1 Investigating Experience Design in Industry Marco C. Rozendaal Designing Quality in Interaction, Department of Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology Eindhoven, The Netherlands, marco@symbiont-innovation.nl Abstract: In this paper, the field of experience design is investigated in industry with the aim to identify research opportunities that can advance experience design as a practice. To this end, seven interviews were held with design consultancy agencies. The focus was to discover common practices and unmet needs in relation to experience related aspects of design. Some of the topics included; client demands, end-user involvement, quality standards and community building. Results showed that common practices and unmet needs could be grouped into four themes that involve (1) the constituents of experience design, (2) processes involved (3) expertise needed to design for experience and (4) aspects related to experience design clients. The paper is concluded with a list of research opportunities aimed to advance experience design as a practice. Key words: experience, design, industry, practice, research, innovation. 1. Introduction Experience design is a developing field of design. Its aim is to optimize people’s experiences of products, systems, services and brands [1,2]. Typical experience design projects cross multiple design disciplines such as product design, communication design and architecture. In retail for instance, lighting, spatial layout, store fixtures, product packaging and interactive media are all involved in creating a unified costumer experience [3,4]. Experience design - which explicates subjectivity in design - relates to the discourse on user experience [5], product experience [6] and emotional design [7,8]. The aim of this study is to investigate common practices and unmet needs regarding experience related aspects of design in order to advance experience design as a practice. Governmental programs (regional, national as well as European) have been set-up to drive innovation by connecting industry with academia. In this line of thinking, we want to take current practices in industry as starting point and extrapolate them to research and educational activities in academia. Seven design consultancy agencies [9-15] were interviewed about experience related aspects of design, which is coined experience design. Some of these questions included; the manner in which experience is defined within their practices; how they dealt with experience during the design and research process; the disciplines and types of expertise needed and which types of questions from business favor an experience design approach.