Rethinking education as experience design

Internationally recognised creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson (2011) has argued that there is an urgent need to transform education systems around the world in view of today’s social, economic and environmental challenges. The current system of mass education that arose from the demands of the Industrial Revolution places unnecessary limitations on the creative capacities of today’s students, he claims. New conceptions of intelligence, creativity and human ability are needed. One way of contributing to that transformation might be to rethink education in terms of experience design – an emerging cross-disciplinary field of research and practice that is concerned with designing products, services, processes, events and environments with a focus on the quality of human experience. This article discusses selected theories and principles from the field of experience design, and considers how they can be applied to learning experiences, both face-to-face and online.