Experience design and artefacts after the fact

Featured in a special issue in CoDesign: International Journal of CoCreation in Design and the Arts, and part of the Crossing Design Boundaries conference. In this paper the authors discuss a new interdisciplinary project which integrates product design innovations from IDEO, in particular experience prototyping, and touches upon aspects of Eddie Obeng's design paradigms such as fog and quest. The project, ‘Artefact after the Fact’ weaves experience design directly into a New York study trip, which is then further developed by interdisciplinary student teams within a neutral studio space. The authors describe this process, involving 120 students from 5 design disciplines with a staff team with expertise ranging from Product to Interiors, and with contextual input from the School of Architecture, Design History Theory & Practice. Mediating artefacts (convenient shorthand for ‘product’ objects, as experiential metaphors for process and product) are explored, which may be relevant to engineering students, or other ‘non’ product disciplines. As educators, there is much we can learn from industry, but much we need to be wary of within design education; modular inflexibility, reduced teaching time, and a growing obsession with grades collectively threaten the kind of ‘connected’, ‘holistic’ and experimental ‘experiential learning’ which institutions exist to foster, industry demands, and learners need. Interdisciplinary learning echoes those types of product innovations and collaborative and critical team working valued in the creative industries, and in this context, is a means of exploring the changing nature of product design (the experience economy rather than just the object economy). Interdisciplinarity lets us tentatively cross, and challenge, imaginary disciplinary boundaries, and in sharing our imaginations we transform our horizons.