Co-experience: Understanding user experiences in social interaction

spaces illustrates, merely telling someone that an aspect is important may not
be enough: it has to be anchorable to some kind of personal experience. A key
part of experience is that it is marked by emotions. Emotions help to prioritise
matters, to determine the significance of one alternative compared to another
(e.g. Damasio 2000). Personal experience is what turns information into knowledge,
something that is actionable.
How can designers then get the experience to which to connect the information?
This is done the same way any person can learn: from others and by trying
it out oneself. Even if the exact experience of others cannot be known, approximations
can and should be sought by seeking experiences with similar contexts,
situations, actions and products. The experiences then are used as a learning
tool: they are compared and contrasted to what other people do and how they
behave. Learning about experiences is a process of interpretation where different
elements and senses contribute to an emerging understanding.
The ability for a person to relate to another’s experience ranges from complete
incomprensibility (as for example a foreign culture, different gender or different
abilities) to having developed a sense of a closely shared experience and
being able to discuss and understand them with the help of shared reference
points (see e.g. Yerkovich’s study on establishing a gossip relationship, Koskinen
2000). The way in which a sense of rapport (it could also be called empathy
or intimacy) is established is with subtle body language: mimicry, mirroring and
synchrony of gestures, moves and expressions (Hatfield et al. 1994). The study
of emotional contagion suggests that the reason it is so necessary for designers
to truly interact with the people they are designing for is the fact that building
rapport, the element necessary for developing the conditions for empathy and
role taking, is something that happens in face-to-face interaction.
People have a great ability to imagine actions and consequences from their
own point of view or from the point of view of another person they know (McCall
& Simmons), and this can be leveraged in design. The use of personas (Cooper
1999) to embody design criteria in the form of person descriptions and the use
of extreme characters to explore interaction ideas (Djajadiningrat et al. 2000)
are both good examples.
Verbal stories of experiences focus more on the meanings of the experience
than the sensations and feelings themselves. Communicating experiences to
others is an act of reconstructing past memories into descriptive, coherent,
even story-like elements (for a detailed study on stories see Sacks et al. 1995,
and on stories in the workplace Orr 1996). Photo albums are good examples
of how artefacts support storytelling and how stories are constructed for others
(Frohlich et al. 2002). When a person is talking about experiences, she may
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