Co-experience: Understanding user experiences in social interaction

3.1 REALITY SEEKS THEORY FOR SERIOUS PARTNERSHIP
80 3 CO-EXPERIENCE
In 1998 an EU project called Maypole was developing concepts to support social
communication among children and their immediate family and peers. The team
at Helsinki University of Technology engaged in a host of different activities
involving children, foam and cardboard models and real products, each tried
and learned from in turn (Maypole 1999). Experiences with prototypes were useful
and guided towards a common research interest, but the most interesting
study – in fact the seed for this work – came from field studies (Article 1, Mäkelä
& Battarbee 1999). The first was a field study of a kid computer called in2it, a
product never launched on the market. Five siblings used the in2its for a week
and were interviewed about their use. The second was a field experiment with
Gameboy Cameras. Two groups of children used gameboy cameras and printers
for a week, taking pictures, editing them and printing them out as small
stickers. The interviews took place after the week and the children showed us
copies of the pictures they had taken describing what they had done, where
and with whom. The results of their activities are described in the following
scenario sketches (Figures 18 & 19).
In these examples the important experience and explorations of the products
are not private and individual, but social and shared. New kinds of uses
and applications emerge and are tried out in collaborative use. The models of
user experience that are described in Chapter 2, while addressing social needs
in general, do not, for the most part, take into account what happens to user
experiences in interaction when people start collaborating, communicating and
doing things together.
These aspects have been addressed in some other fields of research. The children
in the scenarios are clearly having fun, but can this be explored in terms
of user experience? The interaction approaches in Chapter one (Forlizzi & Ford
2000, Wright et al. 2003) come closest to breaking the invisible conceptual barrier
that surrounds the individual in user experience frameworks. Forlizzi and
Ford (2000) describe storytelling interactions that result in meaning-making or
narrative experiences. Wright et al. (2003) describe processes of meaning making
that are part of experience. Although these – recounting, anticipating etc.
– can happen in self-talk, a social activity that treats the self as a subject, most
often these meaning making interactions involve other people. Both models
state that things are made meaningful or become meaningful, but neither the
presence nor absence of others is elaborated.