TOTAL EXPERIENCE explores designing for experience: its theory, its practice, and how designing for experiences affects us socially and in our personal lives.
CO-AUTHORS
BOB JACOBSON is fascinated by the experience of experience. A planner and technologist, Bob has a Ph.D. in Urban Planning & Design from UCLA. He's been a policy researcher, technology CEO, science writer, and consultant. As a Fulbright Scholar, he studied cellular telephony's impacts on transborder communities in the Nordic Arctic Circle. Bob edited Information Design (MIT Press 2000) and is now writing a book on the theory and practice of creating edifying, transformative experiences.
PAULA THORNTON says, "Understanding human behavior (economics), optimizing interactions (design) and facilitating conversations (markets), are the means to achieve strategic differentiation. This is the focus of our discipline. It is not a 'nice to have'‚ and is not, like documentation once was, an afterthought. It is the means by which to start a strategic discussion and the means by which to drive a tactical initiative. All design should be evidence-based."
Going for the Simple
The current version of Business 2.0 includes a short collection of products featured in a piece called Clever by Design. Two that I think capitalize on very 'simple' value-add dimensions through the innovative use of technology are:
* The new portable self-heating, self-contained beverage (by OnTech, check out the video that describes how the design works)
* The new germproof refrigerator (by Samsung, who doesn't rate getting a link to their site, because they were too shortsighted to realize that people might actually go to their site looking for the new refrigerator -- no where to be found -- or that they might search for the term nanoscale, as in "nanoscale silver", the term used in the article to identify the germ-fighting approach)
Now if they could just understand that the experience doesn't begin or end with the product itself. [*Paula*]