Understanding human experience and its subjective nature
In a recent classroom exercise at the Insitute of Design, we were asked by our professor to judge our campus building and make an assessment of its accessibility, form, function, and performance. There were 3 groups of students and they rated the same campus building in three different sets of rankings. It was surprising, to see, that all the three groups gave different ratings for the same parameters of the campus building based on their experience. Some rated the performance to be 5/5, others rated it to be 3/5 and 2/5. When asked for reasons, people had their own logic to justify their claim.
How did students of the same class, having the same experience every day with the campus building and working in the same environment with the same assignments, had very different experiences with the building?
Experiencing is the process through which conscious organisms perceive and process the world around them.[1] Experiences are highly subjective in nature and intimately depend on the values of the individual processing or perceiving them.
To experience is to observe, perceive, and feel the visceral environment around us, quantify these three layers collectively and store it in our memory. [i] In the example above, the experiences of each individual student with the building depended on their own values, upbringing, and sensibility. People from noisier cities did not find the building to be noisy while others did, people from developing countries found it accessible, some people liked the form and architecture while others didn't, and so on.
Factors affecting a lived experience
Experiences are subjective in nature and will always be. Hence, it is important to know the ideas and values of the person experiencing to determine and study the experience itself. Any human experience depends on:
• Time and Space: This refers to the time and space in a 3-dimensional world when an experience is recorded.
• Sense and sensations: Sensing occurs through all the five different sense organs involved in perceiving an experience.
• Expectations and intentions: Goals and expectations of living the moment
• Social Context and values associated with each touchpoint in an experience journey: Each person is unique due to the values they possess. These values play a critical role in defining their lived experience. environment and external stimuli involved in a lived experience are also a part of the social and environmental context.
• Emotions and reflections: Values also determine sensing and emotional reflection on each individual subjective experience.
Mapping an experience into touch-points and defining a scale
An experience can be an individual or a collective group of different touch-points in a human journey. For example, a simple activity could be eating a meal or a complex activity can be going on a date. Going on a date involves a set of touch-points like — getting dressed, communicating with the date, selecting a place, commuting to the destination, emotional attachment with the date, and so on. Such an activity needs to be mapped for all of its touch-points since they happened at different points on a space and time scale.
Moreover, each touch-point needs a generalized scale to mark the experience. Let us continue with the date example: getting dressed can be identified as strongly satisfied, neutral, and not satisfied. This scale can be different for each individual touch-point.
Sufficient data needs to be collected from user interviews, think-aloud, or user observation to mark the level on each experiential touch-point scale.
Understanding the experience journey
After collecting this experience data for several different users, we can understand various categories of individual and subjective experiences by correlating the lived experience with the factors involved.[i]
However, there can be innumerable factors and biases involved in defining an experience and subjectivity can never be completely determined. In today’s world where businesses are constantly striving to create memorable experiences for their customers — an actual lived experience is hard to predict. Whether an experience is positive, negative, or neutral is depended on many subjective psychological factors.
In his book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari points out that “Genetics play a big role in determining how happy you are. Some people will waver between 3–7 on the happiness scale no matter what good fortunes they are given. Others will waver between 6–10 no matter what bad fortunes befall them.” “It is difficult to measure happiness because people do not really know themselves.” [2]
Sources:
[1]Perceptual Experience and Perceptual Justification”. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved 16 July 2020.
[2] Chapter 19: And they lived happily ever after: Sapiens — A brief history of humankind.
