June 17th, 2009
Wabi-sabi and Experience Design
When I was teaching interactive design, I used to try to explain the concept of wabi-sabi to my students. It was a daunting task, and I’m sure I didn’t do justice to the aesthetic ideal and mindset. Nevertheless, I’ve continued to study it, and the more I learn, the more connections emerge between the mindset of wabi-sabi and that of experience design.

Wabi-sabi leaf
On one level, wabi-sabi refers to the innate beauty of simplicity and authenticity without pretense. It is also an expression of imperfection, impermanence, and natural decay. There are no direct translations of this compound Japanese term, but I would suggest that organic is a potential analogue in the Western culture. The aesthetic is intertwined with the history of Zen, Taoism, and has been refined and expressed over the centuries in the Japanese Tea Ceremony. Wabi-sabi is the foundation for the Japanese aesthetic framework, much like Greek ideals underlie Western aesthetics.
Wabi-sabi is articulated through objects that express the passage of time, and denoted by the lack of an absolute form. It rejects ornamentation, and promotes equanimity in thought and interaction. We interact invisibly with our environment because our environment is not separate from us. The visible interactions, those that occur through actions and are registered through perception, are treated with the same attitude of respect in wabi-sabi thinking.
Experience design is similarly concerned with discovering the natural way people interact with things, their environment, and each other. Treating each experience as an extension of core human essence and behavior. Removing the space between the user and his/her intent is one of the primary goals of experience design. Like a great film editor, if they have done the job, the audience doesn’t notice. Bringing oneness to the user, the interaction, and the interface results in effortless, natural experiences. As you may know, this is a difficult concept to sell - especially in a culture where the standard disruption-based messaging model of advertising still lingers in the mainstream culture.
Wabi-sabi is a usable aesthetic, averse to over-curation. It produces small ideas that work exceedingly well within their environment and in concert with the people for whom they are designed. It is reductionist, paring back interactions to core functions and crafting them to become unified within their context. The wabi-sabi approach allows for experience flow through focus, clarity, simplicity, and balance. The wabi-sabi interaction should be natural and intimate, and the interface should only appearing when needed - otherwise it should be transparent, vanishing.
I’m putting a lot of thought into practical ways I can continue to integrate this approach into interactive experiences, and I’d love to hear your ideas and see examples that you think show the wabi-sabi ideal in action. I’ll be starting a little collection, and uploading case studies here and to the blog at Zeus Jones.
Sources:
The Book of Tea (Stone Bridge Classics)
Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers
Update: after writing this post I found a similar observation made by Matt Linderman on 37signals’ Signal vs. Noise blog in 1995. Take a look at his observations, and also at the cool diagram posted in reply by Peter Boersma.


