As students of BDW, our learning objective is ultimately user experience. Our teachers are artists and masters of creating outcomes. They craft the emotions that people take away from an experience. Their lessons are as much on empathy as they are code or design. But, explaining UX and the BDW program is difficult. For something that deals its currency in emotion, UX seeks to engineer an affinity toward something. When I try to describe this concept to people outside of my small program, it feels like I am pointing to air. Looking around, UX in technology is extremely prominent, as almost everyone I see is on a smart phone. But for me, the concept of UX permeates more than technology.
I like to think of UX in terms of an evolution. User experience is the record that indicates how our relationship with the world around us has changed. In his book Enchanted Objects, David Rose talks about the world of his grandfather, a world in which redundancy in objects was not only expected it was celebrated. David talks about how every object had a purpose, whether it was a set of screwdrivers spread across a garage floor or a library full of books dusty and brown. They were things that people could touch and people developed relationships with these items. For individual reasons these objects were useful, useable and compelling and we have carried the desire for these three qualities over into the digital space.
My point is not that we are necessarily getting away from this kind of anthropomorphizing behavior, we are creating a thousand different apps and devices that have been tested (hopefully) to make individuals feel a certain way. In an economy that doesn’t give a fuck about the dumb shit that has been push marketed to us, we are actually starting to create tangible experiences. Frankly, I can’t believe people are not in the streets freaking out about this more! I am literally shaking as I write this because of the potential I believe this holds! The fact that I could give that to another human being makes me feel intimate as a stranger. It makes me feel vulnerable and responsible and hungry to see the world through their eyes.
This yearlong program at BDW is in itself an engineered experience. On almost a weekly basis I have had conversations with members of my cohort where they described feeling a way that I truly believed was unique to me. Most of these conversations have centered on insecurities. When a dear cohort member mentioned questioning what he was doing in the program after a particularly tough coding class, I admitted to him that I had gone home to cry in the shower that evening. After hearing my voice shake during a presentation, another cohort member pitched a prototype for a wearable that would allow me to feel their heartbeat. The heartbeat would serve as the reminder that they were there, sharing the experience.
Cohort 7 is a competitive group. I have watched people defend their ideas in a way that might seem unreasonable to an outsider. We push each other and hold respective viewpoints accountable at every level. But, there is also a collective feeling of unbridled excitement. When a good idea is presented the air in our classroom changes, people lean forward and ideas start snowballing. It’s a feeling that keeps me up till 2AM. I know my cohort members are awake and furiously working on ideas too because they have texted me enthusiastically in those hours. In those moments when I feel that shared experience, whether in our brick classroom or behind our respective screens. I absolutely wouldn’t miss a minute of this shared C7 experience.
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