IT WASN'T UNTIL PAGE 20 OF MY GOOGLE SEARCH ON THE WORD, “EXPERIENCE,” that I first found a reasonably objective description of its meaning. The preceding 19 pages were filled with commercial claptrap, notices of events, and bloganeering claims to own the term. Too many were advertisements selling ways to create and control experience (often meaning, the banality of Web surfing). The hubris of this foolish cacophony spoke for itself.
Different traditions have different ways of categorizing experience. For the spiritual and the formally religious, it's the peregrinations of the soul. Professionals of a more scientific bent situate experience in the same realm as perception and cognition, physical and psychic processes built into human beings and other living things that are, even to the scientistis, frankly still a mystery. Then there are the opportunists who take experience for granted and forge ahead with the project of altering minds by tripping people out with “new” and “better” experiences (at least in their own estimation).
Excuse my candor, but from my perspective, it's incumbent on those who are attempting to engineer new experiences (and even more, those who claim success in this effort), to get down to the epistemology of experience: how we truly can understand what we're doing when we play with people's hearts and minds. Pragmatists in our “experience design” community will dismiss this as so much philosophical noodling: “There are things to be done, we don't have time to count the angels on a pin!” Au contraire. So far the field has been whirling crazily, processing from one axis to another, searching for anchor points that constantly elude it.
From a market perspective -- and what else matters in capitalist thinking? -- it's enough to create MySpace and let the chips fall where they may, so long as there are subscribers. “The proof is in the pudding.” A pretty thick glop, it appears to me. From a social perspective, getting people off the dime, to take positive action is always an adequate rationale (the alternative being inertia) -- until one set of actions contradicts another, provoking strife, exploitation, social conflict...even war. From a spiritual perspective, edification is sufficient; but so, so elusive and most often, ephemeral.
I'm writing this provoked by yet another workshop on the design of experience (though that's not exactly what it's called, to fend off potential critics). It's a very hands-on enterprise, this time having to do with mobility and location-awareness. (In fact, there are several occurring that share this trendy theme.) The talk at the event predictably will be hither and yon, spiced with anecdotal evidence for one or another speaker's proximity to the truth about experience -- but it's all alchemy for now, like Ptolemy explaining the complex Earth-centric universe; or how lead can be transmuted into gold.
Maybe philosophical pondering about experience design wouldn't be a bad thing. Philosophy, after all, is the science of thinking.
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."
