Monday, May 21, 2007

A first time for everything I like reading Bob Jacobson's insights on his Total Experience blog; Bob incorporates some remarkably wide-ranging experience with design-thinking to get an enlightening perspective on things. Like for instance, only Bob could tie together experience design with the theory of constraints: Effective design of experience requires the application of constraints. . . Like the sculpting of the David by Michaelangelo described in Irving Stone's The Agony and the Ecstasy, designing a memorable experience is a process akin to removing the excess marble that occludes the living statuary presence within it. Effective design of experience is a process of applying constraints: paring away, focusing on the essentials. In management parlance, this is known at the Theory of Constraints. The Theory of Constraints runs counter to the prevailing practice of experience design, which too often has to do with adding features, over-endowing the experiential environment, and creating spectacles that are themselves memorable at the expense of the meaning or sensations they're intended to convey. This is a consequence of designers not having theories to work from in the first place; therefore, they don't know what elements to constrain to produce the desired experience. . . [Total Experience] I studied ToC for a couple of years near the end of my career in small business management. It's an eminently sensible theory hobbled by some convoluted practice that can easily leave one tied up in knots following the received wisdom. The company I was working at wasn't ready for it, so I didn't really get to apply what I'd learned. But the thought of using ToC to explain and inform UX, now that's a totally intriguing thought. 9:15:36 PM    Questions? Comments? Flames? []

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