Richard Serra and experience design

A great American experience designer, Richard Serra, is now featured in a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Every reader of this blog should try to visit before it closes on September 10 - or if that's not possible, at least watch Charlie Rose's interview of Serra (part 1, part 2).

Serra is best known as a sculptor and artist, but what struck me most about the exhibit, and the Charlie Rose interview, was Serra's explicit focus on creating an experience, rather an object to be revered, in his art.

Consider this quote from the MoMA brochure to the exhibit:

For [Serra], this experience of space is what the work is about: unlike traditional sculpture, it emphasizes movement and its psychological impact, not contemplation from a distance.

The exhibit starts with earlier pieces - experiments in process, where Serra applies a set of verbs to various materials (pulling rubber, tearing lead, and so on.) Then it arrives at Serra's more recent work, towering walls of curved steel plates that create various spaces for visitors to walk through and stand in.

Serra describes in the interview how he reverses the traditional subject-object relationship in art. Here's the old way: a painting hangs on a gallery wall, and we, the subject, are invited to look at it, the object. We're here, and it's there.

In contrast, Serra's work makes us the object. As you walk through the mazelike structure of "Sequence," for example, the art's impact is on your own personal experience walking through the space - perhaps feeling confused or disoriented. It's an experience, not a set of aesthetic qualities in the steel itself. The steel just sets up the context for the experience (always note the importance of setting context when creating good experience!).

Again, from the MoMA brochure:

With "Sequence," Serra has expanded the psychological, experiential quality of his earlier work into an essentially abstract spatial experience.

In other words, the steel plates are pure context, allowing the visitor to have a pure experience; thus visitors themselves are the focus of the exhibit, not the steel.

I think that Serra's subject-object reversal teaches an important a lesson for anyone who creates experiences for others - which is to say, every entrepreneur, manager, technologist, teacher, doctor, parent, and most everyone else.

To be a good experience, the focus should be on the other person, not on oneself (or one's own company, or one's own short-term benefit).

This pattern holds outside the art world - like, for example, in the world of technology or business. The most user-centered and customer-centered companies are emerging as the leaders of their fields because they make the customer - more accurately, the long-term benefits of the customer - the subject of the development and marketing efforts.

Walk through those steel-enclosed spaces at MoMA and get a lesson in experience design.

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See also:

- MoMA drawings on bit overload (including another pic of the Serra exhibition)

- MoMA's Serra exhibit online (annoying Flash site, argh)

- (from the comments) Serra sculpture in downtown St. Louis

- (where i got the image above) Nelson's post (in Spanish)

• Jun 28, 2007
• IN: Customer Experience
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