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DESIGNING EXPERIENCE
Experience design is an expanding discipline that orchestrates the balance and
flow of a participant’s thoughts, sensations, emotions and behaviors. It
is not the experience itself that is designed but the conditions of engagement through which experiences form. Museums exhibitions,
zoos, theme park rides, guided adventure experiences, participatory events, tours, computer-simulated environments, retail
spaces, restaurants, are only a few examples of designed experiences. The most successful of these are a well knit interweaving
of arts and sciences. Experience design emerges from a variety of disciplines including: environmental design, information
design, cognitive science, social psychology, behavioral science, interaction design, architecture, ergonomics, product design,
storytelling, brand strategy and service design and countless artistic disciplines. The relatively new focus on experience design is somewhat perplexing. It may be an indication
that we are just now recognizing the potential in interweaving the multitude of conditions that we inhabit and use.
What is particularly telling about the term experience design is that it admits to our extreme condition of
immersion in a designed world.
 Countless diagrams and charts attempt
to identify the components of experience. Very few, if any, are the same, exposing the
relative nature of the subject. While non-designed experiences have become
quite rare, it may be the lack of an interrelated organization of designed experiences that makes the notion of experience
design desirable. Perhaps it emerges from the age-old dream of finding order and meaning in the world. More and more, new
technologies allow us to manage the components of our environment and therefore our experiences in those environments. The
only surprise should be that the term experience design has not emerged sooner. One might speculate that, partly
due to a consciousness of interconnected systems growing in the sciences in the mid and late twentieth century as well as
an explosive unfolding of technologies for both capturing, reassembling and delivering content, there emerged a fertile
environment for thinking about experience as a combination of parts that could be designed and constructed.
Designing and controlling experiences has become an obsession in big business and politics. In many ways its always been like
that. Much has been written about the way religions shape experience, but only
now are we seeing experience design as an occupation. Just like the term “interactive”,
which gained new significance as real life interactions were displaced by virtual ones, experience becomes popular
at a point when so much of it is manufactured. Our insatiable desire for more may actually be a symptom of deprivation.
MWB 2010
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