Experiencing
Manita and Andy

Introduction

Within Design Thinking, the act of experience serves designers on a wide range of fronts. Designers have their own experiences, which they earn from their years of working in design. These years of crafting work and participating in designerly tasks have left many designers with a wide range of experiences to draw upon. In addition, designers have users experience to draw upon in order to enhance and refine their designs. By studying users, designers can achieve a greater grasp of their designs and what elements work and don’t work. In addition, experiencing refers to the way designers perceive the world around them with their senses. Experiencing refers to the way a user senses a space and many different senses a designer uses when studying a space. Experiences server a designer well and act as tools for the designer to draw upon when crafting their own designs.

Experiences and Using experiences in design thinking

Experience has a wide range of meaning. For Aristotle, experience is associated with two terms, memory, and sensation and perception. Both terms are the component of knowledge referring to men’s natural desires to know and constituting experience (Sukla, 2003, p.xii). Memory helps us to retain many sensations and perceptions of experiences. For him, experience is ‘the permanence of a cognition acquired cumulatively and retained in memory’ (ibid, p.xii). On the other hand, Descartes argues that there is the possibility of an experience of the subject without any external object. For example, one may experience an illusion, a ghost that can not be seen and then proof. Moreover, experience may not always be perceptual because the subject and the object can have a direct contact. This could refer to the encounter generating from instinct. Other means of knowledge constitute experience are such as inference, testimony and analogy. Therefore, such an unknown or unverified encounter is also experience that is not necessary to associate with knowledge.

In the design field, experience means in a similar way but is articulated with the relation of designers and users by which an object or a product is a reflective agent. In this sense, experience means the sensations, feelings, desires, aspirations and social relation that arise through our interactions with the designed world (Press and Cooper, 2003, p.70). Knowledge gained from experiences in design should be valid and verifies in order to design a product.

Understanding user experiences for design process

‘What people seek is not the meaning of life but the experience of being alive’.

Joseph Campbell

The commercial failure in most design ideas is to fail the meaningful or effective connection with people’s lives. Press and Cooper (2003, p.69) wrote that a person who designs an object is not just a creator, but is ‘an enabler of experiences’: it is the idea of experience used as a starting point and focus on design. So the idea of experience is important to shape the design process.

For this section, I examine how user experiences help to shape the design process. In design industry, a customer is the first priority. The successful design is to fulfill the requirement of a customer’s preference. John Cain points out the important missing point in the design process is everyday experiences of a customer’s use after handing over a product (ibid, p.69). This becomes the design problem based experiences forcing designers back to examine users’ behavior during using. Such an on-going problem is a ‘wicked problem’ since people’s behaviors can change according to the social context. Experience from products’ use, therefore, changes the direction of design problem.

It is important to understand people’s behavior and social use context to form the idea of designing. Press and Cooper (2003) suggest the properties and experiences for designers to consider in design thinking, which are:

The first step is to understand the human experience involved with a product’s function. For example, our physical action changes depend on the device used for writing. A computer provides us with its concepts of writing and transforms us with the new writing experience. The signification of product signified social group membership is the second properties. For example, iMac’s users may be identified with the creative or thinking-different thought. This can be said that identity of users is defined through using iMac. As well as for some owners, iMac becomes a fashion and an accessory that signifies sexual identity or activity and differentiates user’s groups. These can enhance their self-images as well. Sexuality, thus, is considered as a user experience in different sexes. Besides, in this sense, Knowledge means a product that contains knowledge, maps, timetables, or books. It is how knowledge products facilitate all kinds of human experiences and change their behaviors, including an environment, for example working in the train by using iMac. Another property is aesthetics, style or form of the products, that influences users’ emotional response and decision making. This aestheticisation makes products become the material culture. Finally, the property of mediation is the ability of a product enabling us to communicate, to contact and to engage with people. However, not all products involve any form of mediation. Each product has its degree to the extent of social contact. iMac has a form of mediation: social connection occurs through online chatting or discussion forum, and it can lead to face-to-face iMac cub.

All the properties and experience of a product, iMac as an example, offer a new set of different experiences that change the way of our uses and behaviors, and vice versa, the design industry market employs people’s applications and experiences to shape and develop its designed product as well. Briefly, it may say that experience based design is an actively reflective process that requires the active participation of users and designers as co-designers of the new product.

Understanding space by experiencing: in aural architecture
In this section, I introduce an experiencing of spaces by one of those senses, hearing. Apart from experiencing spaces by seeing that we usually do, there is also by listening. Listening is different from hearing because it is not just aware of sound with your ears but is to pay attention to something or somebody that you hear (Oxford Dictionary, 2005). Listening in aural architecture can assist us to gain different dimensions of spatial understanding and has the capacity to enhance or diminish a quality of living. Experiencing in aural spaces does not require special skills because all human being can do it. In the book ‘Spaces Speak, Are you Listening?’(Blesser and Salter, 2007) explains people have ability to sense spaces by listening. An object like a flat wall reflects its echo sound from a hand cap to listener. The hearing of echo is determined by the distance of the wall to our ears. The wall plays an important part of listening experience and becomes an audible manifestation that gives the listener acoustic cues to visualize spatial geometry and objects. The space formed by listening through echo suggests the existence of the wall. ‘See with ours ears’ said the authors.
Experiencing by listening in aural architecture has many types. According to Blesser and Salter (2007), there are at least five types of spatiality: social, musical, navigation, aesthetic, and symbolic. However, only social and musical will be given as the examples; the former associated with a built environment represents an aural experience of social boundary; and the later is an aural experience through a natural environment. How could we experience social space? Basically, we acknowledge visually social spaces through boundaries distinguishing spaces between private and public spaces. The body of building, walls, windows, and surfaces, come to play and influence the movement of space flows that enable us to understand it. On the other hand, sounds can be acknowledged only if it flows thought the opening. The given example (figure 1.) illustrates the openness of the window destroys aural boundary of a violinist living inside the building and it consolidates aural public and private into a single aural space. The moment that the window is opened changes our aural experience from quiet sound to loud and annoying sounds, but such an experience can be controlled by a person, or an aural architect as the authors put it. Therefore, such an aural experience enables us to perceive the social boundaries and contexts, and the boundaries of who experience it.

Figure 1: Hogarth’s Enraged Musician.
Source: Courtesy of Graphic Arts Collection, Princeton University, from ‘Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? Experiencing Aural Architecture, Blesser and Salter, 2006

Another example illustrates an experience in soundscape associated with sound and acoustics of place where contributes to hearing. Emily Thompson (2002) describes it as ‘simultaneously a physical environment and a way of perceiving that environment . . . both a world and a culture constructed to make sense of that world’’. Her definition clearly explains that is the relation of practices and institutions and the production and representation of the sounds of a place. Grotto of Jeita in Lebanon (figure2.) is a glistening subterranean world of natural acoustics (ibid, p.180). With the natural acoustics, the experiences of listeners are differently multisensory since the effects of space dominant the direction of the sound. As Michael Kurtz (1992), cited by Blesser and et al., stated that the acoustics of cave had their own role play; the reverberation of sound along the rock walls created experiences that had never experienced in normal concert hall. Likewise, space that we perceive through hearing tells us that is not a single large space, but is space consisted of a combination of multiple connected spaces, a natural space. Therefore, such an experience in this place is described ‘as being in an altered state…’ (Berezan, 2000), cited by Blesser, et al..

Figure 2: Stockhausen’s performance of “Stimmung” in the Jeita Cave near Beirut.
Source: Courtest of the Archives of Stockhausen Foundation for Music, from ‘Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? Experiencing Aural Architecture, Blesser and Salter, 2006

Architectures and sounds shape our experience. When we encounter sound whether knowingly or unknowingly, we actually are engaged with its environment or the structure that constitutes different experiences as the given examples above, aural architecture and natural architecture. The auditory experience of space not only enhances the perception and the quality of listening to music or voice in that environment but it can change the mood of the listeners, affect their spatial orientation. Besides, the collection of experiences from aural perceptions of spaces would be helpful in architectural design field. Experience thus becomes accumulative knowledge for architects in design thinking.

Designer Experience Verse User Experience

In design thinking, there are two types of experiences that should be analyzed and studied. The first is the experience of the designer; looking at the background and former experiences that an individual has gone through and how that’s shaped them as a designer. The second would be the experiences that the end-user, the person using the product, are going to encounter once they start using the product. In both of them experience acts as a form of language. For a designer, “As he develops his language of design, in other words, settles on a vocabulary of forms or types of solution and a manner in which he repeatedly uses them…” (Green 24) and the same stands true for language of the “user” or groups of users. Both types speak different languages because of their own, unique backgrounds.

Designer Experience: Varied Backgrounds

One example of experience being used as a design tool steams from designers looking into their own past and using their own experiences and stories as a means to frame future designs. “Stories have helped us ground the design of a new system in the users’ business context and environment by immersing designers and developers in the situations in which their systems will be used.“ (Gruen et al. 504) Designers ask themselves throughout the process how the end product is going to be used and what they’re going to be used for. Stories serve different points, principally, as a starting off point, a “what if?” Through investigation of narrative, designers allow themselves the chance to investigate, step-by-step, how a product is intended to work. “If designers can describe what they are doing, and why a they are doing it, they can then evaluate their designs to see whether they had the intended outcome.“ (Robinson 6) Stories also act as areas for which collaborative design can begin with a team.
Particularly in a design team, each designer has their own background and their own experience. Sometimes the only thing a group of designers have in common is the fact that they are designers. Collaboration “Likewise, …, whether it be for the web or for the macrophysical world, invariably entails collaborative production—between different designers, engineers, computer scientists, writers, etc.” (McKenzie 134) Different backgrounds and different points of opinion all stem from the different experiences that designers have created, dealt with, and overcome in the past. A designer with experience graphic arts is bound to approach a problem differently than someone with experience in computer programming, architecture, or broadcasting and there’s a chance that both designers would be on the same design team. Also designers of different levels of design experience may be on similar teams. In teams, “if the purpose is to develop a useful repertoire of design approaches based on previous endeavors, and therefore avoid the pitfalls of the past, the student may miss this point…” (Robinson Experience of different designers serves as tools for which teams or individuals can draw from to create better concepts, and by extension, better products.

User Experience: Before and After

The User Experience acts as an interesting factor in design thinking. It provides both as data from past products for which designers can use in the creation of their own designs and it can also be used as a vision for an end product. In terms of data, users can be invaluable in providing information designers need. “To design a system that will delight, provide value, and “feel right,” designers and engineers need a deep understanding of the people for whom they are designing, their goals and values, the settings in which they live and work, and their activities.” (Gruen et al 503) Knowing how individual’s work and act can be achieved through a variety of ways such as surveying, questionnaires, or direct observation of an individual or a group. In this process of obtaining information, designers act like scientists by theorizing, establishing a means to measure and experiment, and then gathering data before processing it. “Experience design also results in the creation of cognitive and affective models that define personal identity through dynamic relationships. In many forms of experience design, memory becomes the catalyst for defining these relationships.” (Search 50) Gathered data and recalling how a user acts in situations will direct the way a designer works.
User Experience also acts as an end point. “Thinking about a specific person performing an activity in detail and asking, “How can my tool help the most at each point” can point to features and functionalities that were not part of the initial conception of the product.” (Gruen et al. 508) During the design process, thinking about how users actually use a product is bound to influence the design almost as much as observation would. Designing using a users experience and perspective then becomes a balancing act. On one hand, there’s the information that he gather and on the other, there’s what he believes will happen. When designing an end users experience, it’s important to take a look at the past data but also to extrapolate upon that information and anticipate what would a concept even more efficient. The process becomes cyclical. A designer observes a user with a product, designs the product to according to how he believes the user would like to use it, then he’s going to observe again to see if his analysis was correct.

Interface Design

“Experience design focuses on the user’s overall experience of interacting with the interface.” (McKenzie124) What experience marks in the design process is how the user interacts with the final product. While it’s important to look at the before and after experience, the “during” experience, the actual use of a product, is translated to the user through the products interface. It’s important for designers to think about interface when they’re creating a product. “While we may easily recognize the interfaces of such household gadgets as blenders and remote controls, interfaces surround our public lives as well: ATM machines, phone booths, copiers, elevators, automatic hand dryers, roadway signage, the surface of the road itself, even the meeting of foot and ground—all these can be considered as interfaces.” (McKenzie 123) Interfaces are everywhere. They are the gateway to a users experience with a product. While they come in a variety of different forms, all interfaces are dependant on the user and in a way, a successful interface, and by extension, a successful experience, depend on a successful, symbiotic relationship between user and the product. “Viewers create their own reality through memory and exploration.” (Search 50) Within a successful interface, viewers are given paths to interact with and experiment with. Sometimes those paths are as simple as a button or as complex as a computers operating interface but all successful interfaces enable the user direct to system or product they’re experiencing.

References

Press, M., & Cooper (2003), The design experience: the role of design and designers in the twenty- first century, Published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Blesser, B., & Salter, L. R., (2006), Spaces speak, are you listening?: experiencing aural architecture
Published by MIT Press.

Sukla, A., C., (2003), Art and experience, published by Greenwood Publishing Group.

Thompson, E., (2002), The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933,The MIT Press. Journal of Architectural Education, Volume 61, Issue 4 (p 139-141)

Search, Patricia. “The Dynamic Discourse of Visual Literacy in Experience Design.” TechTrends. March/April 2009. Volume 53. pp 50-54.

Gruen, Dan. Rauch, Thyra. Redpath, Sarah. Ruettinger, Stefan. “The Use of Stories in User Experience Design.” International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction. 14(3&4). 2002. pp 503–534.

McKenzie, Jon. “Towards a Sociopoetics of Interface Design: etoy, eToys, TOYWAR.” Strategies, Vol. 14, No. 1, 2001. pp 120 – 139.

Robinson, Julia Williams. Weeks, J. Stephen. “Programming as Design.” JAE, Vol. 37, No. 2 (Winter, 1983). Blackwell Publishing. pp 5-11.

Green, Cedric. “Playing Design Games.” Source: JAE, Vol. 33, No. 1, Gaming (Sep., 1979), Blackwell Publishing. pp. 22-26.

(2005) Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, 7th ed., Oxford University Press.