Co-experience: Understanding user experiences in social interaction

102 4 PRESENTING THE ARTICLES
cial theme was emotions. The paper uses two “technology legends” or stories of
creative social uses of a communication product. It describes the co-experience
as being social, fun, multi-modal and creative in an everyday kind of way. The
paper’s aim is to show that these aspects may not be addressed well enough
in the HCI literature and outlines the work ahead: a framework to explain the
concept, case studies and further attention on methods and processes.
ARTICLE 3, “Defining Co-experience” (Battarbee 2003b) takes the challenge
from the previous paper and attempts to define co-experience for the design
audience. The paper takes the design for user experience point of view and illustrates
it by products and experiences “coming to life” when people do things
together. The central aspect of the communication as the key element in coexperience
becomes evident as the data used here (as well as in many other
subsequent papers) comes from a multimedia messaging pilot, where the communication
can be studied as it happened in one medium between groups of
friends. The presentation at the conference demonstrated not only what was in
the messages, but extrapolated what must have happened between them, partially
reconstructing the necessary steps between them and thus showing how
the experience is shaped in the course of the messaging turns.
Articles 2 and 3 both describe co-experience but in different ways. At the time
of the writing the idea of co-experience was clear in the sense that it was about
people interacting and products being involved. Different audiences (human
computer interaction people vs designers and interaction designers) require a
different amount of background work. The point of article 2 was to point out that
shared experiences were not addressed in product design. The point of article
3 (Battarbee 2003b) was to seek to describe what was particular about shared
experiences and sharing experiences. Three main dimensions were presented:
explorative – organised, synchronous – asynchronous and creation – interpretation.
The matter of being explorative or organised is perhaps poorly phrased,
but it refers to the degree of established forms of activities. These, in hindsight,
are what can be seen as resources for interaction: if people know what is expected
of them, they can comply with it or deviate from it. When new products
or technologies are brought in, these kinds of expectations have not become
established, and it is in fact a process that continues to be upheld or changed.
The synchronicity of communication is mainly a technological standpoint, although
in practice face-to-face interactions also often leave topics and return to
them later intemittently (see e.g. newsroom conversations in Heath & Luff 2000).
The creation vs interpretation dimension mainly addresses the role of people as
consumers of content or creators of content. To some degree these are particularly
illustrated by the case of mobile multimedia messaging. Compared to article