Co-experience: Understanding user experiences in social interaction

other kinds of products. These models also emphasise a designer’s way of looking
at products and experiences rather than a user’s manner of perceiving and
evaluating them – a distinction that needs to be acknowledged in design.
In fact, many of the models, both person and product centred, can be seen as
representing personal or corporate philosophies, and have probably been created
as part of developing a business brand or profile on how a company does
good design and being distinguishable from other, competing designers. They
use terms and frameworks that are simple enough to serve as communication
tools by customers as well as for in-house use. As all designers are individuals,
what works for one may not work for another – it is the mark of growing
as a designer to develop a personal process and approach. The trend, in fact,
may be towards turning designing into a myth and avoiding actual theoretical
reflection (Buchanan 1995). Design, however, has such economic potential that
relying on a myth may not be viable. Certainly there is no need to create user
experience hype. Experience as a term is too useful to merely be used as marketing
hype and then discarded.
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2.1.3 FOCUS ON THE ACTION: FRAMEWORKS ABOUT INTERACTION
The person-centred and product-centred approaches described above have their
purposes and uses, but as the evaluations attest, there are aspects that leave
something unaccounted for. They are at times too static; they attempt to use
terms and categorisations to describe user experiences that reflect designing
more than experiencing, and in some cases time and context are not included
in the frameworks. The way to span all these aspects in an experience-oriented
way is to take interaction as the focus of study. There are currently two ways to
address interaction: from an experience-in-interaction point of view and from a
perception-and-meaning point of view. The experience-in-interaction view takes
the individual and describes his or her experiencing in relation to time. There is
the moment, what came before and what comes after. It is precisely the addition
of the moment that sets these frameworks apart from other kinds of studies on
product meaning or pleasure. The perception-and-meaning view describes the
kinds of changes that happen to how the moment is experienced.
Focusing on the interaction requires accounting both for the subjective and
the observable: what people do and how they interact. Sanders describes user
experience as the spark (see Fig. 7) between what has happened in the past
and what is expected in the future (Sanders 2003). This is the simplest of the
models.
This model provides an appealing visual for describing experience as both of
the moment (the spark) and as something that aims to connect past experiences to