« Effective design of experience requires the application of constraints |
Main
| What is experience? Comments from the readers »
May 21, 2007
Cooper-Hewitt's National Design Awards for 2007: where's experience design?
Posted by Bob Jacobson
Cooper-Hewitt, the National Museum of Design at the Smithsonian Institution, has announced the National Design Awards for 2007.
Without taking away anything from the wonderful designs and their designers, whom Cooper-Hewitt has justly honored, it's still rather amazing that all of the awards are for discrete physical, environmental, or media artifacts. There is no category for design that incorporates all of these elements to create an holistic designed experience. This year's awards reify our conventional notions of design and ignore the emergence and importance of integrated design in the service of experience.
The Design Mind Award for Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi comes closest. Brown and Venturi, practitioners and theoreticians of full-fledged experience design (in the guise of architecture) have labored long and hard to promote an holistic approach to design from the standpoint of “experiencers.” Cooper-Hewitt's appreciation of their advocacy is overdue but welcome at last.
The National Design Awards, by the way, are sponsored by the retailer Target, one of the arch-proponents of customer experience design. Target's take on the importance of holistic design is worth reading.
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Commentary | ED Projects of Note
POST A COMMENT
- RELATED ENTRIES
- › Making Lemonade
- › Amazon Kindle: Video Review
- › Davos 2008: Collaborative Innovation at the Global Country Club
- › Designing Today for a Very Different Tomorrow: Suggestions for the coming Age of Austerity
- › Designing Today for a Very Different Tomorrow: The coming Age of Austeriy
- › Amazon Kindle: A New Experience Channel
- › Shine Doesn't Matter
- › Prisoners in the Digital Panopticon: The Experience of Constant Surveillance -- Or, When Bad Things Beckon to Good Designers
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."
