Experience-centered Design

Book excerpt: 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.