I’m hosting a “lunch and learn” this Thursday at the StartUp Zone. This is the first talk I’ve held in Canada, and I think the first time I’ve given a presentation in front of an English as a first language audience.

Design talks are generally poorly attended in Charlottetown, so this is a low key trial run, a “user test”, to see if abstract topics like this are of any interest to the StartUp Zone community.

As such I am only looking for a handful of people to attend, 6 – 8 being ideal, which sadly is usually the number of people who attend the design meetups I have been to. At the end of the talk I’ll ask for some open ended feedback and the participants will be compensated with lunch.

The talk description:

Experience is the new Product.

Goods and services are no longer enough. In a world saturated with largely undifferentiated goods and services, the greatest opportunity for value creation is in the staging of experiences.

This in-house Lunch & Learn is a condensed version of a workshop that I have given over the past 15 years. We will take a deep dive into having a more fundamental understanding of experience, impress the need to be sensitive to time (time is the currency of experience), and introduce a simple method for analyzing experiences in the hope that it can influence future and current product development, and deepen understanding of experience itself.

That first paragraph is a direct grab from one of Joseph Pines books, which along with Nathan Shedroff, Don Norman, and many more, form the basis of the ideas contained within.

The last time I gave this talk it lasted almost 3 hours, so I have thus far deleted about 2 thirds of the slides – mostly bits about emotional design, mental models and such – topics which I assume few really want to talk about.

There is a good chance it will bomb, but I’m enjoying spending the day revisiting an old topic and seeing it through older myopic eyes.