Co-experience: Understanding user experiences in social interaction

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MARY
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This dissertation focuses on user experience, and in particular co-experience:
user experiences in social interaction. User experience is a term that has become
popular in user centred design in recent years. It offers a holistic approach to
understanding the relationship between the user and product, and the experiences
that result from their interaction.
However, a review of the current user experience literature reveals that the
term user experience lacks a common definition. Instead, it is often used to
embrace a broader context for design that relates to the needs, emotions and
experiences of users and to the products that contribute to them. It then depends
on the field of design how broad and inclusive the definition becomes.
In concept design the focus is on the experiences that the future users find
meaningful, useful and delightful, which are used instead of the more common
problem-solving approach as the starting point for design. In the design of interactive
content, the focus tends to be on the interface solution itself. However,
there is also research that attempts to define user experience in a way that is
theoretically informed. These recent approaches define user experience as both
the “moment” of interaction and its different qualities between person and environment,
as well as the meaning making activities that relate the past to the
present and anticipate the future. It is the aspect of meaning and its relationship
to time that is often lacking from the practice-oriented approaches.
In the design literature there is a clear bias towards treating experience as
a private phenomenon and supporting ways to let people express what they
have experienced to researchers and designers. However, the social interaction
situation influences what is communicated and how. When deciding how to share