Zen and the Art of 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.

I had the pleasure of speaking at the University of Minnesota’s MinneWebCon event on Monday, April 6th. I even got Doc Searls’ to autograph my copy of his legendary book The Cluetrain Manifesto.

Enjoyed meeting everyone - keep the conversation going.

Barbie's Evolution

In the late fifties, entrepreneur Ruth Handler invented the Barbie doll after watching her daughters play with paper dolls. She noticed that they were injecting themselves into the dolls as part of the play experience - personifying the dolls by imagining themselves as grown-ups. Thus was born this iconic aspirational toy (well, that and finding a German doll designed around a similar idea, but that’s beside the point).

Because those aspirations were at the time severely and unfortunately limited by a male-dominated American culture, the doll’s ubiquity became synonymous with the misogynistic environment from which it came. Handler, however, was a master marketer and ironically lived a life antithetical to the symbol she helped create. She was a pioneer in marketing to children, gambling the future of her company on a sponsorship deal with the Mickey Mouse Club - an innovation that paid off for Mattel.

Barbie is one in a list of products born from personal observation. It reminds us that the sources of innovative UX design are all around us all the time - we just have to train ourselves to pay attention. In a more recent example, Deborah Adler came up with the idea for a consumer-centered pill bottle when her grandmother nearly overdosed after taking the wrong medication. What began as a powerful personal observation became today’s Target ClearRx, an impressive (and ambitious) piece of experience design which is now recognized in New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Tree Top Barbie

Another sign of enduring UX design is how designed objects and services respond and adapt to the changing culture. Often this transition is not driven by the original creator of the design, but rather by a new layer of innovation that displaces outmoded products - a hack. One of the more interesting ways that Barbie has been coopted is in a product mash-up created by the International Canopy Network, a non-profit group dedicated to creating awareness about the ecological importance of preserving forests. Tree-Top Barbie is a culture hack, designed to “raise consciousness among young girls (and boys!) about the importance of forest canopy organisms and interactions” (ICAN).

Here the icon is subverted to empower young people, challenge conditioned thinking patterns, and raise consciousness about what we are doing to our planet in the process. This hack shows another level of observation of how humans interact with their culture of consumption. Both observations (that leading to the original Barbie and that subverting it) consider what was (the observation) in context of something that was not (the extension, or connecting idea). In the case of the original Barbie, the extension was creating an object that allowed children to freely associate with their fantasy adult-selves - an observed behavior without a symbol. With Tree Top Barbie, the extension was to modify the toy to build awareness for a cause and provide a more positive aspirational model. This observation was more abstract - but nevertheless, the idea was based on a cultural behavior with a gap that needed to be filled.

He Plays with Barbies

If the evolutionary approach to transforming culture isn’t bringing change fast enough, don’t despair. We can always fall back on the more revolutionary Barbie hacks. A quick search uncovered the full gamut of Barbie subversion, including a wide array of beheaded Barbies, a frozen Barbie, Barbie Death Camp and Wine Bistro (an installation at Burning Man, where else?), and Barbie as drumstick  seen at right. DIY culture never starts from scratch.

Sources:
PBS: Who Made America?

ICAN: Tree Top Barbie

NPR: At 50, Barbie’s Accomplishments Impress

MoMA: ClearRx