Raising the Sluice Gates of the Experience Design Thought Box

Arundhati Mitter, Director, Flow India

I love unpacking ideas and thinking approaches that cut across different disciplines and domains. Lately, my brain has been dwelling on what ‘experience’ design has to offer when freed from industry-led silos in thinking, and how museum spaces in India can benefit from its versatility when we cast a wider net in our approach to crafting experiences.

What is experience design?

Experience design is the intentional shaping of how people feel, think, and act during an interaction or event. Expanding its scope beyond the mere outlay of activities, it concerns itself with creating emotional resonance, prompting reflection, and designing moments that leave a lasting impact. The contours of an experience may be defined by three critical dimensions - context, time, and impression, which in turn influence one another. Context speaks to the conditions in which an experience unfolds - the (spatial or cognitive) situation in which the user or audience finds themselves, the lead-up, or the immediate surroundings within which the experience occurs. Any experience unfolds in time. Its temporal structure and pacing have a direct bearing on the audience’s willingness to engage and the intended outcome. Impression signals the perceived outcome of the experience - what made it memorable or forgettable and informs the audience’s willingness to reengage. Experience design contains within itself many overlapping domains - user experience design, interaction design, user interface design, service design, learning experience design, and more. All of these disciplines offer us a wide variety of thought trails to further unpack within the context of experiences in museums and other cultural spaces. For the purpose of this article, let's consider two of these subsets: user experience design and learning experience design.

What is user experience design, and what can museums derive from it?

User experience design is a term we usually encounter in product and digital product design. It concerns itself with a person's perceptions and responses resulting from the use or anticipated use of a product, system, or service. It typically zooms out to encompass the entire journey or life cycle of engagement, rather than focusing solely on the usability or functionality of a product or service. Professor Dom Norman, who is credited with coining the term, draws our attention to three levels of design in his highly celebrated book - Emotional Design — Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things. He posits, ‘Human responses to the everyday things of the world are complex, determined by a wide variety of factors. Some of these are outside the person, controlled by designer and manufacturer, or by advertising and such things as brand image. And some come from within, from your own, private experiences. Each of the three levels of design— visceral, behavioral, and reflective—plays its part in shaping your experience. Each is as important as the others, but each requires a different approach by the designer.’

Visceral is all about the first impression, the appearance, the physical feel, aesthetics, and the emotional impact it triggers. Behavioural is all about use – determining how functional, understandable, and usable a designed solution is. It concerns itself with satisfying both the articulated and unarticulated needs of the people for whom the designed solution is intended. Reflective is all about the cultural context in which a designed object or experience is situated, and the role it plays in fulfilling people’s emotional needs and in contributing to their sense of self and place in the world. The blend of these three dimensions within user experience design offers many intriguing threads of exploration for curators, exhibit designers, outreach planners, and marketing strategists who are in the business of crafting museum experiences. What might a pleasing sensorial experience look and feel like for our diverse audience groups, and where and how do we precipitate their encounter with it? How does one catalyse discovery and delight in engagement while ensuring that an exhibit interpretation or spatial way-finding design is clearly comprehensible? How do we weave in moments of personalisation that signal to the audience that their thoughts and reactions matter? What are those various touchpoints within a cultural space where it is possible to foster the audience-institution relationship? All of these are worthy considerations on the design and planning board. Now let's consider what the other subset, learning experience design, has to offer.

What is learning experience design, and what big ideas can museums draw from it?

Learning experience design is a focused domain within experience design that draws from other disciplines such as cognitive or learning psychology, neuroscience, and interaction design to intentionally craft a holistic experience with a meaningful learning outcome. I am particularly drawn to the thinking and work of celebrated Hungarian psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who is recognised for positing the Flow theory. In the early 90s, he co-authored a paper with Kim Hemerson at the University of Chicago on what motivates visitors to want to learn in a museum context. With the intent of speaking to museum experience and learning planners and developers, they argued that unless the audience’s interaction with the exhibits becomes intrinsically rewarding, they are unlikely to hold the former’s attention long enough for any positive intellectual or emotional change. Therefore, it was important to investigate what made an experience rewarding in and of itself, so as to understand what motivated a person to look and think about an exhibit for “no good reason”— that is, in the absence of external rewards. The authors were wise to caveat that no single recipe for motivating audiences would work across the diverse visitor profiles found in museum environments. That being said, a broad outline could be adapted to specific conditions. The first step in triggering intrinsic motivation is invoking curiosity. This is defined as the ‘hook’, which may call upon a variety of sensorial stimuli (visual, auditory, tactile or kinetic) to speak to the audience’s prior interests. Once an individual's curiosity is aroused, interest is likely to be sustained when opportunities for self-discovery or those that invoke awe are leveraged to support engagement and subsequent learning. Learning involves the use of sensory, emotional, and intellectual faculties; this connection leads us to the

third step of the process: the state of mindfulness. Mindfulness is that state of mind that results from drawing novel distinctions, examining information from new perspectives, and being sensitive to context. When information is presented as true and without alternative perspectives, it discourages the motivation to explore and learn more. In learning psychology, such a situation is defined as ‘premature cognitive commitment’. Thus, creating an experience, an environment that is effectively able to immerse, involve, absorb, and engross visitors, is essential to precipitate intrinsically motivated learning. Here again, certain factors are critical for such an immersion to occur. Helping visitors set manageable goals for their entire visit and for individual exhibit points can facilitate an enjoyable experience. Offering a feedback loop allows visitors to commit to making guesses, evaluating, responding, and reflecting. Matching opportunities for involvement to a broad range of visitor skills supports meaningful engagement and keeps the visitor ‘hooked’. While Mihaly’s framework directly speaks to how ‘learning’ is intrinsically triggered, it can also be an equally fascinating guide for experience designers planning both the wider engagement arc of visitors and their encounters at individual touchpoints. What may yield when interpretation planners collaborate with their strategic marketing team to map out the emotion graph of their audiences with reference to this framework? How would one deliberately position ‘hooks’ within the engagement to ‘reel’ in the visitor? What kind of choices would one make in language and tone of communication to have a similar effect? What kinds of conceptual and editorial decisions might the curatorial team make to successfully stimulate visitors’ sensory, emotional, and intellectual faculties? These are all plausible questions and, interestingly, point to two critical considerations. Firstly, both the subsets of experience design explored in this article give considerable focus to understanding the user: the audience, the visitor. Museums ultimately communicate to people, thus the mindset of putting people first. Examining their behaviour, choices, and habits should not be an afterthought or the least considered criterion in development. This has a direct bearing on building audiences in the long run. It is also valuable to clarify that researching one’s audience does not mean developing only what the audience ‘wants’. Valuable insights are also drawn from what remains unknown and unarticulated, which helps frame how a new idea or viewpoint may be presented to visitors or how an institution may expand its reach to new audiences. Secondly, crafting experiences is a multi-skill effort. It requires a synergistic approach involving design, curatorial, conservation, outreach, marketing, merchandise, and leadership teams working in tandem. However, one often finds teams working in sequence or silos instead. Outreach, programming, and marketing teams begin building an audience and mapping their digital and physical reach only after the exhibition experience has been inaugurated. Interpretation, design, and merchandise teams miss the window to work collaboratively to explore how the spatial extent or the conceptual idea of an exhibit is coded in a physical takeaway. In such situations, the opportunity to create anticipation or spark curiosity is lost, as is the benefit of drawing from shared expertise on the design board. And this brings me back to where I started; we surely have more ways to strengthen our toolboxes and our craft when we allow ourselves a birds-eye view of experience design.

View original pages, photographs & credits