Adaptive Path Blog

My first homemade business card when I left design school looked like this:

10 years later my business card is a bit less crafty, but it does have something in common with that first card, a concern with designing for anything that moves. My current card identifies me as an Experience Designer.

In my initial vision of design for anything that moves, my passion was for designing things that change, transition, evolve during the time that people spend with them. The field was younger then, and I was immersed in creating all sorts of digital artifacts with time lines, from broadcast design to game design to narrative-based interaction design. “Anything that moves” was the right level of specificity to encompass all of these interests. (It was also a bit of a cheeky play on a magazine around at that time which explored a different sort of unbounded openness, Anything That Moves.)

Currently, in the design community, there is a bunch of discussions raging about what is an experience, how is an experience made and can an experience be designed, especially by someone called an experience designer. At the end of the day, I don’t feel so strongly about what anyone chooses to call themselves and even how they describe what they do.

For me, the word experience has been a proxy for things that people participate in, and with, that take place over time–experience design, then, for things that work to move, to dance with people through the time lines of their lives.

Thus, when I think about experience, I imagine what we take with us, what we leave behind, and that layer of soapy film that can never be fully washed off.

It does matter to me, that we, as designers, care about the role of time in our designs for people. We need to care about the first time, the last time, that one time, and every time. We need to care about free time, personal time, family time, spending time, and wasting time.

Experiences may be things that at the end of the day, only people can determine. That said, I’m not willing to abdicate my responsibility at the moment of the first bite. Like it or not, the after taste is also partly mine to imagine, invent, and participate in.

In these, the worst of times and perhaps the best of times, there is much to contribute. Very few designs are timeless.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 25th, 2009 at 4:43 pm and is filed under Conversations, Experience Design, Idealism (Uncensored). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.