The Objective Body Experience from Jeff Wain on Vimeo.

The Objective Body Experience is a museum exhibit created by Jeff Wain, Jeremy White, and Matt Holfelner for the IU HCI/d Experience Design course, Spring 2011. Skip to 4:47 to get right to the action and our Google SketchUp model of the exhibit.

This exhibit is meant to point out people’s subjective view of the world by letting them experience a range of different activities from a third-person perspective. Our goal is to help people think more objectively about the world and consider how their subjective view of things influences their interactions and considerations of others and their surroundings.

The design isn’t perfect, and neither is the video, but we found it to be an interesting and effective way to get people to think about their own understandings of normalcy and perspective. We found Google SketchUp to be an effective tool in communicating our design.

Each time we sat down to discuss the latest short story, our Advanced Writing professor would remind us; “a tree is never just a tree. It’s a tree laden with deep symbolic meaning.” I’ve found this phrase sum up my life as a designer well. What we see is the now, without any understanding of the past, the storms it’s weathered, the diseases it’s fought, the topsoil it’s saved from runoff. The amount of work put into any given design in the world is staggering. We forget this, sometimes.

But it’s apparent when it’s not the case. When it happens to be some potted tree plucked from a big box home improvement store and put on display.

One of the things I’ve find both frustrating and inspiring as a designer is how much meaning people will ascribe something they don’t understand. Sure, that tree took significant time and effort to grow. People can take that tree and imagine the treehouse that must have been housed there and the kids that climbed it, the hunter holding his breath waiting for just the right moment to loose the string of his bow, or the generations of birds raised under its broad leaves. But you know what, sometimes it is just a tree, uprooted from a tree farm somewhere and placed out in the world.

That tree, that design, can grow to be great. But it lacks the history, it lacks the knowledge of that place and time and that particular soil. It’s more likely to catch disease or not take root. I’ve found that designs pulled out of the mind without a history and without that contextual knowledge don’t thrive. They look pretty for a few months, maybe even a year, but they never do take root and are eventually replaced.

With design that transplant is obvious.

The great thing about designing, like being a gardener with a green thumb, is loving what I do. I get the chance to put things in the world that can make a real impact. Designs that enable those stories that people try to ascribe something that was tossed out there to look pretty, but in reality could never achieve. I get the chance to practice what I do in a huge variety of ways, all of which I enjoy. Ultimately, the best part is that all this practice, all this messy work, crafting some bonsai instead of tossing seeds in the off chance they’ll sprout requires hard work and dedication, but I love it nonetheless.

I don’t consider my work a chore and I don’t sympathize with those who do. To me, this practice isn’t work, it’s what I want to be do, it’s what I love doing, it’s why I spend all my time doing it, and it’s why I believe I’ll be passionate about it for a long time to come.

In our roles as interaction or experience designers, there is a notable difference between the “D”esign and the “d”esign. “D”esign here refers the visuals, functionality, fidelity, capabilities, technical specs, socializing, usability, and the more concrete understanding of an object or service, while the “d”esign encompasses such ideas as core understanding, behavioral needs, empathy, desires, motivations, relationships, change over time, emotion, and context. These two ideas are certainly intertwined, yet distinct when observed through the lens of a designer’s process. “D”esign is important and yes the Design needs to be right, but that’s the easy part.

As an interaction designer, Design is not my focus, nor do I want it to be. It is important and it is necessary, but it has become foundational. We as designers now have a responsibility to make things work well, be quick and usable, and functional. As design becomes more and more widespread and legitimized (in a sense, just look to Co.Design and the rise of Apple for reassurance), Design is now expected of us. D-schools teach capital-D-design as the “important part,” but I believe that skill to be something that we can and should explore and learn on our own.

Thousands of budding designers learn Design on their own every day, many of whom go on to be successful UX professionals (more about that here). Anyone can place a button on a screen, but as designers we need to do that implicitly in our process. More often than not, functionality will change through development, especially in a corporate setting. All too often though, people fail to look beyond the Design into the deeper understanding of the “d”esign. The Design sits on top, it’s visible, it’s sometimes tangible, and the untrained eye locks there without looking beyond the facade. Tens of thousands of people can design that just as well or better than we as interaction designers can or should want to do it. As an interaction designer, solely focusing on the Design is shallow. Our real goal is to create amazing designs and be able communicate them in a clear, powerful way.

I believe not about getting the Design right, it’s about getting the right design. A strong focus on the process is what leads us there, but not with out the lengthy, messy process of design: thorough and thoughtful research, synthesis of ideas, sketching, concepting and ideation, talking with real people, criticism, storytelling, exploration, failure and triumph. We have a responsibility as designers to identify the core understanding of a design and why it matters. Any number of people can create a Design, but powerful, meaningful designs come from a deep understanding of the problem being solved. In finding that understanding, that’s when the right design emerges. My responsibility is to be able to confidently say that yes, this is the right “d”esign.

First example

The problem

Four and a half days to design an application to help survivors of the zombie apocalypse reach safety. GPS works, albiet infrequently, and can communicate on a basic level, enough to push an application and send/receive small amounts of data. No phone signal or internet is available. All prototyping and testing had to be done in PowerPoint.

The approach

I pushed my team to fit as much of the entire process as we could into a single week. My goal for the team was to push us to produce a real-world approach at a very limited timeframe of designing something. Much of the work should have been put into concepting, simply based on the time constraints. However, we focused instead on building a solid foundation of research as well as performing a reasonable amount of usability tests that would hopefully inform our design without a huge amount of iteration.

The output

The core of our project became to “Help survivors reach safety safely.” In that goal, we ultimately were successful. While the overall quality of the concept could have used refinement, we had enough time to do what would otherwise be considered a “normal” amount of research and testing for a significantly longer project.

Our team conducted a total of seventeen (17) interviews which were crafted in a very specific way to evaluate how we could lead people to safe havens. These interviews focused on how people fundamentally think of navigation, and how they navigate changes based on danger and unfamiliar situations. Assessment of zombie knowledge was secondary to our approach, but still helped us greatly in informing our personas. From this data, two accurate yet ultimately unfinished peronas–Ana Basey and Robert Begay–were created.

We also had the chance to conduct four (4) usability tests, running through two (2) iterations of our prototype, derived from plenty of sketches. Our process was formed around Valerie Casey’s Lenses approach. Unfortunately we only iterated through the entire Lenses process one time, though we still felt confident in our final solution. We did run into time constraints which left our personas not entirely refined to a point I’d feel comfortable sending to a client, and our presentation had some problems in the presented prototype. Ultimately, however, I feel as if this first experiment was a resounding success.

One of our professors at IU, Eli Blevis focuses on sustainability in design. It’s something I’ve always admired but not necessarily something that’s always been on the top of my mind. My goal this year is to consider it more closely in my designs. Because really, this is a huge problem.

Image: The Digital Dump by GOOD. Retrieved on 07.23.2011 from good.is

via Dan Funderburgh

I was spurred to tackle this issue after reading a post from the end of last year by Teehan+Lax, referencing an argument by iA’s Oliver Reichenstein along with a response by Dane Petersen from Adaptive Path. David sums up the two presented arguments nicely:

iA says: experience design means more rigour. It has to do with how you design. It’s design practice made accountable to research, user feedback and measurable business results. It is practiced by seasoned professionals who are passionate about what they do and have earned their stripes through hard-fought experience.

AP says: experience design means more complexity. It has to do with what you design. It’s design practice that focuses on a broader, more multidimensional design space. It is practiced by multi-disciplinary teams who have been trained to apply design thinking systematically and holistically, across a variety of channels and modes.

Both these arguments examine user experience as a whole, but they are born of different approaches to UX. Dane makes an additional distinction in his description, claiming that experience design is “not designing experiences, but designing for experiences.” While I do agree with this point, I think it warrants even further clarification and is worth making a distinction of UX from XD. UX attempts to design a user’s experience in a controlled manner. I have spent this summer researching and pondering our field’s attempts at defining experience design an attempt to craft my own description of this distinction.

So what’s the difference?

UX defines the “how,” the “why,” and the “what” of design, including the interactions, research, design, testing, and implementation. A good model of UX can be seen in the User Experience Wheel by Magnus Revang. UX examines the whole picture of a product from idea, to launch, to strategy and redesign. UX typically focuses on one medium like a product or website. It produces an “experience.” UX is typically situated in the market, informed by business strategy as well as user needs.

XD informs the “how,” the “why,” and the “what” of design. The primary goal of XD is interpretation of experiences, exploring the factors that surround experience. The goal is to produce a concept of the “experience.” You can define “an experience,” but in the end people adapt, reappropriate, misinterpret, and have opinions and lives outside the experience a product affords. People have their own agency, subjectively experiencing the world. A new parent with a screaming baby is going to interact with an iPhone app in a completely different manner than a businessperson on a plane or a kid at a ball game.

I believe UX is still fundamentally born of experience design, but exists as a focused approach to XD. “User” experience rightly infers its roots in usability and a focus on designing something for a person. Since its coining by Don Norman, UX was born of and has largely been appropriated by the web and the web design community. Its inception was based on the change in definition of interaction with devices. No longer were interactions with a computer constrained to a terminal and a person (hence the moniker Human-Computer Interaction, or HCI), but complex networks were forming around data, online services, and the people that used them.

UX is technology-centric

UX lives and dies in technology and business. First and foremost, a UX designer is trying to create something successful, but needs to to have an understanding of user needs, usability, the customer experience (CX), visual design, and how this product fits into a person’s ecology of use. It’s a big picture approach to designing for a user. It’s design with an equal focus on function and purpose. There is an end goal of solving a problem or addressing needs.

XD focuses less on technologically-driven motivations to human- and socially-driven motivations when designing. Experience design sits outside the world of business, though its principles are used. It’s driven on a belief that experience evolves around an artifact based on the person using it. Experience design focuses on emergent experiences rather than experiences that are afforded or dictated by use of an artifact. It’s design with a belief that the purpose is more important than the function, but will in the end define the function. The end goal is (re)definition and refinement of the problem and needs.

Experience is dynamic, ill-defined, and ever-evolving.

Experience Design is a remedy to this. It starts from the Why, tries to clarify the needs and emotions involved in an activity, the meaning, the experience. Only then, it determines functionality that is able to provide the experience (the What) and an appropriate way of putting the functionality to action (the How). Experience Design wants the Why, What and How to chime together, but with the Why, the needs and emotions, setting the tone (see Figure 7). This leads to products which are sensitive to the particularities of human experience. It leads to products able to tell enjoyable stories through their use or consumption. – Marc Hassenzahl

Experience design about telling a story, about communicating and supporting experiences, rather than creating an experience around a device. It’s a dialogue created by a person, outlined or suggested by the designer. It’s about creating understanding. Design is the creation of meaning (Krippendorf, 1989), but even moreso, experience design is a deep contemplation of what meanings emerge. Some indie games design for an emotion (Braid, Amnesia, Limbo) that model their interactions around the why and the experience, rather than building the interaction then defining the “why”.

Design has moved from its origins of making things look attractive (styling), to making things that fulfill true needs in an effective understandable way (design studies and interactive design) to the enabling of experiences (experience design). Each step is more difficult than the one before each requires and builds upon what was learned before. – Don Norman

In examining thinking by Dewey and Bahktin, I believe McCarthy and Wright offer an excellent example of what experience design entails. The creation of a movie is a frequently used and excellent example of UX design. It is a consummate design of the story, the methods of consumption, the effects, crafted in a way that each piece is designed to work together in support of a whole and provide you with “an experience.” XD would also take into account recommendations by friends, families, and reviewers and the expectations created, as well as the follow-up reflections and conversations with other friends and family. It includes the aesthetic experience, connectedness, continuity, and the process of reflection.

I offer a distinction.

UX is the process of designing a medium and the experience surrounding it. XD is the process of exploring and studying the experience that includes a medium. They’re not mutually exclusive, but UX is just one part of experience design. This thinking is based on substantial work and thinking by others before me. I do hope this helps clarify ideas for some and spark debate for others, but I would love any feedback the design community-at-large is willing to offer.

References

For this particular project, I chose to focus on the concept of digital imagery as a means of exploring and visualizing the unknown. I began my research by exploring the depths of design consultancy concepts, NASA projects, and the Earth Observatory for examples of the impact digital imagery has had on our lives. The PDF copy of this project is also attached to this post.

The project

Visual research of ways we understand the unknown through digital imagery. Images flow from the most intimate to the least, clockwise from the top left. References available in the PDF.

The first page of my design document contains the research relevant to my design search and final concept. Moving clockwise from the top left five (5) images, I was initially inspired by IDEO’s Palette concept. This simple analog design attempts to point out the nutritional value of foods through color. From there I moved to ways digital imagery details and teaches us about our personal and physical selves. This is shown using images of a sonogram and Google’s new Body Browser lab, both of which show us details about our bodies that would be impossible or prohibitive to understand without the assistance of digital imagery. Next are examples of sonar and Doppler radar scans which have helped us understand the world around us. Finally, the images move to examples of pictures taken of our solar system by the Hubble telescope and Chandra. Technology has enabled us, through digital imagery to explore and understand the previously inconceivable.

The concept I outlined with this project, showing new ways in which we can now understand our surroundings through digital imagery.

The second page of this project outlines how the concept of under the unknown through digital imagery has affected us on a global scale. The first image shows a picture of a toxic sludge reservoir leak that happened in October, 2010 in Hungary. Digital satellite imagery allowed people to see and evaluate the spill and its effects on people in the area. The second image shows aerosol concentrations around the world. Without digital imagery, this information is a complete unknown, even though this is a major contributing factor to global warming through the reflection of sunlight. The final image shows the concept of the new Space Fence concept. Lockheed Martin won this contract a few weeks ago, and before this sort of technology, objects surrounding the earth have been tracked entirely by path estimation and visual tracing. This gives NASA a tangible means of observation presented in a visible, interactive manner. These three images in my final concept also move from the close–which could have moved even closer to show real people–to the very distant, centering on our interaction with the earth.

The caraway seeds and white pepper.

I’m aiming for this to be a hoppy rye with a bite to celebrate both my bitterness at the cold and the (hopefully) upcoming warm weather. The rye flavor should be pulled out more with the addition of caraway seeds (1oz.) and the spiciness upped with some white pepper (.5oz), both added to primary fermentation. This was also my first batch in two and a half years in which I’ve had to make a yeast starter, since the California V I’m using was a little old. This was a partial mash batch, and the grains were mashed in two gallons at 158° for 40min. then sparged with an additional gallon at 172°. I messed up sparging in this batch, so I’m sure the conversion is quite low.

Recipe for “Pow, ‘rye in the kisser!”

I started using Hopville as of this recipe since I really haven’t had a great experience with BeerTools over the past year. The link will be here until I have a usable recipe format I can post here in the future.

Part of my brew setup, including the yeast starter and my new scale.

After the first week of use–five to eleven hours per day–I’ve just been a little sore, but I can already tell that I’m more focused on what I’m working on. I’ve been using the drafting chair for about 20 minutes every three hours or so. The five feet of working space that I have to work with now is great, and there’s plenty of room to also set up my laptop and sketch.

Update 07.19.2011: I’ve been missing my desk something fierce this summer, and can’t wait to get back to it. Since I wrote this post, I’ve had a lot of people interested in building this desk. I have done some updates since I built it, and plan to do a few more. Namely, I added a few more coats of poly to the top of the desk, built a stand for the monitor and speakers–which are now both at eye level–and am in the process of adding some cross-bracing to the back thanks to the folks at Tinkering Monkey. I’ll be sure to add pictures come September!

Update: My desk has been featured at Unplggd.com! Thanks guys!

The process

It had been about a year since the idea to build a standing desk crossed my mind. There was an article released describing a hand-built standing desk over on Lifehacker that planted the idea in my mind to build something similar. It looked great and looked like something I might actually be able to build. Before actually doing any design on the desk, I tried to figure out if I could handle standing all day. I stacked books on the kitchen bar in my apartment until what felt was a good height to work, then tested it out for a couple weeks while working from home on my laptop. Back on campus, I was also standing at the tall tables in the design studio. So I built it.

The design

The desk was built and assembled in my apartment, and I didn’t run into any major problems along the way. I will have to change some of the structure later on, as all the joints are connected with 1″ L brackets that really aren’t that stable, so there is a slight wobble to it. Despite that and the height, my setup keeps it stable enough. My next project is to use some leftover plywood and the 8″x8″x8″ blocks I have for my speakers to bring the monitor and speakers up to eye level.

As for the building, I applied red oak veneer to the edges of the plywood, which looks great. I also could have left the back of the plywood unfinished and used just one package. The legs and supports each were given one coat of stain and two coats of polyurethane. The plywood was given a coat of stain, then two coats of polyurethane. It may have been my sub-par sanding skills or just the wood, but the plywood wasn’t dark enough. Another coat of stain was applied over the polyurethane then a final coat was applied (in total, two coats stain, three poly).

Hardware

• 1 – 60″x32″ Red oak hardwood plywood (top)
• 1 – 52″x16″ Red oak hardwood plywood (bottom shelf)
• 2 – 4″x4″x42″ Douglas fir (legs)
• 3 – 2″x4″x45″ Red cedar (supports)
• 4 – 2″x4″x17″ Red cedar (supports)
• 2 – 2″x2″x15″ Pine (bracing for top)
• 2 – 2″x2″x43″ Pine (bracing for top)
• 2 – 3/4″x25′ Red oak veneer edging
• 1″ L bracket hardware packs with screws for supports
• 10×1″ wood screws for legs
• 6×1-1/2″ wood screws for attaching pine to top
• 60 grit sandpaper for rough sanding
• 120 grit sandpaper for finer sanding
• 220 and 320 grit sandpaper for sanding between polyurethane coats
• Minwax clear satin polyurethane (used 3/4 can)
• Minwax Special Walnut 224 wood finish (used 1/3 can)
• Drafting chair ($99) (not included in final total)

Total cost: $185.00

The sketch I used to build the desk. After changing the width, it was no longer to scale.