Introduction
Experience is a word that we frequently find at the center of discus-
sions about design. Years ago, the emphasis was on styling and
fonction, but in recent years, much attention has been given to the
question of how designed products—whether objects, systèmes, ou
environments—contribute to the quality of life. Experience as a
word does not negate questions of appearance and function; plutôt,
it incorporates them into a larger framework that integrates them
into discussions of how people live their lives.
In his seminal book Art and Experience, philosopher John
Dewey was one of the first to address this topic, and his discussion
of the subject continues to directly and indirectly inform other
inquiries. As the topic has been pursued, researchers have explored
and articulated different dimensions of it. In his article, “Go Green:
Hotels, Design, and the Sustainability Paradox,” David Brody con-
siders the social consequences of adopting “green practices” in the
hotel industry. In order to create a better experience for their hotel
guests, managers in several different hotels adopt policies that have
an adverse effect on the labor practices that support guest services.
Ainsi, improving the experience for hotel customers worsened cir-
cumstances for hotel employees. The problems seem to arise from
not defining the situation in a way that considers the interests of
everyone involved. Brody describes the Starwood Hotel’s policy to
save water by washing guests’ sheets less frequently. Par conséquent,
hotel employees’ work hours were reduced, which resulted in less
frequent visits to guest rooms—hence less cleaning, which ulti-
mately resulted in a buildup of oily sunscreen residues in bathtubs
and showers. When these consequences came to light, the policy
was canceled. Brody concludes by showing that achieving virtuous
aims can be complicated when the interests of multiple parties are
involved. The hotel industry, il dit, needs to develop a greater
awareness of design’s relation to labor.
Wellington Gomes de Medeiros approaches experience
from a different perspective in his article, “Meaningful Interaction
with Products.” De Medeiros recognizes different theories such as
semiotics and semantics that have been applied to the study of
des produits, but he believes that their separateness has prevented the
est ce que je:10.1162/DESI_e_00273
© 2014 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Les problèmes de conception: Volume 30, Nombre 3 Été 2014
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exploration of how meaning is generated from the interaction of
products and people. He introduces the concept of “meaningful
interaction,” which he characterizes as both a theoretical founda-
tion and practical framework. The value of this approach, he argues,
is to bring new research exemplified by the work on products and
emotions into relation with purely representational theories like
semiotics, and functionalist theories like ergonomics.
Robert Farrell and Cliff Hooker challenge the view that
design and scientific research are very different processes in their
article, “Values and Norms Between Design and Science.” They
begin their article by debunking the logical positivist argument of
Herbert Simon that design is a normative process concerned with
attaining goals, while science excludes normative values in order to
describe how things are. By arguing that design and science share
a concern for values and norms, they also reject the attempts of
some earlier design methods theorists, like S. UN. Gregory, to align
design with a non-normative definition of science. They also refute
the dichotomy that science is a search for knowledge, while design
is a search for client satisfaction. Plutôt, they propose a strategic
approach to knowledge acquisition that scientists and designers
share. The value of their argument is that it supports methods of
design research without attempting to legitimate them falsely with
an oversimplified definition of science.
Jesper Jensen introduces a new concept of experience in his
article, “Designing for Profound Experiences.” He claims that eth-
nographic methods have not gone far enough in revealing the expe-
riential possibilities that products can offer, and in this, il
propounds the need for methods that can enable designers to
engage with what he calls the “full richness of an experience.” He
goes beyond the concept of user-centered design to move from the
“use-experience” to the “profound experience.” Profound experi-
ence is fully immersive, and as Jensen points out, it has some rela-
tion to psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s idea of “flow.” To
aid designers in understanding and exploring what he means by
“profound experience,” Jensen introduces an Experience Scope
Framework (ESF) and demonstrates how it might work through a
case study of design in the Aarhus, Denmark city library.
A case study that addresses user experience indirectly,
while concentrating on the process of designing a new digital mag-
azine is discussed in “Oscillating Between Four Orders of Design:
The Case of Digital Magazines” by Daniel Nylén, Jonny Holmström,
and Kalle Lyytinen.
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Les problèmes de conception: Volume 30, Nombre 3 Été 2014
The authors consider the design for a digital magazine—initiated
by the Swedish media company Bonnier—by applying Richard
Buchanan’s four orders of design, originally articulated in Buchan-
an’s Design Issues article, “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking” of
1992. Where Buchanan outlined “places to consider design at differ-
ent scales,” the authors of this article provide an empirical study of
how the four orders can be seen as different dimensions of a single
complex project and, par conséquent, help to produce a full character-
ization of the project for the purpose of case-study research.
Keith Russell’s “Chocolate Bread, Sacred Rice: Continental
Ways of Looking at Things” employs the descriptive potential of
Continental philosophy to introduce a deeper sense of objects. It can
connect people with what Russell calls an entre nous (“between us”)
that contributes to our experience of “self and other and objects.”
For Russell, the entre nous can help us to discover a vitality that he
believes design has lost.
In this issue, we inaugurate a new concept for the visual
essay that we will elaborate in future issues. The late Paul Stiff’s
“Designing Information for Daily Life,” looks at a group of printed
documents that were designed to provide useful information to
people as part of their daily life. In future visual essays we plan to
offer comparable analyses of other kinds of artifacts.
This issue also has a number of different kinds of reviews.
Ksenija Berk reviews the symposium “Balkan Locus-Focus: Long
20th Century Visual Communication Design Histories,” which was
held in Izmir, Turkey. With the recent set of review articles in the
Journal of Design History on the literature of Asian design, there has
been a growing interest in regional design history, which Berk
justifies for the Balkans through her descriptions of the Confer-
ence’s paper presentations and conclusions. Elizabeth Glickfeld
reviews the British Museum’s exhibition and catalogue British
Design from 1948–2012: Innovation in the Modern Age. She evaluates
the three-part structure of the exhibition and the catalogue essays
but concludes that visitors to the exhibition would find no easy
answer to the question “What is British design?” Katarina Serulus,
in Brussels, and Bess Williamson, in Chicago, review exhibitions
of furniture designers. Serulus looks at the furniture of Jules
Wabbes—a designer not well-enough known outside Belgium.
Wabbes designed furniture for homes and for offices; et, the exhi-
bition and catalogue highlight a project for a Belgian insurance com-
pany that involved his collaboration in the design of the building,
as well as its furniture. Williamson looks at a display of furniture
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Les problèmes de conception: Volume 30, Nombre 3 Été 2014
and domestic products by the French designers Rowan and Erwan
Bouroullec. Always original, the Boroullecs’ work is as much fun to
use as it is to see. These qualities are emphasized in the exhibition,
which offered visitors a chance to interact with the objects rather
than to only view them on pedestals and in glass cases. Enfin,
Astrid Skjerven reviews an exhibition of design for a very different
audience in “Design Without Borders – Creating Change,” held at
the Norwegian Centre for Design and Architecture in Oslo. Le
exhibition and accompanying catalogue that chronicle a body of
work designed for developing countries sought to evaluate ten years
of work by Norsk Form in cooperation with several Norwegian
foreign aid organizations. While, Skjerven lauds the informational
value of the exhibition and catalogue, she also recognizes that
the issues that they raise are complicated and call for much
more investigation.
Bruce Brown
Richard Buchanan
Carl DiSalvo
Dennis Doordan
Victor Margolin
Massimo Vignelli 1931–2014
In his long career as a designer of graphics, des produits, and interiors,
Massimo Vignelli fought for quality in design and demonstrated it
through the things he produced. The many designs for which he is
responsible have changed the landscape in which we live and work.
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Les problèmes de conception: Volume 30, Nombre 3 Été 2014
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