Readiness Design - A category of Experience Design for situated human availability

This foundational working paper proposes Readiness Design as a category of experience design concerned with how people enter or return to a task. A person may have the skills, resources, and motivation to act and still find it difficult to begin. Readiness Design treats that passage as something designers can shape by considering the person’s starting conditions, the demands of the intended activity, and the environment in which the transition occurs. The paper introduces Readiness Integrity as the principle of considering the starting conditions, intended activity, and passage together. It describes Continuing Deliberation as the process of revisiting design decisions as conditions change. It also distinguishes experiences that offer readiness support directly, experiences that prepare people to engage with another offering, and preparation for responsibilities that may arise with little notice. A PowerUp example illustrates the approach through the experience of returning to reading amid surrounding noise. The paper traces the design adaptation to B. K. S. Iyengar’s commentary on Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras and draws on informal participant accounts to describe how people experienced it. The paper connects the proposed category to existing design scholarship and identifies questions for further research on how readiness experiences are composed, used, and evaluated.