What is the experience of a run down a mountain on a snowboard? It depends on the weight and material qualities of the board, the bindings and your boots, the snow conditions the weather, the terrain, the temperature of air in your hair, your skill level, your current state of mind, the mood and expressions of your companions (Buchenau and Suri, 2000, p.1).

Experience-centred design in HCI is a design philosophy that focuses on the experiential relationships that people have with technology. It is a holistic and humanist approach that challenges the idea of ‘users’ of technology and many of the assumptions of the positivistic ‘sciencey’ approach of traditional HCI practice. But for us to get a proper handle on what is meant by the term, it makes sense to ask, where did it come from? And what do we mean when we say experience?

In the first part of their book ‘Experience-Centered Design’ Peter Wright and John McCarthy answer these questions. Situating it in the history of HCI, they credit its rise in popularity to the general ‘turn-to-practice’ in third-wave HCI and the shift in focus from workplaces to the domestic and leisure spheres. Wright and McCarthy interestingly argue that an experiential lens has always been implied in HCI in some sense, thanks to HCI’s humanist focus on ‘the potential for technology to enhance and transform people’s lives.’

Tracing the evolution of experience-centered design from simply thinking in terms of usability and ‘end users’ to scenario-based field methods with iterative prototyping to Scandinavian participatory design processes, the authors also mark an evolution in thought in HCI from Cartesian and cognitivist conceptions of mind and body, to a more holistic and constructivist one. Here they express a meaning of experience heavily inspired by John Dewey’s pragmatism, one that defines experience as an irreducible and actively constructed act of sense making.

The idea here is that our experiences are more than our bodily actions and thoughts in the world, but that they are constructed by ourselves, co-constructed with others, that they are always emotionally connected to situations and are always in flux. It is a very slippery idea to get a handle of, and the temptation is to want to chop experience up into smaller more manageable bits that we can measure and assess against (as has been attempted many a time). But to do so is to miss the true nature of experience, that every experience is dependent upon an infinitude of factors and histories and can only be properly understood in that full context.

When expressed like this, it seems a terrifying task for a designer to look at experience and think, ‘how on earth can I begin to capture something so massive and mutable? And that’s before I even start to design for it!’ I must admit, that although my own humanist views of experience and my own philosophical position on mind and body are in most ways in sympathy with this conception of experience, I am at a loss as how to proceed in experience-centered design. This question excites me a lot however. I guess I’ll have to read the rest of the book.