CO-EXPERIENCE: PRODUCT EXPERIENCE AS SOCIAL INTERACTION

Publisher Summary This chapter describes some works on the notion of user experience. It elaborates the concept by situating it in social interaction. It relates the work discussed in it to other work in this area as a brief theoretical excursus. It illustrates the work through two examples. The first is more research-focused, intended to illustrate conceptual aspects of the work. The second is more design-oriented, illustrating how sensitivity to social aspects of experience can be taken into account in interpreting user research and integrating it into actual design work. Throughout the work, it takes it as an axiom that experience takes place in a social setting. It coins the term coexperience as convenient shorthand for this feature. In theoretical terms, this term is an elaboration of the user experience model introduced by Forlizzi and Ford (2000) , which is mainly indebted to the pragmatic philosophy of John Dewey (1934) . However, since its aim has been to push the social grounds of experience to the forefront, we have built primarily on Herbert Blumer’s thinking (1968) in our attempt to understand coexperience as social action. Shifting attention to the social grounds of experience has an additional methodological benefit. Unlike cognitive states, social action is directly observable. It can be studied by simple means without recourse to complex, contested theories of, say, how the brain functions or wearable technological devices for measuring and monitoring the body’s various states.