Are You Experienced.

Expressing the Brand Beyond Geometry.

For as long as the car itself, the soul of a car has been expressed through form. In our ocularcentric culture, appearance has been exalted over texture, scent or sound. This has led to an impoverishment of the built environment and feeling of detachment, argues Juhai Palasmaa in his book ‘The Eyes of the Skin’. Experience Design promises to redress this, digitalisation bringing with it a wave of sensorial content that offers a new way for customers to re-engage with an object, space or brand.

Experience Design is a nebulous term that has grown from UI to cover an array of interpretations. There is Experience Design: the Product - interaction with the product and creation of digital ‘moments’ -and Experience Design: the Process -viewing the brand from the customer’s perspective from retail to after-sales. Each example can be imagined as stills from a storyboard, whereby the camera follows the customer’s perspective along a user journey, revealing different combinations of content. It demands an holistic perspective once normally the preserve of design directors and the CEO, and offers a highly fertile arena for designers to mix media.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella comments that leaders have to master the combinatorial nature of technology and its exponential reach. This can be hard to achieve where many organisations are structured around manufacturing processes. Two components that work hand-in-glove from the customer’s perspective can find themselves positioned on opposite sides of the orga-chart. As Nadella states, we need to “… optimise operations and empower employees so they can collaborate, communicate, create new value and change the very nature of the product.” Fortunately design departments are optimally positioned to achieve this, already adept at co-ordinating and visualising cross-discipline projects. The next step is to incorporate the other senses too.

Before their grounding this year, the Boeing 747 was the backdrop to many of my most memorable journeys. The drone of the jets would be perforated by the intermittent click of the drinks trolley parking. Like you, a Bloody Mary crosses my mind. Despite the feeble sachets of seasoning, 25% of drinks ordered by passengers are tomato juices, Bloody or otherwise. The reason is due to sound: loud noises suppress the perception of taste -except for the umami of tomato juice. So says Professor Charles Spence, who has made a name for himself as Head of Crossmodal Research at Oxford University. His is one example of how one sense can influence another, and the importance of ritual to an experience.

Flying is often considered analogous to autonomous travel by car, both in terms of user journeys and the experience of travelling without driving. Being on a plane is the dominant experience that platforms content like Zoom and Netflix. This belies a more potent incursion on time: time in a brand. The very act of driving demands you wholly engage with an automotive brand. Driver-aids relinquish that, permitting the connectivity so highly prized by the customer to become the Trojan horse by which foreign companies engage users with alternative products. This might not matter if your brand is built on connectivity and convenience, but if more emotional then decoupling the user from the journey presents a greater risk.

Designers abhor a vacuum, and the expression of emotion through sound is a conspicuous casualty of the industry’s shift from ICE to BEV-centric driving. Even explosive acceleration is curiously benign when silent. In 2018 at the Royal College of Art, student Irene Chiu partnered with Bentley to explore the role of sound in her Luxury Soundscapes project, augmenting light and sound to enhance travel. Chiu’s project also demonstrated the multifarity of RCA where students live and breathe inspiration from different disciplines.

The same year, Volvo exhibited their S90 Ambience interior concept which combined light, sound and scent to augment in-car environments. Scenarios such as Northern Lights and Forest underscored the importance of strong narratives to express brand values. These are not just pages lifted from the brand’s white paper; a recent study by Goldsmiths University of London demonstrates that exposure to images of nature increase positive emotions such as happiness and inspiration. Experience design therefore not only offers a conduit for expression and engagement, but stages stimuli for well-being. In this brave new world the experience is the brand and the customer journey is the product.

The language of design has always evolved with technology, from the splines of nautical sections, to the curvatures of computer modelling. Today design is no longer limited to bending metal or moulding plastic; the levers that define character are coded in software. Consequently, design is finding a new language to express behaviour, one that is more poetic and closer to story-telling than strategies. It is an unexpected break in the cloud of digitalisation, where prose and coding can co-exist to keep within human reach ever greater complexity. To paraphrase Charlie Chaplin in the The Great Dictator, more than technology we need humanity.