Inside Scoop

Our own CEO Sara Goldstein co-wrote a chapter in the book above. Here’s what she has to say about it…

In a field as new as experience design, copying, borrowing and outright stealing are incredibly important research tools. If people in another field have solved a problem, adapting their solution is a sound strategy. Does it ever make sense to re-invent the wheel?

In that context, Digital Experience Design: Ideas, Industries, Interaction has the potential to be important in the experience design field. Each chapter is co-authored with a subject matter expert, to see what ideas from their field can be applied to experience design.

I was fortunate enough to be asked to co-author a chapter that looks at the intersection between fashion and experience design. The single most important idea that the fashion world knows (and the experience design world largely does not) is that we each have idealized selves as well as our real self.

Our ideal selves are an amalgam of who we’re trying to become and who we wish we could be. They’re not ‘real’ as they only exist inside their owner’s head — but they do effect our behavior in interesting and measurable ways.

In the fashion world, that’s taken for granted. People will purchase things they will never use in the real world if that item suits their ideal self. They will also pay much more for basic items that seem to reflect their ambitions and desires, like a Ralph Lauren polo shirt with its carefully cultivated associations with old money.

The nascent experience design field could learn from that.

Smash-hit products are the ones we collectively fall in love with. When a product evokes desire by helping us feel more like the person we want to be, it becomes a ‘must have’ — no matter how non-essential the item is by practical standards. For example, the iPod.

I’d love to see a web site as seductive as an iPod, but I’m not sure I have yet.