UE X : Experience design

The seminar UE X - Experience Design challenges students to transcend conventional boundaries and cultivate a holistic understanding of AI-driven experience design as a powerful tool for shaping future urban environments.

Through the lens of climate emergency, students harness experience design to navigate complex challenges, rethink urban apps, services, furniture, typologies and systems, and ultimately reimagine future designs for cities that are not just sustainable but thrive as immersive, human-centered, and resilient habitats.

The course is structured around a series of six independent mini-projects/workshops, each spanning two weeks, addressing each a unique experience design methodology, and a different design brief, at multiple scale. Fueled by the use of generative AI (Midjourney or Stable Diffusion) as a versatile co-design agent, the course aims to equip and empower students with a spectrum of contemporary design strategies to craft experiential narratives that resonate with the future city's evolving landscapes facing an enduring climate crisis.

The projects will use the city of Lausanne, as a case study or living laboratory for addressing a wide range of experience design questions, including: How can we integrate the awareness of the enduring climate crisis into everyday life? What new experiences become possible? How can a digital interface raise awareness of issues such as climate justice, data privacy, and urban health, as well as promote citizen-involvement and quality of life?

The seminar combines students from architecture, computer science, communication science, data science, digital humanities and other areas in a truly interdisciplinary process.Groups are formed and re-grouped for each of the six projects.

The cross-disciplinary groups will brainstorm, critically question, and with the aid of AI, iteratively develop novel designs, interfaces and augmented urban artifacts as possible alternatives to reconfigure the senses of perception, redistribute time, and re-orchestrate the configuration of social, emotional and spatial experiences in the augmented city.

The six projects will provide a fertile training ground for learning about and practicing experience design (with the help of AI), exploring the following methodological nuances:

1. Experience Design by Empathy

This classical experience design approach uses Empathy to define the problem and provide the prompts for speculative designs. Possible project brief: Urban Mobility - augmented bench (to rest).

2. Experience Design by Decomposition

A problem is decomposed into subprojects with specific parameters. Morphological techniques enable to interactively give and remove weights to and from parameters/prompts. Possible project brief: Urban waste circular everyday (to trash).

3. Experience Design by Analogy

Analogical reasoning and the art of drawing inspiration from a reference image (precedent) are used to estrange and transcend the ordinary. Metaphors become designs. Possible project brief for Analogy: Architecture office - designing design (to work)

4. Experience Design by Collage

By exploring the methods of Sampling, Blending and Remixing, students develop the ability to transpose and weave together seemingly unrelated concepts into holistic and engaging narratives. Possible project brief: Urban parks facing the danger of heat islands augmenting the outdoors (to replenish)

5. Experience Design by Context

Systems thinking and contextualization as a cornerstone of experience design. By zooming out and adopting different perspectives, students grapple with designing experiences that resonate with an ecosystem on multiple scales and from multiple angles. Possible project brief: From birdhouse to migration designing the experience of indigenous birds (to fly)

6. Experience Design by Style

Students engage with the concept of styles as means of imagination and expression in experience design. Possible project brief: Docs on Wheels - future patient experience in the city (to heal)

-- Final Portfolio

In the final stage of the course, students will compile their journey into a portfolio. This culmination will showcase the six projects completed.