Markus Giesler on customer experience design

At Experientia, we live the mantra that experience design is always contextual experience design. Understanding and designing for people within a culture, a context and how people evolve and change within these, is at the very essence of what we do. It is therefore no coincidence that our new website always shows people, including our staff, in real-life contexts and not on some white background.

So it is very nice to read that Markus Giesler, a Canadian economist, marketing professor, and expert on market creation and customer experience design, sees the future of design thinking as centered on culture:

Is “Design Thinking” still a thing? What comes after design thinking?
I’d say something I call big design. Design thinking typically involves a creative and systematic approach to problem solving by placing the customer at the center of the experience. Most managers I talk with are frustrated. They don’t get the best results with this approach because they spend too little attention to the forces that actually shape the customer experience, which is culture. In order to succeed, managers also need to understand culture – taking the perspective of the people and institutions that shape a market or customer experience. That’s the ‘“big” in big design.

The interview published in The Marketing Journal is worth a full read.