Re: when was "experience design" coined? seeking academic citation

These may be correct attributions, Dan, but the use of the term "user" in
"user experience design" signifies a different discipline from experience
design per se, which is a larger subset.  Don could very well be the author
of the term, though not in 1995.  At a conference of designers at Stanford
organized in 2004 (I think), Don renounced his use of "user" and said he
wished he'd never connected it with experience design when he was at UCSD.
So you can track back and see when he did that, and perhaps earlier he used
experience design in its pure form.

I think the issue though, isn't who coined the term experience design, but
who invented its practice.  Heck, for the CA Legislature back in 1983, I
coined the term "electronic commerce," but I for sure didn't invent
ecommerce.  It first happened on a BBS in San Bernardino, CA, in 1982, and
later on CompuServe and Prodigy.

If you asked me for a list of historical first-ever experience designers, I
guess I'd start with the people who designed the cave paintings that we now
think of as archaeological curiosities.  Stonehenge.  The Greeks who
designed the Oracle of Delphi's pad.  (I'm sure there were many
practitioners of the art of the spectacle.)  The builders of the Coliseum
and the Pantheon.  Beijing's Forbidden City.  Etc., etc.

In modern times, I'd shout out the designers of the various world fairs
(especially the Columbian Exposition), the Bauhaus, Charles and Ray Eames,
Walt Disney, Lawrence Halprin the landscape architect (who said, "Design not
with forms but with forces"), and Bob Rogers.  The promoters of EAT
(Experiments in Art and Technology) at the LA County Museum of Art, in 1967.
Marshall McLuhan, Romedi Passini, and Arthur Frank in Canada. Also Roger
Whitehouse, John Rheinfrank, John Thackara, Brenda Dervin, Bruce Mau,
Antonio Camara (Ydreams), Jef Raskin, Ricky Wurman, and many others.  Each
has corps of disciples spreading the word.  Most recently,  the designers of
the recently revamped national art galleries in both the US and the UK, and
Hilary Cottam who directs the UK Design Council's RED design team.  (These
are all Western examples; I'm sure they've counterparts elsewhere.)

One of my treasures is a little pamphlet self-published by Wurman in 1976,
"WHAT-IF, COULD-BE," printed on grey paper, stapled, with wiggly line-drawn
cartoons (by Blechman, the Alka Seltz stomach illustrator).  It depicted a
future when technology served public knowing.  (Possibly a utopian dream.)
It was my third and decisive hit on the head regarding experience design,
after reading Gene Youngblood's EXPANDED CINEMA (in 1969) and teaching with
him at UCLA; and faithfully reading RADICAL SOFTWARE, the irregularly
published, rainbow-inked newspaper and later magazine published by the
Raindance Foundation during the height of the public access TV movement in
the late 60s and early 70s.  It proposed and discussed much of the theory of
interaction that undergirds today's Web practice.  It's said that most
creativity is reinvention.  Frankly, a lot of today's "innovation" was
hatched and hashed over pretty well during the 60s.  Only the forms are
different; the forces are the same.

 Bob Jacobson
 Santa Monica
 Total Experience (http://totalexperience.corante.com/)


On 9/12/06 6:26 AM, "Dan Saffer" <[email protected]> wrote:
 
> Peter Merholz tracked it down to Don Norman in the early 1990s and
> possibly Brenda Laurel back in 1986:
> 
> http://www.peterme.com/index112498.html
> 
> Don's reference has a 1995 CHI proceedings article (although the link
> is broken).
> 
> Dan Saffer
> book http://www.designingforinteraction.com
> work http://www.adaptivepath.com
> site   http://www.odannyboy.com
>
> On Sep 11, 2006, at 6:41 PM, molly wright steenson wrote:
> 
>> When was the term "experience design" first coined? A few years back,
>> I had a conversation with John Rheinfrank where he showed me the
>> article in which he had coined the phrase, I think as early as 1987.
>> But I don't recall where the piece was published and who his co-
>> author was (for some reason, I don't think it was Shelley Evenson).
>> Could it really be this early?
>> 



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