Verge: AIGA Seminar on Experience Design

This seminar was held at Parsons School of Design in New York on March 10, 2001.

The premise
Verge, a one-day convergence on experience design, explored how technology and multi-disciplinary teams have opened up new avenues of thinking about the implications of design and the role of the designer across all categories. Speakers of seemingly divergent professional orientations will share their theories and pragmatic approaches to shaping experiences where meaning is the only true currency.

MODERATOR: Brenda Laurel
Opening remarks
Welcome to Verge. AIGA has assembled a remarkably diverse group of practitioners who will lead us in poking at the edges of experience design. It is truly wonderful, after spending literally all of my professional life in this field, to have a name for our practice that actually sounds exciting and sexy. Twenty, or even ten years ago, this audience would probably have been composed primarily of interface types, psychologists, and human factors engineers like you see in Norton Utilities. It’s wonderful to see young designers who are eager to stretch themselves across the old boundaries between computers, media, art, and popular culture.

When I moved from Ohio to California in 1979, the first thing I wanted to do was go to Disneyland. I fell in love with the world of Disney on TV when I was a kid. There was nothing even a little bit like it in the Midwest. Oh, there were traveling carnivals and county fairs that definitely qualified as alternate realities, but Disneyland—Disneyland was the big daddy, the seamless dream, the ultimate designed experience.

When I finally got there I went on every single ride. At the end of the day, as the electric light parade was about to start, little kids were lined up six or seven deep at the curb of Main Street, about to explode from excitement. I tried to behave like an adult. I tried to see the kids as “cute.” I had almost succeeded when that first float rounded the bend, and then I snapped. I pushed and shoved kids out of the way until I got to the front of the crowd, crying, “You have your whole life ahead of you, and I’ve waited twenty-nine years for this.”

At Art Center I am amazed at how few of my graduate students in media design have visited Disneyland. Nowadays I make it a requirement. I don’t think you should call yourself an experience designer without experiencing the place at least once.

And speaking of California, what do Walt Disney, Gene Roddenberry, and Dr. Timothy Leary have in common?

• All three are dead white guys who had a large influence on the boomer generation
• All three were experience designers
• Two of them were launched into near-earth orbit after death (together!)

I never had the pleasure to meet and thank Walt Disney or Gene Roddenberry, but I knew Tim Leary as one of his producers in the computer game business, then as an editor, and after a while, as a real friend. When I asked him to submit a bio for his essay in a book I was editing in 1990, he described himself as “one of the most accomplished liars of the twentieth century.” My mother couldn’t stand him, because of what she thought he stood for, until he blurbed my second book. After that she began to refer to him as “That nice Mr. Leary.”

We work in a tricky business. And I wonder - among experience designers, what constitutes honor? Writers and artists, designers of monuments, painters, photographers, poets and priests, all may be accused of “lying to tell the truth.” In Greek civilization, the first actors were priests of the god Dionysus - their duty was sacred, as was the role of the Celtic bard. Nearly every culture honors the tellers of tales and the speakers of dreams.

Every parent—every citizen—comes upon the conundrum of how to tell our children stories while at the same time teaching them to recognize and value what is true. The Tooth Fairy, Coyote, the Easter Bunny, the Golem, Santa Claus, Helen of Troy, the Bible—where does one draw the line?

And if children learn to trust stories, will they believe with equal facility in the goodness of Gap or the divine right of corporations? And how do they learn to know the difference between what is true and what is not, or maybe more important, the difference between what is good and what is merely true? How will they choose between true stories and true belief—between the mundane realities of secular tolerance and the grand narratives of nationalism, racism, and holy war?

Why do we put such store in stories? The answer, I believe, is that they help us to see. Perhaps the survival value of narrative intelligence is this: a certain kind of truth - like a thief in the night - may be seen only in a mediated view—through the night-vision of the poem, the painting, the song.

Information, environments, art, and entertainment all involve some form of experience design. Experience designers exploit the fact that people’s perceptions and emotions are profoundly malleable. Are designers deceivers? Do we trade in manipulation, projective construction, or just good clean fun? This is one of the edges we can explore today.

I learned a great deal about true illusions from a story written by our first speaker, entitled “True Names.”

25 years ago, when I was a graduate student in theatre just beginning to dabble with computers, I was asking myself, what was participatory drama? What might interactive fiction be? And what the hell was interactivity anyway?

A few years later I read “True Names,” and I instantly recognized what I and many of my colleagues had been straining to begin to articulate to one another, what we had hoped we could imagine and perhaps one day achieve. The story gave us lush imaginary worlds inhabited by real people, whose fantastical identities were as intimate as fingerprints. Its author has consistently given us a high-res view of what could be, what could be good, and what might be very, very scary. For those fans of the “Zones of Thought” series, you’ll be glad to know that currently working on the third novel, which he tells us we will see within the year.

Blessed be the storyteller whose tales may make us wise, for imagination is the laboratory of the spirit. It is my very great honor to introduce Dr. Vernor Vinge.

Brenda Laurel
End notes
Experience design is narrative, magical, often embodied or "bonded to architecture," always personal, and causes a shift or a change.

At worst, harmless, but hopefully benign. And at its best, experience design can induce vision, enable empathy, stimulate dialogue, and serve that fine old notion of the greater good.

Program coordinator: Molly Beverstein