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(April 11, 2003)
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While there's no clear boundary between empathetic design and open-ended design, there's a difference in the user's levels of engagement. With empathetic design, the user is reactive. Each user has his or her own distinct reading of the same piece. With open-ended design, the user is active. Each user creates his or her contribution, which gives new content to or alters the meaning of the original piece.
In the electricity-bill project for Paul Elliman's class, my idea was to turn the bill into a calendar. The user can write on it; everyone's calendar/bill, therefore, is different. A calendar/bill can almost be a personal diary recording of the user's everyday experiences.
Here is the relationship:
The designer sets the framework--borders and surfaces;
the user comes and gives it a new meaning.
The thing between designer and user, the calendar/bill, is an interface. The calendar/bill makes the relationship between the designer and the user or the self and the world possible.
Sometimes multiple users can interact with one interface:
Yale LGBT Pride posters by my classmates Rebecca Ross and Andrew Sloat. A final product is made possible by both designers and passers-by.
In the computer game The Sims, the player not only can select the characters (including their names, skins, personalities), but can also strongly affect the narrative of the game. "The game is highly 'open-ended' in that players control much of what happens--not to mention how it looks," noted an I.D. Magazine review. "As part of that process, players also project themselves into the game and its characters." (Caniglia 101)
The Sims "Family Exchange" website offers another example. It has thousands of different Sims stories submitted by players from all over the world. These comic book-like stories are composed of screenshots and users' own interpretations.
In the Placebo project by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, participants were invited to adopt one of eight objects designed by Dunne and Raby. Nobody was really sure how these objects functioned. But over time, all the users developed their own methods to use the objects and formed emotional attachments to them. (75)
"By accepting the possibility of leaving a design open-ended, by up to a point not finishing it, the designer not only leaves room for the recipient's and reader's own interpretation of the message--an emanicipatory aspect, this--he also creates the space for a personal standpoint. The design now suggests that this is how things might be--it opens a dialogue about the way itself functions in the communication process of which it is a part." (Bruinsma)
In this kind of open-ended design, the user plays a significant role. The user easily reinforces or subverts the meaning of the original piece by changing its parts because the piece is perceived as a unity. It is as if the designer creates the stage, and the users emerge and play. Or, in other words, the user becomes the designer, while the designer becomes the curator.
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