I loved Bob's cute image in his June 28th post. I think I was so taken by the imagery and his personal story that I missed the significance of his incidental mentioning of the Adam Greefield piece. Just for diversity, I'm linking here to the original version as a contribution to Adobe's Think Tank series.

Of greatest significance:

...the time would appear to be ripe for a new kind of designer to take center stage...neither a "graphic" nor a "Web" nor even an "interaction" designer.

Over the past few years, the domain of practice known (if only briefly) as "user experience" has begun to accommodate the new realities...recasting itself as "experience design."

Adam then suggests why the transition is relevant:

...our technosocial practices have transcended the rather limited model of the "user" ultimately derived from old-school human-computer interaction studies...

One of the challenges with the piece, is that Adam makes sweeping assumptions as to what he believes Experience Design has resulted in. Indeed, there are always malappropriations of any discipline. But good Experience Design is flexible. Indeed, the primary focus is to recognize that not every scenario can be accounted for, so the design needs to be flexible enough to not rule out possiblities. The true focus of Experience Design is to design out barriers. We're the engineers of facilitating individual progress.

The examples Adam selects are very narrow in focus and his perspective of "Experience Designer" appears to be more in line with that of Joseph Pine's perspective (one that I have always taken issue with, as a predominant focus), where the goal is to 'create' an experience. My definition of Experience Design is to 'facilitate' an experience. Fortunately, Adam is effectively arguing for the same thing, but doesn't realize it. [I can also see how this 'disconnect' could have occurred as he got his inspiration from AIGA perspectives of the space/practice, which are often in line with the 'creationism' theory (e.g. reference to theatre).]

He specifically states the architectural goals I have been defending for over a decade, that the ultimate design goal:

...ought to allow people to swap their own desired components in and out at will, to pull data out in a useful format...

The latter was a point I tried to make to Bill Gates, face to face, in 1990 when I asked, "When are you going to separate your applications from the data they create?" The former was the point we made to a collection of vendors at an internal MCI data warehousing conference in 1996, when we asked them to break their applications apart into component functions and allow us to assemble them at will and put our own interface on the front. While akin to the SOA efforts going on, I have IBM architecture diagrams from the '80s that purport the same thing.

Both of these concepts are fundamental to 2.0 thinking. But they're not specific to just digital -- digital just happens to provide a great platform upon which to effectively exchange stuff and facilitate open conversations, with recall.

In the end, it's not about designing 'in' an experience it's about designing 'out' barriers to end goals (intents). It's about tying together things that are often considered in isolation from one another. And fundamentally it IS about the whole (contrary to comment 2 from the blog post suggesting that "holistic never ever works"). The disconnect comes to play in various ways that want to focus on the parts (budgets aligned to a piece of the whole, breadth of responsiblity/influence limited to a part of the process, akin to Seth Godin's 7 Reasons This Is Broken, the first one being, "Not My Job").

Experience Design is fundamentally a practice of synthesis, not analysis.

Image Credits: L!NA, Flickr