Experience

A book that produces sensory experiences while bringing the concept of experience itself into relief as a subject of criticism and an object of contemplation. Experience offers a reading experience like no other. A heat-sensitive cover by Olafur Eliasson reveals words, colors, and a drawing when touched by human hands. Endpapers designed by Carsten Höller are printed in ink containing carefully calibrated quantities of the synthesized human pheromones estratetraenol and androstadienone, evoking the suggestibility of human desire. The margins and edges of the book are designed by Tauba Auerbach in complementary colors that create a dynamically shifting effect when the book is shifted or closed. When the book is opened, bookmarks cascade from the center, emerging from spider web prints by Tomás Saraceno. Experience produces experience while bringing the concept itself into relief as an object of contemplation. The sensory experience of the book as a physical object resonates with the intellectual experience of the book as a container of ideas. Experience convenes a conversation with artists, musicians, philosophers, anthropologists, historians, and neuroscientists, each of whom explores aspects of sensorial and cultural realms of experience. The texts include new essays written for this volume and classic texts by such figures as William James and Michel Foucault. The first publication from MIT's Center for Art, Science, & Technology, Experience approaches its subject through multiple modes. Publication design by Kimberly Varella with Becca Lofchie, Content Object Design Studio. Cover concept by Olafur Eliasson in collaboration with Kimberly Varella (Content Object). Contributors Tauba Auerbach, Bevil Conway, John Dewey, Olafur Eliasson, Michel Foucault, Adam Frank, Vittorio Gallese, Renée Green, Stefan Helmreich, Carsten Höller, Edmund Husserl, William James, Caroline A. Jones, Douglas Kahn, Brian Kane, Leah Kelly, Bruno Latour, Alvin Lucier, David Mather, Mara Mills, Alva Noë, Jacques Rancière, Michael Rossi, Tomás Saraceno, Natasha Schüll, Joan W.Scott, Tino Sehgal, Alma Steingart, Josh Tenenbaum, Rebecca Uchill

Everyone knows that the best way to create customer loyalty is with service so good, so over the top, that it surprises and delights. But what if everyone is wrong? In their acclaimed bestseller The Challenger Sale, Matthew Dixon and his colleagues at CEB busted many longstanding myths about sales. Now they’ve turned their research and analysis to a new vital business subject—customer loyalty—with a new book that turns the conventional wisdom on its head. The idea that companies must delight customers by exceeding service expectations is so entrenched that managers rarely even question it. They devote untold time, energy, and resources to trying to dazzle people and inspire their undying loyalty. Yet CEB’s careful research over five years and tens of thousands of respondents proves that the “dazzle factor” is wildly overrated—it simply doesn’t predict repeat sales, share of wallet, or positive wordof-mouth. The reality: Loyalty is driven by how well a company delivers on its basic promises and solves day-to-day problems, not on how spectacular its service experience might be. Most customers don’t want to be “wowed”; they want an effortless experience. And they are far more likely to punish you for bad service than to reward you for good service. If you put on your customer hat rather than your manager or marketer hat, this makes a lot of sense. What do you really want from your cable company, a free month of HBO when it screws up or a fast, painless restoration of your connection? What about your bank—do you want free cookies and a cheerful smile, even a personal relationship with your teller? Or just a quick in-and-out transaction and an easy way to get a refund when it accidentally overcharges on fees? The Effortless Experience takes readers on a fascinating journey deep inside the customer experience to reveal what really makes customers loyal—and disloyal. The authors lay out the four key pillars of a low-effort customer experience, along the way delivering robust data, shocking insights and profiles of companies that are already using the principles revealed by CEB’s research, with great results. And they include many tools and templates you can start applying right away to improve service, reduce costs, decrease customer churn, and ultimately generate the elusive loyalty that the “dazzle factor” fails to deliver. The rewards are there for the taking, and the pathway to achieving them is now clearly marked.

Contrary towhat one might imagine, there is no such thing as an experience designer. Atleast not in the sense that we might talk of an individual recognised as such.To make experiences is to be human. Shaman, architect, food engineer - you nameit, they are all experience designers. Informed by an understanding of people'sneeds and wants - our stories, our rituals, our myths - the beautifullydesigned experience has the power to transform lives. “/i>iThe Experience Book is an ode to that power. Essentially, it is a book abouttime and how we use it to design and make experiencesthat define the spaces we live, work and play in. Divided into a guidebook anda sourcebook, it begins by explaining what it is about the human mind that sodeeply feasts on the notion of the experience, and then employs this knowledgeto suggest a method or framework fordesigning experiences. The guidebook done, the sourcebook serves asinspiration for the art of experience design, with precedents drawn from the past 35,000 years' worth oftransformative experience making. The first publication about theattributes that together make what is fast becoming a recognised discipline, “/i>iThe Experience Book is beautifully presented. Comprised of a wonderfully eclectic range of written forms, illustratedby a fantastic mix of drawings and photography, and backed by historicaland contemporary examples from the worlds ofarchitecture, branding, fashion, music, art, sport and business, it introducesthe maker of experiences as part ethnographer, storyteller, master planner andperformance artist. Challenging theorthodoxy of function, reasserting process over monument and product, delighting in the unexpected, and championing the spectator over the spectacle, this is a book for anyone interested in the power of design,be they creator, communicator or consumer.

Product Experience brings together research that investigates how people experience products: durable, non-durable, or virtual. In contrast to other books, the present book takes a very broad, possibly all-inclusive perspective, on how people experience products. It thereby bridges gaps between several areas within psychology (e.g. perception, cognition, emotion) and links these areas to more applied areas of science, such as product design, human-computer interaction and marketing. The field of product experience research will include some of the research from four areas: Arts, Ergonomics, Technology, and Marketing. Traditionally, each of these four fields seems to have a natural emphasis on the human (ergonomics and marketing), the product (technology) or the experience (arts). However, to fully understand human product experience, we need to use different approaches and we need to build bridges between these various fields of expertise. Most comprehensive collection of psychological research behind product design and usability Consistenly addresses the 3 components of human-product experience: the human, the product, and the experience International contributions from experts in the field

As we live our lives, we repeatedly make decisions that shape our future circumstances and affect the sort of person we will be. When choosing whether to start a family, or deciding on a career, we often think we can assess the options by imagining what different experiences would be like for us. L. A. Paul argues that, for choices involving dramatically new experiences, we are confronted by the brute fact that we can know very little about our subjective futures. This has serious implications for our decisions. If we make life choices in the way we naturally and intuitively want to--by considering what we care about, and what our future selves will be like if we choose to have the experience--we only learn what we really need to know after we have already committed ourselves. If we try to escape the dilemma by avoiding an experience, we have still made a choice. Choosing rationally, then, may require us to regard big life decisions as choices to make discoveries, small and large, about the intrinsic nature of experience, and to recognize that part of the value of living authentically is to experience one's life and preferences in whatever way they may evolve in the wake of the choices one makes. Using classic philosophical examples about the nature of consciousness, and drawing on recent work in normative decision theory, cognitive science, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind, Paul develops a rigorous account of transformative experience that sheds light on how we should understand real-world experience and our capacity to rationally map our subjective futures.

“There are more than 50 creative prompts for the artist (or artist at heart) to explore. Take the title of this book as affirmation, and get started.” —Fast Company More than 50 assignments, ideas, and prompts to expand your world and help you make outstanding new things to put into it Curator Sarah Urist Green left her office in the basement of an art museum to travel and visit a diverse range of artists, asking them to share prompts that relate to their own ways of working. The result is You Are an Artist, a journey of creation through which you'll invent imaginary friends, sort books, declare a cause, construct a landscape, find your band, and become someone else (or at least try). Your challenge is to filter these assignments through the lens of your own experience and make art that reflects the world as you see it. You don't have to know how to draw well, stretch a canvas, or mix a paint color that perfectly matches that of a mountain stream. This book is for anyone who wants to make art, regardless of experience level. The only materials you'll need are what you already have on hand or can source for free. Full of insights, techniques, and inspiration from art history, this book opens up the processes and practices of artists and proves that you, too, have what it takes to call yourself one. You Are an Artist brings together more than 50 assignments gathered from some of the most innovative creators working today, including Sonya Clark, Michelle Grabner, The Guerrilla Girls, Fritz Haeg, Pablo Helguera, Nina Katchadourian, Toyin Ojih Odutola, J. Morgan Puett, Dread Scott, Alec Soth, Gillian Wearing, and many others.

The legendary creator of iconic television programs All in the Family, Sanford and Son, Maude, Good Times, The Jeffersons, and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, Norman Lear remade our television culture, while leading a life of unparalleled political, civic, and social involvement. Sharing the wealth of Lear's ninety years, this is a memoir as touching and remarkable as the life he has led.

In this groundbreaking volume, Krzysztof Ziarek rethinks modern experience by bringing together philosophical critiques of modernity and avant-garde poetry. Ziarek explores, through selective readings of avant-garde poetry, the key aspects of the radical critique of experience: technology, everydayness, event, and sexual difference. To that extent, The Historicity of Experience is less a book about the avant-garde than a critique of experience through the avant-garde. Ziarek reads the avant-garde in dialogue with the work of some of the major critics of modernity (Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Jean-François Lyotard, and Luce Irigaray) to show how avant-garde experiments bear critically on the issue of modern experience and its technological organization. The four poets Ziarek considers—Gertrude Stein, Velimir Khlebnikov, Miron Biaoszewski, and Susan Howe—demonstrate the broad reach of and variety of forms taken by the avant-garde revision of experience and aesthetics. Moreover, this quartet illustrates how the main operative concepts and strategies of the avant-garde underpinned the practices of canonical writers. A profound philosophical meditation on language, modernity, and the everyday, The Historicity of Experience offers a fundamental reconceptualization of the avant-garde in relation to experience.

This book provides a review of the current theory and practice of experiential tourism and how it is marketed. Many societies today are characterised by widespread individual wealth of an order previously confined to the elite with the consequence that ownership of ‘ordinary’ physical goods is no longer a distinguishing factor. Instead people are now seeking the ‘extraordinary’ with examples being bodies enhanced through surgery, personal fitness trainers, and, in the case of leisure and tourism, seeking unique and unusual places to visit and activities to undertake. This trend manifests in the increasing consumption of services and the addition of experiential elements to physical goods by businesses aware of societal changes. The trend is enhanced by rapidly changing technology and economic production methods providing new sectors of the world’s population with access to the consumption experiences that are repeatedly featured in the media. This is the experience economy, characterised by a search by consumers for fantasies, feelings, and fun. This book was based on a special issue of Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Mangement.

This book examines the strategic principles that define the customer experience. Building on the recent findings in the domains of behavioral economics and social psychology, Customer Science discusses the customer experience from three different perspectives: what customers do—how they identify a problem, seek a solution, and interact with the offering; what they think and feel during this process—how they evaluate different market offerings; and what motivates their behavior—why they act the way they do. In this context, it examines all components of the customer experience—from activating a need to buying a company’s offerings, to becoming a loyal customer and advocate for the company. The different stages of customer interaction with the company and its offerings are presented in the form of a customer experience map, which functions as the organizing principle for this book. The customer experience map is the blueprint for understanding the different stages of the customer experience and facilitating managerial decision making at each stage. The customer experience map is also the foundation of the customer experience canvas, a practical tool to identify the key questions managers should ask as they strive to create impactful customer experiences.