Co-experience: Understanding user experiences in social interaction

context, the setting in which a person has experiences. The concept of co-experience
can help to alleviate this individualistic in design. The claim of this work
is that although experience is in its essence most unique and subjective the
way in which experiences “come to life” is a social phenomenon. Social interaction
can be seen as the context of meaning making, and at the same time its
prime motivator.
“Co-experiencing” means experiencing together, and it highlights the social
quality of this activity. As this work suggests, user experiences – the experiences
that people create for themselves and others with products – can also be seen
as interaction. This work rests on a pragmatist philosophy that treats theories
as tools and practical consequences as the measure of relevance (James 1995).
The framework for co-experience is from symbolic interactionism, a school of
sociological thought that focuses on the interpretation of meanings in social
interaction (Blumer 1986). In co-experience, people are prompted to evaluate
their experiences and offer them to the shared attention of others, and others
are thus compelled to interpret these experiences and respond in some way.
People can participate in this exchange in many ways, with or without technology
and in a variety of settings. For example, as people were using new mobile
multimedia phones to communicate with their friends, they simultaneously
came to define the purpose for the technology as mutual entertainment and
their relationships as mutual entertainers (Koskinen, 2003b). These were the
relevant experiences that they found the technology could provide. In a different
social or co-experience context the actions of the people and the purpose
of the technology could have become quite different.
People have a desire to share experiences with their near and dear, wherever
they may be and whether alone or in company. When designing for and studying
user experience, following the content of the growing shared attention, of
co-experience, gives insight both into the lives of people and to the experiences
they find meaningful.
1.2 THE EMERGING RELEVANCE OF USER EXPERIENCE
16 1 INTRODUCTION
How did user experience as a design term come about? Why is the literature on
user experience so diverse? This can be attributed to how design as a group of
disciplines has evolved in response to new technologies and changes in consumer
markets. The world of science has faced increasing specialisation of
skills, knowledge and technologies. Technologies become increasingly smaller
and more efficient while computation capacity increases, which makes technological
solutions cheaper and more widely applicable in consumer products. Pro-