A Design Education Toolkit for Ideating Experience Design Effects

This article presents a set of tools implemented at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, United States, that guides experience design students through an iterative process of envisioning possible effects of the outcomes they create. Experience Design is an emerging, transdisciplinary practice whose outcomes endeavor to facilitate memorable experiences resulting from use. People who use products, services, and systems designed with this mindset value them because of the memories and emotions these outcomes facilitate. This article presents the roles of futures thinking, design thinking, and experience design for empowering planners when addressing complex social issues. It shares a toolkit that scaffolds learning to facilitate divergent thinking, intertwining concepts from theatre, social psychology, scholarship of teaching and learning, and design. Two toolkit methods are discussed: Experience Design Scenes and Experience-Based Proto-Personas. This article presents the toolkit’s applications for introducing an experience design mindset into design education. It includes how this approach can give students foresight to anticipate the intended and unintended consequences their candidate designs may cause.