Good Experiences

Every week or so I get a push email from Mark Hurst at Good Experience with some of his ruminations and observations. Mark’s interest is in “what enables or detracts from meaningful experiences of creativity, technology, community, and life.”   If you look at the Good Experience job board you’ll see that most of the postings are related to e-commerce and other software applications where “user experience” has a specific meaning.  But it turns out once you start thinking about user experience it carries over into all manner of experiences that call out for consideration and critique, from product design to in-store experiences to artistic experiences, and so the website covers all of these things.

If you want to get a sense of the scope of the work, check out the videos from past GEL conferences (GEL= Good Experience Live), an annual event in New York.  You’ll see a mix of talks by designers, artists, writers, and entrepreneurs.  The conference schedule includes experiences that are exemplary and memorable and make the participants get up and do stuff, like learning to juggle with the Flying Karamazov Brothers, taking a “Sound Walk” in Central Park with Doug Quin, or  going on culture and tasting walks through New York City neighborhoods.   To get a sense of how some people outside the cultural sector think about experiences, try physician Brigid Duffy on the experience of being a patient; or Sal Khan on creating engaging educational videos that students want to use;  or Natasha Schull on how the gambling industry creates experiences for its customers.