You’ve heard of product design, graphic design, fashion design, architecture, etc, but Experience Design is the invisible frontier of human engagement. As mobile technologies continue to get smaller and more capable, they are beginning to disappear from our physical awareness without letting go of our attention – in fact, they are cleverly meshing our physical and digital worlds into an integrated and augmented attention that can be interwoven with ‘stories’ to enhance our purpose, presence, sociability, etc.
Opportunity Statement
Experience Design is what mobile technologies were born to enable. We have lived so long with the monolithic linear narratives that were the best experiences our other media have been able to deliver, that the opportunity of authoring open, social, synchronous, real-world narratives is unliteral and unnatural for us. Welcome to the new natural, if you’re bold enough to author it. The opportunities for learning are breathtaking.
Prediction Source(s)
WIRED – Design & The Digital World
Experience design is key in a paramilitary environment since the training needs to be complex and varied with the setting/story/narratives impacting scenario. Further, much of the training requires a scenario to be effective – the immersive experiences and the realism that is required in order to make training effective relies on the experience design-driven training. Similar types of experience design is required within medical fields as well.
Experience Design (XD) is employed by educators each day as they craft lessons that allow students to access the curriculum in engaging and meaningful ways. However, as I work with new applications and hardware in the classroom, I often find myself disappointed by my user experience. Our favourite digital tools are the ones that seamlessly integrate into our lives and enhance our routines and activities.
This emerging market is highly relevant because it encompasses the other important markets that we have highlighted as well – think about Big Data, Classrooms of the Future, Game Based Learning, and Immersive Experiences. How can we effectively use new tools without detailed attention to their XD? Like any new product, new ventures in learning technology will need to properly engage user experience and experience designers that have a proper understanding of their audiences.
I believe there is an opportunity for those in educational spaces to collaborate with both user and experience designers to fine-tune our new tools and applications to better suit our users, as we know them best.