For far too long, the word UX has been relegated to the design of digital experiences for the web and mobile devices. At Trestles, we think holistically about the idea of user experience, expanding our work well beyond digital touch points to brand extensions like customer call centers, front-line staff, and even channel partner services.
This fall, Trestles is making a concerted pivot towards a relatively untapped arena of design thinking and service experience: designed environments. In concert with our new focus on designed environments, we will also be prioritizing work in the arenas of organizational vitality, organizational identity and employee engagement. Why the pivot? Because if you don’t have a system that’s designed to cultivate innovation from the inside out, you’re only going to get so far. And we want to move the needle on making design thinking more accessible, more actionable, and more impactful-rather than building concepts that sit on shelves and make us feel good about our ideation skills.
So, why space, and why now? Let me posit a fairly unusual theory to you:
When the word technology was first conceived, it meant much more than digital. It meant any kind of mechanism (tangible or intangible) that could move an individual, entity, or population towards a goal. Literally it was a means to an end. Arguably, from its inception technology has been about much more than making things digital instead of analog. I would likewise argue that the word user experience has been far too narrowly relegated to products and digital (read: modernly-termed “technology”) outputs. In reality, the word is much more complicated and should be significantly broadened in the popular vernacular.
What if we expanded our working definition of technology to encompass a wider range of outpourings? For example, what if we thought about a workspace more like a computer, as a network of connections, decisions, and information that needed to be organized for both usability and impact? How then, might we re-define the word user experience? And how then might that reshape the profession of UX designers? They could design buildings alongside architects, and make them more efficient and productive.
I’m not the first to recommend such a broadened definition, and certainly not the last. In a fairly seminal, yet largely untapped, piece entitled “Servicescapes,” Mary Jo Bitner argues the following:
The effect of atmospherics, or physical design and decor elements, on consumers and workers is recognized by managers and mentioned in virtually all marketing, retailing, and organizational behavior texts. Yet, particularly in marketing, there is a surprising lack of empirical research or theoretically based frameworks addressing the role of physical surroundings in consumption settings. Managers continually plan, build, change, and control an organization’s physical surroundings, but frequently the impact of a specific design or design change on ultimate users of the facility is not fully understood.
Bitner goes on to lay out a framework for understanding service environments and the impacts that certain types of environmental design can have on human behavior, both theoretically and empirically. While Bitner goes far in her work, the article does not go far enough, particularly because of the timing of its release.
Since Bitner’s in depth exploration of the topic, the design field has been both broadened and widely misunderstood. Do designers belong in boardrooms or at the C-level of companies? If so, what can they contribute? Recent findings suggest they might have a lot of untapped potential.
And further, what’s space got to do with it? In my opinion, everything. Whereas the 1990s and 2000s were dominated by a focus on digital technology, I would argue that the 2020s-30s are going to be all about environmental technology-how to make our surroundings smarter and more intuitive, safer and more authentic, ultimately more human-centered? And the focus shouldn’t be just upon digitizing everything, it should be upon making it useful and impactful.
More on this topic to come…