Taylor Holdsworth

Title: Meaningful Innovation Relies on Interaction and Service Design
Conference video: http://www.ixda.org/resources/nathan-shedroff-meaningful-innovation-relies-interaction-and-service-design

A Key Quote: “All design is the process of evoking meaning.  Most successful experiences are the ones that connect on this level”

This presentation set the stage for the foregrounding of the “meaning” meme present in countless discussions and presentations throughout the weekend.

Battle Cry: <<< Consumerism Should Die >>>  As a society, consumerism has not served us well.  We need a new way forward.

The ground rules for the next new thing are that it must be innovative, meaningful, sustainable, and profitable.

As a visualization, I appreciated this model that locates where meaning falls relative to the individual:

The scale of SIGNIFICANCE   (1-shallowest,farthest from the person, 5-deepest, closest to the person)

1. Function (Performance)
2. Price
3. Emotion (Does this make me feel <happy/powerful/handsome/pretty>?)
4. Identity/Status
5. Meaning (Does this fit into my world?)

As befits the opening keynote, Nathan’s presentation was full of calls to action for the assembled conference attendees:

To the attendees:
Go out and test for what top 5 core meanings from this list* are for your organization (or customer, self, or competitor).     The 15 choices  (See more about them at makingmeaning.org):

• Accomplishment
• Beauty
• Creation
• Community
• Duty
• Enlightenment
• Freedom
• Harmony
• Justice
• Oneness
• Redemption
• Security
• Truth
• Validation

To the discipline of interaction design:

What are the templates for research on experience and meaning?   We don’t have the research methods for this and we need them.  Designers, however, are ideally placed to contribute to this effort as we have the models and research methods to understand people and the mechanism to suggest a replacement.     (For a start on meaning research templates at Nathan.com/thoughts)

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And for the record – Nathan’s position on whether experience can be designed:   Yes!

My position?  I don’t see the point in bludgeoning each other on the battleground of “can experience be designed or not.”  Some of those on the ‘no’ side of this debate take the position that you can only design the framework for the individual to build their own experience.  Others maintain that you can’t design experience but you  can design behavior – which seems to me like a dog chasing it’s own tail since bring you back to the start of the same debate with a different word at the center.   I tend to side with designers taking responsibility for the framework and for setting the tone and trigger points for engagement and experience and am perfectly happy to leave the experience/behavior debate on the table.

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