Book Review

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ISBN: 0735710783

Author: Shedroff, Nathan

Publisher: New Riders Publishing

Publication Date: c2001

Review Details

I was looking forward to reading Nathan Shedroff's Experience Design after hearing him speak that the CHIFOO program in March 2003. He was an engaging speaker and his ideas were provocative.

I come to the topic from the field of education. It is my belief that learning should be embedded in meaningful contexts with serious attention to how the learner experiences the learning in the moment. Deep engagement with the learning, I believe, implies more effective and satisfying learning. These ideas arise out of my reading of John Dewey, the 20th century educational philosopher. I am interested in experience design as a means to create engaging learning environments.

I was not disappointed by Shedroff's book. It contains great nuggets of insight that inform the debate in various fields about what is experience design. It has most relevance for those in the visual design fields including graphic designers, instructional designers and information architects.

The book has high-gloss photos and illustrations on every page. Short statements and essays are often superimposed on the illustrations. Since no observation takes more that a few pages, the book has the feel of a coffee-table volume which invites short, repeated viewings.

Shedroff starts off immediately distinguishing Experience Design from more traditional design or instructional design philosophies. For instance, most information-based education assumes that the learner has a neutral point of view, that they have only a cognitive engagement with the material. Counter to this cognitive orientation, Shedroff (2001) writes:

"The point of view of the experience itself can have an affect on how people interact and relate to it. Consider how immersive computer and video games can be with their (mostly) first-person and second-person perspectives. Stories, movies, and theater also draw us in at different levels based on the perspective from which we view them." (p. 232)

Shedroff points out that information must be embedded in meaningful contexts. The need to present information in a coherent manner implies that the information should be contextualized (not separated into unrelated facts). This is where information architecture can be considered a component of user experience design (but not equivalent to it). Shedroff agrees:

"The organization and presentation of data can profoundly change its understanding. Presentation can affect the knowledge people build and the experience people have. This is where information design can have its greatest impact. It is the discipline concerned with transforming data into information by creating context and structure." (Shedroff, p. 43)

Instructional design considers not just information presentation but also learning theories and sequencing of that information making information architecture useful in instructional design. But traditional information and instructional design philosophies are weak on theorizing the context of learning. In education, as Dewey noted almost a century ago, information must not only be related to other information but related also to the real world context in which that information is useful.

The active engagement and participation of students in their own learning seems to be a necessary ingredient in effective education. This is the foundation of constructivism where learners are primarily responsible for their own knowledge construction through engagement with the learning environment. It was also true for Dewey. Shedroff makes a similar point:

"While we can build knowledge for others (pointing it out as well as designing the experiences to make it easier to understand), this is the beginning of the crossing of a threshold in which people must build these kinds of understandings for themselves. Wisdom, for example, is something people can only build for themselves and knowledge shares part of this characteristic. Knowledge is increasingly personal in that the processes in our minds that help define and understand knowledge rely increasingly on personal contexts, content, and previous understandings, and less on shared ones... Context moves from the global (societal or cultural) to the local (shared among increasingly smaller groups and more idiosyncratic) to the personal (easily understood only by ourselves without explanation)" (Shedroff, p. 48).

Consistent with a constructivist view of learning, communication and an opportunity to be creative can be powerful motivators. Shedroff writes:

"People have an inherent need to express themselves. Experiences that allow people to communicate with each other or simply to be heard tend to be rewarding, satisfying ones... Humans are inherently creative creatures and when we have a chance to create we feel more satisfied and valuable... Creativity is often though of in terms of artistic expression and hobbies, while productivity is most commonly associated with work and value creation. In truth, there is no difference as each set of activities involves the creation of something." (Shedroff, p. 178 & 166)

The subtitle of the book is "a manifesto for the creation of experience." This is not a manifesto. While I found the book useful in prompting questions in my field, education, it is less directly relevant for that field since it fails to link with ideas and debates in the history of education. Indeed, one of the flaws of the book is that it does not attempt to build a complex argument. The book tends to feel like a serious of observations without a coherent story line, lacking, actually, the quality of a manifesto.

I have to agree with Peter Esmonde in his review of the same book that "Shedroff's arguments for experience design come across as thin and inconsistent, even fragmentary... [and] glosses over questions around narrative ambiguity, shifting signification, characterization and temporal metaphor." (LOOP: AIGA Journal of Interactive Design Education, August 2001, No. 3).

In the end, I forgave Shedroff the lack of depth about the origins and history of ideas related to experience design because I so enjoyed his insights. It is clear that he brings a wealth of knowledge about interaction and interface design and I believe he does lend clarity to the debates about what experience design is and how to do it.