This long Memorial Day weekend, I've set myself the goal of describing Experience.
During the last year, searching for a deeper understanding of Experience, I've intensively read, in articles, on blogs, and in exchanges of email, how designers of experience speak about experience. Almost universally, when experience designers -- whatever their medium, in the material or synthetic worlds -- speak of Experience, they do so in behavioral, almost clinical terms. Just as automotive engineers mostly concern themselves with cylinders and pistons, rather than the wonder of combustion and the production of power -- a marvelous alchemy -- experience designers typically conceive of Experience objectively. They usually begin designing with an idea of the outcomes that they seek already in mind -- some thought or action they hope to catalyze. To serve these purely instrumental goals, the designers needn't engage in subjective discourse with their audiences. They don't share their audiences' subjective gestalt. The designers just "get it"; then they design. They wax eloquent on the subjectivity of Experience, however, when describing their own experiences.
Why are experience designers' conceptions of Experience -- the first as an instrumental goal to be enacted by others, the second as an inviolate personal asset -- so separate and even at odds? The reason lies in our field's tendency not to consider Experience as something that needs comprehension. Like the followers of a deity in worship, designers accept Experience's salience and form on faith. The result is an unintentional dichotomy in our practice: we design for others' experiences differently and less passionately than we seek out experiences for ourselves.
My goal over the next five days is to characterize Experience as other than an instrumental endgame. Because there are many categories of experiences and different modalities for experiencing them, my description of Experience won't be as a monolithic phenomenon but rather as a mosaic of phenomena. As I write, I can think of four paradigmatic domains in which Experience is a central topic: philosophy, spirituality, cognitive science (including environmental psychology), and design (especially interaction design and the design of virtual worlds). There may be more. Each understands and applies Experience within a different framework of meanings, interpretations, and traditions. I don't expect to find easy correlations among these domains and their traditions, but I believe that at a high enough level of abstraction, the concept of Experience becomes transcendent and unifying. If this is true, then the lessons learned designing experiences in a domain of greater subjectivity (for example, philosophy or spirituality) will be applicable to the design of experiences in domains less obviously so.
That's my goal. Check in over the weekend to see how close I come.
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."
