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Consistent exposure to sunshine with high ultraviolet values has significant negative effects on human skin. Key risks include melanoma and the rapid onset of signs of ageing. For Chinese, these are viewed as undesirable, because their genetic legacy predisposes them to greater numbers of skin blemishes and because darker shades are culturally and socially viewed as less attractive. Properties in sunshine locations may need to modify aspects of their infrastructure and service delivery to meet the needs of the globally influential Chinese market. Shaded spaces, new activities, scheduling of experiences in the early morning, evening and at night, are all a part of the required innovations in experience design.

This account of a field experience is written in the form of a reverie, to match the conditions that gave rise to it. It emerges from my long-term study of the Burning Man festival, a massive countercultural communal celebration of aesthetic immediacy held annually in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada. Marked by the suspension of ordinary commerce in favor of a gift economy, the spectacle culminates in the torching of an enormous effigy. This experimental ethnography follows in the symbolic interactionist tradition of an earlier tale told by Andrea Fontana.11Fontana, Andrea (2001), “Salt Fever: An Ethnographic Narrative in Four Sections,” Studies in Symbolic Interaction, 24: 147–163.“Urethral awakening dream.”