Kristine Oustrup doesn't seem to take anything at face value. Her theory of Mood Consumption takes us back to the 5th Century BC to our present stream of multiple life choices today. Her quest for our inner core determining individual preferences is both 'artistic' and 'scientific' in equal measure.
- Ron Pompei

EED: Elemental Experience Design

The human mind once stretched by a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions. - Oliver Wendell Holmes

by Kristine Oustrup

Elemental Experience Design (EED) is a new technique to create great customer and brand experiences. In short, EED combines the Western focus on emotions and personality with the Asian art of architecture and elemental design. Welcome a whole new world of applications!

Why did I invent Elemental Experience Design and is there a need for it?

It’s really quite simple. In today’s marketing and design processes, we constantly talk about creating the great user or customer experience. The winning brand is the one that provides the best experience, whether it’s through the products, in the stores, on the web or by using clever user oriented advertising. Good experience is really important, don’t you agree?

The problem here is that what I consider a good experience may be a bad experience for you. Exactly the same experience might be rated completely differently by different people. So we cannot talk about good experience without considering for whom? But, how do we define “the who?”. By age, gender, income, location, lifestyle? Tough! A 35 year old Parisian female nurse might have more in common with a 59 year old billionaire New Yorker in terms of personality and taste than her colleague working right next to her.

Rather than categorizing people according to the usual demographics and lifestyle, progressive thinkers talk about creating an emotional connection and how feelings and senses become much more important factors. Great, but how do we measure this emotional and sensual experience? How do we create marketing and design processes based on these important factors? It’s all a bit fluffy and we need harder evidence; we need more structure so that we can plan and measure the results. After all, most of our stakeholders want measurable facts to back up our ideas with hard earned design and marketing budgets.

This is the puzzle that I decided to solve. The result is EED Emotional Experience Design - a tool to help you design, plan and measure experiences. The great thing about EED is that you can use it on people, stores, products, ads, services and experiences. They can all be placed in one of the five elements: Earth, Fire, Metal-Air, Water or Wood. It can be used as a general inspirational landscape for new development as well as pinpointing and testing specific ideas.

To continue reading, click on the link to the left to download the complete essay in PDF format.