The efforts to understand how humans experience and perceive the world and themselves, has produced philosophies and theories, such as:

• Dualism, an ancient philosophy that sees a clear separation between body and mind, each, an independent entity to itself
• Behaviorism, an approach that explains all behaviors, emotions, and thoughts purely as a product of stimuli transmitted through the senses
• Functionalism, a recent theory, explains all human thought and behavior as if it was software that operates with inputs and outputs

"I see what you meant", "I was touched by this experience", "Smell the roses", "The taste of paradise", "Sound bites"--these are just a few examples of phrases that demonstrate the paradox of experience--while our five senses continuously feed objective data about the physical world, that data is being processed and reconstructed by the brain, and the result is subjective, a mix of thoughts and emotions.

Designers found that controlling the objective ingredients of the experience can lead to a reliable prediction of the subjective response to that experience. The careful curation and arrangement of shapes, materials, colors, textures, and other elements, can make an object desirable, usable and emotionally satisfying. But as mentioned before, finding the right blend is hard, with so many variables, and so many unknowns.

This chapter has been the first of three that make up the experience theme--a deep dive into the physical and psychological building blocks of human experience. Next, an exploration of disciplines that evolved the practice and theory of experience design.