In this post I want to discuss the relation that occurs between the concepts of experience and design. I argue that even if we are more and more talking about designing experience, it is not clear how they are related and what is the right design approach. In doing so, I will explore the meaning of experience and interaction and what a design process is. This paper will also discuss what I think are the potentialities of the novel field of interaction design and how it can provide better perspectives for the design of experiences.ARTICULATING THE CONCEPT OF EXPERIENCEI have always found quite hard to understand what experience is. Even if, as a student, I have been through different approaches that dealt with it, I have never had a clear understanding of its meaning. It is quite clear that experience is the outcome of our contacts with the world and that it is related to the perception and sensuousness. But most of definitions of such a complex concept seem to me too coded or too vague and superficial.When dealing with something I cannot define well enough, I am used to analyse its etymology. The term experience originates from the Greek and specifically from the verb peiro, which means ‘going through’, and the term peira, which means ‘attempt, experiment’. If we look at its sense in Latin, we can find something else: ‘ex-perior’ implies the notion of danger and test (Gattinara, 1998). Gathering these findings let us understand that experience implies a passage, a test and some sort of danger. I would argue that it implies also the unknown and the novelty. Having an experience, then, is passing through unknown territories where we have never been before. Experience is then something that excites and has to be lived actively. As a consequence, we will never have the feeling of having an experience while doing activities that have become automatic: the first times we ride a bike, we focus most of our attentive resources on doing it, it is something new; but once one knows and learns how to, riding becomes an automatism and is not an experience anymore, unless one explores new way of riding it (with a higher level of danger).We have an experience, then, when our existence is subtracted to the repetitive everyday world. Even if we can locate where an experience happened, its most important feature is temporalness: it is located in time with its own timeline, like an event. Since it is a passage implying changing, it has a starting and an ending point. And since it is a passage between two states, it changes the actor leaving traces. Memories of an experience can scar body and mind, past and future.Sometimes we can decide to have an experience, others it just happens to us. In both cases, it is a chance that can be caught or not. Its temporal dimension makes it an event in time that passes like a train. An experience is a door in the dimension of time that hides unknown things, positive or not. Opening the doors of experience means making a passage to a different room, where everything is possible. In this sense, experience has obviously a link with the dimension of space but we cannot repeat it by trespassing the same physical door: every experience is unique because unique is the moment and the actor in that moment. In fact, the passage implies a changing and after that, we are not the same.EXPERIENCE AND DESIGNI will keep the metaphor of the door to explain what I think the role of design should be in this discussion. In the physical world we use artifacts and interfaces to accomplish goals and perform tasks. Most of them let us perform automatism in a faster and more efficient way. Once we know how to use the interfaces, there is not experience anymore (Dourish, 2002). However, our life is still full of experiences since we cannot refuse or flee away from them, most of the experience just happens to us.Only recently, design fields are getting aware of the role experiences play in our life and that it is not only a matter of goals and tasks. The interfaces that have been designed since now have just become part of one or more automatisms and designers want to design things that are able to deal with experiences. The failures of unproper approaches and interfaces have made the design field aware that this shift ferequires a completely new paradigm that looks at things from a different perspective.The problem with designing experiences is that experience and design belong to different domains. Experience is an analog concept in the sense that is something continuous and not measurable with quantitative tools, it is a flow. Design is a digital concept, it is discrete and more certain because it implies a project and a set of activities with one or more goals. In this sense, design is a process .Designing experience, then, is dealing with a flow: you can design the starting and the ending point but you will never be able to predict the variations in the middle just because they are based on possibilities that do not follow a clear line. Anyway, if it wants to deal with experience, design has to focus on the spectrum of possibilities generated through the entire interaction, aiming at designing supports for unending possibilities, not at designing the experiences: designers should start to think about platforms (Löwgren, 2006) capable of adapting to whatever situations human actors will generate since they cannot foresee what they are going to do.THE ROLE OF INTERACTIONThe interaction is the key to the door of experience. It is through the interaction that people have experience of something and it is on the interaction that this new paradigm should be focused on. If designing experience is not possible, we can design for the possibilities generated by the interactions human actors will be performing (Wright et al., 2003).This new stance towards the experience has led to a new design field that is interaction design. Even if there is no agreement upon its definition, it is quite clear that this field deals with interactive systems and digital materials (Löwgren, 2006). What is not evident, is that under this label relies a crucial shift in the way designers look at problems and solutions. Interaction design is an approach that is trying to build a new paradigm that takes into account all the previous ones but that also wants to consider the world of emotions and of imperfections that characterise the human actors; it looks at the interactions as a complex but open dialogue that can be supported by technology; it imagines systems, environments and services that are open to different possibilities and to the contingent intentions and feelings of the persons (Giovannella, 2005).An approach that lead design to the development of open solutions that are adaptable to the situations, to the contexts and, especially, to the persons is the only way in which design can deal with experiences. I think that these are the keys that design should provide human actors in order to let them open the doors of experience in a technologically supported way.REFERENCESDourish, P., 2002. Where the Action is. The Foundations of EmbodiedInteraction. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press.Gattinara, E. C., 1998. Con esperienza…, in Aperture n.5 - http://digilander.libero.it/aperture/ Giovannella, C. ,2005. Interaction Design or Designing Imperfection, inID&A_magazine N.0, p. 37-42.Krippendorf K., 2006. The Semantic Turn. A New Foundation for Design. BocaRaton: Taylor & Francis Group.Löwgren, J., 2006. Articulating the use qualities of digital designs.In Fishwick, P. (ed.) Aesthetic computing, pp. 383–403. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Wright, P., McCarthy, J. and L. Meekison, 2003. “Making Sense of Experience”. In Funology: From Usability to Enjoyment, Blythe, M., Monk, A., Overbeeke, K. and P. Wright (eds). Dordrecht: Kluwer.

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