Co-experience: Understanding user experiences in social interaction

ple explore a product or a technology. The new uses that people invent can seem
self-evident and small unless followed carefully (article 3 Battarbee 2003b).
Only later, people settle to certain uses (Koskinen 2003). Some changes take
months to become part of routine (Millen 2000). Thus, in a study of mobile
multimedia messaging, participants started to use mobile multimedia phones
and ended up collectively defining the purpose and meaning of the technology
for them (Koskinen 2003, Kurvinen 2003). Utilitarian uses did not emerge
more than in an isolated incident, but the participants came to a (mostly nonasserted)
agreement that the purpose for their messaging was, in fact, mutual
entertainment. Here the participants were recruited as groups of friends
through one person, and such an explanation makes sense because of the nature
of the social ties.
The key to applying the concept of co-experience is that people’s actions
are social even when they are alone. In any given situation, all the person’s social
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FIGURE 23
This is a more radical departure of the concept of motorised transport. It is
called RIOT (Reinventing Of The Wheel) and is here being demonstrated at
the Burning Man festival in 2003. The RIOT is a large wheel with a motorised
hub and a balanced seat in front. The RIOT challenges previous concepts
of monowheels with an imaginative design. The purpose of the RIOT is to
reintroduce thrill and excitement to the experience of motorised transportation.
© Jake Lyall 2003 http://theriotwheel.com/.