I’m a new student of “Experience Design”. Can you really design experiences?

One of the books I discovered in my flat a few months ago was the best-selling ‘The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’ (by Stephen Covey). The book advocates the idea of a life that is governed by “principles”, by which positive outcomes are the natural product of this way of living, and not necessarily the aim. So according to Covey, a life led by positive principles leads to positive outcomes. A similar approach can be taken towards design, in terms of experience. The idea is similar: a designer focused on human experience of the finished object, rather than “designing an object”, will produce superior work.

I’ve just started to read Bill Buxton’s ‘Sketching User Experiences’. Here’s a quotation from Buxton’s website:

Ultimately, we are deluding ourselves if we think that the products that we design are the “things” that we sell, rather than the individual, social and cultural experience that they engender, and the value and impact that they have. Design that ignores this is not worthy of the name.

For me this is a totally new and very exciting way of looking at design.

We live in terms of experiences. We are surrounded by objects that give us an experience. Le Corbusier’s opening line in his 1923 book, ‘Vers une architecture’ (towards a new architecture), is “a house is a machine for living in“. I think this is a good approach to architecture. A house is a machine for living in, and a house is populated by various other man-made things such as a bed, a bookcase, a bedside table, a lamp. We experience a lamp when we attempt to turn it on and off. We experience a bed when we lie on it. We experience a bookcase when we put our books in it. If we can identify the components of what makes an experience good, then experiences are designable.

Objects we choose to surround ourselves with are, on the whole, man made; and they are objects which we have selected ourselves. We select these objects because they are easy to use, cheap, practical, aesthetically-pleasing, or all of these things. In other words, we choose to surround ourselves with objects that give us a pleasant experience. A designer who designs with this experience in mind is looking at the top of the hierarchy of everything a designer should be thinking about. Design exists to give human beings a good experience, whether it’s an entire city, a map to navigate the city, a dictionary, or a clear dictionary typeface.

I think a big enemy for designers is distraction, or approaching a problem with an existing agenda or idea in mind. Role-models (i.e. famous graphic designers, artists, architects) and inspirational objects (i.e. examples of existing examples that you admire by famous graphic designers, artists, architects) can distract and obscure, rather than clarify and help. By focusing on experience, the designer has a clear canvas. Good experience is the aim, and it doesn’t matter how you reach this aim. It includes both function and aesthetics, as both are necessary for a good experience, and both are necessary for a good design.

Experience design is very relevant to mobile design, and even more so as the small screen attempts an increasingly ambitious portfolio of capabilities that the desktop/laptop computer can already do. Designing applications that provide the user with a delightful experience is one thing. Working out how to deal with the desktop-scaled web on a small screen is another. I’m looking forward to giving this more thought…