A Unified Field Theory of Design

Overview
Information Interaction Design

Information Design
Continuum of Understanding
Experience of  Knowledge
Organizing Things
Multiple Organizations
Goals & Messages
Clarity

Interaction Design
Having an Experience
Continuum of Interactivity
Control & Feedback
Productive and Creative Experiences
Communicative Experiences
Adaptive Experiences
The Experience Cube

Sensorial Design
Media Differences
Style & Meaning
Conclusion

Additional Resources

Art as Experience

The philosopher John Dewey was no Elvis, but he did write about the nature of experience and its relationship to the formal structures and characteristics of all the arts of his day: architecture, sculpture, painting, music and literature. The segments for this lecture were taken from his book Art as Experience , first published in 1934. What he had to say then is still of relevance to the Interaction Designer who must have a fundamental understanding of the nature of experience if she is to design successful experiences for a broader audience.

Here is a brief discussion of some issues related to the topic of experience.

Having experiences

By experiencing, I mean that first moment when we receive life before the mind arises. For example: before I think, "Oh, that's a red shirt," there's just seeing.
--Charlotte Joko Beck

We are always having experiences. An experience happens when our bodies and our senses interact with the environment around us. The simple act of breathing is an experience. It can be an unconscious or conscious experience, as when we focus on breathing during the act of meditation, for instance. Our relationship to the experience of breathing is a lifelong and continuous one. Most experiences are characterized by rupture, discontinuity and lack of cohesion. They fail to sustain continuity and cease before they have reached a conclusion. The workplace is a perfect example of an environment in which experience is continually interrupted and usurped.

Having an experience

We have an experience when the materials that make it up are allowed to run to their conclusion. This conclusion, also widely referred to as "closure," is what brackets the experience off from the flow of other events and experiences that are constantly impinging on us. These experiences work there way into our memory and shape our view of the world.

Some experiences that can reach a satisfactory conclusion:

• a game is played through

• a problem receives its solution

• work is completed in a satisfactory way

• a situation, such as having a conversation, eating a meal, or playing a game of chess, is rounded out in a way so that it's close is a consummation and not a cessation.

Real experiences flow. Natural transitions between their internal parts give a sense that the whole is a sum of its parts. The parts never lose their own identity, but lend it to the whole. Think of how an MC stitches together the intervals between acts on stage, or how a mass, in its various parts, is held together by the intervening prayer and song.

The excellent experience has a unity that gives it its name:

• that meal

• that storm

• that potato salad

Experiences that don't quite add up lack this sense unity. Things happen, just as in any experience, but "they are neither definitely included or definitely excluded; we drift," Dewey tells us. These experiences begin and end but without a sense of commencement or summation.

Experienced

An experience exhibist a sense of movement that places a premium on orderly, patterned progress toward a conclusion. An experience is a swarm of seemingly unrelated events gradually taking shape in space and over time. At its conclusion, one can look back on an experience and point to the emergent elements and the role they play. At its conclusion, an experience discloses its meaning as a summation of all the emotional, intellectual and physical components it contained.