Experience matters because people matter. Designers should strive to improve a person's life through meaningful interpretations of emotion, expression, and experience within daily contexts of work and play.
Figure 1: The core elements of an interaction
How can increased reflection of aesthetic values and rhetorical influence enhance strategic collaboration as well as the products we create? And how can the economics of choice/trade-offs be balanced with human concerns for respect, trust, and wellness? Such questions imply a humanist approach to design. Far from being sentamentalist, this is simply realizing that technologies enable profound human interaction and communication vital to living.
The Driving Issue
We need to shift our perception of design away from only style towards an Integrative Aesthetic Experience whereby style, performance, story, and utility intersect and transform an experience into much more than a list of features or eye candy. Not episodic. Not piecemeal. Integrative, where each element supports the other in an ecological way.
A Useful Process
For me design is an issue of social communication. A user-oriented process can help generate solutions with a deep understanding of the "how" and "why" of a context and activity and thus stage a fruitful conversation with stakeholders. I apply a flavor of this process:
Figure 2: The major phases of a UCD process
This process offers a framework for envisioning how all the pieces of the puzzle come together systematically and rationally, rather than accidentally. Plus it can also break down complex projects into tangible, manageable, repeatable steps (and outputs) for better overall communication with teams.
