The User Experience Economy

The User Experience Economy

Notes taken from“Re-inventing invention: new tendencies in capitalist commodification”

Nigel Thrift in Economy and Society Volume 35 Number 2 May 2006: 279_/306

And final Chapter of Non-Representational TheorySee this article and others in PDF format http://nigelthrift.org/downloads/

Pine and Gilmore

Joseph Pine Management Speaker (Guru)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIG2NM-EieI&feature=related

‘In the long procession of history, capitalism is the late-comer. It

arrives when everything is ready’ (Historian Fernand Braudel 1977: 75 cited in Thrift)

The Leech

The Central Role of Design• ‘The functioning of the economy…

facilitate[s] the intensification of collaboration of supply and demand in a way that enables consumers to participate actively in the qualification of products. Design, as an activity that crosses through the entire organization, becomes central: the firm organizes itself to make the dynamic process of qualification and requalification of products possible and manageable.’

(Callon et al . 2002)

Thrift’s three tendencies (adapted from)

1. Plumbing the non-cognitive realm of consumption (affect)

2. The ‘experience economy’ (Pine and Gilmore 1999 cited in Thrift)

3. The active [social] engineering of the space of innovation

1. Plumbing the non-cognitive

• Corporate “obsession” with

– Creativity – ‘Fostering [of] tacit

knowledge and aptitudes through devices like the community’

1. Plumbing the non-cognitive

• Exploiting the non-cognitive realm and ‘fast’ thinking

• Norman’s notion of the visceral level in rapid judgments

• ‘The extraordinarily perceptive and deceptive power of the sub-conscious mind’

• See Malcolm Gladwell’s business bestseller Blink (2005)

2. The ‘experience economy’

• A desire to rework consumption and draw consumers more fully into the production process

• Leeching consumer knowledge of commodities and adding it back into the system as added value

2. The ‘experience economy’

• Models of ‘co-creation’ [customer-made] which are changing corporate perceptions of what constitutes

• ‘production’ • ‘consumption’ • ‘commodity’• ‘the market’ • ‘innovation’

3. [Social] engineering of the space of innovation

• Learning how to combine information technology [with] group formation in ways that really will deliver the goods

• ‘New audiences can be worked on: their enthusiasm can be played to, for example through the medium of websites that act as ‘honey traps’. So, for example, Amazon.com now sell more books from the backlist outside their top 130,000 bestsellers than they do from within them, in part through all manner of devices that are intended to capture and foster enthusiasms and automate ‘word of mouth’

• Nigel Thrift: Re-inventing invention p. 287

The Role of Design

• ‘Taken together, these three developments have… foregrounded the absolute importance of design' (Thrift)

The Role of Design

‘… design is becoming ever more central to the whole production/consumption process’

(McCullough 2004 cited in Thrift)

The Role of Design

‘Design is how we can be dominated by instrumental rationality and love it, too’

(Liu 2004: 236 cited in Thrift)

Modes of Design

1. Sensory Design2. Interaction Design3. User Centred Design4. Collective Design

1. Sensory Design

Corporate strategy

• ‘Today the value proposition is more intimate and intuitive’ (Hill 2003: 20 cited in Thrift).

• Appeal to the Senses

• Increases the commodity’s stickiness

1. Sensory Design

Corporate strategy

• Commodities need to resonate in many sensory registers at once

• Make them recognizable in the commodity cacophony of modern capitalism

1. Sensory design - adds more feelingadds more value

• “The Affective Grip”

• Stimulate the emotions connected with things

• Appeal to senses formerly neglected – – ‘aesthetics’ refers to all

senses• Produce more

commitment = sell more

1. Sensory design - adds more feelingadds more value

• Examples– Car doors are designed to

give a satisfyingly solid clunk as they shut

– New cars are given distinct smells

– Breakfast cereals are designed to give a distinct crunch (Kellogg’s patent)

– Travel experiences are given distinctive aromas (Singapore Airlines)

The ‘generation of passions’

The added value of emotions and affects

2. Interaction Design

• ‘the success of a design is arrived at socially’

• ‘… the design of commodities that behave, communicate or inform’

• ‘processes of variation and difference that can allow for the unforeseen’ usage

• offer ‘clues to further incarnations

2. Interaction Design

• Thrift notes the ‘flowering of so-called open or user-centered innovation

• Consumers = vital force in research and experimentation

3. User-Centered Design

• User-centered innovation processes offer great advantages over the manufacturer-centric development systems that have been the mainstay of commerce over hundreds of years

3. User-Centered Design

• Users that innovate… develop exactly what they want, rather than rely on manufacturers to act as their (very often imperfect) agents

4. Collective Design

• Invention ‘Spill[s] outside the organizational boundary [of the] corporation’

– Focus groups– Ethnography of various kinds – Style boards – Means-end chains – Clinics – Pre-launch event– Fan websites

• Co-creation… as a continual process of tuning arrived at by distributed aspiration.

‘Not all the smart people work for you’

(Chesbrough 2003 cited in Thrift)

• People enjoy design processes

• Seek incentives like prizes or awards

Customer-Made

Lead Users

‘Those consumers that face the needs that will be general in the marketplace, but face them months or years ahead of

the rest of the marketplace’ Electronics Corporation Philips

See http://livesimplicity.net/

See Trendwatching.com, 2005: Customer-madehttp://www.trendwatching.com/trends/CUSTOMER-MADE.htm

Case Study

Philips & Co-creation

Taken from Philips: The creative customer“Increasing consumer involvement in product-innovation processes at Philips” By Maaike

Spoor, Aad Streng and Paul Louis IskeIn Inside Knowledge Magazine 18 Apr 2005 in Volume 8 Issue 7

Philips: The Creative Customer

• Co-creation =

• Collaboration with online consumer groups

• Tapping into collective wisdom

• Mobilising customer creativity

• Enhancing the speed and effectiveness of product development

Co-Creation Defined

• ‘Heterogeneous interaction with active, empowered and knowledgeable individuals, rather than by the organised control of passive consumers.’

3 Roles of the Consumer

1. ‘Consumer as Resource’ – Tracking online user

communities, in which users exchange product experience

pronto.philips.com

3 Roles of the Consumer

2. Consumers act as ‘co-creator’– Become part of the

company’s activities– Experiencing virtual

representations and rapid prototyping

pronto.philips.com

3 Roles of the Consumer

• 3. Consumers act as ‘users’ – Write product reviews – Discuss products in forums– Online message boards – Enabling user-to-user

support, where users can engage in an interactive learning process

pronto.philips.com

Co-creation and Brand

• Co-creation = added value for Philips

• ‘Co-creation expresses the element of ‘sense’ in the way that Philips takes care of, and listens to, its consumers’

Co-creation and Brand

• The brand is – ‘designed around you’– ‘easy to experience’ – ‘advanced’

Who joins a consumer community?

Characteristics• Highly involved with the

product • Show brand affinity • Psycho-sociological

needs– expression of needs– creativity– product knowledge– hedonic

The Montreal Adobe User Group on Second Life

Adobe as an example

Not just about product

• The co-creation of a lamp-bulb?

• More to do with user experience of atmosphere, ambience and mood

• Affect?

Delivering the Goods

Outcomes of the Economy of User

‘Invention’

• Invention and mere use are superseded by pleasure in the activity itself

Outcomes of the Economy of User ‘Invention’

• Consumer communities will evolve beyond a company’s control

• e.g user groups development

• Co-creating provides the firm with a new terrain of profit

• Policy of “open reveal”

Google's Open Source Android OS Will Free the Wireless WebSee Tony’s book review of FLOSS +Art - Turning Software Inside Out

Hackability and Customization

Open Source

Outcomes of the Economy of User ‘Invention’

• User community feedback and intervention makes commodity existence unpredictable

• Not a ‘finished’ end product… the commodities ‘survive their performance’ (Virno 2004 cited in Thrift).

Outcomes of the Economy of User ‘Invention’

• Value is ‘embedded in an experience environment that the company co-develops with consumers’ (Prahalad and Ramaswamy 2004: 121 cited in Thrift).

Outcomes of the Economy of User ‘Invention’

• ‘Greater interactivity means that ‘the market pervades the entire system’

(Prahalad and Ramaswamy 2004: 125 cited in Thrift)

• Ubicomp!!!

Feedback on last week’s cw2 questionnaire

I have the brainwave visualizer working

• Let’s play! In EB. 1.63

Tasks for Week Eight SeminarDiscussing the five essay titles

1. To what extent is usability implicated in the production of Crary’s concept of the attentive subject?

2. In what ways has usability theory moved on from the study of user cognition to the affective and emotional realm of non-cognition?

3. Norman locates the user-centred orientation of emotional design firmly in ‘the world of products’ and brands. Using a particular brand as an example, discuss how consumers become emotionally and affectively connected to what they consume?

4. Select a usability method and/or software product (e.g. eye tracking, card sorting) and discuss how it relates the consumer to the mass consumption of brands and products?

5. How do affect and emotions influence decision making processes and how might this in turn influence the design of a specified interactive media production?

Reading and Watching

• User Experience and Experience Design by Marc Hassenzahl

• http://www.interaction-design.org/encyclopedia/user_experience_and_experience_design.html