Experience Design - locked down or thumb tight?

Came across this interesting and well written introduction to Experience Design on the Adobe site by Adam Greenfield.

It gives a basic introduction to the new discipline (as you might expect on the Adobe site) but it also raises some interesting points.

"(But) it turns out that experience design, as it is currently conceived, does not always lead to successful experiences. Ensuring that all phases and aspects of someone's interaction with a product/service ecology align with a singular vision requires a large degree of control. This, in turn, leaves little room for the self-evident (and lovely) messiness of our lives, and not much in the way of flexibility should the scenario of use deviate to any significant degree from that contemplated at design time."

So, how might we design an experience which is only 'thumb tight' (my phrase), which leaves room for the participant to play, input and in a way co-create the experience?

The article goes on to describe how the success of experience ecologies are subject to the 'house of cards' theory - where all is well except for one (often small) detail which ruins the whole experience. Sometimes this missing piece of the jigsaw is the responsibility of the service provider, like infrastructure or rolling stock. Sometimes it's people like us who are the cause.

"...a particularly acute issue wherever a designed ecology brings human beings face-to-face with one another. As things now stand, experience design's Achilles heel is customer service. A combination of low wages, disinvestment in training and deeper cultural factors has left American businesses without a large pool of workers motivated to provide customer service at the level routinely specified by designers. The result is that experiences seamless on paper break down the moment a human being enters the loop."

So in designing experiences, it pays not only the be empathic to the user's needs, but also understanding of the other actor's human issues, like employee training, and incentives. Not traditional design territory, but when you think about experience design in the context of designing relationship - then of course people, the 'actors', be they 'us' the users or 'them' are right at the very heart.

Extending the acting analogy a little further, the ability for staff and providers to go off script, to improvise, whether at a call centre or face-to-face in the store is another example where 'thumb tight' is better then 'locked down'.