Experience design and new professions

Two interesting and thought-provoking posts but it has taken me a while to write this up so it's not as timely as it chould have been.

Firstly, Adam Greenfield at Speedbird on experience design.

He starts off by looking at the iPod and iTunes as a service and experience, their two insights being:

1. The product is not isolated and it's a way of getting access to content


2. They account for interactions across multiple channels and over time

This is "experience design". But the flaw with this smooth experience is that all this requires control and leaves less room for messiness, hacking and emergent behaviour. Adam looks at the Nike+ iPod product which enables a very smooth experience but means that you can't do anything but what the designers intended. This also means that it's unlikely to be a long-term experience - for that you would need an open system and the ability to get your data in and out. So he suggests that maybe the most successful products and services would be well-designed overarching experiences that are open and have pluggable, optional components - "small pieces, loosely joined". Experience designers should plan for people configuring their own experiences - "designing for interaction". And they should include "beautiful seams", so users can reach into and configure the experience.

This kind of reminds me of the current debate over Facebook and its perception as a walled-garden (see here or here for more). People seem to like the experience, it certainly looks nicer than Myspace, but it's not open or extendable (well, not in a maintainable way) or hackable. No seams?

Anyway, I'll go away and do some thinking about how BBC radio and its web and other digital platforms work as an end-to-end experience.

Second up, Thomas Vanderwal on a new profession of hybrid software and design people - New Profession Unfolding In Beauty and Geekery.

Having seen the Microsoft Photosynth demo he reflects on how much data we are now producing and storing and how we need skills, tools and understanding to make use and make sense of it all. In particular, visualisation is a particularly powerful tool for understanding all this data.

And we need people with the right skills to do this. Traditionally designers and information architects have lacked the quantitive skills to analyse this data, but those with the quantitive and analytical skills have lacked the design and artistic skills necessary to make it understandable and accessible. He proposes a new profession because of...

"The need to understand not only broad but deep sets of data and information so to contextualize it into understanding..."

Interesting, it's certainly an area that attracts me and I'd like to do more work there (see my previous posts on incoming text messages).

And also, on a related note, another TED video. Take a look at Hans Rosling's talk showing the use of statistics and visualisation to give new insights on poverty and life around the world.