Exploration over Experimentation

daniel Harvey (Medium bug won’t let me capitalize Daniel and keep the link) asked me to explain this part of the Proposed New Manifesto for Experience Creation that I recently came up with.

What is Experimentation?

For me in the scientific method, experimentation is based on hypothesis, assumption, or an understood question. Experiments are tests for truth. Here is my idea, I’m going to try it to find out if it is true or not. An experiment can be frames as …

If I do this, will this happen?

What is Exploration?

Exploration starts from a broad question of ambiguity. There is no known answer to that question, or even a hypothesized one. There is no truth. I go into the arena of the question, searching it, observing within it. provoking it. An exploration would be framed as.

If I do this, what will happen?

Why does this distinction (if we can agree it is real) matters when designing experiences?

Of course, we need both experiments and explorations, but why do we need to put weight on exploring more than experimentation? The answer lies in admitting that we do not know all the questions that need to be asked. And that the questions that we need to ask often only reveal themselves after a provocation with ambiguous purpose.

If we are only experimenting (as described above), we are not immersing ourselves in contexts. We are not trying to understand contexts of people, place, organizations, and environments in a general way. Experimentation feels great because by having an absolute binary or other quantitative result we feel safe in assurance, and we can communicate that assurance. However, we will never get to “why” in a deep meaningful way. We need to explore, observe, immerse, interpret, synthesize, analyze and ultimately value the exploration of what the total gestalt of a new experience can and will be.

I hope this answers your question, Dan. Thanx for asking. Which one needs to be explained next? (question is open to anyone).