Designing Products for Everyday Rituals

The user’s experience of his or her interaction with a product is becoming an increasingly important aspect of product design. In the ‘experience economy’, experiential factors have become major discriminants affecting the success of new products. Industry is well aware of this, and likewise design schools are adjusting their curricula to better train their students to take into account factors of product experience. Areas of entertainment culture, such as theatre and cinema, have long developed theories and techniques to approach the design of experience. However, because product designers facilitate (rather than control) experience, these theories and techniques must be adapted for use by designers. On the poster we present a possible approach for this. The experiences involved in everyday activities such as brushing your teeth, buying a ticket can be understood by approaching them as rituals: humanproduct interactions which have a meaning and value beyond their primary (technical) function. In order to design for such rituals, designers need to attend to contextual factors such as the situation of product use, the people involved, and the unfolding of the interaction over time (including the time that the user doesn’t explicitly manipulate the products). In a project course, 150 Bachelor students of Industrial Design Engineering analyzed experiential factors concerning everyday rituals, and designed products that elicit and enhance these identified factors. On the poster we present examples of the techniques used in the analysis and conceptualization (e.g., product design storyboards), and the resulting designs.