Experience Design – PGDP Finish

Is yet another app a real solution for someone addicted to their phone or social media? Is navigating to a new location using a phone-based app while riding a bike the safest interaction one can design for a delivery person? Is Virtual Reality’s dazzling capabilities to deliver immersive experiences an all-encompassing technology without limitations? These are just some of the many inescapable ‘wicked questions’ an Experience Designer must wrestle with in practice.

The MA program at SMI Experience Design focuses on shaping digital material to enable better experiences while interacting with, using, and living with a product, service, or system. Although digital technology is the primary ‘material of play’ for an Experience Designer, this program is not limited by it. While Aspiring Experience Design Practitioners are informed by their quest to create opportunities for humans to be able to enhance their own lived experiences – with and through technologies as the creators, facilitators, and mediators of those experiences – they remain cognisant of how their proposed human interventions might impact both existing human and more-than-human systems they eventually get embedded in.

The vision of the Postgraduate Program in Experience Design at Srishti Manipal Institute is to nurture balanced practitioners and reflective makers in the field of Experience Design practice. A balanced practitioner who is proficient in both effectively and ethically responding to the current demands of the field of Experience Design, and is a reflective maker who, through reflection-in-action informs and enriches the broader field through their own conscious experimentation and knowledge building practices.

With the creative confidence to thoughtfully navigate the inevitable complexities and uncertainties that accompany the shaping of current and future technologies, this program aims to equip you to both sensitively question and playfully explore beyond the current ways and notions of practicing ‘User Interface/User Experience (UI/UX) Design’ today. You are expected to consciously push the boundaries of this evolving field, and challenging status quos through a deeper understanding of contexts, insightfulness, self-reflexivity, intensive and iterative making, a strong bias for being collaborative and empathetic, and a real willingness to engage with complexity.

Your learning journey in the program is ground up – dismantling current understandings around experiences, before proceeding to build for experiences in the real, lived world. As an aspiring practitioner-inquirer, you will begin by unpacking the very conception of ‘experience design’ by asking more fundamental questions such as:

1. What is an experience? Where is an experience really situated?
2. What are the elements of an experience?
3. What is design in the realm of experiences? Can experiences intentionally be ‘designed’ for – if at all?

Further, recognizing how the current human paradigms are rapidly shifting from dominant notions of  ‘convenience, efficiency and usability’ to those of  ‘ecological consciousness, social equity, well-being and care’, the inquiries advance to how might we:

1. Attentively understand the intricacies of human-technology interactions i.e. the nuances of the human and non-human somas and their complex relationships.
2. Thoughtfully craft services, systems, interfaces, and interactions that are pliable to the needs of those who will interact with them.
3. Sensitively build within complex socio-cultural contexts such as that of India and create futuristic yet authentic experiences for its populace.
4. Consciously design with cognizance to the environment and more-than-human systems.
5. Creatively speculate, envision, and inform future technologies that respect the ecosystems they eventually become part of.

Your practice emerges over time as you continually engage with theories, methodologies and approaches that transcend disciplines, focusing on advancing the key skills of recognizing patterns and making connections while you also begin to understand experiences beyond the cognitive by exploring the embodied and somaesthetic approaches of shaping human encounters with technology, broadly defined, through critical inquiry and practical exploration.

Learning at the postgraduate level is driven by published lines of inquiries that are enacted through studio-based learning, workshops, theoretical reflections and field work. This approach cultivates a creative practice through engagement in diverse contexts and collaborative and participatory approaches leading to knowledge development.

Program learning approaches include:

1. A theoretical and historical knowledge of philosophies and methods of shaping human experiences with digital technology.
2. Methods of Hands-on and critical making as means of research and design.
3. Methods of speculative and participatory creativity and research.
4. Frameworks and methodologies of ethical perspectives and self-reflexivity while designing for experiences.

Upon successful completion of the course, graduates will have the capabilities to:

1. Understand Experiences: Observe and systematically evaluate everyday human activities and develop an empathetic and nuanced understanding of the human, lived experience.
2. Understand Contexts to be Insightful: Engage with multiple forms of data sourced from multiple stakeholders through participatory methods to synthesize them into novel insights.
3. Position self in practice: Discern and align, through conscious perceiving, questioning, and distinguishing between information from different sources, theories, and knowledge forms, in order to develop an informed stance on historical, current and emerging trends as well as the relationship between embodied and lived experiences, and technologies that mediate it.
4. Adopt a multidisciplinary approach: Through divergent and convergent thinking abilities and making connections, convert the empathetic insights from research into purposeful and value-laden concepts towards problem-solving or to enhance experiences.
5. Negotiate complexities at a systems-and-services level: Through analytical, critical, and strategic thinking, comprehend and negotiate at a systems-and-services level, the complex dynamics and interdependencies between the audience, culture, ecology, business, design and technology.
6. Make to iterate and reflect: Engage with multiple media and materials and technological artifacts for creative and playful creation or, towards iterative or critical evaluation.
7. Communicate compellingly with relevant audiences: Through critical and creative communication of one’s work, invite critique and develop a community of stakeholders for the work.
8. Practice Responsibly: Be aware of, transparent and ethical in acknowledging and articulating one’s position with respect to the social, cultural, and political implications of technology, and one’s design interventions.