experience-based design

Bate, S.P. and Robert, G. (2007) Bringing user experience to health care improvement: the concepts, methods and practices of experience-based design. Oxford; Radcliffe Publishing

Even if ‘experience-based design’ could sound as another label into the already crowded field of design, I personally think that the book itself is really a great source for service design researchers and practitioners. It throughly explains the theoretical roots of ‘experience design’, that I hardly found anywhere else, and it links it to the practice providing methods and case studies that enable also ‘non-designers’ (such as professionals working in the health care sector) to dig into the modes and thinking of design. What stroke me most though has been the path that brought Paul bate and Glenn Robert (University College London) to ‘experience design’: starting in Organisational Development (OD) they reached into design science to look for frameworks to support the development challenges facing the NHS, and ended up selecting a specific approach such as ‘experience design’. I am actually moving the opposite way around: from Service Design as design of interactions and experiences (at the periphery of the organisation) to explore services as complex social systems and then to investigate the role of Service Design for organisational change. I really hope this kind of interdisciplinary convergences will grow in number, generating more and more interesting projects and publications.