Interpreting Experience Design Scenes
What about peoples' makeup, reasoning, emotions, and surrounding environment are worth considering to guide what features of products, services, and systems will facilitate experiences they value?
Dennis Cheatham
Experience-Centered Design Research
Design isn't about design.
It's about the experience.
Whether a person is drinking coffee, plowing a field, or telling their sister they love them, what people use to do these is not the point—their experience while using them is what matters. As much as designers like to celebrate their beautifully crafted or technologically advanced work, if the design gets in the way, it fails.
I examine the interplay between contexts, people, and design to better understand these experiences—why they fail or flourish, their inner workings, and how to design for better experiences.
My Work
I seek answers to three questions.
Advancing People Driven Design
How can design research and processes be implemented to promote personal and community wellbeing by positioning people affected by complex social issues as leaders and designers?
Developing Experience Designers
What learning experiences and curricular formats effectively develop experience-centered designers who will create products based on peoples' physical makeup, cultural background, and emotional states?
Weekly Reflections
Reflection is a way to make meaning. Every week, I ask learners in my courses to reflect on the week behind. Here's where I practice what I preach.
Reflection
Reflection
Reflection
Stories
Thoughts & Updates
Posts on a variety of topics and updates about my work. Off-the-cuff, on-the-fly, top-of-mind, and other hyphenated kinds of thinking.
Post
Post
Post
Project Spotlight
Design Workbench
The Design Workbench website showcases ongoing design research projects. It houses tutorials and articles to help readers learn more about becoming an experience-centered designer. It also features a podcast that introduces listeners to critical experience-centered design concepts.
Project Spotlight
Aspects of Experiences for Design
For an app or health clinic to deliver a fantastic experience, the product's features must match the experiencer—the person using the design. The challenge facing designers who care about these experiences is deciphering what parts of a person's physical and emotional makeup should drive those features.
Stream of Consciousness
ThoughtDots
Some thoughts are worth keeping. ThoughtDots are save-worthy posts that connect to form significant ideas worth investigating.
Stories
Publishing
Work I am publishing and presenting across various outlets.
Interpreting Experience Design Scenes
Developing Experience Designers
Developing Experience Designers