Experience and medium

While in San Francisco recently I had a fascinating conversation with Jesse James Garrett, President of Adaptive Path, about the terms or framing concepts for their operation.

Jesse explained that when AP was founded eight years ago, its key people came from a web design background, although they were working with the beginnings of something "higher", as in more aspirational (or "deeper", as in more fundamental) that at the time was called "user experience", although it was still rooted specifically in the online medium. For several years, they were careful not to overemphasise the verb "design", preferring the noun "user experience", to avoid importing inappropriate expectations on the part of their clients about the nitty-gritty of engineering code. About two years ago, however, the notion of "design" having come to connote a broader, less minutely technical process, the company's stated bailiwick became "experience design" and "experience strategy".

As the above story illustrates, the terms in this field are rapidly evolving. Part of the evolutionary process is found in a current tension between two distinct camps among designers, and their corresponding interpretations of "experience design". On the one hand, says Jesse, the Mediumists are convinced that experience design is simply a newfangled term for what they believe designers have always sought to do -- good design, in whatever medium they happen to be using. The Anti-Mediumists, on the other hand, regard experience design as enabling discussion, and pursuit, of good design of a different order. The former, trained in and committed to a particular medium of design (whether websites, or chairs), tend to focus on the characteristics and qualities of the artifact; while the latter, looking past the medium to the experiential substrate, ask what the thing is like to use, look at, or be around.

Through the lens of a particular medium, specialised language enables certain specific features to be apprehended and readily discussed, while through the encompassing, medium-agnostic language of experience, its net effect is opened up for conversation. For example, the formalism implicit in a medium-focus may lead to the conclusion that a technically accomplished piece of work is entirely admirable: the chair is distinctive, elegant, well constructed, sustainably produced, and appropriately priced. But an experience focus will always keep the user's bottom line (so to speak) in plain view: is it comfortable to sit in?

It seems likely to me that where or if this dilemma requires resolution, it is for designers to aspire to grasp both perspectives at once, or in any case to be able to alternate between them, as when switching between two Gestalt views of an optical illusion. But, as someone not formally trained in any particular design medium, the Anti-Mediumist perspective makes perfect sense to me, especially at the early stages of a project when the task is designing backwards from a desired outcome. In all our FoundFutures projects, and especially on "Hawaii 2050", we had to work backwards from the hoped-for insights and outcomes. We brought a series of (intially very muddy, gradually clearer) constraints into play, setting the context for producing a desired experience. The constraints are resources (space and budget) and intent (audience and scenario). Medium-expertise may be brought to bear on the job once we've deduced and decided (it's a combination of both) which media will be involved: text, slideshows and video, ambient audio, graphics and printed matter, handcrafted "future-museum" artifacts, performance...

If the medium is the message, then in our work to date, the first question has concerned the experience of the message, including the circumstances of its reception, and we've worked back from there to figure out which medium fits best. Often enough, the best solution requires working not in just one medium, but in several at once.

Related posts:
> Cheap prototypes, valuable insights
> Open source futures and design
> Where futures meets experience design
> Manifesting vision
> Future-jamming 101

(Thanks, Jesse!)

Manifesting vision

In addition to the exploratory role of future artifacts frequently described here -- adding experiential dimensions to our map of alternative futures -- they can also be applied in a more targeted way, to persuade an audience of the credibility and desirability (or otherwise) of a particular vision, within a company for example. Not a huge conceptual leap, of course, but this post is about an example of precisely such an application.

The story comes from graphic designer Michael Bierut, partner at Pentagram and author of Seventy-Nine Short Essays on Design, and was recounted by Ryan Freitas (formerly at Adaptive Path, now with Plinky), at his blog second verse back in April 02006:

Having been charged with naming and creating the identity for United Airlines' low cost operator ("LCO" in industry jargon), Pentagram created a presentation that walked the client through their creative process and arrived at their recommendations on the name and brand direction. The deck was intended to get "everyone nodding at the same time," according to Michael, and included something I thought was brilliant:

They actually mocked up FAKE articles from the WSJ and put them in the deck. The first was a reminder of just how late United was entering into the market against established LCOs like Southwest and Song. The second was after they'd presented their recommendation - an article lauding United for it's [sic] bravery in pursuing a compelling and unique identity in the LCO space.

Those articles were almost as compelling as the direction itself, and I’m certain they had quite a bit to do with how well the idea sold within the organization.

Not long thereafter, in an email conversation with Adaptive Path president Peter Merholz, Bierut elaborated on the mockup strategy:

Being able to make vivid counterfeits is one of the joys of being a graphic designer, and one that we don’t take enough pleasure in. One of my partners in London once mocked up a whole issue of Fortune to help a client see his business differently.
...
I never talk about "educating the client." I hate that phrase. Almost always it's the designers who need the education, not the client, not the audience. Yet designers and clients both tend to recede into their areas of expertise, and it takes work for us to wrench each other out of it. Making prototypes that help people imagine the effects that design decisions will have in the real world can be a very potent tool. Those fake Wall Street Journal articles were supposed to do exactly that: remind a client who had spent six months showing themselves Powerpoint presentations that there was a real world out there filled with people who didn’t share their fascination with their business strategy or, actually, care at all whether they succeeded at all. It's a good reality check, and it helps to shift the design work from an internal exercise that’s done for management approval, to work that’s done because you’re seeking results with real people in the real world.

Apart from a slight distaste for the phrase "the real world" (probably my own sensitivity owing to hanging around universities, a category of institution widely thought to be entirely unrelated to said reality), I think this point is marvellous and bears repeating: Making prototypes that help people imagine the effects that design decisions will have in the real world can be a very potent tool.

Yes indeed. I'd be interested to hear from anyone with similar experiences to share.

A parting thought: curious how it takes a "fake" artifact to bring the "real" back into view.

Related posts:
> Object-oriented futuring
> Findability features FoundFutures
> Reality prototyping

Open Source futures and design

Image: Adaptive Path

Fellow futurist Jamais Cascio recently blogged on working with San Francisco design consultancy Adaptive Path to build scenarios for the future of the web (which can be found here). The end result of that work was a set of concept videos portraying a web browser, dubbed "Aurora", in the year 02018.



The clip above is the second of four illustrating Aurora's use in different settings. (NB The time horizon isn't foregrounded, but watch for a geeky hint in the events menu.) Its development is described in detail at Adaptive Path, and Lead designer Jesse James Garrett helps dispel any possible confusion:

This is not a demonstration of a real product. What you see in the video is a visualization of our ideas created by animators. Technologically, much of Aurora would be difficult or impossible to implement today. However, we expect everything you see to be possible in some form in the future.

The project was instigated by open-source software org Mozilla (makers, among other things, of the Firefox web-browser which I'm using at this moment), as part of Mozilla Labs' Concept Series, which aims "to provoke thought, facilitate discussion, and inspire future design directions for Firefox, the Mozilla project, and the Web as a whole."

Adaptive Path's Dan Harrelson elaborates:

The Aurora browser concept video is our first venture into the new world of open source design and, in keeping with both Adaptive Path’s and Mozilla’s core philosophies, we are sharing our insights into the design process and providing much of the original source material. Our hope is that others will be inspired to try their hand and release their own vision of the web browser of 2018.

Mozilla Labs' call for participation, released 4 August 02008, notes that Concepts submitted may take the form of Ideas, Mockups, or working Prototypes, but emphasises that all should be set loose for others to tinker with, via a Creative Commons license (for Ideas and Mockups) or the Mozilla Public License (for Prototypes).

Some viewers may find the explanatory video clips a little contrived (like, um, every instructional video ever made) but regardless of what you think of them, or the specific design features of the Aurora itself, what's exciting to me here is the emergence, and potential, of this mode of collaboration: design thinking and futures thinking coming together in a forum deliberately established on the commons model. It makes an intriguing complement to the Superstruct strategy (noted here yesterday) of crowdsourcing scenario fragments through the medium of a game.

I ended an earlier post about a similarly outward-facing concept project from Adaptive Path (the Charmr) with these words:

Encouragingly, it seems, companies prepared to share their "reimaginings" with the wider world -- preferred futures , in the form of ideal design concepts -- stand to do well, and also to do good, at the same time.

They've done it again.

Related posts:
> Public service and self-promotion meet on the adaptive path
> Humans have 23 years to go

Public service and self-promotion meet on the adaptive path

While doing some research on the use of concept designs, I encountered this video from San Francisco design consulting firm Adaptive Path...



Basically, they set about redesigning the daily treatment system for diabetics, and this design concept called the "Charmr" was the result. Says the blurb accompanying the video:

Blogger Amy Tenderich posted her "Open Letter to Steve Jobs" in April [link], pleading with the Apple CEO to apply some of that company's design expertise to improving the lives of the 20 million American diabetics who rely on technology to manage their condition every day. Amy asked for better products for diabetics, but we recognized that those products had to add up to an experience that would satisfy their emotional and psychological needs. So we set out to develop an experience design concept that addressed user behavior and psychology as well as current technological trends to project how insulin pumps and glucose meters might work five years from now.

The company blog contains has a pretty comprehensive rundown of the whole design process, the driving motivation of which was "to generate enthusiasm for human-centered thinking and thus inspire broader change throughout the medical device and design industry". And, says Adaptive Path Interaction Designer Alexa Andrzejewski, reflecting on the process:

The result of this project was not a polished product, but a vision — a vision of what the diabetic experience could look like in a few years if considered from a user-centered perspective.

Now, a few possible points of interest:

1. The video uses a combination of documentary and TV commercial codes, lending it (what I've heard my political science colleague Ashley Lukens describe as) a "texture of truth". It has a number of the qualities of an artifact from the future, presenting vividly imagined piece on a plausible future world (albeit one whose social dimension is limited by dint of its gadget focus).

2. Apart from the opening title cards, the video content presents itself in-scenario; that is, it's not set in the present day talking "about" the hypothetical future in which the product is available, but comes to us "from" that future, so to speak. The former could be called the "inside-out" approach to presenting a scenario; the latter "outside-in".

3. This research and development project was done on spec, i.e., on nine weeks of the company's own time (and money). This makes it an interesting combination of self-promotion -- showcasing the design talents of the team -- and public service. There's an important lesson in that hybridity, of which we recently saw a more commercial, but no less interesting, variation in the Nokia Morph video.

4. I'm reminded of an earlier t.s.f. post which dealt with the contrast between marketing tangible products, versus marketing ways of thinking. This virtual product, particularly insofar as it represented a project of passion for the Adaptive Path design team, plays interestingly with the line between those two categories. Their efforts embody and enact an extension of their type of design thinking to a genre of medical products that typically lack it; products that are poorly designed from a user experience standpoint. By envisioning and demonstrating an improvement in the experience of treatment for sufferers of diabetes, there emerges a synergy of selling the way of thinking (design), and selling the thought (changing that aspect of life for that particular group of disease sufferers) -- to the tune of 17,573 views at YouTube to date. Which is quite admirable, really.

This is part of a broader trend in design thinking, according to IDEO's Allison Arieff, who blogged on the Charmr at NY Times on 14 January 02008:

Could a refrigerator be designed to last longer? Could fewer materials or a smaller carbon footprint be used in manufacturing it?

These are the sorts of questions that smart companies (and the designers, engineers and marketers who work for them) are beginning to address.
[...]
The recently launched Designers Accord was founded by my IDEO colleague Valerie Casey as a sort of voluntary Kyoto Treaty for design and innovation firms focused on working together to create positive environmental and social impact. [...] By collectively agreeing to initiate a dialog about environmental impact and sustainable alternatives with each and every client, designers will be able to change the way things are designed, and that will change the way business works.
[...]
Consumers are also getting into the act, pushing companies to tackle the products, improvements and functions that we truly need as opposed to those they think we’ll desire. I recently came across the writer Amy Tenderich’s open letter to Steve Jobs on Tenderich’s blog for people with diabetes.
[...]
The sort of design innovation that Tenderich is after is about much more than aesthetics or styling; it is really about improving quality of life. No one needs much convincing that this is a huge potential growth area for the health and medical care industries. Certainly Adaptive Path didn’t. The San Francisco-based design consultancy contacted Tenderich and agreed to accept her challenge; their prototype, called the Charmr, is not in production but may help guide future design improvements...
[...]
The list of products for such reimaginings is infinite.

Encouragingly, it seems, companies prepared to share their "reimaginings" with the wider world -- preferred futures , in the form of ideal design concepts -- stand to do well, and also to do good, at the same time.