{"id":128,"date":"2026-06-29T15:45:50","date_gmt":"2026-06-29T14:45:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/experiencedesignguild.org\/?page_id=128"},"modified":"2026-07-03T13:05:54","modified_gmt":"2026-07-03T12:05:54","slug":"what-is-experience-design","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/experiencedesignguild.org\/?page_id=128","title":{"rendered":"What is experience design?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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What is experience design?<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

Experience design has no single, settled definition, nor is it a wholly new discipline. It draws together practices long established in other fields, theatre, storytelling, exhibition and interior design, architecture, and graphic and interaction design, and brings them into closer relationship than before. Because it has grown from many fields at once, the practitioners and scholars who shaped it defined it from where they stood. Rather than pretend otherwise, this page gathers a few of the most useful definitions, traces what they share, and sets out how the Guild understands the discipline.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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A focus, and a philosophy<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

A useful place to begin is Don Norman, whose work on human-centred design is foundational across the design world. Norman draws a distinction that the Guild finds especially clarifying. He treats experience design as an area of focus, alongside industrial design and interaction design, and defines it as:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cThe practice of defining products, processes, services, events, and environments with a focus placed on the quality and enjoyment of the total experience.\u201d (Norman, 2013, p.5)<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Separately, he names human-centred design not as an area of focus but as the approach that runs beneath any of them, calling it a design philosophy, and describing it as the process that ensures designs match the needs and capabilities of the people they are intended for (Norman, 2013, p.9).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This gives the Guild a clean two-part frame. Experience design is the focus: the total experience and its effect on people. Human-centred design, which the Guild expresses as a human-led conviction, is the philosophy brought to that focus. A practitioner is one of us by sharing both: the focus on the whole experience, and the philosophy that puts the human first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Guild takes one respectful step beyond Norman\u2019s wording. Many of the experiences our members design are not about enjoyment: a museum confronting difficult history, a healthcare journey, a demanding learning experience. We therefore read \u201cthe total experience\u201d more broadly than enjoyment alone, as the full human encounter and what it leaves behind.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Experience as a distinct, staged offering<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

From the world of business, Joseph Pine and James Gilmore established why experience deserves to be treated as a discipline at all. They argued that experiences are distinct economic offerings, as real as services and goods (Pine and Gilmore, 1998, p.98).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Crucially for the Guild, they framed experiences as something deliberately made rather than incidental, ‘occurring when a company intentionally uses services as the stage, and goods as props,’ to engage people in a memorable way (ibid). Their theatrical language of staging, and their insistence that experiences must be deliberately designed rather than wrapped around an existing offering, give our field its sense of intention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Guild keeps their insight, that experience is a real, distinct thing, made on purpose, while setting aside its commercial limit. We hold that an experience need not command a fee to be worth designing: the gallery, the ward, the public programme, and the lesson matter as much as the attraction or the store.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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A process of orchestration<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

More recently, J. Robert Rossman and Mathew Duerden bring the threads together into a working definition that describes not only what experience design is, but how it is practised:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cExperience design is the process of intentionally orchestrating experience elements to provide opportunities for participants to co-create and sustain interactions that lead to results desired by the participant and the designer.\u201d (Rossman and Duerden, 2019, p.14)<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

This definition is close to the Guild\u2019s heart for two reasons. Its emphasis on intentional orchestration echoes the conviction that nothing in a good experience is left to default. And its idea that designers create opportunities for participants to co-create, rather than dictating a fixed outcome, matches the Guild\u2019s belief that we shape the conditions of an experience, not the person\u2019s response to it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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What these definitions share<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Across three very different starting points, human-centred design, the world of business, and the scholarship of experience, a few threads run clearly:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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  • It concerns encounters, not objects. The designed thing matters for the encounter it creates, not in itself.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • It is human-led. Responsibility sits with the design, and the person\u2019s response is the measure of success.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • It is multidisciplinary by nature. Every account traces it to many older fields in combination.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • It is intentional. Experience is staged, orchestrated, and shaped on purpose.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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    How the Guild defines it<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

    Building on this shared ground, the Guild is developing a working definition of its own:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    Experience design is the intentional shaping of human encounters and their outcomes, brought about through a human-led philosophy.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

    It is a definition broad enough to hold the encounter, the service, the environment, the journey, and the event in a shared frame, and to reveal their relationship to each other. This is the common ground of our Guild.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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    References<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

    Norman, D.A. (2013) The Design of Everyday Things. Revised and expanded edition. New York: Basic Books.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Pine, B.J. and Gilmore, J.H. (1998) \u2018Welcome to the Experience Economy\u2019, Harvard Business Review, 76(4), pp. 97\u2013105.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Rossman, J.R. and Duerden, M.D. (2019) Designing Experiences. New York: Columbia University Press.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    What is experience design? Experience design has no single, settled definition, nor is it a wholly new discipline. It draws together practices long established in other fields, theatre, storytelling, exhibition and interior design, architecture, and graphic and interaction design, and brings them into closer relationship than before. Because it has grown from many fields at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-128","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/experiencedesignguild.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/experiencedesignguild.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/experiencedesignguild.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/experiencedesignguild.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/experiencedesignguild.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=128"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/experiencedesignguild.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/128\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":181,"href":"https:\/\/experiencedesignguild.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/128\/revisions\/181"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/experiencedesignguild.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}