The 12 Principles of Experience
The 12 Principles of Experience describe what happens to a person from before an experience begins until it becomes part of memory:
• How the brain predicts, selects, processes, and remembers.
• How an experience is arranged across space, time and senses.
• How a person acts within the experience.
• How relevance, identity, symbolism, history, and social context shape interpretation.
The First Principle: EXPECTATION
Expectation constructs a provisional expected version of the experience, using memory, reputation, convention, promise, price, and cultural knowledge.
The Second Principle: ORIENTATION
People require enough relational structure to understand where they are and what is possible.
They ask: where am I?
What kind of place or system is this?
What can I do here?
What is expected of me?
A person does not need to understand everything, but they need enough to continue.
The Third Principle: THRESHOLD
A detected change of state. Transition between contexts.
A narrative passage. A chance to guide.
The Fourth Principle: SEQUENCE
Order changes interpretation.
Experience unfolds moment by moment, and each moment prepares,alters, contradicts, or intensifies the next.
Meaning,attention, tension, trust, emotion,and memory emerge through temporal arrangement.
The Fifth Principle: DURATION
Felt time and measured time diverge. Duration concerns both how long an event objectively lasts and how long it seems to last within perception.
The Sixth Principle: ATTENTION
Human perception selects. It cannot process everyvaailable signal with equal priority.
The Seventh Principle: LOAD
Every experience places demand on the human system.
Load is the total perceptual, cognitive, sensory, emotional, social, navigational, timing, and decision demand creatd by each experience.
The Eighth Principle: SENSORY ROLES
Sensory channels perform different perceptual jobs:
sound, light, motion, color, shape, density, scent, material, temperature, vibration, silence, scale, and spatial acoustics contribute different forms of information and and influence bodily state, attention, memory, orientation, emotion, trust, and interpretation.
The Ninth Principle: PARTICIPATION
The relation between the person and the situation.
Participation defines what a person can do and what changes because of that action.
A click, movement, choice, gesture, delay, refusal, or contribution becomes participation only when it affects what happens next, how the situation is understood, or how other people are involved.
Consequential action increases emotional investment by connecting outcome to effort, choice, exposure, responsibility, or control.
The Tenth Principle: EMOTION
Emotion assigns bodily and motivational relevance to what is
happening, changing how the same situation is attended to, judged, remembered, and acted upon.
The Eleventh Principle: MEANING
Meaning arises when perceived events are related to knowledge, history, identity, symbolism, social use, values, and consequences beyond their immediate sensory form.
The Twelfth Principle: MEMORY
Memory preserves a selective reconstruction of an experience through fragments, relations, emotional weights, sensory traces, peaks, boundaries, and endings.
What survives becomes prior knowledge, and prior
knowledge supplies the predictions through which the following encounter begins.
