Towards meaning change: experience goals driving design space expansion

Abstract

Experience design is a relatively new approach to product design. While there are several possible starting points in designing for positive experiences, we start with experience goals that state a profound source for a meaningful experience. In this paper, we investigate three design cases that used experience goals as the starting point for both incremental and radical design, and analyse them from the perspective of their potential for design space expansion. Our work addresses the recent call for design research directed toward new interpretations of what could be meaningful to people, which is seen as the source for creating new meanings for products, and thereby, possibly leading to radical innovations. Based on this idea, we think about the design space as a set of possible concepts derived from deep meanings that experience goals help to communicate. According to our initial results from the small-scale touchpoint design cases, the type of experience goals we use seem to have the potential to generate not only incremental but also radical design ideas.