Design for Life, and the Taxonomy of Experience

To design for an experience one must know it. The experience of using a personal timepiece.

The Design for Life project, run by a guest professor, Ian Coxon, from the University of Western Sydney, Australia, was my first project at KISD, and so far my favorite. The main goal was to choose an experience and study it so fully, to learn it's specific vocabulary, and intricacies, in order to better design for it. I chose to study the Experience of Using a Personal Timepiece. The course was focussed around philosophical concepts from Heidegger, and Gadamer, about how to understand and categorize experiences. From this philosopy Ian created a process which he called the Taxonomy of Experience.

The Process
We were first to experience our chosen experience ourselves, and document that experience as well as possible including as many nit-picky details as possible. I think I learned the most from this step, just inspecting my own behavior was very interesting to me. We were then to use our learned vocabulary for the experience to interview about, and inspect the experiences of others. This ended up for me being about 15 written pages of notes, and plenty of tiny scribbled notes all through my notebooks such as "the lecture no longer interests me, I check my watch." From these documentations we pulled out all the bits of the experience and categorized them under subsets of senses, positive/negative, cognitive, and emotional factors. This was quite a bit of work for me since I ended up with more than 1000 bits.
We then assigned each bit a theme, that was more specific, for example under Sense of Touch I used categories such as cold, heavy, and sweaty. Each bit was then interpretted, in order to document whatever information might be hidden behind the simple words of the text.
We then began narrowing down the information to the essential elements. Cutting my list down to 1/10 of what it was, cutting out overly repetitive elements, and things that did not seem to be essential to the experience.
The most difficult step came next, finding the extraordinary parts of the experience. We chose from the essential elements, the bits that had some surprising aspect to them. We were encouraged to leave behind information on form, and function, and to focus on only the super-ordinary aspects such as feelings, and philosophical ideas. We then gave each of these super-ordinary aspects a title, and sorted them accordingly. This led very quickly to the end product, about 4 words with which you could summarize the experience.
I was extremely excited and pleased to reach the end stage, after having droned through so many bits of information to finally have reached the nucleus of the experience. But I wasn't really surprised by any of the words I had found, because at that point I was so deep inside the experience that they all seemed so applicable to me.

5 Summarizing words
Emotional Attachment
People grow a huge personal attachment to their watch. First, because as a concept, it is a trusted source of information that is important to them. Second, as an object. The watch can represent something about it's past, such as it's former owner, or being a gift celebrating a big achievement. The watch can also become a symbol of you. Because it is a piece that you wear almost every day, it can come to represent your style, showing yourself through a piece of jewelry.

Coordination
Time has become a kind of grid work for the world, a fourth dimension. Just like streets, latitude, longitude and even country borders, are systems humans have created, and implemented to coordinate ourselves with the first 3 dimensions of the world. Watches and clocks are simply establishing a common framework to organize this fourth dimension. We use time to coordinate the flow of our day with those of the people in our society, in creating appointments, such as opening hours, friendly meetings, even train schedules. It's a way for us to coordinate our moments, and in doing so, consolidate our time so that we can get more done with what we have available.

Craving
The need for an answer to the question of "what time it is" can sometimes be very casual, and unimportant, but more often it is urgent, and pressing. It can control you, and cause stress and anxiety just by having the question in your head. This is the reason for having a wrist watch in the first place, a quick and simple satiation to our craving to know the time. It is always there, and can be depended on as a source of the necessary information.

Exactness
Because our own personal interpretation of lengths of time is so weak, the system of measuring and dividing common time has been set into place. The amazing thing about time is that according to our experience it is so inexact. 1 minute can seem to last a lifetime, and an hour can seem to fly by in just a couple minutes. I find it amazing that sometimes a 10 minute exactness is plenty, and at times it is necessary to be exact down to the fraction of a second. But the system of time is designed to function like this, dividable down to the second, every division of time is applicable to measuring different kinds of activities.

Homeostasis
One main aspect of using a personal timepiece is homeostasis. No matter what the form, be it carrying a personal watch, using a cell phone, or even outside sources for the time the user becomes acquainted to, and comfortable with this resource. This can be a physical comfort, in which the watch becomes like a part of the body. Or mental comfort, where you grow a dependance on the watch as a source for the time. After you have grown a homeostatic connecting with your watch an expectation grows, you expect for the watch to be there on your wrist, or not, depending on which side you are on. And when your expectations are wrong, it is always a bit of a surprise, sometimes good, and sometimes disappointing.


Making a Design
Finally we turned our results into a design. Because of time restraints we weren't supposed to make something practical, but more to capture the essence of the experience into a product, or design.

I based the concept for my final product, on the word craving. Quickly put, a watch is a way to strap our the satiation to our craving for time to our wrists. My product is then just a strap, with which one can strap their own personal craving to their wrist. The "cravings" shown in the example are more conceptual than practical, I found however that had I then studied what people currently "crave" a strap-on version of this could have been designed as a more practical application.