Designing for Experience

I recently got a nice little email from someone who said they liked the title of the blog.  I want to make sure and blog a few times a week, if not more, so I’m using that as my blogging fodder.

The title of the blog is designing for experience, and I often used to talk about being an experience designer, naively thinking that I could, in fact, design an experience and then a person would in fact have the experience I designed. Then the cognitive dissonance started to come… what about when you have an excellently crafted experience, like say Disney World, and people fail to have the experience that was designed.  I know my wife didn’t exactly love it.  What about the person who’s brother is in the hospital thousands of miles away, but yet they aren’t going home until tomorrow, will they have the same experience as the person without such worries?  What about the person who has never seen a disney movie and then arrives to the wonderful world of Disney?

The last example is unlikely in today’s world admittedly, but still the fundamental issue stands: as designers we cannot control someone’s felt experience.  The notion of experience involves both a person’s external surroundings as well as internal states of all kinds.  McCarthy & Wright talk about the “Threads of Experience” they are the aesthetic, the emotional, the spatio-temporal, and the compositional, and these are but the threads they chose to pick out and explain.  Felt, or lived experience is something that is ultimately constructed by the self.  I freely acknowledge that we socially construct many different aspects of our lives and even our self concepts, but in the end our experience is uniquely our own and dependent on our previous experiences.

All these thoughts ultimately gelled and came together while at CHI this year and was at the SIG on towards a shared definition of user experience.  Throughout the discussion this idea had been developing in my mind.  Yes it’s rather elementary after you lay it out, but before then I hadn’t known it. I finally understood why  Ian McClelland of Phillips Design calls himself an experience architect, not an experience designer.  I was speaking with him after the session and asked him exactly that question, and he looked at me as if I was a little daft. Of course that’s why his title is what it is, because he recognizes that the locus of control is not with him, but rather the person who has the experience.  We construct something that is then to be experienced by someone else (or by ourselves in a different role).

So as a designer I am here to say that while I strive to design for experiences that will inform, transform, delight, and even amuse people, I recognize that each individual will have their own experience with what is designed, and that experience is.  It is reminiscent of Kant’s categorical imperative, not treating other as merely a means to an end, but rather being a member of a kingdom of ends (to paraphrase it as I remember it).

In conclusion I design for experience, a holistic, iterative, people-centered approach where I recognize that ultimately each what people do with what is designed is up to them.  Different uses will emerge, and ultimately what I help co-create in this world is not mine, and never will be.

I am part-way through Bill Buxton’s Sketching User Experience, and I’ve read part of the Experience Economy, and of course my course last year on Experience Design.  Add to that the UK’s Design Council finding that businesses that use design thinking and methods are more successful than their counterparts.  Of course I am totally fascinated by what is happening with NextD, and using design to inquire and innovate.

Certainly F@astCompany and BusinessWeek have both picked up on the idea of design, but I’m surprised that this isn’t more widely talked about.

Now add to the mix some of the papers that have come out of the HCI community of practice about research through design and I start wonder. It seems like design is being used in all kinds of disparate contexts, so disparate I wonder if there is any unifying thread to what is being called design?

I of course turn to Nelson & Stolterman’s The Design Way for answers.  They want the book to explain what design is, to instill design culture and design thinking, and I hope to find at least a preliminary answer to my question in this rereading of the question.

If I can answer more simply what design is in all these contexts, I would like to answer the question that has been riddling me for months now: what is the philosophical basis of design (if indeed it has one)? What can research by design rightly say?

All this come back to my original start point, how does design methodology and thinking really impact business? What is it that moves forward like so many think it does?  I think it has something to do with what design is, and where it comes from theoretically.

Hi, I’m Aaron and I’m a technofetishist.   I love everything new and shiny that promises to make my life better and easier.  I sometimes love technology just for it’s own sake.  Yes I know it’s at least a little out of whack with what I stand for: thoughtfully designed technology that is sensitive to human needs, values, and ethics. What are we to do?
It seems to me that at least some of the many problems we have with technology is the rapid rate at which it changes, and is improved, and we replace it .  As soon as something starts to get really stable, well used, and developed, a new version comes out.  In the case of commercial products like windows or OS X, another version comes out and we are asked to pay for an upgrade.  With hardware we have no choice but to upgrade at least every 7 years or so or we will be left high and dry because the programs we would like to use are no longer supported by those that make them (or those companies have gone out of business or have been sold etc.)  Honestly though, most people upgrade their whole computer, if not major parts of it, every 3-4 years it seems.  This creates a massive amount of waste.Sites are upgraded so often that any kind of documentation to help those that use it is outdated almost as soon as it is written.

I honestly don’t know what to do, but  it is clear to me that the technology industry, from hardware to software and design, is totally reliant on this kind of constant upgrade to keep their current business models functioning.  While I am happy to see that initiatives are happening in the HCI community on sustainability (notably many of them right here at IU Bloomington), I don’t know if it’s enough.

What this comes down to for me is that I think:

• We need to replace less often.
• We need upgradability/modularity
• We need things that actually work well and stand the test of time
• Escape the current business models that are entrenched in the world today.

I am not optimistic on many of these points, but perhaps by starting a discussion and developing my thinking here we can find a starting point.

Aaron’s Current Capstone Presentation - Google Doc or on SlideShare

So I had to finally present to my colleagues last night (as referenced by Dave RoedlRoyer’s post at the Interaction Culture Blog) and got some great feedback on several fronts. One interesting thing Sam Shoulders brought up was to compare educational TV to educational games. It may be interesting to take a look at the differences between production of let’s say any ol’ cartoon, like transformers, and say Dora the Explora (or are you supposed to spell explorere properly?). That may produce some interesting items.

Essentially what Dave was saying in his post is that all games are serious, and teach people something. The difference between a “serious game” and just a game is that it was designed with the intent to teach, and that was explicitly made part of the game. Keywords: intent, explicit. All games teach, although it may not be what people think.

Some people think violent video games teach people to be violent, making it into a causal relationship. Kid A plays GTA, GTA in turn causes that kid to be violent. Perhaps we can put it in terms of influence, or that it sends the message that certain things are OK. I don’t really know, but it’s pretty clear from the millions of people who have played very violent games like say Contra, Duke Nukem, or pretty much any of the early space games (space invaders, galaga et al) who haven’t become violent (yet?!) that there is more to this question.

What’s the take home message here? Everything we make as designers embed values, judgments, prejudice… in short we embed a piece of ourselves and our culture in everything we make.

What does this mean for us? My reaction to this is, Hey Aaron, be the best man you can be! So that when you make your next game that explicitly teaches, it will make the world a better place.

“…there’s no real technology there. There’s no noteworthy computer-science problem being solved. The Ajax stuff is pre-written. You just have to go to the libraries and put it all together.
When Gmail came out — and Gmail is a pretty kick-ass product — it was like, “Ha! Ajax for dynamic web apps! We can use it for everything!” So now you have companies like Zoho, for example. Their sole goal is to take every desktop app that ever existed and reimplement it in Ajax with no added features or functionality. It irritates me as an engineer that companies with no engineering merit.” (Emphasis mine)

This quote is from Ted Dziuba, and came from Wired, and I read it first in Zoho Blog (via Scoble’s Tweetstream). Ted has BS in Computation Mathematics, and perhaps that is why I fundamentally disagree on this issue, here are the three issues I have with his analysis.

#1 By “No real technology” I think that Ted means that there is no innovation.–WRONG
#2 “There’s no noteworthy computer-science problem being solved”–RIGHT (maybe), but that’s not the point!
#3 Ted is an engineer, and he’s mad because “There’s no engineering Merit” in Zoho– RIGHT, but again not the point.

#1 One could take him to mean that liteally there is no technology there, but I sincerely doubt that is what he is saying, rather that there is nothing new, no innovation. The idea of a word processor or a spreadsheet has been around for at least as long as Ted has been alive, so it’s true that part of it isn’t new. Of course the idea of sending messages to someone, in the form of letters has been around for centuries, millenia in fact, but when we suddenly got to be able to do it online it was the killer app. IM then changed things again, but it was still essentially the same concept. We applied computer science to it. We reduced something to s set of rules, modeled those rules in a computer language and, presto, our world is forever changed (Well I’m sure there is more than just computer science at work here,but for the sake of room and simplicity). Real, seamless online collaboration with word processing and other productivity applications is an innovation, one that is already starting to change the way people work. We are in the early stages, there is no doubt, but I feel comfortable saying that this kind of collaboration will change the way we do think about work.

#2 If you choose to define computer science at the logical positivist/reductionist activities of creating computer languages and modeling different rule sets to create things, then you are right. There is no big problem, they didn’t create Ajax. I’m no coder, so I don’t know, I’m guessing they may not even be pushing Ajax to it’s limits, maybe there is no new code at all, just rearranging things in novel ways to create new applications. So essentially it’s true, from a CS perpective online collaborative word processing and it’s sister apps are not a noteworthy computer science problem, and by that definition most computer applications aren’t either unless they are pushing the language into places it hasn’t been before, combining rule sets in significantly new ways, or something else like that. Again, I’m no coder, so I don’t really have any examples at hand, and if I’m wrong I’d like to hear about it. No the problem Zoho is solving is essentially a social one, a human problem, a problem tackled by interaction designers. I blogged about designing for sociality, and in fact I used productivity software as my example. Zoho is starting to solve a great HCI problem, and I applaud them for it. So yes, Ted, you’re right, but you’ve missed the point IMO.

#3 This is pretty much the same thing, but with engineering as it’s focus. I assume Ted means computer engineering, which is essentially the applied branch of CS. I was kind of sketchy between CS & CE in #2, I haven’t thought about that too much, and I frankly don’t plan to in the near future. Again Ted you’ve missed the point. There are companies that get money and success through engineering, or scientific merit. I would say originally, Google was one of these (no longer though, IMO, but they do have very good CS & CE). A good technology business, one that will be successful is a blend of several things: CS, CE, Entrepreneurship, HCI & UX Design, believing in your idea  in your idea to the point of being one or more of the following: arrogance, stupidity, chauvinism.   I’m sure I left out a bunch of other things too.

So go sneer to yourself and your minions, and realize that excellence and innovation and good technology in this world comes form cross-disciplinary teams working together.  HCI people need CS, CE people need CS ideas, and the list can go on forever.

Last of all, thank you Ted for making me think about this, you’ve clarified and crystallized some of my views, and I welcome any corrections and discussion.