3.3 Experiential

As talk of the Experience Economy gathers pace companies servicing the consumer are exploring how to move from selling products to selling experiences.  In many cases this language disguises the fact that companies wish to sell a service that manifests itself as a product with various consumables or system products attached.  In the context of slow design, experiential has a different meaning.  Experiential objects, spaces or buildings permit the user(s) to apply his/her or their own design abilities to affect the overall experience or outcomes.  The designer (and producer of the artifacts) is a catalyst in creating design opportunities so that the user can re-design, re-configure and create new experiences.  Re-configurable modular design offers users the ability to control the design experience although many examples of slow design gravitate towards creating time for deeper, longer experiences.

Process

Designer sets ‘initial’ design and opens a series of possibilities for the user.

Outcomes

Object-user interaction, user as maker, user continues design  or re-design process

Individual human well-being

Encourages a more intense relationship between object/building/space  and user.  Stimulates improved mental, emotional and spiritual sense of well-being.

Socio-cultural well-being

Stimulates social acts of making, interacting, modifying

Environmental well-being

Slowing consumption, resource use through maintaining socio-cultural relevance of object/building/space


Felt 12 x 12 by FortuneCookies, Denmark – Velcro strips attached to squares of felt encourage the user to experiment with new configurations of clothing, to design their own ‘look’.  Participation encourages individual expression and places the task of fashioning new clothes entirely back in the hands of the consumer, neatly sidestepping the pitfalls of wearing last season’s look or clone-like outfits from the high street.  Each new garment, lovingly assembled, creates fresh emotions, challenges the mind and caresses the body in unexpected ways.

Funktion object by El Ultimo Grito – Moving the furniture around one’s flat or house might not seem a liberating gesture but it is fundamentally important to our feelings of identity, liberty and security which we seek in our homes.  As we arrange furniture within interior spaces, we are instrumental in creating social environments.  Repositioning a series of modular Funktion objects sets the stage for the next social experience.  The object is instrumental in suggesting possibilities for interaction.

Testbed studio, Malmö, Sweden by Jonas Olsson and Fredrik Magnusson – Testbed studio challenges the division line between landscape elements and buildings.  By offering a series of modular components for basic elements (furniture, partitions, windows, spatial frame), mediating elements (steel gabion cages infilled with rock, soil, vegetation, wood) and landscape elements (live or artificial turf, rock, seeds, flowers, garden gnomes) the home builder is given an operating system within which to tailor his/her home to the building site.  People design their own experiences by personalising the building-site interface.  Testbed Studio is part of an ambitious and engaging project initiated in 2000 called PARASITES (Prototypes for Advanced Ready-made Amphibious Small-scale Individual Temporary Ecological Houses), an architectural research and exhibition project initiated and orgnised by Rien Korteknie and Mechthild Stuhlmacher (Stichting Parasite Foundation Rotterdam) in collaboration with Bo01 Malmö, IBT Rotterdam-Hoogvliet and Projectgroep Ijberg Amsterdam.  It involved over 24 architects throughout Europe.

©2004, 2005 Alastair Fuad-Luke. All rights reserved.