“The broader one’s understanding of human
experience, the better design we will have.” -- Steve Jobs
The toolbar of design intelligence is now being developed
not just for the fine arts, media, or performance and theater, but for a far
larger universe—that of experience and the experience economy as XD, or
experience design.
The Experience Economy was formulated by Joe Pine and Jim
Gilmore in their 1999 book of that title
that describes the progression of economic value from commodities through
brands to customization into experience—and ultimately into meaning and
transformation. “We are talking about a
fundamentally new way of attracting and retaining your customers through
creating new experience offerings.”* Early examples cited include Volkswagen’s
Autostadt flagship / destination attraction at Wolfsburg, Germany, General
Mills’ Cereal Adventure at the Mall of America, American Girl in Chicago, and
the Heineken Experience in its old factory in downtown Amsterdam. These build the brand well beyond the
conventional faculty tour, and for retail like Starbucks, can actually replace
advertising.
Business has discovered the Experience premium—the multiple
value people are willing to pay (up to four times) (McKinsey, 2017) for
experience at all levels, over products: from the Starbucks latte to art tours
in exotic locales to healthcare concierge services to trips into space on Virgin
Galactic (tickets: $200 K). Meditation
at mind spas on private island resorts, airport massages, semesters abroad,
outdoor kitchens, a world built of toys (Legoland). And recently, Starbucks Reserve, the upscale version,
at company headquarters in Seattle, with 1000 planned worldwide. Pine and Gilmore pose the question as to why
Amazon has not (to date) created its own experience in the same city.
And of course the great template of the total destination
theme park, the archetype from the imagination of Walt Disney in the 1950s,
when no one but a handful of Imagineers even guessed at what he was trying to
do. Disney was looking for a way to
translate his film production success into an interactive drama, with stage
sets, on the ground, as an immersive public experience. No one suspected, other than a few
avant-garde architects, that his park success would create an entirely new way
of thinking about goods, services, and settings—as experiences. This is the mindset that is now designing
everything from retail to restaurants to cities, regions, and living compounds
for Mars.
At the recent Hawaiian Space Exploration Analog and
Simulation (HI-SEAS) dome on the Big Island, a series of a six-person astronaut-capable
crew lived in isolated confinement to experience living and working in the
hostile Mars environment. Their mission: to anticipate the social and
psychological challenges on another planet.
In the same way, themed environments—even the most unassuming Chinese
restaurant—re-frame our brains to evoke other times and places, freeing us to
think in new ways about both ourselves and world.
Experience design is a universe of knowledge, ancient to state
of the art, one that requires keen insight into how to draw upon its variants
to solve problems around creating experiences in real time and space. These XD skills—are there are hundreds—can be
applied across the board to any and all aspects of the wider Experience Economy
– including every type of experience, and futuristic trends like Artificial
Intelligence and Augmented Reality.
This panoply of public and private spaces (including virtual
spaces) ranges from work- and data-based: software (User Experience, UX, is the
general label), offices, social media, virtual reality, libraries; to travel:
airline flight, resorts and hotels, auto and public transport; sociability:
sports and stadia, city, social center, house, complex, parks, and neighborhoods;
health clubs, auditoria, supermarkets, dining, malls, church, games and
gamification, bars, casinos; to cultural and educational, including college
education (test prep is a subindustry), museums, galleries, and exhibits,
classrooms, retreats and seminars, special public events, the Olympics,
television, film, and looping back to screens of any size, jumbo to hand-held.
These places, physical or virtual, have always been designed
to the conventions that dictate what they have long been expected to look,
feel, and act like. But the indications
are that technology and innovation, as in the theme park case, are having their
effects in making us keenly aware of new potentials in every area of human life
for design that fits the human factors landscape. That would include the way we
instinctively take in these places into our imaginations, set our mental agenda
to fit their archetypal uses, and adapt our thinking and behavior to fit their
purposes. Now, though, through better
cultural research, these places can serve our purposes (rather than our fitting
theirs) and even produce novel ways of making their purposes fit our own in
ways we hadn’t before been able to imagine. Helper robots, self-driving cars, private
pods on trans-continental flights, and importing the movie theater to our phone
or desktop screen are everyday examples.
These human factors are those theme-park designers discuss
in their design sessions: context,
perception, attention, color, scale, lighting, expectation, press (forces
operating at odds to the design), procession, pacing, arc, suspense,
resolution. So that now, teaching this
still-evolving artform - and finding a way to do knowledge transfer with a
complexly creative skill set - will be the ongoing task of the XD / thematics
industry. It will at the same time
advance the cause of creativity across disciplines. The outcomes of experience mindset range from
Fitbits to inspire more walking to discovering life’s meaning at a family
reunion in the Magic Kingdom at locations worldwide.
The experience design industry can be traced back to the 19th-century
World’s Fair as well as other commercial showcases like the Ford Rotunda at
world headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan—host to more visitors in the 1950s
than the Statue of Liberty. Another
wellspring is Tivoli Gardens, a very early amusement park (1843, the world’s
second-oldest) where as a tourist in Copenhagen, Walt was first inspired to
think about his film work in a new way: in translation--to create immersive worlds
people could walk through and imagine in three dimensions. This single idea,
brought to life through the arts, is one of the most transformational in art
history.
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*The Experience IS the
Marketing (2002)
