Co-experience: Understanding user experiences in social interaction

28 1 INTRODUCTION
has to say about the ordinary and the possible design opportunities that have
been revealed. In studying user experience, the focus should be on the world
according to the users, not according to the designers, the professional critics
and makers of products.
Designers are interested in creating something new – to do this they need
an understanding of the current and use that as a starting point. One common
strategy is to begin by studying existing products to define the starting point.
Aside from feature lists, this evaluation process is often also an evaluation of
appearance – as Vihma notes that the semantic and aesthetic features of products
are often treated together and seem to be related (Vihma 1995: 14). Products
communicate with their form and appearance. In product semantics, products
have representational qualities, which mean they act as signs. Products
can contain iconic signs such as images, diagrams and metaphors. They can
also serve as an index, like smoke is an index for fire. Symbols refer to general
ideas; examples of such are the things that come to mind when seeing a word
or a colour – ideas that have been learned in the culture. (Vihma 1995: 68–70)
However, the question of the relationship between an object’s design and the
context in which it is evaluated is not particularly taken into account in this
treatment of meaning. The conclusions that designers can draw from observing
products in their office or studio should always be treated as designer’s
general evaluations, and not reliably representative of those of the users in
their environments.
It is also known that people bestow personal meaning on objects. For example,
these objects may be kitschy souvenirs or trinkets (Norman 2004), or any
of the many things in people’s homes, where each family member may have
their own meaning and story relating to a particular item (Csikszentmihalyi &
Rochberg-Halton 1981). Stories of meaningful or significant products can be
a good vehicle to learn about people and the things they hold important and
the experiences that are relevant. However, studies show that such personal
meanings to objects are not entirely arbitrary, and that people can guess or
empathise with many of the more general meanings that objects can have for
people. This suggests that the meanings that objects are given are not entirely
private and idiosyncratic, and that these meanings possibly have different cultural
levels as well. (Richins 1994)
The third idea that meaning is created in interaction between the person and
other people and the world is interesting, because it looks at meaning making
as a process, which accounts for change as well. This idea has existed in debate
both in phenomenology as well as in pragmatist philosophy. It is a critique
of the older Cartesian division of mind from body and the idea that thinking is