important motivation. Underneath all of the absurdity and play is me trying to create a space or moment where someone will think or feel something like, “Hey, strangers aren’t always dangers and they can even be fun”. I want to help encourage more lighthearted connections with people we don’t know – even if it’s just for an hour at the Eureka Room.
Do you have any memories from childhood that you can share with us?
As a teenager, I worked a few summers at a local amusement park. I wouldn’t say it was my favorite memory, but it was formative.
Pricing:
- $25 per person
Contact Info:
- Website: eurekaroom.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/eurekaroom
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/eurekaroom
- Other: irlxd.com This is my blog on IRL Experience Design
