Experience Design - Focus Debated

Focus Debated

There is a debate occurring in the experience design community regarding its focus, provoked in part by design scholar and practitioner, Don Norman. Norman claims that when designers describe people only as customers, consumers, and users, designers risk diminishing their ability to do good design. Given that experience is so totally an affective, subjective, and personal process — not an abstract — it would be ironic, it's been argued, for experience designers, when designing experiences, to approach people merely as objects of commerce or cogs in a machine. Experience design, perhaps more than other forms of design, is transactive and transformative: every experience designer is an experiencer; and every experiencer, via his or her reactions, a designer of experience in turn. While commercial contexts often describe people as "customers, consumers, or users," this and non-commercial contexts might use the words "audience, people, and participants." In either case, for conscientious experience designers, this is merely a semantic difference.