Experience Design models
Here is a starting selection of models to explore:
Pine and Gilmore, 1998.
One of the most widely borrowed experience frameworks, used in tourism, retail, hospitality, events, and beyond. It maps experiences across two axes, participation (passive to active) and connection (absorption to immersion), producing four realms: entertainment, educational, aesthetic, and escapist. Richer experiences, they argue, reach into all four.
Origin: business and marketing.
Borrowed by: almost everyone.
Falk and Dierking.
Describes the visitor experience as the overlap of three contexts: the personal (motivations, prior knowledge, interests), the sociocultural (who you are with, your background), and the physical (the space, objects, and design). Meaning is made where the three meet. Though developed for museums, it is a powerful general model for any designed environment people move through.
Origin: museum studies.
Useful for: anyone designing physical or social experiences.
Falk.
Proposes that visitors arrive with one of five identity-driven motivations that shape their whole experience: Explorer, Facilitator, Experience Seeker, Professional/Hobbyist, and Recharger. Rather than designing for demographics, design for the motivation someone brings. The principle, design for why people come, not who they are on paper, travels well beyond museums.
Origin: museum studies.
Useful for: audience and visitor design anywhere.
Kahneman and colleagues.
People do not remember an experience as an average of every moment; they remember it largely by its most intense point (the peak) and its ending. A CX or service designer uses this to invest in the moments that will be remembered rather than smoothing every step equally.
Origin: behavioural psychology.
Borrowed heavily by: CX, service design, events, hospitality.
A family of tools that map an experience as a sequence of touchpoints over time, layering on what the person does, thinks, and feels at each, and (in service blueprinting) the “backstage” processes that make each touchpoint possible. The core idea, that an experience is a journey with on-stage and off-stage parts, is one of the field’s most transferable.
Origin: service design and CX.
Useful for: any time-based or multi-touchpoint experience.
Tussyadiah, 2014.
Distils experience design in tourism to three fundamentals: human-centredness, an iterative design process, and a holistic concept of the experience as the outcome of design. A clear, compact statement of what experience design involves, developed in tourism but readable as a general creed for the field.
Origin: tourism research.
Useful for: a foundational definition of the design process itself.
Compared together, these models start to talk to each other.
The Peak-End Rule (from psychology) tells a tourism designer which moments of Tussyadiah’s holistic experience matter most to memory. Falk’s identity motivations (from museums) give a CX team a richer way to segment than journey maps alone. The Experience Economy’s four realms (from business) give a museum a vocabulary for the aesthetic and escapist dimensions its Contextual Model does not name.
This is what the Guild is for: not one model to rule them all, but a field confident enough to learn across its own boundaries.