XD: Reproducing Technological Experience

Experience design (XD) and its relationship to NMD is the focus of Chapter 7: a dimension of new media design based on the entire human sensorium. XD is not only consequential to our study, but leads to an important philosophical question – how to think and design for a dynamic, complex system rather than the components of that system – and a challenge to new media artists and designers to anticipate and activate a range of sensorial encounters between media environments and users. What is required to digitally encode, store and retransmit an experience? Theatre people, actors and performers are uniquely well placed to answer this question and our discussion returns to the work of dumb type to consider this. We also explore the performer/spectator relationship in the digital media work Karen by Blast Theory. For this company, digital media offers enormous scope for varying the environments they are creating and therefore also the possible forms of user interaction with these environments.