With each day we learn something new that helps us better understand what human experience is really about, it repeatedly challenges our perception of it in some fundamental way.

But looking back to how design has shaped the necessary tools to study, influence, mediate and sometimes even control the way we experience the artifacts we interact with, it raises the question if that experience can really be designed. And it certainly triggers lively debate.

An apparently simple statement like "experience can/can't be designed" requires at least a working definition of the terms at hand.

experience /ɪkˈspɪərɪəns, ɛk-/ noun an event or occurrence which leaves an impression on someone

design /dɪˈzʌɪn/ verb do or plan (something) with a specific purpose in mind

Also, logic dictates that can implies the principle of alternate possibilities while can't implies absolute. So, on one hand we have a possibility and on the other, we have a bold statement according to which, under no circumstances, an impression — admittedly, with all the associated cognitive implications — can be planned and resulted for. Dismissing all other possibilities seems a bit drastic.

But a dictionary definition will not suffice. The complexity involved in dealing with human experiences can be obtained by merely considering behavior; the sheer number of functions we have to call upon is simply astonishing: stimuli, reception, expectancy, response, function, meaning, mental models, perception, encoding, memory, engagement, interaction, emotion and so forth.

This involves insights from a long array of separate disciplines like linguistics and communication, cognitive and perceptual psychology, information architecture and design, sociology and social interaction. We learn what we have to. Only to inch closer to solving a problem. And we constantly redefine ourselves to better design a system in which all these insights come together harmoniously, regardless of medium, be that a brand, a website or an application.

But complexity can also be judged by the minimum information content that can trigger a observable reaction. If we can look deep enough at the smallest, simplest entity that can further form the simplest, quantifiable, controllable and repeatable sequence, we can then get an idea of how we can control and maybe design experiences.

Up until recently, one of the most common and also powerful experiences known to man involved religion in some form. ( 1 ) Reasons for this are varied and irrelevant in this context. What is relevant is the fact that, if we can find a way to mimic and simulate a religious experience, an experience so basic that our society has evolved throughout thousand of years directly into our brains, we just might discover the argument and inspiration we need to pursue designing experiences properly.

This is where the god helmet comes in. It is a device designed originally by Stanley Koren to study creativity. But the participants reported a sensed presence and about 1% claim to have experienced God. This obviously lead to a media hype which also gave it it's dramatic name. Although the experiment still awaits proper scientific peer-reviews, it successfully proved that a subjective experience can be induced by using specific brain functions.

Basically, a small set of brain cells in your right temporal lobe can produce a powerful sense, a memorable experience. And if we can map out the stimuli to which our brain responds to — in this case a magnet on your right hemisphere, but we can safely extend the list from physiological stimuli to psychological ones — we can determine a sequence of different stimuli, all carefully controlled to trigger a response. We can develop whole systems and procedures to induce a certain type of impression.

Even if this example explicitly outlines the physiological nature of the experiment, nevertheless it supports the idea that there are possibilities to design experiences. We just have to find them. Signs of patterns are everywhere.

Just look for psychological tripwires and think about how people think.

Or rather, they should be. In the words of Carl Sagan, only a small group of individuals, men or women, who find all human knowledge — the arts and sciences, philosophy and psychology — interesting and, most importantly, accessible can truly look for insights and connections to coherently synthesize a system and manipulate it in such a manner that it results in a real, hopefully lasting, emotion.

Structuralism, as defined in the Oxford American dictionary, is a method of interpretation and analysis of aspects of human cognition, behavior, culture, and experience that focus on relationships of contrast between elements in conceptual systems that reflect patterns underlying a superficial diversity.” Thus, structuralism straddles multiple disciplines, such as language, architecture, graphic design, sociology, and anthropology, to name a few.

It is the one trait that sets us apart as an industry and enables us to take on the role of system creators: the ability to make connections. Norman Potter refers to it the trait that unites the very disparate standards that coexist in any one profession, ( 2 ) Milton Glaser calls it a way to unify separate occurrences and create a gestalt, and experience in which this new unity provides insight, Simon Collison calls it our spirit of inquiry and Dan Cederholm describes us as 80 percenters.

A structuralistic approach to design is not without risk though. Scientific observation, a process that is to observe, collect, sort, analyze, postulate a theory, test also leads to mountains of data, that more often than not are hard to make sense of.

Getting data is easy, but selecting, storing, indexing, updating, and most importantly contextualizing the information is rather difficult.

To accurately form conjectures about possible interactions between insights obtained from brain physiology and human behavior, comparative and analytical thinking is critical. Observations need to be rigorously studied to be adequate enough to form a basis for solid reasoning.

But the benefits of churning through cognitive complexities far outweighs the costs. Mapping out common sequences of particular cognitive functions is a solid way of mediating and creating experiences, regardless of medium.

So, we all have subconscious automatisms, be that on a behavioral or physiological level, that we adhere to. Things we do without even realizing that we're doing them.

Psychological tripwires. We're all vulnerable to these subconscious stimuli.

By learning to see the underlying patterns in our behavior, we can learn to build systems, environments in which anticipation of human behaviors can be done with a smaller risk factor. We could say we can learn to predict behavior and control a human interaction. If the system is designed properly, that is.

What actually happens at a process level?

Edward de Bono elegantly describes ( 2 ) one basic underlying principle for all functioning mechanisms of the brain :

The brain is brilliantly uncreative.

Basically, we're all wired to search for familiar patterns, making use of memory and emotions to trigger all sorts of neuronal responses that eventually lead to more complex reactions and behaviors. Out brain takes shortcuts. Sometimes, even unwanted shortcuts.

When we're thinking, what we're trying to do is to look for the nearest, available pattern. Once we can find it, we can stop thinking and just follow along the pattern. This makes for a very efficient computing machine we call our brain.

A potential dangerous aspect of this process is that we may eventually get locked into patterns. And once we've been using these patterns again and again, it's very difficult to shift to other patterns. This is an essential aspect of decision-making. If we can't incorporate the lessons of the past into our future decisions, then we're destined to endlessly repeat our mistakes.

Sometimes, these locking-pattern anomalies manifest themselves very consistently as illusions. And for a discipline that works with human behavior and is fundamentally visual - like design - of particular interest are 2 types of illusions that humans are susceptible to :

Mark Changizi's work ( 3 ) demonstrates that our visual system responds with appropriate latency-correction mechanisms as a result of a 100ms neural delay from the time an event actually happens and the time it is perceived. On this basis, he explains more than 50 kinds of illusions in this paper.

Dan Ariely states ( 4 ) that our intuition is really fooling us in a repeatable, predictable and consistent way. There's really almost nothing we can do about it.

There isn't. But we can learn to leverage it. We can learn to design experiences that take advantage of these limitations. But we first have to know what these limitations are and understand exactly how they work.

For example, cognition has a severely limited capacity ( 5 ) : adult humans can retain only about four items “in mind”. This limitation is fundamental to human brain function. This inherently shapes the extent of which we can push the input we provide in any given stage of an interaction. Making people remember things from one task to another is inefficient.

Unfortunately, cognitive barriers are not limited to the amount of information we can take in, but also extend to the manner of which we interpret that information. Although we can interpret visual stimuli in a multitude of ways, the human visual system usually prefers only one interpretation : the simplest one. ( 6 ) This relates directly to the pattern-seeking process mentioned earlier.

People will do the least amount of work possible to get a task done.

When dealing with complex or multiple tasks, we can use global and holistic processes involved in perceiving structure in the environment as guides for ordering an experience throughout all it's constituent stages. And the optimal way of doing that is to mimic the manner that is biologically built into our minds : a manner that is regular, orderly, symmetric and simple, as suggested by the Gestalt approaches to visual perception. ( 7 )

But structure is not everything. People look for guidance in others on what they should do. Especially if they're uncertain. Social validation nd automatic social behavior stand as testament to that.

Each of us is in fact what he is almost exclusively by virtue of his imitativeness. WILLIAM JAMES

We have an innate tendency to imitate and social attitutes - which we can simulate - modulate automatic imitation. ( 8 ) Even the thought of a stereotype alone is enough to make us adapt our behavior to fit that stereotype. This opens up an amazing opportunity for designers to frame a context to concentrate on benefits or risks to alter people's decisions without them even knowing it.

Almost always, if a decision is taken to avoid a loss, it will be a bolder, more aggressive decision than one taken to achieve a gain.This is a bias known as the framing effect. And that means that if you can get people to commit to a small action, then it is much more likely that they will later commit to a larger action.

Considering all the input we have available, all the insights we can gather through a multi-disciplinary approach and the lengths we can go to to model and predict human behavior in a specific context, the importance - and I can't stress this enough - of a designer as a system creator becomes increasingly clear.

A more formal and complete characterization of design would sound something like a specification of an object, manifested by an agent, intended to accomplish goals, in a particular environment, using a set of primitive components, satisfying a set of requirements, subject to constraints. ( 1 )

What I find interesting is that the human factor is slightly underrated in this context, with no direct correspondence between the technique in a specific sub-discipline and the cognitive counter-part that explains how humans respond in certain contexts. Objects, goals, environments are fundamentally human.

Humans interact with the artifact design produces. And it is humans that develop an experience based on those interactions.

Unfortunately, it is common practice in today's line of designers to conveniently package an unknown under the false pretext of a liberal art, rather than grasping the complexities of cognitive phenomena. Rather than thinking about how people think.

As it happens, the value-engineering mindset that's so crucial to profitability as a commodity trader is fatal as a purveyor of experiences. ADAM GREENFIELDS

Even in what seems to be a fairly standard activity today, like reading off a display, the brain performs a multitude of complex activities like creating information structures, modifying them, adding to them and even designing new structures.

Understanding these phenomenas and how our brain works, to what are we hardwired to respond to and how we actually respond in a specific context is vital when designing an interaction - under any shape or form - and ultimately an experience.

The fact that we have different capacities in each hemisphere implies that we should present information in a way that does not overtax one hemisphere while undertaxing the other [...] For example, heads-up displays [transparent projections of information that a driver or pilot would normally need to look down at the dashboard to see] show a lot of data. Our results suggest that you want to put that information evenly on both sides of the visual field to maximize the amount of information that gets into the brain. TIM BUSCHMAN

( Human ) Experience is a big word.

And trying to design an experience is a tall order.

Since you can look at design as a communication method that utilizes a gathering of related subjects and methodologies like linguistics and communication, cognitive and perceptual psychology, information architecture and design, sociology and social interaction, it's becoming increasingly clear that now, more than ever, design holds the tools necessary to mediate our experience. Even control it.

In looking to improve my own design process, I decided to combine multiple insights offered by existing disciplines to start to develop my own approach, which centers around how our mind fundamentally works.

Cognition at the core of human centered design.

The best work emerges from the observations of phenomena that exist independently of each other. What the designer intuits is the linkage, singular or plural. He sees a way to unify separate occurrences and create a gestalt, and experience in which this new unity provides insight. MILTON GLASER

There's a cognitive model behind Milton Glaser's statement, best described by Douglas Hofstdater as chunking ( 2 ) : our mind is constructed with an unlimited quantity of chunking. That means that primordial concepts become a larger conceptual unit. And we build our concepts by putting several concepts together. And then some internal components seem to start to disappear. And we're left with this new concept which becomes semi-visible. But if it's structured at many levels or hierarchy, the concepts inside the concepts inside the concepts are certainly just about invisible. And it takes some unpacking to get there.

It is dangerously easy to give in to a constant bombardment of materials owned by an societal apparatus that puts quantity before quality, with little regard to a more fulfilling essence of design : solving a problem. But we need to educate our mind to make associations and connections to learn and understand how our mind works. Only then we can safely say we can rigurously design an interaction. And ultimately, an experience.

It's time science and art can meet again on a higher level as friends.

I am putting forward a series of scribblings, covering a good spectrum of ideas that fit the label of my own formalism, my personal approach to design as it directly relates to human experiences.

As I explore related disciplines and their tangents, I hope to articulate what I think it's actively denied to public awareness and what can benefit from dialogues and consultations with related disciplines and their tangents.

While I have formal education in graphic design, I have no formal education in the physiology or psychology of the brain. Thus, all remarks brought forward in future articles are purely speculative and should be taken with a certain degree of trepidation. Hopefully, they will stimulate further, deeper analysis by others.

There is a high degree of correspondence in structure. All patterns of behavior within different cultures are transformations of each other; however different, the relation vis a vis their own system within which they perform a function are, in principle, constant. LEVI STRAUSS

Like investors use calculus of variations ( 2 ) to maximize profits, or engineers use the same method to minimize energy use, what I'm proposing is a reversal of priorities towards a primordial constituent of a human experience. Look around us, specifically at disciplines that reveal how our brain works - the cognitive sciences - for insights on how we can structure our own processes, as much as we look for inspiration.

We need a new design language because science and society aren't polar opposites. DAISY GINSBERG