Experience as excursion: a note towards a metaphysics of design thinking By Connie Svabo and Michael Shanks Drat, 2013: for the anthology Designing Experience, Peter Benz (ed), Bloomsbury, 2014. A central value of what may be termed Experience Design is its aspiration to shit focus from the logic of singular design ields to the interrelations and interactions that take place in situations where people are simultaneously engaged with multiple designs. Experience Design can allow researchers and practitioners to travel – making it possible to follow experiences as they are enacted across and between places, modes of transportation, mobile mediation and assemblages of things. Drawing on the nomadic metaphysics of philosopher Michel Serres, the journeying, shiting and propagating qualities of experience are highlighted as part of a suggestion that design may indeed relate as much to metaphysics as to mechanics, materials science, and the psychology of the consumer and user. An Experience Design is sketched out as the choreography of temporary and shiting engagements across disparate designs, a perspective that complements well the pragmatics of much contemporary design practice, and as captured in the designation “design thinking”. A fuzzy field — Design While we generally use the term design in a rather loose way to refer to purpose, intention, signiicance and agency in making, it is certainly right to connect the emergence of the distinctively modern ield of design with the growth from the eighteenth century of industrial manufacture associated with increasingly radical division of labor. Design became a process most oten separate from manufacture – creating a plan or speciication for something, an artifact, system, service, or, now, an experience, and one that might even transform you. While designers work with mass manufacturing processes in the industrial design of everyday objects, they have also always had to deal with quite intangible issues of taste and style, functionality and desirability, safety regulation and legality, and the emotional impact of what they design. Immediately implicated are the structures and cultures of modernity, class, gender, ethnicity – horizontal and vertical distinctions at the core of individual and group identities in an everyday world that has come to revolve around manufactured goods. Market competition has thrown emphasis upon innovation – developing products that ofer something new or diferent. Svabo and Shanks: a metaphysics of design thinking 1