Co-experience: Understanding user experiences in social interaction

pretation act to shape the experience into the desired direction. The social situation
creates the incentive to respond and continue.
CO-EXPERIENCE IS MULTI-MODAL
Co-experience, like human–human communication, is multi-modal. The richness
of face-to-face communication and the setting it takes place in can be
augmented with various communication technologies. What is begun in one
modality or channel may continue seamlessly in another. Technologies divide
the interaction possibilities into more specialised niches, which users utilise
creatively to meet their needs.
CO-EXPERIENCE IS CREATIVE
Co-experience is about people’s everyday creativity. Sanders [8] points out that
when people use technology together, they produce much more creative and
interesting results than when people user products just on their own. Co-experience
is a creative resource, it is what propels social innovation. However,
the creativity in co-experience is not about creating products or art. It is about
the ways in which participants make things meaningful for others, the way in
which they use the tools to create the experiences.
CO-EXPERIENCE IS FOR FUN
Co-experience is something people do for pleasure – to have fun together, to
pass the time, to keep in touch and to strengthen social ties. This means taking
“having fun” seriously [7] as the driving force behind co-experience and as
a motivation in its own right.
CONCLUSIONS
116 4 PRESENTING THE ARTICLES
Future work on co-experience requires practical work: studying co-experience
for design, developing the process and tools to do so, and applying and communicating
the findings. A framework of co-experience needs to be developed.
Finally, co-experience should be seen as the product’s adoption into human life.
The other, individualistic aspects of user experience precede and complement
it, so that both individual and social experiences find their balance.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Prof. Ilpo Koskinen for support and advice and Sampsa Piira and Andrea
Botero for the example stories.