“Design a lighting unit that evokes the user’s emotion and is able to add a positive spatial experience.”
Introduction:
The goal of the design process and its applied practices is to create supportive conditions to enrich someone’s experience; it is a form of application, capable of communicating visually and functionally to satisfy the user demands and offer a useful, usable and compellingly tangible design. This teaching unit places emphasis on learning the principle of ‘designing the experience’; that is, on the ways in which we understand and apply the human sensory element in developing a new design of lighting unit. Responding to the presented design brief, which articulates the relationship between emotion, space, technology, making and communication, are the broader elements of the applied design process in this unit.
Context:
Such a process broadens the traditional design process that aims to restyle the product aesthetically and/or functionally. Design theorists rely much on John Dewey’s intensive theory of experience in education, to develop the theoretical background and capability methodologically to inform the design process and its creative practices, achieving the goal of ‘designing the experience’. Although, when considering the relationship between us (the user) and the products “we need to understand them before we can access their services. We do this initially through an interface … The interface … is the set of characteristics that define a product for us” (Margolin, 2002, p. 46).
