Lou Carbone on Experience Design
Posted by Vincent Woo
I was just talking with a friend about how teaching design is hard since it is so subjective. I’ve had design professors/lecturers who wouldn’t even attempt to articulate why they hate or love a student’s work. Others would give a thumbs up for near finished work and then trash it during the final evaluation for insane reasons. However, it was worth putting up with them to attend classes taught by professors who could communicate design as a objective discipline. So it was to my delight to listen to this presentation by Lou Carbone that conveys experience design insight that actually makes sense. Seriously, even if you don’t give a damn about the design discipline, listen to this podcast. Some excerpts:
“He came up and he shook his finger in my face and he said, “There’s no way you’re going to get that bag on that plane without paying a hundred dollars.”
I looked at him and I lost it. I absolutely lost it. I wave my finger back at him and I said, “You! You’re the reason NorthWest is bankrupt and I hope you’re the first person to lose your job!”
Four people in line clapped.”
”...and said the largest – the opportunity – for people in the design community, to think of their role as designing experiences – designing business experiences, this is the creative firepower of the world that has the only design skills to create an effect that is not rooted in the industrial age. That understands that creative thought is more dynamic than a process. So where we are is a very interesting place. Because what awoke the world to experience years ago, and as we look at technology and the expansion of that into ipod, thinking of it as a system, all experiences are a system. Its all these components coming together to create a feeling…knowing what the feeling is that you want to create and how to create it. So as we move from this industrial age, the world of make and sell, product, product, design product, make product. We refer to – you know the worst thing that happened to the banking industry was discovering product. They were in the relationship business years ago. Suddenly, marketing touches them and we’re into “We’ve got products” and they began to loose sight of the relationships. So this idea of make and sell product is what we rooted our businesses into. Its the silos that we created. We think of experiences as being on an assembly line. A process map. Thinking of it as being linear. Its a very very different world because we now live in a world of sensing and responding….we lived in a world of efficiency at the cost of effectiveness.”
