The Landscape of Experience
Three days of conference notes from Living Surfaces 2001 in Chicago, November 2001, an AIGA conference on experience design, interactive media and the design practice emerging around them. Written as a trip report for UK colleagues in the days after returning to London. Speakers included Mohan Sawhney, Nick Durrant, Michael Schrage, Tim Parsey of Motorola, Hugh Dubberly, Don Norman, Idit Harel of MamaMedia and Julie Pokorny of Lante, among others. At the time, “experience design” was a new enough term that the conference was partly an exercise in defining it. The notes are preserved as written in November 2001, lightly tidied but otherwise intact. Speakers were reasonably diverse, with no overall design, HCI or usability focus, definitely attempting to be inclusive under the term “experience design”. I have a clearer overview of the state of the US design landscape, and the kind of work that intelligent agencies and individuals are undertaking. There were a number of very sharp individuals presenting. Experience design is a widely accepted term, widely understood as a process, and validated by the client and market reaction. There is a vacuum waiting to be filled after years of new-media mishap and recent financial failure.