Design

Lens: Type: Component
Design:

Anything designed—a product, service, or system.

Photo: cottonbro
a girl looking at a poster

Designed products, services, and systems deserve careful inspection—it’s hard to live a day in modern society and not use something designed. In Things That Keep Us Busy: The Elements of Interaction (2017), Lars-Erik Janlert and Erik Stolterman gave designed outcomes their moment in the spotlight as “objects.” Objects were explored independently—not as things that are just related to other things or activities. Janlert and Stolterman referred to any design outcome as an object—a distinction that removes designed things from roles like “problem-solving” or “money-making,” emphasizing that objects are worth examining in their own right.

When designed outcomes are allowed to be themselves, we can discover fascinating details that reveal their impacts, inner workings, and how we can design them more effectively. After all, the universe is comprised mostly of objects—Saturn, a Canadian Hemlock, a coffee cup—all objects (Harman, 2016). By reducing design to objects, much like how LaTour reduces all things into Actants in his Actor Network Theory, we may back away from the mess of objects and see the connections between them. We may see the constellations and how each designed outcome relates to another.

Products, services, and systems are artificial—made by someone or something for a purpose (Simon, 1996). These objects exist in contexts, and they are used by people. Sometimes these objects work perfectly for the people we intend. Sometimes they just create more problems. As design outcomes have become more and more a part of daily life, learning their effects can help designers understand how they affect people and the environment.

Characteristics and Behavior

Observations can produce descriptions of components. Designers can document things like physical size, style, and makeup. Components’ characteristics and behaviors directly define what they are and how they are working. However, they fall short of revealing more profound aspects of who they are, why they are, and their function in experience design scenes.

Select any of the aspects to learn its role in experience design scenes at the characteristics and behaviors level.

Components
Design Characteristics
Design Behavior
Design

Characteristics

Style Material Size: Design

Behavior

State Operation

Experience-Level Aspects

A designer with experience mindset researches and designs with the tangible and the intangible in mind. When researching experience design scenes, these aspects can be targeted using different design research methods. Designing for complete experiences does not neglect these aspects. Instead, products, services, and systems are designed to align with these aspects and consider them as essential drivers for design decisions.

“Seeing” these aspects requires taking different perspectives—putting on a set of “lenses.” Bifocals, a magnifying glass, and a stethoscope enable the viewer to see different things. Explore scenes using each set of lenses to reveal new details about components in experience design scenes (Gilmore, 2016).

Select any of the aspects to learn its role in experience design scenes at the experience design level.

Experience Theme
Complex
Underlying
Core
Design: Interaction
Purpose Accessibility Usefulness Usability
Affordances
Meaning

Research Objects to Learn...

building viewed through a lens

Evaluation

A design is already implemented. How well did the design work? What were the intended and unintended outcomes?

Read MoreEvaluation

Sources

References and sources that support the inclusion of this Aspects of Experiences for Design component.

Design

Harman, G. (2017). Immaterialism: Objects and Social Theory. John Wiley & Sons.

Harman, G. (2018). Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything. Penguin UK.

Janlert, L.-E., & Stolterman, E. (2017). Things That Keep Us Busy: The Elements of Interaction. The MIT Press.

Simon, H. A. (1996). The Sciences of the Artificial. MIT Press.

Social Sciences

Ritzer, George. Actor Network Theory. London: Sage, 2004.