Co-experience: Understanding user experiences in social interaction

4 PRESENTING
THE ARTICLES
This ordering of the articles is not in strict accordance with the chronological
order of the publications, although the key developments are in order. ARTICLE
1, “It is fun to do things together” (Mäkelä & Battarbee 1999), predates all of the
others considerably. Its focus is on the use of existing products in field experiments
to learn about what is fun for children about a particular technological
possibility. The paper has elements that are key to the idea of co-experience,
but it is not written from the user experience point of view. In fact this paper
is a starting point; the shortcomings of existing models for user experience
were revealed when they did not seem to address the point of the paper, the
experiences of doing together, in a satisfactory way. Thus emerged the need to
discover how this could be accounted for in the field of design for user experience.
The paper proposes that fun – or the enjoyment derived from using the
Gameboy Camera – for these users was related to doing together. This insight,
initially suggested by the first author Anu Kankainen (née Mäkelä) and then
presented for the first Computers and Fun seminar in York, is the cornerstone
that has helped to orient all the various papers together into a research direction.
My task in this publication was the reporting of the studies. This result
was not explored further at that time by the authors.
A first attempt at explaining the need for a new concept for describing shared
product experiencing happened in a CHI short paper called “Co-Experience: the
Social User Experience”, here (ARTICLE 2 Battarbee 2003a). The conference’s spe-