Article
Dennis M. Cheatham
Associate Professor of Communication Design, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, United States
Abstract
This article presents a set of tools implemented at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, United States, that guides experience design students through an iterative process of envisioning possible effects of the outcomes they create. Experience Design is an emerging, transdisciplinary practice whose outcomes endeavor to facilitate memorable experiences resulting from use. People who use products, services, and systems designed with this mindset value them because of the memories and emotions these outcomes facilitate. This article presents the roles of futures thinking, design thinking, and experience design for empowering planners when addressing complex social issues. It shares a toolkit that scaffolds learning to facilitate divergent thinking, intertwining concepts from theatre, social psychology, scholarship of teaching and learning, and design. Two toolkit methods are discussed: Experience Design Scenes and Experience-Based Proto-Personas. This article presents the toolkit’s applications for introducing an experience design mindset into design education. It includes how this approach can give students foresight to anticipate the intended and unintended consequences their candidate designs may cause.
Keywords
Experience design, Experiential learning, Behavior design, Design pedagogy
Introduction
Designers are future thinkers and makers. Designs such as social media smartphone apps, hospital patient check-in procedures, and coffee packaging act as interventions to create futures that clients and stakeholder’s desire. The five-stage design thinking process taught in schools at many levels is proven for defining problems and prototyping solutions at any scale. Design teams use it to plan products, services, and systems, from hotel robot toothbrush delivery to Google apps (Knapp et al., 2016). However, designers’ roles and the skills they must possess expand beyond aesthetic making as the problems they “solve” become complex, sociotechnical concerns (Davis, 2008). Designers co-create outcomes that touch nearly every facet of a person’s daily experience and are partners in shaping future policies in the private and public sectors. As design students are called upon to design experiences, plain old design thinking is underpowered to meet the challenge.
The purpose of this article is to explore how to integrate experience design, design thinking, and futures thinking into design education to develop students’ experience mindset and the foresight necessary to anticipate the future effects of the products, services, and systems they create. I explain how behavior changes effectively impact societal problems and how an experience mindset is essential for design students who wish to affect positive change in their communities and beyond. To facilitate an experience mindset, I created and implemented several tools, and in this article, I report the effects of these assignments on students in my classes. If designers are to become co-creators of more preferred futures, design education will do well to integrate futures thinking into the design process (Masini, 2006, p. 1166).
Shared Goals: Better Futures Through Design
Futures studies and design thinking are concerned with creating more preferable futures by addressing “wicked” problems (Buchanan, 1992; Rittel & Webber, 1973; B. Schwarz et al., 1982). The most pressing challenges our society faces are problems at the systems level (John Christopher Jones, 1970; Meadows, 2008). Systems such as healthcare, transportation, policymaking, and environmental protection have long been the subject of work in futures studies whose methods give planners foresight to identify possible futures and to inform the design of products, services, and systems to achieve those futures (B. Schwarz et al., 1982). Through specializations such as design research, systemic design, transition design, and experience design, designers apply the design thinking process to address sociotechnical problems (Irwin, 2015; C. B. Jones, 2023; D. A. Norman & Stappers, 2015; Ryan, 2014).
Designing to solve complex problems at the systems level often involves implementing policies that attempt to solve the problem by dictating new ways of operating; however, this rigid model often fails because the complexity of many of these problems undermines rigid, top-down approaches (Mueller, 2020). Behavioral interventions hold a great deal of promise for addressing systems-level problems. The use of behavioral science in the United States government through various efforts led by the Behavioral Sciences Team has improved services and access across several agencies (Congdon & Shankar, 2015; Moore et al., 2022; Obama, n.d.; Office of the Assistant Secretary for Policy, n.d.). As designers become more involved in creating interventions to address sociotechnical problems, designing for experiences that facilitate behavior change at the personal level can produce a widespread change for brighter futures.
Design’s potential for social behavior change is significant, as initiatives have reported design’s potent role as a motivational force for developing new habits (Chick, 2012; Manzini, 2015; Niedderer, 2013; Resnick, 2016). Small changes repeated regularly over time reinforce new habits (Clear, 2018). For example, when designers create outcomes that make drinking water throughout the day easier or encourage getting outside to spend time in nature, people are more likely to maintain their water intake or to get outside during their workday. Remaining hydrated and spending time in nature produce positive health benefits for the individual, but they also scale up to community, city, regional, and global levels. Habit formation is experiential, and when an experience such as driving an electric car or caring for one’s mental health through daily meditation is memorable and enjoyable, people are more likely to be motivated to continue the habit (Fogg, 2009). Planners should not consider this approach lightly, as social influences and “nudges” for behavior change can control behavior and influence others without their consent (Sunstein, 2016). Designers with an experience mindset have the knowledge, thinking, and skills to create outcomes that encourage positive habits, which can potentially make widespread improvements in the future. Such power highlights the importance of futures thinking and futures studies to give planners foresight into the possible consequences of experience-centered design (C. B. Jones, 2023; Ramos, 2020).
Design curricula that prepare learners to address systems-level problems through experience-centered design must equip learners to envision possible futures, research present conditions, and create testable interventions, all with an experience mindset. Experiences are as variable and ill-defined as sociotechnical problems—a significant challenge for students who wish to create experience-centered products, services, and systems that spark emotional responses such as belonging, curiosity, joy, or awe. As Generative AI and large language models become more prevalent in our society, designers must become well-versed in experiences. In his “Design In Tech 2023” report at the South by Southwest Conference, Design leader John Maeda gave the charge that “Speaking human really well will matter more than speaking machine in this next chapter” (Maeda, 2023). Sociotechnical problems are human problems, so the work ahead for higher education is to train students to become experts in human experiences who can operate the design thinking process and utilize futures thinking to ideate the effects of their designs.
Facing The Blank Canvas of Sociotechnical Problems
Anyone who plans—writers, inventors, artists, policymakers, or designers—faces the same challenge: the “blank canvas” of possibility. Knowing where to start when imagining futures and creating interventions that align with peoples’ emotional makeup can be difficult. Inexperienced innovators, especially students in colleges and universities, are particularly vulnerable to feeling lost when creating artifacts, plans, or mental models of the future. Futures thinking, design thinking, and experience design offer frameworks that guide planners facing the blank canvas of possibility. Though each practice differs in its goals and deliverables, when combined, they guide planners through concepts of speculation, ideation, and designing interventions with the potential to change behavior and society. Each practice’s foundational principles and processes are essential for planners who create experience-centered outcomes on the blank canvas of the future.
Experience Design: The X-Ray
Experience Design is a specialization for designing products, services, and systems that are not only useful, usable, and desirable but also memorable. People who use experience-centered design are not users—they are participants (Rossman & Duerden, 2019). Experience Designers create outcomes that facilitate two kinds of experiences: everyday experiences that often go unnoticed, like riding a train to work every day, and personally felt “special” experiences—ones that people are keenly aware of while experiencing (Coxon, 2015). Experience-centered outcomes—especially those for “special” experiences like those in theme parks, restaurants, immersive entertainment, or museums are differentiated in the market because of the unique experiences they create for participants (Pine & Gilmore, 2019; Rossman & Duerden, 2019; Solis, 2015). More than merely a specialization, experience design is a mindset that shapes designers’ goals and decisions (Cheatham, 2017). This holistic approach considers the person, environment, and surrounding conditions as factors in their experience. Those who design for experiences consider aspects like people’s emotions, physical makeup, purchasing power, and personal relationships integral to understanding the people’s makeup (Desmet & Hekkert, 2007; Marc Hassenzahl, 2001, 2013; Pschetz & Bastian, 2018). Experience designers conduct primary and secondary research and use methods like experience mapping, storyboarding, empathy maps, and behavioral personas to elucidate participant makeup and to inform design that aligns with these aspects. Experience-centered design outcomes employ various design approaches—combining interior design, sound, lighting, game design, and storytelling to facilitate memorable and often immersive experiences.
The experience mindset is an X-ray instrument that identifies emotions, attitudes, and physical sensations people feel. Experience designers use this X-ray to discover participants’ inner makeup via research and how to design products, services, and systems that spark delight, awe, calm, belonging, and other powerful emotions. Students with an experience mindset develop a bank of concepts and methods that unlock the blank canvas because they can find ways that design can align with participants’ identities and worldviews and support healthier habits that align with their makeup.
Design Thinking: Bifocal Lens Eyeglasses
Design Thinking is a process of creative problem-solving strategies—systematizing goal-directed creativity to solve problems through formulating problems and creating interventions. Typical Design Thinking process stages include empathy, defining problems, ideation prototyping, testing, and evaluation (Dam & Siang, 2016; Design Council, 2015; Knapp et al., 2016; J. O. Schwarz et al., 2023). Other variations consolidate these phases into need-finding, brainstorming, and prototyping (Seidel & Fixson, 2013). At its core, Design Thinking produces digital and physical products, services, and systems prototypes that can be tested and improved for those who use them before full release. With its multi-step, making-centric approach, Design Thinking guides planners to know how to create “solutions” on the blank canvas of the future.
Within the Design Thinking process, various methods that facilitate research, ideation, and prototyping include concept mapping, card sorting, A/B Testing, rapid prototyping, usability testing, and content analysis (John Chris Jones, 1992; Martin et al., 2012). Co-design decenters the designer as an expert who “knows all” by inviting all stakeholders to create outcomes—a value held by futures studies and design (Angheloiu et al., 2020, p. 107). When designers use methods emphasizing usefulness, usability, and accessibility, the design’s “success” is no longer measured by the designer’s desires or the artifact’s aesthetics (P. Jones, 2018; D. Norman, 2013; Sanders & Stappers, 2012).
Like bifocal lensed eyeglasses, design thinking features two magnification powers for examining sociotechnical problems—one set of lenses through which planners examine problems in detail via research and a second set of lenses that focus designers on the immediate phase of the creation and testing process in front of them. Skills such as coding websites, directing when and how to use artificial intelligence, or crafting mood boards and branding guidelines produce outcomes that facilitate interaction (Janlert & Stolterman, 2017; Nelson & Stolterman, 2012). Design Thinking reveals the blank canvas’s size and guides what is most appropriate to place on it. Students who employ design thinking use its step-by-step process to gain insights and produce functioning, testable interventions.
Futures Thinking: The Wide Field Telescope
Futures thinking frameworks guide planners through envisioning many future possibilities, not just the probable ones (Fu & Xia, 2022; Nissen, 2021). Concepts in economics, politics, technology, social science, military/defense, futurology, forecasting, sociology, and science fiction underpin futures studies (Fu & Xia, 2022; Scupelli et al., 2016). When using futures thinking, planners gain foresight to anticipate possible outcomes caused by present decisions. Its objectives, such as defining alternative futures, identifying areas that signal warnings of possible futures, and understanding underlying processes of change (Amara, 1978; Slaughter, 1993), assist planners through divergent thinking facilitated by tools like Inayatullah’s Six Pillars of Futures Studies (Inayatullah, 2008), Causal Layered Analysis (Mercer, 2022), scenario planning (Amer et al., 2013), and the futures cone (Christophilopoulos, 2021; Gall et al., 2022).
Concepts in futures thinking reveal the blank canvas (or, more accurately, myriad canvasses), helping planners identify many projected, preferable, probable, plausible, possible, and preposterous futures (Christophilopoulos, 2021, p. 84). The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) listed Futures Literacy as “An essential competency for the 21st century” (UNESCO, 2019), signaling how crucial this ability is as our world faces complex problems that threaten the futures of its people. As a wide field telescope, futures studies promote divergent thinking—formulating problems, then exploring and considering many possible consequences of their design decisions simultaneously to select the most appropriate solution (Amara, 1978; Mumford et al., 1994; Runco, 2011; Runco & Okuda, 1988; B. Schwarz et al., 1982). Futures thinking and a willingness to explore unexpected combinations are essential skills for positive change as part of an experience-centered design process (Corthell, 2021; Manzini, 2009; Nissen, 2021; Rust, 2004). Experience design students who apply futures thinking frameworks reveal points on distant horizons that guide design decision-making, helping students adjust course and reevaluate their decisions as design interventions take shape and the blank canvas fills.
Creating Experience-Centered Interventions with Multiple Magnifications
Combining the three magnification levels above provides planners with frameworks for creating interventions well-suited for addressing wicked problems by promoting behavior change. Innovation at this level requires radical approaches versus incremental changes that reinforce the status quo (D. A. Norman & Verganti, 2014). One helpful design thinking approach for envisioning futures is the disruptive hypothesis, where designers ask a question about a future that “disrupts” the status quo (Williams, 2015). Shifting students’ perspectives from prizing final products and aesthetics to integrating futures thinking into their design process is imperative if they hope to use experience-centered design for behavior change and brighter futures different from the world they know now. Our students must recognize “seeds of change” and be willing to embrace social systems different from the one they are in—eschewing the tendency to perpetuate that system (Masini, 2006).
An experience mindset focuses design and futures thinking on the participant’s experience. When researching, planners aim to discover how the design can align with the participant’s makeup. When designing, color, style, size, operation, and other details are selected to enhance the experience. Futures thinking with an experience mindset questions what effect the design will have on the person and their surrounding community.
Fig. 1: Experience mindset process
Throughout the experience mindset process, the participant’s experience drives decisions during each stage—envisioning possible futures, creating interventions, and envisioning new possible futures the intervention could create. To operate this process, students must develop the ability to maintain an experience mindset while defining possible future states and creating products, services, and systems in the present. These students must develop emotional intelligence, both to describe their own emotions and to interpret the emotions of others (Goleman, 1996). If the experience level is an effective way to achieve behavior change through habit formation, the challenge for educators is finding how to mentor learners to develop an experience mindset.
Learning Experience Design Futures
As creators of the future, designers are called upon to be inventive dreamers, skilled researchers, and astute planners. In their paper “Dexign Futures: A Pedagogy for Long-Horizon Design Scenarios” (Scupelli et al., 2016), Peter Scupelli, Arnold Wasserman, and Judy Brooks documented programs in higher education that combine futures studies and design in ways that equip students with these skills. Infusing an experience mindset into design thinking and futures thinking focuses planners on creating outcomes that can impact behavior. However, doing so significantly increases the number of variables early career designers must consider when designing for experiences. This level of complexity can be staggering due to its integrative nature.
I developed the two tools documented below and used them in several undergraduate courses in Communication Design and graduate courses in Experience Design at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, United States. Undergraduate students in my university-level courses were between 18 and 23 years of age. Graduate students in the online Master of Fine Arts in Experience Design program were between 25 and 40. Because of their early stage in life, undergraduate students have a finite set of life experiences from which to draw. Although older, graduate students are often very new to Experience Design. None of the students who used the tools below had formal training in futures studies or experience design; some were just learning the design thinking process.
My goal for students is to develop an experience mindset for design, informed and expanded by futures thinking, and to apply this combination regardless of the industry or domain. The toolkit described below is designed to scaffold learning—incrementally introducing students to concepts, mindsets, and methods so that students can develop competency (Wood et al., 1976). I adopted a constructivist approach to instruction for these activities—developing learning activities that consider students’ understandings and life experiences to increase the likelihood that content delivery will match their learning ability and willingness to try new things (Knight, 2012). Through Design-Based Learning, students can envision alternative futures and formulate problems (Rowe, 2023).
Dissecting Design: Experience Design Scenes
Traditional design education prioritizes design for aesthetics, functionality, and makeup. However, an experience-centered mindset holds that a quality design is exemplified by how well it supports the performance of an activity. The activity is the center of the experience—a “coordinated, integrated set of tasks” (D. Norman, 2005, p.15) that comprises an activity such as traveling to work or learning interaction design in a classroom.
Fig. 2: Activity symbol
Activity: the objective a person completes using designed outcomes in a specific context.
Examples: Washing laundry; Relaxing on vacation; Preparing fields for planting season; Celebrating a loved one’s high school graduation; Preparing for a day at work; Traveling to an academic conference
Isolating the activity concept prompts students to examine the activity and answer the following questions critically.
Table 1: Activity-centered design prompts
Define the Need (Design Thinking) | What activity do people want to complete? |
Activity + Design (Design Thinking) | How do product, service, or system features help them accomplish their goal? |
The Experience (Experience Design) | What physical and emotional experiences result from usage? |
Possible Consequences (Futures Thinking) | What possible long-term effects could this design and experience produce? |
I used this activity-centered design model in Spring 2021 in a third-year, 300-level undergraduate user experience design course titled Design for Use for a project where students were required to design smartphone app prototypes. At the start of the project, during an in-class workshop, students were asked to: 1) define an activity their app would facilitate and 2) how its features would produce a positive user experience. Students described apps that would assist with scheduling and managing lawn care services, pre-ordering and customizing desserts from an ice cream shop, and researching high-end mountain biking equipment.
Almost all 19 students in the course could clearly describe the activity their app would promote using the prompts listed above. Half of the participants could successfully describe how their features would assist users in completing their activities. Students needed help when asked to share what experience their app ideas would facilitate. A few students shared that their features would make services “easier to understand” or “save time.” A few others shared how they would design for accessibility: typography that would be easy to see or buttons large enough to easily touch, but no answers described emotional experiences or sensations. The project parameters did not ask students to explain the long-term implications of their apps, though one student designing an app for an art museum described how their app could promote increased attendance and love of art in the future. Responses to the in-class exercise suggested that defining experience design scenes as discrete components could help students develop critical thinking skills when creating app features and considering the possible impacts of their design decisions.
Building upon work by myriad researchers and practitioners described in detail later in this article, I delineated the concept of an experience design scene—a scope of time with a beginning and an end that comprises components like actors, a motivation that drives the story (the activity) and the resulting experience. Time and duration are necessary conditions of any experience or story, so implementing concepts from theatre studies was a valuable mechanism for framing interactions between components and how usage and experience are intertwined (Harjula & Kokko, 2022; Jääskö & Mattelmäki, 2003). By dissecting experiences into their parts, students can examine each component as an isolated variable that can produce new possible experiences and futures when modified, using scenario planning methods (Amer et al., 2013).
Fig. 3: AoE4D Component: Context symbol
Context: the setting in which the scene takes place
Examples: Inside a train station; Lagos, Nigeria; Under a coffee shop awning in a thunderstorm; In the seats at Estadio Azteca in Mexico City; A trail in Huangshan National Park
Fig. 4: AoE4D Component: People symbol
People: the characters in the scene
Examples: An 84-year-old grandparent; A black woman who creates graffiti art; Three army buddies who served together in World War II; A premature baby with bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD)
Fig. 5: AoE4D Component: Object symbol
Design: The product, service, or system that is used
Examples: Clothes-washing machine; Horse-drawn plow; Bubble tea; An app for ordering food; The CN Tower in Toronto, Ontario, Canada; A genetics course at a university; T-shirt
Each component of an experience design scene is loaded with aspects that describe their nuanced makeup in ways that affect experiences. Context, people, and design are amorphous concepts because they can take many forms depending on the activity in which they are involved. A T-shirt worn at a gala makes a fashion statement but blends into the environment when worn at a beach. To give designers and students a precise vocabulary for describing, researching, and designing experiences, I conducted a literature review to learn what engineering, psychology, art, and business scholars considered core for designing experiences. The result was 48 Aspects of Experiences for Design.
Fig. 6: Aspects of Experiences for Design
These 48 Aspects of Experiences for Design were identified through an exhaustive literature review exploring theory and practice related to activities, context, people, and design. Concepts of experiences and meaning were drawn from work by Dewey, de Certeau, Gendlin, Pine and Gillmore, Rossman and Duerden (de Certeau, 2011; Dewey, 2005; Gendlin, 1997; Pine & Gilmore, 2019; Rossman & Duerden, 2019).
The Theory of Planned Behavior concerns people’s motivations to act and covers aspects like attention, subjective norm, intention, and attitude (Ajzen, 1991). Soft Systems Methodology by Peter Checkland added the concept of worldview and the importance of context (Checkland & Scholes, 1999). Hierarchy, interconnections, and systems-level concepts were discovered in Donella Meadows’ work (Meadows, 2008). The importance of peoples’ cultural makeup, self-concept, and matters related to personal identity came from work in social cognition, sociology, and cultural anthropology (Fiske & Taylor, 2017; Hill Collins, 2000; LeCompte & Schensul, 2010). Design concepts such as usefulness, usability, affordance, purpose, and meaning were common themes across design literature, highlighted in work by Norman, Sanders, Forlizzi and Ford, Jääskö, Desmet, Hassenzahl, and Gibson (Forlizzi & Ford, 2000; Gibson, 2014; M. Hassenzahl, 2010; Jääskö et al., 2003; D. Norman, 2013). Martin Heidegger’s Being in Time provided concepts related to moods, and Erving Goffman’s work contributed aspects that explain how people present themselves to others (Goffman, 1959; Heidegger, 2010).
Each component in an experience design scene has aspects such as a person’s worldview, the physical materials from which a design is made, or the temperature inside a room. These aspects represent variables that designers can manipulate when exploring the possible future effects of such changes. Many factors determine if a person has an ideal experience when they do activities such as learning by attending an online video class meeting, farming by plowing a field, relaxing by drinking coffee in a café, or making memories attending a theme park with family. Not all aspects are essential in every scene, but in most, changing one can produce wildly different futures that produce a domino effect—sparking new futures and, in turn, concerns for design to respond to those possible future states.
I created the Travel Experience Fieldwork (TEF) assignment to challenge learners to examine each aspect and its effects. All graduate students in the Experience Design Studio course in the MFA in Experience Design program at Miami University travel once per semester to a location in North America for a “Destination Weekend.” While traveling to the semester’s destination, the TEF assignment required students to observe two experience design scenes and document their observations using an assigned set of Aspects of Experiences for Design. I assigned the TEF assignment eight times between 2019 and 2023. Figures 7, 8, and 9 show portions of several TEF reports.
Fig. 7: Closeup of student work for TEF Fall 2021: Boarding a delayed flight at Houston Hobby Airport (work by student Shavon Anderson)
Fig. 8: Closeup of student work for TEF Fall 2022: Purchasing a transit pass in a Montréal underground station (work by student Carolyn Noll Sorg)
Fig. 9: Closeup of student work for TEF Spring 2021: Deplaning at Chicago O’Hare airport (work by student Amber Dewey Schultz)
The TEF focuses students’ attention on the experience like an X-ray—noticing peoples’ frustrations when deplaning, effortless use thanks to the intuitive design of a pay station when purchasing transit passes, or the “wild west” culture of airports. Students who complete the TEF assignment practice defining the activity they observe and must frame experience design scenes by establishing a start, middle, and endpoint. The TEF also helps students identify aspects they do not understand. In Figure 3, the student noted was “stuck” and could not explain the worldview aspect, which allowed me to give feedback on how worldview (weltanschauung) could factor into the experience design scene.
The Travel Experience Fieldwork assignment fuels rich discussions about experiences and the future in my course. We discuss how products, services, and systems that produced negative experiences could be redesigned for better outcomes. In these class sessions, I asked students to change one component of the scene—a person with a different makeup, revised weather conditions surrounding the scene, or a product whose interface is in a different language—to inspire discussions about the interdependencies of each component. Students also expanded the time horizon in our class discussions, sparking conversations about the future of air travel, customer service, and accessibility—all with an experience mindset.
Undergraduate and graduate students in my courses use Aspects of Experiences for Design as a guide to help them discover what aspects cause positive and negative experiences. Because of their limited life experience, students do not always think about situations different from their own, such as the effects of a severe health condition on decisions about finances or advance care planning. Breaking experience design scenes into discrete aspects gives designers granular building blocks for imagining possible futures that produce better experiences. Experience design scenes and their aspects open doors for students to ask, “what if?” by altering one aspect at a time, then inspecting what possible futures each new combination creates.
Experience-Based Proto-Personas
Personas are a widely used tool in interaction and user experience design, and design educators have utilized them when teaching Futures Thinking (Scupelli et al., 2016). Design teams use personas to represent the critical qualities of groups of people who use products, services, or systems, such as age, social class, behavior, attitudes, and brand preferences. Personas are evidence-based—design teams use qualitative and quantitative research methods whose aggregate findings produce one or two persona cards representing all study participants. Persona cards usually comprise an image of the persona, lists of their qualities, and sometimes a quote evoking the persona’s beliefs. These persona cards keep the end users “on the mind” of the design team to improve the likelihood that design decisions will align with the user’s makeup (Dam & Siang, 2016).
Proto-personas are used when field research is impossible due to time constraints or when organizations do not value evidence-based design. Without primary research, persona card content is limited to design teams’ best guesses about the people for whom they design. Proto-personas are not a replacement for rigorous primary and secondary research; however, they can be a helpful tool for sparking questions that direct research and discovery, especially during a semester course where time for research is limited.
Due to their limited life experience, students are often unaware of peoples’ imperceivable yet potent qualities and how they affect experiences. I taught a 200-level, Design Research Methods Basics with 18-24 students every year between 2017-2021, where undergraduate students in design learn field research methods for evidence-based design. In this course, students learn ethnographic methods—conducting in-person observations, documenting findings in field notes, and informing the creation of persona cards. Over the time I taught the course, students’ observation field notes lacked detail. For example, written field notes in a coffee shop indicated that “people were sitting around a table,” neglecting to document physical details, including how many people, approximate ages, racial makeup, or clothing styles. Behavioral details were rare in field notes, such as the languages people spoke, emotional moods, or expressions like physical movements, posturing, and tone of voice. Without detailed field notes, students produced demographic-heavy persona cards instead of behavioral personas that captured the habits, trends, and feelings of people sharing a common experience.
I created Experience-Based Proto-Personas as a speculative tool for challenging undergraduate and graduate students to critically examine how a person’s makeup can drive their motivations, behavior, relationships, preferences, and futures. Experience-Based Proto-Personas are hypothetical personas randomly generated by the Aspects of Experience for Design Persona Generator (https://www.aoe4d.com/tools/persona-generator/.) I designed and developed this tool for use in their coursework though it is available for anyone. The generator produces random (and sometimes impossible) proto-personas that, when used as an inspiration for design, challenge students to consider how discrete aspects person’s makeup affects their experience.
Experience-Based Proto-Personas
Personas are a widely used tool in interaction and user experience design, and design educators have utilized them when teaching Futures Thinking (Scupelli et al., 2016). Design teams use personas to represent the critical qualities of groups of people who use products, services, or systems, such as age, social class, behavior, attitudes, and brand preferences. Personas are evidence-based—design teams use qualitative and quantitative research methods whose aggregate findings produce one or two persona cards representing all study participants. Persona cards usually comprise an image of the persona, lists of their qualities, and sometimes a quote evoking the persona’s beliefs. These persona cards keep the end users “on the mind” of the design team to improve the likelihood that design decisions will align with the user’s makeup (Dam & Siang, 2016).
Proto-personas are used when field research is impossible due to time constraints or when organizations do not value evidence-based design. Without primary research, persona card content is limited to design teams’ best guesses about the people for whom they design. Proto-personas are not a replacement for rigorous primary and secondary research; however, they can be a helpful tool for sparking questions that direct research and discovery, especially during a semester course where time for research is limited.
Due to their limited life experience, students are often unaware of peoples’ imperceivable yet potent qualities and how they affect experiences. I taught a 200-level, Design Research Methods Basics with 18-24 students every year between 2017-2021, where undergraduate students in design learn field research methods for evidence-based design. In this course, students learn ethnographic methods—conducting in-person observations, documenting findings in field notes, and informing the creation of persona cards. Over the time I taught the course, students’ observation field notes lacked detail. For example, written field notes in a coffee shop indicated that “people were sitting around a table,” neglecting to document physical details, including how many people, approximate ages, racial makeup, or clothing styles. Behavioral details were rare in field notes, such as the languages people spoke, emotional moods, or expressions like physical movements, posturing, and tone of voice. Without detailed field notes, students produced demographic-heavy persona cards instead of behavioral personas that captured the habits, trends, and feelings of people sharing a common experience.
I created Experience-Based Proto-Personas as a speculative tool for challenging undergraduate and graduate students to critically examine how a person’s makeup can drive their motivations, behavior, relationships, preferences, and futures. Experience-Based Proto-Personas are hypothetical personas randomly generated by the Aspects of Experience for Design Persona Generator at https://www.aoe4d.com/tools/persona-generator/. I designed and developed this tool for use in their coursework though it is available for anyone. The generator produces random (and sometimes impossible) proto-personas that, when used as an inspiration for design, challenge students to consider how discrete aspects person’s makeup affects their experience.
Fig. 10: A Proto-Persona Created by the Aspects of Experiences for Design Proto-Persona Generator
In the spring 2022 semester, I used the Persona Generator in an introductory (100-level) first-year course in the Communication Design BFA program titled Becoming a People-Driven Designer, where each student was challenged to speculate what to design for the persona based on their makeup. Fifty-four students used the tool—split into two sections of 27. Students were seated in groups of four to five per group per class. After students generated proto-personas, I asked them to consider their persona’s makeup and answer several questions in the table below. Students were given 15 minutes to ponder these questions before “introducing” their persona to their groupmates.
Table 2: Proto-persona activity prompts
Now: Needs | What could this person want and need? |
Now: Challenges | What challenges may this person face every day due to their makeup? |
Future: Desires | What could be some of their hopes and dreams for the future? |
Future: Design | What design could help them live a better life and achieve their goals? |
During the activity, almost every student in each class started their process by researching aspects of their personas—most notably the year when the persona “lived,” their knowledge sets, and cultural makeup. Students recognized that research was essential to envision their persona’s motivations. Personas came alive during “introductions” when students combined aspects of their personas into fears, concerns, needs, and goals.
- A 19-year-old male in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, in the year 1955, who was gay, felt discriminated by his others but loved listening to records of his favorite musical artists.
- A 45-year-old male in Texas, USA, in the year 2019 had a boisterous personality and wanted a community where they could cosplay.
Through this exercise, students learned to empathize and consider how their persona’s aspect pairs created a unique individual and how they suggested challenges and opportunities for the future.
Fig. 11: An aspect pairings example
For example, a student selected the pairings shown in Figure 7 and posed questions for the future:
- What sustainable materials could be used to reduce waste in model train packaging?
- What distribution methods could be created to give kids in Dubois access to a greater variety of model train options?
- Could a model train club be established to create a community of hobbyists?
Following this in-class activity, Becoming a People-Driven Designer students created three icons representing critical aspects of their experience-based proto-persona over the next few weeks. These icons conveyed more nuanced persona qualities than the previous year. 21 out of 54 student icons illustrated complex and underlying-level concepts, including cultural heritage, values, and language, when these concepts were nonexistent in previous projects.
Experience-Based Proto-Personas challenge students to reflect more deeply on what they know about target users because their content captures more than simple demographics. These personas challenge students to inquire, “If we were to create a produce ordering app, how would our persona’s weekly shopping habits be supported, and what could they do with the time they saved?” instead of more basic graphic design questions like “should we make the buttons bigger?” Combining aspects challenged students to consider which pairings had the most potential for experience design, which create the most significant challenges, and which alignments suggest a product, service, or system would be readily adopted.
Discussion: Developing an Experience Mindset
I designed Experience Design Scenes and Experience-Based Proto-Personas to make easily missed aspects of experiences tangible and relatable. By naming salient experience concepts, I hoped students would recognize them in their research and would design to enhance or reduce them where appropriate. “Success” for these tools was if students could demonstrate they were developing an experience mindset versus designing surface-level, designer-driven products. From a futures thinking perspective, I wanted learners to explore the implications of their designs on the future—how they would impact individuals, their communities, and society in near and far futures. My greatest goal for this work was to implement tools that help learners overcome the blank canvas of where to start designing—a challenge exacerbated when designing for experiences.
Graduate students who completed the Travel Experience Fieldwork assignment struggled to apply the most abstract, core experience aspects (peoples’ self-concept, worldview, and a design’s “meaning”) but successfully identified complex and underlying aspects of observed peoples’ subjective norms and design affordances via observation. Each semester, I assign a culminating, seven-week project to graduate students in the Experience Design Studio course. Every project since 2019 (21 in all) has used at least one aspect from the “complex” category as a basis for developing research methods and designing products, services, and system prototypes. These students overcame the blank canvas by using aspects as a starting central theme for their project work, prompting the inclusion of other aspects in the framework. During project asynchronous and synchronous critique sessions, students and I offered feedback that asked students to anticipate their design proposals’ intended and unintended consequences. The most significant revisions to project work, such as adding a secret, players-only room for tabletop roleplaying games to a storefront or streamlining steps involved in a homebuying service, resulted from probing questions about future effects caused by design.
Undergraduate students who designed with Experience-Based Proto-Personas embraced their personas as real people—even naming them. These students demonstrated empathy for their personas. However, like the graduate students, they struggled to directly apply core aspects of peoples’ self-concept, worldview, and a design’s “meaning.” This suggests that further work is needed to develop learners’ familiarity with these challenging aspects. Later in the Becoming a People-Driven Designer course, students completed an assignment to identify a product that caused usability problems for users. Students selected coffee makers, pedestrian walkways, water bottles, shower heads, and other designs involved in their daily lives. Out of 54 projects, 41 students reported ways their selected design created a negative emotional experience, and 23 students used a combination of aspects to describe the makeup of components in the experience design scene. These results indicate that experiences are on students’ minds, and emotions, sensations, and personal makeup are front-of-mind for some.
Though graduate students in the Experience Design Studio course and undergraduate students in Becoming a People-Driven Designer shared future scenarios that could result from their experience-centered designs, I did not implement futures thinking methods to direct an exploration of possible futures. In future semesters I will integrate futures thinking into the design thinking process to facilitate this exploration to fuel disruptive hypotheses, radical innovation, and foresight to anticipate the consequences of design decisions. Though these tools were implemented in small settings—with an average of eight students in each Experience Design Studio course section and only once with 54 undergraduate students, the results of these projects suggest that the tools discussed above are sparking an experience design mindset in students.
Conclusion
Planners who address wicked problems have no room to fail—once an intervention is implemented, it cannot be easily undone (Rittel & Webber, 1973). The products, services, and systems designers create can harm people with misinformation, mislabeling, or imagery that can alienate and exclude people groups. To reduce the chance of harm, students must learn to establish clear goals in partnership with stakeholders, recommend realistic courses of action, and anticipate their creations’ positive and negative effects (Krippendorff, 2012).
Students in my courses have shown that they want to affect positive change in the world, but these are lofty goals fraught with intended and unintended consequences, and they are often overwhelmed by the blank canvas—not knowing where to start. Experience Design Scenes and Experience-Based Proto-Personas are ways I have broken experience design concerns into smaller parts for students new to these concepts, and these students have started to use this vocabulary of experiences in their work. Experience design education’s next step is to develop students’ futures literacy and strategic foresight alongside design thinking and an experience mindset. If these planners can learn to design experiences that support healthier attitudes, improve family relationships, and champion civic engagement, the communities encircling those individuals will benefit.
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