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We are in the experience economy.

This Harvard Business Review article is written by B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore and published in 1998.

As goods and services become commoditized, the customer experiences that companies create will matter most.

There is a book written by the same authors.

“The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business a Stage”

A few weeks ago, I bumped into a blog, where I learned the simple mantra of experience economy.

I’m not an order taker. I’m an experience maker!

This mantra reminds me that, all we are designing/creating experiences for our clients/customers.

It’s the picture that I took with iPhone in a restaurant in Seoul, Korea. The poster was on the front wall of the kitchen where waiting staffs get dishes from the kitchen. It says, “From the moment you step outside here, you should be an actor/actress.”

Korean companies are also investing on user/customer experience as a way of innovation. For example, SK Telecom has HCI (Human-Centered Innovation) group and KTF has CEM (Customer Experience Management) team.

We, D’strict helps companies create their original and unique customer experience, especially in digital display market. I will write more about this later on.

Update: I decided to change the category “User Experience” to “Customer Experience” since the latter is broader and more appropriate.

Amy Tenderich wrote an open letter to Steve Jobs, asking to use Apple’s design expertise to invent a device which helps diabetics to have a better life. Diabetics can’t leave their home without an insulin pump and/or blood glucose monitor wired to their body. Even though they have portable devices but those are far short of our expectation in terms of design and usability. It’s annoying sometimes and clunky.

We are, of course, deeply grateful to the medical device industry for keeping us alive.But while they’re still struggling with shrinking complex technologies down to a scale where we can attach them, hard-wired, to our bodies, design kinda becomes an afterthought.

She also said:

In short, medical device manufacturers are stuck in a bygone era; they continue to design these products in an engineering-driven, physician-centered bubble. They have not yet grasped the concept that medical devices are also life devices, and therefore need to feel good and look good for the patients using them 24/7, in addition to keeping us alive.

And not long after her blog, surprisingly Adaptive Path, a company with usability expertise responded to her call and designed an excellent conceptual product. You can find the story about it on their blog. This is a video overview:

I felt a headache whenever I was told that I should take a look into bio & nano technologies and the next revolution would happen where those technology meet IT technology. Logically I couldn’t agree more with the idea but I was baffled because I don’t have any background in those fields and didn’t know where to start. But when I saw the Charmr video, I felt like seeing a ray of light in the dark cave. This might be a sign of ‘€œSingularity’ as Dr. Raymond Kurzweil is telling us in his recent book. You might think that we don’t even have wearable computers yet and that kind of thing wouldn’t come into our lives in the near future. But think again, iPod is a wearable computer and Charmr is one, too. We *are* already in that stage.

If you wanna dive into the world of these new technologies, you will find this interview interesting: Guy’€™s interview with Moira Gun, the author of Welcome to Biotech Nation“.

The world is changing. It’s changing much faster than we expect.

Joe Schoendorf, a partner of ACCELL partners for 20 years and a former employee of HP and Apple for 40 years, talked about “The Global Shift - Everything is Changing” at Stanford Summit. I strongly encourage you to take 15 minutes of your precious life for watching this session. In the end of the session, someone in the audience asked him about what his biggest mistake was. He answered back by confessing one of his mistakes: Laughing at Bill Joy’s idea of creating workstation. (Bill is a co-founder of SUN Microsystems. ;-)) Joe, himself was one of the bozos which Guy mentioned in “The Art of Innovation“.

Also you might want to check out another session, “Introducing the New Captains of Innovation” of which Guy was a moderator. I really liked the part when he teased about “Aggregate Knowledge”. Who in the world creates that kind of name for a company?

Change is already happening and it’s inevitable. It’s time for us to catch new opportunities.