“Shedroff’s definition gets things started: “Experience design is an approach to design, and you can use that approach in pretty much any discipline—graphic design or industrial design or interaction design, or retail design. It says the dimensions of experience are wider than what those disciplines normally take into account. And if you think wider—through time, multiple senses and other dimensions—then you can create a more meaningful experience.”

And he follows it up with the 5 levels of significance:

1. Function (“Does this do what I want it to do?”)
2. Price (“There are lots of cars out there to get me from point A to point B”)
3. Emotion (“That’s where lifestyle is engaged. How does this make me feel?”)
4. Identity or Value (“This is subconscious: “Would I be caught dead with this?; am I a Nike fan, or an Adidas fan?”)
5. Meaning (Not “Is this me?”, but “Does this fit my reality?” “Does this even fit inside the world as I perceive it?”)

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I am not going to analyse the politics of the decline here (a blog post is not enough!) nor the financial intricacies of it all (although a full account of it wouldn’t be bad). Suffice it to say that many Interaction-Ivrea graduates are working for major international companies and that also two of the four Experientia founders are former Interaction-Ivrea staff members (Jan-Christoph Zoels and myself).

That said, the website of Interaction-Ivrea used to be an access point to rich content on projects and on people. I worked on it a lot to help assure that. No longer so.

Although all the content is technically still there (including interviews with people like John Maeda, Ranjit Makkuni and Nathan Shedroff), most of it is not accessible anymore from the home page. The same thing applies to the personal student sites (which former students can no longer update or correct) or staff bio pages. The “people” and “news” menu buttons are no longer even active.

It has become a dead site, which is not managed anymore and with most of the content hardly accessible.

This is not the place now to point fingers. The decline of Interaction-Ivrea was in my mind a process of immense value destruction. It is quite disheartening to see that this now seems to continue.

The main comfort is that good people went through the place and are now changing the fields of interaction design, experience design, and people-centred design all over the world, including here in Italy itself.

To better define the vision and the concept of the lab, the academy has invited some authorities in the field for a one day conference on Friday 29 September. Nathan Shedroff will deliver the keynote address. Other speakers include:

• Fiona Raby – Royal College of Art, London, UK
• François Jegou – Solutioning Design & Domus Academy
• Ralf Beuker -Zollverein Essen Heritage, Germany
• Wim Dries – Deputy Mayor of Urban Planning, City of Genk, Belgium
• Jan-Christoph Zoels – Experientia & ex-Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, Italy
• Jan Kriekels – Jaga Radiator Factory, Belgium
• Nik Baerten – Pantopicon, Belgium
• Jan Boelen – Z33 Limburg, Belgium
• Jef Gabriëls – Mayor, City of Genk, Belgium

Experientia partner Mark Vanderbeeken myself will moderate one of the sessions. The project is guided by academy director Henk Heuts, project manager Jan Louis De Bruyn and programme manager Virginia Tassinari. Virginia, who only last year moved to Belgium from Italy, coordinates the content development of the lab and is one of the driving forces behind its visioning.

The event, which will be held in English, is open to an interested public, so if you are near that area, do register on their website.

The Experience Design Lab and the C-Mine project in general are endeavours close to our heart, since they are sited in an area Mark grew up in, embody a social and engaged vision of design, and are driven by a dynamic group of young people.

“Experience design is about the design of environments — from conception through deployment – that convey an idea, engender an emotion and catalyse action.”

Meanwhile, Nathan Shedroff just updated his own evolving glossary of experience design.

In this book, the authors Steve Diller, Nathan Shedroff and Darrel Rhea explore the dimensions of Experience Design in the context of business value and describe a tested development process that any company or organisation can use to better understand their customers in terms of meaning, and better develop products and services that will be of meaning to them.

The book is published by New Riders and will be for sale at the end of 2005. [Amazon link]

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