Experience Design

Definition:
Experience design is the practice of designing products, processes, services, events, and environments with a focus placed on the quality of the user experience and culturally relevant solutions.

An emerging discipline, experience design draws from many sources including product design, graphic and information design, information architecture, cognitive psychology and perceptual psychology,linguistics, cognitive science, architecture and environmental design, haptics, ethnography, brand management, interaction design, service design, storytelling, heuristics, and design thinking.

In its commercial context, experience design is driven by consideration of the moments of engagement, or touchpoints, between people and brands, products, services, and events, and the ideas,emotions, and memories that these moments create.

Experience Designer Ronald Jones describes the practice as working across disciplines, often furthest from their own creating a relevant integration between concepts, methods and theories. Experience designers such as Nathon Shedroff design experiences over time with real and measurable consequences; time is their medium. According to Jones, the mission of Experience Design is "to persuade, stimulate, inform, envision, entertain, and forecast events, influencing meaning and modifying human behavior."

There is a debate occurring in the experience design community regarding its focus, provoked in part by design scholar and practitioner, Don Norman. Norman claims that when designers describe people only as customers, consumers, and users and designers risk diminishing their ability to do good design. Given that experience is so totally an affective, subjective, and personal process -- not an abstract --- it would be ironic, it's been argued, for experience designers, when designing experiences, to approach people merely as objects of commerce or cogs in a machine. Experience design, perhaps more than other forms of design, is transactive and transformative: every experience designer is an experiencer; and every experiencer, via his or her reactions, a designer of experience in turn.

Nathan Shedroff says: There are, at least, 6 dimensions to experiences: Time/Duration, Interactivity, Intensity, Breadth/Consistency, Sensorial and Cognitive Triggers, and Significance/Meaning. Together, these create an enornous palette of possibilities for creating effective, meaningful, and successful experiences.

References:
1. Aarts, Emile H. L.; Stefano Marzano (2003). The New Everyday: Views on Ambient Intelligence. 010 Publishers, 46. ISBN 9789064505027.
2. "Ronald Jones". Konstfack Vårutställning 2008. Retrieved on 2008-10-03.
3. "Words Matter. Talk About People: Not Customers, Not Consumers, Not Users". Don Norman's jnd website. Retrieved on 2008-10-03.
4. Steve Diller, Nathan Shedroff, Darrel Rhea (2005): Making Meaning: How Successful Businesses Deliver Meaningful Customer Experiences. New Riders Press ISBN 0321374096
5. Nathon Shedroff's website: http://www.nathan.com/ed/index.html