John James Marshall thesis.pdf - OpenAIR @ RGU - Robert Gordon ...

‘experience design’ requires a cross-disciplinary perspective that considers
multiple aspects of designing products, processes, services, events, and
environments based on the consideration of an individual's or group's needs,
desires, beliefs, knowledge, skills, experiences, and perceptions.
Jonathan Chapman’s ‘Emotionally Durable Design: Objects, Experiences and
Empathy’ (2005) explores the essential question, why do users discard products
that still work? Chapman states that this form of waste represents
“…a failed user/object relationship, where insufficient empathy led to the
perfunctory dumping of one by the other.” (Chapman, 2005, p.20)
Chapman states the inability for products to mutually evolve with their users
makes most incapable of sustaining a durable relationship. ‘Emotionally
Durable Design’ aims to address the cause of this rather than the symptoms.
Chapman claims that approaches to sustainable design such as recycling,
biodegradability and design for disassembly only address the symptoms.
“Users must therefore be designed into narratives as co-producers and
not simply as inert, passive witnesses.” (Chapman, 2005, p.128)
These concerns are in common with developments in Human–computer
interaction (HCI), and the emergent discipline of interaction design. Again, the
scope of this is too extensive to be dealt with adequately within this research.
However, it is interesting to note the parallels between these interdisciplinary
developments that more fully integrate users in the design process and similar
concerns of interactive computer-based artworks.
2.9.5 Implications for audiences and users
Echoing Duchamp (in his speech at the Museum of Modern Art, 1961) Penny
(1996) noted the techniques of the observer are as important as the techniques
of the artist in establishing meaning in an artwork. If this meaning is founded
on the relationship of the audience and the work, then the design of interactive
experiences is a further dimension (beyond the 3 main physical dimensions) of
designed objects. Penny stated that this was without precedent in the visual and
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