The 20th Century was one of the significant theoretical and operational developments for the design of artifacts. Its first half saw the creation and/or progress of a significant number of objects that have transformed our lives: the train, the car, then the plane and finally the space shuttle. All have reduced the concept of distance; household appliances have enabled entirely new forms of home management, and mechanization has revolutionized agricultural activity. These are just a few examples of a movement in which no sector has been spared.

The second half of the century was marked by the gradual emergence of cognitive artifacts: information, knowledge, and also communication, culture, entertainment and leisure. The “chatter of the mind”, the television (Missika and Wolton, 1983), has established a sustainable world of flows, a contemporary universe that is constantly evolving and renewing itself up to the recent transformations of the smartphone and connected networks. Control instruments have also impacted many areas, from medical diagnosis to security surveillance. Increasingly sophisticated help systems have been developed to support decision-making, from the most strategic to the most commonplace. Many observers still argue that a new world is opening up, even though the relevance of the statement does not always stand up to rigorous scrutiny (Jeanneret, 2000).

At the epistemological level, constructivism as elaborated by Jean-Louis Le Moigne (1995, pp. 46–66) from the disegno of Jean-Baptiste Vico draws a line of continuity from Leonardo da Vinci to our contemporary designers, in this, our most recent history of design. Recherches en design (“Design research”) (Leleu-Merviel and Boulekbache-Mazouz, 2013) has already outlined its features, particularly in the chapter “Les représentations en conception à l’ère du numérique : vers l’avènement d’un nouveau disegno” (“Design representations in the digital age: towards the advent of a new disegno”) (Mineur, 2013).

Throughout the current century, engineering has been at the center of activity, with the engineer being the one who designs solutions. Through certain activity, an initial question finds a form of resolution through the production of a “suitable” artifact, that is, one that is appropriate. Everything can be accomplished in the closed design circles, without taking into account the user, their habits, desires, pleasures, etc.

If, in a somewhat caricature and coarse way, we can highlight a “turning point” at the turn of the 20th and 21st Centuries, it is that of this new consideration. It is worth discussing quality to begin with, which is defined as “the ability to satisfy expressed or implicit needs”. Even though we continue to think in terms of the functions to be performed, it is now the expectations and presumed uses that constitute the core of the specifications, after converting these “needs” into functions via functional analysis. We then see many “user-centered” approaches flourish, which radically reverses the point of view. The designation is sometimes a sincere desire, as the process remains largely unchanged, providing only a late “seat” to the association users in the methodological process. Nevertheless, a movement is underway.

It is once again epistemology that will provide an unprecedented scope to this inverted point of view. Through enaction, a theory outlined by Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana (1992), it is no longer possible to separate the subject and the artifactual object, because both are co-constructed together by self-possession in an environment where recursive loops and structural couplings are incessant: the interaction is permanent and inextricable. It is then positioned as a “primate”, first to all observable and conceivable, in the so-called Palo Alto school of thought (Winkin, 1981). Based in part on these theoretical foundations, Jacques Theureau (2017) founded an “activity theory” centered on enaction where the gaze moves away from the single artifact and embraces the subject, the object, the environment and the situation to constitute an “analysis of the activity”. “What is the action?” defines the horizon of relevance of this research program, the fruitfulness of which is well-known in terms of design. Today, as Francis Jauréguiberry and Serge Proulx (2011) noted, there are many approaches to studying situational activities by subjects located in an environment equipped with communication and information technologies. They unite to reconsider the conditions for observing uses and user figures.

This book opens another door to a new horizon of relevance: that of experience. When you are sitting alone in a chair and watching a movie, the activity is brief: you are sitting and watching. Yet, we live an existence that can be violent and passionate, unforgettable even. We can come out of this temporary experience forever transformed. By placing experience rather than activity at the heart of the analysis, the scope of possibilities is extended in two ways: first, by taking into account situations where the action is reduced as in the example above; then by integrating artifacts without “objects”. When you listen to a poem by a great actor on the radio, where is the object? In the poem, in its reading, in the radio show, in the radio station itself? It is clear that an object-based approach fails to address a very common situation. On the contrary, thinking that we are creating not an artifact (whether material or symbolic), but an experiential situation offered to the user, raises some of the difficulties encountered.

The notion of experience has a heuristic interest because of its suggestive polysemy. A door opens onto a land where the senses and cognition, subjective experience and the acquisition of knowledge and skills, representations and procedures interact. The experience allows us to think dialectically about what is structuring in a situation, a device, a medium and what the subject invents by also experiencing it for themselves. This notion therefore goes beyond that of “use” and “reception” to extend towards practices and underlines the sensitive, cognitive and emotional dimensions of the construction of meaning. Placed at the heart of our relationship with the world and with ourselves, the experience leads us to reconsider separate research traditions – one on uses and the other on reception – to better understand new issues that transcend academic boundaries.

This is how experience design is born. This expression emphasizes, from the outset, the purpose of the project as a “living experience” (Vial, 2015) and directs attention towards a “human ecology” where the subjects “interact with their natural and artificial environment”. According to the same author, design is undergoing a “semantic shift” that claims a communicative and social dimension. In this perspective, experiential design would aim to create experiential situations that would encourage the production of meaning, thus contributing to “creating the world” at the same time as “making sense”.

The “experience design” research program begins by identifying the principles that govern it. What are the theoretical concepts? And on which ontological assumptions are they based? These are the two questions that run throughout the chapters of the first part of the book. They determine the epistemological horizon of the proposed works and mark out general research areas to be explored.

Secondly, the theoretical support necessary for the rest of the scientific construction is constructed from the fundamental objects established previously. Based on the proposed approach, the methods, tools and the way they are mobilized constitute the methodological framework for a set of specific studies conducted in specific fields.

When it comes to field studies, it becomes clear that experience design knows few boundaries. Indeed, when you drive a car, you certainly move or travel, you drive a vehicle from which you expect an “appropriate”¹ performance, but you also receive an experience. The moment you open the door of a store, an experience of the place, the moment, the buying situation begins. In a dwelling, a whole set of actions is carried out, but each of them is associated with one (or more) experience(s). An urban setting, a landscape, a museum, a creation, a book, a show, a festival, a trip, a meal, a vacation, hospitalization, a return to school, a teaching module, etc. everything is subject to experiences created and/or shaped by humans for humans. Their conception is in fact a matter of design. The diversity of situations thus leads to the extension of UXD, User eXperience Design, to a new concept: LivXD, Living eXperience Design, the design of life experiences. The main difference is that life experience does not necessarily include a digital device, and if it does, it is no longer a primary concern.

For each of these distinct fields, it is necessary to determine the observatory set up: protocols, instruments, data collection procedures, analytical methods, etc. Finally, the results and deliverables make it possible to accredit the productivity which results from an experiential approach.

This book is a collective production by the DeVisu laboratory² (Visual and Urban Design). All the chapters in it have been written by the members of the laboratory and their partners. Following two joint seminars held several months apart on the concept of experience, we invited colleagues from the IMSIC laboratory (Toulon and Marseille) to contribute for two chapters that we have devoted to them. A third chapter has been entrusted to our historical partner, the Paragraphe laboratory at the University of Paris 8.

The common lines of research underlying the various chapters of this book are as follows:

1. 1) How can we define the experience?
2. 2) What characterizes the experience? How do we identify it?
3. 3) What protocols should be put in place to capture the experience?
4. 4) How can we receive feedback on the actual experience in comparison with the anticipated experience?
5. 5) How does the designer’s thought express the future experience they are producing?
6. 6) Do formal project representation tools influence future experience?
7. 7) Can experience design be formalized and/or structured? And if so, how?
8. 8) What significant difference and what new contribution justifies shifting from UXD to LivXD?

Introduction written by Sylvie LELEU-MERVIEL, Daniel SCHMITT and Philippe USEILLE.