Yes!

As a (former) Senior LXD who’s never done traditional ID, I find this approach to experience to be key to the conversation. In fact, it’s been involved in a misunderstanding with UX experts. Particularly this one colleague who kept insisting that LXD is a mere subset of UXD, and what counts are the products/services we create for others.

The analogy which keeps coming back to my mind is health (or wellbeing, more generally) as an experience. If there’s such a thing as Health Experience Design, people probably work on medical devices and procedures by health professionals. Yet what matters most, in the end, is the transformative experience of becoming healthier. Sure, there are caregiving events. Bedside manners do matter a lot. There’s a lot of affect involved. In the end, we need a deep understanding of what it means to live healthily.

As Learning Pros, we need a deep understanding of what it means to learn. From informal learning to schooling and from corporate learning to Communities of Practice and the fifth discipline.
It’s tempting to reduce learning to a transaction (which would please web3 enthusiasts and other people who treat others like walking wallets). One might claim that each skill developed is a “transformation”… and miss what’s transformative about it.
There’s obviously nothing at all wrong with, say, creating modules helping people train themselves in handwashing. Those sure came in handy during the pandemic and they were already a classic in Instructional Design. Some of these modules evoke emotional experiences, which goes well with the “UX+ID” concept. Yet there’s something much deeper when these modules are brought to a larger context. Including that of workplace identities and organizational structure. The modules themselves are useful and there’s a huge effort spent on creating them, often with very high production value. Having taken an Air France flight, recently (because of Open Education Global), I have a strong memory of their version of the safety drill clip, as it was a very elaborate production with jokes and high quality cinematography. Yet I don’t think this video has done anything to make me a safer passenger, compared to the usual drill.

At some point, LXD can help us pay more attention to *how* people often learn together. That’s closer to Systems Design than to designing products and services. I do realize that seasoned instructional designers occasionally talk about these learning processes. Thing is, though, the outcome is the same. They’ll still focus on “designing a thing” which can be used by people as they learn together… instead of implementing meaningful change which will enhance this learning.

That’d be about transformational experiences, not instructional events.

Interesting that it’s been more a part of your experience than I see in much of what we do. As I said: “True, proper ID shouldn’t ignore it. ” Glad to hear that it’s not always lost ;).