Welcome to Total Experience, where together we'll explore the cultural phenomenon of intentional, designed experience.

Not all experience is designed. Serendipity plays a large part in broadening our understanding. But increasingly, the experiences that fill our days are crafted to create an impression, stimulate a thought, or provoke an action – often, all three simultaneously. Total Experience is about the intentional, systematic design of experience and its outcomes.

The strategic mapping and propagation of “touchpoints” that the designer arranges for the “experiencer” – a word I use often in Total Experience – is a contemporary phenomenon worthy of everyone’s attention. Total Experience takes the normative point of view that experiences should be voluntary; but realistically, they often are not. What can the experiencer do to negate undesirable experiences or even to seek recourse? Perhaps you, the reader, can help us to arrive at useful answers.

Experience design is holistic, interdisciplinary, and inherently interactive. Accordingly, Total Experience will wander the far shores of design practice – including, for example, product engineering, landscape architecture, sociology, environmental psychology, and memetics – as well as more familiar design modalities. Total Experience is not about web design (whose practitioners use "experience design" to mean webside behavior) except as part of a larger designed experience.

Within its mission of examining the emerging practice of experience design, Total Experience has these purposes, to:

4. Create a community of practitioners via this blog and associated media

I’m the captain for our shakedown cruise, but in the future I’ll be recruiting co-authors to enrich Total Experience with diverse points of view and expertise. If you’re interested in participating, please send me an email. Be patient: my bandwidth is limited, but I will get back to you.

Thanks for joining me here at Total Experience. Please let me know how I can make your stay here more valuable and enjoyable. May your participation in Total Experience be a good experience, always.