Experience Design: The Ultimate Form of Human-Centred Design
The first of a new series on how we think about design at StudioJDB.
1. What experience design means at StudioJDB
Experience design sits comfortably alongside experiential design as you see it in a mall. The difference is scale and duration.
Experiential design tends to live on a five-by-five-metre pad, temporarily. Our experience design generally covers something much larger, think of the Jameson project at the Castle of Good Hope, five distinct areas across a sitem, where the number of experiential engagements goes far beyond a single touchpoint. It isn't the activation stand. It's the experience of the whole distillery tour arena.
To place it properly, it helps to look at the neighbouring disciplines.
UX design is a digital term. UX designers make products and services accessible, intuitive, and enjoyable typically websites and apps. Product designers do the same for a physical product. Either way, the job is to make a product or service usable, enjoyable, and accessible.
Their environments run on testing. A/B tests for accessibility. Sorting products into logical groups to see whether they fit the architecture of people's thinking. Can the end user actually use the finished product once they've bought it? Around that sit whole fields and artefacts: human-computer interaction as a field of study; information architecture, the structural design of information to make it understandable; mock-ups, physical or digital, to test against; personas, a simulation of the ideal customer to understand their needs, goals, and behaviour; prototypes, which go beyond the mock-up to something workable that people can give feedback on; user flows, diagrams mapping the steps a user takes; and wireframes before a website is built.
Interior design asks a different set of questions. What look and feel do you like? What do you most use the space for? Which textures do you appreciate? What kind of couch L-shape, Chesterfield, recliner? Between style, structure, and flow, the interior designer settles the overall look and feel of, say, a lounge.
And a good interior designer goes further. They walk through the client's calendar, the structure of their life with or without children, the shape (or shapelessness) of their weekends, the things they like to do at home versus outside of it. What comes out of that is a user persona, much like the UX designer builds, but focused on a single individual in a home, or on a group of people in an office. And in an office, the end user shifts: people are hired, people leave, the group morphs, yet it's still held to the philosophy and vision of the business. So the interior designer works in the here and now with an eye on the future, where an experiential designer may be designing for an as-now product without necessarily designing for its future.
StudioJDB's experience design is a human-centred experience in a space, throughout a space, with a product both physical and digital and it encompasses all of these things.
It isn't experience design versus the UX designer or versus the interior designer. Our experience design incorporates the interior design, plus the experiential design inside that interior, plus the engagement with the digital products in that space. That whole way of working with people on a design is what gets coined human-centred.
2. Where human-centred design comes from
Go back through the older documents and books and one of the first places you encounter human-centric design in modern literature is the handbook of building types, Neufert's Architects' Data, the international English edition, with its airports and youth hostels, its tables, checklists, planning data, plans, sections, diagrams, bibliographies and references. Garden design. Hotels. Industrial buildings. Farm buildings. Sports halls. Cinemas. Stadia. Equitation. The general principles of those building types are all in there.
And those buildings are designed in the context of human-centred design: the human sits at the top of the hierarchy and everything else falls in below.
The human is using the industrial design. So it is the human first, the conveyor belt and the robots second. The robot can work autonomously, but there's a perspex case around it so it can't hurt the human. There are yellow and blue lines on the floor marking where things move and where things are static and safe, where the environment feels slower.
You can trace the thread much further back. Leonardo da Vinci, a human standing with arms outstretched inside a circle, telling us what human scale is all about. All the way to the 21st century, where we hold Neufert in our hands and look at what humans have generated and accumulated data on, to better understand how important it is to design for the experience.
Take an architectural firm like MVRDV, whose highly collaborative, research-based design method involves client stakeholders and experts from a wide range of fields from early on in the creative process. That is human-centred design as a working method rather than a slogan.
And the principle it points to is this: a building has to work for the janitor as well as the executive, for the mid-level manager as well as the catering supplier. Everyone in a building has something to say about how it performs for them. It's a continuous cycle of making sure that everyone, regardless of their level of responsibility, has their experience met the building centred on making it work for the human.
3. The raw materials: movement, the senses, and memory
We work with them in that order movement, then the senses, then memory because every venue is different, and how you move toward a venue is different too.
Sometimes you fly in and take an Uber to the starting point of the experience. Sometimes the Uber parks in an underground basement with a dedicated pickup and drop-off zone. Sometimes the building manager has secured a VIP red-carpet arrival at street level, and every Uber, taxi, and personal vehicle has been arranged to approach the building that way. And sometimes the day-to-day use isn't an event at all: it's staff needing a safe entry point, with the first focus on reaching the gym before a day's work getting the blood flowing, the brain oxygenated, the daily movement in.
So do you design differently for each? Yes. Do you sequence certain aspects first because the approach to the building has to be memorable and sensory? Yes. And in certain environments, do you want to deceive the senses to give the visitor as little sense of their place in time as possible at the start of an event? Sometimes, yes.
Working with Frank Lloyd Wright, as a journeyman or apprentice to the master architect, you learned quickly that he would draw you from a wide perspective toward the building and then in through a narrow, human-scaled side entrance. Much like the hobbit's hole in the ground, the vista of the experience was funnelled into a centralised human moment where it fitted just enough for a person to enter and especially in homes, it felt cosy, warm, inviting, completely centred on human size.
At a festival or an event highlighting a product or service, the goal inverts. You get the senses so involved — through movement and sound and taste and sight and touch that the memory itself is completely soaked in the experience of the product. The focus is on making sure the memory is intensely injected with positive information about that product, so that it stays appealing long after.
That's how we design with the raw materials: movement, senses, memory, aimed at the client's desired outcome. Memorable to the point of purchase or use. Memorable enough to keep someone in relationship with that business. Memorable enough that the business reads as a thought leader, or as the highest standard in their industry.
4. How the client brief changes when they buy an experience, not a fit-out
In a fit-out, a client usually arrives with a sketch or drawing a previous fit-out of theirs, or one they've seen elsewhere. There's a list of ten things to hit. Ten things to get right. Ten things their superior needs to acknowledge as fulfilled. Ten things to share with stakeholders who will read the deliverable completely differently. A general belief about what it should and shouldn't look like, and a set of boxes to tick.
When a client comes to buy an experience, the briefing session itself becomes an experience at best, and at worst. You as the designer are enveloped in it: etched, perplexed, swooned by the client. The brief is an experience unto itself, and through shared belief and the teamwork of engaging with the client, you begin to experience for yourself the hope of creating their vision.
The limits reset. The experience can take on different forms, simply because it can. Movement, memory, and the senses come into the brief. And when we introduce our interview-style briefing our frequently asked questions what we're really doing is trying to experience the experience with them.
4.1 An example: Navigate World Whisky
Look at the Navigate World Whisky project on our website. The experience starts in the name.
Navigation. Columbus. Wooden ships bringing nutmeg from countries far overseas. The uncomfortable inclination toward thinking about nations colonising other nations. Navigating globally. A compass. Finding your way. The world, and the adventure of it all.
Then the name completes itself: navigating the world of whisky.
And for us as a design team yes, we know whisky. Most of us have had it. Most of us first met it as young adults, mixed into a cocktail. Once or twice we've had it clean, with ice or a few drops of water, and either enjoyed it or been repelled by its strength. We may have bought a bottle for a parent, a father figure, an uncle, a spouse and in doing so we looked at price point, quality, and origin.
And when we looked at origin, we realised Navigate World Whisky encompasses the whole world. There must be different whiskies from different nations. So with a bottle in hand at a local liquor store, we scan the racks and try to navigate: what are those different nations? And once we've navigated them, we're struck by how differently each nation makes whisky sweet and smooth, smooth but not sweet. Different grains at the starting point. Different ways of preparing those grains before toasting, during toasting, during fermentation.
We become involved. We become ingrained. We slowly fall in love with the process now that we've started navigating the world of whisky. And as the process and the people behind it grow larger in our minds, we fall in love with the journey.
Then whisky stops being the thing you mix with Coca-Cola on a Saturday to forget how Monday to Friday went. Instead you're in company. You explain to the people around the table that you bought this bottle in memory of a father who passed recently, and that it has aged a certain amount. In celebration of his life, everyone toasts a single measure with a stainless steel or stone cube, or neat with a few drops of water. You explain to the non-whisky drinkers why there's no Coke, why you're not watering it down with melting ice.
The regard and esteem in that conversation places value on the whisky maker, on the bottle in your hand, on the people around the table. You're saying: we appreciate you. We appreciate the process of this product. And we value the importer the business in Melrose Arch who travel the world navigating whisky, with far more knowledge than we have.
Slowly, it becomes our own story. And so the experience, rather than the tick-boxes of a fit-out, becomes the way the design is generated.
Which is not to say we're devoid of boxes to tick. We're not devoid of budgets or timelines. But our starting point and our belief sits where the client can entrust us with their experience, and with the experience they want their customer to have.
5. Why we call it the ultimate form of human-centred design
Think of Jony Ive at Apple: the young designer taken under Steve Jobs' wing, and everything that followed. Today he runs LoveFrom, working between the UK and the United States. From the little I understand of him the biography, the interviews, what's on their website the practice is built on a sense of love for design. And the first thing someone like Jony Ive and his team would want to do, if they took on your work, is fall in love with the product themselves. By the time you hand the work over, they believe your product, believe in your business, believe in you.
There is nothing more fulfilling, from a design or a collaboration point of view, than knowing that the people you work with fit with you, believe the same things, stand for the same values, and work as one with you.
Experience design at its core is designing with a group of people who believe that the way they work comes from the core of their being and who would want to experience the design they are designing, themselves.
That is our starting point with experience design.
For questions, email info@studiojdb.com.
Navigate World Whisky, Why Clients Struggle to Read Plans, or Design for Emotion
