The main difference between conceiving design as the design of an experience (as opposed to the design of an artifact) is that with experience design the design problem is conceived phenomenologically.

What is aimed for is not an object of some particular characteristic, but rather a specific relationship between a person and an object.

It is becoming clearer by the day that this phenomenological approach to design problems is also a powerfully productive way to approach branding.

Instead of thinking primarily of the object of the experience design being one artifact such as a CPAP mask or a web site, the “object” of the experience becomes the organization who provides the artifact and services, all of which together are experienced by a person as the brand.

Taking an experience design approach does not eliminate or even diminish the problems traditionally associated with the craft of design or engineering. It simply places them in a new, larger context. The designed offerings (whether products or services) still must have very specific characteristics to integrate with and reinforce the overarching brand experience, and designers will work to imbue their designs with these characteristic. And, as always, engineering is of central importance in actualizing the designs in concrete form so they function as intended. But the engineering is done within the context of creating some entity with designed characteristics, and the design in turn is done within the context of a brand experience of some specific quality. The problems nest.

Three developments on the horizon that interest me:

1. The idea that some experiences are “had” by groups, of whom individuals are participants. For instance, organizations making large purchases often involve complex evaluation processes that can only be understood as soft systems. Even many apparent individual choices are social in non-obvious ways. For instance, a consumer choosing between three brands of laundry detergent in a grocery store has already had his consideration set limited by a network of merchants, distributors, product managers, R&D engineers, and opportunity-defining marketing professionals — whose interactions excluded myriad actual and possible products. Understanding the successful delivery of any concrete experience will include understanding the entire value chain that enables its existence, and conceiving of that chain as people who experience and behave.
2. The recognition that the tacit dimension of experiences are both crucial and irreducible to explicit language. This has very deep implications. Business is conducted almost exclusively in language (mathematics is a variety of language) that abstracts from reality that which is readily communicable in explicit language. How can an organization that makes decisions based on explicit facts related in logical arguments conceive products that tap into  tacit life-practices (the essence of “user-friendliness”) and tacit moral valuations (the je ne sais quois, what people just “love for no reason”) and evaluate them rigorously without accidentally reducing them to explicit concepts and thus falsifying them? Current design research and “design thinking” practice has made significant inroads, but there’s still a lot of exciting progress to be made here.
3. If businesses, business models, and services are improved by thinking about them as design problems — and this is a new development — what exactly were businesses doing before? I would argue that businesses conceived themselves as engineering problems. Over the last 20 years, I’ve watched UX go from being from a powerful tool in an engineer-led process to being an equal partner in product development (at least in organizations that have adopted the full UX practice). To me it appears “design thinking” is on a similar trajectory. Today it is a powerful tool in the hands of executives, tomorrow, executive leadership might be only one of several branches of leadership: the branch that executes what other branches of leadership have envisioned and interpreted into concrete activity systems. Just as excellent engineering alone can no longer guarantee a product’s success, excellent execution alone cannot guarantee a great brand.