42 3 TheFoundations of Human-Experiential Design Sometimes designers and design researchers blindly accept that methods guar- antee a satisfactory design achievement. Methods are however not a guarantee of superior design. We should not forget that a design method is a tool in the explicit way, and it can be said that all theorizing processes and theoretical models are incomplete. Hall (1976) pointed out that: by definition, they are abstractions and therefore leave things out. What things they leave out is as important as, if not more important than, what they do not, because it is what is left out that gives structure and form to the system. (Hall 1976, p. 14) This ‘leaving out’ has tended to equal avoidance of the complicatedness of the real worldandofhumans.Designhasbeen‘scientific’totheextentthatithaskeptaway from dealing with everyday concerns. But beneath the clearly perceived, highly explicit surface phenomena there lies the rest of the world. The underneath and the surface are inseparable. Integrated Design Science: Towards Human-Experiential Design An integrated approach to design seeks to take account of both overt and covert aspects, the implicit and the explicit, the things that are externalised in talk and the things that are not. In this book we propose human-experiential design as such an approach that can be applied to our everyday lives, including aspects that are implicit, oftenunconscious,andarenoteasilyexternalisableinwords–wayswhich, as it were, only our bodies know. Information and communication technologies already, and will increasingly, mediate our experience of the world and people around us, from mobile phones to homeentertainmentandimmersivecomputergames,toliving/housingenvironment, public spaces architecture in general (Wiberg 2011). As we discussed in Chap. 1, the future of the human sense of presence, of being in the world in the here and now, will reflect the rapid development of ever more pervasively penetrating digital technologies (Waterworth et al. 2010). The ultimate in presence is a perceivedexperiencethroughtechnologyasifdirectlythoughthehumansensesand perceptual processes – the illusion of non-mediation (Lombard and Ditton 1997). It is currently unusual to achieve this state, since technology is most often designedonthebasisofexplicitconceptualknowledge,while humansensationand perception is rather an embodied implicit phenomenon. Human beings therefore have to adapt to the mediating technologies, even though human behaviours are naturally expressed as a natural flow of action based on the experience of being present in an environment. How can technology be designed to allow humans to experience an integrated sense of presence in the physical world as mediated by technology? In user-centred HCI, we usually answer the question of how to design in this way: “Designers should conduct user studies, users should be involved in a design process.” But is this enough?