Co-experience: Understanding user experiences in social interaction

veen’s alarm clock (ibid.) is interesting, but the final stage of the scenario is still
missing: if I slam the alarm clock controls to set the time, how would the alarm
clock respond? Should it have the possibility for reflexive emotions as well?
Would it sulk, or be fearful? Would it behave angrily back at me? Would it be all
the more friendly and eager to cheer me up or would it refuse to work under
abusive conditions? Without risking losing the actual waking up service, how
am I supposed to determine this? And what are my emotions if I accidentally
offend my alarm clock beyond apology? Will my enjoyment in alarm clock use
centre around the subversive pleasures of torturing the poor device to its limits,
rather than the more elegant satisfaction of interacting with it beautifully
and expressively?
Clearly an alarm clock is a simple thing that serves an important function
in our society, and there is no reason why products with important functions
should be boring or tedious to interact with. However, the motivations for interacting
with products and using them go beyond mere utility.
Focusing on one person only reveals half of how the experience is shaped as
people try things out, evaluate outcomes, laugh, tease, get upset or find a new
thing to talk about. When people act together, they come to create unpredictable
situations where they must respond to each other’s actions creatively. They
influence each other and create experiences for each other. If social interaction
is described only as belonging to the same general concept of context along
with objects and spaces, the actual impact that social interactions have on experiences
becomes overlooked. However, people generally behave in ways that
allow others to anticipate the general direction of a likely outcome. Experiences
also exist in this volatile, and yet relatively predictable, world. Focusing only
on the individual or the product, or the individual interacting with the product,
do not account for all that happens in the real world.
As studies on social interaction (Goffman 1961) suggest, people in general
are motivated by the search for meaning, rather than emotion. Emotions are a
resource, a tool, a bargaining chip, and their value depends on the meanings
that they are attached to. This is in some ways an issue of scale. Emotions,
negative, positive and ambivalent, are but elements that influence the search
and interpretation of meaning in experience.
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2.3 SHARING THE SUBJECTIVE
As described in Chapter 1, designers have always delivered more than functionality
and used form and material elegantly, playfully, aesthetically and expressively.
Moreover, the people who use, handle and own products have experi-