The New York Times Magazine's special "Design 2004" issue (11/28/04) raises profound questions about experience design and how good is too good.
This issue is dedicated to design for children. A dozen articles describe one exciting experience design project after another...but connecting all the dots, the reader is left with the impression that a child's life is no longer his or her own. So intensely is daily experience designed, from marketing to prams to playground sets and lunch boxes -- even a child's ability to play sports!! What's left to discover?
The Times' redoubtable design writer, Ann Hulbert, describes the especially poignant condition of designed-for teens, who are already in the throes of trying to understand what about their world and themselves is genuine and what's not.
Fortunately, kids are resilient and inventive: they'll find the interstices where design leaves off and serendipity is in order. But adults for the most part aren't so creative. We can muse about the condition of our children and emerging adults, but what about us? There are no design ombudsmen to advocate for and defend adult victims of over-design, the pernicious effects of which one sees all too often as fads and collective bad judgment.
For example, the recent US presidential election, whichever side you were on, was a massive case of over-design, neglecting the authentic needs of real Americans as expressed through grassroots organizations largely neglected by the established party bureaucracies. Experience designers (marketers, TV producers, pollsters, guerrilla political activists, the 527-funded media developers) ran rampant. Can anyone say the results were good? That America stands stronger and more united as a result? Hardly.
If our fundamental machinery for governance can be so misused, what about lesser social processes: fashion, home-design, social infrastructure, education, self-imagery? Championing experience design doesn't relieve one of the ethical charge to see its power used wisely. Maybe one of the reasons why experience design hasn't been clearly delineated is the freedom that invisibility gives its practitioners to not worry much about ethical canons. That there are no canons of ethical experience design screams with a loud silence.
Images: Oregon State U. (children), Clay Towne (cartoon), MSNBC (politicos)
BOB JACOBSON is fascinated by the experience of experience. A planner and technologist, Bob has a Ph.D. in Urban Planning & Design from UCLA. He's been a policy researcher, technology CEO, science writer, and consultant. As a Fulbright Scholar, he studied cellular telephony's impacts on transborder communities in the Nordic Arctic Circle. Bob edited Information Design (MIT Press 2000) and is now writing a book on the theory and practice of creating edifying, transformative experiences.
PAULA THORNTON says, "Understanding human behavior (economics), optimizing interactions (design) and facilitating conversations (markets), are the means to achieve strategic differentiation. This is the focus of our discipline. It is not a 'nice to have'‚ and is not, like documentation once was, an afterthought. It is the means by which to start a strategic discussion and the means by which to drive a tactical initiative. All design should be evidence-based."
