Nathan Shedroff's "Experience Design" - sustainability

"While everything, technically, is an experience of some sort, there is something important and special to many experiences that make them worth discussing. In particular, the elements that contribute to superior experiences are knowable and reproducible, which make them designable." - Nathan Sherdoff

From the guest lecture at UC Davis' design dept. on Wednesday, I was able to take some key ideas and thoughts. I copied down two of his illustrated points- that of what makes up "experience design" and what three keys lie in good design for the future:


The first Venn diagram shows just what experience design is made up of- the combination of design/engineering with sustainability in mind and coupled with business leads to a successful product with these three aspects in mind for the consumer.

"Don't design things today that make tomorrow worse." - Nathan Shedroff

Consumerism is such a huge aspect in society today that the very foundation of our economy is based upon it. Our landfills are piling up with products that while pretty well designed for its use was, in the end, unable to be sustainable and recycled properly. The fact is there is no such thing as "sustainable design" simply because the products we make today do not last forever in the eye of the consumer. Products break down and new versions are made. This is what drives consumers to buy the new and the trendy, but in hindsight they fail to see that they're just creating more garbage with their older products. Thus to create "sustainable" products, you must place a sentimental value within them. The best example is a child's "blankey"- an object that the child will keep for as long as possible (much to the parent's dismay when the child is "too old" for such a thing) because of the emotional and sentimental value of the object. The child feels "safe" with the object, and thus keeps it for as long as possible.

By placing a sentimental value on an object, that object gains a somewhat sustainable factor in being used and kept for a long time, and doesn't end up in the landfill quite so quickly.

for more about Nathan and his books, visit http://nathan.com/ed/index.html