The Design of Experience

I came to my ideas on designing experiences after a field trip to the Oregon School for the Blind in Salem in the Winter of 1968.. We met with the faculty and staff and then later with students. I was amazed at how blind children overcame their handicap by developing skills based on sense perceptions other than sight.  Their perception of radiant heat and sound reflections was very acute.  They were able to navigate around the school as easily as the sighted but by using their perception of heat radiating off of various surfaces to give them clues as to where they were.;  The same for the particular.quality of sound that resulted from its reflection off of various surfaces.  After the visit, we designed toys for the blind that gave particular attention to sound, feel, etc.

Then in the Spring term, we were assigned the task of designing a "better" playhouse for a pre-school center operated by the St. Thomas Episcopal Church in Eugene, Oregon. This was to be a contest for the best design, and the professors would select the best one and the class would build it.  Among the requirements of the project was that the house must be able to house the school's riding lawn mower.  The reason was that the children refuse to use the existing story-book style playhouse and it was therefore being used for the lawn mower.; After some protests by the class, the professors dropped the lawn mower storage requirement.

I could not get enthusiastic for the project since I thought that a playhouse was simply a device intended to indoctrinate children into the traditional family system and assumed that little boys and girls would just be delighted to engage in reenactments of hubby coming home from work while wifey would cook and serve him dinner. I found the entire idea repulsive.

So I decided to determine what it is that children really liked to do when they played and the onl;y thing I had to go on was memories of my own childhood and my observations of what other children did. I decided they liked to climb up on things, jump off things, crawl through thing, swing, tight-rope walk on pieces of lumber and a host of other activities -- none having anything to do with "playing house." But, having made my list, I hadn't the slightest idea of how to realize this within the parameters of the "house" project. Then, one afternoon while driving around, I spotted a pile of telephone poles that were being sold cheaply.  These poles are used quite a bit in Oregon for curb stops on gravel parking lots.

I then got the idea of combining my list of play activities into a structure using the telephone poles spanned by bridges as the basic structure.  Soon, the structure almost built itself. but the other students pointed out that the project called for designing a house -- not a collection of bridges. So I reasoned that in that case I would add a little shed to one end of the structure and that would be the "house."

I made a scale model of the structure and held my breath when I presented it to the class in a critique session.  Members of the class, following the assignment  closely had  designed a number of unimaginative houses based on popular architects.  So we had the Frank Lloyd House, the Mies van der Rohe, the California Ranch, the Story-book style and one guy submitted a circus tent. But it was my submission that impressed them the most because of its unique, original design and the thought and analysis that went into it. They selected it as the winner and we went to work building it in the Spring of 1968.

Then  Sunset Magazine got wind of the project and sent their photographer and reporter to do a story on it.  The result was a story in the in March 1970 issue of the magazine. I have copied these photos of the structure from the Sunset Magazine article since I have no pictures of the original.

Figure 1, Detail of the structure. This photo shows the shed I designed  to satisfy the requirement that the project be for a "playhouse./"  It serves no functional or rational purpose except to satisfy the requirement.

Figure 2, picture of the structure from Sunset Magazine. The shingle structure at the rear was from another student's design and was added because the professors were worried that the shed on my design would not be sufficient to satisfy the school authorities.

After publication of the Sunset Magazine article, the design went viral on the West Coast . Then it went viral throughout the world.  Soon commercial interpretations were made of the structure and were being sold by several companies and the structure became standard equipment in virtually all  K through 5 schools in the world.



Unfortunately, life and shifting fortune later resulted in the destruction of the structure and its replacement with one of the commercial versions.  I sort of regret that the original structure was not preserved for its historical value, but I think that the administration of the church 30 years later, did not realize the importance the structure played in revolutionizing playground equipment throughout the world.

Figure 3, the  commercial structure that eventually replaced the original.  What is interesting about all of the structures that followed mine is that the silly shed that I added in a failed attempt to satisfy the assignment, has been preserved in all in all of them even though it is completely redundant.

If it seems like I am blowing my own horn, you would be completely right.  But my purpose here is to show how important it is in design to concentrate on the kind of experience you wish to create.  When starting from this point of view, a design is almost guaranteed to be, not only unique, but very satisfying and exciting for the user.