Adam Greenfield, author of “Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing”, talks about the increasing trend to see products and services being combined in a way that focuses on the customer’s experience when using the product/service bundle. In his article titled “On the ground running: Lessons from experience design” he explains some of the underlying design principles of some well-known products.

Starting with the positive example of the iPod/iTunes bundle he dives into the challenges of designing end-to-end experiences when one company is not in control of the whole experience. IDEO’s approach to redesigning Amtrak’s Acela Express not just by looking at the train interior but by designing the overall travel experience is mentioned but also the challenges of keeping the experience “alive” are portrayed.

He concludes with:

If absolutely top-shelf design organizations like IDEO and Apple are unable to fully encompass the challenges of everyday life in the real world, how will the rest of us fair? Isn’t it better, then, to open these systems up—to provide the APIs and other hooks that would allow people to configure them to their own liking?

This goes beyond William Gibson’s oft-quoted and unimpeachably correct observation that “the street finds its own uses for things,” toward the recognition that designers cannot, even in principle, encompass at design time the full range of uses to which their work will be put. In some respects, too, this is what human-computer interaction guru Don Norman is alluding to, when he argues that the person formerly known to experience design as the “user,” “customer,” or “consumer”; needs to be understood as a human being before designers can do their work properly. Any other approach, he reasons, risks treating this person as an instrumental component, not as someone capable of fully participatory co-creation.

You can read the full article here.

Why do I blog this? Reading articles like this shows me that I am right on track with my research activities to develop a method to understand and model consumers and to use this information for the development of new services.

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