Keywords

1 Introduction

1.1 Demand for Meaning

Theoretically, Clifford Geertz, one of the preeminent thinkers in contemporary anthropology, regarded that meaning is our mind’s construction of reality, the translation of existence into conceptual form. Why do we construct meaning in the first place? Aside from reflexes and instincts, human beings require an explanation of the world that helps us decide how to act. Meaning helps us understand the world and ourselves, learn, and make sense of what’s around us. It provides a framework for assessing what we value, believe, condone, and desire. Anything that supports a sense of meaning supports the basis for understanding and action, making it extremely valuable to us [1]. For example, millions of downloadable songs are not just because of fickle consumers, but because each of these items is a building block in the reality which we increasingly prefer they fit our concept of self. As we selectively purchase or reject these items, they become inextricably part of how we construct meaning in our lives.

As a matter of fact, it is common in advanced consumer markets that products and services have been already designed to meet sophisticated emotional or identity needs. The new generation of consumers who have grown up with the smart phones and instant messaging are talking more frequently and passionately about meaning in their lives, expressing a desire for—even expecting—meaningful experiences from daily necessities. The emotions of young people are easy to light up when they learn about something capable of making their friends develop a stronger sense of community. Take iPod as an instance, what makes the iPod an overwhelming success is the union of invention, design, and marketing into a seamless whole that evokes meaning in the enjoyment of music by concentrating on the customer’s experience. It goes beyond simply selling digital-music to selling the sensation of freedom, wonder and control. This wildly popular product integrated and reinforced a desirable musical experience, meeting the customer’s demand for meaning.

Not only because of the demand for meaning may even be the defining characteristic of what makes us human [2], but also there are some objective reasons for meaningful consumption, such as social trends, economic forces, and technological advances [3]. Take WeChat as an example for the factor of social trends, it is a kind of communication software or platform that connecting more than a billion people with calls, chats, and more, profoundly affecting the process of people’s interactions. Just as its slogan says, it has been a way of life, which means it is changing the way people socialize, like paying with WeChat Pay instead of cash when people go to the supermarket. The phenomenon of more and more people becoming smartphone addicts illustrates this point. The economic ability of consumers has to be considered, when it comes to the factor of economic forces. Alibaba’s turnover was 213.5 billion yuan on the Double Eleven Shopping Festival in 2018, which shows excess income that people perceive they have, or that they expect to have, to give them purchasing power. As social factors change, where and how people spend their money changes. And along with the material life being satisfied, more and more people are tending to pursue spiritual needs. Technological factors refer to the potential value of direct or indirect use of new technologies and research results for the design of data products, including communication technology, space technology and engineering technology. As for the factor of technological advances, the technology of virtual reality must be mentioned, which has the potential to integrate natural human motions into the computer aided assembly planning environment. This would allow evaluations of an assembler’s ability to manipulate and assemble parts and result in reduced time and cost for product design [4]. These advanced technologies make customized and personalized production available to provide meaningful experiences for different kinds of consumers simultaneously.

1.2 Meaningful Data Commercialization

Nowadays, data is accompanied by people anytime and anywhere, bringing lifestyle changes to all fields and society as a whole. From the agricultural society to the industrial society, data was generated in every manufacturing process. While in the information age, as the amount of data has exploded, data is becoming more and more popular to discuss. At different times, people had different views on data. In the beginning, the data was irrelevant and ignored, while now the identity and emotion play momentous roles in the ultimate success of data commercialization, at the same time, the customer’s experience of interacting with data is a positive one (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1.
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Data is recorded and designed to conveys the rhythm of Tai Chi [5].

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For example, combining camera technology, data processing and artistic creation, Tai Chi’s movements of hands and feet, including position coordinates and dwell time, are digitized and saved into data as the material of multimedia art creation. These limb’s location data manually are collected and processed through the artistic processing of data visualization, such as changing the point where the hands and feet stay longer, and converting them into grayscale changes, which not only reflects the movement of the body in the most basic way: with visual motion akin to Chinese ink brush painting, but also conveys the rhythm of Tai Chi and the operation of “Qi” in Chinese traditional culture, gathering invisible power from universe and balancing inner turbulences to harmonization.

Another example, if you choose the location of Hangzhou in the electronic map (https://sou-yun.com/poetlifemap.html), you can see all the names and works of poets related to Hangzhou in history will be displayed, which is a wonderful experience, expecially combined with live video and specific music. If anyone wants to feel the literary charm of Hangzhou, he can use the map to find out which ancient poets ever come to Hangzhou, what verses they had written. This system with a good experience benefits from meaningful processing of the data. That is, the literary materials left by ancient poets and writers in every location in China were organized, categorized, and then presented on an electronic map, so that the viewer only needs to select a certain place on the electronic map to feel the rich stereoscopic poetry charm of the place.

It is important for data-driven companies to evoke meaning through user experiences. As we’ve suggested, the experience people have with products, services, and events is only partly due to what a company might envision and endeavor to provide. The bulk of the experience is actually created by the consumers; that’s how it becomes highly relevant for the individual.

2 Experience Design

2.1 A Meaningful Experience

A meaningful experience is any process we’re conscious of and involved in as it happens. As an individual, all of those things happen in the course of daily life express parts of your identity and define you in significant ways, including the tasks you do, the responsibilities you hold, the relationships and decisions you make etc. Specifically, you would rather get up early to walk through a beautiful park to go to work, instead of choosing to take the subway to work in a hurry, which means “harmony” is the meaning you prefer to experience. You are in pursuit of harmony by seeking a work/life balance. The meaning of what you do is reflected in the process of experience.

Sample:

Drawings is an effective means for children to explore and communicate their understandings about the world, which means drawing is a constructive process of thinking in action, rather than a developing ability to make visual reference to objects in the world [6]. It is quite important for children to freely use their imagination, including scribbling and expressing without unwanted constraints, which is nearly the most important meaningful experience for children in the drawing process. As some scholars have mentioned, the meaning of drawings resides most significantly in the ways that participants interpret those images, rather than as some inherent property of the images themselves [7]. It is necessary to care about children’s narratives and interpretations during their drawings, so that their views are able to be presented clearly and their contexts are capable of being understood correctly. Several studies show that the best way for children to construct and convey meaning is drawing while talking at the same time, and both the drawing and the narrative that accompanies the drawing has proven to be a powerful combination [8]. Focusing on drawing as meaning-making moves away from the discourse of drawing as representation. The discourse of drawing as meaning-making recognizes the importance of context in children’s drawings. Context includes the availability of resources and materials as well as social and cultural elements. In the eyes of adults, the results of drawing maybe are not so favored, while more importantly, the importance of drawing as a process, rather than the drawing product. Many researchers have done much to extend the understanding of drawing as a tool for constructing and sharing meaning.

Apart from the impossibility of completely controlling all touch points in an experience, there’s positive value in intentionally relinquishing some control and encouraging customers to participate in co-creating experiences. Some of companies, like Disney and Apple are well recognized for the success of their total customer experience. Combining the power of invention, design, and marketing to create meaningful experiences for their customers provides a blueprint to achieving sustained and stable growth. The companies that recognize the importance of these experiences and provide them to become the cocreators of consumers’ lives. This type of bond between a company and a consumer goes beyond customer satisfaction and brand building. Rather than being a component of marketing or design, designing experiences that evoke meaning is the heart and soul of innovation.

2.2 Data and Experience

As symbols, Data is the storage of intrinsic meaning, a mere representation. The main purpose of data is to record activities or situations, to attempt to capture the true picture or real event [9]. Data commercialization is not unique in the information age. Humans have been using data for a long time. Throughout the historical process of data applications, the relationship between data and design can be divided into four stages. Here we use small dot to represent data and big circle to represent design (see Fig. 2).

Fig. 2.
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Four stages of data commercialization.

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In the first stage, data as extra output is usually used to deepen the perception of experience, for example, designers can make a graph of how many players have lost in the game and let the players feel his achievements in an intuitive way after experiencing a wonderful game. In the second stage, when data becomes the subsidiary force of design, data is capable of helping designers to build a good fragmented experience. For example, based on user preferences, a precise advertising system has the ability to allow users to receive useful information and avoid interference from spam ads, which partially enhance the user experience. In the third stage, as data becomes the core competency of organization, the application of data is used throughout all aspects of manufacturing and marketing to create an integrated user experience. In the fourth stage, when data becomes a kind of raw material, many companies can purchase these universal materials to make a wide variety of data products, just as garment companies buy common fabrics to produce different styles of clothing, which means a revolution that you can create a meaningful and complete experience.

In order to figure out how user experience design supports data commercialization, the Table 1 gives a summary of the relationship between data applications and impact on experience in the different stages of data commercialization.

Table 1. The relationship between data applications and impact on experience.
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3 Four Stages of Data Commercialization

3.1 Stage 1: Data as Extra Output

In the process of using products, users may temporarily leave down some data such as numbers or words in the system, most of which will be forgotten or destroyed because these data are additional outputs. At this stage, the relationship of data and design can be considered to be irrelevant or interrelated.

Whether or not these data are used depends on the designer. For example, knowing the rise and fall of Chinese dynasties helps understand the critical transitions of Chinese history and study the tradition of specific manageable history segments. Based on the overall data of social stability, economic power, technological advancement, ideological development and geographical span, scholars are able to draw a picture to show dynasties over time versus the evaluation of their strength. At times when the country was geograophically unified, political strong, culturally influential and with social stability and prosperous economy, its overall success is represented through the high raised curve line. Viewer can easily find out the regular pattern through the picture.

Another example, they can be used to deepen the player’s perception of game performance, through data visualization (see Fig. 3). The processing of data helps achieve a sense of accomplishment benefiting from intuitive data presentation and user experience. Through this interface, players can see the medals and rewards they have received this time. Although these things are all intangible spiritual incentives, players will get excitement and have the desire to continue to participate in the game.

Fig. 3.
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Data visualization in the case of data as extra output [10].

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At this stage, data is considered as extra output, which does not mean that data is unuseful. Actually data is still valuable, depending on how to use the data.

3.2 Stage 2: Data as Subsidiary Force

In today’s Internet products arena, as the User Experience Professional Association mentioned in a research report, nearly 70% of respondents underlined the importance of data-driven design [11]. This survey shows that data will effectively help designers learn to understand consumers’ habits and meet their needs accurately, because the behavior log can restore consumers’ online access path and discover the specific page that causes confusion during the transaction process. In the field of natural sciences, physicists and chemists have been experimenting with data to improve their experimental programs for hundreds of years. At this stage, data is used to improve or optimize the design inseparably, in order to give users a better experience with the product.

Kansei engineering is a typical example, which quantifies users’ various sensations by transforming their perceptions of products into data, such as heartbeat, blood pressure, sound decibel and etc. The quantification allows designers to be more rational in optimizing products, in order to increase the comfort of the product experience. Kansei Engineering is a proactive product development methodology, which translates customers’ impressions, feelings and demands on existing products or concepts into design solutions and concrete design parameters [12]. Kansei data collection and analysis is often complex and connected with statistical analysis, most of them require good expert knowledge and a reasonable amount of experience to carry out the studies sufficiently.

3.3 Stage 3: Data as Core Competency

With the right mindset, data can be cleverly commercialized to become a fountain of new services and innovation, such as Google Flu Trends [13], using data to predict the future in advance. Another example, Alibaba is evolving into a more strategic and sustainable brand-building platform, called Brand Databank, which analyses live data from consumers across its vast ecosystem by combining its massive data, which will provide brands insights into consumer behavior and, in turn, brands can use this data to segment audiences, which affects the life and death of the company. At this stage, data is the object of design, decisively influencing the quality of design results.

In the field of science and technology, self-driving car is a good case of showing the core competency of data. The challenge for driverless car designers is to produce control systems capable of analyzing sensory data in order to provide accurate detection of other vehicles and the road ahead [14]. These self-driving cars combine a variety of sensors to perceive their surroundings, such as radar, computer vision, lidar, and sonar, to collect data from different dimensions. Some of these sensors that keep an eye out for you while you can do something such as text somebody, shave, put your makeup on, watch a video, anything but pay attention to your driving. Advanced control systems fuse data from multiple sensors and interpret sensory information to identify appropriate navigation paths, which requires a lot of calculations on the data. These data are core competency undoubtedly.

In the field of humanities and arts, the core competency of data is reflected in social computing, which is based on creating or recreating social conventions, capable of outlining possible changes in human environments that could be brought about. For example, a team of social scientists in Facebook is hunting for unprecedented insights about human behavior and reshape the understanding of how our society works [15].

3.4 Stage 4: Data as Raw Materials

As data has been becoming a torrent flowing into every area of the global economy, data can be seen as the oil of the information economy [16], which means data becomes intangible corporate asset and raw material of new business models. There is strong evidence that data can play a significant economic role to the benefit not only of private commerce but also of national economies and their citizens, like creating momentous value for the economy of the world. For the entrepreneurs, in the new context of big data, when the data-driven emerging business ecosystems such as Alibaba’s Sesame Credit, China Unicom’s Wisdom Footprint, and new retail are gradually maturing, the industrial environment, product attributes, and design processes that designers serve are quite different from traditional product designs. For the artists, they can use data directly to express ideas. Through a computational process, artworks can be produced by an autonomous system based on an algorithm designed by the artist, with data sources used as raw materials. Such as Shan Shui in the World presents landscape paintings of selected places in the world generated by a computational process based on geography-related data [17]. At this stage, the world we live in today can be described by countless data sources, and design process is based on data inputs.

Many researchers argued that products and services should be encouraged to go beyond the limitations of traditional “features-and-benefits” marketing and move to a more holistic model of delivering integrated and meaningful experiences, especially for the data products. According the mode of experience economy [18], when a person buys an experience, he pays to spend time enjoying a series of memorable events that a data-driven company stages—as in a theatrical play—to engage him in a personal way. Here we propose an experience design mode: user experience in the data commercialization occurs when a company intentionally uses data infrastructure as theater, data-driven services or products as the stage, and data as props, to engage data consumers as actors in a way that creates some memorable and meaningful events (see Fig. 4).

Fig. 4.
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Experience design mode in the case of data as raw materials.

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Sample 1:

For example, the Arena of Valor, an international adaptation of Wangzhe Rongyao, is a multiplayer online battle arena mobile-game, having more than two hundred million players who are willing to pay for fictitious heroes in the game. Since all parts of the game are made with data, in a non-material form, they can be reused by many people without loss. Just by selling these virtual heroes’ virtual clothes in the game, Tencent company could account for more than 100 million yuan a day once before, which is the most prominent way to generate profits. The reason is that Tencent provides the staged experiences of the theme games based on the stable data infrastructure, free of charge for any player. In this case, the game players are data consumers, like an actor, playing the role of heroes in the game; different fictitious heroes made by data are like different props waiting on the stage to pick according to the need of the game scenes, which are data-driven; the environment of theater built by the data infrastructure is invisible but vital, capable of supporting hundreds of thousands of players simultaneously online.

Speaking of meaningful experience, players can manage to accomplish the game task together with friends from different places in the world through online voice chat, which is the most important meaning that the game can bring to the game players. Accomplishment is what they pursue, which is a sense of satisfaction that can result from productivity, focus, talent, or status by achieving goals and making something of oneself. Some player would rather endure bad food and prefer to save money to buy heroes’ virtual clothes, because they are not just buying practical functions and visual effects, but more importantly, satisfying the sense of accomplishment.

Sample 2:

Another example is TikTok mobile app, also known as Douyin in China, which is a media app for creating and sharing short videos, allowing users to create a short video of themselves which can be sped up, slowed down or edited with a filter and then upload it to share with others. All parts of the app are made with data, and it is well-known that video is also a type of data. While users are attracted to participate in the data commercialization, one of the reasons is because of the user-friendly video editing tools as well as the convenient social platform, the other is benefit of users’ demands for the sense of unity and connection with others. In this case, data consumers as actors use the App to deal with different props such as short videos and other type of data. Those video filters are driven by data, which can be considered as stage. The data infrastructure of App platform is like a theater, providing basic data application capabilities.

When it comes to the meaningful experience, these interactions among users make important meanings. And the offerings of this App are underlined by the sharing and enjoying of community, which is a sense of unity with others around us, a deeper desire for belonging, and a general connection with other human beings.

The following Table 2 gives a summary of these two samples.

Table 2. Experience design samples in data commercialization.
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Whether it is a game product, or a social product made by data, they need to provide a series of memorable events—as in a theatrical play—to engage every distinctive user in a personal way. The experience itself has a satisfying emotional quality because it possesses internal integration and fulfillment reached through ordered and organized movement [19]. Designers are responsible for creating opportunities for users to participate in the performance process, making it possible for users to accomplish certain things. Take TikTok as an example again, a video can be viewed and forwarded by tens of millions of people, not because some designer helps push, but the designer creates opportunities for tens of millions of users to participate in forwarding. The consumer is the main role, not the object to be observed and studied. Consumers can make his own decisions according to personal preferences and personalized needs instead of passively accepting the arrangement. Consumers creates new value of the data through interaction with others in the process of using the data.

After the data is commercialized as raw materials, the data products have five basic characteristics: 1. Data products exist in a non-material form and do not have the physical characteristics of appearance, size and material. Although the existence and circulation of data products need to be attached to material carriers, they are independent of material carriers. 2. The initial input cost of the data product is high, but the later replication cost is very low. Different users can have the same piece of data products at the same time. As the number of users expands, the average cost per unit of data products continues to decline, and the marginal cost of the data product tends to zero. 3. Before using the data product, the user cannot recognize and understand the content owned by the data product and must be understood by the user after a period of experience. 4. The consumption of data products does not result in any change in the content of the data. The main factor in measuring whether a data product is scrapped is the value and timeliness of the data product. 5. The process of using data products by users will further increase the value of data products, because the related operations performed in conjunction with their existing knowledge and experience will generate new data that can be developed to form new data products.

4 Conclusion

We are still at the dawn of big data, those new technologies like motion-based-simulators, virtual-reality and artificial-intelligence particularly encourage whole new genres of meaningful experience. As a series of technology trends accelerate and converge, it is necessary and urgent to do some research about how to make meaning through the experience process in the data commercialization.

Based on the case studies of data-driven products, data commercialization can be divided into four stages, namely: data as extra output, data as subsidiary force, data as core competency, and data as raw materials. The goal of the data was initially used to deepen perception of experience, gradually shift to build a good fragmented experience. With the production of amounts of data, designer should become an enabler, using data to build a good whole experience, and then further to build a meaningful whole experience, to make data possible for consumers to enjoy the meaningful process.