Experience Centred Design: Whats all the fuss about?

This week I read Wright et al’s paper Aesthetics and Experience-Centred Design [1].

The authors build on Graves Peterson’s pragmatist framework for understanding aesthetics as an additional complementary perspective on user-centered design. By utilising the rich philosophical underpinnings of pragmatism, aesthetics-based design enables the design of interfaces that explore the concepts of playfulness, surprise and enchantment. An experience, when seen through this lens, is a unique blend of the interplay between user, context, culture, and history. The experience is a ‘felt’ one. This is in sharp contrast to other approaches which try to make interfaces seductive and appealing regardless of the context of use, culture, history or user.

Drawing on the work of the stellar 20th century pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, the authors present three themes to understand aesthetic experiences in understanding people’s interactions with technology:

1. Holistic approach: the intellectual, sensual, and emotional stand as equal partners in experience.
2. Continuous engagement and sense-making: each self brings personal and cultural meanings to every interaction and completes the experience through acts of sense-making.
3. Relational approach: the self, object and setting are always in dialogue and thus the experience is never finalised, but always ever-forming.

Using one of the authors (Jayne Wallace) own case studies, they demonstrate how experience-centred design principles play out in practice. Wallace designed a piece of digital jewelry for a participant, through an iterative design process while immersing herself thoroughly in the process so as to “engage with the puzzle presented to her” and “connect aspects of interactions that resonate with her”.

When presenting the case study, the authors show decisively that if they had shunned the experience-centred approach and had treated it like a user-centred one, the participant would not have gained such a rich experience that evoked varied emotions, and guided the participant’s sense-making in unique ways. By utilising ambiguity in design, and evoking existential musings such as the “fleeting qualities of many of our experience”, the designer was able to break the boundaries imposed by traditional design practices.

Wright, McCarthy and Wallace present a strong defence for their premise of the value in experience-centred design. Their argument that felt life and human experience need to be placed at the centre of good design theory and practice, is one that needs to be listened to.

            Applying this in my own research, when designing cross-cultural technological solutions aimed at low tech-literacy contexts, it is often a temptation to generalise an “average user” scenario, and design a “one size fits all” template. Wright et al. demonstrate the fallacious reasoning underlying such a paradigm. Every user is unique, every experience is a unique one, but to cater to each of them, while balancing the challenge of overwhelming the client is a difficult one, but worth pursuing nonetheless.

References

[1]      P. Wright, J. Wallace, and J. McCarthy, “Aesthetics and experience-centered design,” ACM Trans. Comput. Interact., vol. 15, no. 4, pp. 1–21, 2008.