Design for Experiencing - New Tools

Summary

Sanders and Dandavate argue that designers cannot directly design experience because experiencing is constructed by users through interaction between what is provided and what they bring to it. Design should instead be for experiencing, using participatory and generative methods that access what people say, do, use, know, feel, and dream. The article presents Make Tools as visual, projective toolkits that help users and stakeholders express tacit knowledge, latent needs, feelings, dreams, and mental models early in design development.

Important Keywords

Design for experiencing: designing conditions and artifacts that support users in constructing their own experiences.
Experience Design: an orientation to design that attends to what people say, do, use, know, feel, and dream.
Participatory design: involving users and stakeholders directly in expressing needs, meanings, and possibilities.
Generative research: early design research that helps people express tacit and latent knowledge through creative activities.
Make Tools: visual and projective toolkits that participants use to make artifacts expressing feelings, dreams, and mental models.
Emotional toolkits: Make Tools aimed at surfacing feelings and affective responses.
Cognitive toolkits: Make Tools aimed at surfacing mental models, categories, and understandings.
Tacit knowledge: knowledge people use but may not be able to state directly.
Latent needs: needs or desires that are not yet explicit or easily articulated by users.
User-generated artifacts: things participants create during research to communicate experience and meaning.
Co-design: design activity where users and designers jointly contribute to understanding and creation.
Collective generativity: the shared production of ideas and meanings by participants and designers.
Resonance: the fit or meaningful connection between design materials and people's experiences.
Felt life: embodied, sensory, emotional, and situated experience.
Pre-reflective experience: smooth, habitual experience before conscious reflection.
Reflective experience: sense-making during or after experience.
Aesthetic experience: direct, engaged connection between body, world, and action.
Co-producer of experience: user understood as actively shaping the experience, not only receiving it.

Important Concepts

Experience is constructed through both what designers provide and what users bring to an interaction.
Accessing user experience requires more than observing behavior or asking questions; it also requires reaching feelings, dreams, and imagination.
What people say, do, and make each reveal different dimensions of experience and should be explored together.
Make Tools create a visual design language for users as well as designers, supporting co-design across disciplines and perspectives.
Generative research uses projective tools early in development to uncover unknown, unmet, or latent user needs.
Designers and design researchers are becoming more interdependent as users and stakeholders participate directly in creating ideas and opportunities.
Experience-centered design goes beyond usability, efficiency, and effectiveness to address embodied, emotional, aesthetic, social, and reflective experience.
Users are treated as whole persons, concerned agents, and co-producers of experience.
Felt life emphasizes lived, sensory, emotional, and situated experience across time and space.
Stories, scenarios, drama, role-play, personas, probes, and artifacts can make experience discussable and designable.
Dialogue is not merely collecting requirements; it creates new understanding through respectful engagement with difference.

Examples

The Internet is described as revealing previously latent communication needs.
Emotional toolkits can produce collages or diaries that tell stories about feelings, dreams, fears, and aspirations.
Cognitive toolkits can produce maps, mappings, 3-D models of functionality, relationship diagrams, process flowcharts, and cognitive models.