Heartfelt concern and positive thoughts go out to the families whose lives have been disrupted by Hurricane Katrina. [All of my Cajun relatives were all but spared just as Katrina veered east.]
Without intent to diminish the dire circumstances of individuals whose lives have been drastically changed by this event, therein lies a great object lesson. Suddenly, there is no 'normal'. Moreso than recent catastrophies, the situation in New Orleans suggests that recovery may not only be long, but may simply not be worth it for some both for those with little and for those with 'more'. Some have quickly adapted and have used the upheaval to redefine their lives. A distant relative, a restauranteur, has moved his family into an apartment in Baton Rouge and is already pursuing new business plans there, with plans to permanently relocate.
While our professional goals tend to focus on trying to make things 'better', sometimes there is need to simply focus on survival -- to give singular attention to making basic corrections before adding embellishments, or perhaps to simply switch direction altogether. Often, businesses miss subtle 'survival' opportunities because nothing stops. Nothing draws attention to the situation.
When an o-ring fails on a rocket booster system, the results are catastrophic. Businesses can often operate for years with many just-ever-so-slightly-impared o-rings that manage to allow them to function perhaps less optimally.
And then again, sometimes, just as in the case of the fatal o-rings, someone has spoken the truth of the situation. From the 'inside view' of many companies I've often found an unspoken truth: denial. No one wants to admit anything that might be percieved as failure. Once in my career I discovered that a regularly published report had not been accurately designed (it was mis-reporting data). Once corrections were made, I was prevented from 'celebrating' the report corrections to the recipients (e.g. "We recently discovered and have fixed..."). I was forbidden from telling them that the reports had changed at all -- to do so would have supposedly implicated 'failure' on the part of the Director.
This is offered as a simple testament that the greatest forces of destructive turbulence are often quiet and unspoken. Our challenge may be a responsibility to infuse greater tolerance for honesty and forthrightness. Change is difficult, but deep pride presents a high hurdle that can trip up the path to a noble goal.
Where are the business writings on effective ways to mitigate and influence rampant pride? We need insights to relevant approaches to be more effective in our efforts.
Our buddy, MarK Hurst (of Good Experience fame), recently shared a link to a New York Times article, "Rethinking Skyways and Tunnels" (requires registration).
Based on my own experiences with Skywalks, in particular, I take issue with the conclusions drawn from the article. Or, I choose to point out that this is a far more complex economic exchange of tradeoffs such that the 'reasons' for decline in cities with these structures is not necessarily the result of the structures. Indeed, how much 'more personable' is a street-level sidewalk rather than either skyway or a tunnel, especially in extreme weather. Do you find your interactions more frequent with people on the street than in a similar walkway suspended or depressed? Are you looking for interactions or trying to just get somewhere?
As Experience Design goes, I tend to be an advocate for the 'small stuff' and leave the 'large stuff' to people like Joseph Pine. I wanted to share this decidedly small stuff experience to serve as a testimony of what works.
While much of what I write about focuses on companies who prevent customers from doing business with them, this is clearly a celebration of a decidedly small company that made a point of maintaining/building on the 'attraction' of what might otherwise end up being a one-time customer.
Here's the story.
I have a refrigerator with a changeable water filter. It's a fabulous, time-saving feature that helped us replace a former routine of having huge 5-gallon bottles of water delivered to our doorstep (with associated requirements of having to find storage for 3 full bottles and two empty bottles -- not a desirable challenge in less than 1500 square feet living space -- all important details for those of us who look to understand the full depth of experiences). But this water filter is not something that is easily purchased up during my normal shopping routines to the grocery store. It takes some effort -- effort that is not necessarily cherished.
In fact, I spent quite a bit of time looking for an appropriate online source for this small but important piece of my daily life, at the best price. I even saved a box from the last filter (which is lying on the floor in my garage right now, as a reminder) to make sure I'd know what I had to order. The task to reorder this filter has been 'nagging' me of late. But the thought of finding the reference to my previous order just wasn't appealing. I'm sure I would have waited for the red light to show up on the refrigerator until my 'tipping point' would have been reached.
But today, this arrived in my inbox. I leave this to stand on its own as a best practice for a small but effective means to increase business and build relationship equity, that very few companies focus on.
Hello Paula Thornton,
On your last order placed with FiltersFast.com on 10/5/2004 you requested to be notified in 9 months that it is time to change your refrigerator water filter.
That time has passed and it is now time to change your refrigerator water filter. Below you will find a link to the product(s) that you ordered when you signed up for our free reminder service.
We also would like to offer you a $1 discount on your next order as our Thank You to you for your continued support. To redeem the discount, simply enter the discount code 8899101 in the disount code box while in the shopping cart and click on the update button. You will see the discount reflected in your total.
You last ordered the following products. Click the product name to view the details and to order your replacement.
WF50, UKF8001AXX, 12589208 Amana Water Filter
Thank you for your continued support and we look forward to serving you for your next order. Best regards,
www.FiltersFast.com
Taking advantage of my Washington DC proximity, I made a trip to the National Mall again today this time taking in the American History Museum. While it needs some serious updating, the one exhibit that I was most inspired by was the one on the Information Age.
Ignoring for a moment, the blatant misuse of the term information (most of the technologies supported the exchange of data, not information), I made some rather significant discoveries. While everyone seemed to zip past one multi-wall equipment display and exclaim simply, "That's the first computer", I spent considerable time watching the various video clips discussing the operation of the ENIAC.
I began to realize that with the hundreds of light indicators and the hundreds of vacuum tubes, the fault possibilities for the basic operation of this device were endless. Most of the effort to execute a calculation was in testing the soundness of the parts and pieces, before a calculation could be initiated.
Back in September I wrote about a fatal stampede at the opening of an IKEA store in Saudi Arabia. Seems that the largest IKEA store in England just opened, with similar (if not-fatal) results.
Up to 7,000 flocked to the Edmonton store lured by adverts promising huge discounts, including 45 sofas and 30 bed frames, to those who bought before 3am. When the main doors opened 40 security guards were overwhelmed and crowds pushed through, leaving people pinned to the wall or trampled on the ground.
Security guard Gerard Visagie said "I have never felt so threatened. It was madness. A guard next to me was punched by a customer. He had his jaw dislocated. People were punching and kicking me and screaming. We were under siege.'
Latyia Arpesh, 23, from Tottenham, said: "I was pushed to the ground and people clambered over me. I feared for my life."
Avril Nanton, 46, from Edmonton, left the queue after four hours: "Near the front there was a sense of camaraderie. But when the doors opened, people at the back ran to the entrance. Everyone was upset, people were fighting. I saw a woman held down by a group of girls."
Ben Adetimle, 31, from Leytonstone, added: "I bought a sofa but when I turned my back someone stole it. I'm not upset. It's just furniture, not worth dying over." As medics helped the injured, customers carried on shopping. A woman with pot plants said: "I've come from Birmingham for this." Jilal Patel, 29, from Tottenham, said: "I was queuing at 11am. Nothing is going to stop me from getting my sofa."
Brondell takes on a formidable design-and-marketing challenge - getting Americans to change their product interactions in the bathroom.
You walk into your bathroom and sit down on your Swash contoured and comfortably heated toilet seat. When finished, you simply press a button for a posterior or feminine wash and you are met with a warm, aerated water spray. You can dry yourself with the warm air dryer or pat-dry with a small amount of toilet paper. You leave your bathroom shower-fresh as the gentle-closing lid slowly lowers behind you. Swash-like products are providing over 20 million men, women, and children around the world a healthier, more hygienic lifestyle. The bidet is recognized for its superior cleansing qualities accomplished by using water rather than irritating, ineffective dry toilet paper.
No doubt it's comfortable, perhaps pleasurable, more hygienic and whatever other benefits you can imagine. And hey, the Japanese all use it (or a similar product). But something is badly missing in order to get this marketplace to use it. As their CEO says ''Once someone experiences one of our warm toilet seats and the warm-water bidet, there's no going back to the cold porcelain toilet." (article here)
There's nothing in their product or their website that begins to address the challenge of creating a new use model for a private, semi-shameful habitual activity that we can't even talk about. A PR foray gets them exposure today, but what will we see from them in 2 months or 6 months?
If this was every other blog that touches on marketing or advertising, you'd see my list of recommendations for Blondell. But please, isn't that a bit silly? I can see the challenges they have, but without understanding their company, and most importantly, the perceptions of their target customers (not my personal opinions) around the barriers to adoption, it's ridiculous to offer advice. Except to learn about the customers and find ways to reframe the offering to induce a change of behavior. Abstract as anything, I guess.
Any readers have any ideas, in the spirit of brainstorming, not expertise?
Forbes Magazine has a current article that gets a 'big DUH' award from me: "Have It Your Way". Playing off of the old Burger King promotional tag, it's their inane claim "companies are tapping consumers as never before" that really caused great gall.
Aside from the fact that the article is celebrating something that people would clearly EXPECT companies to do, they are making it sound as if this were a 'new' thing. Did they totally miss the cottage-industry era? Are we saying that the industrial revolution has finally come full circle?
The article continues "they have concluded that instant feedback is one way to cope with the pressure for shorter product cycles and with the high failure rate of new products". Can we offer another big round of "DUH"s? Did they miss the memo on scientific models which have proven this theory has existed forEVER, we just weren't smart enough to see it? Or that feedback loops are the means by which, on a path of free energy, that we can increase momentum (see item #6)?
The New York Times Magazine's special "Design 2004" issue (11/28/04) raises profound questions about experience design and how good is too good.
This issue is dedicated to design for children. A dozen articles describe one exciting experience design project after another...but connecting all the dots, the reader is left with the impression that a child's life is no longer his or her own. So intensely is daily experience designed, from marketing to prams to playground sets and lunch boxes -- even a child's ability to play sports!! What's left to discover?
The Times' redoubtable design writer, Ann Hulbert, describes the especially poignant condition of designed-for teens, who are already in the throes of trying to understand what about their world and themselves is genuine and what's not.
Fortunately, kids are resilient and inventive: they'll find the interstices where design leaves off and serendipity is in order. But adults for the most part aren't so creative. We can muse about the condition of our children and emerging adults, but what about us? There are no design ombudsmen to advocate for and defend adult victims of over-design, the pernicious effects of which one sees all too often as fads and collective bad judgment.
For example, the recent US presidential election, whichever side you were on, was a massive case of over-design, neglecting the authentic needs of real Americans as expressed through grassroots organizations largely neglected by the established party bureaucracies. Experience designers (marketers, TV producers, pollsters, guerrilla political activists, the 527-funded media developers) ran rampant. Can anyone say the results were good? That America stands stronger and more united as a result? Hardly.
If our fundamental machinery for governance can be so misused, what about lesser social processes: fashion, home-design, social infrastructure, education, self-imagery? Championing experience design doesn't relieve one of the ethical charge to see its power used wisely. Maybe one of the reasons why experience design hasn't been clearly delineated is the freedom that invisibility gives its practitioners to not worry much about ethical canons. That there are no canons of ethical experience design screams with a loud silence.
Images: Oregon State U. (children), Clay Towne (cartoon), MSNBC (politicos)
From the LARCH-L Mailing List:
Date: Monday, 22 November 2004
From: Tom Turner
I've wanted to write a landscape architecture manifesto for years, but caution held me back. Recent posts on this forum have encouraged me now to take a deep breath and extend my neck in a vulnerable manner. Your chops and cuts are cordially invited....
MANIFESTO FOR AN UNBLINKERED LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE, by Tom Turner*
1. We believe landscape architecture to be the most comprehensive of the arts. Its theory and history are continuous from ancient to modern times, with Senenmut, Vitruvius, Bramante, Babur, Le N-tre, Brown, Repton, Meason, Olmsted, Jellicoe, and McHarg among its leaders.
2. Lanship, defined as the condition of friendship between people and places, is our goal.
3. The six grand compositional elements of designed landscape are: landform,
water, plants, climate, buildings, and paving (or "horizontal and vertical structures").
4. As an art, the practice of landscape architecture rests on the "imitation
of nature" (mimesis) in the classical (neo-Neoplatonic) sense of representing visual ideas about the nature of the world.
5. Landscape design does best when preceded by excellent landscape planning and sustained by able stewards. It's therefore necessary to involve clients, communities, and other professionals in the planning, design, and maintenance of projects which aim to create lanship.
"Landscape architects of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your
blinkers!"
Image: University of Arkansas
Yesterday I was interviewed by a reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle about the demise of San Jose's hard rock station, KSJO (without much warning, it shifted to a Mexican oldies format, in acknowledging of a dramatically shifted South Bay demographic). The story might appear this weekend - if so I'll post the link in the comments.
The interviewer didn't know much about KSJO, what kind of music they played, and hard rock was not really her thing. She was looking for a nostalgia angle, perhaps listening to this station took me back to my head-banging days (I didn't have those and it didn't), and I tried to explain to her what I think many rock and roll fans have understood, that listening to older rock music straddles a really interesting line between ironic enjoyment and actual enjoyment. You can have both experiences simultaneously, and there's a gestalt - it's more fun because you're laughing at how crappy it is and how cool it is. This is Spinal Tap was the first and best encapsulation of that. The first time I saw Dread Zeppelin (where an Elvis impersonator leads a reggae band through Led Zep cover tunes)was a dramatic version of this - when they played Stairway to Heaven, the crowd absolutely freaked out. Stairway? Does anyone really want to hear this song again? In this irony-straddling context, we did.
And so, I got a kick out of this story wherein a group of improv performance artists decided to give a very low-profile rock band their "best gig ever." They have a large group of "agents" that they called upon to attend a performance and treat it as if this was their favorite band. But not to mock the band or to sarcastically act as if this was their favorite band. Simply describing it is a challenge, because the notion of sending people in to pretend to enjoy something brings up an image of people yelling too loud and giving off false audience vibes. These guys didn't do that; they are performers, and they took their assignment seriously.
The link above documents the experience from a few points of view. Despite making an overt choice to act as if this was a band they were really enjoying, it seems as if everyone, the band included, really did have a good time. And these guys are improv performers, not culture-jammers, so no doubt that improv aspect of being in-the-moment really came through. This could easily have been one of those clever-post-Candid-Camera punk'd tricks we see on TV and the web all the time, but in fact, it was a genuine yet manufactured experience.
A similarly-themed story hitting the boards today is about the effectiveness of robot cats for medical treatment. The robots generated more emotional response and engagement than plush toys. They may have a therapeutic role, or may even simply remind people to take their medications.
No one is fooled by the robot cats, but even with disbelief not suspended, there is a "true" experience created.
These may be things that storytellers such as filmmakers have known forever, but applying some of this to social networks and robotic technology is opening up some new possibilities, and forcing us to look closer at not only what is real and what is fake, but at what points does it really matter?
Halloween, or Samhain (so-wen) as the Celts called it, is the ultimate Day of Experience in North America. Other holidays come complete with an iconic lexicon that is mostly virtual: holiness, patriotism, love of family, and so forth. The expression of these sensibilities occurs in TV and filmic images, magazines, conversation, and sermons.
With the possible exceptions of Thanksgiving, where the preparation and consumption of food takes center stage, the Mexican Dio de Los Muertes (Day of the Dead), and reenactments of historical moments for example, the Boston Tea Party no day so heartily celebrates the inducement of awe, fear, and jocularity by outside stimuli as does Halloween.
Despite the United States reputation as a churchy nation, in fact Halloween easily trumps most Christian and other holidays as a reason for consumers to part with their dollars buying decorations, costumes, and candy. Only on Christmas, the evolution of the Roman Saturnalia, with its gift-giving ritual essential to retaining bonds of love and fealty do Americans spend moreand then its not about the occasion so much as the give and take.
Halloween is different. The whole build-up to and craziness of Halloween is about having experiencing the day and evening in their various aspects: union of the dimensional worlds, day of dread, precursor of winter, harvest celebration, and most recent, childrens holiday. Without the instilling of the feelings that accompany these experiences, there might as well not be a Halloween.
The fact that Halloween and its revelers have outlasted 1,500 years of criticism and oppression (including burning at the stake) from Christianity and other monotheistic religions and that Wicca and Nordic mythos, forms of neo-paganism, are on the rise expresses humanitys deeply felt need for at least one official day each year of extreme experience.
A quick tour of the Web reveals a Halloween websites up the kazoo, including those that are raw, frightening, informative, amusing, entertaining, and incomprehensible. Ghost-watching sites abound. In the physical world, the kids are out in costume. Pumpkins, the New Worlds contribution to the affair (in the Old World, Jack O Lanterns to scare away evil spirits were carved from turnips), are prolific. Entire street corners are filled with pumpkin lots, today trying frantically to dispose of their fare. Homes sport decorations from modest black cats and paper skeletons to elaborate lawn sets of moving figures complete with the acoustics necessary to provide a heart attack with each Baby Ruth candy bar.
In the commercial world, aside from the ridiculous sales and other activities contrived to have a Halloween tie-in, a lot of effort goes into both retail and entertainment venues taking part in the days glory. Im especially enamored of the haunted houses that civic groups and hustlers construct, using their imagination (usually remembrances of similar venues in the past) to thrill and chill and generate revenues. This is the weekend of a spate of horror movies that would have less meaning in any other setting, but this weekend add to the sense of heightened awareness of Other Worlds, meaning ghostlier abodes. Of course, the big theme parks get into the mood though their offerings are surprisingly underfinanced and tame, even lame, perhaps because for them, dispensing experience is just another days work. An exception is Paramount's FearFest, which took some serious imagination and multimedia trickery to pull off.
Some extreme Christian sects attempt to sweep back this tide of emotion. Hell House, the subject of a widely-shown indie documentary, is a particularly gruesome effort to link sin as defined by the evangelicals who run this bizarre institution with horror in the Beyond. But as soon as religious cant is given this embodiment, it ceases to be holy in the stark Christian sense and becomes rather pagan. Like the Halloween occasion it mocks, Hell House becomes a well, a house of Hell within which its young actors are free to play the roles of murderers, apostates, whores, suicides, and other sinners with as much enthusiasm as they can muster, more than they or their audiences put out for the Sunday sermon. Halloween is the one day each year that they get to have a full, physical experience, inside and out. More power to them.
For myself, tonight I might stroll down to the Union Cemetery, hidden and unnoticed, in my suburban home of Redwood City, California, and silently commiserate with the souls of the soldiers who died 140 years ago, some nobly, some without purpose whose bones for some unknown reason ended up in the Bay Area. Or perhaps Ill walk among the graves, old and new, in the Portuguese Cemetery in Pescadero, on the coast. What more acute reminder of the sanctity of life than the experience of death, or as close as we can come to it and still remain on This Side? Tomorrow comes soon enough.
From Garrison Keilor's daily, wonderful, always inspiring The Writer's Almanac, for October 20, 2004:
"It was on this day in 1892 that the city of Chicago officially dedicated the World's Columbian Exposition, celebrating the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus sailing to America. Though it was formally dedicated on this day in 1892, the planning ran behind schedule, so the fair wasn't actually held until the following summer.
"It was the most successful world's fair ever held in the United States. In its half-year of existence, it drew 27 million visitors, or about half the American population at the time. The novelist Hamlin Garland wrote to his parents, 'Sell the cookstove if necessary and come. You must see the Fair!'
"The area designated for the fair covered almost 700 acres along the shore of Lake Michigan, and a giant 'white city' was built in the style of classical architecture. The buildings were also strung with electric lights and lit up at night, the first time electric lights were used on such a large scale in America. In fact in was at the Chicago World's Fair that most Americans first saw electricity in use. The children's book writer L. Frank Baum was one of the visitors to the fair, and used the White City as the model for his Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz (1900).
"Among the many things first introduced to Americans at the fair were postcards, the zipper, the ice cream cone, Cracker Jack, Quaker Oats, Shredded Wheat, belly dancing, spray paint, the Pledge of Allegiance, and of course the Ferris Wheel. The Ferris Wheel was 264 feet high, carried 2000 passengers at a time, turning on a 45-foot axlethe largest single piece of steel ever forged."
Finally, a chance to get down to a commentary on last Tuesdays BayCHI-UXnet "User Experience event at Stanford!
The evening was a coming together of 10 experience design associations, each with a claim to the phrase, user experience, and an audience of 300+ comprising designers, professors, and a lot of interested parties. A mixer held in the auditorium lobby preceded the main event, between long tables loaded with promotional material and association hawkers.
Rightly, there was great excitement in the air: this was an historic gathering. Represented were:
Information Architecture (AifIA)
Interaction Design (IxDG)
Graphic Design (AIGA)
Computer Graphics (SIGGRAPH)
Human Factors (BACHFES)
Technical Communications (STC)
Human Interaction (BayCHI)
Usability (UPA)
Industrial Design (IDSA)
Everybody (Uxnet)
(For links to these groups and to the organizers' and speakers' websites, link to the event's BayCHI calendar listing.)
The evening began with an interview of design icon Don Norman conducted by event co-organizer Richard Anderson. The interview traveled the length and breadth of design practice. LukeWs Functioning Form has a nice highlight view of Dons comments. (Thanks to Steve Portigal for noting this link.)
Don remarked that while still at UCSD, he insisted that the word user be removed from the phrase, user experience, as an inappropriate qualifier. How interesting then, that for the rest of Tuesday night, every speaker (but me) insisted on using the term, user experience. Old habits are hard to break.
Event co-organizer Rashmi Sinha kept the panelists recitations succinct a good idea since, as later questions from the audience revealed, most of the speakers were more prepared to speak about their organizations than about experience design an artifact of the evenings design.
Halfway through the 10, John Zapolski of AIGA Experience Design (who keeps a great website pointing to other experience designers' mentions in the news) broke the intensity by having the audience stand and share mini-backrubs. By then the parable of the blind men and the elephant irresistibly came to mind. Its not that the speakers werent unaware of the challenge facing each of them: to deal with the design of experience an holistic, analogic, syncretic phenomenon within the narrow domains of their respective professional disciplines. The issue is that professional designations are separating designers whose main chances to correspond and collaborate occur when a customer calls them together. Even then, there is usually no ber-experience designer coordinating the various practitioners. During the Q&A, Don Norman confirmed that the most common job title occupying the role of ber-experience designer is project manager. The person who gets the job done is another.
Each of the speakers was sincere and interesting, especially in comparison. The Powerpoint slides they presented mostly werent exactly paragons of information design, but since when has Powerpoint been seen as a real information design too? (It's more like an Etch-A-Sketch.) As the editor of a book named INFORMATION DESIGN (MIT Press 1999) that, regrettably, didnt feature much of it, Im highly sympathetic. We often design better for other than we do for ourselves. It would have been interesting, however, to see how each discipline visualized the practice of experience design, rather than only writing about their organizational activities.
During the Q&A I asked the panelists to describe in one line the experience that they are concerned with designing. As I commented earlier on this blog, Mark Rolson of IDSA and frog design gave the most eloquent response but generally among those who answered, their replies were inchoate. That is, we all know that were working with experience, but were not exactly sure what it is.
In part, this was because, as Don pointed out, a lot disciplines were missing. Architects, design engineers, environmental designers (I really missed my favorite design organization, SEGD, the Society for Environmental Graphic Design, environmental psychologists, urban designers, landscape architects, and holistic experience designers like Bob Rogers of BRC Imagination Arts all of these, and others, have a lot to say about experience, user or otherwise. And the otherwise is notable: most experiences are not designed for users, theyre designed into products, services, and environments that are less often consciously used than experienced.
None of this should be taken as critical of the event. It was pretty darn neat, to be sitting in an audience comprising designing peers and others greatly interested in the design enterprise. Dons comments were good to hear and the speakers all had something interesting to say. I was tempted to run up to the mike at the meetings conclusion and ask, Whens the next get-together? Sooner than next year! But I didnt. And so the evening concluded on an ambiguous note. Theres a lot of diversity in the field of experience design, and thats a good sign: the meta-discipline is growing. But is it also fracturing? There was a time when a Raymond Loewy or a Saul Bass or the Eaves handled all aspects of a designed experience and made it memorable, indeed. That no longer seems to be the case. Its a good question whether this is rampant professionalism divvying up the work or simply the need for more precise expertise at every step of the way.
One consequence of bringing together all of the design groups was that experience design could appear as a kaleidoscope, twirling wildly, or a mosaic, cementing every one in his or her place. It remains to be seen whether synergy or separation is the result, and the ultimate outcome for experience design as a unified practice.
Today I drove north from Redwood City on the picturesque Highway 280, the parallel route to San Francisco. It was the usual scene: the rolling hills of dense chapparal, pine, and oak; the long San Andreas Lakes; the thousand-foot-tall fog "waves" that descend from the west down the coastal hills and into the darkening valley that implies the San Andreas fault beneath. A small but profound discovery lay in wait.
Traffic was heavy and had slowed from the usual (illegal) 75 MPH. As my car's velocity descended to 45 MPH, I sensed within me elation, the pleasure of movement, and a lightness of being. My car floated. I later noticed that as traffic cleared and I exceeded 50 MPH, driving became a challenge again. My anxiety increased. My concentration on the road ratcheted. I noticed that other drivers were taking dangerous, speed-exacerbated chances. Driving was no longer fun.
How interesting it would be to lower traffic speeds, to see if it made driving more pleasurable -- less demanding and safer -- for everyone. In our pursuit of raw speed, we have given up conviviality on our highways. In fact, for the sake of speed, we are giving it up everywhere. Our quality of life is at risk.
"POSSIBLY TOO MUCH TRUCK. LIKE THAT'S A PROBLEM."
Yes, it IS a problem, International Harvester.
Your new CXT "pickup," twice the cost of a Hummer and at six tons (!), considerably larger -- has "all the attributes of a commercial truck [it's based on a "severe service truck"], but you don't need a commercial driver's license to drive it." Just great.
It will turn our roads into a more brutish environment and make driving nastier.
The CXT promises to further trash the atmospheric environment, hastening global warming.
A passenger car of sorts, it uses scarce petroleum at rates unprecedented in the history of personal transportation.
International is mad to sell this truck. Truly megalomanic design, the experience it promotes best is -- gluttony.
Image Source: International Harvester
"For successful restaurants, aesthetics is no longer an afterthought. Customers are paying for memories, not just fuel. What's true for restaurants is true across the economy. New economic value increasingly comes from experiences."
Vance Packard wrote about the selling of experience in The Hidden Persuaders, a bestselling screed on advertising's manipulation of emotions published in the 1950s and republished several times since. More recently, Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore's The Experience Economy and Bern Schmitt's Experiential Marketing make a more seasoned case for the same phenomena.
What's significant about the historical moment in which we live is that efforts to sell consumers on "the intangibles" finally seems to be gaining traction. It will dominate design practice and marketing in years to come, as physical commodities become more dear and the cost of creating experiences declines.
According to Postrel, design of experience is squarely in the economic driver's seat, at least so far as consumer spending is concerned. Providing experiences is good business. Here's the rest of Postrel's thesis:
"Americans have not stopped buying stuff, of course. (Indeed, there's a whole industry devoted to organizing our pantry-like closets.) But the marginal value of tangibles versus intangibles has shifted. That many manufactured goods are also getting cheaper only intensifies the trend.
"Products as well as services increasingly distinguish themselves through aesthetics, adding emotional value to practical use. This trend confounds those who equate "quality" with function.
"Hence a recent Dilbert comic strip satirizes a product designer who declares: "Quality is yesterday's news. Today we focus on the emotional impact of the product."
"In fact, the trend toward emotional value is exactly what psychological research would predict. Particularly as incomes rise, people find that additional experiences give them more pleasure than additional possessions."
Image: Caesar's Palace
Hotel Shopping Mall Interior
Welcome to Total Experience, where together we'll explore the cultural phenomenon of intentional, designed experience.
Not all experience is designed. Serendipity plays a large part in broadening our understanding. But increasingly, the experiences that fill our days are crafted to create an impression, stimulate a thought, or provoke an action often, all three simultaneously. Total Experience is about the intentional, systematic design of experience and its outcomes.
The strategic mapping and propagation of touchpoints that the designer arranges for the experiencer a word I use often in Total Experience is a contemporary phenomenon worthy of everyones attention. Total Experience takes the normative point of view that experiences should be voluntary; but realistically, they often are not. What can the experiencer do to negate undesirable experiences or even to seek recourse? Perhaps you, the reader, can help us to arrive at useful answers.
Experience design is holistic, interdisciplinary, and inherently interactive. Accordingly, Total Experience will wander the far shores of design practice including, for example, product engineering, landscape architecture, sociology, environmental psychology, and memetics as well as more familiar design modalities. Total Experience is not about web design (whose practitioners use "experience design" to mean webside behavior) except as part of a larger designed experience.
Within its mission of examining the emerging practice of experience design, Total Experience has these purposes, to:
1. Identify and comment upon outstanding or oddly noteworthy demonstrations of experience design
2. Stay abreast of the relevant news and developments in our field
3. Develop a theory of experience design and interdisciplinary practice
4. Create a community of practitioners via this blog and associated media
Im the captain for our shakedown cruise, but in the future Ill be recruiting co-authors to enrich Total Experience with diverse points of view and expertise. If youre interested in participating, please send me an email. Be patient: my bandwidth is limited, but I will get back to you.
Thanks for joining me here at Total Experience. Please let me know how I can make your stay here more valuable and enjoyable. May your participation in Total Experience be a good experience, always.
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