Every connected system is already inside a social situation.

Design can decide what it does there.

k_o studio

Experience design and concept inquiry

Situation-centric design.

Experience Design's existing vocabulary was built for a narrower relationship with technology than the one we're now living inside.

The task shrinks. The situation expands.

When the task gets automated, design attention doesn't disappear. It moves toward what was always there.

The situation: the emotions, the relations, the intentions sitting just outside the frame the task drew around itself.

The task-centered paradigm takes the task as the unit of design.

The situation-centric paradigm takes the situation as the design space.

A situation is a specific moment in the social life of the connected system.

Who is here, what relations are already operating, what the system is already inside, the person is actually experiencing at the level beneath the stated task.

The relations and emotions the task sits inside.

The most interesting design question of this moment is about relationship. What kind of participant an adaptive, always-on system should be in a person's life, and how you design for that before the category for it fully exists.

This is the design space k_o works in.