Brad Lauster's (e²)

Comment: Emotions ≠ Experiences

A comment I posted on nundroo™:

"Sorry, but I'm going to nit pick. When you say you can't design happiness, satisfaction or frustration, you're talking about not being able to design emotions, and I agree. We can't design emotions. I also agree that experiences are tied to emotions in that our emotions are the manifestation of our experiences. But dismissing experience design because we can't design emotions seems unsound. An experience is not equivalent to an emotion, nor is there even a 1:1 relationship between the two.

Now, I'm not saying that experiences can be designed. Lately, my position on whether we can or can not design an experience vacillates daily. The more I read about neuroscience, the more I think we can design an experience....but I digress.

My point here is not to argue for what it should be called, but to help us make sure that, in this time of definition, we are clear with our words."

Design as Experience Placebo

Randy Dotinga's Wired.com article, Why Sugar Pills Cure Some Ills, made me wonder if design could be used as an experience placebo?

That is, could a person's perception that a product, service, object or system has been "designed" have a positive affect on the person's experience with the product, service, object or system?

This also brings up the question of whether or not design processes will become part of a product's marketing collateral? Will certain design methodologies or even user-centered (or any other philosophical approaches to) design ever become mainstream enough to be advertised?

Personal shout-out: David Spiegel, who is quoted in the article, runs the Stanford Emotional Coding Lab, at which I volunteer occasionally.

Peterme's Model of Attention

Peter Merholz created a nice model of the human attention system. Check it out.

Phenomenological Foundations of Cognition, Language, and Computation

CS378: Phenomenological Foundations of Cognition, Language, and Computation

I guess you could say I'm not so much auditing this class as I am reading along. I'm only about 20 pages into the book, but I can't imagine not recommending it when I'm done - sheer brilliance. It blows me away that Flores and Winograd were thinking about this stuff in 1985!

Emotional about design

I'm always skeptical about articles with no attributed author. Emotional about design is one such article. I imagine the entire thing was written by some grunt at NNG, or perhaps by Don himself.

None-the-less, the article discusses the premise of Don Norman's book, Emotional Design in a nice little package. I suppose I'll review it when I get around to reading it. Right now, I'm more into Husserl and Heidegger.

Erik Davis on Experience Design

Erik Davis' Experience Design And the Design of Experience is the single best piece I've read on the subject.

Not only does he offer a sublime definition of experience,

"…let’s just think of human experience as the phenomenal unfolding of awareness in real time"

…but he also touches on some powerful, related topics such as recreational drug use, spirituality and also scary shit like the manipulation of desire for the purpose of advertising.

Additionally, much of what he writes suggests an increasing need for Design Ethicists—a topic in which I'm surprised to find myself very interested.

Nathan Shedroff: the v-2 interview

From back in 2002, Adam Greenfield interviews Nathan Shedroff [part 1, part 2].

I had high hopes that this interview would address the problem that there exists no general theory of or approach to Experience Design. Shedroff gets close to discussing it a couple times during the interview, but Greenfield keeps pulling him away with his Information Architecture obsession. Arrgh!

The extent of what Shedroff says about an approach to Experience Design is (imagine a lot of hand waving here), "You just consider the experience." Utterly unsatisfying.

Even if they had discussed it directly, I suspect it wouldn't have been very meaningful, simply because both Greenfield and Shedroff seemed much more concerned with other topics during the interview.

Notes on Kant and Locke

Some notes on Kant and Locke from the book, Understanding Emerson : "The American Scholar" and His Struggle for Self-Reliance. I think these are all from page 8.

John Lock introduced the idea of the mind as tabula rasa, a blank tablet, and held that consciousness is shaped largely by external experience.

Immanuel Kant:

• Critique of Pure Reason (1781)
• Observed that metaphysicians (Locke) were unable to show how external objects shape human perception
• "if the material world appears knowable, it is because the human mind makes it so"
• The categories of understanding that are intuitive to us all determine the way we perceive what we call reality

…and a bonus quote from James Freeman Clarke: "until Coleridge showed me from Kant that though knowledge begins with experience, it does not come from experience"

Nature of Experience Model

I created this last year, before I read anything about linguistics, cognition or human experience. That's my way of saying this is probably very wrong, but it's at least a good tool for thinking about the relationship between the three.

(click for a larger image)

Brian Knutson

I also saw Brian Knutson speak at Stanford recently.

Brian is interested in the neural basis of emotion and runs the Symbiotic Project on Affective Neuroscience. (Psychologists use the word "affect" to describe mood states and personality traits characterized both by high arousal and either positive or negative valence.)

Brian is also interested in the convergence of disciplines brought about by his research. I'm going to see if I can speak with him about design.

Ian Gotlib

I saw Ian Gotlib speak at Stanford last Saturday. He gave an excellent presentation about his work on depression.

During his talk, Ian mentioned a Dr. Brown who "literally wrote the book" on mood/memory congruence (and who was in the audience). I must be sure to get more information about this guy.

John Gabrieli

Last week, I attended a talk by John Gabrieli at Stanford's Symbolic Systems Forum.

John is the director of the Gabrieli Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory. He discussed some of his work using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to study the regulation of thoughts, emotions and memories in the human brain.

Cool stuff. Obviously, thought, emotion and memory are related to human experience, but I'm not yet sure how they fit together with experience and design.

Two Types of Experiences

From Philosophy in the Flesh:

The book suggests that there are two types of experiences:

1. Subjective
2. Sensorimotor

My interpretation of these goes like this: the subjective experiences are those related to emotions (such as, I experienced desire) and sensorimotor experiences are those that involve external stimuli (such as, I experienced pain).

About Brad Lauster's (e²)

The first time I ever heard someone use the term Experience Design was in 2000. It was a powerful, no duh moment for me. Of course Designers should be thinking about and solving problems in even more holistic ways than those enabled by current User-Centered Design methods!

Soon after I was introduced to the idea, I was talking to Kim Ladin when Experience Design came up. Kim told me the whole thing was silly because you can't design an experience. My naive mind was thrown for a loop!

The first question I had was whether or not Kim was right. A little exploration uncovered some writing by Liz Sanders of Sonic Rim. Her two-part article Beyond User-Centered Design [part 1, part 2] quickly confirmed, for me, that Kim was right. Experiencing is in people, not in what we design.

The second question I had was: how could the Design community, a group of people who seemed to be more concerned with being right than anyone, have named the future of their practice with such a misnomer? To this day, Designers continue to use Experience Design to refer to the next logical area of focus for their profession. Frankly, the idea of designing an experience is just too problematic for me to get behind. To their credit, some of the leaders in the Design community are aware of the problem and are beginning to address it. Indeed, the subtitle for the DUX 2003 conference was Designing for User Experiences (my emphasis). The point being that the minor addition of the word for, creates a major change in the meaning of the subtitle.

Even though we can't design experiences (yet), I do believe experience is a topic upon which the Design community must focus. Unfortunately, the discussions we've had about experience have been (and I say this with a heavy heart) embarrassing. They are littered with challenges relevant only to particular domains of work and are marginalized by concerns relevant only to particular disciplines of practice.

That's where this blog, (e²), comes in. I have a feeling that a lot of these problems are the result of a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of human experience and how it is that we experience experiences.

So, these are things I'm starting to think about. I intend (e²) to be a place where I can collect notes on the things I'm reading, thoughts on the ideas I'm developing, and pointers to the things I don't quite understand.

If you were a reader of my old blog, brad lauster (dot com), welcome back! I'm happy you're still listening. I think you can expect (e²) to be different in a couple ways: 1. The posts to (e²) will be a lot less developed than the posts to my previous blog. 2. There will be no posts about my life.

In the grand scheme of things, posts to (e²) will be developed into a series a essays that I'll publish on the next version of brad lauster (dot com).

…and now, on with the show!