Experience-centered Design: Designers, Users, and Communities in Dialogue

Peter Wright · John McCarthy

Jan 2010 · Synthesis lectures on human-centered informatics Book 9 · Morgan & Claypool Publishers

About this ebook

Experience-centered design, experience-based design, experience design, designing for experience, user experience design. All of these terms have emerged and gained acceptance in the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Interaction Design relatively recently. In this book, we set out our understanding of experience-centered design as a humanistic approach to designing digital technologies and media that enhance lived experience. The book is divided into three sections. In Section 1, we outline the historical origins and basic concepts that led into and flow out from our understanding of experience as the heart of people's interactions with digital technology. In Section 2, we describe three examples of experience-centered projects and use them to illustrate and explain our dialogical approach. In Section 3, we recapitulate some of the main ideas and themes of the book and discuss the potential of experience-centered design to continue the humanist agenda by giving a voice to those who might otherwise be excluded from design and by creating opportunities for people to enrich their lived experience with and through technology.

About the author

Dr Peter Wright is Professor of Social Computing in the Computer Science Department at Newcastle University. He has published widely in interaction design and user research and is best known for his work on theory and methods for experience-centred design. His current projects focus on the design of health and social technologies. John McCarthy is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Applied Psychology, University College Cork. He has held a visiting fellowship at University of York, UK and a visiting professorship at Södertörns University in Stockholm. His current research is in conceptualizing experience-centered design and exploring conceptual and methodological challenges of understanding experience.