Vir tuosos of the Exper ience Domain

Elizabeth B.-N. Sanders, IDSA

President, SonicRim
The Ohio State University
Intr oduction
There is a lot of talk lately about Experience Design. Companies sell experience
design, but dont define what it is. On-line discussion groups debate who the
virtuosos of the experience domain should be. Design educators wonder if they
should be teaching it. And they wonder how they should be teaching it.
In this paper I will address the following questions:
What is experience?
What is experience design?
Who is creative?
How do you design for experiencing?
Who are the real virtuosos of the Experience Domain?
Does this perspective change design education? How?
What is exper ience?
Experience is a subjective event, felt only by the person who has the experience.
Experience is ephemeral, i.e., lasting only for the moment. Experiences that have
already been lived and felt I will call memories. Experiences not yet lived or felt,
but imagined, I will call dreams. Experiencing is the point where memory and
imagination meet. Figure 1 shows the full set of experiences (i.e., memories, the
current moment and dreams) in the experience domain.
FIGURE 1 The exper ience domain
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The moment is inextricably woven into past memories. We interpret what is
happening around us with reference to our past experiences. The moment is also
tightly coupled to the dreams of our imagination. We interpret what is going on
around us in anticipation of our hopes and fears for the future.
The images of experience described below have helped me to see it more clearly.
Our future is cantilevered from the pastour present experience gains dimension
and resonance when we can discern in it traces of the people, places, and
sensations that left their mark on us and incline us to be the individuals we
presently are. (Wendlinger, 1995).
A flimsy curtain separates memory from imagination (Loftus and Calvin, 2001).
Loftus is referring to the work she has done in regarding memory reconstruction in
the areas of eye-witness testimony and cases of alleged child abuse. But the
metaphor also illuminates the ephemerality of the moment.
What is exper ience design?
There is no such thing as experience design. You cant design experience because
experiencing is in people. You can design for experiencing, however. You can
design the scaffolding or infrastructure that people can use to create their own
experiences.
Who is cr eative?
Everyone is creative. (Bohm, 1998). Most people, however, are not in the habit of
using or expressing their creativity. Their creativity is likely to be latent. In fact,
ordinary people have gotten a reputation (amongst designers and marketers, for
example) of not being creative at all. This attitude comes, in part, from the
language of product development. We call people consumers, users, and
customers. But people only play these roles for small, often insignificant and not
so positive portions of their lives. When we label them, it relegates them to minor
roles. If we start referring to them as people, maybe we will begin to think of
them as people.
There is a wellspring of creativity that all people have when it comes to
experiences meaningful to them. And with the advent of new forms of
communication and information technology, people today are becoming more
demanding consumers. They are beginning to use their influence to get what
they want, when they want it and how they want it. They are in the position now
to become participants, even idea generators, in the design development process.
And they know it.
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How do you design for exper iencing?
The first step in learning to design for experiencing is to take a new attitude about
the people who buy and use the products and services you are designing. This
attitude is to respect their opinions and to respect their innate creativity. This wont
be hard for those of you new to design, because it matches your intuition. But it
may be much harder for those who are experienced design professionals.
The new attitude comes from a field known as participatory design. The
participatory attitude is based on the principle that those involved in the use
and/or production of a product need to be directly involved in its design.
How do we involve non-designers in the design development process? We start by
learning about their memories, their current experiences and their dreams for the
future. There are many different ways to do this including:
We can listen to what people say and make inferences about what they think.
We can watch what people do and use.
We can discover what people know.
We can elicit an understanding of what people feel.
We can evoke people to dream. And when they have come to the dreaming
point, we can give them participatory design tools with which they can create and
express their own ideas.
Each route to experience reveals a different story or picture. Listening to what
people say tells us what they are able to express in words (i.e., explicit
knowledge). But it only gives us what they want us to hear. Watching what
people do and seeing what they use provides us with observable information (or
observed experience). But knowing what people say/think, do and use is not
enough (Sanders, 1992).
Discovering what people know helps us to communicate with them.
Understanding what they feel gives us the ability to empathize with them. This
way of knowing provides tacit knowledge, i.e., knowledge that cant readily be
expressed in words (Polanyi, 1983). Evoking peoples dreams will show us how
their future could change for the better. It can reveal latent needs, i.e., needs not
recognizable until the future. When we bring ordinary people through a guided
discovery process and put them in touch with their feelings and dreams, we have
established in them the conditions for creative thought and expression.
These different ways of accessing peoples experiences have evolved over time.
Traditional design research methods were focused primarily on observational
research (i.e., looking at what people do and use). Traditional market research
methods, on the other hand, have been focused more on what people say and
think (through focus groups, interviews, and questionnaires). The new tools are
focused on what people make, i.e., what they create from the toolkits we provide
for them to use in expressing their thoughts, feelings, dreams and new ideas. Make
methods enable creative expression by giving people ambiguous visual stimuli to
work with. Being ambiguous, these stimuli can be interpreted in different ways,
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and can activate different memories and feelings in different people. The visual
nature liberates peoples creativity from the boundaries of what they can state in
words. Together, the ambiguity and the visual nature of these tools allow people
room for creativity, both in expressing their current experiences and feelings and
in generating new ideas.
FIGURE 2 What people say, do and make: A design r esear ch fr amewor k
When all three perspectives (what people do, what they say, and what they make)
are explored simultaneously, we are able to understand the experience domains of
the ordinary people we are serving. When we bring them through guided
discovery and give them the participatory make tools, we have set the stage for
them to express their own creative ideas.
But how do we decide which methods to use and in what order to use the
methods? Figure 3 shows how the three categories of methods are useful at
different places along the experience domain.
For example, the what people do methods cover the current situation only. The
what people say methods extend backward to the recent past and forward into the
immediate future. The what people make methods, on the other hand, extend even
farther to the past (i.e., into memories) and the future (i.e., into dreams).
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FIGURE 3 What people say, do and make acr oss the exper ience domain
This framework can be very useful when deciding how to plan relevant design
research approaches. For example, we might start in the middle with what people
do in their current situation using contextual observations. Then we might move to
what people say methods in the form of a dairy as well as one-on-one interviews.
Finally, we could engage the participants in what people make sessions using a
wide variety of participatory tools. In this type of plan, each research phase can be
informed by the previous phase. The use of a wide variety of research methods
and tools results in a very rich array of data. In addition, the make tools provide
visual artifacts, such as collages, maps and Velcro models (Sanders, 2000) that are
inspirational to the design process.
Who ar e the r eal vir tuosos of the Exper ience Domain?
The people who buy and use the products and services that we design are the real
virtuosos of the Experience Domain. They are the ones who will create their own
experiences. Their potential collective creativity is enormous. If we invite them
into the fuzzy front end of the design development process with us, we will learn
to far better satisfy their needs.
Does this per spective change design education? How?
The participatory attitude and the new tools for design research are beginning to
change the shape of the design profession and design education. They
demonstrate that ordinary people can successfully contribute to the design
development process at its very beginning. A number of schools have integrated
participatory design thinking into their design curriculum, including:
- The Ohio State University
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- Carnegie Mellon University
- Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
- Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Design for experiencing alters the understanding of creativity in design. We see
that the collective creativity of a group of people can be more powerful and
relevant than individual creativity. We see new roles for designers, i.e., to learn
how to access and to understand the dreams of everyday people and to create the
scaffolds or infrastructures on which these people can express their creativity.
Design scaffolding operates at two different levels. First, we can use participatory
toolkits to elicit creative thinking and expression from everyday people during the
early phases of the design development process. Second, we can design products
and services as scaffolds that support creative experiencing by everyday people.
Refer ences and r elated r eadings
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Jensen, R. (1999) The Dream Society: How the Coming Shift from Information to
Imagination will Transform your Business. McGraw-Hill, New York.
Koestler, A. (1964) The Act of Creation. Hutchinson & Co, London.
Loftus, E.F. and Calvin, W.H. Memorys Future. (2001) Psychology Today, March-April,
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Neisser, U. (1982) Memory Observed: Remembering in Natural Contexts. W.H. Freeman
and Company, San Francisco.
Polyani, M. (1983) The Tacit Dimension. Peter Smith, Gloucester, MA.
Ray, P.H. and Anderson, S.R. (2000) The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People are
Changing the World. Harmony Books, New York.
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a Paid-for Experience. Tarcher/Putnam, New York.
Root-Bernstein, R. And Root-Bernstein, M. (1999) Sparks of Genius: The 13 Thinking Tools
of the World's Most Creative People. Houghton-Mifflin, New York.
Sanders, E.B.-N. (2000) Generative Tools for CoDesigning in Collaborative Design,
Scrivener, Ball and Woodcock (Eds.) Springer-Verlag, London.
Wendlinger, B. (1995) The Memory Triggering Book. Proust Press, Oakland CA.
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