Paul Kahn is a renowned and respected designer and teacher in the United States.
He worked for a long time in France. During his training on the Mapping Experience, March 4&5, 2019 at UX-Republic, we spoke with him about his career and his vision of the evolution of the profession of Designer.

Why did you become a Designer?

I've always been fascinated by visual quality.
I studied literature, which is visual in an indirect way. Graphic design is the lens through which books and magazines communicate to our eyes and then to our imagination.
There's this thought-provoking quote from British poet and artist William Blake:

“If the gates of perception were purified, everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite.”

I think design is a method of clearing or expanding that gate, primarily the eye, to help us understand better.

How did you become a Designer?

At first, I was self-taught.
I became a Designer by trying my hand at designing publications and finding opportunities to work with Designers.

The process was basically iterative: look for good examples, use what you learned to make your own design, compare your results with good examples, try again.

In the process, you learn to master the technique to improve your results.
I met Krzysztof Lenk in 1989 as part of the hypertext research project of the Brown University. Kris was a great publication designer and a master professor of typography and information design who emigrated from Poland.
He taught me the principles of visual appearance, what makes design good or bad. Together, we worked on projects that translated these principles from paper to computer screen.

What were the main stages of your career?

70s: from analog to digital

I learned to manage texts on a computer in the late 1970s.
This was the time when typesetting and print production moved from analog (metal type and photography) to digital (computer typesetting and raster imaging). I learned to move text from the computers where people wrote – mainframes, minicomputers, word processors – to the computer typesetting systems where the pages were produced.

I had 2 weeks in advance and I became the local expert.

80s: hypertext systems

In 1985, I joined a research team at Brown University to develop a hypertext system to create linked multimedia documents. This system, known as IRIS Intermedia, pioneered many of the concepts that later appeared on the World Wide Web, such as collecting linked documents into networks and anchors as the endpoint of links (the tag ).
This search system was a proof of concept (POC) that evolved into websites and web applications.

90s: electronic years

Throughout the 1990s, we were at the forefront.
It gave Kris Lenk and me another head start when we created Dynamic diagrams in 1990 to specifically apply the design to electronic documents.

We understood the issues our customers would face as websites grew exponentially and encyclopedias, scientific and technical literature in particular, faced the challenges of online distribution.

To do this, we were the first to develop techniques for visualizing the structure of electronic publications. These have been published in many design books and collected in Mapping Websites (Rotovision 2001), which has been translated from English into 5 other languages. These visual inventories and planning diagrams have been essential to our design practice. These are the visual representations of the information architecture.

2000s: Paris…

In 2001, I created Kahn+Associates in Paris.
Our agency was interested in organizing information on websites and apps to be efficient and user-centric. During the decade that I worked in France, I taught information architecture in many masters and collaborated with many great Designers in the Parisian community.

2010s: Mapping Experience

I returned to the United States in 2012 to join Mad * Pow, an Experience Design agency.
I led a variety of design thinking workshops – customer journey mapping, design studio, service plans – which applied design experience and service design technique to plan product transformation digital. Visualizing current and future states is an important part of this technique. I also led teams that designed and tested business applications, mainly in the healthcare field.

Why did you become interested in Datavisualization and Mapping Experience?

I was drawn to data visualization by being interested in large-scale information problems.
At Dynamic Diagrams, we've worked on very large websites – IBM.com, Sun.com – that had hundreds of thousands of pages. We've also worked with clients who had hundreds of individual websites, like Samsung and the Holtzbrinck Publishing Group. We have developed methods to draw these large networks and developed software to explore and visualize websites.

Software engineering techniques for Data Viz have grown tremendously over the past decade, driven by more data sets and important business needs to visualize all the information we record or leave behind. as traces every day.

It's a very exciting field, full of new tools and job opportunities. I am honored to be on the faculty of the Information Design & Visualization program at the Northeastern University in Boston, where students work for leading software and communications companies around the world.
My interest in the Mapping Experience dates back to the very first isometric diagram we did for the book. Information Architects by Richard Saul Wurman (Graphis 1996).
The topic was the digital edition of the Encyclopedia Africana, a concept paper we developed for a group at Harvard University. We wanted to explain what could not be seen on screen, the structure of an electronic document. This map showed the experience of a user moving from section to section.
I continued to develop these representations of websites and software systems using a variety of visual techniques at Kahn+Associates and in my teaching in France. The important thing was to help clients see these invisible relationships, to create common mental models for a project.
In 2011, I collaborated with Jim Kalbach on Locating Value with Alignment Diagrams , which brings together visualization practices in information architecture, experience design and service design. I think the techniques have a lot in common.

How would you define these two techniques?

Data visualization is the transformation of quantitative data into images that reveal meaningful information.
To reveal information, the designer must find the patterns that relate the data through visual means to the audience. Information is a difference that makes a difference. Data visualization involves knowing what matters to the audience and matching that to data values.
Experience Mapping is the technique of recording the observation of an experience – a process based on time – and correlating these observations with a variety of attributes – like touchpoints, actors, response – in a visual pattern.
This experience can focus on a customer's interaction with a product or service – buying a bottle of wine, choosing a parking space, subscribing to a streaming video service.

The objective is generally to identify the stages of the process and to locate the points for improvement.

Experience Maps are essentially flexible visual boards – a matrix of events. They can be extended to include background processes and systems and become service plans.

What does your teaching experience bring to your profession as a Designer?

Teaching keeps my brain alive.

I always test the ideas I have developed against my students' expectations and understanding. I always learn from how students respond to assignments, especially in vocational training.

What advice would you give to a beginner Designer?

Design requires a combination of optimism – the belief that you can solve a problem – and tenacity – the ability to see a complex task through to completion. You must have both.

Design is problem solving through action. In that sense, it's a bit like engineering. You should learn by doing. Create a poster, code a website, develop a service.
Learn how to make type and image do what you want them to do. By doing this you will learn what you need to learn. By drawing on different media – on paper, on screen, in 3D space – you will learn the commonalities of design problems.

Do you want to add something?

I am convinced that the Mapping Experience will be useful to professionals in many fields.
I know that the use of smartphones, the engagement in applications and digital services have increased enormously in France in recent years.
I am very happy to offer my Experience Mapping workshop in Paris and I want to thank the UX-Republic team for giving me this opportunity.

I look forward to reconnecting with the French Design community and learning what I can from your unique experience.

Explore more!

Thanks to Paul Kahn for giving us this interview. It was a pleasure and a chance to discuss with a historical Designer of our profession.
If you want to know more about these user experience mapping techniques, find an interview with Paul Kahn, on our channel Youtube  carried out at UX-Republic on March 4 and 5, 2019 in our premises in Paris.
Register now.
Sébastien Faure, Learning & Development Manager @UX-Republic
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