Program Overview

---

Program Overview

The Experience Design course, denoted as UE X, is a comprehensive program that examines the effects of digitalization on architectural typologies in the contemporary city. It questions traditional typologies by focusing on an understanding and re-design of social, geographic, temporal, and emotional experiences.

Course Description

At the dawn of the generative AI revolution, techno-utopian narratives painted an imminent future where people would evolve from citizens into "netizens" driven by neoliberal ideals of relentless efficiency, limitless productivity, and optimized convenience. However, while digital experiences have undeniably transformed fundamental aspects of our everyday lives, the physical world remains central and essential. People still deeply crave sensory experiences, social interactions, and tangible engagements. As AI and digital infrastructures continue to infiltrate our built environments, the physical and virtual realms are increasingly merging, spawning entirely novel architectural typologies.

Course Objectives

The seminar UE X / Experience Design challenges students to transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries and cultivate a holistic understanding of experience design as a critical tool for shaping future architectures. It explores which traditional spaces and building types become obsolete or profoundly altered by digital transitions, how architectural and urban concepts of space evolve as new interactive elements emerge, and what new experiences and typologies are enabled by merging physical and digital realms.

Methodologies

Employing critical experience design methodologies, the course involves:

• Mapping social dynamics surrounding a lived experience, emphasizing the relational over the transactional
• Critically analyzing geographical and temporal flows (experience journeys)
• Carefully redesigning experience touchpoints to foreground humanistic values of care, presence, and agency

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the course, the student must be able to:

• Identify issues of experience design in relation to an actual typology
• Perform rigorous analysis of the problem space and map the stakeholders, spatial flows, temporal journeys, and touch points involved in the experience
• Develop alternative design concepts for future experiences
• Translate experience concepts into meaningful architectures through iterative prototyping at appropriate scales and levels of granularity
• Create convincing arguments and visual evidence for the design propositions

Transversal Skills

• Collect data
• Design and present a poster
• Set objectives and design an action plan to reach those objectives
• Make an oral presentation

Teaching Methods

• Presentations
• Mapping exercises
• Hands-on design activities
• Design reviews
• Group projects

Expected Student Activities

• Group discussion
• Case studies
• Mapping
• Sketching
• Designing
• Design Reviews
• Pin-Up
• Desk Crits

Assessment Methods

Grading will be based upon the quality of the projects in the exercises (30%), in the midterm review (20%), and in the final review (50%). Projects will be reviewed and assessed based on their conceptual strength, the coherence of their translation into prototypes, their narrative clarity and experiential power, and the persuasiveness of their communication, both orally and through the presented artifacts.

Supervision

• Office hours: Yes
• Assistants: Yes

Resources

Bibliography

• Huang, J., Future Space: A New Blueprint for Business Architecture, Harvard Business Review (April 2001): 149-157
• Pine, J. and Gilmore, J. (1999) The Experience Economy, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, 1999
• Cziksentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of optimal experience. New York: Happer and Row
• Dewey, J. (1934). Art as experience. New York: Perigee
• Diller, S., Shedroff, N., & Rhea, D. (2006). Making meaning: How successful businesses deliver meaningful experiences. CA: New Riders
• Sergei Eisenstein, The Film Sense, translated and edited by Jay Leyda, Faber and Faber, London, 1943 (1986 edition)
• Hutchinson-Guest, Ann. (1989). Choreo-Graphics; A Comparison of Dance Notation Systems from the Fifteenth Century to the Present. New York: Gordon and Breach
• Lev Kuleshov, Kuleshov on Film, translated and edited by Robert Levaco, University of California Press, Berkeley, California, 1974, pp. 49-50
• Laban, Rudoph. (1928). . Wein: Universal
• Norman, D. A. (1988). The design of everyday things. New York: Double Day Dell
• Shedroff, N. (2001). Experience design. Indiana: New Riders
• Shostack, G. Lynn. "Designing Services that Deliver", Harvard Business Review, vol. 62, no. 1 January - February 1984, pp 133-139
• Tschumi, Bernard. The Manhattan Transcripts. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981
• Tufte, Edward R (2001) [1983], The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (2nd ed.), Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press

Program Details

Architecture Master Semester 1

• Semester: Fall
• Exam form: During the semester (winter session)
• Subject examined: UE X : Experience design
• Courses: 3 Hour(s) per week x 12 weeks
• Exercises: 1 Hour(s) per week x 12 weeks
• Type: optional

Architecture Master Semester 3

• Semester: Fall
• Exam form: During the semester (winter session)
• Subject examined: UE X : Experience design
• Courses: 3 Hour(s) per week x 12 weeks
• Exercises: 1 Hour(s) per week x 12 weeks
• Type: optional

AR Exchange Autumn Semester

• Semester: Fall
• Exam form: During the semester (winter session)
• Subject examined: UE X : Experience design
• Courses: 3 Hour(s) per week x 12 weeks
• Exercises: 1 Hour(s) per week x 12 weeks
• Type: optional

Reference Week

| Mo| Tu| We| Th| Fr
---|---|---|---|---|---
8-9| | | | |
9-10| | | | |
10-11| | | | |
11-12| | | | |
12-13| | | | |
13-14| | | | | SG0213
14-15| | | |
15-16| | | |
16-17| | | | | SG0213
17-18| | | |
18-19| | | | |
19-20| | | | |
20-21| | | | |
21-22| | | | |

Légendes: Lecture

Exercise, TP

Project, Lab, other

Friday, 13h - 16h: Lecture SG0213

Friday, 16h - 18h: Exercise, TP SG0213

Related Courses

Results from graphsearch.epfl.ch.