Ufuldendte Oplevelser - engagerende oplevelsesdesign til kreativ adfærd [abstract]

Thesis abstract:

Imperfect Experiences - engaging experience design for creative behaviour

This thesis explores how places and surroundings can facilitate creativity and creative behaviour among their users. The thesis is based on an understanding of the experience economic market paradigm, that consumers today consume experiences as well as the actual material goods, and that these experiences can be designed to make a better and more attractive product. What is important for consumers is not merely to acquire an object in exchange for an amount of money, but to feel the personal satisfaction, identity formation and value creation that consumption brings. The experience of consuming has become a central part of the consumption. Modern consumers attach value and meaning to the consumption, and this is a big part of the consumption experience.

User engagement is achieved when an experience is exciting, surprising and speaks to the individual's creativity and curiosity. The Imperfect Experiences that is the title of this thesis is referring to a kind of experiences that require the user to invest his own body and emotions in order to complete the experience; to perfect it. Experiences in which the users do the completion themselves becomes unique to the individual.

This thesis further argues that in designing experiences with the purpose to engage its users and help them to achieve greater creative potential, the designer should be aware of three basic factors: Emotional co-creation, focusing on impressions and questioning of the framing. Emotional co-creation is about the user of an experience design being the central actor in creating his own experience. This does not mean that the user necessarily add anything physical or tangible in the design, but rather that they should be encouraged to invest personality and emotion in the experience. When users attach value to their consumption behavior it creates experiences with a greater existential significance for the individual. The experience should give the user something to work with, and therefore be focusing on impressions. A large variety of impressions creates potential for even greater experiences, because they can inspire, surprise and start something unpredictable. Each user decodes the input in a unique way and thus different experiences can arise from the same design. A framing may be an attempt to control and program the user to a particular practice or way of appropriating a place or an experience. In 'frameless' experiences users are free to go their own ways, be curious and act creatively. On the other hand, the absence of framing may also result in an unfocused use pointing in too many directions, instead of moving towards one specific goal. It is therefore very important always to incorporate how the framing of an experience design should and could influence the user experience.

The thesis has two main analysis objects: Innovative work environments and idea-generating workshops. Both are designed to support and foster creative behavior for the people who are in the created framing. Described with an experience economic vocabulary, they try to create an experience, that at once facilitates the users creative expression by providing them with inspiration, while at the same time trying to engage them into doing their best and invest emotions and personality. The fundamental difference between the two analysis objects is, that one - the idea-generating workshops - is designed to actively create specific ideas here and now, while the second - the innovative work environments - more passively attempts to support the users' creativity. What they both have in common is, that the users are the active part, while the framing is a more passive, though very influential, part.

The thesis is based on four theoretical cornerstones: An overall understanding of the concept of creativity, which lays the foundation for the rest of the thesis' exploration of creative behavior; the theory of space and place, which among other things provides insight into the effects that the surroundings have on user behavior; the theory of Co-creation, that looks at the users' own roles in creating the experience; and the concept of serendipity, which can be used to describe the influence of the wider context on each user's unique experience, and vice versa.

The chapter on creative behaviour outlines how the thesis understands the concept of creativity, and describes a general model for how ideas are generated by the creative individual. What is meant by creative is culturally and socially determined, and the understanding is sometimes determined by societys creativity myths, that can affect both thoughts and actions. A model of the phases in the creative process is presented and used to try to understand how and why some framings are better for facillitating creative behavior than others. In this chapter it is determined that, respectively, the innovative work environments and the idea-generating workshops in various ways facilitate creative behavior with those who are influenced by them. Most prominently by creating a 'culture for creativity', that sets people in a general creative 'mode'.

The chapter on space and place explores how people behave in certain spaces, and how environment influences the use. By understanding a place's unique assets, it is possible to design interventions that uses its unique potentials and thus might facillitate the continued reproduction of the site in exciting new directions. The chapter explains that a place is defined by the emotions attributed to it, and this way the real value of a good experience is the investment of emotion and personality that the user contributes. This chapter shows that places, and the meaning users attribute to them, is a central reason why a culture for creative behaviour can be created. Users are constantly helping to reproduce the place and its values, and they thereby create the creative culture. They let themselves be influenced by the place, because they themselves are the ones ascribing it's meaning.

The chapter on co-creation describes Boswijk's concept of generations in the experience economy, Prahalad & Ramaswamy's concept of co-creation and Nonaka's model of learning and knowledge sharing in organizations. Both Boswijk and Prahalad & Ramaswamy works with the emotional form of co-creation, not the concrete form. Value is created when users attach meaning to their behaviour or practice and invest their personality and emotions in their consuming. Nonaka's model complements this understanding by explaining how communication between company and users takes place and how this interaction creates value. The analytic part of this chapter deals with how, respectively, the innovative work environments and the idea-generating workshops don't quite fit in with Boswijk's concept of generations, because they have active users but a passive provider or framing. I also explains how both concrete and emotional co-creation are used in the empirical cases, and how the concrete cocreation is an efficiant factor in creating emotional cocreation among users. The chapter finally explores how the sharing of knowledge and learning takes place, and which parts of the designs help where.

In the chapter on serendipity the concept is used to analytically explain the unpredictability that exists when users encounter a designed experience and how coincidences can affect people's experiences. The term itself covers only the positive surprises that may occur, but derived from that it also gives an opportunity to discuss why any negative surprises arise and how they can be avoided. The theory's primary purpose is to give suggestions on how a designer can concentrate on cultivating serendiptous events that can extend, optimize and transform the user experience. The fact that the users' background and many other unforeseeable parameters play a role in the individual's unique experience is in itself not new or revolutionary, but the thesis attempts to describe how designers can exploit the user's individual cognitive co-creation proactively: how serendipity can be used as a parameter in the design of a good experience. The chapter looks at how serendipity is a part of creative behavior, and tries to further apply the concept in an experience economic context, based on the empirical cases. The concept of serendipity gives an extra dimension to the understanding of what an experience entails. A large number of unpredictable factors ranging from weather to a person's love life, play into each user's unique experience and understanding of a given experience design. Serendipity is thus an unavoidable condition when users meet a designed experience.

The concluding chapter summarizes the thesis' points and findings across theory and analysis, based on the three-way divided thesis statement: Emotional co-creation, focusing on impressions and questioning of the framing. In short the emotional co-creation makes sure that the users invest feelings and personality, and thus engage themselves deeper in creating their own experience; a multitude of impresions makes it possible for different users to decode the experience in different ways, and increases the chance of the occurance of serendiptous events; and a framing that is loose and agile enough, creates a platform on which the users are both guided to a better experience and free to engage in creative appropriation of the possibilities that the design presents.

The final, perspectival chapter shortly summarizes two areas where this thesis believe to have added to a new understanding of the experience economic market- and design paradigm, and thus opens up for further exploration. This includes a critical reading of Boswijk's generation concept, which leads to an alternative way of categorizing designed experiences; and the application of the concept of serendipity as a way to understand how the wider context always plays an important part in each user's unique experience. Finally, the thesis summarizes its investigations into three specific recommendations on how to create engaging experience design for creative behavior.

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