Nonsense and Transformative Experience - From Breaking Meaning to Making Meaning

Transformative experiences are intellectually and emotionally cohesive experiences that shift how people view the world. For designers, developing these experiences can prove difficult. In this work, I argue that nonsense can provide an engaging route to transformations. Usually understood as "meaningless" acts, nonsense may seem like an enemy to understanding. On the contrary, I argue that nonsense can aid people in the meaning-making process. When nonsense is resolved - that is, when a user reorganizes information that has been disorganized - a change in cognition occurs. This change is not passive: it is active emotional and intellectual learning, which relates directly to the imperative of designing for transformative experiences. While both defying expectations and working within them, nonsense can pleasantly disrupt the status quo and inspire real change in people. Nonsense - through the organization, disorganization, and reorganization of information that it necessitates - relies on the disruption of expectation as its primary route to transformative experience. In a cross-disciplinary overview of the cognitive roots of nonsense and its manifestations in the fine arts and linguistics, I explore how nonsense can be used as a powerful rhetorical device. From this exploration, I have developed a set of heuristics for designers who want to create the framework for transformative experiences