Trevor’s comment about the desire to separate “meaning” from “experience” is an insightful one. I believe experience occurs in the here and now; in that regard, it is ethereal. That is why I believe designers are aiming for something more lasting, meaning. Meaning grows from, and, as you indicate, informs, experience. This is what some phenomenologists have referred to as a “hermeneutic circle.”

Some may find that a distinction with difference but it helps me to highlight the differential paths that can lead to meaning. For example, the meaning, “innocence” which Trevor cites as connected with Dove’s Wilma Flintstone campaign, arises for others from disparate experiences. But the meaning adheres to childhood nonetheless.

We might also say that meanings cluster and form beliefs, while beliefs cluster to form identities. Not in a linear fashion, of course, but in a system of interpenetrating threads, woven together through a diverse flow of experiences. Identifying the common experiential patterns that underlie the broadest set of desired meanings (that is, explicating the underlying existential structures of those meanings) is the holy grail of designing with purpose. Malcolm Gladwell recently wrote an extensive piece in The New Yorker about work now being done in musical composition and filmwriting to do just that. It was a fascinating article and I recommend it highly.

A commercial comes to mind here. Dove recently came out with a line of shampoo. For the advertising, they chose to use female characters from cartoons that were popular twenty years ago, in a clever campaign highlighting the fact that these characters’ hairdos never moved. The origin in time of the cartoons made it clear who their target audience was; women in their 30s and 40s who would associate Dove shampoo (which as a brand focuses on purity – 99 44/100 pure soap!) with the feelings of innocence they had as children.

Here, like everywhere else, the meaning that is attributed determines the emotions that are felt. By associating their product with something that evokes almost universally positive memories for most people (i.e. cartoons), they have, in turn created a positive experience. Obviously, not everyone who saw these cartoons has positive memories of them. In this case, the commercials may have been attributed a negative meaning, and created a negative experience. Either way though, the two (meaning and experience) are so closely tied together that it is difficult to seperate them. Marketers and designers can never ENSURE that all their users/customers will have the same experience. But, by focusing their efforts on things that have commonly shared meanings for people, marketers and designers can elicit positive experiences from a majority of customers/users. The trick is to identify those common experiences.