Abstract
It seems that there are two different streams of a discussion on “experience”. Researchers in marketing talk about experiences given to customers through services and products. Researchers in usability focus on user-experience of operating products. In a product development process, the former experience is examined in a definition phase, and the latter in an evaluation phase. A question here is how we get experience ideas in a discovery phase. This paper tends to shed light on the role of designers' experience in a primary design phase.
We conducted interviews with designers and design managers. Analyzing them, we found that there were two basic steps in minds of designers. Direct experiences make possible for designers not only to do “re-definition”of themes, but also to do “discovering analogies”for solutions. So we propose that “experience design”should be understood as “design by experience”. In addition, understanding the mechanism of creation, corporations can start dealing with experiences of designers in more organized ways.
