Mark Beever is a mentor for Codebase and the founder of Expanding Circle Studio. He works with brands and organisations across Europe and North America to design transformative experiences and brand storytelling that connect people, leverage ideas, and deliver positive impact.
We’re living through rapid social and technological change: spatial computing, real-time 3D, AI reshaping how we work, live and communicate. Each day something long-established is declared obsolete, only to be reborn in a new form. We embrace some advances, meet others with caution. Their real power isn’t in code or hardware but in the people who use them—technology matters most when it enables better decisions, richer experiences and results of genuine human value.
Across the world, immersive tools now let us step inside stories and build collaborative communities across continents. To understand and realise their full value, we need to engage with the age-old human drivers: the need to belong, to share stories and to help shape the world around us. When innovation processes align with curiosity, emotion and aspiration, technology can become an amplifier of what already makes us human.
Let’s touch on three complementary facets of innovation that allow technology to achieve that human impact: how audiences are becoming communities; how storytelling is core to innovation; how new models of collaboration are supported (not replaced) by AI; and how human engagement itself becomes both vital to the process and a measure of success.
Turning consumers into co-creators
For decades brands and organisations thought in terms of audiences: focused on people who passively watched or consumed. Social and immersive technologies have changed that. The best experiences now invite people to co-create. People participate because experiences tap into why they act, purchase or share: they feel, they care, they connect, they become personally invested.
Whether it is an interactive brand launch, a virtual or hybrid concert or a city-wide AR treasure hunt, the shift is from consumption to participation and a shared human and brand experience. Communities become collaborators, shaping narratives, contributing ideas and influencing the brand experience itself.
Within the sectors I work across – from finance to luxury goods, culture and education to destination and event industries – the most powerful experiences give people a growing and genuine role in shaping and being part of the story. Their contributions deepen and broaden brand engagement, build ownership, strengthen loyalty and spark insight-driven ideas that increasingly drive creative and innovative teams to think and create differently. This approach reshapes how teams gain user insight.
Why stories drive change where data alone can’t
Facts and policy targets alone have rarely moved hearts, so real change struggles to take hold when there’s no relatable story. To inspire action on something as complex and large as a topic like net zero, people need to feel its relevance to their own lives. Technology can help by personalising the impact and creating solutions people can take ownership of and act on. But it is the narrative that transforms those signals into a call to action that actually resonates.
This is where storytelling and technology meet. Immersive tools make the data personal, but the story turns information into a possibility people can feel. For businesses the principle is the same. A brand’s story unites customers, employees and partners around a shared purpose. Storytelling isn’t about the teller; it’s the shared exchange. It creates a shared space in which people see themselves as part of the narrative. Without that, even the most sophisticated technology risks becoming an impressive but fleeting spectacle. Storytelling provides the infrastructure that gives technology meaning and gives participants context, purpose and motivation.
New models of collaboration
As humans we can be very slow to grasp the full impact, possibilities and even the hubris of emerging technologies. We sense them reshaping what is possible; the real excitement begins when we recognise that they can also change how we create. AI now enables rapid prototyping and instant visualisation, but we understand now its value isn’t in cost-cutting or generic content. The breathtaking pace calls for curiosity: time to reflect on how these tools enrich the process and amplify creativity.
AI and immersive technologies allow diverse voices to participate, creating experiences that are richer and more resilient. Communities are no longer just audiences; they are co-creators. Their input strengthens outcomes and builds a sense of shared ownership that can extend well beyond any single project.
This shift demands new ways of organising teams and sharing ownership: rethinking intellectual property, data use and co-creation rights. Approached thoughtfully, these changes unlock value not only from technology but from the very communities it engages at every stage of the journey.
Designing tech around human values
Ingenuity is deeply human, and technology expresses it. Scotland’s Innovation Week celebrates that spirit and should challenge us to make sure that our technical brilliance creates lasting human value.
The question for every innovator is not just ‘what can this technology do?’ but ‘how will it help people connect, belong and act together?’
The answer lies in combining cutting-edge tools with ever more human-informed insight. When we design with curiosity, empathy and a commitment to shared storytelling, technology becomes more than an impressive tool: it enables lives to connect meaningfully and ideas to turn into collective action.
Scotland has a long tradition of marrying engineering brilliance with social impact. Today’s immersive technologies offer a new canvas to continue that tradition: not merely to build the next platform, but to shape global communities that will use, share, develop and carry its stories forward.
Innovation succeeds when it serves our deepest human instincts. That is what will make Scotland’s next wave of innovation not only technically remarkable but unforgettable and humanly empowering.
