Melissa is a famous brand in Brazil. Selling shoes, Melissa’s main customer group is girls. The following is one of recent advertisements.

picture from: http://www.melissa.com.br/

The ad caught my eyes because I love Disney animations. Yeah, once upon a time, there is……That it is. I cannot help paying attention to these ads because they reverse my original views to Disney’ princesses. They are modern, sexy and unusual. It is the difference and uniqueness grasp my attention. In this regard, I have the prejudices which restrict my imagination of these princesses and their context. What they wear, how they act, what environments they are in “should be” in a certain way. Therefore, when something is different from my prejudices, this becomes a novelty.

I think it might be the same reason that Shrek is so popular. The series of the movie change the understanding of some traditional ideas in our mind, which provides an interesting, new perspective to review what is common. Lots of people call it “creativity.” We have something “new” which based on something already exists. That might be the idea of experience design. It is the reason we need to understand users and the world surrounding them. It is the reason we learn phenomenology and structuralism as approaches to achieve our goal, although they made us headache.

Jeff has brought up a statement in class which impressed but puzzled me, “we still don’t know how to make interaction design engage people just like films and novels do.” I believe it is a tough task. Some films and novels enable us to be really into the stories because they touch and recall some experiences in our life. What we value, like or interest in. However, for an interaction designer, the experience we design seems to be different. The experience is the experience we have when using other design. For example, the icon of recycled bin on our desktop is based on the experience we use trash can in daily life; the interface of Guitar Hero is based on the experience we use guitar and use a pub. I think it is different level of experience between designing a film and an interface. An interaction design would not make you as moved as films and novels do. I hope it is possible, but I have no idea how to do that.

Oops, this entry is like my prewriting. How come I start from Cinderella and end up with designing experience? I think what I would like to say is the message of every media is designed from experiences of both encoders and decoders. In this way, message communication becomes more effective and has more possibilities. But designers of different media might concern different kinds of experience.