Description

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An engaging introduction to the cutting-edge discipline of experience design for students and practitioners in creative fields, including architecture, product design, gaming, exhibition design, and performance
 
What does it mean to design experiences? Traditional design practices invite us to design things, and to use those things to solve problems. But experience is not a problem; it is life. Experience designers engage with unpredictability and the unknown, partnering with their audiences to generate possibility and relationality. Experience designers create worlds, craft narratives that leave the page and enter people’s lives, and structure transformation. Broadly interdisciplinary and deeply human, experience design is a practice that at once embraces new technologies and offers a balm for our disconnected lives.
 
In this playful, accessible, and visually engaging book, Burickson lays out ten basic principles for this emerging practice. Experience Design: A Participatory Manifesto invites the reader to stop making things and, instead, to craft the minutes and hours of human life. Rigorous and philosophical, the book guides the reader through the processes of empathic research; constructing worlds not just for fantasy fiction but in schools, communities, homes; and mastering the tools necessary to work coherently across disciplines to create new experiences. Whether you are a maker of immersive theater, an architect, a graphic designer, a community organizer, or just someone hoping to give a better gift, this book offers a vision of creating that is both new and as old as civilization.

About the Author

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Abraham Burickson is the cofounder and artistic director of the performance collaborative Odyssey Works, where he codirects the Experience Design Certificate Program. He also teaches in the MFA program in graphic design at Maryland Institute College of Art and has trained in architecture and poetry. Ellen Lupton is the Betty Cooke and William O. Steinmetz Design Chair at the Maryland Institute College of Art and is the author of many books, including Design Is Storytelling. Erica Holeman is assistant professor in the communication design program at the University of North Texas.