Hardware and Experiences

Today people are designing for ones experience over anything else. I have been to many health lectures where they have told us that the experience is what matters for the patient and their family. Hardware doesn’t matter as much as the experience when it comes to architecture. In this discussion I’m going to consider computers and technology part of hardware. You can have all the technology in the world and still a person wont have a good experience. In fact, hospitals have some of the most advanced technology that is around today and yet patients still have terrible experiences.

            Designers and Architects are hard at work everyday trying to better a client’s experience. At Disney the Imagineers are always thinking about how they can make the “Disney” experience better. They want park goers to have the best experience they can have and they want it to be a magical time. Though Disney has a ton of hardware to work with they also focus on the experience. The experience is of the people is influenced by the workers, the scenery, and every element that goes into things at Disney Parks. The Disney experience is like no other and that is because they are always questioning how they can make it better. When hardware is used to its ultimate capacity then you can create a really great experience and that’s what I think Disney does best. Using technology in a way to better experiences is used everyday in stores, malls, hospitals, school, etc.

            Hardware opposed to experience in hospitals is a huge problem in those designs. It is really scary for patients to see wires and computers running throughout a room and it can make for a bad experience. With patients and their family facing really terrible things happening it becomes a really scary experience. Today a lot of Architects are designing hospitals to be more home like for the patients. Many cancer patients have to stay in hospitals months at a time and in the old design for hospitals they were in really uncomfortable spaces. Now research has been done on these old designs and they are redesigning to be more homelike to make the patients and families feel more at home. The moment the patient steps into the hospital they want their experience to be a good one to keep them more relaxed and not put as much stress on the patient and families.

            In the past I believe everyone relied on hardware to make an experience great and I don’t think it always does. Hardware is a tool to make it a great experience but the experience itself has to be thought out exactly and executed correctly. With research becoming a much more used resource to make the world better a lot more things are being discovered about how we can make people’s experiences better. As time goes on I think that hardware and people’s experiences will become more integrated into how we design everyday. Hardware will keep changing, therefore so will the experiences we are able to create.

Picture From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk_hardware_emulator