Experientia | mark@experientia.com
[ 1] Kuniavsky, M. “User Experience Design for Ubiquitous Computing.” interactions 15, no. 6 (2008): 20-22.
[ 2] Nathan Shedroff, email communication with author, 5 November 2007.
March + April 2009
Experience design is a human-centered activity. It starts with a deep understanding of people’s needs and contexts of living or working, and the end result is a product or service that provides people with a quality experience or a culturally relevant solution.
With such a clear and deliberate focus on people, other issues such as technology, economics, belief systems, or the broader topic of ethics and sustainability take a secondary role. But should they?
The way we organize our lives and societies in social, economic, spiritual, and environmental terms is very much part of the human experience.
And since we are living in a time of rapid change, our task as professionals is not just to understand the current context or anticipate future possibilities, but to help create a future world that is socially, economically, spiritually, and environmentally sustainable.
From this vantage point, the end-result of our work—that quality experience or culturally relevant solution—takes on a whole other meaning that goes beyond the relevance for an individual (the “user”) or a client.
Distributing Technology to
Distribute Power
Four billion mobile devices
are currently in use in a world
population of 6. 6 billion. Deduct infants, and you realize that a very large percentage of humankind has a mobile phone. The advantages of this technological tsunami for the so-called bottom of the pyramid have been widely publicized, but most of the important decisions in how our countries and economies are run are still in the hands of very few people.
Even in the best scenarios, this power concentration is based on the logic that we need to delegate decisions to accountable leaders, that we cannot involve ourselves in all decisions that matter to us, partly for practical reasons.
This is now changing. Distributing technology in the hands of the many opens previously unfeasible options for a growth in participatory decision-making. But how can this be implemented in the future? What kind of tools would designers need to create to support this? And how can the design itself be decentralized?
As Bruce Sterling recently said during the LIFT Asia ‘08 conference to an audience of startled Koreans:
“When you are working on cell phones, when you are working on the Web, when you are working on electronic money and payment systems, you need to think: What if my user is a
North Korean? How would I do this differently if I knew my user was from Pyongyang, that his regime had collapsed, that his economy had collapsed, he was completely bewildered, and he had never seen a cell phone or a computer in his life, and I intended to make him a productive and happy fellow citizen in 10 years, what kind of technology would I give that person, what kind of trading system, economic system?”
We don’t have all the answers yet, but it is clear that pervasive mobile devices—these always-connected mobile computers— are going to have a transformational impact on our world.
Designers have a responsibility to enable this transformation, to bring the power to the people, and to provide them with the tools to better govern their lives and the communities and societies they live in.
The Physical/Digital Confluence People are social animals; the extent to which online social tools online are affecting people’s social lives and behaviors in the physical world comes as no surprise.
The growing pervasiveness of smartphones combined with cheap data plans are changing this landscape even more: Not only will we be online wherever we are, but we will be online
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