Designing for Human Experience

This book about what I have done for a living since 1989 in Designing for Human Experience. Here have put together an anthology of my life and my passion for designing for human experience. I describe what I do as designing for human experience because you can't design experience as it resides in the emotions of others. But you can design environments and psychological cues that trigger emotional responses and appropriation by attribution of past experience on the current one.Thank you, Robert Powell and Patrick Neeman, for framing this conversation, Designing for Humans remains for me the most fantastic amalgamation of the complex to create the simple, useable and nascent components and artefacts that support human experiences. I'll apologise in advance while I try to use simple English I often fail because someone came up with a word that covers off the complexity I'm trying to express. I use dictionary's often when writing, not least because I'm dyslexic and can't see letters, I was taught to read the gaps between them in primary school by a special teacher, so my perspective is often quite different from others.Fundamental to my work in designing for human experience is my early experiences of human augmentation in supporting what the world describes as disability. When I was eight (1970's) my father was involved in setting up a respite centre for the families of disabled children. It was the first time I'd seen technologies that support people in doing what I take for granted and it changed my perspective on technology and what it means to be human. Looking back, it was clear from an early age that I accepted all people, recognised individuals and gained the realisation that everyone had strengths and limitations. Through my design training at school, college and then university I was able to frame questions about; what does it mean to be human? Ergonomics and Anthropometrics is what started me on questioning why technologies were not measurable against who uses them and their physical, emotional and intelligence limitations. If that's offensive think about it, everyone has limitations they also have strengths, certainly I have benefited by having to work harder with reading and writing than others through being able to make connections others cannot see, I'm not special just different.