The Hills Are Alive with the Sound of Interaction Design
Image: Source lost.
But I was saying at the beginning of this talk how it’s possible to take metaphors to breaking point, to get new ideas, and that VCR idea is still fairly traditional.
I’d like to see if we can’t generate ideas for brand new products purely from this view of our life with products, our experience with them.
One difficulty is that it’s very hard to talk about experience. It’s something that isn’t neatly chunked into parts, despite my list of experience hooks. In general, those are rare.
Experience is more like the weather. The weather doesn’t exist in the form we talk about. It just happens. We’re continually subject to the atmosphere. We experience it, in an ongoing fashion.
Yet, to discuss it – and in the U.K. we discuss barely anything else – we need to find patterns in the weather. Parts of it which appear to stick together. And we do find some: clouds are fuzzy, but we’re able to talk about them separately. Weather fronts can occasionally be discerned. There are low and high pressure systems, hurricanes, jet streams.
All of these are merely convenient features we have discerned. Useful handles that exist only in as much as they persist for a while and let us talk about the weather.
What are the equivalents for experience?