Design for experiences

It is taken for granted that computing systems are designed to implement some functions, to do some tedious and repetitive jobs with precision, and thus to save us time and accomplish tasks more efficiently and effectively. With this perspective, we focus on the content of the computing systems - the function, the jobs or "the what" that computers can do for us, and coorespondingly HCI is concerned to make these functions easy to access and use.

This point of view, of course bears some truth. Anyway, that's the strength of machines. However, to just concentrate on "the what" will limit our understanding of computers and ourselves, and probably lead to the departure of our true motivation. What is our true motivation? No matter how many ways we can state it, to say we want to promote the quality of life will never be wrong. What is quality of life is a philosophical question that is beyond my ability to discuss here, but at least I can safely claim that it is more than efficiency, effectiveness or "the what" - we have to take "the how" into consideration as well. The breakdown of the myth of paperless office testifies that. No matter how much information a computer can instore, how efficiently it can process, or how fast it can transfer, we still can't live without paper. Because what we concern is not just the information, but the way to interact with information. As far as interaction - "the how" - is concerned, paper provides very rich features such as portable, flippable, tearable and drawable, of which computers can hardly achieve, yet proved to be very important for us to attain, exchange and operate on information. So it is time step back, to rethink about our deep value of life, and hopefull to avoid the dilemmas such as whether technology made paper useless or caused an increase usage of paper, or whether technology has improved our quality of life or made it worse...

The inclusion of "the how" together with "the what" will lead us to a more broad view of designing - not just design to implement functions, but design for experiences. Once we move to this perspective, we are opened up to some new and interesting ideas about design. We can reach the same experience by different means. For example, to calm down, we can either listen to music, or look at a painting. To refresh, we can either go to the gym to work out, or dance with the music at home. To have some fun, we can either find some jokes, or watch some comedies. Here we take the experience and the feeling as more basic and root human needs, and we take those into focus rather than some concrete actions. At the same time, some slight change of media, environment or time can greatly change our experience of the same thing. With the same movie, dependent on whether you watch it in a movie theater or on DVD at home, your appreciation of it could be very different. With the same food, different containers, or dishes can change our appetite for it. With the same article, to read it on the computer or on paper could make a difference of your level of understanding.....

What's its implications for design? I am not clear yet, but let's use some imagination here. Now our requirement document will not be like ""this interface should list all the items in the database", instead, it would be like "this interface should give an overview of all the items with a glance"... Also we take computing systems as medium to exchange experiences of designers and users. In order to do that, we designers and users have to share some experiences. So designers go into users to do some ethnographic studies, and users join the designers team to see how much technology can do for them....