Co-experience: Understanding user experiences in social interaction

26 1 INTRODUCTION
plemented (Alben 1997). As long as designers know for whom they are designing
(for example, themselves, other designers, a particular user group), they can
better imagine and discover what would delight and be useful for the audience.
Products and environments are contexts for experience (Overbeeke et al. 1999).
Design for user experience is respectful of its future users as represented by
people today.
However, in about the last ten years there have been a steadily increasing
number of publications from thoughtful designers and researchers who are
striving to come to grips with the concept methodologically and to connect
methods and processes to a more theoretical understanding of user experience.
Researchers have also approached the topic from many disciplines: e.g.
psychology, ethnography and philosophy. Some of the definitions refer to previous
work, but those who do often do so only selectively. To overcome this
disparity, this dissertation analyses existing user experience literature as well
as some related fields with the intention of connecting efforts to each other
and discussing their limitations. These limitations generally relate to one or
more of the following areas: the treatment of emotions, the relationship between
time and experience, the definition of context and the origin and interpretation
of meaning.
The shortcomings in the framing of the context may range from the focus
being entirely on the product without considering to what other real world experiences
and situations it should connect. The qualitative differences between
lab-based interviews or product trials and the same conducted in the real use
context are to my knowledge not available, but excluding the physical surroundings
as well as the social context may lead to a disconnected and unrealistic
evaluation of a product, be it about physical fit or social acceptability.
The study of product-related emotions is gaining popularity, but the key difference
between studying them and studying user experience is that studies
on emotion treat meaning-making processes as a problem because they distort
the reporting of emotions. However, it is not possible to describe experiences
without these processes. Secondly, the study and definition of emotions often
follows a stimulus-response type of model, but does not take into account how
emotions are interpreted and modified in social situations and used strategically
as a resource in social interaction. A more thorough review of this issue
is presented in section 2.2.
If people are to reflect meaningfully on their experiences, they need time to
do so, and if they are to determine relevance and purpose through experimentation,
they need even more time. In the case of field studies on product use,
the novelty effect may last several weeks. Adopting products into use is an even