Katja Battarbee

UNDERSTANDING USER EXPERIENCES IN SOCIAL INTERACTION

2004

Academic dissertation
Publication series of the University of Art and Design Helsinki A 51

Publication Series of the Universityof Art and Design Helsinki A 51
http://www.uiah.fi/publications© Katja Battarbee
Graphic Design: Kalle Järvenpää
English Revision: Cindy Kohtala
All photographs by the author(s),unless stated otherwise.
All photographs published with permission.
ISBN 951-558-158-3 (printed book)ISBN 951-558-161-3 (electronic book)
ISSN 0782-1832
Yleisjäljennös – Painopörssi
Printed in Helsinki, 2004

FOR YOUC

ONTENTSS UMMARYA CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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INTRO
DUCTION15

1.1 FOCUS AND AIMS OF THE STUDY

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1.2 THE EMERGING RELEVANCE OF USER EXPERIENCE

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1.3 WHAT IS DESIGN FOR USER EXPERIENCE?

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1.4 USER EXPERIENCE AND MEANING

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1.5 DATA AND METHODS30

1.6 THE STRUCTURE OF THE DISSERTATION

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USER EXPERIENCE
DEMYSTIFIED

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2.1 USER EXPERIENCE THEORIES AND FRAMEWORKS

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2.2 EMOTIONS AND USER EXPERIENCE

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2.3 SHARING THE SUBJECTIVE

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CO-EXPERIENCE

3.1 REALITY SEEKS THEORY FOR SERIOUS PARTNERSHIP

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3.2 DESIGN FOR CO-EXPERIENCE

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3.3 REFLECTION

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PRESENTING

THE ARTICLES

1101IT’S FUN TO DO THINGS TOGETHER– TWO CASES OF EXPLORATIVE USER STUDIES

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CO-EXPERIENCE – THE SOCIAL USER EXPERIENCE

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DEFINING CO-EXPERIENCE

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CO-EXPERI-ENCE – USER EXPERIENCE AS INTERACTION

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UNDERSTANDING EXPERIENCE IN INTERACTIVE SYSTEMS

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6POOLS AND SATELLITES – INTIMACY IN THE CITY

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R

EFERENCES

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PPENDIX:HISTORICAL TIMELINE

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S

UMMARYThis 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 tounderstanding 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 theterm user experience lacks a common definition. Instead, it is often used toembrace a broader context for design that relates to the needs, emotions andexperiences 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 findmeaningful, 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 istheoretically informed. These recent approaches define user experience as boththe “moment” of interaction and its different qualities between person and environment, as well as the meaning making activities that relate the past to thepresent 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 asa private phenomenon and supporting ways to let people express what they8

have experienced to researchers and designers. However, the social interaction
situation influences what is communicated and how. When deciding how to shareare appropriate for sharing and how they need to be presented to offer desirable interpretations. Therefore, direct involvement with future users should bebalanced with empathic observation of interactions between future users andthe experiences they determine meaningful for each other.
However, despite understanding the current state of the users’ life, it is difficult, if not impossible to predict changes in people’s behaviours when a newtechnology or product is introduced into their lives. This thesis proposes thatto study co-experience, experience prototyping should happen early and in thefield, in the real social and physical contexts of the future users’ lives. By observing how users lift up experiences for each other and how others interpretand respond to them, researchers can begin to develop an empathic understanding of the experiences that are relevant for users. At the same time, it is possible
to study the interaction with the products and the emergence of meanings andpurposes for technology. By focusing on co-experience, user experiences andthe adoption and appropriation of products and technology are not artificiallyseparated, but all three happen in context as they are studied over time.

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an experience, the recipient is used as a resource to determine what experiencesA

CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The birthplace of this dissertation is an academic community that is interested
in current user centred design, best practices, method development and related
theoretical and philosophical issues. As a member of this user centred design
fan club I have also followed the latest articles and books and followed the activities of the key figures in the field. With fellow fans I have evaluated bits of
information and debated identified problems and improvement suggestions.
One of the topics this community has been writing and talking about in thepast years is user experience. It has been rewarding and challenging to moveup from being observer to become one that plays the field, this dissertation
connecting many previous pitches into an actual game plan.
The running joke is that designers do not read, they look at the pictures. It is
proven that designers can be taught to read and write as well, but at heart we
still are make-doers, eager to apply, impatient with purpose and ready to snatch
and run off with anything that looks like it might fit. Meanwhile, decades, if notcenturies, worth of research elsewhere has been dedicated to pondering thelight matters of experience and meaning. Negotiating a path that neither denies
design what it needs, nor pretends the other research does not exist would be
difficult without a knowledgeable guide. Thanks to my supervisor Ilpo Koskinen,
who showed me how to turn my work into a thesis – a feat I still find amazing.
Also, the comments from the evaluators Minna Isomursu and Kees Overbeeke
greatly helped in the final stages of revision.
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Thanks also to good friends and colleagues! Tuuli Mattelmäki, Esko Kurvinen
and Salu Ylirisku have been good friends, research companions and office mates.

extend my gratitude to all fellow smart researchers of past and present. A special thanks to Turkka Keinonen and Simo Säde, who have defended their dissertations before me. They also originally put me in touch with Anu Kankainen
and the hugely inspiring Maypole project – which is the true starting point forthis work.
There are other people I wish to thank also. Andrea Botero is a dear friend
with wisdom, curiosity, humour and integrity. Thank you for bringing to me
to many thoughts, sources and ideas that I might not have found on my own.
Stephan Wensveen and Tom Djajadiningrat from TU Eindhoven have helped
keep these northern corners aware of the ongoings of the rest of the world’s
research activities, and commiserated with paper writing hardships. Jodi Forlizzi from Carnegie Mellon has brought to me opportunities I would never haveimagined seeking and has been a helpful critic and collaborator. I have met
many more wonderful people at projects, courses, classes, workshops and visits over the years, all over the place (Helsinki, Tampere, Liverpool, Eindhoven,
London, Ivrea, Delft, Pittsburgh, Copenhagen, Sønderborg, Boston…) You are
too numerous to list here but all remembered nonetheless. Thanks also to Kaisa,
Aila, Maria, Osse, Joona, Oliver, and the many other people who keep things
going on the 8th floor. Some of you have known me since when I started my BA
in 1993 (time flies!) – but it has been a pleasure to stick around.
Thanks (kiitos, gracias, etc.) to all my friends near and far who have both
kept me on track and provided distraction, in suitable amounts.
The funding that has made this work and its reporting possible is gratefully
acknowledged to a large part to the Academy of Finland through two separate
projects: the Usability of Smart Products in Information Society and Living in
Metamorphosis – Control and Awareness in a Proactive Home Environment.
Other contributors are also the telecom operator Radiolinja (now known as
Elisa) with the Mobile multimedia messaging project and the University of Art
and Design Helsinki with other intermediate employment as well as numerous
travel grants. A scholarship grant from the Nokia Foundation has also been instrumental in publishing and finishing the work.
Kalle Järvenpää gave this work a visual style and appearance that in my opinion greatly contributes to the reading experience. Thanks also to the Publications unit, Annu and Sanna, for managing the publishing process.
Finally: dear immediate and extended family and dear Brian: it’s done!

Happy co-experiencing!

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It takes a group to turn a design student into a researcher, and I would like toFOCUS AND AIMS OF THE STUDY
THE EMERGING RELEVANCE OF USER EXPERIENCEWHAT IS DESIGN FOR USER EXPERIENCE?
USER EXPERIENCE AND MEANINGDATA AND METHODSTHE STRUCTURE OF THE DISSERTATION

1.1
1.2
1.3
1.4
1.5
1.6

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INTRODUCTION

1.1 FOCUS AND AIMS OF THE STUDY
The seed for this thesis was found in a project for developing social communication concepts for children. More specifically, it was a field study with groupsof children and Gameboys with the camera accessory. The first published article(Mäkelä & Battarbee 1999) described these findings in terms of fun. However,it became a more interesting challenge to try to understand the results fromthe point of view of user experience. The existing frameworks for explaining
user experience were a poor fit with results from field studies on new productuse. Why were children mainly trying out products together? Why did these
theories and frameworks not seem to address this? What was missing fromuser experience literature, and how could these findings help to identify andconstruct the missing element? This led to a review of existing approaches andtheir strengths, weaknesses and mutual relationships. The aim of this dissertation is to introduce a social interaction approach to user experience to design
to balance the bias favouring an individualistic view of experience. Design canbe defined in a broad sense as the conception and planning of the artificial(Buchanan 1995), but more specifically this work deals with user research andconcept design of products and interaction.
Meaning as a component of user experience has often been somewhat overlooked. In many cases meaning is seen as merely part of a general, unspecified

context, the setting in which a person has experiences. The concept of co-experience can help to alleviate this individualistic in design. The claim of this workis that although experience is in its essence most unique and subjective theway in which experiences “come to life” is a social phenomenon. Social interaction can be seen as the context of meaning making, and at the same time its
prime motivator.
“Co-experiencing” means experiencing together, and it highlights the social
quality of this activity. As this work suggests, user experiences – the experiencesthat people create for themselves and others with products – can also be seen
as interaction. This work rests on a pragmatist philosophy that treats theories
as tools and practical consequences as the measure of relevance (James 1995).
The framework for co-experience is from symbolic interactionism, a school ofsociological thought that focuses on the interpretation of meanings in social
interaction (Blumer 1986). In co-experience, people are prompted to evaluate
their experiences and offer them to the shared attention of others, and others
are thus compelled to interpret these experiences and respond in some way.
People can participate in this exchange in many ways, with or without technology and in a variety of settings. For example, as people were using new mobile
multimedia phones to communicate with their friends, they simultaneously
came to define the purpose for the technology as mutual entertainment andtheir relationships as mutual entertainers (Koskinen, 2003b). These were therelevant experiences that they found the technology could provide. In a different social or co-experience context the actions of the people and the purposeof the technology could have become quite different.
People have a desire to share experiences with their near and dear, wherever
they may be and whether alone or in company. When designing for and studying user experience, following the content of the growing shared attention, of
co-experience, gives insight both into the lives of people and to the experiences
they find meaningful.

1.2 THE EMERGING RELEVANCE OF USER EXPERIENCE
1 INTRODUCTION

How did user experience as a design term come about? Why is the literature onuser experience so diverse? This can be attributed to how design as a group of
disciplines has evolved in response to new technologies and changes in consumer markets. The world of science has faced increasing specialisation ofskills, knowledge and technologies. Technologies become increasingly smaller

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and more efficient while computation capacity increases, which makes technological solutions cheaper and more widely applicable in consumer products. Pro-

Although designers have always had to work with other disciplines, in practice people need to know about each other’s work as well to collaborate effectively. Edeholt and Löwgren cite Jantsch’s original concepts from 1972 of multi-, cross- and interdisciplinary collaboration. These are part of a hierarchy ofcollaboration between disciplines, each are able to address a higher degree ofcomplexity. (Edeholt & Löwgren 2003) Today an even higher level of disciplinemix can be identified: transdisciplinary work combines methods and knowledge adapted from other disciplines. In the field of new product concept andtechnology development designers need to talk to users, their team, executives
and other stakeholders alike (Fulton Suri 2004). For this they need concepts
that go beyond one discipline’s boundaries, which are holistic and inclusive of
all the aspects that need to be part of the design domain. User experience asa concept is already being used in this way. The following section follows thehistory and emergence of the term user experience to this day. The historicalreview is complemented with a timeline combining the evolution of design,
computing, inventions and research (see the Appendix).
1.2.1 TOWARDS USER CENTRED DESIGN
Although user centredness could be reviewed from other disciplines as well,from the point of view of this work it is relevant to do it from and industrial
design perspective. Industrial design has always had to deal with the separationof client and user, and to do so in a business and production context. The first
designers to be called industrial designers worked already a century ago. Rather
than merely designing a product, as had mostly been the case, they took as
their challenge to also design its production and presentation. Design was also
more than just business; it embodied values and ideology. For example, both
the Arts and Crafts spokesperson Moore as well as designers of the Modernist
movement believed that good design would bring more happiness to people’s
lives while both movements had differing ideas of what counted as good design (Tambini 1996). Joining AEG in Germany in 1907 as artistic advisor, Peter
Behrens influenced not only the designs of products but also of the factories.
His strategy for standardisation and interchangeability of components was a
success for both design and business. Behrens also sought a new aesthetic andfreed the new products of the decorative cultural baggage of earlier methodsof production. (Buddensieg 1984) Industrial product design called for an industrial form language.
Industrial design and its ideological and aesthetic impact spread and grewin Europe; for example the famous Bauhaus school was founded in 1919 by a pro-17

duction cycles are short and the stakes for success in the marketplace are high.

tegé of Behrens, Walter Gropius. The 1925 world exhibition of Modern Decorativeand Industrial Arts in Paris showcased many modernist designs, and in fact thisexhibition transferred the idea of modern design to the United States. There it
was soon taken up on a large scale, and consequently both Loewy, known forhis streamline aesthetics, and Dreyfuss, known for his human factors and shopfloor production approach to design, opened their respective offices in 1929.
Loewy later became known as the streamline stylist and Dreyfuss contributed
to the development of a user centred and research driven approach to design.
(Tambini 1996)
In Designing for People (1974, first edition in 1955) Dreyfuss describes his
five principles for design: Utility and safety, Maintenance, Cost, Sales appealand Appearance. Dreyfuss also describes his human factors (known on the European side as ergonomics) research, the use of anthropometric data as characters Joe and Josephine. He describes design cases and how good design practice is made to happen with sketches, visualisations and prototypes, throughvisits to factories, production plants and offices, and by taking courses in sewing, apprenticing with a telephone repair man and selling alarm clocks at the
department store.
“… if people are made safer, more comfortable, more eager to purchase, more efficient – or just plain happier – by contact with the
product, then the designer has succeeded.” (Dreyfuss: Designing for
People, 1974)
The emergence of human factors can be traced to Taylor’s “scientific management”, practised in the early 1900s and published as a book in 1911. It advertises the detailed study of work broken down into small tasks, analysed, timed
and studied and re-organised for maximum efficiency. According to the philosophy, management is responsible for selecting and training workers whoare best suited to their tasks. In optimising efficiency, science was to replacerules of thumb: objective measurement and analysis provided information on
the previously mysterious nature of work (see e.g. Modern History Sourcebook).
1 INTRODUCTION

Taylor’s stopwatch studies were used by human factors researchers well into
the 1960s (Tambini 1996). This is in line but also in stark contrast with for example Dreyfuss’ empathic and humane approach.
1.2.2 DESIGNING PERCEPTIONS

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How did it happen that the mention of the word “apple” causes some computer
users to sneer and others to express great enthusiasm? Or that certain types ofthat small stitched labels on clothes say something about who you are? It is also
worth nothing that you are not supposed to sew them on yourself.
Symbols such as emblems, signatures, initials, heraldry and watermarks havebeen used for centuries on products to identify producer or trader and guarantee quality of produce (Haig 2003). As producing and creating new products
became an increasing business, companies needed to enable consumers to recognise products as theirs when seeing them in stores and catalogues. Productsof the same manufacturer were made identifiable because of shared visual ordesign elements or qualities in the design. Recognition did not have to rely ona long history; it could also be designed as any other aspect of the product.
The first systematic corporate image development took place at AEG in Germany at the hands of artistic director Behrens at around 1907. Setting standards for products and interchangeable parts was important also at the corporate level to make managing products and parts easier. What AEG stood for was
made concrete in visuals, factory buildings and products, each contributing
to the common image (Buddensieg 1984). Corporate image was later also addressed in Italy in the thirties at Olivetti – despite a lack of design schools andindustrial designers as such, artists and architects were employed to design
Olivetti’s advertising, exhibitions, products and factories to a high standard(Kicherer 1990). Philips was a leading technology product developer already inthe 30s. In the United States corporate branding emerged in the late 1950s andearly 1960s as IBM and Westinghouse integrated the design of their products,
graphic materials and even architecture to the consultants’ guidelines. (Cagan& Vogel 2002)
As in the cases mentioned above, the use of industrial designers to improve
the appearance and style of products and product lines boosted sales – and not
only of consumer products but of industrial machines as well. The new consumers of the post-war United States were the large middle class who could
now afford a new kind of life style and consumer products – this was the introduction of mass markets. Youth culture emerged in the 50s and 60s, creating a
new and eager market segment for whom to market and design. Some companies restyled their products every year to boost sales – designed obsolescencewas wasteful but provided more work and business. Some companies rejected
this path, and for example Braun’s home appliances were known to be durable,
long-lasting products with a style of their own. (Tambini 1996)
In the 1970s the values that had maintained the mass markets began to disintegrate. An increased awareness of the needs of special user groups and a growing demand for quality and safety split the market into smaller niches. People’s

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fizzy flavoured water seem to be about all but thirst or even the flavour? Or even

expectations were higher, and went beyond their own immediate needs, wants
and desires. Designers also felt the need for social responsibility to people
with disabilities. As the mass markets crumbled, it became necessary to target
particular tastes and attitudes. (Cagan & Vogel 2002) Design management entered the business stage.
Branding, the strategic and co-ordinated design of products, graphics andadvertising, aims to create a coherent brand image behind the product. These
product identities are used to address specific target audiences. A good product with a good brand is more profitable than just a good product, but failures in maintaining the brand also increase losses. Branding also means thata good product does not necessarily succeed on its merits alone (Haig 2003).
The marketing and business literature follows design trends closely. The term
“experience” was perhaps first applied to design in the context of brands andin talking about brand experiences. In the late nineties, marketing literature
introduced the term “experience economy” (Pine & Gilmore 1998). Companies
were observed to be offering more than just materials, products and services.
To differentiate in competition, the experience (of eating, shopping, buying or
using the product) had to stand out from the rest and deliver experiences aswell. In his analysis of society and the business of experience, Jensen (1996)
claims that people prefer buying a story that has a product attached to it. People are prepared to pay more for eggs that tell the story of a happy chicken
laying her eggs in an idyllic farmyard setting. Although this particular example could be seen as an ideological choice, plenty of other examples that are
more purely experience-related can be found. This suggests that experience as
a commodity will have a great impact on the ways that business is conductedin the western world.
1.2.3 FROM INTERFACES TO INTERACTION
The transition from fuel-powered mechanical machines to electronic products
has had a great impact on design and the development of the disciplines that
support it. This leap from cogs to electrons has forced disciplines to look at use
and the user much more closely, although it took almost half a century from the
1 INTRODUCTION

first computers to computer chips being common in consumer products.
The first computing machines of the 1930s were not much more than extremely delicate and large calculators. They existed in special labs and wereoperated by expert engineers. Programming was first hardware-based, thencommand-based and later programming languages and compilers were devel-

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oped to make programming and debugging easier. (History of Computing) The
challenge in operating computing products was that their functionality was elec-

early usability studies, however, did not come about with the development ofcomputers, but instead in a military context, in the cockpits of fighter planes.
During the Second World War only the best men were trained to be pilots but
no matter how well they were selected and trained, many pilots crashed theirplanes needlessly. After some time it was determined that what needed improvement was the cockpit and its controls, leading to new kinds of studies onreaction times and decision-making. (Human Factors and Ergonomics Society)
Products had to be designed for physical as well as psychological fit.
The development of computers during the Second World War focused on using them to handle encryption of communications and calculations of trajectories. Various technological innovations influenced the computer, and as theparts of computers became smaller, so did the computers themselves, bringing
first terminals and then entire central processing units on the desks of nonscientists. (History of Computing) This challenged traditional ergonomics aswell as interface design. These new work environments bound the gaze andattention of workers to poor quality terminals for long periods of time, creating challenges that had not previously affected office workers to this degree.
Research on the influence of the environment on people (design, lighting, architecture, population etc.) began in the 1960s (Papanek, 1995). If scientificmanagement focused on physical labour now it was time to take into accountworkers as thinkers as well.
The field of Human Computer Interaction emerged to apply cognitive psychology to the design of computer interfaces. In the 1970s in Scandinavia, computer systems development proceeded with social and democratic, sometimes
even outright revolutionary values regarding work, and created the roots ofparticipatory design as well as the object-oriented programming called SIMULA.
(Participatory Design) This was design ethics: systems had to be designed torespect the skills of their users, and to do so, these users had to take part in
defining the systems.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s usability engineering became an established part of software development. Procedures such as user testing as wellas heuristic evaluations and cognitive walkthroughs became standard practicein software development. About half of all code written relates to the interface,which goes to show how important a good interface is to the task of programming (Nielsen 1993). It was important to establish usability as a measurable
and testable quality of the product. The current definition of usability comesfrom the ISO 9241-11 standard from 1998, which describes usability as “the extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals

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tronic, and there was no movement or mechanism to reveal in the interface. The

with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use” (cited
in Usabilitynet). As the consumer demand for better products increased in the
1980s, industries took up quality development programmes to systematically
improve quality control in the design process (Cagan & Vogel 2002).
The next challenge and destination for computers was the home environment.
Personal computers were revolutionised by Apple in 1984 with the launch of
the Macintosh. The Mac was compact and user-friendly and allowed its users tobe productive from the first click. It was completely unlike the machines of theoffice and industry (Cagan & Vogel 2002). The first digital consumer products
arrived on the markets in the 1980s as well, bringing with them new design
challenges. In the design of interactive content, for example websites or computer games, the product or platform and even the user interface are usuallypredetermined – not so in the design of information appliances. The designersof these “smart” products need to also address the interface, interaction, form
factor, material and context of use issues, which require a greater amount ofresearch and context knowledge and have to be managed with conflicting design requirements (Keinonen 1998: 12). The term “interaction design” was reputedly coined in the 1980s by Bill Moggridge to describe his company’s workon graphical user interfaces and smart products (Hartfield & Winograd 1996:
165). The scope of interaction design is broad and includes the product as wellas the user, the user’s context and actions.
A small number of design companies were involved in pioneering ethnographic experiments in the United States to learn about contexts and users in
the 1980s, most prominently Doblin Group, Fitch and IDEO, and later E-lab andCheskin (Ireland 2003). The design of products and the design of computing
are becoming increasingly inseparable to a degree where old discipline-based
distinctions of design fail to be useful and multidisciplinarity is a requirement
for success.
As usability guru Donald Norman confesses, long ago when colour displays
became available he seriously did not think they were better than black andwhite ones, despite his own reluctance to give up his colour display (Norman
2004: 9). Emotions and aesthetic appeal had at first no weight in the study of
1 INTRODUCTION

cognition or even usability. By the nineties, usability had become something ofan everyday word, and had undergone a shift from being a satisfier to being a
dissatisfier. Users expected a certain standard of usability and only noticed its
absence, when they were dissatisfied. (Green & Jordan 1999) This forced evenusability professionals to take a more open view on usability and address the22

increased importance of satisfaction. The newly invented visual design platform World Wide Web provided a growing forum for creative visual designers

For many, usability was indeed sometimes perceived as the antithesis of what
they strove for: aesthetically pleasing, quirky, delightful, inventive, rich andexploratory, enjoyable in itself, and pushing the abilities of the technology everfurther. These kinds of designs (and their indisputable appeal) helped to challenge the usability engineering dominance and prove that aesthetics and delightmatter. Among these new designers of interactive content, Shedroff was among
the first to latch onto the term “experience design” and apply it to the digital
design domain (Shedroff 2001). As a term it was not the previous property of
any of the existing disciplines, and even in common use has several different
uses and interpretations.
1.2.4 DESIGNING FOR USER EXPERIENCE
Although the term “user experience” is recent, experiences have been addressedin design – always. More specifically they have become central in design thattakes a user-centred or people-centred focus. Ehn & Löwgren review the approaches of “human-centred design” and name three worlds in which designis active: the objective, the social and the subjective. All three need to be addressed both in the product (structure, function and form) as well as in theprocess (engineering, participation and aesthetics). The challenge in design
is to find a balance in these questions in the design practice. (Ehn & Löwgren
1997) Although they do not use the term experience, all these aspects are partof the contexts for experience and can be seen as the framework in which designers must operate when designing for experience. Burvall posits that bothusability and contextual design (an observation-based process for designing
information systems for work contexts, see Beyer & Holtzblatt 1997) fall shortin addressing experience, and points out the need for a new product design
paradigm (Burvall 2001). While both are relevant and respected in the field of
Human Computer Interaction, neither can be called the dominant paradigm ofproduct design, although they have influenced those designers that need tolearn from Human Computer Interaction.
The emergence of the term experience in the design literature can be connected partly to this disappointment with usability. Usability has been seenas the facilitator of utility. Since usability does not address the more fleeting
qualities of interaction with products, such as aesthetics, associations, delight,
excitement, challenge and many similar, relevant aspects of human experience,research has moved to these areas beyond. When the target market’s likes, values, expectations and other possible sources of pleasure and delight are known,
they can be supported in design through form, visuals and other qualities. How-23and content developers to channel their creativity into the interactive domain.

ever, it is evident that there is cultural bias regarding human qualities should
be supported with design, and what are “less nice”, but the truth of what sells
products often overrides it (Hudspith 1997). It would seem odd that matters ofvice and virtue should affect which user needs are articulated for design. However, when discussing matters of, for example, designing for pleasure and fun,these value judgements become evident. Perhaps user experience as a term canhelp to legitimise this discussion in a constructive manner.
The beyond usability movement, which stems from hedonic psychology, is
one approach for looking beyond functionality and its objective, measurable
qualities. Jordan proposes a hierarchy, where functionality is followed by usability, which is topped with pleasure, loosely following a maslowian hierarchy.
Jordan’s adaptation of Tiger’s four pleasures identifies four kinds of pleasuresthat products can provide: ideo, socio, psycho and physio pleasures which are
discussed mainly in a consumer product context. (Jordan 2000) Although thepleasures are convincingly presented and capture a wide range of product experiences, the relevance hierarchy can be questioned – is there not some pleasure
in “pure” functionality, regardless of its usability? Hedonistic psychology has
been studied also in the area of interfaces (Hassenzahl 2003). However, focusing only on pleasure may fail to account for understanding the role of negative
emotions in experience (Desmet 2002). Negative emotions provide depth andcontrast for positive experiences: they make challenges exciting and accomplishments sweet. The most satisfying products are ones that support people
in achieving suitable degrees of satisfaction, success and sense of reward.
It is a shame that the word experience means so many things at the sametime – certain distinctions might be useful. For example in Finnish, there are
two words, kokemus and elämys. The latter denotes “an experience” (a term anddistinction that is also proposed by Dewey 1980), something that is multisensory delightful, unusual and that stands out from the rest. The word kokemus
means experience in the sense of the experience of the moment, and accumulated experience. The approaches to these different kinds of experience arequite different as well.
Perhaps due to this all-inclusiveness, though, the term “experience” has
1 INTRODUCTION

become an umbrella concept that encompasses all aspects of the product including usability as well as more fleeting feelings of positive or negative quality and things such as entertainment and events. Design for user experience
focuses on the user centred design and the challenge of considering people’s
product-related experiences in design. To rephrase an old design slogan: form

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and function must fulfil fantasy (Cagan & Vogel 2002).

As this historical review shows, the term user experience has become relevant
to many kinds of design and related user research. The term is widely embraced
in interaction design, but it is also relevant to the user study stages in concept
and product development and technology studies. Its advantage is that it is acommonly understandable, holistic, all-encompassing concept that includes theuser, the product and the context of use. User experience also emphasises theimportance of the emotional aspects of experience as at least equally importantas the previously over-emphasised cognitive and functional aspects.
The problem with the term is in its lack of proper or at least widely acknowledged definition. Defining experience – as is evident in the literature – is hard to
do because of its dynamic, even paradoxical, nature. On the one hand, experience is private and unique and no other person can know exactly what an experience is for someone else (Pine & Gilmore 1998, Forlizzi & Ford 2000, Buchenau &Fulton Suri 2000). However, this is seemingly ignored in everyday life as people
talk about their holidays, films and food and gossip about absent people, quite
able to do so despite this philosophical principle. If close enough is what theentire world operates on, why would that not be good enough for design?
The definition of a concept as inclusive as user experience is not simple.
Even the idea of user needs in a neat, maslowian hierarchy (see e.g. Jordan
2000: 4–5) is fundamentally flawed from the experience point of view. Determining that something is usable does not mean that it is at all desirable – themost clear examples of this clash that come to mind are in the area of assistive
products (see e.g. the study of bathrooms and elderly in Boess et al. 2002). Thisis because usefulness, not to mention delight and acceptability, is somethingthat is determined by a person in the context of use, and people have full rightto prioritise their needs and desires as they see fit. Functionality is what the
product does; utility and usefulness are qualities that a person perceives in
it and this is a key distinction. This changes the role of the designer from being the judge of good and bad to being a facilitator and a fellow human being.
Understanding the experiences of others is an empathic process and requiresthat the researcher and designer use their own emotions as a sounding board
for understanding those of others.
Consequently the definition of user experience has been avoided in somebranches of design literature (as has been noted by at least Hassenzahl 2003
and Marcus 2004). At the same time, there is clear evidence all around us that
we can recognise good quality design with a clear purpose, which has been created with aesthetic considerations, and that people are generally more pleased
with these products than with things that are poorly defined, designed and im-

25

1.3 WHAT IS DESIGN FOR USER EXPERIENCE?

plemented (Alben 1997). As long as designers know for whom they are designing(for example, themselves, other designers, a particular user group), they canbetter imagine and discover what would delight and be useful for the audience.
Products and environments are contexts for experience (Overbeeke et al. 1999).
Design for user experience is respectful of its future users as represented bypeople today.
However, in about the last ten years there have been a steadily increasing
number of publications from thoughtful designers and researchers who are
striving to come to grips with the concept methodologically and to connect
methods and processes to a more theoretical understanding of user experience. Researchers have also approached the topic from many disciplines: e.g.
psychology, ethnography and philosophy. Some of the definitions refer to previous work, but those who do often do so only selectively. To overcome thisdisparity, this dissertation analyses existing user experience literature as well
as some related fields with the intention of connecting efforts to each otherand discussing their limitations. These limitations generally relate to one ormore of the following areas: the treatment of emotions, the relationship between time and experience, the definition of context and the origin and interpretation of meaning.
The shortcomings in the framing of the context may range from the focus
being entirely on the product without considering to what other real world experiences and situations it should connect. The qualitative differences between
lab-based interviews or product trials and the same conducted in the real use
context are to my knowledge not available, but excluding the physical surroundings as well as the social context may lead to a disconnected and unrealistic
evaluation of a product, be it about physical fit or social acceptability.
The study of product-related emotions is gaining popularity, but the key difference between studying them and studying user experience is that studies
on emotion treat meaning-making processes as a problem because they distort
the reporting of emotions. However, it is not possible to describe experiences
without these processes. Secondly, the study and definition of emotions often
follows a stimulus-response type of model, but does not take into account how
1 INTRODUCTION

emotions are interpreted and modified in social situations and used strategically as a resource in social interaction. A more thorough review of this issue
is presented in section 2.2.
If people are to reflect meaningfully on their experiences, they need time todo so, and if they are to determine relevance and purpose through experimen-

26

tation, they need even more time. In the case of field studies on product use,
the novelty effect may last several weeks. Adopting products into use is an even

many constraints on time and resources affect how user experience studies are
conducted, some aspects of product experiences cannot be studied in a matterof hours or even days. As a designer once said in reference of time constraints
and research in the design industry: “we are in such a hurry that we have to
run with our bicycles.” Sometimes the difference between doing research anddoing research properly is not great, but convincing the necessary people ofthis difference can be impossible. This is one issue where research, hopefully,
can give back to design practice.

1.4 USER EXPERIENCE AND MEANING
Meaning is the glue and thread that connects moments into events and stories,that connects one incident with another, and that introduces strategy and organisation into daily life. On the one hand it is learned and observed from others, on the other hand it is necessarily also an individual interpretation andcreation. In any case, it needs to be accounted for in design, and its definition
influences the resulting activities and processes. This section discusses theconcept of meaning. Following Dourish’s analysis of the term, meaning can beseen as an ontological question – how meaning arises. The idea of meaning as
intentionality has also been explored. Meaning can moreover be seen as a question of communication: how can experiences and meanings that are essentiallyprivate become shared with others? (Dourish 2001) This angle on intersubjectivity is key to the concept of co-experience – the sharing of experiences.
Meaning as a matter of ontology is a question of how meaning is constructed and how it emerges. In Cartesian ontology meaning is internal, somethingthat is assigned to sense data (Dourish 2001: 127). Blumer describes the samein simpler words: meaning can be seen as something that people attribute toobjects, or in an opposite fashion that it resides in objects and emanates fromthere to the surrounding world. The last in the list of three is usually the preferred view, and according to Blumer, meaning should be seen as somethingthat is created by individuals interacting in the social world of people and objects. (Blumer 1956: 4–5)
The problem with Cartesian philosophy is the tendency to develop and workwith abstract models that fail to account for the details of real phenomena,
the tacit and experiential and emerging properties of life. If data do not fit amodel two things can be done: the odd data can be discarded or the model canbe revised. In this situation designers should, and probably would, forget themodel and instead become curious and begin to investigate what the anomalous

27

longer process, in the order of months, even years (Muller et al. 2003). Althoughhas to say about the ordinary and the possible design opportunities that havebeen revealed. In studying user experience, the focus should be on the world
according to the users, not according to the designers, the professional critics
and makers of products.
Designers are interested in creating something new – to do this they need
an understanding of the current and use that as a starting point. One common
strategy is to begin by studying existing products to define the starting point.
Aside from feature lists, this evaluation process is often also an evaluation of
appearance – as Vihma notes that the semantic and aesthetic features of products are often treated together and seem to be related (Vihma 1995: 14). Products communicate with their form and appearance. In product semantics, products have representational qualities, which mean they act as signs. Products
can contain iconic signs such as images, diagrams and metaphors. They canalso serve as an index, like smoke is an index for fire. Symbols refer to generalideas; examples of such are the things that come to mind when seeing a word
or a colour – ideas that have been learned in the culture. (Vihma 1995: 68–70)
However, the question of the relationship between an object’s design and thecontext in which it is evaluated is not particularly taken into account in thistreatment of meaning. The conclusions that designers can draw from observing products in their office or studio should always be treated as designer’s
general evaluations, and not reliably representative of those of the users intheir environments.
It is also known that people bestow personal meaning on objects. For example, these objects may be kitschy souvenirs or trinkets (Norman 2004), or anyof the many things in people’s homes, where each family member may havetheir own meaning and story relating to a particular item (Csikszentmihalyi &Rochberg-Halton 1981). Stories of meaningful or significant products can bea good vehicle to learn about people and the things they hold important andthe experiences that are relevant. However, studies show that such personal
meanings to objects are not entirely arbitrary, and that people can guess or
empathise with many of the more general meanings that objects can have forpeople. This suggests that the meanings that objects are given are not entirely
1 INTRODUCTION

private and idiosyncratic, and that these meanings possibly have different cultural levels as well. (Richins 1994)
The third idea that meaning is created in interaction between the person andother people and the world is interesting, because it looks at meaning making
as a process, which accounts for change as well. This idea has existed in de-

28bate both in phenomenology as well as in pragmatist philosophy. It is a critiqueof the older Cartesian division of mind from body and the idea that thinking is

1995: 38). The phenomenological philosophy’s trail is reviewed from a computing standpoint by Dourish (Dourish 2001: 106). Dourish’s purpose is to track
the concept of embodied interaction, and discuss its role behind both social
computing and tangible interaction. It ties in perception and action, thought
and emotion, and physical and social contexts.
Pragmatist philosophy include the rejection of final truths, a desire to avoid
endless philosophical debates and instead focus on practical consequences
and applicability (see e.g. James 1996: 56). Dewey writes that “experience is theresult, the sign and the reward of that interaction between organism and environment which, when it is carried to the full, is a transformation of interaction
into participation and communication” (Dewey 1934: 22). Thought is tied toexperience, which arises from interacting in the world. Dewey suggested thatacts of expression (as in acts that result in works of art) are a way to deal withemotional tension and distress – positive forces for action. He also suggeststhat the work of a scientist and the work of an artist are in fact similar, notpolar opposites (Dewey 1934). Tension and equilibrium are fluctuating statesof existence and action and expression affect and influence them. Meaning is
discovered and expressed in action with the world.
The theory of affordance, originally by Gibson and the field of perceptual
psychology, addresses the particular aspect of an individual interacting with hisor her environment, and also states that meaning is created in the interaction(Overbeeke & Wensveen 2003). People perceive their environment according
to the abilities they have, and thus perceive it as either enabling or disabling:a person who is travelling on foot looks at the terrain ahead in terms of its
walkability. However, applying the idea of affordance to contemporary design
problems remains superficial: even if a button clearly invites pushing, how canpushing a button to cancel be different from pushing a button to initiate, when
the purpose of these actions are opposite? The concept of feedforward has beensuggested to extend the idea that form should communicate action to the factthat form should through interaction also communicate its purpose (Wensveen
et al. 2004, Djajadiningrat et al. 2004). However, the role of social interaction
can also be included in a symbolic interactionist fashion to this debate. Following the example above of the walkability of the terrain, the evaluation of
the walkability of a mountain path is greatly affected by seeing small children
run and play along it, or by hearing about an experienced hiker who last year
stumbled on it and fell to his death.
The key to this social transfer of meaning is intersubjectivity. Intersubjectivity is the process of many individuals coming to know a common phenomenon,29

something independent of being and doing (see e.g. Dourish 2001: 18, 127; Peirce

although each does so through their own subjective experience (Dourish 2001:
131–134). Dourish describes the challenges of communicating actions and purpose in the form and appearance of products as intersubjectivity between designer and user. When designers claim to be “designing experience”, they havethe first approach in mind, communicating to the user through the design. The
product, whether it is a form, a song, a website or a space, is designed to evoke
particular experiences. To say that the experience has been designed suggeststhat the receiving end merely comes into touch with the design and the experience is delivered to them. Experience is constructive and active (Sanders 1999),
regardless of whether people are sitting still in a cinema, snapping photos orbuilding a log cabin. Communication is as much about sending as it is about
receiving, and feedback in the form of sales is not necessarily enough to constitute experience feedback. A product may sell, but for what reason?
Another kind of intersubjectivity is what happens between users as they communicate with each other using products or systems (Dourish 2001: 131–134).
In evaluating their own experiences people take the role of others to determine
what is relevant and acceptable for sharing and how it should be communicatedMany approaches overlook this process as something worth studying (with theobvious exception of communication technology studies where using is communicating). However, by studying the process of sharing experiences designers
can come to know the kinds of experiences people find relevant and how theyshare them with others. In doing so they can learn about the product as well as
the story that goes with it. People communicate with each other because they
like to and because they can. This is what is at the heart of co-experience. The
design of a product or system as a context for experience impacts what kindsof experiences become shareable, how they can be shared and how others can
respond to these shared experiences. Even more interestingly, new technology
products put people into the role of content developers. With new informationand communication technologies all content can be digital, which means that it
can be easily copied, transmitted via cables or wireless to other personal prod-

1 INTRODUCTION

ucts, and published for the possible viewing of millions on the Internet.

1.5 DATA AND METHODSFor the source material on user experience models, frameworks and theories,
this dissertation relies heavily on the review and study of published design
and research work. Although these reports of published work come from many30

relevant design conferences and other publishing forums, only a fraction ofdesign work ever gets represented in this way. The more research-minded com-design work cannot be equated with the willingness to report it. However, it islikely that within the published results there is a strong representation of bestpractices and field leaders – review processes support this kind of positive bias.
Language issues and cultural affiliations have partly affected which geographic
areas and cultures have become represented in this study. There is a clear NorthEuropean and Anglo-American emphasis in the selection of reviewed work, andonly material published in English (or, in a few cases Finnish) has been used.
However, English is the preferred language for international reporting of workin this field, and as a source language it is probably the least limiting one both
culturally and regionally.
The research that has been used to exemplify and develop the analysis on
the concrete level in this work belongs for the most part to two projects involving field studies. These are the Maypole project for designing social communication product concepts for children (see article 1, Mäkelä & Battarbee
1999) and the Mobile Multimedia project for ascertaining what consumers ofmobile multimedia communication would like to do with it (see articles 2, Battarbee 2003a, and 3, Battarbee 2003b). The same issues are also discussed inarticles 2 (with anecdotes of product use involving a mobile phone and a internet chat environment in Battarbee 2003a) and 6 (which describes a concept
design workshop group’s process and thoughts for developing communication
concepts for urban communities in Battarbee et al. 2002). The main key data
are field studies of technology use and involve mobile, personal technologies
for communication. In Maypole, users were given new products to experimentwith for a week and the results were collected in artefact interviews together
with the pictures the participants had taken. In Mobile Multimedia, groups ofusers were given multimedia messaging capable phones and a free account formessaging for five weeks. No interviews were conducted, but the messaging
data in itself provided a rich window into the groups’ new and evolving messaging patterns.
Both projects represent design problems in which user experience is of thehighest importance and in which contexts of product use change. Both are achallenge for conducting studies and consequently, these cases can be treatedas examples of extreme cases of user studies. (Naturally, each context has its
problems, but the mobile context is always a observational challenge.) It is not
surprising, then, that when observations from these cases were used to test
existing frameworks of user experience, the frameworks were found to be lacking in accounting for and explaining the importance of social interaction andits role in making user experiences meaningful.

31

panies are more likely to publish reports on their work, but the quality of theThe analysis of the user experience approaches and frameworks has proceeded by comparing models to each other and identifying similarities anddifferences. The groupings have been revised as the work has progressed, andthoughts have become clearer and better defined.
The concept of co-experience has also gone through several cycles of descriptions and definitions, which are evident in articles 2 (Battarbee 2003a) 3(Battarbee2003b), 4 (Battarbee & Koskinen forthcoming) and 5 (Forlizzi & Battarbee 2004). The early attempts to describe what kinds of experiences become
shared or what dimensions describe such shared experiences also address different audiences. The short article 2 (Battarbee 2003a) is for the computer human interaction audience and article 3 (Battarbee 2003b) is aimed at a design
audience with an interest in pleasure and its relation to design. The definitionof co-experience became more solid in article 4 (Battarbee & Koskinen forthcoming), where it was described as a process of lifting up and responding toexperiences. Article 5 (Forlizzi & Battarbee 2004) further attempted to connect
the concept to other evolving models of user experience.

1.6 THE STRUCTURE OF THE DISSERTATIONThis dissertation contains two parts: the introduction essay and the articles.
The purpose of the introduction essay is to present the work that has been
published in the articles as a coherent whole, describing the backgrounds ofthe arguments, the arguments themselves, and connecting the work and ideas
described in the articles together.
1 INTRODUCTION describes the aims of the study. It states the problem ofindividualistic bias in the understanding of user experience, and the generallack of a common definition. It seeks to explain this situation with a review ofthe emergence and development of the term user experience through the last
one hundred years. The concept of meaning is described as a key aspect of user
experience. The data, methods and structure of this article-based dissertation
are also explained.
2 USER EXPERIENCE DEMYSTIFIED reviews a broad selection of existing frame1 INTRODUCTION

works that describe or define user experience and compare them to each other.
As emotions are identified as a key element of experience, the chapter also
reviews current research approaches to emotion and design, defining their essential differences. The interactionist approach is selected as the most valid
one, and emotions in interaction are also discussed. The chapter also compares32

and analyses four well-published approaches of understanding and designing
for user experience.

but points out their shortcomings: a lack of addressing how meaning comesto be and how it changes in social interaction. To account for this, the workbuilds on a framework based on symbolic interactionism. This chapter also discusses the methodological implications that co-experience has on conductinguser studies and design, emphasising field studies, prototyping and empathic
observations.
4 PRESENTING THE ARTICLES introduces the articles and discusses the work
described in each. The articles included in this dissertation are all published in
English in peer-reviewed conference proceedings or journals, and are printed
in this chapter in their entirety.

33

3 CO-EXPERIENCE takes the most promising aspects of existing frameworks,

USER EXPERIENCE THEORIES AND FRAMEWORKSEMOTIONS AND USER EXPERIENCESHARING THE SUBJECTIVE

2.1

2.2

2.3

2

USER
EXPERIENCE
DEMYSTIFIEDThis chapter does three things: it outlines and groups together existing frameworks of user experience, it reviews current research approaches to emotion
and design and finally describes four design approaches that take user experience into account in an interesting way. The frameworks presented here havebeen published in a range of different sources, but what is common to each isthat they represent theoretically informed understanding of user experience.
Why should we theorise about user experience? Dourish argues that philosophies influence both the theory and practice of design and determine what
efforts are made and what kinds of success can be expected with the results(Dourish 2001: preface). Although Dourish focuses on interaction and computing, his work has been helpful in looking at user experience as well, because
both hinge on the concept of meaning. The philosophy was reviewed in chapter
1, this chapter is dedicated to the theory and practice.

2.1 USER EXPERIENCE THEORIES AND FRAMEWORKS
A number of designers and researchers have put effort into creating frameworks
to describe user experience; some have reviewed the work of others and somehave chosen to reflect on their own work and process. In the following they areorganised into three loose groups according to their basic principles. The firstgroup is for person centred frameworks that focus primarily on the individual’s
experience and the elements that contribute to it. These tend to be a description of general characteristics of experience that are relevant for going beyond
utility and usability. The second group is for the approaches that aim to connect
product features to experience and create checklists describing the product-related experience contexts. They tend to focus on the practical ways in which
evaluations or distinctions can be made of the experience. The third group isan approach that focuses on the interaction between person and the productin its context. In fact, for these the product is merely the connective node in a
network of things in context. Furthermore, in contrast to the other approaches
that often seek to identify relevant dimensions for experience, needs and desires become relevant if and when they emerge in the interaction, but there is
no prescribed checklist for those either.
What all these frameworks have in common is a designer friendly simplicity
and the preference for using a small number of concepts, generally three tofive, over detailed, complex and specific categorisations, processes or methods.
After all, an idea needs to be well-understood to be easy to apply in designingand creating something new.
2.1.1 PERSON-CENTRED FRAMEWORKS:
WHAT PEOPLE NEED
These frameworks cover a wide array of ways to understand people. Some of
the frameworks focus on people’s needs in general, others focus on the relationships that people have with products. Further still, some approaches lookat why some activities with products are pleasurable and others are not. Whatthese all have in common is the idea that products should satisfy people’s needs
and that user experiences revolve around these needs. The frameworks thendiffer in the naming and interpretation of the needs and how specific or generally human the named needs are.
2 USER EXPRERIENCE DEMYSTIFIED

that serve as conversation pieces contribute to socio pleasure. Physio pleasure

38

Although not a framework on user experience, it is relevant to begin withtile and olfactory qualities. Psycho pleasure relates to the mind, and is rewarding

the key formulation of the “beyond usability” literature. Jordan’s version of thefour pleasures (first presented by Tiger) lists the kinds of pleasures that people can have with products. Ideo pleasure refers to values that products cansatisfy. This means that products are sometimes chosen because they reflect
or represent values that are important to the person. Socio pleasure deals withinteraction with others. Products that facilitate communication as well as thoserelates to the senses. Visual qualities are important, but so also are audio, tac-dan 2000) These four kinds of pleasure show how pleasure can tie into almost
any aspect of life.
The six degrees of freedom of user experience space (Marcus 2004) focus on
the user’s needs although the descriptions of the elements are written to apply
specifically to the design of interactive products and websites. I-ware relates to
identity and privacy, you-ware to connecting to other people and communities,
fun-ware is for entertainment, buy-ware is about commerce, know-ware about
information and be-ware about self-enhancement and wellbeing (see Figure1). The advantage and shortcoming of such application-specific frameworks isthat some aspects (as here privacy, commerce and knowledge) are presented
in a way that relates to the activities or product categories of the specific domain, but that applying such frameworks to other kinds of design might notwork as well. This seems to echo the kind of thinking that is behind Jordan’s four

kn

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-ware
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SELFENHANCEMENTRELATIONSHIPS

ar
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IDENTITY

ENTERTAINMENT
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INFORMATIONCOMMERCE

FIGURE 1

-war

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b

uy

Six degrees of freedom of user experience space (Marcus 2004).

39

because of the way people enjoy challenge, learning and problem solving. (Jor-FIGURE 2

MEANINGFUL TOOLMEANINGFUL ASSOCIATION

LIVING OBJECT

Meaningful relationships with products fall under three categories: meaningful tools, meaningful associations and living objects (Battarbee & Mattelmäki 2002).

pleasures, but specifically for the web – sensory experiences, for example, are
not included at all.
Another way to focus on product experiences is to see what kinds of meaningful relationships people can have with products – assuming that people
have needs that lead to product use and then to relationships. The study on
the meaning of things (Csikszentmihalyi & Rochberg-Halton 1981) is a classic,
but their exhaustive classification is too heavy for designers to use. Similar

2 USER EXPRERIENCE DEMYSTIFIED

meaningful relationships could be described in a more general model, in for
example three categories. These are meaningful tools that help people to do
things that are important to them; meaningful associations such as memories,
stories and values that are attached to products; and living objects, productsthat people become fond of and to which they are attached (Battarbee & Mattelmäki 2002) (see Fig. 2). Such relationships are relatively far removed fromthe actual experiences during use; other models focus more on these experiences.
Hudspith considers four aspects of psychological needs that need to be ad-

40

dressed for user experience: perceptions, latent needs, beliefs and emotions.
The model offers three concepts for making these salient. Utility is the useful-bolic uses that attach ceremonial qualities to the products that play a part inthem. Appeal refers to the perceived qualities of products, including aesthetic
values, social perception and identity. (Hudspith 1997) While utility and appeal
are concepts that are easy to grasp, the idea of ceremony is a little odd and elusive – Hudspith notes that evaluators found it the most difficult to grasp andevaluate. Sometimes the symbolic value of an object and its monetary value areentirely unrelated, and this relationship is probably also culturally influenced(Battarbee & Mattelmäki 2004). A different term would perhaps give the richness of material culture a better foothold in this model. Although appeal deals
with hedonic psychology, Hudspith also notes that sometimes less attractive
qualities in people such as gullibility, vanity and greed are the ones that help
to sell products. What is missing from this model are the pleasures that deal
with product use for things like creativity, self expression and challenge – itwould seem that breaking them up into utility and appeal would cause something essential to be lost.
Margolin offers four dimensions that could help better elaborate the relationship between the designer and the user – for him experience is a way to gain abetter notion of the person who will use the product than the traditional ideaof the user. These are the social dimension, the inventive dimension, the operational dimension and the aesthetic dimension. The social dimension in thispoint of view relates to products, social problems and legislation. The inventive dimension relates to being able to conceive products that will be enjoyedby and be valuable to the users. The operational dimension relates to use andusability. The aesthetic dimension he lists as being the one where designers aremost prescriptive and are least accepting of the taste of the public. (Margolin1997) Margolin further lists three ways that the user experience can come to be
known by designers: by own experience, by users forming developing communities and by specific user research activities. What seems to be lacking in thisunderstanding of user experience is its empathic and emotional quality, andwhat is unusual (yet problematic in its directness) is the attempt to relate user
experience to society and legislation. Although for example Dewey (1980) takes
the discussion of art as experience to the level of societal well being, productdesign literature rarely connects to society on this level.
Hummels places emphasis on the need for aesthetic interactions and respectfulness, and calls for resonance and products that people can engage with andcreate their own rituals. Her approach emphasises personal meaning and tactile
qualities of products, and her interpretation of respectfulness and resonancedeals partly with the way in which people handle and interact with products. For

41

ness – the ability to facilitate tasks. Ceremony is about facilitating rituals, sym-

example, the grace and care needed in using an old record player with a needle
should be compared to the operations of compact disk players. (Hummels 2000)
The full capacity of people’s senses could be addressed more widely in the design of electronic products. Aesthetics is not just for the eye but for action as
well. This view seems to emphasise a designer’s way of seeing and relating to
objects, although it is true that the experience of operating products is commonly not addressed as much as it should.
Hassenzahl states that people have two modes for product interaction: goals
and action. The goal mode is practical and work-oriented; the action mode isfor fun and entertainment (see Fig. 3). Hassenzahl thus suggests that enjoyment
has more to do with the human mindset than with the product. Hassenzahl
helps to clarify why the same thing can be experienced at times as irritating
and stressful (in the goal oriented mode) but at other times exciting, challenging and fun, when in the action oriented mode. (Hassenzahl 2003) The model
does not account for how or why these modes change or what other aspects
may influence experience, such as aesthetics.
As can be interpreted from the variety of these mainly person-centred models, determining the most relevant dimensions that people find significant inproduct experiences and making them understandable, accessible and usable
is not simple. In that sense, Jordan’s framework of pleasures is probably themost general yet practical. Focusing more on action and the moment of experience, Hassenzahl’s model explains why Hummels’ call for resonance sounds
at the same time both wonderful and annoying, as our preference for enjoying
action versus accomplishing tasks varies in interaction. These two models tie
our experience more tightly to the moment of experiencing instead of separating utility from pleasure and other emotional aspects.
2.1.2 PRODUCT-CENTRED FRAMEWORKS:

2 USER EXPRERIENCE DEMYSTIFIEDDESIGN AND RESEARCH CHECKLISTSAs design is about creating something, it is natural that models also focus on
the qualities of the design and their relationship to people’s experiences andevaluations of them.
Jääskö et al. have developed a framework that describes the elements that
contribute to user experience from the product point of view especially in thecontext of concept design and user studies. To understand the user experiencesthat relate to products, five different viewpoints, or worlds, can be identified:
the world of activities, the world of product meanings, the physical world, the42world of products and the world of humans (see Fig. 4). They call the set up
the scene of experiences (Jääskö et al. 2003).

43

ACTION
GOAL

goal
goal

goal

FIGURE 3

actionHassenzahl’s model of goals and action in work and fun: Goal mode is for
productivity, action mode for fun (Hassenzahl 2003).

The framework’s advantage is that it connects clear techniques and activities
to each of these worlds, creating a comprehensive chart for placing user study
activities in relation to each other.
Kansei engineering (Nagamachi 2001) attempts to identify the feelings that
customers seek and engineers products to create and suggest these feelings intheir look and feel. Feeling, here, is a crude translation of the Japanese conceptof kansei, which means something like the psychological feeling or image of a
product – an exact translation is difficult to create. Through a systematic engineering and testing process, products can be designed to support the image
the manufacturer wants to convey.
Hassenzahl (2003) gives product features a European treatment, basing theviews on combining usability and pleasure. Product features contribute to character, but the features of products can be identified as hedonistic and pragmatic
attributes. The hedonistic attributes are stimulation, identification and evocation, which relate to the self – the pragmatic attributes relate to what Hassenzahl calls the act dimension. The consequences of products can be satisfaction,pleasure and appeal (see Fig. 5).

GS
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APPEARANCEUSER INTERFACEFIGURE 4

TH

THE WORLD OF
PRODUCTSAL
SIC LD
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H OR
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THE
W
HUM ORLDOFANSThe scene of experiences – the five worlds which need to be understood tolearn about user experiences. (Jääskö et al. 2003).

ticular subset of product use in their frameworks. Garrett offers a model for
information design that connects structuring the user experience of hypertext
and interface with creating the interface for a website. The design of experience happens on five levels: strategy, scope, structure, skeleton and surface.
(Garrett 2002) However, this model of user experience for information design
fails to include sensory qualities of experience, which can be included as anelaboration of Garrett’s model towards all kinds of online experiences (Olsen
2003). Compared to the scene of experiences by Jääskö et al., these two versions of the model relate to the development process, not the evaluation of a
product, and consequently they do not include the context of the experiencer
as a part of the experience.
Products can have different roles and stages over time – static views do notalways emphasise enough the ever-changing nature of product experiences.
Holman’s study of roles of products as seen in advertising demonstrates the

FIGURE 5

hedonistic attributes

appealpleasuresatisfaction

CONSEQUENCES

pragmatic attributes

SITUATION

APPARENTPRODUCT
CHARACTER

range they have from background and low intensity to higher intensity prod-

The user perspective of product experiences: in a situation, a product’s
pragmatic and hedonic attributes result in appeal, pleasure and satisfaction (Hassenzahl 2003).

45

Interaction designers who focus on designing digital content address a par-

com
mi

ME
NT

t
en
tm

EXPERI

EN
CE

g

en

dis

SOL

UTION

ENGAGE

t

en

m
age

nt

RE

me

e
olv

inv

FE

FIGURE 6

on

ati

CONTEXT

egr
int

LI

The life cycle model of product experiences with transitions and stages in
the product involvement (Rhea 1992).

ucts in the focus of attention. (Holman 1986) Holman does not account for how
products achieve these positions in life, or what qualities in them support ahigh involvement; however it is important to note that background roles canalso be relevant for products. Rhea’s life cycle of product meaning explores
this idea of changing roles from the point of view of one product. In this life
cycle events change a product’s position and the experiences that relate to it

2 USER EXPRERIENCE DEMYSTIFIED(see Fig. 6). (Rhea 1992) As often with cyclical models, things do not necessarily move only in this order, and even if products disappear from a life context,
they may return to it.
Product-centred frameworks typically do not take time into account in theirformulations – of these the only real exception is Rhea’s model. These viewson what contributes to experience are most connected to practice and pick andmix resources from disciplines and practical experience. Frameworks that focus
exclusively on the product or solution may be less helpful in a situation where
desired experiences do not have an obvious product form. Frameworks that46

focus on the design process are also less directly transferable: what may workfor designing the structure of a website may not address the core design issues ofing at products and experiences rather than a user’s manner of perceiving andevaluating them – a distinction that needs to be acknowledged in design.
In fact, many of the models, both person and product centred, can be seen as
representing personal or corporate philosophies, and have probably been created as part of developing a business brand or profile on how a company does
good design and being distinguishable from other, competing designers. They
use terms and frameworks that are simple enough to serve as communication
tools by customers as well as for in-house use. As all designers are individuals, what works for one may not work for another – it is the mark of growing
as a designer to develop a personal process and approach. The trend, in fact,
may be towards turning designing into a myth and avoiding actual theoreticalreflection (Buchanan 1995). Design, however, has such economic potential thatrelying on a myth may not be viable. Certainly there is no need to create user
experience hype. Experience as a term is too useful to merely be used as marketing hype and then discarded.
2.1.3 FOCUS ON THE ACTION: FRAMEWORKS ABOUT INTERACTION
The person-centred and product-centred approaches described above have their
purposes and uses, but as the evaluations attest, there are aspects that leavesomething unaccounted for. They are at times too static; they attempt to use
terms and categorisations to describe user experiences that reflect designing
more than experiencing, and in some cases time and context are not includedin the frameworks. The way to span all these aspects in an experience-oriented
way is to take interaction as the focus of study. There are currently two ways toaddress interaction: from an experience-in-interaction point of view and from aperception-and-meaning point of view. The experience-in-interaction view takes
the individual and describes his or her experiencing in relation to time. There is
the moment, what came before and what comes after. It is precisely the additionof the moment that sets these frameworks apart from other kinds of studies on
product meaning or pleasure. The perception-and-meaning view describes thekinds of changes that happen to how the moment is experienced.
Focusing on the interaction requires accounting both for the subjective andthe observable: what people do and how they interact. Sanders describes user
experience as the spark (see Fig. 7) between what has happened in the past
and what is expected in the future (Sanders 2003). This is the simplest of themodels.
This model provides an appealing visual for describing experience as both ofthe moment (the spark) and as something that aims to connect past experiences to47other kinds of products. These models also emphasise a designer’s way of look-the moment and to future experiences. Further, the same illustration contains thevarious ways to access these experiences: the doing, saying and the making.
Mäkelä and Fulton Suri break down the moment of experiencing to the elements that can be analysed: the context, motivations and actions. The model
describes how previous experiences influence motivated actions in context,
which produce expectations. (Mäkelä & Fulton Suri 2001) This model then lists
the things that need to be studied: a person’s past experiences, his or her current motivations and what he or she does, the context and any expectations
for coming experiences be identified (see Fig. 8). The importance of this modelis that it is also relatively simple and it takes time into account – experienceschange in time.
Further, Kankainen (née Mäkelä) elaborates in her dissertation the motivational theory behind part of the work. It postulates that action is influenced
both by motivational level needs (why someone is doing something) and action level needs (how something is accomplished in the moment), which may
be emotionally directed. (Kankainen 2002) This follows that the motivational
level of action is engaged with thinking about identity, roles, values and such,and that action level needs connect with usability and tasks. This distinction
derives most likely from the process of interface development. However, theexamples presented of motivational and action level needs are too similar andseem to suggest that drawing these distinctions, or at least their application
to field study findings, is not straightforward. Social learning and influence ofothers are mentioned as important factors in forming expectations. Positive
emotions and satisfaction are the results of met or exceeded expectations, but
over time products face value erosion – something that was delightful today
may be ordinary tomorrow and dissatisfying the day after.
Forlizzi & Ford base their work on the philosophy of John Dewey and examine what happens to user experiences in interaction. They identify and address

2 USER EXPRERIENCE DEMYSTIFIED

three ways of talking about experience: as the ongoing, as an event that has abeginning and an end, and as something that is part of storytelling. Experience
thus fluctuates between these states. The model suggests that experiences canbe of different natures: well learned and subconscious, or in the process of being learned and cognitive (see Fig. 9). As experiences become meaningful, people’s actions take on a storytelling quality, resulting in changes in the product,and changes in the person (Forlizzi & Ford 2000). The nature of experience isvolatile and ever-changing. This model has been later elaborated to include coexperience as well (Forlizzi & Battarbee 2004, article 5).

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This is, as far as can be seen, the first model of user experience that mentions meaning explicitly as a part of user experience. The model also accounts for

49
MOMENT

EXPERIENCE

FUTUREPAST

ETHDREAMS

dosayExperience as a spark of the moment between the past and the future.
Tools for understanding what people do, say and make relate to experience (Sanders 2003).
User experience as motivated action in a context, which is influenced bypast and which results in modified expectations for the future (Kankainen

ACTION& Fulton-Suri 2001).

TIME

FIGURE 8

FIGURE 7

makeprevious experiences
expectations

ON
TI
VA
I
T
MO

present
experience

more experiences
modified expectations

CO

NT

EX

T

FIGURE 10

meaning

FIGURE 9

SUB-CONSCIOUSNESSSTORYTELLING

Experience in interaction: changes in the kinds of interactions and the resulting experiences that people have (Forlizzi & Ford 2000).
The four-thread composition of experience and activities of meaning making (McCarthy & Wright 2004).

NG
AT
I
RI
AP

AN

PR

C
TI

OP

emotional

spatiotemporal

TI
NE
C
CO
N
NG
TI
IPA

2 USER EXPRERIENCE DEMYSTIFIED

G

IN

sensualT
EC

compositional

FL

RE

IN

G

INTERPRETINGRECOUNTING

50

experienceas storytelling

experiencean experience

NARRATIVE

COGNITION

experiences can be transformed and reinterpreted – for social contexts as well.
Although slightly complex, this model begins to try to describe and relate experience to interaction, the moment where person and product meet.
The same phenomenon can be described also in a less dynamic fashion. Experience is composed of four strands: sensory, emotional, spatio-temporal andcompositional strands. This means that all experience has a meaning structurethat happens in space and time and is sensory as well as emotional. (Wright etal. 2003, McCarthy & Wright 2004) As Forlizzi and Ford (2000) attempted to describe how experience changes, this points out instead what is common to all
experience. In addition, Wright et al. describe meaning making activities that
relate to experience: anticipating, connecting, interpreting, reflecting, appropriating and recounting (see Fig. 10). The strands describe elements of the being-in-the-moment kind of experience, the meaning making aspects of how weconnect the moment with the past and orient towards the future. In this sense
this model connects also to Sanders’ model describing not only what happens
but also how in more detail.
Overbeeke & Wensveen (2003) focus on interaction but it represents one aspect of meaning in user experience. The framework that is presented in Wensveen et al. (2004) elaborates the idea of interfaces and coupling as suggested by
Dourish (see Dourish 2001) and describes the role of interfaces in interaction.
The framework, called the Interaction Frogger after an arcade game classic, studies information as the bridge between action and the interface (see Figure 11).
User experiences in interaction can be seen from a more person and action
based emphasis, as with Kankainen and Fulton Suri, but also as a more detailed
study of interacting with a product, as with the Interaction Frogger (Wensveen
et al. 2004). All of these see user experience as dealing with sensing, perceiving and meaning making qualities of people, but at the same time as something
inseparable from its context.
Dourish describes Heidegger’s phenomenological ideas of embodied interaction that relate to the ways in which people encounter the world and act
through it: ready-to-hand and present-at-hand. When acting through objects
without thinking of them but the end result, objects are ready-to-hand. When
problems are encountered, people become conscious of the objects and they
are present-at-hand. (Dourish 2001) The experience of products is not always
the same, but dependent on what people are doing (action) and what they arethinking and intending to do. This idea is in fact also echoed in the user experience as interaction model (Forlizzi & Ford 2000) as subconscious and cognitive
interactions with products, although the cited references are Dewey and others.

51

experiences with products that do not need much attention, as well as how theseDourish in fact pursues the idea further by stating that these two interactions are
not enough to account for the complexity of interacting with computers, but themultiple layers of abstraction and representation need a more thorough analysis(as indeed has been done in the Interaction Frogger framework).
Focusing on the action in interaction connects the making of meaning to experience – at least in some ways. People-oriented approaches may study meaning as it has been created already, but do not account for how it emerges in thefirst place. Product-centred models also often fail to acknowledge that the acceptance of products is social and that people’s product related experiences arecontext dependent. Kankainen and Fulton Suri base their person-centred modelon an axis of time – their model combines elements from several sources withpractical value. The people centred frameworks come closest to being interested in emotions, and the interaction centred models are furthest away fromstudying them – although emotions are central to experience. The relationshipbetween emotion, meaning and experience thus needs clarification.

2.2 EMOTIONS AND USER EXPERIENCE
In the frameworks described above, the person and his or her needs are addressed and the product as a contributor to experience is analysed.
The study of emotions is relevant to design, because emotions are a key
part of experience and they influence people’s actions, expectations and futureevaluations. Emotions are an integral factor in people’s behaviour – and badexperiences tend to influence more people than just the one with the direct experience. Emotions are possibly the most researched aspect of user experience.
Perceptions are always first emotionally evaluated before any cognitive process
can take part (for a thorough account, see Damasio 2000). Studying emotional
responses is one aspect of learning about user experience. However, the rele-

2 USER EXPRERIENCE DEMYSTIFIED

vance of an emotional response is determined in how it affects the experiences
and actions that follow. From a user experience point of view an emotional response emerges in a context and then is mixed back into the ongoing action andinterpretation process. Tracing the longer lasting effects of a particular response
becomes difficult. By necessity the study of user experience needs to track thedevelopment of experiences and evaluations from a more holistic perspective.
2.2.1 EMOTIONS AS MOTIVATORS FOR ACTION
Hedonistic psychology suggests that people are driven by the pursuit of pleas-52

ure and the avoidance of displeasure, and that the purpose of design is toprovide pleasure and minimise displeasure. Jordan’s adaptations of Tiger’s four

53
ACTIONINHERENT INFORMATIONAUGMENTED INFORMATION

time
location
direction
modality
dynamic
expression

FIGURE 11

FUNCTIONAL INFORMATION

The interaction frogger: an interaction framework describing all the ways
in which action and reaction are coupled. Different kinds of interfaces offer different coupling profiles (Wensveen et al. 2004).

pleasures have been influential in understanding the dimensions of pleasurable
experiences that people have in relation to products. (Jordan 2000) While usefulon a general level, these theories fail to reflect product experiences as something that change over time although the product itself might stay the same andthe general expectations and values of people would also remain similar. Neither
does the hedonistic approach acknowledge the important roles that negative
and ambivalent emotions have in people’s lives (Desmet 2002). Emotions arerecognised as a motivating force in action, but the relationship between emotion and action can vary. Emotions can be part of the stress that invites creative
release (Dewey 1980), or the reward in the hedonic pursuit of pleasure (Jordan
2000) or part of the evaluation of certain kinds of mental states achieved in interaction, such as engagement and flow. The difference in seeing emotions as
responses to designed products compared to emotions as part of interaction
is significant. Views that include use and interaction necessarily invite including the user and the context in a broader sense, which is necessary for understanding user experience.
So far, the most comprehensive model that explicitly accounts for motivation and action in user experience is the one presented by Mäkelä and Fulton
Suri. Their model sums up experience as motivated action in a context, which is
influenced by past experiences and where future expectations are also formed(Mäkelä & Fulton Suri 2001). The examples that the work cites deal with communication and the positive emotional experiences that relate to it, such as
joking and expressing affection – which are all emotional by nature. In theirmodel emotions influence motivation and thus can also direct experiences as
expectations are created and past experiences reviewed.
Jordan’s views of pleasure treat pleasure with products as something that issought and displeasure as something that is avoided (Jordan 2000). It is clearthat with new or old products alike, people seek experiences they enjoy – which

2 USER EXPRERIENCE DEMYSTIFIED

has also led to the study of fun. Defining “fun” in the field of human-computerinteraction has been taken up in earnest only in the last five years or so, beginning with the “Computers and Fun” seminar in 1999 (where article 1, Mäkelä &Battarbee 1999, was also first presented). This has led towards the serious studyof fun, Funology, a common forum for studies focused on fun, enjoyment andengagement. Designing for fun or enjoyment is difficult: on the one hand certain
products are quite supportive of enjoyable experiences, but ultimately theirsuccess always depends on the person’s willingness to be entertained. Thereis the fun of novelty, and then enjoyment that is inherent in activities that can

54

be labelled as work in one context and entertainment in another. In certain environments people are very willing to be entertained and have a good time.

work. Fun focuses on the action, productive work on goals. In fun, goals are
small and less important, subservient to action and only serve to frame theaction. In productive work, action serves the achievement of goals. What will
excite and challenge in fun will cause stress in work. (Hassenzahl 2003) People,
however, frequently switch between these modes during the day even when
they are at work, making the actual separation of work and play an idea thathas fewer roots in practice than most employers might like to think. Work andfun can be seen as even more closely affiliated than the flip sides of the samecoin. Brandtzæg & Følstad describe aspects of enjoyment, building on a demand-control-support model for good and healthy work. First, there must be
demands of challenge and variation. Second, there should be the opportunity toboth use and develop skills, and the person should have the authority to makedecisions. Third, social support in the form of co-activity as well as a sense of
belonging increase enjoyment. (Brandtzæg & Følstad 2003)
The term engagement, as used by Laurel, describes the positive, first person
interaction experience that people can have with computers. Like watching aplay, people willingly pretend that the representations they interact with are
real. This accounts for two advantages: in so doing people gain many new potentials to act with the representation, but also, as the representations are notreal, they are not affected by the negative aspects of the world, and can thus bemuch more pleasurable to interact with. This is called the mimetic state, which
is disrupted if the person has to stop thinking about what they are doing andinstead interact with the system on a meta-level, thinking about what the system wants to do. (Laurel 1991)
Csikszentmihalyi (1991) focuses on the optimal experience, flow (not unlike
Laurel’s term engagement, above), and describes elements not dissimilar fromthe ones listed by Følstad et al. above. The flow experience consists of challenging activity, a merge of action and awareness, clear goals and feedback,concentration, the paradox of control, and loss of self-consciousness and trackof time. The flow experience is a highly rewarding state of doing. Awarenessand action could be both a person playing a computer game, or it could be twodancers perfectly responding to each other or a group of musicians improvising together – matching skill levels is essential for the flow experience to becreated together.
Game developers and researchers have much interest in understanding whatmakes games enjoyable (or, possibly, fun). Good usability does not to correlatewith a good engaging game, and instead concepts such as social usability andplayability are introduced to support evaluation of gameplay experiences. Play-

55

Hassenzahl defines fun as a mode of doing that is opposite of productive

ability can be divided further into functional, structural, audiovisual and social
playability. (Järvinen et al. 2002).
If the willingness to be entertained is partly supported by the environment
and partly the person’s choice, what other factors affect the situation where
fun is to be had? The context of the social gathering is essential to the successof for example an enjoyable game experience. While the game is played, realities outside the game are consciously ignored and as long as the rules are followed, play is fair. The management of tension, or the disparity between theoutside realities that are suspended and the gaming realities that are played
with, is essential to the success of game gatherings and game play. Only as participants can people then enjoy and have fun in winning. However, participants
may become too involved in the game and take it so seriously that fun disappears. If people leave in the middle, the remaining participants have to work
harder to try to maintain the fun in the game. (Goffman 1961) Fun, games andplay are also affected, then, by the social context and a mutually maintained
agreement to have fun.
The above examples suggest that fun is a matter of perception, framing andinterpretation which has to do with activities, their purpose and a temporary,
manageable and mutually agreed detachment from “serious” reality. Fun has
a social dimension, because framing situations is more enjoyable when others engage in it too; having others around helps in maintaining the tension
between the big picture and the “fun” activity at hand. Fun is then not a property of a product per se, but rather a type of action with self-contained aims
and purposes that can be communicated and understood by others as well. In
the work and play contrast, fun is about instant gratification, which is gainedat the expense of the “real outside world”. In practice it may be integral to ourwellbeing, and called forth because of unnatural demands on “serious” work

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and productivity.
2.2.2 WHAT A PRETTY THING!
EMOTIONS AND DESIGN
Most people remember a moment of unbelievable frustration with a video recorder or similar product. Sometimes these experiences are the unpleasantnorm rather than the odd exception. All product developers are keen to minimise the frustration, dissatisfaction and desperation that alienate customers
and anger users. In the context of product design and user research, emotional
responses are interesting because of their business consequences: emotional

56

responses to the product itself or advertising help the customers select a product from among many similar ones. As Desmet elaborates, seeing, using, own-responses, most of which are not well understood in design (Desmet 2002).
With “understood”, Desmet refers to academic research. Traditionally, productdesigners have worked to develop sensitivity and skills that allow them to address these aspects in their work, even if they have not been able to describe
exactly how and why they achieve this. Desmet’s research addresses emotions
that are elicited by the appearance. There are other emotions and experiencesthat relate to product use, although for the purpose of user experience, bothshould be included as appropriate.
Norman lists product related emotions in three categories: visceral, behavioural and reflective. Visceral relates to instinctive attraction to form, colour
and the resulting bodily reactions. Behavioural responses deal with use andfunctionality, and the interfaces and objects that people for example touch,grip and drive. Reflective responses deal with matters of identity and culturethat are associated with products. (Norman 2004) While Norman can do muchto legitimise and bring forth research and discussion on emotions, these results are not groundbreaking or new. Researchers strive to connect productfeatures and qualities to emotional responses and these further to attitudes,
actions and experiences (see e.g. Rhea 1992). However, this becomes increasingly difficult: the more the qualitative richness of the product and context is
included, the less transferable the individual findings are.
There are needs for basic research, because design projects, as any activity,
need to be anchored on something. Such beliefs can be, for example, that usability is important for the success of a product. But what constitutes usability
for the future customers may not be well understood. In fact, perceived usability in smart products is very one-dimensional: a product with a few interface
elements is perceived as easy but simple; one with many elements is morecapable but more difficult. However, the emergence of usability problems does
not logically correspond to the number of interface elements (Keinonen 1999).
A study on the usability of interfaces (see the experiment of e.g. Tractinsky1997) aimed to prove that an interface that is evaluated as more beautiful isexperienced as more usable as well. It must be assumed that a beautiful interface evoked more positive emotions as well, however, exactly how beauty wasdefined and applied in these studies can be debated. More recent studies suggest that functional quality and hedonic quality are independent factors that
contribute equally to product satisfaction (Hassenzahl et al. 2000). However,satisfaction and user experience are not synonyms – the term satisfaction isa concept that nests inside the definition of usability, a measurable quality ofa product and its interface.

57

ing, and coveting products all elicit different kinds of emotions and emotional

Usability still applies a very narrow view of context – most people do notlive or work in a usability laboratory. Although the definition of usability has
evolved since its original conception, the definition of specific tasks, specificcontexts and specific users excludes experiences that relate to aspects such as
non-use and misuse. These might be very relevant to user experience: we mightfeel proud to own a product or safer and happier because of a product’s presence, or adapt the product to other, unintended uses. The emotions that become
relevant in these situations relate partly to a product’s appearance, partly to its
functionality, and in a great part to its meaning. The next section will review
the current situation in studying product-related emotions.
2.2.3 HOW TO CAPTURE THE EMOTIONAL
There are many ways to access and measure emotions. Observation and biometric measures are one way to identify immediate emotional responses. However,if these emotions are to be verbalised, they need to be interpreted, which is acontext dependent activity. The moods and emotions of others around as well
as social norms can influence how the interpretation of, for example, excitement is affected.
The way most people first express their emotions, consciously or not, isthrough changes in facial expressions, body posture, voice and so forth – thisis called sentic modulation. Many of these are plainly observable. (Picard 1997:25) Some emotional responses can be extremely fleeting, for example certain
facial expressions may be as short as 125 milliseconds (Hatfield et al. 1994:
19). Expressions may not be plainly visible also because they happen inside
the body and require biometric measurements such as galvanic skin response,
heart rate or blood pressure to be detected. When coupled with observational
data biometric measurements can identify, for example, a frustrating incident and connect it to a specific situation. The aim of affective computing is

2 USER EXPRERIENCE DEMYSTIFIED

to furnish computers with the ability to recognise and respond appropriately
to emotions. Possible applications for such computers include game controls,therapeutic feedback tools and jewellery that indicates its wearer’s emotional
state. (Picard 1997, current research projects are also described on the MIT Affective Computing website)
It is common, also, to ask people to report on their emotions and experiences. Many tools exist for measuring for example subjective satisfaction using
questionnaires and surveys (Keinonen 1998: 46). Verbal reports and scales havetheir challenges, though, as developing a reliable tool is difficult and language-58

dependent. Desmet argues that the best way to understand emotions elicitedby a product’s appearance is by non-verbal means, although both verbal and non-over time modify their emotional reporting. For studying emotional responses
to design, Desmet’s tool, PrEmo, uses animated cartoon puppets, which convey
a response with sound, facial expressions and body gestures. Users select theones that apply of the fourteen. The advantage of this tool is that it allows people to express conflicting emotional responses to products – although people
may like one aspect of a product, they may dislike something else about it.
In product design one necessary part of setting design goals is to determine
metrics on how to evaluate them. Having tools that allow benchmarking, independent results and such are a quantitative way to monitor the quality ofthe design. Such measuring approaches may not, however, be as useful for thegenerative stages of design work.
2.2.4 THE ART OF INTERPRETATION: EMOTIONS IN SOCIAL INTERACTION
For the practice of user centred design and concept development it is rarely
practical to use surveys or measuring devices. It is much more useful and effective to put designers in direct contact with users in their context, and trust thatthe emotional responses of the (future) users is conveyed in social interaction.
For this, it is necessary to understand the role of emotions in social interaction. Emotions can motivate action but cannot dictate it: in social interaction at
any given time there are a range of available acceptable and many more unacceptable actions from which to choose. For the purpose of understanding user
experiences, product use and product related emotions should not be isolated
from their real material and social contexts. Flipping a light switch with moreforce than necessary may mean a range of things: that someone left the lighton all day, that the price of electricity has gone up again, or that the person
just trod on a Lego brick and hurt their foot, or all of the above.
The majority of emotion research that pertains to Human Computer Interaction is limited in its treatment of emotion. In fact, all of the models of interactivity that are applied in Human Computer Interaction design fail to accountfor symbolic uses of interactions (Svanæs 2000). The purpose of expressing an
emotion relates to the context, and people can train to suppress or exaggerate
the visible expressions of emotions, or use them to communicate with others.
In a study to understand how emotions play a part in computer interaction,
experiments testing principles of social psychology were created with computers playing the part of the other person. The results suggest that interaction,with humans and computers alike, is social, even if the interaction involves only
text-based commands. People evaluate a computer’s performance more honestly
on a different machine, and like a computer better when it adjusts its interaction

59

verbal self-reports are subject to the general tendency of people to increasinglystyle to match that of the person’s (Reeves & Nass 1996). The global validity ofthis social interaction with computers theory has been challenged with a study
focusing on small handheld products such as palm top computers and phones.
When the politeness test, i.e. people are more polite face-to-face than not, wasreplicated, the results were not the same as with desktop computers. This suggests that other, more complex social perception phenomena, situational variables and cultural differences may play a part in perceiving computing products
as social interaction partners (Goldstein et al. 2002).
Dewey examined actions as expression, as something that people learn to
do to achieve particular consequences or outcomes (Dewey 1932). When people act together, their smiles, offered to others, may take on other meanings.
They may wish to communicate their good-natured personality, their delightin subjects presented to them, such as pets or small children, or to emphasisethat despite the last disagreement the friendship is still intact. They may fish
for compliments or sympathy, or otherwise seek personal gain. (Goffman 1967)
In fact, sometimes people’s problems lie in how to convince others that theiremotions are in fact “genuine”, and not part of a manipulation trick. Goffman’sinterpretation is that both can be true: people act at the same time cynicallyand manipulatively and yet with good intention and sincerity at heart (Manning1992). Many meanings that float about in social interaction are ambiguous andremain so, and are constantly, or at least potentially, changeable.
Emotions are also reflexive. Because of people’s ability to treat the self as a
subject, people can also observe, reflect on, regulate and produce alterationsin the internal processes of emotions. These influence the way that ambiguous
emotions are identified, how emotions are displayed to others appropriately
and how people can intentionally influence their emotional experiences towards
positive or negative. (Rosenberg 1990) Emotions can be also expressed intentionally: a car door can be closed lovingly or slammed angrily – both actions

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result in a closed door but suggest different interpretations, should anything besensing it. If products could sense how they are handled and operated by people
and what this conveys about their emotional expectations, products that afford
these interactions could have a natural channel to receive input about what is
expected of them (Wensveen et al. 2000, Wensveen et al. 2002). Interfaces thatprovide many ways to achieve the same result can support rich interactions andprovide a medium for products to read emotions directly from use.
Some of the questions that come to mind about the projects underway at
the Affective Computing lab relate to the purpose and desirability of having

60

emotions recognised. Therapeutic and special needs contexts are important
but what purpose could these technologies have for the common person? Wens-

missing: if I slam the alarm clock controls to set the time, how would the alarm
clock respond? Should it have the possibility for reflexive emotions as well?
Would it sulk, or be fearful? Would it behave angrily back at me? Would it be all
the more friendly and eager to cheer me up or would it refuse to work underabusive conditions? Without risking losing the actual waking up service, how
am I supposed to determine this? And what are my emotions if I accidentally
offend my alarm clock beyond apology? Will my enjoyment in alarm clock use
centre around the subversive pleasures of torturing the poor device to its limits, rather than the more elegant satisfaction of interacting with it beautifullyand expressively?
Clearly an alarm clock is a simple thing that serves an important functionin our society, and there is no reason why products with important functions
should be boring or tedious to interact with. However, the motivations for interacting with products and using them go beyond mere utility.
Focusing on one person only reveals half of how the experience is shaped as
people try things out, evaluate outcomes, laugh, tease, get upset or find a newthing to talk about. When people act together, they come to create unpredictable situations where they must respond to each other’s actions creatively. They
influence each other and create experiences for each other. If social interaction
is described only as belonging to the same general concept of context alongwith objects and spaces, the actual impact that social interactions have on experiences becomes overlooked. However, people generally behave in ways thatallow others to anticipate the general direction of a likely outcome. Experiences
also exist in this volatile, and yet relatively predictable, world. Focusing only
on the individual or the product, or the individual interacting with the product,
do not account for all that happens in the real world.
As studies on social interaction (Goffman 1961) suggest, people in general
are motivated by the search for meaning, rather than emotion. Emotions are aresource, a tool, a bargaining chip, and their value depends on the meanings
that they are attached to. This is in some ways an issue of scale. Emotions,
negative, positive and ambivalent, are but elements that influence the searchand interpretation of meaning in experience.

2.3 SHARING THE SUBJECTIVE
As described in Chapter 1, designers have always delivered more than functionality and used form and material elegantly, playfully, aesthetically and expressively. Moreover, the people who use, handle and own products have experi-

61

veen’s alarm clock (ibid.) is interesting, but the final stage of the scenario is stillences with them regardless of how much this was part of the initial specifications.
It is necessary for design, however, to understand the relationships between
products and their specifications as well as what people actually come to experience.
In real life there are many ways in which people can learn about the subjective experiences of others, even if they can never exactly know them, as discussed in the previous section. Through observing what people do and how they
behave, by becoming exposed to the same or similar experiences and interactingwith people designers can create working interpretations of the experiences ofothers. The more two people have shared common experiences and learn about
each other, the better and closer their empathic understanding of each other.
The limitations of sharing become evident when trying to design for people
with different abilities. For example, a visually disabled engineer in Helsinki has
often consulted architects on how to design public spaces that are friendly forpeople with visual disability. He had often tried to explain the painful and temporarily debilitating effects that strong direct light, especially when reflected
off shiny surfaces, has on people with these conditions. This advice had completely been ignored several times. Contrast problems are, according to him,
the one thing that normally sighted people always forget first, and most often
ignore. Eyes with normal vision accommodate faster and better to changes inlight, and hardly ever experience it as a problem. Many visual disabilities causesuch changes to become much more difficult to manage: a simple transition
from outdoors to indoors can render a partially sighted person completely blind
for several minutes. His conclusion was that sighted people cannot relate tosuch an experience, cannot imagine the significance of the experience, and thus
cannot relate to it (personal communication, 11th June 2003).
Sanders’ framework offers an explanation for this by suggesting that what
people do, what they say and what they make are all needed for forming an

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understanding of the experience of others (Sanders 1999). No one method ortool alone can give a reliable account of experience; instead many methods andtechniques need to be used in parallel (e.g. Sanders 1992, Black 1998, Buchenau & Fulton Suri 2000). The matter of communicating experience depends on
both people, the person who is the (potential) user and the person who is thedesigner and/or researcher.
As the approach examples in this chapter illustrate, there are many ways
to support processes that help people to become more aware of their experiences and to find ways to share them. But it is not only a matter of how to get

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the user person to communicate; it is also necessary for the designer or researcher to receive them properly. As the example above of the design of public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 prioritisematters, 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 andbeing 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 andsynchrony of gestures, moves and expressions (Hatfield et al. 1994). The studyof 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 androle taking, is something that happens in face-to-face interaction.
People have a great ability to imagine actions and consequences from theirown 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 (Cooper1999) to embody design criteria in the form of person descriptions and the useof 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 toothers 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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spaces illustrates, merely telling someone that an aspect is important may notsay things like “it was a nice conference and I met some people I knew”, or begin to recount the story of the opening day when at the same moment threedifferent people called her name and she didn’t know who to greet first. The
first is the kind of description that Sacks (Sacks 1995) refers to as “doing being ordinary”, where the aim of the description is not to focus on the unusual, but rather on the expected and the normal, while the second story is anaccount of something unusual. Actual stories are a production that take into
account rules of storytelling that affect the content: how it is introduced andframed, who is entitled to what degree of emotional responses and so forth.
(Sacks et al. 1995)
Although the production of stories depends greatly on the situation in which
they are told, storytelling can be useful to collect information quickly about
key problems, relevant experiences and breakdowns (Erickson 1995 provides
some examples). How and what is communicated depends very much on how
the questions or recall situations are created. Images can also be used toprompt stories in discussions (Mäkelä & Mattelmäki 2002). Direct questions
often force a presumption on people which they themselves would not haveused or considered. Designers and users alike can also use various media toexpress their experiences: diaries and other written accounts, visual material,
drawings and diagrams, photographs, video and any combinations of these.
This media can help capture rich qualitative and sensory expeirences, document findings and keep them fresh and convincing even for those who were
not there themselves.
In the following, several approaches to learning about the subjective experiences of others are characterised and compared to each other. The characterisations are not necessarily mutually inclusive, nor is this listing definitive– however these are the ones that have been emerging in the field of design for

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user experience.
z applied ethnography – analytical reporting of observations
z empathic approach – observations are balanced with empathyz participatory approach – supporting the creative thinking ofparticipants
z inspirational approach – people’s idiosyncrasies fuel creativity

and ideation
Being user centred does not mean that designers even agree on how to best in-64

volve the user in the design process and to what degree. The roles of the designer and researcher vary. The inspiration-oriented approach is a designer-centred,curiosity. The empathy-based orientation is also built around the designer as aperson, but balances this with observations to create a working balancing act
and to filter out mis- or over-interpretations. Participatory approaches to user
experience support participatory design and a heavier involvement of people
in the process through the co-construction of an understanding, while design
ethnography focuses on the practice and aims at being much less invasive. The
ethnographic approach leans on a more rigid theoretical and methodologicalbackground than the interpretation based empathy and inspiration approaches– and yet all can be lauded for being sensitive to people’s experiences and supporting design for user experience.
2.3.1 INTERPRETING OBSERVATIONS FOR DESIGN
Ethnographic methods have been applied to design in many ways and have resulted in some design approaches that echo the spirit and attitude of ethnography: the researcher is a middle man between the informants and the audience.
Although design ethnography is not generally advertised as being a user experience approach, as a contextual, person-to-person approach to learning about
the users’ world it is most suited to learning about experiences. Millen points
out that ethnography is often thought to be a method of collecting field data,when in fact it is a form of analytical reporting of the data. Ethnography studies emphasise observational studies in real contexts, providing a larger picture
and understanding activities from the informant’s perspective. (Millen 2000)
Ethnographic reporting is done through taking small observational notes, which
are then sorted and analysed to formulate hypotheses of how to further focus
field studies and to propose information on what people do and why (Schatzman & Strauss 1973). In rapid ethnography, the number of informants must be
cut down and carefully selected and several approaches used concurrently tosave time (Millen 2000).
For a well-known example of an approach based on ethnography, the Contextual Design process follows four principles: context, partnership, interpretationand focus. The role of the researchers is to pick up on aspects that are invisible
to the people they need to learn from and help them articulate what they know.
To this end, and the interpretation of the collected data, Contextual Design offers a comprehensive team process. (Beyer & Holtzblatt 1997)
Cain outlines a similar approach and distils experience-based design and its
aims in the following way: in understanding everyday experience, the components of experience are sociocultural systems, patterns and routines of action
and things that people use and the subsequent impact on what people think and65even artistic, approach that treats people as a source of stories and the subject ofTHINK

USE

FIGURE 12

DO

The focus on studying people: what they think, do and use. An ethnographic approach for creating a framework for each studied case (Cain1998).

do. By studying what people think, do and use (see Fig.12), experiences can belearned from and turned into design requirements. (Cain 1998)
The intended outcome of ethnographic studies are detailed descriptions ofpeople’s activities and their meanings, which are the result of the researcher
frequently studying, visiting and talking to people, and analysing and refining
empirical data. This requires ethnographic training but may divorce research
work away from the designers, emphasising a separation of research and design. Ethnography and design have contradictory aims methodologically: one

2 USER EXPRERIENCE DEMYSTIFIED

to understand, the other to transform (Dourish & Button 1996). It seems that
if user research results are to be transferred from one person to another, thisrequires tight collaboration and involvement.
2.3.2 WITH HEART AND MIND – DESIGN EMPATHY
Empathy can mean the mimicry of emotional expressions, the following of another’s gaze or, through role-taking, the ability to imagine someone else’s experiences without having them directly. The last of these is the definition that isuseful and used in design empathy (Koskinen 2003b). It is the “altered subjec-

66

tivity that can come from immersion into a particular context” (Plowman 2003:
34). Design empathy is an approach where observations in real contexts and em-

B

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R
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A
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NC
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FIGURE 13

O

BS

ER
VA
TIO

N

EM

TH
PA

Y

Design empathy is about observing people and relating to them emotionally (Fulton Suri 2003).

pathic tuning in are used in turn to learn about the experiences that people haveand the meanings that these experiences have (see Fig.13). In practice, empathy
helps to make the leap from knowing to understanding.
As each designer is different, approaches like design empathy that require
direct and personal engagement are dependent on the person’s willingness andability to empathise and engage. This may also mean that the role of the “expert designer” needs to be traded for a more useful role as a learner, partnerand fellow human. The empathic immersion needs to be balanced with timesof cooling off, emotional tuning in with an outsider’s calculative gaze and reflective thinking. Creativity is stumped by critique and judgement – the same
applies to learning about experiences. With empathy the aim is not to judge
but to relate to and understand the situations and why certain experiences aremeaningful to these people.
A key part of the design for user experience process is to leverage the ability to have new experiences and experience new things for learning and under-standing. Empathy in the field visits is important as empathic design is based on
observation (Leonard & Rayport 1997). The observations can be documented
with rich media: pictures, video, sound, things that people have made or used,scenarios, stories, and so forth (see Figure 14). These observations and materials then need to be processed, organised and communicated with others.
Schön & Bennett outline three kinds of reflection in relationship to design.
Reflection is always spurred by an element of surprise. Firstly, reflection in action happens while doing, and implies a process where the person begins toobserve the situation while doing and take it into account. Reflection can also
happen on action, which means that people stop what they were doing and begin to analyse the surprise and its cause and implications. The third is reflection on practice – which is how masters teach novices. (Schön & Bennett 1996)
Design empathy works because it helps to find the things that surprise, thatmove, that are emotionally significant. Design empathy deals not only with
context, but also with the role of the researcher (for a more complete account,see Koskinen & Battarbee 2003) (see Figure 15).
Empathic design is user-centred, but offers ways to extend the experiencing
into other contexts as well: role-playing, bodystorming and trying things out
can be important aspects of design studio work as well. As in usability, discount methods such as cognitive walkthroughs and heuristics can help designers challenge their own thinking; some of these methods can be seen as a way
to improve the experience vocabulary of the designers as well as to jump startand fuel their creative processes at the office.
The empathic approach supports ideation more than the ethnographic approach, because it does not imply that designing and learning about users is
separate. The results are often described as stories, scenarios, and even designideas. It could even be called more designerly, as it does not follow a strict methodology, but rather puts the designers in direct contact with their end users at

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least at times. The analysing is kept to a minimum; reporting is designed to beconvincing and rich and the emphasis is on personal experience.
2.3.3 PARTICIPATORY CREATIVITY
Design is often understood as a production process, but it can also be seen as
a learning process. In user centred “learning”, people are brought into a process where they can together with researchers reflect on and construct knowledge about their experiences (see Fig. 16). A true understanding of experience
happens when people are actually involved in the process, as more than just68

informants (Sanders 1999), the term anthropology uses of the people they
study.

69
FIGURE 14

Empathic observations on videotape and visualised into notes and sketches. In the video a visually disabled person “reads” magazines with wireless headphones and a keyboard – an experience very different fromsitting in a sofa, looking at printed pages. Jokes and stories also help toconvey attitudes and expectations.

RVER

CED

OBSE

RIEN

text

ED

E
EXP

con

GIN

user
centreddesignrole

designer
centreddesignIMA

EXPE

FIGURE 16

FIGURE 15

RIEN

CER

A designer’s radar – design empathy depends on the designer’s active roletaking activities in the user’s context (Koskinen & Battarbee 2003).
By studying what people say, do and make, designers can learn what people think, use, know, feel and dream (Sanders 1999).

SAY
THINK

SAY

DO
USE

DO

KNOW
FEEL
DREAM

MAKE

studying experiences with people. She is, consequently, also an advocate of participatory design. She uses three ways to access experience: by studying what
people say, what people do and what people make. The argument is that witheach way people are able to communicate different kinds of experience. Making
is a way to let people access their dreams: those parts of experience which are
not well constructed with words alone and which cannot be shown (Dandavate
et al. 2000). Special tools are used, such as velcro models (Sanders 1992), picture sets, cardboard forms and other materials with which to involve people.
These and other assignments such as self photography are then talked throughand observed. Furthermore, at SonicRim, these very qualitative tools are used toprime people to be ready for a meeting with the research and design team. Using images in participatory design activities has also been explored elsewhere,
for example in the context of bathrooms and old people (Boess et al. 2002).
This approach allows seeing users as people that can be brought into theprocess despite their lack of formal training and experience in design. Whenthey are put into a position where they can reflect on their own experiences
they create new information, to the benefit of the designers. In the constructive process the participants are actively involved in creating a better understanding of themselves and their experiences. This calls for special techniques,concrete materials and active participation (for a comparison study of suchmaterials and media, see Stappers & Sanders 2004). The process usually begins
with priming tasks that start gearing people’s thinking towards an area of design interest and lets them process it typically for some days, after which theactual design and interview discussion takes place. According to the requirements of the project, participants discuss and further construct descriptions
that reflect their experiences.
Other participatory activities emphasise for example the use of video, mockups, prototypes, collaborative acting out and designing together with target users (e.g. Bødker & Buur 2002). The sheer amount of data that is collected thisway is only manageable by experts. SonicRim uses cluster analysis software anda rigorous transcription routine in making sense of and connecting the materials from up to twenty participants. Material kits are customised for each case,but are standardised so that they can be used to aid in other projects as well.
Video data needs editing and metadata added to it to make it truly useful.
2.3.4 SEEKING INSPIRATIONIn the previous empathic approach, inspiration and empathy is balanced against
observations and information. But what if inspiration can run free? This inspira-71

Liz Sanders has been influential in developing the methods and tools fortion-oriented approach has sprung forth from the Royal College of Art in London,
most prominently from creative minds at the Computer Related Design studio.
Their focus is to become inspired by and of people and to treat concept design
as a tool for creating value fiction – creations that challenge people to think
about their relationships with technology and products (Dunne & Gaver 1997
– they approach value fiction mainly through concept prototypes). One of theirmost influential works was the original Cultural Probes process, a process ortechnique for collecting input from the elderly in various locations in Europe
for the EU-funded project Presence (Gaver et al 1999).
The cultural probes approach from the Presence project has become influential at least in Europe (Gaver et al. 1999). They used designed tasks in a kit
to help people describe their experiences and attitudes towards their life andtheir neighbourhood. The results, as postcards, photographs, maps and stories,
trickled back to London one by one through the mail from Norway, the Netherlands and Italy. The principle of the cultural probes was that the designers
could become inspired by what the people created directly, and that the sometimes even ambiguous material would evoke stories and help the designers toapproach the issue of the elderly and neighbourhoods creatively.
Their approach to becoming inspired is to interpret the ambiguous, focus
on the idiosyncratic, blow it out of proportion, design for it and then inspect
the results. This approach is best at home where design concepts are used to
inform, speculate, learn and warn: they have been used in art installations andstudent work (Dunne & Raby 2001). The creative and highly inventive qualityof the Cultural Probes, and later the Domestic Probes, has not been surpassed.
Both projects aimed at collecting highly personal, subjective and fragmentary
pieces of input from people on a broad, experience-related topic and using theresults to fuel creativity and ideation.
The probes approach has been applied to pre-concept research in different

2 USER EXPRERIENCE DEMYSTIFIED

areas as well, and has been combined with other types of user studies. Wensveen
applied the probes approach to help people document their waking experiences, something a visiting researcher could not very well come to do. His probes
helped people express their emotions during waking up and their attitudes towards the alarm clock. (Wensveen 1999) Probes, then, do not have to travel far to
be useful. Probes were also applied in a case of exercise and wellbeing, and following that, several pre-concept research projects (e.g. Mattelmäki & Battarbee
2002). The approach was more towards using the probes approach as one partof establishing a dialogue between participants and reserachers. The process72

involved several stages of studying materials, forming profiles or conclusions
and then meeting again with the participant to learn more (see Fig. 17). In cases

73
Examples of self documentation probes from projects at the University of

FIGURE 17

Art and Design Helsinki. Project Morphome (PROACT, Academy of Finland)studied experiences of living with technology in homes using e.g. animal
stickers and a floor plan. A student project for Kone corporation studied
the experiences and moods of wheelchair users as they encounter elevators during their day (student team: Bogesits, Uhari-Pakkalin and Vasara).

with companies and design consultants the approach has been developed in the
pre-concept stages to inform how users experience their work or the products
the company makes (Jääskö & Mattelmäki 2003). Probes have also been appliedin the context of technology and families (Hutchinson et al. 2003). Digital media tools are already used in digital ethnography (Masten & Plowman 2003) andthe first reports on using mobile phones with cameras in probes experiments(Hulkko et al. 2004) are promising.
The original probes study has inspired more focused applications in user research that typically try to produce some kind of analysis as well (to the stateddisappointment of the original idea developers, Gaver et al. 2004). However, it
seems that the value of this type of artistic endeavour is precisely that it caninspire other types of user research to be creative, and to take the process of
becoming inspired more seriously (Mattelmäki & Keinonen 2001).
In learning about user experience, these approaches have different principles.
The ethnographic approach focuses on learning about the users’ world by personal experience and observation. The participatory approach is not concernedwith preserving authenticity but instead brings the participants into a stormof materials to help them express what they know and do and feel and dream.
The empathic approach is based on observations and experience simulations,and uses prototypes to develop a sense of the design context and desirable
outcomes. The probes tools have been applied in different kinds of projects,

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some more empathic, some more ethnographic.

REALITY SEEKS THEORY FOR SERIOUS PARTNERSHIPDESIGN FOR CO-EXPERIENCE
REFLECTION

3.1
3.2
3.3

3

COEXPERIENCE

The previous chapters have described what user experience is, how it relates tofor example emotions, meaning and social interaction and how it is interpreted
in design. Frameworks of user experience have been reviewed and the role ofmeaning has been discussed. Each approach has its merits and shortcomings,
and this chapter discusses one approach that has not been evident in the user
experience discussion so far: user experience in social interaction. Rather thanusing this description, or calling the phenomenon intersubjectivity between
users (as Dourish 2001 does), this work suggests using a shorter and catchierterm: co-experience.
The idea of co-experience emerged in a way described as appropriate byJames (1996). He suggested that when a disparity between theory and a perceived thing is noted, this should set forth a search for accommodating ideas
and following a try of many, trying to find an explanation that upsets as little
as possible the previously believed “truths” (James 1996). The aim of this exploration is to find a framework that includes as much of the sensible existingknowledge of experience but which also helps to account for the observations
that challenged the existing knowledge.
This chapter describes how the search for the concept came about, explains
what is meant with co-experience and matches it to existing approaches andpractices in design.

3.1 REALITY SEEKS THEORY FOR SERIOUS PARTNERSHIPIn 1998 an EU project called Maypole was developing concepts to support social
communication among children and their immediate family and peers. The teamat Helsinki University of Technology engaged in a host of different activities
involving children, foam and cardboard models and real products, each triedand 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, aproduct 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 withGameboy 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 ofuser 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 anddoing 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
3 CO-EXPERIENCE

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, mostoften these meaning making interactions involve other people. Both models
state that things are made meaningful or become meaningful, but neither the80

presence nor absence of others is elaborated.

FIGURE 18

Boys acted out dramatic fighting scenes together to get photo evidence.

FIGURE 19

EMMA

TOM

WHO WROTE TH
AT?
IT’S NOT TRUE!

The infrared connectivity of the in2its was used to anonymously tease others.

3.1.1 EXPERIENCES IN SOCIAL INTERACTION
Social interaction, when face-to-face, consists of verbal and non-verbal actions,which together constitute a move – everything that happens during a turn taking
action (Goffman 1959). Goffman further describes that moves consist of messages (the actual content or information), ritual respect for others, regard for
self, communicative restraints in order to be understood and framing instructions, that give clues as to how the message should be interpreted, in jest or
seriously. (Manning 1992) When social interaction is mediated with technology,
the forms that moves take can change and the communicative restraints may
also be dictated by the medium: a maximum number of characters, length ofvideo or audio, size of file, number of pages, and so forth. In co-experiencing
as in social interaction, what is shared may be no more important than how it
defines the relationship of the person towards others and what kinds of interpretations are offered to make sense of the message. In co-experience products
support, constrain and shape the sharing of experiences with others, and theshared experiences are influenced by other people as well. It is a process of interpretation and change in terms of the meaning of an experience but also ofcontinuity for social relationships.
For the purpose of understanding how users share experiences, it is useful
to borrow from a theory that accounts for this. Blumer’s symbolic interactionism is a theory of social interaction that, as outlined in section 1.4, sees meaning as something that is created by people interacting with others in the world.
Symbolic interactionism is based on three main principles:z people act upon and towards things according

to the meanings they have for them,z these meanings arise from interaction with other people and thatz these meanings are handled in and modified by people

in an interpretive process. (Blumer 1986)
People’s social interactions consist of symbolic interactions (which communicate meanings as the results of interpretive processes) and non-symbolic
3 CO-EXPERIENCE

interactions. That is to say that people are able to purposefully act to convey
meaning to others. People do not merely respond to outside events or execute
their plans – their actions also have strategic, communicative purposes that go
beyond the task itself. In being able to use products to share experiences withothers, the meaning of the technology itself emerges as well.

82

Historically, the value of symbolic interactionism was that it popularised
participant observation as a study method and rejected quantitative surveys insearcher’s part. (Coulon 1995) Symbolic interactionism stresses the importanceof interpretation in the meaning making process. All things, be they physical objects such as chairs and clothes, social objects such as mothers and politiciansor abstract objects such as forgiveness or ideology, get their meaning throughinteracting with others and perceiving what kinds of meanings others have forthem (Blumer 1986). This is a very dynamic view of the symbolic interactionism
classic. Blumer’s version of symbolic interactionism reflects the environment
where it was created: the city of Chicago of the 1930s was a city of restlessness
with high immigration and social disorder. However, once these meanings arelearned, they remain relatively stable, and even in restless environments, people strive for stability and respectability of conduct (Duneier 1992). Similarly,
in more stable surroundings such as present-day Northern Europe or the UnitedStates Midwest, roles and identities play a greater role in how people interpret
each others’ intentions and actions, which makes interaction more stable compared to Blumer’s view (McCall and Simmons 1978).
When translating the symbolic interactionist principle to design, symbolic
interactions are interpretations of a product’s meaning and of the meaning of
the experiences it provides, made relevant to the recipients. Therefore, by following how people interact and communicate about or with a product, theirmutual process of evaluating its appropriateness, potential, purpose and meaning is made evident also for a researcher to begin to interpret. In co-experience,social interaction contains elements of (see Fig. 19):z Lifting up experiences to shared attention
z Reciprocating experiences (acknowledging, accepting,reciprocating)z Rejecting experiences (ignoring, making fun of,

downplaying, rejecting).
The “shared attention” creation proceeds in the interpretations and actions of
its participants: from the feedback and responses of others people can determine what part of the lifted up experience has been received and how it has
been interpreted, and fit their responses accordingly.
For instance, an example in article 4 (Battarbee & Koskinen forthcoming)
shows a sample of mobile multimedia messages exchanged between friends.
Thomas has sent many messages about his toddler son having temper tantrums. His younger single friend finally grows tired of the topic and gently
teases Thomas about the baby’s behaviour and Thomas’ lacking parenting skills.

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favour of seeing people as actors. Learning happens through role-taking on the re-He succeeds in terminating the reports, but at the cost of being called a crybaby
himself. In the example the friends share an experience, but they also interpret it, reinterpret it and in doing so come to define their relationship for a
moment.
The example above is particularly rich with mixed emotions. These can beinterpreted from the exchange by taking first the side of one, then the other.
Emotions mark those experiences that are worth lifting up and sharing withothers. Thomas the father is proud of his son, but probably also amused andfrustrated by his temper. The single friend is first sympathetic, then bored, evenslightly offended that he is expected to sustain interest in wailing babies all day.
Thomas recognises the possibility for hurt pride and retaliates. These are theexperiences that they offer to each other, and their subsequent responses offer
clues to the interpretation of these experiences. Whether a particular response
was the intended one is plausible or debatable and is of secondary relevancefrom the point of view of the meaning of the technology. In the process of thechatter, the mock fight, the pictures of wailing babies and weekend afternoons,the meaning of mobile multimedia messaging takes shape, renewed in the exchange of each message. The messages themselves are documents of how theexperiences were selected and lifted up, but it is also necessary to “see the forest, not just the trees”, the emerging bigger picture.
The argument thus far is simply that social interaction is essential to manykinds of experience. Social interaction is not only a framing context; it invites
and motivates people to interpret and communicate the meanings for technology for themselves and the social group. In interaction, people evaluate theirexperiences and identify entities of experience that are significant for sharing.
These are created into custom-made interpretations according to the interestsof the others or otherwise taking into account the gist of what has been previously communicated.
3.1.2 CO-EXPERIENCE AS A SENSITISING CONCEPT
Symbolic interactionism suggests the use of sensitising concepts. These areconcepts with relatively open definitions that however offer a perspective for
3 CO-EXPERIENCE

studying people. (Blumer 1986) The purpose of such concepts is that of scaffolds in the construction of the house: they are put up to make constructing
the house easier but they are taken down before the house is complete. Sensitising concepts offer ways to structure attention and observations especially atthe beginning when no observations have yet been made, while still remaining

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open enough to let new interpretations be formed. As the perspective of studying the individual is still strong, having another angle for focusing on the social

proposes that this should take place in the context of social interaction.
The reason for suggesting that sensitising concepts might work in designis plain: in symbolic interactionism the researchers cannot know when they
begin what is relevant and what is not, because such interpretations can only
be made after learning about the situation and reflecting on it. Designers or
researchers doing observations for design also do so because they need to develop and understanding of what is relevant and what is not. However, somekinds of structures are necessary to help in getting started, and co-experience
could well provide a way to begin to understand the experiences that people
have. When looking at the frameworks and models created by designers andresearchers, they all contain only a few concepts or terms. For a framework to
be useful in a complex situation, it has to be simple and easy to remember. A
good framework is also transferable from project to another and is not tied toa particular solution or context.
To learn about how to support co-experience in a particular context, the focusof the study needs to include the possibilities of the technologies that are considered, the use of other relevant products and the contexts of use that could
be served with the combination. Techniques that allow capturing experiences
over time and communicating them can help in this process: be they instantmessages, digital photos (Masten & Plowman 2003), journals or tools for experience sampling (Csikszentmihalyi & Larson 1977). Mainly these are used tofacilitate communication between participants and researchers. However, when
the technology is also part of the picture, it is important to track communicationof the participant with his or her social networks. The purpose of this would
be to see how people currently or in a special situation lift up experiences toothers and respond to them in face-to-face situations and in mediated and remote communications. This can then be interpreted and used for inspiration
to create new ways to support desirable experiences.
The principles in learning about co-experience are that the experiences canbe observed directly and implicitly from the social interaction between the people involved in a broader sense. Direct observations are similar to any kinds ofproduct use observations, especially relevant to technologies and products in
co-present use. An example could be the story of co-present challenge gameswith mobile phones, a drinking game invention of a group of young men (article
2, Battarbee 2003a). Implicit observations relate to the ways in which people
document what they do and experience to others with products that support
creating and sharing content and communicating. Ample examples of this havebeen reported from the Mobile Multimedia pilot and the conclusions that can be

85

interaction makes sense. Empathy is always for another person – co-experiencedrawn from the content and continuity of the mobile multimedia messages created by groups of friends (article 3 Battarbee 2003b, article 4 Battarbee & Koskinen forthcoming).
An essential factor for studying co-experience, then, is to accommodatesocial interaction – to conduct studies in real context and with enough time.
Typical ethnographic studies will last months, with the same amount of time
for interpretation – studies on co-experience need to take the time that is appropriate for the design project and for the amount of communication thatparticipants can be expected to have (Millen 2000). Studies on mobile communication exploration (Koskinen et al. 2002, Koskinen 2003) have shown thatthe number of messages sent decreases over the first 2–3 weeks, indicatingthat “the honeymoon” of abundant exploration is over and that longer term
frequency of use may remain close to this level. However, the maturity model of instant messaging states that purposes of use will in fact increase overtime, suggesting that a successful communication medium and the increase in
networks will continue to shape user experiences over longer periods of time
as well. However, even studies of one week have been informative in allowing
participants to explore relevant experiences together – the predictive qualityof such a study on long term use may not be conclusive (article 1, Mäkelä &Battarbee 1999). In fact, even Suchman’s transcription of product states andthe discussions of two people trying to use a photocopier are useful (Suchman 1984).
Learning about co-experience is by nature empathic. In order to make senseof and understand social interaction, a role in the interaction needs to be assumed, and one must seek sensitivity to the experiences of others as they arecommunicated and offered for interpretation. Analysis can then take place to
see how the social interaction has influenced and shaped the experiences. Interpretations must be made – and yet must remain open for reinterpretation
as well. Finally the purpose is to reflect on an emerging larger picture of purpose and meaning.
These principles address both research in the pre-concept stage as well as
in the stages of product evaluation. In fact, as mentioned in chapter 4, the dis3 CO-EXPERIENCE

cussion addresses the paradox of user centred product and technology development.
3.1.3 EXPERIENCE PROTOTYPING AND CO-EXPERIENCE
Prototyping, along with iterations, is one of the key elements of user centred86

design. In designing for user experience it is necessary to make the designs
concrete so that they can be experienced first-hand by designers and future users

process, serving a whole range of purposes. In the area of developing interactive products, paper and screen-based prototypes are used in various stagesof usability testing. In product design, prototypes represent dimensions, form
and materials. Engineering prototypes serve engineering needs. Prototypes,
regardless of how narrowly or broadly they are defined, are essentially things
that resemble the intended product in some aspects in higher or lower fidelity (Virzi et al. 1996). Houde and Hill first suggested that prototypes should be
named not according to the materials or tools they were created with or eventhe fidelity, but rather according to how they are used. They propose three different purposes: role, look and feel, and implementation. Role prototypes address the meaning that a new functionality might have for people; look and feeladdresses a new form of a familiar technology and implementation addresses
a new interaction technique. (Houde & Hill 1997) However, if prototyping foruser expererience is taken seriously, the relevance of the prototype is in how
well it reflects the user experience, which is a different matter of even fidelity
or materials (Hoff et al.). They discuss various types of representation and theways in which different technologies can prototype essentially the same user
experience, and then again how similar technological setups can prototype very
different kinds of user experiences.
Product experiences cannot be imagined for evaluation – it would be as hopeless as describing the flavour of an exotic fruit and having people think about
whether they would buy and enjoy it as a yoghurt flavour. Buchenau and Fulton
Suri (2000) pick up on Houde & Hill’s idea, and propose the term “experience
prototype” to emphasise the experiential aspect of any representation necessary
to successfully live or convey the experience with a product, space or system.
In their paper they describe both an interactive product as well as bodystorming in airplane interior mockups as experience prototyping.
Bodystorming with physical props, in acting out movements and behaviours,
can quickly help structure a design problem space (Kelley 2001). These wereused successfully in a student project to support storytelling experiences forfly fishermen (see Figures 20 and 21). Although the fishermen interviewed were
all technology enthusiasts, during the actual fishing all of their gadgets wereleft behind. The students also felt that no storytelling device could competewith the atmosphere of the campfire. To get to grips with the problem space,
the two students put on their coats, found long sticks and string to be theirfishing poles, tied flies of coloured paper and walked to “the river” to go fishing.
One walked some hundred metres “upstream”, the other a little downstream.
The lines swished and the colourful flies skitted on the surfaces of the “river”

87

alike. A prototype can be anything that is built to learn from during the design

20

The actual fishing experience at the “river”. Photo: Raimo Nikkanen.

FIGURES

Students are enacting the experience of fly fishing to understand oppor-

21

The “campfire” and tying the flies after fishing.

tunities for storytelling (students: Salu Ylirisku, Katja Pettersson, tutor
Raimo Nikkanen).

informative enough, and gestured to the other that he would be going back to
the “campfire” (Figure 21). The other thought it was a sign that a fish had beencaught, and waved back enthusiastically with thumbs up. This incident led
the students to think of a way to share the catching fish experience – throughtactile feedback in the fishing rods. All other equipment was elsewhere, but
through the rods two or three kinds of tactile messages could be shared between fishermen who might otherwise be out of sight or not inclined to shout
loudly to each other.
Different variations of prototype use can be identified, which vary according to the purpose, the functionality, specificity and robustness of implementation.
Experience props are objects that represent for example the size or form
factor of a product concept, which can be “used” or acted with in everyday life
to assess issues such as portability and help in participatory design activities.
Iacucci et al. describe their “magic thing”, a block of foam (Iacucci et al. 2000)
used in contextual ideation sessions. Simple, suggestive foam models were also used with children in a participatory design session in the Maypole project(Maypole 1999). These essentially help imagining use and learning about therelationship of the concept and the context.
Off the shelf experience prototypes are existing products that can, with some,little or no tinkering, provide a robust prototype for one or two key functionalities of interest. Kurvinen & Koskinen used polaroid cameras and paper toprototype an online photo album with a group of people (2003). Koskinen etal. (2002) used existing digital cameras and communicators to simulate mobile image communication. In article 1 (Mäkelä & Battarbee 1999), children
used Gameboy Cameras to see what kinds of mobile image taking experiences
they might enjoy. These are robust, functional, implementable tools that canbe applied for estimates or approximations of user experience or for particular aspects of experience. The advantage of off-the-shelf products is that they
can usually be put into use early in the process, when they can still influence
decision making.
Experiential prototypes are specifically constructed to demonstrate an aspect or quality of functionality or interaction that cannot be demonstrated with
off-the-shelf products or more refined combinations of functionalities. To communicate the intended experience of the digital camera, a large prototype wasconstructed to tune and demonstrate the experience (Buchenau & Fulton Suri
2000). The projects Pogo and LiMe at Philips gained much from using experiential prototypes as well (Goulden & McGroary 2003). Experiential prototypes are

89(see Figure 20). After a while one of them decided that the experience had been

typically half-way prototypes that help evaluate particular new aspects of experience. These can be complemented with, for example, scenarios.
Mini-designs are specifically constructed concept designs that allow theevaluation of an idea in a finished looking form and interaction. The word minidesign has been taken into use at The Eindhoven university of technology for
research through design. Mini-designs are conceptual in nature and are notintended directly for the purposeful world of use, but rather to demonstrateand study an idea. For example, a game was constructed to test children’s flow
experiences during gaming (Eggen et al. 2003). These are typically research oriented prototypes that bring together both design and research.
Field testing prototypes are like experiential prototypes, but often developedin small numbers and made robust enough to be tested by groups of people
in real contexts of use over time (Mäkelä et al. 2000, Buchenau & Fulton Suri
2000). These are typically costly, labour intensive and built when technology
ideas are already relatively strong. For software creating such prototypes may
be easy, for handheld products extremely difficult.
The situations in which these different kinds of prototypes become part ofthe experience prototyping are varied as well. Prototypes may be necessary forin-team activities among designers themselves to learn about relevant experiences, seek inspiration and test and develop their ideas further (Moggridge
1999, South 2004). They can be also instrumental in communications between
design consultants and clients. Prototypes can be used in sessions or situations
where designers and future users collaborate and do things together with them.
Provotypes (Mogensen 1992) are existing products, prototypes or mockups thatare used in analysis to provoke awareness of current practice by exploring alternatives (Kjærsgaard et al. 2003). In reciprocal evolution (Allen 1993) the idea isthat use is design. Quite often it happens that a new technology is introduced,
and users start then also using it in ways it was not designed for. Therefore, themost interesting results can be found when studying emerging practices, when
the process of negotiation, meaning seeking and change is rapid, and gained
insights can inspire the development of products and technologies.
Users, researchers and designers can also experiment with the products
3 CO-EXPERIENCE

their participants are using. Sometimes design ideas can emerge from relatively
loosely framed experimentations. As an example, two colleagues and myself
conducted a small experiment on lifting up experiences and context. Two of
us lived in Helsinki, one in Belgium, and although acquaintances, the Belgian
had not been in Finland and the Finnish had not visited the Belgian. We were90interested if something could be done with location awareness – this was a general interest without a specific need attached to it. We used short messaging with

91
FIGURE 22

Even short and small field experiments with technology can lead to experiences and insights. “Sorry, I cannot respond to your request right now”
– and taking a photograph to explain why.

mobile phones to signal a note-taking moment, and notebooks and digital cameras to document the location and the situation. The analysis was done in twostages: first only the notes were shared and we each sketched small drawings
with which we imagined what the picture would be like. This was an empathic
exercise, but also a challenge to see what kinds of images the notes would evoke.
Finally also the photos were shared and compared to the drawings and notes.
In analysing the results, several interesting things emerged, for example
that close friends can sometimes accurately guess the angle and framing of aphotograph taken by the other person. But the design idea that emerged fromthe experiment related to a moment of unavailability and the knowledge thatthe mobile phone alert was likely to beep at any moment, requesting note taking at a time that was inconvenient. I took a photo in anticipation to describe
what I was doing and why I could not take notes. This brought forth the ideaof using photographs to communicate unavailability (see Figure 22). As we
had experienced, knowing another person’s physical environment and context
brings an added level of interpretation into photographs. The better two people know each other, the more meanings can be offered and interpreted froma single photograph.
The solution to co-experience and prototyping is to turn the traditional design process around, where field testing has traditionally happened last, and treatfield testing as an early research tool. Experience prototyping needs to expand
towards social experience prototyping. With activities that introduce change
into existing social and physical contexts new things can be learned and theprocess of change can be studied as well.

3.2 DESIGN FOR CO-EXPERIENCEIn designing for co-experience, following a few key principles in the design
process is more important than the actual method used. The paradigm that
describes the required conditions for designing for co-experience consists ofat least the following elements:
1. People are involved and present in a user-centred process toovercome studio-based contemplation of irrelevant issues.
2. More than one person is involved in a unit of study, to create theconditions for co-experience in a manner that is appropriate forthe design context.
3. The interactions and co-experiencing take place in a real context,
not a laboratory.
4. People are the authors of their own experiences. They are involved
as creative actors, who can and will engage with available productsthat support them in their interests, their social interaction andexperiences that they find meaningful.
5. Experiences are followed over time, with an eye to trace thetrajectory and path of the experiences after the “first five minutes”
and the “first five days” and to be sensitive to the process of
exploration and redefinition that takes place.
The studies presented in this thesis follow these guidelines to a large degree.
For the first, each article presents work that involves “real people”. The exception is in article 6 (Battarbee et al. 2002), where lack of a common language
made observations limited. The intervention’s factual worth for the final design
3 CO-EXPERIENCE

was relatively low although its inspirational value was relevant. The article isincluded to illustrate that co-experience can be accessed with design tools likescenarios. The second rule is also followed, as all the studies focus on a person in some kind of a small community – a group of friends or acquaintances,a family or a romantic couple. Also, the ideas are tied to the observed contexts

92of the Italian town of Ivrea. In all the other studies, technology of interest wasgiven to people who could take it with them wherever they went. Not a single one

data collection but a necessity for data creation – the consequences of unpredictable events and other contexts can inform design in ways that controlled
set-ups and laboratory environments never can.
The fourth notion – that people are creative – is trickier. Creating solutions is
a skill that most people engage in their everyday life. For example, clear acetate
tape with pressure sensitive adhesive was developed and marketed as something with which to repair books. However, people started using it for dozens
of other purposes, many of which turned out to be new business opportunities
for product development. The meaning of the invention was discovered in dialogue with people. (Schön & Bennett 1996) Sanders suggests that rather thanfocusing extensively on “designing the user experience” (and, one may presume,continuing to ignore the impossibility of literally doing so), designers should
support collective creativity. It can result in new uses, new practices and applications for technologies and products that are relevant to understanding what
motivates people and what latent needs people are discovering for themselvesin product use (Sanders 2002, 2003b).
Sanders prefers to address this as “the creativity of everyday people”. Nondesigners are not in the habit of expressing their creativity except perhaps in areas of one or two passions and interests. She identifies four levels of creativity:
doing, adapting, making and creating. On the level of doing, everyday products
and services satisfy people’s needs and require minimal skill and effort. When
adapting, people invest more effort and skill to make products fit their use orenvironment. When people make things, they follow directions or a recipe andsometimes invest much in both money and time to do things they truly careabout. In creating, people leave instructions behind, and use raw materials
and their skill to create and express themselves. (Sanders 2003a) Designing for
creativity – what people like to do – is a strong departure from designing forsomething like pleasure derived from owning a particular product.
Seeing people as creative actors with an unlimited capacity for experiencing
supports a more collaborative approach to thinking about user experiences. The
way fads, trends and popular ideas spread is social (for an interesting analysis of seeing the spread of ideas as an epidemic, see Gladwell 2002). Design(in the sense of cultural production) is expected to be creative and feed, guideand live off such trends. But when it comes to doing and using, the experiencesthat people create for themselves are always personally rewarding (for a fun
example, see fig. 23).
Fifth, it is important to study use for a long period – several weeks seems tobe ideal – to see how experience develops. The first days and weeks are when peo-93of these studies was conducted in laboratory conditions. This is a challenge for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 takemonths 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

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
FIGURE 23

94

3 CO-EXPERIENCEThis is a more radical departure of the concept of motorised transport. It is

hub and a balanced seat in front. The RIOT challenges previous conceptsof monowheels with an imaginative design. The purpose of the RIOT is toreintroduce thrill and excitement to the experience of motorised transportation. © Jake Lyall 2003 http://theriotwheel.com/.

opportunity is and how it is realised is a matter of the context, the technology
and the people. Therefore, as in the story of the mobile phone drinking game(see article 2 Battarbee 2003a), a product that supports remote communication
is useless in face-to-face communication situations, unless its functionality isrevisited with an eye for entertainment.
In any context and with any product, situations can be reviewed with an eye
for co-experience with two concrete views. The first is here and now – supporting the creating and sharing of experiences in the moment between co-present
people. What is available, what is the situation? What kinds of experiences arethey creating together and how are products facilitating, constraining and shaping them? The other perspective is there and later – how could future or remoteinteractions be supported as well? This perspective leads to thinking of thepeople who matter, and what could be shared with them of the current momentand how (Battarbee & Kurvinen 2003). Would a grandparent like a sound clip ora post card or both? A toy for the son, or a long letter to a partner? A floating
balloon in the sky, an icon on a screen or a ring on a finger glowing pink? Orperhaps something merely touches the imagination and a purpose for it will
be found later. Such souvenirs of moments can take any form, and people are
their own craft artists in that respect. The next step for the designers would be
to discover ways to try out these ideas and to learn from them.
Research on product use and the kinds of experiences people enjoy is typical of the early stages of design, in the pre-concept research of the fuzzy front
end of design (Cagan & Vogel 2002). At this stage the inquiry is into opportunities that could be supported, problems that could be addressed and othersources of inspiration from the users’ lives that can help in the formulation ofideas, translating them to matter and discussing them. Once designs are implemented, products are subjected to usability testing and marketing studies.
User experience is generally defined in a much more narrow fashion in thesestages, and is much more likely to be context, technology platform or project
specific (Garrett 2002, Marcus 2004). Different stages of design call for different methods and processes, although the principles of user centred design still
apply. However, the usefulness of the concept of co-experience is not limited
to the realm of pre-design user research. The work described in the publishedarticles of this thesis focus on the following three things:
z Studies on existing technologies, with findings that suggest thatusing products to communicate and share experiences withothers posed a challenge for user experience frameworks existing at

95

interactions are dormant, waiting for an opportunity and a purpose. What thisthe time (articles 1 Mäkelä & Battarbee 1999, article 2 Battarbee
2003a, article 3 Battarbee 2003b, article 4 Battarbee & Koskinen
forthcoming)z Concept development and scenarios that take the needs forsharing and communicating into account (article 6 Battarbee et al.
2002)z Elaborations of the concept for interactive system design (article 5

Forlizzi & Battarbee 2004).
Rather than a particular method, co-experience is a perspective that opens designers’ eyes to a feature of reality that sometimes is blinked away: the factthat people often make sense of their experiences together, and the definitionof the meaning or purpose of a technology emerges from these shared experiences. The ways in which these experiences become shared become evident inall the forms of social interaction, both face-to-face and mediated. The methodological argument for co-experience is that observing how people lift up
experiences for each other and respond to them is the best way to learn about
the experiences that are relevant to a technology or product. Meaning is emergent in social interaction; therefore to learn about it, the conditions for it tohappen must be created. Once the conditions are set up and exist, preferredapproaches that allow these experiences to be interpreted from the interaction can be used, with empathic sensitivity to the experiences and also theiremotional significance.

3.3 REFLECTION
Dourish (2001) draws an exhaustive list of why research (social studies, ethnographic studies) and design (in most cases, system design for computer supported collaborative work) have not been able to connect properly in the design
process despite the dire need to do so. Social studies and design have opposing aims: frameworks are either too general to be practical or too detailed to
be useful but to the person who created them. This dissertation has, hopefully,
3 CO-EXPERIENCE

addressed these challenges and managed to provide enough of a theoreticalbackground but also enough of practical reflection to be both interesting anduseful. This is why there are attempts to connect to philosophy, theory andpractice, at the expense of none of them being in the central focus.
It also seems unfortunately rare that designers actually visit the places their96

users work (Dourish 2001 mentions this and his observations are probably notoutdated). It seems there is still plenty of work in the field, especially in relating

& Luff 2000).
All kinds of design are still needed as in the days of Modernism. There are therare but necessary radical innovations that usually have little to do with involving the users and at the same time users’ social innovation in taking existing
technologies and appropriating them. Similarly, there is need for a good, solid
development of products involving design work, materials and manufacturedevelopment and which clearly can benefit from user centred processes.
There is also need for experimentation, style and styling, fashion, interactivity and breaching the boundaries of design, interaction, art and technology.
Increasingly, design is also part of creating technologies for people’s lives, forcommunication, for activities that tie many others together, and for allowing
people to create content. This line of work could probably most benefit fromthis study, as it is about how technology, social interaction and design all cometogether in ways that can be learned from and designed for. Co-experience asa concept can inform the design of spaces, of products, of human computerinteraction, new media, and events.
The validity of the ideas and proposals, in a practical sense, is determinedby how many user experience professionals learn about them and whether theideas presented have a positive effect on the definition and perception of theterm “user experience” in practical work. Determining such success and effectis difficult – the dissertation alone should not be expected to change much ina grand scale – such a goal should rather be a life-long one.
Secondly, the validity of the ideas can be seen more directly in how they become visible in further research on design and user experience – thanks to online reference tracking in databases, following this kind of influence is easier,though possibly rather superficial. Thirdly, the proof of concept of the validity of the ideas is to be seen in how these ideas can be put into practice in myown future work, be it practical design work, design education or technology
research. Of this I am most optimistic. Applying the idea of user experience insocial interaction and collaboration contexts seems a promising one.

97

social interaction to design, be it about work or systems of collaboration (Heath

IT’S FUN TO DO THINGS TOGETHER – TWO CASES OF EXPLORATIVE USER STUDIES
CO-EXPERIENCE – THE SOCIAL USER EXPERIENCE
DEFINING CO-EXPERIENCE
CO-EXPERIENCE – USER EXPERIENCE AS INTERACTION
UNDERSTANDING EXPERIENCE IN INTERACTIVE SYSTEMSPOOLS AND SATELLITES – INTIMACY IN THE CITY

1

2

3

4

5

6

4

PRESENTING
THE ARTICLESThis ordering of the articles is not in strict accordance with the chronologicalorder of the publications, although the key developments are in order. ARTICLE
1, “It is fun to do things together” (Mäkelä & Battarbee 1999), predates all of theothers considerably. Its focus is on the use of existing products in field experiments to learn about what is fun for children about a particular technologicalpossibility. The paper has elements that are key to the idea of co-experience,but it is not written from the user experience point of view. In fact this paper
is a starting point; the shortcomings of existing models for user experience
were revealed when they did not seem to address the point of the paper, theexperiences of doing together, in a satisfactory way. Thus emerged the need to
discover how this could be accounted for in the field of design for user experience. The paper proposes that fun – or the enjoyment derived from using theGameboy Camera – for these users was related to doing together. This insight,
initially suggested by the first author Anu Kankainen (née Mäkelä) and thenpresented for the first Computers and Fun seminar in York, is the cornerstonethat has helped to orient all the various papers together into a research direction. My task in this publication was the reporting of the studies. This result
was not explored further at that time by the authors.
A first attempt at explaining the need for a new concept for describing sharedproduct experiencing happened in a CHI short paper called “Co-Experience: theSocial User Experience”, here (ARTICLE 2 Battarbee 2003a). The conference’s spe-

cial theme was emotions. The paper uses two “technology legends” or stories ofcreative social uses of a communication product. It describes the co-experience
as being social, fun, multi-modal and creative in an everyday kind of way. The
paper’s aim is to show that these aspects may not be addressed well enoughin the HCI literature and outlines the work ahead: a framework to explain theconcept, case studies and further attention on methods and processes.
ARTICLE 3, “Defining Co-experience” (Battarbee 2003b) takes the challenge
from the previous paper and attempts to define co-experience for the design
audience. The paper takes the design for user experience point of view and illustrates it by products and experiences “coming to life” when people do things
together. The central aspect of the communication as the key element in coexperience becomes evident as the data used here (as well as in many othersubsequent papers) comes from a multimedia messaging pilot, where the communication can be studied as it happened in one medium between groups offriends. The presentation at the conference demonstrated not only what was in
the messages, but extrapolated what must have happened between them, partially reconstructing the necessary steps between them and thus showing how
the experience is shaped in the course of the messaging turns.
Articles 2 and 3 both describe co-experience but in different ways. At the timeof the writing the idea of co-experience was clear in the sense that it was about
people interacting and products being involved. Different audiences (human
computer interaction people vs designers and interaction designers) require adifferent amount of background work. The point of article 2 was to point out thatshared experiences were not addressed in product design. The point of article
3 (Battarbee 2003b) was to seek to describe what was particular about sharedexperiences and sharing experiences. Three main dimensions were presented:
explorative – organised, synchronous – asynchronous and creation – interpretation. The matter of being explorative or organised is perhaps poorly phrased,
but it refers to the degree of established forms of activities. These, in hindsight,
are what can be seen as resources for interaction: if people know what is ex4 PRESENTING THE ARTICLESThe creation vs interpretation dimension mainly addresses the role of people as102

pected of them, they can comply with it or deviate from it. When new products

larly illustrated by the case of mobile multimedia messaging. Compared to article

or technologies are brought in, these kinds of expectations have not become
established, and it is in fact a process that continues to be upheld or changed.
The synchronicity of communication is mainly a technological standpoint, although in practice face-to-face interactions also often leave topics and return tothem later intemittently (see e.g. newsroom conversations in Heath & Luff 2000).
consumers of content or creators of content. To some degree these are particu-

it still fails to deliver a theoretical basis for the concept of co-experience.
ARTICLE 4 (Battarbee & Koskinen forthcoming) works towards a theoretical understanding of co-experience in relation to the other design models andframeworks on user experience. It answers the key question of what happens
to experiences in interaction in Forlizzi and Ford’s (2000) model, and borrows
a sociological theory called symbolic interactionism to form an answer. The article is conceptual in nature: the connection back to design is not this paper’s
main point, and in fact the review of the existing fields is more complete inboth article 5 as well as here in chapter 2. The article makes again heavy useof material from the multimedia messaging study. In this paper Ilpo Koskinen’s knowledge of theoretical and practical work in the field were important in
helping to shape the paper’s key contribution and form.
ARTICLE 5 (Forlizzi & Battarbee 2004) is an attempt to integrate the concept ofco-experience back to the models of user experience in interaction. Existing approaches are reviewed, and this paper then builds on the Forlizzi & Ford model,
connecting co-experience to the individual experiences as a parallel possibility
through communication. Examples of different experiences are illustrated withsuggestions on how to study them for the design of interactive systems. The
conceptual task of bringing co-experience and the previous model together was
shared. My tasks also involved arranging illustrations and case examples andworking on the concept as well as overall work on the text.
Finally, ARTICLE 6 (Battarbee et al. 2002) was written before the term co-experience had surfaced. It was a write-up of a summer school project on designingfor communities and designing for intimacy in the city. The premise, however,is perfectly co-experiential, which is why the article and the design cases aswell as the interaction requirements presented in it can be now used to discuss
how co-experience could be applied. It also discusses the term intimacy in a waythat makes it a term useful in thinking about new technologies, communication,
co-presence and communities for interaction design. In the presentation at theconference, the focus was on describing the design requirements and illustrating them with the scenarios. The design requirements that must be supported
are: intimacy, interactivity, meaningfulness, and openness to participation. This
reflects the idea of connecting people directly with each other, rather than creating ambient art installations with more oblique effects on people’s experiences.
The rationale for this was that for intimacy, the design had to bring people together, not just paint an abstract moodscape or create artistic displays. My task
in the writing was management and integration of the individual participants’contributions, and the final editing task was shared with Nik Baerten.

103

2, this is already a better formed description of the qualities of co-experience, but

104

4 PRESENTING THE ARTICLES105ARTICLE 1

1

IT’S FUN TO DO
ARTICLE
THINGS TOGETHER– TWO CASES OF
EXPLORATIVEUSER STUDIES†

Mäkelä, Anu1 & Battarbee, Katja2
1 Usability Group, Helsinki University of Technology, Espoo;
2 Department of Product and Strategic Design, University of Art and
Design, Helsinki, Finland

ABSTRACTThis paper describes two explorative user studies conducted in a research
project called Maypole. The purpose of the first user study was to understandhow children thought communication with personal technologies could be fun.
The second study focused on what children thought was fun in taking and editing digital images. In both studies, children aged 7–12 were given existing personal technologies to use in their own environment for one week. After that, afocus group was held with the children in order to discuss what they thought
was fun in using the technologies.

†

First published in Personal Technologies (1999) 3: 137–140.
© Springer-Verlag London Ltd

The results of the two user studies illustrate how fun in using personal technologies could relate to a user’s social behaviour, and not only to human–computer interaction. Therefore, designers are encouraged to explore further thesocial aspects of fun in their creations. Moreover, the two studies illustratesome methodological problems in studying a user’s experience of fun, whichrefer to a need for more public research on methods.
KEYWORDSChildren; Product concept design; Social aspects of fun; User study

1. INTRODUCTION
This paper is not the report of a scientific study on fun and computers, but thedescription of two explorative user studies carried out as a research project.
We believe that it illustrates nicely how fun in using personal technologies canbe based also on human interaction and not only on human–computer interaction. It also illustrates the methodological problems in studying users’ experience of fun.
The paper describes two small user studies carried out in a project called
Maypole (see more about this project in [1]). The aim of the project was to explore and create new ideas for communication products for children aged 8–12
and members of their social networks. It followed the principles of the user-centred concept design phase of product development but was a research projectof six different European industrial and academic partners.
1.1 USER STUDIESThe aim of the two user studies described in this paper was to learn more aboutchildren’s ideas of fun in order to design fun product concepts for them. They
were not the only user studies conducted in the Maypole project [1,2].

106

4 PRESENTING THE ARTICLESThe first study, on the in2it, was carried out at a time when the scope of the
project was focusedon everyday communication, and several completely different concepts weregenerated by the partners. The second study, focusing on the Game Boy Camera,
was done when it had already been decided that the project would concentratespecifically on communication with digital images, and design and engineering
partners were about to start the design of the concept for prototyping (Fig. 1).
In both studies, children were given existing yet novel technology to use
for one week in their own environment. It was believed that by giving thechildren access to technology with features similar or close to the area of the2. METHODS
2.1 IN2IT STUDYWith the help of the Netherlands Design Institute, we were sent six in2it devices by Philips Electronics for the first study. The in2it was designed by Philips
in a user-centred process especially to meet the needs of young girls, a fairly
untapped market niche [3]. It had a calendar and an alarm, it could be used formaking tunes, drawings, stories and cards, and these could be traded between
in2its via infrared. It could also be used to calculate biorhythms and makematches between two people.
The children participating in the study were five siblings, aged between fiveand twelve. The reason why we selected siblings to be the test users was that at

FIGURE 1

Illustration of the experimental design process of the concept for communication with digital images in Maypole. The in2it study was carried out
in the concept definition phase, and the Game Boy study in the new concept and UI phase. Reproduced from [2] with permission.

107

afterwards, information could be gathered for generating and designing new
product concepts.

ARTICLE 1

project interests, allowing them to freely use the technology and discussing it

108

4 PRESENTING THE ARTICLESOne of the users with a Nintendo Game Boy Camera.

FIGURE 3

FIGURE 2

One of the users with a Philips in2it.

The siblings were given the in2it devices and translated manuals, and wereinvited back a week later to return them and discuss in the focus group what
they had liked about them, what they had done and where. A large part of the
discussion was about their interests in general and they everyday lives and social activities. They were also asked to give suggestions for ways to improve
the in2it devices. These suggestions were not intended to be used to improvethe devices but were asked for because it was believed they would reveal something about the children’s preferences in general.
2.2 GAME BOY CAMERA STUDY
Three Game Boy Cameras and Printers were bought for the second study. The
Game Boy Camera was an accessory for the Nintendo Game Boy, and has only
just arrived on the Finnish market. It can be used for shooting and saving blackand-white snapshots, adding on stamps, frames and text, making animations,and taking panorama pictures. The self-made pictures can be printed out as
stickers with the Game Boy Printer.
The field trial was conducted with separate groups of boys and girls. The
groups were already established friends, the girls aged nine and ten, and theboys aged 8–13. The children were given the Game Boy equipment, a brief tutoring, and a translation of the basic features from the manual. They were also
given a phone number to call in case of problems. A week later, they were invited to return the equipment and talk to us about what they had liked about
the Cameras and Printers, what they had done with them and where, and show
us what kind of pictures they had taken.

3. RESULTS
3.1 IN2IT STUDY
The first user study on using in2it devices gave firsthand impressions to thedesign-research group on what children thought was fun to do in their leisuretime. The children considered gossiping, spying and practical joke messaging
to be special fun activities related to communication. These activities werethen explored in the features of the new product concepts generated by the
project partners.
The favourite in2it features of the over-9-yearolds were matchmaking andcreating face collages; the younger children liked drawing. The boy had also en-

109

concentrate. The siblings were different ages but still part of the same social
network.

ARTICLE 1

the time of the project it was not clear on which age range the project wanted tojoyed the challenge of breaking the eldest sister’s user password. At home they
sent anonymous teasing messages to each other via the infrared link. The sizeand bulkiness of the in2its were not seen as a problem when used at home, but
the children thought the machine was too big to be fun to carry around.
In the focus group, we found that the older siblings tended to control theconversation and do most of the talking. In order to get everyone’s opinion, theyounger ones were encouraged by asking them individual questions.
3.2 GAME BOY CAMERA STUDY
The study using the Game Boy Camera indicated that users should be able toedit digital images before sending them over the wireless network to others.
All the children who participated in the Game Boy Camera study liked editing
the pictures with silly stamps, such as adding ugly monster or beautiful princess eyes.
Moreover, the boys enjoyed the activity of taking pictures, preferably together, by spying on people, play-acting stories and staging silly pictures. They
also spent a lot of time together exploring the product for new features andpossibilities. They showed the Cameras to their friends and gave away most of
the printed pictures they took. The girls preferred to take pictures of family,
friends and pets, and they traded pictures with each other. The best pictures
were printed out and kept as treasures, stuck to a notebook or pencil case.

4. DISCUSSION
Although it is not possible to generalise about the findings of the two explorative user studies, it would appear that experiencing fun in product use would
relate to human interaction as well. We hope that this paper works as an inspiration for designers to explore more fully the social aspects of fun in theircreations.
The paper describes activities that the children experienced as fun, such as
4 PRESENTING THE ARTICLES

techniques for observing and testing feelings of fun in product use.

110

spying, gossiping, and taking pictures together. Personal technologies could

think to observe the children in their own environment during the trials. In hind-support playful aspects of work as well. For example, experiencing work as agame and goofing around in the workplace [4] could be some them to explore
further.
We also hope that our methodological problems in studying user experienceof fun will encourage researchers and designers to study and develop valid
Due to the tight schedule of the project and other parallel tasks, we did notinquiry [5], or those presented by Hackos and Redish [6] or Wixon and Ramey[7], do not provide specific techniques to understand the user’s feelings or attitudes, as their approach is more about understanding a user’s tasks at work.
Another methodological problem was that, on the basis of our previous user
studies with children, we were aware that children might adopt other groupmembers’ opinions in focus grolips. Indeed, we did detect sometimes that those
who had different opinions did not say them aloud. However, it also worked theother way round, because sometimes, if a user tried to tell exaggerated truths
in order to impress us, they were corrected by their friends in the group.
The reason why we took the risk of missing something in the focus groups
was that we did not know the right terms and questions to talk about fun withchildren. We believed that in focus groups children would use their own language when among other, familiar children. If given more time, we could have
tried to apply an informal method called “co-discovery exploration” [8] for iterative design of consumer products. In “co-discovery exploration”, the users are
asked to come in pairs to a laboratory. The method concentrates on cognitiveand emotional aspects of the first impression, and initial use of a product. We
wanted the users to explore the devices for at least some days in their own environment, but the idea of users exploring the devices in pairs after the trial could
be worth trying, if field inquiry methods do not provide better alternatives.
As well as testing existing technologies, some of the empathic methods
developed by designers during the design process to take into account users’ needs, feelings and emotions could have been worth trying as we tried to
explore what “fun” meant to our target group. However, the emphatic design
techniques used in design companies vary. There are some publications about
those techniques [9,10], but their descriptions are often too general to be applied in practice, and their successful implementation would also need yearsof accumulated experience.
Gaver et al. [11] have described a promising technique of emphatic design,
called “cultural probes”. To their target group they sent packages called probes,
containing disposable cameras, postcards, maps, etc. with questions on specific experiences. The focus of their study was not on fun but the techniquewould be interesting to try when exploring users’ experiences of it. However,
the technique needs piloting in order to find the right language to ask about
fun and a good way to communicate the gathered data to all parties in the design project.

111dren used the devices, but we did not have the methodology for observing feelings in the field. Field methods developed for user research, such as contextual

ARTICLE 1

sight, a field enquiry could have given more reliable information on how the chil-ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We thank the other Maypole partners: CURE, IDEO, Netherlands Design Institute, Nokia Corporation and Meru Research. Many thanks also to Philips Electronics for lending the in2it devices, and Juha Huuhtanen and Pia Kurimo who
assisted us in conducting the user studies. Moreover, we would like to express
our gratitude to Professor Kari Kuutti and other colleagues who helped us tocommunicate our ideas.

REFERENCES
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The digital hug: families keeping in

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Kemp JAM, Gelderen, T Co-discovery
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Beyer H, Holtzblatt K. Contextual design.

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Hackos JT, Redish Jc. User and task analy-

Correspondence to: A Makela, Usability

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Wixon 0, Ramey J. Field methods casebook for software design. Wiley Computer Publishing, 1996

113
ARTICLE 2

ARTICLE

2

CO-EXPERIENCE– THE SOCIAL USER
EXPERIENCE†

Battarbee, Katja

ABSTRACTThis paper presents a critical view of existing models of user experience. Thesemodels view experience as the subjective response in the individual’s mind.
While designers and developers have to try to provide a satisfying user experience, the means to do so remain limited. This paper presents a missing aspectof user experience. Experience can be seen as an individual’s reaction, but also
as something constructed in social interaction. Designed artifacts, especiallypersonal communication and digital media products, environments and systems can facilitate this kind of use. “Co-experience” is the experience that users
themselves create together in social interaction.

†

First published in the Proceedings of Computer Human Interaction CHI' 03 Extended Abstracts (730–731). New York, NY; ACM Press.
© Copyright is held by the author/owner(s).
CHI 2003, April 5–10, 2003, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA.
ACM 1-58113-630-7/03/0004.

KEYWORDS
User experience, interaction design, co-experience

INTRODUCTION
Usability has been critiqued for not addressing the emotional side of productuse strongly enough. It aims more at the removal of obstacles than at providing engaging and fun experiences [7]. The lingering mental image is of a user
sitting in front of a terminal, accomplishing tasks as efficiently as possible. As
Dourish [2] points out, in general both computer science and cognitive science
imply that thought is separate from action, despite the recent interest in thesituational perspective [9] as well as social computing [2].
Models and frameworks on user experience have been emerging in the last ten
years. The models focus on understanding the individual’s experience, what elements affect and constitute it and how it may be expressed [3], a necessary starting point. These models emphasise that designers cannot design the subjective
experience, only the context may be designed [5, 3]. Although some professionals claim to design and deliver experiences, they agree with these limitations.
There is, however a vast number of people who can and in fact do design
experiences on a daily basis. These people are the users themselves, who together with others create experiences together, collectively. They are creating
co-experience with designed artefacts.
The reason why co-experience is a relevant issue in the field of Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) is the development of personal communication technologies and digital media in affordable consumer products that allow ordinary
people to take over these technologies for their own purposes. Even when describing pleasure with products, explicit mentions of multiple users are missing [6]. People enjoy the company of each other more than their products. It
remains vital to design attractive, functional and usable products, but it is even114

4 PRESENTING THE ARTICLES

more important to provide the opportunity for the users to create the relevant
experiences together with their family and friends near and far.
STORIES OF CO-EXPERIENCE
To illustrate user experience, I present two examples of stories I have heard.
Both are examples of re-appropriating technology for social use.
MOBILE POKER
A group of players sits in a bar. Each types a rude text message into their phone.
Before sending, they swap phones and start blindly scrolling through the list ofof beverages are then placed, which the player can then win by pressing thesend button – the more inappropriate the recipient, the higher the bet.
The first reaction to this example is that no company would want their products to be used for such questionable entertainment. However, the situation reveals interesting facts: mobile phones are part of leisure. Phones contain games,
but they typically are for one player, and require full attention. The games also
do not utilise the functions of the phone: making calls and sending messages.
It is unlikely that a person invented this alone, but it is easy to see how agroup of friends might have come up with the idea on a Friday night. The gameprovides experiences that many young men seek: taking a challenge [1] in frontof others, developing sense of taking decisions and being responsible for theconsequences – experiences that could be supported also in a more socially
responsible game.
THE VIRTUAL THEATRE GROUP
Two young girls have the hobby of writing little plays during recess at school.
In the evenings, they go to a virtual chat environment [10] on the Internet where
they have set up a room with chairs and a stage. Each with their script, they act
out their plays with their avatars. Sometimes they invite their friends to appear
as avatars in the audience.
The virtual environment is designed as a chat room for teenagers: users log
in with an avatar and move in the axonometric space, typing what they want tosay. The same functions provide an outlet for the dramatic expression needsof the girls: the avatars can change appearance and the private rooms havevirtual furniture. The environment supports the participation of many people
remotely. Virtual performances are easier to organise than a real drama group,and provide more freedom for the characters – more imagination and less reality, in fact, the perfect setup for young girls’ imaginative play.

WHAT DEFINES CO-EXPERIENCE?
CO-EXPERIENCE IS SOCIAL
Co-experience relies on communication. A study of how professional designers construct things collectively [4] describes the collaborative design process
as being a dialog, in which proposals are created, and then evaluated, rejectedor accepted and new ones created in response. The designers of co-experience
respond similarly to the situation presented by others, and through their inter-

115

who hold them to their forehead for others to see the displayed recipient. Bets

ARTICLE 2

recipients until someone says “halt”. The phones are returned to the owners,

pretation act to shape the experience into the desired direction. The social situation creates the incentive to respond and continue.
CO-EXPERIENCE IS MULTI-MODAL
Co-experience, like human–human communication, is multi-modal. The richness of face-to-face communication and the setting it takes place in can beaugmented with various communication technologies. What is begun in one
modality or channel may continue seamlessly in another. Technologies divide
the interaction possibilities into more specialised niches, which users utilise
creatively to meet their needs.
CO-EXPERIENCE IS CREATIVE
Co-experience is about people’s everyday creativity. Sanders [8] points out thatwhen people use technology together, they produce much more creative andinteresting results than when people user products just on their own. Co-experience is a creative resource, it is what propels social innovation. However,the creativity in co-experience is not about creating products or art. It is about
the ways in which participants make things meaningful for others, the way inwhich they use the tools to create the experiences.
CO-EXPERIENCE IS FOR FUN
Co-experience is something people do for pleasure – to have fun together, topass the time, to keep in touch and to strengthen social ties. This means taking “having fun” seriously [7] as the driving force behind co-experience and as
a motivation in its own right.

CONCLUSIONS
Future work on co-experience requires practical work: studying co-experience116

4 PRESENTING THE ARTICLES

for design, developing the process and tools to do so, and applying and communicating the findings. A framework of co-experience needs to be developed.
Finally, co-experience should be seen as the product’s adoption into human life.
The other, individualistic aspects of user experience precede and complement
it, so that both individual and social experiences find their balance.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Prof. Ilpo Koskinen for support and advice and Sampsa Piira and Andrea Botero for the example stories.

Brandtzaeg, P.B., Foelstad, A. (2001) How

6.

Decision Latitude and Social Support toman Factors. Taylor & Francis, London,

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Reed, D. (2002) Funology: Designing En-

Asean Academic Press, London, 131–130

joyment. Conference Extended Abstracts

Dourish, P. (2001) Where the Action Is

on Human Factors in Computer Systems– the Foundations of Embodied Interac-

2002, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, 924–

Forlizzi, J., Ford, S. (2000) The Building

925.
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work For Interaction Designers. Proceed-

Education, December 2002 Number 6.

ings of Designing Interactive Systems

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DIS’00, Brooklyn, New York, 419–423

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Sanders, L. (2002) Collective Creativity. In
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Blocks of Experience. And Early Frame-

4.

Monk, A., Hassenzahl, M., Blythe, M.,

ence on Affective Human Factors Design,tion. MIT Press, Cambridge, 233 p.
3.

Jordan, P.W. (2000) Designing Pleasurable
Products: An Introduction to the New Hu-

to Understand Fun: Using Demands ,Geisler, C., Rogers, E.H. (2000) Technolog-

9.

Suchman, L. (1987) Plans and Situatedical Mediation for Design Collaboration.

Actions: The Problem of Human–Machine

Proceedings of IEEE 2000, 395–405.

Communication. Cambridge University

Hummels, C.C.M., Djajadiningrat, J.P., &Press, Cambridge, 220 p.

Overbeeke, C.J. (2001). Knowing, doing

10. Available at: http://www.kultakala.com/

and feeling: communicating with yourhabbo/ or in English at http://www.hab-

digital products. Proceedings of Interd-bohotel.com/.

isziplinäres Kolleg Kognitions- und Neurowissenschaften., Günne am Möhnesee,
March 2–9 2001, 289–308.

117

1.

ARTICLE 2

REFERENCES

118

4 PRESENTING THE ARTICLES119ARTICLE 3

ARTICLE

3

DEFINING
COEXPERIENCE†

Battarbee, Katja

ABSTRACTIn the context of design for experience this paper presents a review of existingmodels of user experience. In response to a prevalent view of experience assomething individual, this paper suggests how these models should grow toinclude social use as well. Examples from a multimedia messaging study are
discussed to this end and the concept of co-experience is introduced to take
into account the social aspects of user experience and the experiences that users create for themselves with designed artefacts.

†

First published in the Proceedings of the Conference on Designing Pleasurable Products andInterfaces, 23–26 June, Pittsburgh (109–113). New York, NY; ACM Press.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit
or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first
page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires
prior specific permission and/or a fee. DPPI’03, June 23–26, 2003, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,
USA. Copyright 2003 ACM 1-58113-652-8/03/0006...$5.00.

CATEGORIES AND SUBJECT DESCRIPTORS: A.0 [General]: Conference Proceedings
GENERAL TERMS: Design, Human Factors, Theory
KEYWORDS: User Experience, Co-Experience, Interaction design

1. INTRODUCTION
In the recent years there has been an increasing interest in understanding how
to design and deliver user experiences to consumers. Experience is seen now
as the next new business in addition to selling products and services [18]. In
the field of design the word “experience” is used to mean many things, suchas products, retail spaces and online content. In fact, it can be anything andeverything.
The understanding, however, remains that experiences are private and subjective [18, 3] and what remain to be designed are the “contexts for experience”[3, 9, 20]. This means that design supports the possibility for having certain
experiences while it is accepted that due to uncontrollable factors, the experiences may also be different. Models describing user experience thus have focused on describing experience [3] as well as defining the elements that contribute to experience [13].
The advances in consumer products and available technologies are bringing
in new possibilities for product related experiences – an interesting example
is the digital camera, which has been available for some years already. How is
it used? Most of the time it gets no attention at all. Then a group of friends get
together – suddenly the camera is pointing and clicking, being passed fromhand to hand. Grouped closely over the display, the friends are commenting on
the expressions, posing for pictures, deleting, approving and smiling. It seems
that some experiences only come to life when they can be shared. How do cur-120

4 PRESENTING THE ARTICLES

rent models of user experience account for this?
This question arose from the results of the Maypole study [5]. The study focused on supporting social interaction with new technologies. In the process of
research and design, existing products with relevant features were field tested
with target users. A field evaluation of the new GameBoy Camera was used tounderstand what kinds of experiences a personal product that can capture andshare images might support. Collaborative use was important: teasing, editing
funny images, staging pictures and creating stories – all things done together– were the most enjoyable features [12]. The final prototypes of wireless image
communicators were field tested with two families in Finland and in Austria [14].

mother started creating abstract art puzzles and would talk about them withthe grandchildren over the phone. Social use experience is more than the sumof the individual experiences.
The concept of user experience needs to be expanded to encompass not
only the individual side of experience, but also to take into account the socialside. In fact, the issue of not being able to design experiences can be resolved
by letting the users themselves be the ones who create their experiences, andwho do this also together. This paper explores how people create experiences
together with designed artefacts. These socially created experiences, or “coexperiences”, are illustrated with a set of examples from a case study on multimedia messaging. Finally, the paper will discuss designing for co-experience,
present possible dimensions for it and point to further work.

2. WHAT IS CO-EXPERIENCE?
Experiencing is a constructive activity [20]. Co-experience is the user experience, which is created in social interaction. Co-experience is the seamless
blend of user experience of products and social interaction. The experience,
while essentially created by the users, would not be the same or even possible
without the presence of the product and the possibilities for experience thatit provides.
2.1 EVERYDAY CREATIVITY IN CO-EXPERIENCE
The action of co-experience is creative and collaborative. Sanders criticises theindividualistically oriented approach of experience design and suggests thatthe focus be rather on understanding collective creativity: the creativity of ordinary people in their everyday life. What people do and create together is much
more interesting and unpredictable than what people do when they use things
alone [21]. Creativity, then, is not just the domain of the designers, and what iscreated is not necessarily a product or art. Users create ways to make existing
technologies and products work in for them in social interaction. Creativity is
one of the drivers of co-experience.
Collaborative (and creative) design work has been studied in the context ofprofessional designers, where Geisler and Rogers [6] analyse the process of
co-construction, of people getting together to make something. The results
can be transferred also to support and understand the collaborative process
involved in co-experience. The process of creation is argumental: participants

121

Children staged stories, took silly pictures and teased each other. The grand-

ARTICLE 3

The families used the prototypes in different ways depending on their interests.

make proposals and counterproposals, evaluate, reject and accept in a dialog ofcommunication and action.
2.2 EVERYDAY SOCIAL INTERACTION IN CO-EXPERIENCE
Social sciences provide insights into what people do in their everyday lives witheach other and why. Some of the essential tasks of being a social being are topresent yourself to others in a favourable way [7], keep social connections active, maintain normality [19], and string the events of everyday existence into
coherent, meaningful narratives in the process [15].
Social motives the a key driver for co-experience and they affect people’s
lives in all its aspects. Learning can be much more effective when it happens
socially and socialising at the work place makes actual work run more smoothly[17]. We want to communicate with our near and dear even if we have “nothing to say”. People are both individuals and social beings, and neglecting thesocial aspect of experiences would be to overlook a very important aspect of
being human.

3. EXAMPLES OF CO-EXPERIENCE
3.1 CREATING AND SHARING EXPERIENCES WITH MULTIMEDIA
A pilot study on mobile multimedia messaging (MMS) was organised by Radiolinja, a Finnish mobile telecommunications operator. Groups of friends were
given multimedia capable mobile phones for a period of four weeks, and with
their permission, their communications were logged. The MMS mobile phones
are able to take a digital image, add text and sound to it, and send it as a multimedia message to other such phones and an Internet repository.
During the one-month pilot, the 25 users sent over over 2000 unique messages, which were analysed quantitatively, and two samples of the messages
were also qualitatively analysed. The messages are published here with permis-

122

4 PRESENTING THE ARTICLESsion and the names of people and places have been changed to protect theirprivacy.
Looking at the user experience of the MMS phones, the examples below demonstrate that being the owner of the MMS phone did not mean that the person
was its only user. Many MMS messages were created by more than one person
and received by a group or a couple, or were sent from a person other thanthe owner of the MMS phone to a third person in the company of an owner of a
MMS phone. This was facilitated both by the features used to create multimedia messages and the context-rich nature of multimedia messaging, which wasoften used to introduce other co-present people.

prompt, then in response (to introduce all the recipients) and finally by request.

From Anna-Maija:
6th July 2002 16:26
Text: I just got back fromsauna, all pink and

FIGURE 1

flushed.. hugs to all!

From Kira:
6th July 2002 16:33
Text: Hi this is Emma. Could
you take a pic of the sau-

FIGURE 2na cabin AND LAKE. PIITU
WANTS TO SEE THE PLACE

From Anna-Maija:
6th July 2002 16:36
Text: That’s the sauna
FIGURE 3

hut..

123

This exchange shows how participants share their mood and context without

ARTICLE 3

3.2 COMMUNICATING CONTEXTThe first message (figure 1) is just a casual message where the sender is sharing her experiences of the present – the sender, Anna-Maija, is clearly enjoying
her evening and is sharing some the elements of her experiences with text andimage (rosy cheeks, towel around head, cabin porch). The recipient, Kira, shows
the message to two other friends, Emma and Piitu, who take interest in the summer place – maybe Kira and Emma have been there or seen pictures previously
and talk enviously about the lake. Within a few minutes, Emma takes over thephone and creates a reply from herself and Piitu (figure 2). The girls introduce
themselves with a picture as well as their names and create a request for morepictures of the cabin’s view of the lake. Back at the summer place Anna-Maija
happily complies and within three minutes sends a picture of the sauna cabin,the first of a sequence of pictures describing the summer place (figure 3).
3.3 THE INVITATION GREETINGS
This message (figure 4) contains several elements: a greeting, an emotive description and an invitation all in one. It also shows how easily other people canparticipate in the message creation.
Leena, the user of the phone, and her partner Pate have arrived at a summer
place. They are there as guests of the woman in the picture and they probably

From Leena: 10th July 2002 12:27
Subject: Greetings from Kesäjärvi!
Audio: (female voice) “So, greetings from here, our hot summer
garden, from Kesäjärvi. Having
a glass of sparkling. Leena andtomorrow then, welcome!”

FIGURE 4124

4 PRESENTING THE ARTICLESPate are visiting, lovely. See you125

From Leena: 5.7.2002 11:58

ARTICLE 3

Subject: Great holiday weather!
Audio: (male voice in windy
weather) “Hi Pekka, greetingsfrom these sunny isles, Leenaand I are on our way slowly
towards Porkkala point andas you can see, the weather
here really is quite fantastic.

FIGURE 5

Cheers”

also talk about Leena’s sister, who will be arriving the next day. Leena helps thewoman to send a message to Leena’s sister by recording the voice message andtaking the picture, and sending it off to her sister’s MMS-phone. The welcoming
message presents to the recipient elements for pleasant experiences: company(represented by the smiling woman in picture, the visitors’ cars and soundsof other people in the background), enjoyable food and drink (sparkling winein the glass), the summery hot garden (in the background), and invites the recipient to share the enjoyment of these at Kesäjärvi (= Summer Lake) the following day.
3.4 CREATING HUMOUR WITH RICH CONTEXTThis message (figure 5) is just one example of the ways the multimedia aspectsof the messages were used in a humorous way. The message plays a sarcastic
version on the common format of sending post cards from holidays and describing how warm and sunny the weather is. The facts: the steely grey sky andwaters behind the hooded figure, the man’s voice slightly raised to be heard
over the whipping sound of the wind in the microphone. In fact, it is impossible to say if the person in the picture is a man or a woman. Their disappointment must also be put to context of the season: the previous two months of thesummer had been unusually warm and sunny, and July is generally the warmest

and sunniest time of year. The “fantastic” weather is in fact the opposite. Also
here the message has been created together on Leena’s phone: it is a man who
speaks, and who maybe is in the picture, the bright reds and yellows of thesailing jacket in contrast with the gloomy surroundings.
All messages with sound were analysed in one sample in which four distinct
content categories emerged: humour, greetings, emotive content and informative content. Most messages contained more than one type of content (as in thecase of the invitation greeting). Interpreting humour is difficult. A well-masked
inside joke may be hard to notice but this sarcastic type of humour was easily recognisable in many messages as a contradiction between the meanings ofthe different media elements. For example, the text and the image would suggest one interpretation and the sound would provide the final clue and turn thesituation upside down. Any combination of media could be used to this effect,
but it would seem that in supporting these interpretations, the richer context
of the sound was helpful. In a sample (N=98) of all MMS messages, humour waspresent in 12% of the messages. Messages containing sound were evaluated asa separate sample, and half of these messages were found to be humorous (seetable 1). Humour was divided into subsets, such as situational commentary,

TABLE 1absurd messages, insults, puzzles and spoofs.
Prevalence of humour in message samples.
MESSAGE TYPEHUMOUR

Selection sample of all messages n=98

12%

All messages incorporating sound n=190

48%

These values should be understood as a rough impression, due to the complexity of identifying and classifying humour.

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4 PRESENTING THE ARTICLES

3.5 CO-EXPERIENCE IN MMS
Co-experience takes two forms in the data of this study. One is the use of themobile phone in creating a message. The other is the message itself and how
its content is experienced and interpreted. Both have been analysed from evidence in the messages themselves.
While typing a sms message collectively does not sound likely or attractive,
creating a MMS greeting does. The picture and the sound recording feature allow openness for participation and collaborative message creation – everyone
from young children to parents and grandparents can be involved in speaking
into the microphone and posing in the photograph. All of these messages were cre-

women were familiar with text input and used that to communicate, while themiddle-aged woman recorded her message in audio, giving a brief soundscapeof the garden and the murmur of other people’s conversation in the background.
The sailors make sure the howling of the wind is a part of their message, too.
So how can such a small image and a few words written or spoken serve toshare experiences? The parts of the message serve the purpose of providing
context, which is essential for using and interpreting humour and affect [17].
The interpretation of these media fragments, especially images, is surprisingly evocative and emotional [10]. Participants of an earlier mobile image communication experiment have remarked how the events described in messages
appear better and more fun than reality [10]. The creativity in authoring thesemessages is similar to “performance” [7] where people control the physical environment as well as their behaviour and other expressions in front of otherpeople to convey particular messages about themselves. With the fragmentary
nature of multimedia messaging, this controlling and editing becomes very easy
– multimedia messages can be seen as mini performances.
In messaging, both sender and recipient take part in the creative action. The
sender quite literally may put on a performance, which is then documented
and composed as the message and sent to the recipient. The elements of themessages may support each other and be intuitively understandable or createa discord or a puzzle, which then must be interpreted by the recipient. Quite
possibly these messages also become part of conversations and discussions,in which interpretations and counter-proposals are created. Storytelling andreminiscing over photographs are the ways in which memories are shared andkept alive [4]. Whether this will be possible with multimedia remains to beseen, but for now the messages themselves are of a semi-disposable nature
with limited storage.

4. DIMENSIONS OF CO-EXPERIENCE
With the onset of affordable digital media and information and communication devices, communication takes many forms. In face to face situations
people are able to use their full range of expression: language, expressions,
gestures, and interaction with the artefacts and space. Mediated communication has to rely on a more limited range – text, sound, image, and video alone
or in any combination. Communication can be synchronous or asynchronousand constructed to require a reply or to function as a lone comment. As people

127

and discovering ways in which to make use of the message formats. The young

ARTICLE 3

ated in the first week of the experiment, when the participants were still exploringbecome fluent in forms of media, these start to be used in new ways and combinations to create richer experiences.
Co-experience, however is not only about communication. Below is a firstattempt at understanding the dimensions of co-experience.
4.1 EXPLORATIVE – ORGANISED
Explorative co-experiences are not planned in advance, they happen because apossibility has presented itself at a suitable moment. As an opposite, organised
experiences are events such as parties, which are planned beforehand and prepared for. In the case of multimedia messages, participants use existings forms
and predictable situations (postcards, birthday cards) as well as explore newforms (such as image puzzles). Dewey contrasts these two kinds of experiencing as the ongoing experience and the “an experience”, one the flowing ongoing consciousness and the other with a marked beginning and end, that can becompleted. This experience breaks down into numerous smaller experiences,which comprise the whole. [2]The decreases in price and size in consumer electronics are in their part allowing everyday life to become a business opportunity. Mobile and wearable
personal technologies increase the possibilities of spontaneous communication. In fact, they are present in situations that until now have not been partof our documented environment just because of their unexpected nature. New
technologies are pushing more new interaction opportunities into the explorative end of things.
4.2 SYNCHRONOUS – ASYNCHRONOUS
Dividing communication according to the immediacy or delay in reception andreply works both for co-present communication as well as mediated communication. Newsroom journalists remark aloud on their subject matter if they thinksomeone at the neighbouring desk may find it relevant, and the reply may take128

4 PRESENTING THE ARTICLES

place later, or not at all [17]. Mediated communication can also be synchronousor asynchronous, with a delay ranging from some seconds or minutes to days ofdelivery. As in the newsroom commentaries, picture messages may be part of amonologue, but responded to later when a suitable interpretation is thought of[10]. Spontaneity, especially as seen in instant messaging services is fragmenting communication but also extending the sense of social connectedness: thesense having a instant message channel open even if it is inactive [17]. In the
MMS messages, this can be seen in messages that describe mundane situations
and experiences but do not request direct replies or responses. With mobile
phones, can such channels be considered open all day long?

take place over a range of communication channels, and the study of only one
channel is not sufficient; people may respond to a short message with a phone
call, to an email with a photograph, and continue their internet chat session
with a gossip over coffee.
4.3 CREATION – INTERPRETATION
Creativity and interpretation in co-experience relate to the ways in which theparticipants make things and experiences relevant and meaningful for eachother. Information and communication tools are being introduced with the capacity to capture and send data wirelessly. For example, a picture, sound andtext can replicate conventions of post cards, but new formats were sought aswell. Creativity applies here both to usage and content. Creative use finds new
possibilities for existing functionality. Creativity can also be the production of
new content. Interpretation is then required in the interaction process. In the
MMS study, the richness of the message content was much increased with theinclusion of sound and image, but not only because they provided a richer, multisensory description of reality, but because the elements together provided
more possibilities for interpretation: emotion, mood and humour. Messages
were created in response to previous themes visually, aurally and textually.
Creating “performances” of our selves with new media allows more freedom increativity and experimentation than real life. Technologies that were developedfor “serious” communication turn out to have greater potential in sociable communication. In fact, in many cases there is no point in distinguishing tools fromtoys [16]. Studying innovative uses and solutions that users have created is now
an accepted and essential part of new technology development.

5. CONNECTING CO-EXPERIENCE
Dewey [2] analysed experience and stated that the experience created by two
people interacting is closer to art and drama than to sociology and psychology.
In other words, it involves creativity and interaction.
Forlizzi and Ford presented a review and a model of user experience maderelevant for interaction designers, in which they addressed the ways to talkabout experience as well as the changing nature of the kinds of experiences
people have. Experience flows between the states of subconscious, cognitive,
narrative and storytelling, while learning and events like unexpected situations promote these changes. When experiences become meaningful, they pro-129

tegrate the older technology platforms. The necessary communication may

ARTICLE 3

The challenges are to develop new technologies as well as support and in-mote storytelling. [3] Narration and storytelling imply social dimensions in experience. Meanings are communicated through storytelling, which suggests thatmeaningful experiences might be found in the kinds of stories that people tellof objects. Although the object is part of the story, and obviously related tothe teller, these stories involve other people as well. Our dearest objects often symbolise people and relationships. [1] However, much of our interaction
happens without conscious attention, and cannot directly be accessed throughverbal accounts or stories.
Drawing the exact line between individual and social experiences is not easy.
Problem solving has often been looked at from the individual’s point of view,
but learning and problem solving can happen collaboratively as well. As co-experiencing can be asynchronous, it can be difficult to tell whether somethingis an individual experience or whether it is a part of an asynchronous process.
Human Computer Interaction (HCI) has been criticised for its cognition and individual oriented view on users and technology. Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) takes collaboration as its user. Still, even CSCW systems
sometimes fail because of overlooking things such as the importance of social
interaction in accomplishing apparently individual co-present work or tacitknowledge in paper-based manual systems. [8]6. CONCLUSIONS
It can be seen that the division between individual and social experiences is
not a simple one. The concept of user experience must grow to include also
the co-experience dimensions of product use in social interaction. While consumer oriented, such holistic approaches have their applications in productive
contexts as well.
To some extent, the “adoption of products” has been seen as something mysterious and beyond the control of the designer, which may or may not happen.

130

4 PRESENTING THE ARTICLESThe emergence of co-experience in social interaction must play some part inthis adoption process. Co-experience is a process where participants together
contribute to the shared experience in a reciprocal fashion, creating interpretations and meanings from their life context and allowing themes and social
practices to evolve.
In research into user experience, the social elements of experience have often been neglected in favour of individualistic approaches. Co-experience isdriven by social needs of communication and maintaining relationships as wellas creativity in collaboration. To support co-experience, these aspects should
be addressed in user studies and design.

131

Thanks to Professor Ilpo Koskinen for continuous advice and Professor Turkka
Keinonen for comments. Many thanks to Esko Kurvinen for good discussions
and the rest of our research group comments and also to Paola Cabrera Viancha who worked on the project. Thanks to Seppo Väkevä and Pasi Nuppunen atRadiolinja for the MMS collaboration.

8. REFERENCES
1.

Battarbee, K., and Mattelmäki, T. Mean-

ital products. Proceedings of Interdiszi-

ingful Relationships with Products. In:

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Proceedings of the Design + Emotion

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Dewey, J. Art as Experience. The Berkeley
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in Mobile Visual Communication. In: Pro-

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ative User Studies. Personal Technologies,
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fective Human Factors Design, Singapore
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expressing affection: A field trial of how

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children and their social network com-chusetts 2000, p. 395–405.

municate with digital images in leisure

Goffman, E. The Presentation of Self intime. In Proceedings of CHI 2000. ACM

Everyday Life. Doubleday, New York,1959.
Heath, C. and Luff, P. Technology in Action. Cambridge University Press, 2000.
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Users’ Creativity: Design to Induce Pleas-

Giller, V., Tscheligi, M., Sefelin, R., Mäkelä,

digital hug. November + December 1999.

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13. Mäkelä, A., and Fulton Suri, J. Supporting

2002, ACM, 166–175.

ACM Press, 12–15.

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do Things Together: Two Cases of Explor-

Don, A. and Ariss, S. Requirements for
New Orleans, Louisiana, November 16–20

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12. Mäkelä, A., and Battarbee, K. It’s Fun to

Frolich, D., Kuchinsky, A., Pering, C.,photoware. In: Proceedings of CSCW’02,

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K. Mobile Image. IT Press, Helsinki, 2002.
11. Kurvinen, E. Emotions in Action: a Case

Forlizzi, F. and Ford, S. The Building

gust 2000, ACM, 419–423.
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March 2–9 2001, 289–308.
10. Koskinen, I., Kurvinen, E. and Lehtonen T.-

Hummels, C.C.M., Djajadiningrat, J.P.,

Press, 548–555.
15. McAdams D.P. The Stories We Live By. Personal Myths and the Making of the Self.
Guildford Press, 1993.
16. Monk, A., Hassenzahl, M., Blythe, M.,& Overbeeke, C.J. Knowing, doing and

Reed, D. Funology: Designing Enjoyment.

feeling: communicating with your dig-

Extended Abstracts on Human Factors

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7. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

in Computer Systems 2002, Minneapolis,
Minnesota, USA, 924–925.
17. Nardi, B.A., Whittaker, S., Bradner, E. Interaction and Outeraction: Instant Messaging in Action. Proceedings of CSCW’00,
Dec 2–6 2000, Philadelphia, 79–88.

Design and Emotion, Delft 1999, p. 87–92.
21. Sanders, L. Collective Creativity. In LOOP:AIGA Journal of Interaction Design Education, December 2002 Number 6. Accessed

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for Experiencing: New Tools. Proceedingsof the First International Conference on

18. Pine, B.J. II and Gilmore, J.H. Welcome to

19. Sacks, H. Lectures on Conversation (Jef-132

20. Sanders, E.B.-N. and Dandavate U. Design

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4

CO-EXPERIENCE – USERARTICLE
EXPERIENCEAS INTERACTION†

Battarbee, Katja & Koskinen, Ilpo

ABSTRACT
User experience is becoming a key term in world of designing interactive products. The term itself lacks proper theoretical definition and is used in many different, even contradicting ways. This paper reviews various existing approaches
to understanding user experience and describes three main approaches andtheir differences. A missing perspective is pointed out in all three, because theirfocus is only on the individual having the experience and neglects the kinds ofexperiences that are created together with others. To address this, a new elaboration called co-experience is presented. It builds on an existing approach but
borrows from symbolic interactionism to create a more inclusive interactionist
framework for thinking about user experiences. Data from a study on mobile
multimedia messaging is used to illustrate and discuss the framework.

†

Reprinted with permission (forthcoming).
CoDesign Journal, Vol. 1, No. 1. London; Taylor & Francis.
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals

INTRODUCTION
Usability experts know that while usability is important, it is not enough on
its own to guarantee a product’s success with customers. While helping people take advantage of the functionality, usability also needs to pave the roadfor pleasure. Usability techniques can be used to improve a given solution but
they do not reveal if another kind of solution might deliver better and moreenjoyable experiences.
Consequently, design has begun to apply hedonistic psychology (Jordan
2000, Hassenzahl 2003) and to design for user experience. For example, Jordan
takes a hedonistic perspective by proposing that pleasure with products is thesum of sociopleasure, ideopleasure, physiopleasure and psychopleasure. He
defines pleasure with products as “the emotional, hedonic and practical benefits associated with products” (Jordan 2000: 12). Hassenzahl (2003) shows thatsatisfaction, a part of usability, is the sum of pragmatic and hedonic quality.
However, as Desmet (2002) notes, the problem with focusing on pleasure is thatit ignores the unpleasant emotional experiences related to product use. Perhaps
to overcome this deficiency, user experience has become the new buzzword indesign (for example, see Kuniavsky 2003, Shedroff 2001, Garrett 2003). User
experience is subjective and holistic. It has both utilitarian and emotional aspects, which change over time (Rhea 1992).
In this paper, we deal with what we see as a major problem in the user experience literature, which is its implicit individualistic bias. We refer to the mostly
missing social quality of experience with the term “co-experience”, and propose
an interactionist perspective for studying co-experience. We show that with thisconcept, we are able to pay attention to things that are not addressed by existing
theories of user experience. We illustrate this perspective by showing how people
communicate emotions with each other with mobile multimedia technology.

134

4 PRESENTING THE ARTICLESTHREE APPROACHES TO USER EXPERIENCE
Currently there are three main approaches to applying and interpreting user experience in design. These are the measuring approach, the empathic approach,and the pragmatist approach. The role of emotional experiences is importantin all three, although, as they stem from different disciplines, they treat emotions differently.
The measuring approach is mainly used in development and testing. It builds
on the notion that experiences can be measured via emotional reactions. Thus,
the approach is narrow – the definition only includes those aspects of user experience that can be measured and by measuring understood and improved. Thereto situations chemically and electrically, and experience this reaction in terms ofemotions. As these reactions are often fleeting and not easy to verbalize, tools
for monitoring those reactions, such as facial expressions or changes in galvanic
skin response, can be recorded to understand when and where people get frustrated (Picard 1997). A second orientation is based on subjective reports (see e.g.
Jordan 2000). For instance, Desmet (2002) has developed a testing tool to elicit
emotional responses to products such as cars. His tool, PrEmo, uses animatedcartoon characters to describe 14 different emotional responses. By selecting allthat apply, the user creates an emotional profile. Universal evaluation criteria
for user experience do not exist, though some have been proposed for interaction design (Alben 1996). Rather, the “soft and emotional experiences” need to
be translated into “experience goals” relevant to each project, and included in
the testing of products and prototypes (Teague & Whitney 2002).
The empathic approach also claims that experience is emotional in nature,
but that the kinds of experiences that products should elicit should be connected to the needs, dreams and motivations of individuals (Dandavate et al.
1996, Black 1998). Designing for user experience begins with creating a rich,empathic understanding of the users’ desired experiences and only then designing concepts and products to support them. The term “design empathy” hasbeen around since the late 1990’s to describe the role of the designer/researcher(Leonard & Rayport 1997, Segal & Fulton Suri 1997, Koskinen et al. 2003). Design empathy makes use not only of the emotions of the users, but also thoseof the designers. In order to become not merely informed but also inspired,designers must both observe and feel for the users (Mäkelä & Fulton Suri 2001,
Kankainen 2002). The methods used in the empathic approaches aim to provide
an understanding of the users’ experiences with qualitative methods, but theyalso assist users in constructing for designers descriptions of their experiences,
dreams, expectations and life context to the designers (Dandavate et al. 1996).
Typically these methods combine visual and textual data, self-documentation,and projective tasks, of which several are used in parallel. This approach aims
to inspire designers rather than produce testable hypotheses through measurement and conceptual elaboration.
The pragmatist approach borrows much of its perspective from pragmatist
philosophy (cf. Dewey 1934). Recently, Forlizzi and Ford (2000) presented amodel of user experience in interaction. This model is theoretical in nature,and shows that experiences are momentary constructions that grow from theinteraction between people and their environment. In their terminology, experi-

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that people experience things as reactions in their bodies. People’s bodies react

ARTICLE 4

are several alternative orientations within the approach. The first builds on the idea

ence fluctuates between the states of cognition, sub-consciousness and storytelling depending on our actions and encounters in the world. Experience is something that happens all the time: sub-conscious experiences are fluent, automaticand fully learned, cognitive ones require effort, focus and concentration. Someof these experiences form meaningful chunks and become demarcated as “anexperience” – something meaningful that has a beginning and an end. Throughstories they may be elaborated into “meta-experiences” that are names for collections of individual experiences. Even more recently, Wright, McCarthy andMeekison (2003) focused on what is common to all experience, describing four
strands: the compositional, sensory, emotional and spatio-temporal strands,
which together form experience. They also describe sense-making processes
such as anticipating, interpreting and recounting.
These three approaches propose divergent methodologies for studying user
experience, but imply different things. The measuring approach focuses on
emotional responses, the empathic approach on user-centered concept design,
while the pragmatic approach links action to meaning. The measuring approachis useful in development and evaluation, but is more difficult to apply at the
fuzzy front end of design (Cagan and Vogel 2001). The pragmatist approachconcentrates on the embodied nature of experience and interaction.
The first two approaches, the measuring and the empathic, share one main
problem. Both see emotions as driving forces of human conduct, an assumption contested by more situated views of interaction (Blumer 1969: 7, aboutplans, see Dourish 2002: 70–73). Of user experience approaches only the pragmatist perspective really accounts for the situated unity of action, emotion,and thought in the individual in a theoretical way. The pragmatist perspectiveis broader than the others in its scope; in fact, other models can be seen as its
special cases. However, all these approaches are individualistic, thus missing a
crucially important aspect of human experience. People as individuals dependon others for all that makes them truly human. Experiencing happens in the136

4 PRESENTING THE ARTICLES

same social context – therefore it is necessary to account for this context andits effect on experience.
CO-EXPERIENCE: ELABORATING THE PRAGMATIST PERSPECTIVE
We use the term co-experience to describe experiences with products in termsof how the meanings of individual experiences emerge and change as they become part of social interaction. To explore co-experience more deeply, we expand the pragmatist model of user experience in interaction (Forlizzi and Ford
2000) and address the mention of meaning in more detail by building on threeclassic principles of symbolic interactionism. First, people act towards things(Blumer 1968: 2–6). These are the classic statement of symbolic interactionism, a sociological tradition that builds on the pragmatist philosophy of John
Dewey, William James, and George Herbert Mead (Cf. Joas 1997). This perspective adds social interaction to the pragmatist model, maintaining that people
come to define situations through an interpretive process in which they take
into account others’ non-symbolic gestures and interpretations.
The improved interactionist model for co-experience uses these meanings
to explain how experiences migrate between the different levels of Forlizzi
and Ford’s model (for an elaboration, see Forlizzi & Battarbee 2004) – from thecenter of attention to the periphery or into stories and acts of personalization
and back again. Such migrations happen in at least three general ways.
z Lifting up experiences. Often subconscious experience migrates

to become “an experience” through a social process. People constantly lift things from the stream of events in everyday life andcommunicate them to others. For example, a person may describe
something that has happened to him, and evaluate it as meaningful enough to be told to others.
z Reciprocating experiences. Quite often, once it has been lifted up

in this way, recipients acknowledge and respond to experience. For
example, they may reciprocate by telling about their own, similar
experiences, or simply offer a sympathetic response (Mauss 1980,
Licoppe and Heurtin 2001, Taylor and Harper 2002, Koskinen et al.
2002: Ch. 7). In doing so they show that the experience (as well as
the person sharing it) is meaningful for them. This can be shownin various ways, for example, by appreciating the experience, orby taking sides with it. Experiences can be maintained, supported,and elaborated socially. Memories of relevant experiences may beretold in this way as well.
z Rejecting and ignoring experiences. Finally, experiences brought tothe attention of others may also be rejected or downgraded by others. For example, something that is important for one person may
be too familiar, uninteresting or even offensive for others. They
may indicate this in various ways to soften the rejection, for example through humor or teasing, or by with varying degrees of topic
change, direct response or inaction.

137

tion with one’s fellows. Third, meanings are handled in, and modified through,an interpretive process used by the person in dealing with things he encounters

ARTICLE 4

through the meanings they have for them. Second, meanings arise from interac-Similarly, people often elaborate “meta-experiences” together (see Forlizzi
and Ford 2000). In this paper we do not focus specifically on meta-experience,for two reasons. First, the pragmatist model of Forlizzi and Ford already accounts for it. When people compare experiences, often collected over several
years, they come to find similarities and differences, and classify them in stories. Ultimately, some stories may become key symbols of their identities (seeOrr’s 1996 analysis of technicians’ “war stories”). Also, stories provide one of
the main mechanisms for reconstructing memories (Neisser 1980, Orr 1996).
Second, we see storytelling as just another form of social interaction. It is asignificant form of social interaction when sharing experiences verbally, but
not necessarily the dominant form for digital media. Although storytelling has
well-studied forms and traits, it nevertheless is included in the more generalapproach of symbolic interactionism, thus making it a special case of the moregeneral argument for all social interaction.
The following example (Figure 1) illustrates the strength of this framework.
The figure is a mobile multimedia (MMS) message: a photo, audio and text message sent from one mobile phone to another during a pilot study in Finland in
2002 (the pilot study and further details of the messaging are described below
under Data and Methods). It shows how Thomas, a father, lifts up a significant
experience, the toddler Mikey’s evening tantrum. Jani, a friend, reciprocates bysaying that his experiences in babysitting Mikey have been similar, and Thomas should consider getting him a soccer ball of his own. Jani’s comment could
be taken as a rejection suggesting a disinterest in Mikey and his temper. In a
subsequent reply Thomas reinstated the importance of the event, and furthermore, turned it into an opportunity to tease Jani. His reply contained a goodaudio sample of the howling and a picture of the boy, red in the face and tears
streaming down his cheeks, and suggested similarities between Mikey and Jani.
However, Jani’s softened rejection was successful: there were no more reports
on Mikey crying after that.

138

4 PRESENTING THE ARTICLESAs this example shows, people may use technology to share meaningful experiences, to sympathize with them, to suggest that they are not particularly
significant, or even to reject denial of their significance. These experiences
would not occur to a user alone; identities, roles and emotions are resources
for interpreting and continuing interaction (Blumer 1968). For instance, in our
example, Thomas and Jani do more than share an experience: they actively interpret it, relate to it, reinterpret it, and in so doing, constitute a line of action
and come to define their mutual relationship for a brief moment. The other recipients remain more or less neutral bystanders.
The interactionist perspective on co-experience claims that experience is a so-

139

From Thomas to all:
Text: Jani and Mikey are alike,they get similar tantrums(for different reasons!)
Audio (baby crying): “Oooo

FIGURE 1

ooo… no!.. Noo! Nooo!…”

A little boy’s bad mood.

cial phenomenon, and needs to be understood as such. Also, it claims that bodily
and psychological responses to external phenomena do not necessarily lead topredictable emotional reactions, because of an interpretive social process in
between (see Shott 1979). Thus, relying solely on emotion as an index of experience leads us astray. For these same reasons, empathizing with individuals
does not explain co-experience. Empathy is necessary, but the focus must first
be on interaction. When people act together, they come to create unpredictablesituations where they must respond to each other’s actions creatively. In the
lifecycle of an experience (compare to Rhea 1992), we need to pay attention toco-experience, not just to individual aspects of experience. This is the crux ofthe symbolic interactionist perspective on user experience.

DATA AND METHODS
We illustrate our argument with data from Mobile Multimedia, a multimedia
messaging pilot study organized with Radiolinja, a Finnish telecommunications
operator. In Mobile Multimedia several groups of friends exchanged multimedia
messages with each other for about five weeks in the summer of 2002. Each par-ARTICLE 4

10th July 21:49

ticipant was given a MMS phone (either a Nokia 7650 with an integrated camera
or a SonyEricsson T68i with a plug-in camera). The service was free of charge(see Koskinen 2003). Out of the Mobile Multimedia pilot, three mixed-gendergroups of 7, 11, and 7 members were selected for a detailed study to explore
in more detail gender difference, terminal types, and the city–countryside axis.
The qualitative study focused on the messaging of these groups.
During the pilot, the three groups sent over 4000 messages, which wereanalyzed quantitatively, and two samples of the messages were also analyzed
qualitatively. The messages are published here with permission; the names ofpeople and places have been changed. The data reveals how people themselves
construct messages, and how others respond to them. Even though there is noaccess to what people did when they received the messages, we see their virtual
response: exactly the same content of text, image and audio, as was received
by the participant. (For other publications, see Kurvinen 2003, Battarbee 2003,
Koskinen 2003).

From Susse: 4th July 16:00
Text: Too bad the smell functions are still missing
Audio (female voice): Ahoy, theland lovers are home, howabout you, have you sailed
to your port yet? Here’s a bitof our atmosphere for you,guess what it is. It has onion,
blue cheese, tomato… andbologna. So… have a good

FIGURE 2

140

4 PRESENTING THE ARTICLES

evening, bye bye!

A pleasant evening.

interaction for at least a turn or more. Since the focus is on how people givemeanings to things, and how they understand them, the study setting needs
to be naturalistic, i.e. to happen in the real world rather than in a controlled
setting such as a laboratory (Blumer 1968, Glaser and Strauss 1967). Designers
need to explore how interaction proceeds, and aim to describe its forms, before trying to explain it in terms of such structural issues as roles or identities.
Rather, inference proceeds inductively (Seale 1999). Roles and identities may
be made relevant in interaction, but they are resources people can use, rather
than features that explain co-experience. In this paper, we aim to indicate thevalue of the concept by showing that experience has features that cannot be
studied adequately with existing concepts of user experience. Here, we aim toillustrate co-experience as a sensitizing concept (Blumer 1968), rather than trying to provide a comprehensive analysis of the varieties of co-experience.

LIFTING UP EXPERIENCES
INTO THE FOCUS OF SOCIAL INTERACTION
From the symbolic interactionist standpoint proposed in this paper, the key feature of experience is symbolization: what people select from experience to beshared with others. People communicate with each other for a variety of reasons,ranging from practical to emotional. In so doing, they place the things they communicate at the focal point of shared attention. In presenting things as “an experience,” they invite others to join in; but these things remain open to negotiation,
something that may or may not be picked up by others and made into something
more meaningful than merely the scenic background of experience.
As an example of an ordinary message that illustrates this argument, we may
take the simple pleasures of eating, drinking and socializing (see Figure 2). Thismessage is part of a sequence of holiday reports between two groups of friend:
the “land lovers” and the “sailors”. Susse and her friends choose to describe theirevening sentiments with a multimedia puzzle. The audio explains the picture
and the text suggests that the key element is in fact still missing and remains
to be imagined: the smell of hot pizza.
Susse may have tried to convey a realistic sense of what the experience of
hot pizza is, but she is also acknowledging that it is impossible, with the smell(and the pizza itself) missing. However, she seems to trust that with the namesof the ingredients, the “sailors” will get the idea – and share their sentiments
as she as has shared theirs.

141

eral people who lift up something from their experience to the center of social

ARTICLE 4

The study of co-experience is the study of social interaction between sev-

Sometimes experiences belong to larger themes, and can be called scalable(Forlizzi & Battarbee 2004). For example, an eagerly waited holiday trip to Paris
is a complex experience that may last for weeks, and contain many larger andsmaller, sometimes contradictory elements. Documenting such experiences
requires more than one message, as in the case of the following monologue.
Markku and his friends are driving to a weekend rock festival. Their first message (Figure 3) describes the mood inside the van. The second message (Figure4) reports that they are still on their way, but something unexpected has happened – they were caught in a speed trap and fined. When experiencing strong
emotions, the process of symbolization requires more effort. The description of
the experience has to take into account the responses of others, such as anger,
fear, disappointment, ridicule, or sympathy, and explore which interpretations
are desirable and which are to be avoided.
What is offered here to the common attention is laughing at the experienceand making fun of it, with only a side reference to the actual event and the emotional experience of being caught by the police and receiving a fine.
In principle, almost any detail of ordinary life can be meaningful enough forsending. In MMS, people document food, drink, children, pets, and spouses (seeKoskinen et al. 2002, Lehtonen et al. 2003). In addition, people report events
such as rock festival trips, events in summer homes, as well as moods, sociallysignificant things, and emotionally relevant experiences. The reason for sending an image and audio is its topic rather than its artistic quality. The literatureon experience tends to emphasize and focus on experiences that are emotionally strong and that stand out as memorable. However, the content created in
Mobile Multimedia focuses predominantly on small, everyday and mundane
matters, suggesting that in social interaction the strength of emotions does
not correlate with the emotional satisfaction of the experience of communicat-

142

4 PRESENTING THE ARTICLES

ing and sharing them.

RECIPROCATING EXPERIENCE IN SOCIAL INTERACTION
People do not merely compose MMS messages, they also acknowledge them in
replies. In responding, recipients pick up the gist of the message and fit their
response to it. Typically, they show that they either share the experience, or
empathize with the sender on a more general level, as is suggested in theories
of gift-exchange (Mauss 1980) applied to mobile communications (Licoppe andHeurtin 2001, Taylor and Harper 2002). Parents share pictures of their babies,
expecting others to mirror their delight, but even in more ordinary cases, theexpected response is a positive, reinforcing one. Of course, recipients may not

143
ARTICLE 4

From Markku:
5th July 2002 3:38 p.m.
Text: Going to ruisrock
Audio: (punkrock music)
From Markku:
5th July 2002 6:26 p.m.
Text: Speeding ticket rules!
No time trvials for us.
Audio (male voice):

FIGURES 3–4

OH FUCK!

Reporting on the speeding ticket incident.

From Liisa:
11th July 2002 6:35 p.m.
Text: Listen Risto, we haveour spiritual values evident in our work and leisure!

From Risto:
11th July 2002 7:03 p.m.
Text: Yeah… The photo (anexcellent one, I laughed
for several minutes :) )said more than a thousand words… A victory of
spirit over matter… I must
try to fill my spiritual void

FIGURES 5–6

in this fashion…

A staged picture prompts staged responses.

144

4 PRESENTING THE ARTICLES

always produce a proper response, and this may prompt problems in subsequentinteraction. For example, the sender may become embarrassed or hurt, andmay even lose face (Gross and Stone 1964, Goffman 1967: 5–45). Between theneed to maintain social interaction and support others, and the need to lookout for personal gain and be selfish, the more likely people are to meet again,
the more they will try to keep the interaction going and help everyone maintainface. This among socially connected people results in an in-built tendency toreciprocate experiences in human interaction – and in MMS.†
Most responses follow this logic. Sometimes people start with a parody, as
in Figure 5. Replies to such messages (Figure 6) are usually not explicit congratula-

145

From Risto:

ARTICLE 4

11th July 2002 9:54 p.m.
Text: Vacation starts tomorrow!

From Tero:
12th July 2002 1:07 a.m.
Text: Been on holiday fora week and still goingA staged picture prompts staged responses.

FIGURES 7–8

strong!

tions. Risto, however, makes a point of saying how much he enjoyed it. However,to really mean this, he needs to respond with a similarly overdone picture, areflection of the first one. Pleased with his message, Risto re-uses the pictureand shares it with other friends as well, this time with a new text (Figure 7).
The response to Risto’s message does not merely share the holiday mood, butalso copies the response format almost perfectly (Figure 8).
†

In conversation analysis terms, there is a preference organization at work here. For instance,
an invitation elicits acceptance as a preferred response turn. Turning the invitation down is adispreferred turn. Preferred turns are typically given directly, with no delay; hesitations, hedges, or justifications are typical of dispreferred turns (see Pomerantz 1984).

People may also align with negative experiences, as in the following instance,
in which two young women share a mood. At first Maria lets Liisa know that she
is experiencing something “typical”, which seems neither exciting nor fun. Liisa
sympathizes, and reciprocates the experience, sharing her own interpretationof what a “typical” experience is like (Figures 9–10).
This example demonstrates the power of the visual in MMS. Compared toemotions, moods are lower intensity and last longer. Because moods are notfocused on any particular object, objects do not describe moods very well.
Here, the focus is on the face. The MMS phones were often used for literal self-

From Maria: 24th July
2002 7:15 p.m.
Text: This is so typical…

From Liisa: 24th July
2002 9:40 p.m.

FIGURES 9–10

146

4 PRESENTING THE ARTICLESText: How about this?

Exchanging pictures of mood.

Through this exchange, Liisa and Maria indicate that they know each otherand have shared similar experiences before: how else could they talk about“this” being “typical”. The closeness is also expressed by the framing of thepicture. Whether Liisa’s response is sincere or a parody is hard to say. Maybe
the interpretation is intentionally left for the recipient to decide, and to remain
open for future interactions.

REJECTING AND IGNORING EXPERIENCES
IN SOCIAL INTERACTION
For a number of reasons, experiences that are offered to the common awareness may also be rejected, downplayed or made fun of. A certain banality is almost built into MMS, which focuses on mundane experiences rather than, say,
key rituals of life, or experiences with fine art. The banality may go overboard,and lose the recipient’s interest. Also, sometimes the report may stretch thebounds of what is morally acceptable – for example, by being sexually explicit(see Kurvinen 2003). Recipients, then, may have many different reasons to interrupt or redirect the messaging, even when it may be difficult to do so without
insulting the sender. How can they accomplish such actions without causing
the sender to lose face?
The first thing to notice is that rejection may be active or passive – communication always offers multiple alternative possibilities for interpretation,and choosing one option may negate others. In the following sequence, Thomas offers a significant experience (getting engaged/married) for others to respond to (Figures 11–13). Predictably, he receives several congratulations andpictures of happy faces. However, Jani did not notice the engagement message
until 25 hours later, and takes a different course of action. In his response, heteases Thomas indirectly for losing his freedom, proclaiming that he himself
has no intention of getting “snatched”, and thus inverts the value of Thomas’s
experience. In response, Thomas defends his case by returning the tease andpeppering it with an insult. The communication between Thomas and Jani isa clever play on the possibilities of multimedia, as the joke is largely a visualplay on the theme of hands.
Generally, a positive experience like the one sent by Thomas calls for analigning response. Responses rejecting the intended value of such messages
normally incorporate accounts and disclaimers that soften the impact of therejection. Typical examples of such accounts and disclaimers are humor, excuses,

147

laboration was also frequent.

ARTICLE 4

documentation – taking a picture of one’s own face at arm’s length – although col-

From Thomas:
16th July 2002
1:41 p.m.
It took 15 years ! But
good things cometo those who wait.

From Jani:
17th July 2002
2:11 p.m.
Screw your ring.
Nobody snatchesme, except missuniverse.

From Thomas:
17th July 2002 4:25
p.m.
Well screw you! Just
think that I’ve had
more mornings withmy woman than you
with both of yourhands ! Hah hah heh
FIGURES 11–13

hee

Two teases.

tional problems posed by the rejection. This was also the case in the messaging around Figure 1, in which Jani indirectly indicated to Thomas that Mikey’s
tantrums were no longer a welcome topic. By advising Thomas to buy a ball for
Mikey; Jani softened the message by suggesting that maybe Mikey had goodreason to be upset, not having a soccer ball of his own. However, the tactic
failed, and Thomas countered by comparing Jani with the baby – humorously,of course, but the comparison still turned his reply into a tease. No matter how
nice, such rejections may still insult the original sender – or at least give himan opportunity to behave as if he were insulted.

CONCLUSIONS AND DISCUSSION
In this paper, we have introduced the notion of co-experience, and present
it as an elaboration of Forlizzi and Ford’s (2000) model of user experience ininteraction. Our claim is based on a simple observation: people create, elaborate, and evaluate experiences together with other people, and products may
be involved as the subject, object or means of these interactions. Social processes are particularly significant in explaining how experiences migrate fromsubconscious into something more meaningful, or lose that status. The concept
of co-experience builds on the understanding that experiences are individual,
but they are not only that. Social interaction is to the experiences of the individual the same as a sudden jolt is to a jar of nitroglycerine: it makes things
happen. We claim that neglecting co-experience in user experience leads to alimited understanding of user experience – and a similarly limited understanding of design possibilities.
The concept of co-experience enriches design in several ways. Firstly, co-experience extends the previous understanding of user experience by showingthat user experiences are created together and that they are thus different fromthe user experiences people have alone. Secondly, it suggests an interactionist
methodology for studying user experience. It is important to see what the content is, what people do, or, in the case of Mobile Multimedia, what is in theirmessages. This alone, however, is not enough to make sense of co-experience.
It is also necessary to study the interactions between people with and without
technologies, and to put the messages into context. Third, co-experience opens
new possibilities in design for user experience by focusing on the role of technology in human action (parallel ideas can be found in the concept of embodied interaction, see Dourish 2002). Co-experience focuses on how people make149

these devices, the communication channel is kept open despite the interac-

ARTICLE 4

justifications and hedges (Scott and Lyman 1968, Hewitt and Stokes 1975). With

distinctions and meanings, carry on conversations, share stories, and do things
together. By understanding these interactions, opportunities for co-experiencecan be designed into the interactions of products and services.
To put this into design terms: user experiences can only be understood incontext. New technologies are adopted in social interactions, where the norms
for behavior (and product use) are gradually developed and accepted. These
rules are never absolute or complete. For example, instead of merely responding to a suggestion, people may turn their response into a mock tease. Thereis therefore little point in creating an interface with a selection of the possible
ways to reply to a message. Such an approach assumes that people are not creative, but act in terms of rules.
This takes us towards two possible extensions of the concept of co-experience. The first concerns the way in which technology guides action: people
are creative. Sanders (2002, 2003) presents a view of what creativity means
to everyday people. First, it is doing things with a product and being efficientwith it. Second, it is about adapting, making the product one’s own. Third, it
may be about making something with one’s own hands, and finally, it can be
an expression of one’s creativity, with possibly far-reaching innovations. Theinterest levels and levels of emotional engagement range from insignificant topassionate. Also, creativity is enabled and constrained by technological possibilities. For example, MMS technology allows recipients to include the people and things in their surroundings more easily in their remote interactions.
However, it does not make complex forms of storytelling possible, or sharing
the experience of fragrances. It “affords” mutual entertainment rather than precise communication. For such communication, a phone call provides a better
instrument (see also Mäkelä et al. 2000, for recent discussion on affordance,
see Hutchby 2001, Arminen and Raudaskoski 2003). MMS fits into a wirelesstechnological framework in which people seamlessly switch from medium tomedium to do different tasks.

150

4 PRESENTING THE ARTICLESThe second point is methodological. Our Mobile Multimedia study relied on
information from messages in a log, and thus missed phone calls, plain text
messages, and face to face interactions. There are many similar technical challenges in studying co-experience. A suitable technique for analyzing co-experience requires not just log data, but also observations and interviews, as well
as visual documentation. Also, comparisons between technologies need to be
conducted to understand co-experience in relation to technology. In our experience, however, it is possible to study co-experience at various phases of thedesign process. Sometimes new products that are already on the market havequalities that make them suitable for field testing (Mäkelä and Battarbee 1999,

together (Mäkelä and Fulton Suri 2001, Kelley 2001: 41–42, Buchenau and Fulton Suri 2000, Kurvinen & Koskinen 2003). Contrary to appearance models or
technology prototypes, these are prototypes that primarily aim to give an insight into the experience of use. Blue-sky ideas built into robust prototypes areuseful for discovering how new designs and technologies might work in realcontexts (Tollmar et al. 2002). Experiences can also be communicated to someextent with scenarios (see Battarbee et al. 2002, Carroll 2000). Empathy is necessary for understand the experiences of others, and any study aiming to focus on co-experience needs to apply design empathy in its interaction-oriented
approach and aim at creating an empathic understanding rather than a factual
explanation (Segal & Fulton Suri 1997, Koskinen et al. 2003).
Co-experience aims to complement and broaden the ways in which user experience is currently seen in the design professions. It suggests that people’sinteractions and collaborations are relevant not just for sociology and computer-supported collaborative work, but also are relevant for studying user
experience.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS, NOTESThe Finnish telecommunications operator Radiolinja made the MMS study possible. Our gratitude also goes to Esko Kurvinen and Turkka Keinonen for acontinuing collaboration on making sense of the results. Mika Pantzar’s andChristian Licoppe’s comments helped us to clarify the paper – as did those of
the editor and the reviewers. Thanks to our supportive co-workers at the Smart
Product Research Group, and especially to the participants in the study, for allowing us to use their messages in our work.

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ABSTRACT
Understanding experience is a critical issue for a variety of professions, especially design. To understand experience and the user experience that resultsfrom interacting with products, designers conduct situated research activities
focused on the interactions between people and products, and the experiencethat results. This paper attempts to clarify experience in interactive systems.
We characterize current approaches to experience from a number of disciplines,
and present a framework for designing experience for interactive system. We
show how the framework can be applied by members of a multidisciplinary
team to understand and generate the kinds of interactions and experiences new
product and system designs might offer.
†First published in Proceedings of Designing Interactive Systems DIS2004, 1–4 August, Boston, MA (261–268). New York, NY; ACM Press.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit
or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first
page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. DIS2004, August 1–4, 2004, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. Copyright 2004 ACM 1-58113-787-7/04/0008...$5.00

ARTICLE 5

5

UNDERSTANDING
ARTICLE
EXPERIENCE IN
INTERACTIVESYSTEMS†CATEGORIES AND SUBJECT DESCRIPTORS: A.0 Introductory and Survey
GENERAL TERMS: Design, Human Factors
KEYWORDS: Experience, user-product interaction, ethnographic methods, interaction design, design theory.

INTRODUCTION
Understanding experience is a critical issue for a variety of professions, especially design. Design has had a fairly long history of attempting to support
specific experiences when interacting with products. The growing popularity of
ethnographic methods applied to design in both academic and business practice has allowed today’s designers to mediate their implicit knowledge withthat of the people they are designing for. In addition to ethnographic methods
adapted from anthropology, methods from social and behavioral science havebeen adapted to explore the form, function, and content of the products madeby designers. One by-product of this activity is the creation of new roles within
multidisciplinary design teams (e.g., User Experience Designer, User Experience
Researcher, Experience Modeler). Another by-product of this activity is the “hybridization” of research activities between members of a multidisciplinary design and development team.
What is unique to design research relative to understanding experience isthat it is focused on the interactions between people and products, and the experience that results. This includes all aspects of experiencing a product – physical,
sensual, cognitive, emotional, and aesthetic. The results of this investigation,
when used to inform product design, greatly extend simple usability techniques
in differentiating particular products in the marketplace [9, 12].
The term “user experience” is associated with a wide range of meanings, and no156

4 PRESENTING THE ARTICLES

cohesive theory of experience exists for the design community. However, there isgreat interest in the subject, and there have been both initial efforts to create theories of user experience [3, 22, 35, 40] as well as more recent efforts to exemplify
and categorize specific types of experiences as they relate to designed products[1, 2, 17, 48, 50]. Rather than increase the diversity, we need to better understandhow the different approaches relate to each other. In practice, these theories must
be made actionable through relevant tools, methods, and processes.
Understanding experience is complex. Designing the user experience for interactive systems is even more complex, particularly when conducted by a teamof multidisciplinary experts. Many approaches exist, and many are informed byrience in a way that does not rely on the point of view of any single discipline,
but provides a common design-oriented frame of reference for all the relevant
actors involved in design.
In this paper, we discuss experience and its role in multidisciplinary researchand practice. We characterize current approaches to experience from a numberof disciplines. Some of the approaches take the perspective of the user, others
attempt to understand experience as it relates to the product, and a third groupattempts to understand user experience through the interaction between user
and product. We argue that an interaction-centered view is the most valuable
for understanding how a user experiences a designed product. Next, we introduce a framework for understanding the experience of interactive systems. The
framework explains how product interactions unfold and how emotion and experience is evoked. We show how the framework can be applied by members ofa multidisciplinary team to understand and generate the kinds of interactions
and experiences new product and system designs might offer.

MODELS AND THEORIES OF EXPERIENCE
A number of models and theoretical approaches have been developed to help understand experience. These include contributions from design, business, philosophy, anthropology, cognitive science, social science, and other disciplines. These
approaches examine experience from a number of perspectives. We have grouped
these approaches as product-centered, user-centered, and interaction-centered.
Product-centered models provide straightforward applications for design
practice. In general, they provide information to assist both designers andnon-designers in the process of creating products that evoke compelling experiences. They describe the kinds of experiences and issues that must be considered in the design and evaluation of an artifact, service, environment, or
system. These models most often take the form of lists of topics or criteria to
use as a checklist when designing. For example, Alben provides a set of criteria
for assessing the quality of experience of a designed product during conception, planning, and execution [3]. Jääskö and Mattelmäki provide a set of design
guidelines for understanding experiences and applying them in user-centeredproduct concept development [33].
User-centered models help designers and developers to understand the people who will use their products. They integrate a number of disciplinary ap-

157

and are made explicit when they are tried out first hand. Integrating all theseperspectives is a challenge. What is needed is a framework that articulates expe-

ARTICLE 5

the insights of different disciplines. Others are informed by implicit knowledge

proaches to offer ways to understand people’s actions, and aspects of experiencethat people will find relevant when interacting with a product. For example,
Hassenzahl provides a theoretical model to describe people’s goals and actions
when interacting with products. It broadens traditional goal- and task-based
thinking to include fun and action-oriented modes of behavior [29]. Hudspith
provides three dimensions grounded in philosophy to derive information about
how people relate to products through utility, ceremony, and appeal [31]. Sonic
Rim, a well-known US-based user research firm, defines the categories of “say,do, make” in research tools to learn of people’s experiences with products andtheir expectations [52]. Cain, formerly of E-Lab and Sapient, developed similaruser-based categories of “think, do, use” [13]. Mäkelä and Fulton-Suri use design
to target people’s motivations and actions, unfolding within particular contexts,
as important in understanding user experience [40].
Interaction-centered models explore the role that products serve in bridging the gap between designer and user. Here, too, we see approaches from anumber of disciplines. For example, the philosopher John Dewey has been instrumental in helping designers understand the qualitative and definitive aspects of experience [17,18]. Essentially experience is a totality, engaging self
in relationship with object in a situation. Researchers and practitioners in avariety of disciplines have built on the foundations of Dewey’s theory to create knowledge about how people engage with products and the world. Wrightet al. [55] discuss experience from a design perspective as consisting of four
threads: compositional, sensory, emotional and spatio-temporal. The threads
contribute to actions (such as anticipating and recounting) that create meaning.
Margolin, a design historian, provides four dimensions that clarify how peopleinteract with designed products – categorizing operational, inventive, aesthetic,
and social uses [41]. Pine and Gilmore differentiate between passive and active
experiences, and experiences that are immersive as opposed to those that areabsorbing [48]. Overbeeke and Wensveen focus on the aesthetics of interaction

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and the ways in which form and behavior support feedforward and feedback.
Information in interfaces and action are coupled in six ways: time, location,
direction, modality, dynamics and expression [47].

AN INTERACTION-CENTERED FRAMEWORK OF EXPERIENCE
Our framework takes an interaction-centered perspective, situated within asocial context. It builds on the interaction-centered model presented in [22] aswell as studies on collaborative aspects of user experience [4]. The framework
focuses on interactions between individuals and products and the experiencescognitive, and expressive), and dimensions of experience (experience, an ex-

TABLE 1

perience, and co-experience) (Table 1).
Summary of a framework of user experience as it relates to the design of interactive systems. There are three types of user-product interactions, which, in a context of use, yield three types of experience.

TYPES OF USER–PRODUCTINTERACTIONSDESCRIPTION

EXAMPLE

FluentAutomatic and skilled inter-z riding a bicycle

actions with productsz making the morning coffee
z checking the calendar by glancing

at the PDA
Cognitive

Interactions that focus onz trying to identify the flushing

the product at hand; result

mechanism of a toilet in a foreignin knowledge or confusion

country

and errorz using online algebra tutor tosolve a math problem
Expressive

Interactions that help theuser form a relationship to
the productz restoring a chair and painting it adifferent colorz setting background images formobile phones
z creating workarounds in complex

software

TYPES OF EXPERIENCEDESCRIPTION

EXAMPLE

Experience

Constant stream of “self-z walking in a parktalk” that happens when wez doing light housekeeping

interact with productsz using instant messaging systems

Can be articulated orz going on a roller coaster ride

named; has a beginning andz watching a movie

end; inspires behavioral andz discovering an online community

An Experienceemotional change
Co-Experience

Creating meaning and emotion together through product useof interestz interacting with others with a mu-seum exhibit
z commenting on a friend’s remod-

eled kitchenz playing a mobile messaging gamewith friends

159

context of social interaction, in which people interpret particular events andcreate meaning. The framework describes user-product interactions (fluent,

ARTICLE 5

that result. Additionally, it stresses the importance of these experiences in the

USER-PRODUCT INTERACTIONS: FLUENT, COGNITIVE, EXPRESSIVE
There are three ways that we describe user-product interactions. Fluent userproduct interactions are the most automatic and well-learned ones (Figure 1).
These types of interactions do not compete for our attention; instead, they
allow us to focus on the consequences of our activities or other matters. For
example, one’s morning coffee-making ritual or the ability to effortlessly ride abicycle are examples of fluent user-product interactions.
Cognitive user-product interactions focus on the product at hand (Figure 2).
These types of interactions can result in knowledge, or confusion and error if
a product does not match anything in our past history of product use. Such experiences are often encountered while abroad and encountering foreign toilets,
taps and kitchen tools. Cognitive experiences cause a change in the user (suchas a skill or a solution) and often the context of use as a result.
Expressive user-product interactions are interactions that help the user form
a relationship to a product, or some aspect of it (Figure 3). In expressive interaction users may change, modify, or personalize, investing effort in creating
a better fit between person and product. These interactions may be expressed

FIGURE 1

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also as stories about product relationships. For example, restoring an old piece

The dynamics of experience in interaction for individuals and in social interaction.

161
ARTICLE 5

Products for camping trips may include phones, maps, bike tools and
FIGURE 2

cooking equipment. The trip is also an experience: preparations areready, the trip begins. The experience of the trip accumulates from manysmaller ones. In the process, experiences with products may change: atent may start leaking, or a phone may save the day.

of furniture, customizing cars or creating workarounds using a word processor
are expressive user-product interactions.
TYPES OF EXPERIENCE: EXPERIENCE, AN EXPERIENCE, CO-EXPERIENCE
These user-product interactions unfold in a particular context, yielding what
we characterize as three types of experience (Figure 1). The first, experience, isthe constant stream of “self-talk” that happens while we are conscious. Experience is how we constantly assess our goals relative to the people, products,
and environments that surround us at any given time. For example, walking ina park or doing light housekeeping are typical experiences.
An experience is more coalesced, something that could be articulated or
named. This type of experience may be characterized by a number of productinteractions and emotions, but is schematized with a particular character in
one’s memory and a sense of completion. An experience has a beginning and anend, and often inspires emotional and behavioral changes in the experiencer. For
example, a dinner party or a news hour seen on television could be classified
as an experience.
Co-experience is a third way to talk about experience. Co-experience is aboutuser experience in social contexts. Co-experience takes place as experiences
are created together, or shared with others. People find certain experiences
worth sharing and “lift them up” to shared attention. Shared experiences allow
a range of interpretations by others, from the expected and agreeable to theunusual or even deviant. For example, one may reciprocate, reject or ignore an
experience. [6] Therefore, expressing meaning is invited by, and the meanings
are elaborated in, co-experience through social interaction [4].
Social situations greatly influence co-experience. For example, whether running out of gas when driving to the countryside with friends is viewed as anadventure or a disaster depends on how the friends decide to interpret thesituation. One person might be upset, another might point out the humorous potential, and a third might agree. Other examples of social interaction
influencing the user experience might include watching others interact with amuseum exhibit before using it oneself, looking at a new digital camera in astore with a friend, and adopting abbreviated spellings from friends in mobile
messaging.
Co-experience reveals how the experiences an individual has and the interpretations that are made of them are influenced by the physical or virtual presence of others. Other researchers have examined how mutual understanding
and context for action shaped the flow and construction of experience, particularly when interacting with technology [19]. Interactive technology systems canplay a large role in supporting co-experience, through providing mediated communication channels and the possibility to create, edit, share and view content
with others. These systems enable co-experience by providing new channels forsocial interaction, but can also constrain it by disallowing particular actions or

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making them cumbersome.
When an individual interacts with a product (fig. 4), his or her experiences
dynamically flow between fluent, cognitive and expressive interaction as they
happen. Co-experience is the process of lifting up experiences to shared attention, where they become part of a social interpretation process that can influence what the experience comes to mean to the individuals and others.
EMOTION AND EXPERIENCE
Emotion is at the heart of any human experience and an essential componentof user-product interactions and user experience. Standard theories of emotion

From a psychological standpoint, emotion has three basic functions: to shape
our plans and intentions, to organize the procedures related to the plans, andto evaluate outcomes [14]. From a design standpoint, emotion shapes the gap
that exists between people and products in the world. Emotion affects how weplan to interact with products, how we actually interact with products, and theperceptions and outcomes that surround those interactions. Emotion serves asa resource for understanding and communicating about what we experience.
For example, emotion can shape our plans and intentions for how we willinteract with products. These plans, or mental representations of the actions
we plan to take, provide a link between our physical and mental beings and thegoal we intend to achieve. Plans can be short or long-ranging. Suchman notedthat plans often change in the face of experienced emotion and the constantre-evaluation of a particular situation [53]. For example, we may have a friend
visiting and suddenly find ourselves very hungry at six p.m. In such a case,emotion guides us to look for ways to feed the guest and ourselves – in an appropriate way. For some guests leftover pizza or a quick omelet does not seem
proper. Our goal is to deal with the intensifying hunger in the proper way, anda plan is constructed (going to the supermarket for supplies or going to theChinese restaurant instead).
Next, to achieve one’s goal, emotion coordinates our activity with products
and interfaces in the environment. The affordances of products give us clues
about how to support our activity. The psychologist J.J. Gibson originatedthese ideas in his theory of affordances [27]. Some have associated the concept of affordances with product usability, but affordances can also be seenas the way people undertake cognition and action in the world to make meaning. If products make suitable activities available and easy at a given time,pleasure and positive product interactions result. If our plans and resulting
activities are interrupted, negative emotion results, often startling us to devise a new plan.
Finally, emotion helps us to evaluate our outcomes and experiences in interacting with products. If the outcome is satisfactory, a sense of accomplishment
results, and effort is reduced or a new goal is created. This type of outcome
supports fluent experience; it has also been described as the flow state [15].
The concept of pleasure as the emotional outcome of a product interaction is
one that has been discussed in design literature [34]. Pleasure that results frominteracting with products may be any benefit that is perceived in the product.
However, these theories fail to explain how negative emotions can turn into posi-163

that disposition, and the bodily changes associated with emotional arousal.

ARTICLE 5

generally explain how we are disposed to act, the positive or negative valence of

tive, often shared experiences – such as how hardships during a hiking trip makefor a good story, or how parents may put up with a young musician’s terrible
trumpet playing with affection, while hoping that it will improve soon.
Emotion serves other roles in social interaction as well: exceeded social regard is pleasant, failed interaction expectations can be disappointing, embarrassing or even enraging. Clearly, social contexts play a role in how we feel, express, and modify our emotions, as well as the resulting meaning that is made.
Emotional experiences change, often quickly, in the presence of other people,
activities, artifacts, and environments. For example, a call from a friend may
cheer a boring day, or a sad incident may bring the entire party down. Emotions
mark the experiences that might be suitable or worth sharing with others [6].
We control what emotions we choose to show and communicate, in a way thattends to portray events and experiences as more positive or just more intensethan they actually were [36]. We also aim to create emotional responses in others with our actions [37]. For example, we may comfort someone by providing
intimacy, be it just being together, sharing values, or expressing commitment.
This is a type of social interaction that is inherently emotional [5, 54].
SCALABILITY OF EXPERIENCE
Experiences and emotions are not singular events that unfold without a relationship to other experiences and emotions. To address this in design terms
we define Scalability of experience as the infinite amount of smaller user-product interactions and emotional responses (relating to contexts, people, goals
and actions at a particular moment) that build up to yield larger and larger
experiences over time. Typically, as time passes the smallest experiences areforgotten, and only larger experiences, extremely emotional ones and experiences that connect to others are remembered (Figure 2). Scalability of experience is important to consider when using the framework. A small experience
will be interpreted in a number of ways, and contribute to an evolving set of164

4 PRESENTING THE ARTICLES

larger experiences.
For example, when doing research to inform the design of a wearable computer with web-based services to help users maintain a balanced healthy lifestyle [23], models of emotion and experience were used to help the researchteam think about how a person’s relationship with the product might changeover time. Users need to attain fluency with the product early on, to ensure thatthey will continue to use the product and not abandon it in frustration. Thismeans that minimal time can be invested in learning the basic controls, andthat use should be rewarding from the start. Over time, the product should enable cognitive experiences as users begin to learn about their diet, exercise, sleep,the user begins to foster a long-term relationship with the product. Finally, theproduct should foster co-experiences through the creation of a support group,and communication about the product through the assistance it has brought
the individual who is using it. A similar study followed how people’s interactions and experiences with small objects such as bags and keyrings changed
over time Pand context of use [39]. people construct meaning with products
by following product use through a number of real-world contexts, as well as
witnessing the responses of others.
Scalability of experience can help to build an overall picture ranging fromdetails of product interactions to the stories and meanings that people use to
articulate their experiences. Continuing with the above health and wellness example, smaller experiences around the product could include trying it on thearm for the first time, installing the software, the sound and feel of a button,
excitement upon seeing the first results, viewing the data with a friend, or feeling anxiety about the privacy of the data. In interactive systems the challenge isto understand the influence small experiences and emotional responses have onothers, as well as the overall view. Each product interaction in an experience canbe characterized by a particular fleeting emotional response, may coalesce intoa particular emotional expression or mood, and is ultimately stored in memory
as a particular aspect of an experience. Scalability of experience also relates to
how people’s experiences change in relationship to products over time. Thesechanges are best understood with time-based investigations of products in areal or realistic context of use. Mapping smaller experiences inside bigger ones
can be done afterwards by designers and researchers, or be the focus of anactivity with participants, in order to understand relationships between small
and large. Associated emotional responses are hard to understand, let alone
quantify. New research methods are needed to better articulate the relationshipbetween what we feel and what we do. A current trend, for example, is to use
biometric data collected from wearable sensors to attempt to capture the most
fleeting emotional experiences.

THE ROLE OF THE DESIGNER
IN A MULTIDISCIPLINARY TEAM
Armed with the framework as a tool, how can designers make an informed
contribution to a multidisciplinary team tasked with designing an interactive
system? Designers can offer a unique perspective on what kinds of user-product165

experiences are associated with positive, longer-term emotional responses, as

ARTICLE 5

and wellness habits, and make the necessary changes in behavior. Perhaps theseinteractions and experiences a system might offer, and how these experiences
might change over time. To do so, designers along with other researchers needa deep understanding of those they are designing for. Designers also need to
become inspired by and apply information and knowledge about the aspects of
how people use and make meaning with products to the design team.
Conversation analysis methods have been used to understand how peoplearrange their activities with, through and around products [30]. It focuses oncommon understanding as an achievement by the participants, how their actions proceed as turns, and how this makes both talking and listening activeroles in a conversation.
Ethnographic methods have also been used to understand the needs ofgroups of people, and to generalize theories and ideas from detailed investigations. Cultural anthropology has defined a cultural ecology as the study ofsymbiotic relationship between people and their environment, in order to understand how people understand, use, and modify the environment in which
they live [46]. Cultural ecologies provide a basis for understanding a particular culture. They take a material approach, focusing on products, services, andinteractions in an environment to describe the behavior for a given group ofpeople [28].
Nardi and O’Day use the term “information ecology” to describe an interrelated system of people, practices, values, and technologies within a particular
local environment [45]. An information ecology is used to situate new technologies ethically and responsibly, and to understand technology as a catalyst
for change. Bell uses the term “ecology” to qualitatively describe relationships
between people and their environment, choosing to push the definition ofenvironment beyond physical and biological limitations to include all the aspects of a specific experience [7]. According to Bell, cultural ecologies and the
ethnographic research behind them help to “convey an experience, a sense, aglimpse, or a window into another world… a way of talking about deep cultural

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patterns that implicate everything we do. Knowing these stories, interests, andpatterns makes it possible to design and develop products and services that fit(intuitively) into people’s lives.” [8].
Bell’s approach seems highly relevant for understanding the quality of experience, because it offers a mechanism for examining all of the aspects of aparticular experience that may be relevant to designing products. However, any
approach that brings detailed knowledge of users must be considered alongwith the designer’s understanding of products and contexts. The designer’sview should be one of several perspectives within a multidisciplinary team.
This concept has also been described as design empathy, 25]; one of a range of“bricoleur” [21].

USING THE FRAMEWORK
Multidisciplinary design teams can use the framework to understand and generate kinds of interactions and experiences that new product and system designs
might offer. Once a set of user-product interactions and experiences has been
generated, research can be conducted to better understand the people, contexts,
and activities to provide solutions for the design problem.
Table 2 shows examples of research activities that can be used to learn about
different kinds of experience within the framework. To illustrate we have selected similar case studies of design research and generative design, where similar
research activities were carried out. For the more fluent aspects of experience,
it is important to capture much of the user’s interactions in context without
disrupting them. For cognitive and expressive experience, it is important not
only to capture interactions in context as they unfold, but also the articulationof experience after the fact.
Design teams seeking to understand experience must learn about the mostbasic interactions and experiences that the product will offer. What are thecurrent issues in the context where the product will be placed? How can a new
product improve the user’s current experience? Will the new product be easily
adaptable, learnable, and usable? Answers to these questions are best found intaking an objective perspective to the user’s experience and interaction.
Design teams must also follow how an experience unfolds, and how it iscoalesced, and articulated. What product stories are mentioned as memorable
or important? What critical incidents come to light? What language is used to
discuss changes in users and contexts of use? What emotional responses accompany these changes? Answers to these questions are best found by taking
an objective perspective to the user’s experience and interaction. Additionally,
understanding the scalability of product interactions, experience, and emotions
is particularly useful. The concepts in the framework offer ways to seek meaning in people’s interactions, be they alone or together with others.
To understand co-experience design teams must look at all of the potential conditions for collaborating around, communicating about, or sharing a
product. How do users collaborate physically and virtually to create sharedemotions and experiences? What are the potential outcomes of collaborative
product experience? Answers to these questions are best discovered by taking

167

perspectives a designer can assume, from being a creative, to a scientist, to a

ARTICLE 5

holistic perspectives for solving a design problem [16, 49, 51]; and one of several

both a subjective and objective view to collaborative experience, emotion, andinteraction.
When designing interactive systems, it is critical to understand the social andcollaborative aspects of interaction and experience. We have found that severalof the more fruitful research methods include introducing concepts, products,
and prototypes into the user’s world through studies and participatory design
activities. Prototyping includes any and all of the design representations of apotential solution for the purposes of learning subjectively and objectively
about those who will use the product. While traditional knowledge gained fromprototypes has focused on the product function and interface, we have foundprototypes to be very useful for learning about what social interactions andco-experiences can potentially unfold.

CONCLUSION
Understanding experience is an exceedingly critical issue for those tasked withdesigning interactive systems. Understanding user experience – how people interact with products, other people and the resulting emotions and experiencethat unfold – will result in products and systems that improve the lives of those
who use them. Interactive systems for work use can benefit from a more experience-oriented approach, but for new technologies with no immediate perfectuse, the experience oriented approach is the only real way that user centered
design can impact the technology push. By understanding experience, meaningful and experiential applications can be found for technology as well.
Our research has led to a common way to understand experience, and tounderstand how social interaction and collaborative product use influence theindividual’s product experiences and the meanings those experiences come tohave. In this paper, we offer an understanding of the experiences of the individual and co-experience as a sensitizing concept to help in interpreting meaning168

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from a social interaction perspective. This process needs to be visual, empathic,
and emotionally driven to be ultimately successful in supporting inspirationand gaining insights into user experience.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This research was partially funded by NSF IIS 0121426 as well as the Academyof Finland. Thank you to Ilpo Koskinen and Carl DiSalvo for comments. Thanks
also to Jacob Buur, Tuuli Mattelmäki, Vesa Jääskö and Salu Ylirisku, as well asother Luotain project people for an inspiring workshop collaboration.

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4 PRESENTING THE ARTICLES173
ARTICLE 66

POOLS ANDARTICLESATELLITES– INTIMACY
IN THE CITY†

Battarbee, K., Baerten, N., Hinfelaar, M., Irvine,
P., Loeber, S. Munro, A. and Pederson, T.

This paper addresses the issue of mediating intimacy in order to support citycommunities. What is intimacy and how can it be mediated through the introduction of new technology in a community? It illustrates the discussion by describing two explorative information and communication technology concepts
and scenarios.

†

First published in Proceedings of Designing Interactive Systems DIS2002, 26–29 June, London (237–245). New York, NY; ACM Press.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit
or commercial advantage, and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first
page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires
prior specific permission and/or a fee. Copyright 2002 ACM-1-58113-515-7/02/0006 …
$5.00

This leads us to the core question of our project:
How can we support intimacy within an urban environment / community by means of introducing new kinds of interactive systems?
In response to this question, we describe in this paper two “intimate” devices,
designed for community use within an urban context. The initial concepts weredeveloped in September 2001 during the i3 Summer School. After examining
what intimacy stands for and what its potential importance in interaction design could be, we focus on how it might be supported in urban environments.
To illustrate this, we present two scenarios that explain the setting and use of
our two “intimate” devices within an urban community context and discuss theconcepts with regard to several evaluation criteria. Finally, we describe ways inwhich this work may be developed further.
Designing new interactive technologies for communities was the core themeof the i3 Summer School 2001, which took place at the Interactive Institute in
Ivrea, Italy [13]. The “Intimate City” Atelier concentrated around designs for urban communities – taking the city of Ivrea as a case study. Communities haveneeds, which go well beyond the functional. This atelier was inspired by two
related threads: intimate media and social navigation. Intimate Media [21] areobjects for communicating our identities and keeping memories; social navigation is the process of using other people to find out what is going on andwhere to go. We used these two elements to try to look at ways to manipulate
and influence new ways of interacting with our urban environment.
KEYWORDS:
community, interaction design, intimacy, city

174

4 PRESENTING THE ARTICLESINTRODUCTION
Every day new ICT (information and communication technology) appliances
find their way into our work, public, domestic and personal spaces [9,19]. While
such new technologies may allow us to move beyond physical limitations suchas time and distance, the interfaces and physical manifestations of these appliances are becoming increasingly important. Where these various elements
meet, interesting new patterns of interactions can evolve, not only between
people and their devices, but between people as well.

BACKGROUND175

INTIMACY

ARTICLE 6

Intimacy relies on communication and a sense of closeness. Such feelings ofcloseness are seen as inherent in cognitive, affective and physical aspects of
intimacy. They may be expressed through face-to-face conversation, non-verbal communication (by means of gestures), close physical proximity or touch.
Intimate relationships may include feelings of [4]:z commitment (feeling of cohesion and connection)z affective intimacy (a deep sense of caring, compassion, andpositive regard and the opportunities to express the same)z cognitive intimacy (thinking about and awareness of another,sharing values and goals)z physical intimacy (sharing physical encounters ranging fromproximity to sexuality)z mutuality (a process of exchange or interdependence)

INTIMACY, COMMUNITY AND TECHNOLOGY
Although a difficult concept to capture in words, many of the characteristics
of intimacy, in terms of human relationships, can extend to other contexts aswell. For example, there are simple objects in our everyday lives that invoke
intimacy because they remind us of, support us in, promote or mediate intimate relationships. A personal diary, for example, can be viewed as intimate
when used to record intimate aspects of a person’s life. But it only becomes“intimate” when it is used.
Intimacy is a quality endowed through use, either by the context of use, or by
the manner of use. A softly lit restaurant may be perceived as intimate in thatit may be conducive to intimacy. In contrast, a crowded city space may not beseen as intimate in that it does not promote private interaction, although close
examination may reveal myriad intimate interactions. The holding of hands,
eye contact and the close proximity of people as they walk and talk may expose
an intimacy, which is largely inaccessible to us.
“To live in a city is to live in a community of people who are strangers to each other. You have to act on hints and fancies, for they
are all that the mobile and cellular nature of life will allow you. You
expose yourself in, and are exposed to by others, fragments, isolated signals, bare disconnected gestures, jungle cries and whispers

that resist all your attempts to unravel their meaning, their consistency.” [18, p.15]
We have a need to break through this mass of disconnected signals, to create
order, to form relationships and reach a sense of closeness. Intimacy may beinvested in objects and places and this intimacy may be conveyed to others
through context or manner of use. This provides a range of possibilities for
how physical interventions may be used to invoke or convey intimacy within
the space of an urban community.
A starting point for making use of information and communication technologies in this context is the communication element. After all, communication
technology has been the key way in which computerisation has changed manyof the ways in which we relate to one another. Although it is often blamed forincreasing distance between people by eliminating face-to-face communication,
this is not the whole truth. Many communication technologies provide people
with alternatives, that may even increase communication and support face-toface communication. Increasing and augmenting the possibilities for communication could work within an urban community as well – as communication isan indispensable aspect of community life and a prerequisite for intimacy.
In fact, communities can be characterised by people that share at least three
things: a set of common interests, frequent interaction and identification [20].
This is valid for all kinds of communities whether they are traditional geographically based, or new kinds of virtual or on-line communities. In terms ofinteraction, communication technology certainly has the potential to support
communities by providing new ways for interaction to take place. Besides allowing communication to take place through the media, its physical presence
can – if well designed – also attract community communication around it.
As will become clear later, these observations and insights will prove valu-

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4 PRESENTING THE ARTICLES

able in our designs.
COMMUNITY AND SOCIAL NEEDSThe city as an environment often requires people to navigate both physicallythrough the spaces of the city, as well as socially. We use other people as a resource in a number of different ways: indirectly, following trails of footprints,
well-worn paths, seeing a graffiti on a wall, following where the crowds go. Or
we may navigate more directly, asking people what’s going on, receiving directions, etc. We are constantly using other people, their behaviour, the artefacts
and the markings they leave behind as resources to make sense of the city andenjoy it [16].

interested in whether users navigate more efficiently, or find exactly
what they need more quickly; instead, we want to make them staylonger in the space, feeling more relaxed, and perhaps be inspired
to tryout new functionality or pick up new products and new information items or to tryout new services that they would not haveconsidered otherwise. [6]The social navigation approach can help in our conception of how to design
intimate technologies for the city. It makes us aware of the feeling of closeness, of intimacy that people’s traces can convey. These can be regarded as
traces of community life that people can use to feel part of it, to feel in touchwith their fellow community members. In sharing a common city, people interact with each other directly and indirectly to get around. By using technology to increase awareness of others and create enhanced and new methods ofapprehending people and their traces, we might find ways to support intimacy
in the city.
COMMUNITY AND TECHNOLOGY
The feeling of sharing a common identity makes people feel safe, supported
and supportive. Traditionally, this takes place in the physical and social environment of the local milieu. However, today’s electronic media and information
technologies have the propensity to remove human activities from the physicalworld. Replacing the city, traditionally the cultural kernel of a society, with avirtual world, renders location and therefore identification with a city irrelevant.
Already on the Internet, new “virtual” communities are cropping up, and as new
kinds of communities form, others may fall apart. The “digital age” is moving
away from the communal life of the city to the enclosed, but networked, life ofhome, work and technology.
What is interesting, for the purposes of this work, is that available technologies may be used in new, innovative ways for different, originally unintended
purposes. The physical manifestation of many technological appliances inrecent times has generally been as a desktop or laptop device, and the most
revolutionary use seems to have been to enable people to coordinate theirwork at a distance, across space and time zones. However, this is changing
now. Technological advance has made it possible for many devices to “disappear” into the background, into different elements of our environment [12].
Such calm technology may look like a bench, a normal wall, a normal building,177

space is alive and might make it more inviting. Here we are not relly

ARTICLE 6… this awareness of others and their actions make us feel that theor even grass. This poses new challenges for designing meaningful interfaces,
which enable us to interact with such technology. In our aim to enhance community life and increase intimacy with and within an urban community environment, such developments provide opportunities for new solutions to makethat difference.
Some exemplary projects have succeeded in applying technology in sucha community-oriented way rather successfully. The Presence project, for example, involved local elders in an Amsterdam suburb to design experimental
objects to strengthen their feelings of safety and involvement in the restlessenvironment [8]. One of the designs was the slogan bench – a simple woodenbench with a window in the back rest. Slogans such as “Methadone is OK but
not in front of children” created and written by the elders themselves, would
rotate inside the window, using old bus sign technology. Social gatherings anddiscussions sprouted up around the new pieces, which became a manifestationof local culture and identity.
The Presence prototypes are interesting examples of what may become “intimate technology” for the city. Maybe we do not need to mediate over distance,
in fact, maybe what is needed is a very local mediation to allow us to leave ourfootprints, our mark on the environment for others, to create and display sometraces of our lives for others to interact with.
MEDIATED INTIMACY
We may sometimes be aware of the intimacy of others but can we detect it
amongst Raban’s [4] disembodied cries and whispers? The fragmentation ofmodern people’s lives is increasingly apparent. People often live and work at
a distance from friends and family and rely on communication technology tosupport their relationships with others [21]. The challenge remains to find appropriate ways to mediate intimacy in communications and to bring it to thecommunity, trusting the drive of social needs to assist in introducing the new178

4 PRESENTING THE ARTICLES

technologies and allowing them to find their place in the community.
New technologies could, and should, find more expressive and experiential
ways to allow people to interact with each other. We believe that intimacy can besupported by using technology to make instances of mediated communication
both visible and open for a community to participate in. Feelings of empathy,
mutuality, of caring and compassion, of respect for one another, of commitment and fulfilling other people’s needs, may all be invoked. Perhaps this way
we can draw people back to places of common experience, the major source ofcommunity narrative, the heart of the community culture.

179
ARTICLE 6

FIGURE 1

The lively main piazza in Ivrea.

DESIGNThe aim of our atelier was to design inter-active concepts to enhance intimacy
in the city community. The process included a heavy emphasis on drawing inspiration from observations within the city of Ivrea and its surroundings andconsidering a wide array of possible concepts. This resulted in the eventual selection and presentation of two of our ideas that embodied best the criteria that
had been decided on during the design process which are presented below.
OBSERVATIONS“What will be the twenty-first century equivalents of the gathering
at the well, the water cooler, the Greek agora, the Roman Forum, thevillage green, the town square, Main Street, the mall?” [15]The Ivrea city centre, like many Italian cities, has many squares. While someof them were very lively, others appeared rather dead and empty. This difference made us wonder about the reasons why people flocked together in a particular square.

FIGURE 2
FIGURE 4
FIGURE 3
FIGURE 5

The large emply
piazza.

The love message.

The death announcement.

The box and one message: “Peace forever and for everyone…and maybe a jukebox”

somehow?
For several days we observed the main square, which had the highest degreeof activity. We saw how people draw together people and how artefacts in thesquare facilitated this also. Benches among large potted plants provided a place
for the elders to sit together and chat, to watch people walk by or to rock thebaby carriages of their new-born grandchildren, for couples of all ages to sit
together and flirt. At least three generations of people harmoniously shared acommon place.
Being situated at the crossing of several streets, people walked across thesquare in many directions, avoiding and walking around the benches and plants,
which divided the square into smaller areas for paths. Besides this, the mainsquare was also framed by several “functional” buildings: the town hall on one
side, a bank on another, several small cafes with terraces on the other sides. Allof these influences together make it virtually impossible for community members not to interact with each other. The square, in that sense, was a facilitator
for occasional social interaction and potential intimacy.
Further down the shopping street was another square, not nearly as lively
as the one described above. Parts of it were being renovated and covered inscaffolding. Although in itself a beautiful square, framed on three sides by animpressive galleria, a theatre, a library, and some cafes and shops on the sideof the shopping street, it lacked the inviting atmosphere. What kind of artefacts
could we introduce to breathe life into this piazza?
We also observed the pervasive presence of references to everyday aspectsof life on many walls in the city. For example, when fellow community members have passed away, it is announced by posting black and white notices ondesignated walls, very similar to obituaries in newspapers. The most emotionally evocative of these was the notice for a young woman, printed especially incolour with a red rose and a photograph of her smiling at the camera.
On a happier note, a private house proudly advertised the birth of a baby
boy by affixing a little wreath of flowers next to the door with a short message
announcing the birth of “Andrea” on the pale blue ribbon. The most memorableof many intimate messages throughout the city was perhaps that by the anonymous man, in love with a girl called Sonia. He had confessed his love by writing
neatly “Ti amo Sonia” with black marker all over the city, including a mailbox.
The presence, and acceptance of, references to all stages of life, could be felt
strongly throughout the city.

181

dead squares in order to liven it up as well and mediate intimacy

ARTICLE 6

How and what kind of attractor could we introduce to one of theINTERVENTIONS
A first attempt to spur inspiration was to ask the people of Ivrea themselves:“What would you like to see on this square?” This question we wrote on a box,
strategically placed near the shopping street on the empty square. The few responses we received lead to a cascade effect of ideas.
One response in particular, i.e. that of a jukebox, brought forth the idea ofusing the square as an interface, using for example people’s movements as input and sound, light and music as output, exploring the square as an interactive space. The importance of the square as a social nexus became evident aswell as the possibility of augmenting the real, familiar environment with a newlevel of connectivity. Physical and virtual environments differ in the way theyafford and constrain [17] human activities. By designing environments in whichthese two worlds are linked tightly to each other, people might be able to makebetter use of the unique advantages that both worlds offer, and this we wanted
to apply to spaces such as the piazza.
In our final design concepts, we decided to focus on two of the social needs
as our drivers, i.e. the inherent need of a community to communicate and theneed to play. As a requirement for intimacy, both concepts have a communicative aspect – one places emphasis on personally meaningful and emotionallyrich visual communication, the other proposes playfulness and exploration ininteraction.
SELECTION CRITERIA
After several rounds of developing and discussing ideas, criteria for evaluatingideas for the final concepts emerged. The primary requirements the designs
were supposed to reflect werez Intimacy supporting intimate experiences or communicationz Interactivity providing means of inter-action for people, not just

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pieces of art
z Meaningfulness providing the possibility to add personal content

and be personally involved
z Openness to participation supporting the passive observers’

experience as well

CONCEPT DESCRIPTIONS
The two final concepts we designed merge various ideas about intimacy within
a community and it is in this light that we explore the aspects of communicationconcept, the Pool of Memory allows people to transfer messages to a central
location, the piazza square, within the city. Our second, more playful conceptof the Satellites explores interactions that may bring people together throughthe use of technology. Both fit well into our search to put technology to use
in order to counter further community alienation and distancing, an effect inmany cases often strengthened by many ICT appliances.
THE POOL OF MEMORY
As a metaphor for our design we chose the age-old attractor, around which mostcommunity life originally developed – a source of water. We took the circularmotif of the village well and transformed it into a shallow pool, to be placed
strategically at the center of the square. Neither the functional necessity of fresh
drinking water nor its primal attraction have changed over time. Because people
have always gathered and talked around such places, we hoped that the Pool ofMemory would attract the people of Ivrea and stimulate their conversation.
The Pool of Memory is a visual community messaging system that allows input from several, even remote, locations and output to a central place and theremote input locations. The visual messages are short videoclips containing
sound. In public places however, playing back sound is more problematic thandisplaying an image, and thus we consider the visual to be of greater overall
importance than the sound. The short audiovisual messages are played in order of creation. To allow people to construct sequences of narrative, new messages can be connected to previous ones, creating chains of messages. Recording a message takes place in front of a small panel mounted in a public place.
For our “problematic” piazza these could be the pillars of the galleries for thispurpose. This could also positively alter the flow of people on and around thepiazza. Instructions for use would be:
z Step up to the panel, and wait for the screen to sense your pres-ence. It will automatically switch from playback to recording
mode. To start recording a new message, press the record button.
z You may enter the reply mode and browse existing messages byscrolling the jog dial. To respond to a particular message push therecord button during the message to start recording.
z To not respond to any of the messages wait for the screen to re-turn to recording mode. Once you stop using the jog dial, thescreen will return to recording mode.

183

cept of communication, in one of them it plays a more central role. Our first

ARTICLE 6

and play or playfulness. Although both designs explore to a certain extent the con-z After recording, preview the message and accept it for sending,otherwise message will be deleted.
z The recorded messages flow together at a central location, the Poolof Memory. It is a large circle of seat-height walls with a drinking
water fountain in the middle. The videoclips circulate slowly onscreens around the inner rim of the structure, casting their reflections onto the water surface.
As one can easily notice, the pool serves many functions to the community thisway: it provides a place for people to sit and socialise, it has a drinking water
fountain, and it allows personal messages to be viewed both from within close
range as from a further distance while passing by.
THE SATELLITESThe satellite is, in essence, a playful exploration of modes of communication.
Its round, biomorph product shapes havebeen chosen to invite people to playfully interact with them. The device
consists of two parts that communicate with each other from different locations. One end can see but cannot hear, the other end can hear but cannot see.
Asymmetrically limiting communication modalities was a deliberate design
choice in order to awaken curiosity and creative thinking, to stimulate discovering different, new ways to interact with other people. At the same time theconcept can be seen as a silent reference to the distancing effect and narrowed
communication of many ICT devices.
The wireless satellite has a round friendly shape in a large “huggable” size. It
captures video and sends it to the ground control. The ground control is alsoround, but rests on legs and is immobile. It displays the video input from thesatellite and records the sound input of the viewers, broadcasting it back tothe satellite. The aim of this is to explore the concept of communication, how

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it is initiated, how the under-standing of the asymmetry of modality is processed and what this might lead to. When effective communication cannot be
the functionality, will the playfulness suggested by the object shape take overand influence people’s behaviour?
The satellite concept also addresses the issue of openness. The main experience is that of using the system, but the way in which people have to interact with
it will draw attention from passers-by and initiate their curiosity. It is a perfect
example of giving people the opportunity to make use of social navigation. Also
the concept allows the person to communicate without actually disclosing her/
his identity or being the entertainer or clown. The social hedonistic needs are ad-

185
ARTICLE 6

It’s Riccardo’s lunch break. He is on his way backfrom a nice long lunch when he remembers thatit’s his and Sonia’s three-month anniversary today … Not remembering would be nothing shortof a crime! On the spur of the moment he stealsa small rose from a restaurant’s flower bed andspins with it to the recording panel on a nearby

Sonia and Maria have a lunch break together.
Maria is 8 months pregnant and likes to shop forbaby clothes in the city centre, close to home
– she can’t walk very far now. They are to meet at
Sonia’s work-place, and Maria crosses the squareon her way. She glances at the images in the pooland stops: surely that one looks very much like
Riccardo, hiding behind a flower? How sweet! Sonia should see this for herself… She calls Sonia
and asks her to come over to the square instead– there is something she should see for herself.
Sonia giggles … that’s so like Riccardo! Isn’t he
the best! Well … she really should reply somehow… maybe a flower for a flower? Maria and Sonia go
to the side of the square to the nearest recording
panel. They find Riccardo’s rose message, and torecord her reply, Sonia holds up a rose from her
dress to the camera, with plans to say something
mysterious and appreciative, but Maria is rollingher eyes and the funny expression causes Sonia
to burst into happy laughter.

A SCENARIO FOR THE POOL OF MEMORY

wall. Holding the rose in his hands, in front of
the camera, he confesses: “Ti amo, Sonia.”

The satellite is on the ground in a busy square, camera pointed up at people, emitting sounds from adifferent part of the city. The ground control is on
the other side of the city centre, displaying the live
video and recording sounds.
Two sisters, and the best friend of the older sister are touring the shops for something nice for an
upcoming party. They glance at the fish-eyed image,and then look again – hehey, what good-looking guys
are right close by! They start joking to each otherand laughing.
One of the guys hears sounds of female laughter

A SCENARIO FOR THE SATELLITES

and thinks he also heard the word “handsome” andlooks around at a red ball on the ground, where thesounds seem to be coming from.
Hey, guys, this looks like some kind of camera,
he says and squats down to take a closer look at
the ball. He hears squeals of surprise and muffledlaughter coming from the loudspeaker.
Oh no! he is looking at us! The girls laugh insurprise. They can’t believe he actually heard them,
however did that happen.
The guy holds the ball up looking in to the camera. He asks the camera: can you hear me? The girls
see his mouth move and figure out what he might
be asking. They tell him that they can only see him,
not hear him.
The guy assures the girls he is heartbroken, notto be able to see the sources of such lovely voices.
His mates laugh and also take a look at the camera.
They want to know where the girls are.
The girls wink at each other and ask the guy toshow them where they are. The guy obliges, sweeping a look at the local cafe and shops with the camera in the ball.
The girls take off, giggling, leaving the guys talking to the camera. Sure they know where that cafe is – who knows, they might go that way for ice
creams later. That would be a laugh if the guys arestill there.

DISCUSSION
THE CONCEPTSThe Intimate City can serve as a good example for the new kinds of interaction
situations that, by necessity, appear as information appliances become mobile,ubiquitous and personal. One user vs. one computer, the interaction situation
formerly assumed to be default within the HCI community, should no longer
be viewed as the default situation.
Although the concept of the satellite has many similarities with the traditional HCI setup of a person-to-person communication device, it also deliberately tries to involve more people than merely the direct users. It does so bydisturbing the modal symmetry of communication. It is a communication deviceof low usability in the functional sense. It is quite unusable for efficient messaging between individuals. It will possibly evoke slight frustration or surprise as
well as curiosity. It is also placed in a public space, on the ground, to be seen
by many potential participants. Its shape is suggestive of play (especially in acountry obsessed by soccer). The asymmetry can be seen as a potential bridgeover personal disabilities of mobility, of hearing and of sight, providing a platform for cooperation between individuals.
The Pool of Memory furthers the idea of “multi-user interaction”. This isachieved by distributing the input devices across several locations in the city,
as well as by placing the output device in a square where it is at the heart of
the action. The concept allows active, meaningful interaction between those
who create messages and those for whom the messages are intended – knowingthat there is also another audience, the rest of the community. It also allows observers to be a part of the experience: seeing and hearing the messages, seeing
people creating messages, possibly discussing the content with others. Without force, but relying on curiosity, the concept hopefully invites and provokes
people to actively take part in this visual communication process.
The complex interaction pattern that the Pool of Memory affords serves as agood example of Emergent Interaction [2] where most participants share someparts of the interaction while other parts are more tuned to individual preferences. The use of visuals makes the channel also more emotionally rich, andthe limitations of a short video clip can become the strict form that allows theparticipants to be playful and inventive in creating content. The active partici-

187

tasks, but they can also turn it into a game (of hide and seek for example).

ARTICLE 6

dressed in the fact that people can interact with each other, cooperate and performpants can experience affective intimacy in sharing messages. The observing, passive participants can see these messages, experiencing cognitive intimacy by
being aware of what others are sharing.
THE DESIGN PROCESSThe design process of these concepts was unusual because of its duration, setting, aims and participants. It took place at a summer school, it was done by agroup of nine people from different countries and different backgrounds during nine afternoons in the Italian town of Ivrea. The most interesting aspectsof the process have been described previously: the intensive observations of
the town and the interventions for design inspiration. Before arriving at the
final concepts, many different avenues of ideas were explored, which sparked
a firmer, further understanding of what we wanted the intimacy in the community to be.
INTIMACY AND INTERACTION DESIGN
The experience of the individual, while taking into account its place within thelarger social context, should be central to good interaction design. How individuals interact with a device may be objectively evaluated according to …
“ … how well they understand how it works; the way it feels in theirhands; how they feel about it while they are using it; how well it serves
their purposes; the way it fits into the context in which they are using
it; and how well it contributes to the quality of their lives. If these experiences are engaging and productive, then people value them.” [1]Retrospectively seeing these constraints as incomplete, Alben [1] suggests theneed for closer, empathic partnerships with the community, conducted beyond
the design studio, in the context of community members’ lives. What Alben

188

4 PRESENTING THE ARTICLES

suggests is missing is “intimacy”. The concept of empathic design is not new,however. Several advocates of leading design consultancies call empathy thetool with which designers internalise the require-ments of the users and can
put their creativity to work for others [3, 5]. Empathy, an emotional understanding, is achieved precisely by leaving the design office and becoming – if briefly– immersed in the lives, environments, attitudes, experiences and dreams of
the future users.
In order to achieve this, so called “cultural probes” have been used to penetrate the hidden nature of individuals’ experience and have revealed rich data
otherwise unavailable [7]. Gaver and colleagues’ investigations were not carriedcultural concerns” in order to design speculative futures. They stress the importance of intimacy in this relationship:“The probes were our personal communication to the elders, andprompted the elders to communicate personally in return.” [7]We believe that the attitude of the design process is reflected in the final concepts: if mutual exchange, respect, and sharing of values and experiences takes
place in the process, it is possible to incorporate these into the design of concepts as well.
EVALUATION
How can intimacy as a community experience then be evaluated? Merely measuring the frequency of communication does not suffice. And if objective criteria
alone cannot be used to inform the design of inti-mate devices, we must also
accept that objective criteria alone cannot be used to evaluate them. Evaluationof intimate devices must extend beyond Alben’s objective assessment of individual experience, to examine the design process and the degree of intimacy it
supports with and within the community.
Evaluation of an intimate device should focus on the characteristics, which
promote or support, intimate relationships, either between the artefact and theindividual, or between members of the community. Factors such as closeness,
self-disclosure, commitment and affective, cognitive and physical intimacy
should be considered, although not all need be present [4]. However, the presence of reciprocity between individuals is necessary, as unsolicited self-disclosure can be perceived as intrusive.
Some factors relating to intimacy may be seen to relate to Alben’s objective
criteria. For example, how something feels or looks may evoke feelings of intimacy. Hofmeester, Kemp, and Blankendaal [10] investigated the issue of sensuality in inter-face design, a quality that may be conducive to intimacy. They
used a range of semantic differentials (such as soft/hard warm/cold attractive/
repulsive) to measure perceptions of personal communications devices. Similar
metrics might be used to determine perceptions of intimacy in the evaluationof intimate devices.
The evaluation of how a concept works in a community needs to be evaluated by members of a community together. This means it is more resourceconsuming than the traditional testing of person-product interaction and stresses

189

sionistic account of their beliefs and desires, their aesthetic preferences andARTICLE 6

out in order to objectively frame a design problem, but to form “a more impres-the importance of qualitative experience-oriented, and contextual research in theearly concept design stages.
These concepts could be prototyped and placed in a community for a timeto see how they become adopted. This may require a long term co-operationcommitment from the designers. It often happens that the results of a research
project are prototyped and tested in a community, but then taken away, as in
the projects Living Memory [11] and Presence [7,8]. The final sign of successfor a community concept is that it remains actively used and maintained evenafter the designers pack up and go home.
CONCLUSIONSIn our designs for the intimate city we have tried to combine the unique physicalcharacteristics of the city environment with the communication and media possibilities that modern ICT can provide. The piazza, the streets and the city walls
merely receive new furniture. By breathing new function-ality and meaning oflife into and around these spaces, we support interactions that can be not only
intimate between individuals, but also supporting the community as a whole.
The call for interaction design is to learn from the different social needs
that people have and incorporate them into the design: to provide interactionthat is playful, respectful and intimate in reflection of its content. This kind ofunderstanding would have wide applications ranging from personal services,
designed environments, inclusive design and teleworking while most importantly promoting the under-standing of people as social beings who need acommunity, and need to feel part of and take part in it, regardless of age, gender or other aspect.
“The form of social space is encounter, assembly, simultaneity … Social space implies actual or potential assembly at a single point, or

190

4 PRESENTING THE ARTICLES

around that point” [14]These new intimate ICT-products have the potential of becoming such points
around which life proliferates. Among benches, potted rose bushes, drinking
fountains and cafe tables we want these new products to become placeholders
for community life.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would like to heartily thank the organisers of the i3 summer school:
Gillian Crampton-Smith, Giorgio De Michelis, Riccardo Antonini, of course also

ARTICLE 6

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1900

...

2003

ZEPPELIN, ESCALATORTHIRD CONFERENCE ON DESIGNING PLEASURABLE PRODUCTS AND INTERFACES...

207EVENTS, INVENTIONS,DESIGN &COMPUTING &RESEARCH ON PEOPLE

ART, CULTURE

BUSINESSTECHNOLOGYAND USER EXPERIENCE

1900 zeppelin, escalator
1901 safety razor, vacuum
cleaner
1902 air conditioner, neonlights1903 the first airplane flight

The first Harley Davidson motorcycle withthe motor integrated
in the frame design.

1905 Einstein’s Relativity
Theory1907 Water lilies by ClaudePeter Behrens becomes

Monet (impressionism). artistic advisor forbakelite

AEG in Germany. He
refuses to replicate
other materials orstyles in the design
work, and goes about
to design a corporate
identity for AEG.

HISTORICAL TIMELINE: 1900 –1907

A

PPENDIX:HISTORICALTIMELINE

EVENTS, INVENTIONS,DESIGN &COMPUTING &RESEARCH ON PEOPLE

ART, CULTURE

BUSINESSTECHNOLOGYAND USER EXPERIENCE1908

The Table fan by Peter
Behrens

1909 Three Women by Pablo Picasso (kubism)
bakelite plastic
1910

first talking motionPeter Behrens designes

picturethe AEG factory andturbine hall in Berlin.
Taylor:The Principles of1911 (dadaism begins)

Scientific Management
1913

bra, modern zipper

Model T Ford – Henry
Ford introduces themoving assembly line

1914 World War I begins.
1916 stainless steel, first radio with tuner
1917 Fountain by Marcel

De Stijl is formed.

Duchamp
1918 World War I ends.

Red-blue chair by Gerrit Rietveld.

1919

Walter Gropius founds
the Bauhaus school

1923 Cathode ray tube
Interantional Exhibi-

1925

tion of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts
in Paris. Thonet’s bentwood Vienna café chair
becomes a success.

APPENDIX: HISTORICAL TIMELINE

1926

Polyvinylchloride (PVC, Market segmentation:
vinyl)

1927 First television broad-coloured cars by GM
In New York, Macy’s

cast in England, first

exposition of “mod-successful talking mo-

ern products” bringtion picture “The Jazz

the industrial design

Singer”

profession to common
knowledge

1928

Kamden Table lamp

208

by a Bauhaus student
is produced in large
numbers.

DESIGN &COMPUTING &RESEARCH ON PEOPLE

BUSINESSTECHNOLOGYAND USER EXPERIENCE

Street Stock Market

Dreyfuss and Loewy
both open their indus-

HISTORICAL TIMELINE: 1908 –1938

1929 The crash of the Wall

209

EVENTS, INVENTIONS,ART, CULTURE

trial design consultancies. Loewy streamlines
the first piece of industrial machinery. Le
Corbusier designs hisclassic chaise longue.
1930

Chrysler Building, New The differential analyzYork, the monument of er at MIT is the largest
Art Decocomputational device
in the world.

1931 The Persistence ofMemory by Salvador
Dali (surrealism)
1933 FM (frequency modu-

The Paimio Sanatorium

lation) radio, stereo

by Alvar Aalto: Every-

records.

thing is designed fromdoor handles to employee daycare facilities. Douglas DC1, firststreamlined monocoque airplane1934 Hitler becomes Fuhrerof Germany

The Chrysler Airflow,

Dewey: Art as Experi-

the first “streamlined”

ence

car, tested in windtunnel.
1935 polyethylene plastic,

Russell Wright’s “Mod-canned beerern Living” becomesthe first popular modern furniture in the US

1936

Modern Times byCharles Chaplin. Acrylic plastic.

1937 Guernica by Pablo Picasso

The KitchenAid mixer

Alan Turing invents

The term “symbolic

receives its classic

the idea of the “Uni-interactionism” is firstform.

versal Machine”, devel- used by Blumer
oping the concept ofcomputability.

1938

ballpoint pen, turbo-

The S 1 steam engine

prop engine, freeze-

design marks Loewy

dried coffee and teflon, as the streamline depolystyrene madepractical

signer.

1939

EVENTS, INVENTIONS,DESIGN &COMPUTING &RESEARCH ON PEOPLE

ART, CULTURE

BUSINESSTECHNOLOGYAND USER EXPERIENCE

Gone with the Wind

Loewy also redesigns

The ABC computer atand Wizard of OZ (first

Lucky Strike packaging Iowa State University

colour movie) by Vic-

is perhaps the earliest

tor Fleming. World War

calculator.

II begins. Nylon.
1940

Human factors research moves on fromanthropometrics towards studies of decision making

1941 Citizen Kane by Orson
Wells
1943

Colossus, a giant decyphering computeris built in Bletcheley
Park, England and is asecret until 1970.

1944 The invasion of Normandy, the largest logistics operation to date.
1945 The bombings of Hi-

The first time the termroshima and Nagasaki.

1946
1947

“bug” and “debugging”

WW II is over. United

are used for comput-

Nations is formed.

ers.

microwave oven

ENIAC is unveiled

Roswell incident of

The first beetles are

The precursor to the

UFO landing

producedtransistor

Eames Fiberglass

The transistor. The

1948 frisbee, velcro andthe Wurlitzer jukebox.

Chairs. Polaroid Model “Manchester Baby” – theThe long playing vinyl

95 camera becomes

first real computer isrecord.

a success. Kaj Frankbuilt.

210

APPENDIX: HISTORICAL TIMELINE

rethinks kitchenware
with Kilta.
1950 The first credit card:
Diners1951 Super glue, power
steering, video taperecorderArne Jacobsen’s chair“Whirlwind” – a com-Loewy: Industrial De-

Myran.

puter for real time

sign

processing. Routinesand re-usable modules
are introduced to programming and the firsttext book is begun.

DESIGN &COMPUTING &RESEARCH ON PEOPLE

BUSINESSTECHNOLOGYAND USER EXPERIENCE

The Lamb Handle: aGrace Hopper intro-

ing reparations to thepatented, ergonomical- duces the idea of a

Soviet Union. Johnly researched handle

Cage’s composition

for knives

HISTORICAL TIMELINE: 1939 –1959

1952 Finland finishes pay-

211

EVENTS, INVENTIONS,ART, CULTURE

compiler and the general concept of lan-4’33” (of silence). A

guage translation incomputer is on the

programming.

cover of TIME magazine.
1953 First commercial colour television broadcast
1954 oral contraceptives,
solar cell. McDonalds
started.

Raymond Loewy designs the Greyhoundbus. Timo Sarpaneva’s
glass sculptures win
the Grand Prix at the
Triennale di Milano.

1955

1956

Sarpaneva creates the

Dreyfuss: Designing for

Iittala logo I

PeoplePaul Rand designs a

The first conference onbrand strategy for IBM

Artificial Intelligence.

and the famous logo.
Eero Saarinen creates
his Tulip chair.
1957 Buddy Holly: Peggy
Sue

The first progamming

language and compiler, Ergonomics Society isof Industrial Design

FORTRAN, is used.

is formed. Sottsass

First error message.

begins work at Olivetti
Computers.
1958

Elvis: Love me tender

LISP, a non-numeric
programming language for processing
strings of symbols istaken into use.

1959

Internal pacemaker,
Barbie doll

Human Factors and

ICSID – International
Council of Societies

Xerox 914 Copier – a
precursor to copier
designs of today. A
jury of 100 designers vote the Olivetti
Lettera 32 typewriterby Nizzoli as the bestproduct of the past
100 years.

formed1960

EVENTS, INVENTIONS,DESIGN &COMPUTING &RESEARCH ON PEOPLE

ART, CULTURE

BUSINESSTECHNOLOGYAND USER EXPERIENCE

Psycho by Alfred

Sarpaneva’s cast iron

COBOL, a business

Hitchcockpot with removable

oriented programming

wooden handle wins

language, is launched.

silver at Triennale di

The era of vacuum

Milano. Jacqueline

tube computers is

Kennedy wears Mar-over.

imekko dresses andpropels it to international success.
1961

Arne Jacobsen’s Egg

First commercially avail-armchairable integrated circuit

Shell’s new logo byFirst laser diodesette. Lawrence ofRaymond Loewy is so

makes optical data

Arabia by David Lean.

successful, the compa- storage for computers

1962 The first audio cas-Campbell Soup Can

ny’s name is dropped(Cream of Chicken) by

from the design

possible

Andy Warhol
1963 Bob Dylan: Blowin’ in
the Wind
1964 Dr. Strangelove by

The first “mouse” is de-

Kubrick
1965 Russian cosmonautveloped by Englebert
Height of popularity

takes a space walk.

for the Tunturi “pappa”

Roddenberry createsmopedpilot episode of Star
Trek.
1967 The Beatles: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts

Pastilli chair by Eero

Garfinkel: Studies in

AarnioEthnomethodology.

Club Band (the first LP
designed as an album)

APPENDIX: HISTORICAL TIMELINE

1968

Blumer: Symbolic Interactionism

ma Thule glass series.

HAL, the computer)
1969

Nokia introduces theSottsass’ bright red

Work on ARPAnet be-phones for the world’s

portable typewriter

gins – what is to be-

first international mo-

Valentine for Olivetti

come the internet

bile phone network

brings colour to the

NMT. Apollo 11 lands

office. The Jumbo jeton the moon– complete with designer interiors.

1970

212

Kubrick: 2001: A Space Tapio Wirkkala’s UltiOdyssey (introducing

Scandinavian participatory design activities
are in full swing

DESIGN &COMPUTING &RESEARCH ON PEOPLE

BUSINESSTECHNOLOGYAND USER EXPERIENCE

1971

213

EVENTS, INVENTIONS,ART, CULTURE

First floppy disks

HISTORICAL TIMELINE: 1960 –1978

and commercial microchips launch thepersonal computing
era. First liquid crystal
display.
1972 The Godfather by Francis Ford Coppola
1973 “Television ate my fam-First computer with aily” said the first real-graphical user inter-ity tv-show’s teenage

face, the Xerox Altoson about the fameand criticism that followed “An American
Family”.
1974 ATM machines, post-it

Finnish design edu-

notes. Autobahn, a 22

cation changes: The

min hit with synthe-

Institute of Industrial

sized music by Kraft-

Arts becomes the Uni-

werk.

versity of Industrial
Arts Helsinki

1975 One Flew Over theFirst personal com-

Cuckoo’s Nest by Mi-

puter, the Altair. First

los Forman. Jaws bylaser printers

Steven Spielberg. The
Vietnam war is over.
The first design man-

1976 The Apple II becomesa market success, bothagement conferenceApple Corp. and Micro-organised by the DM
institute. Design forsoft Corp are founded.

Need conference inLondon calling for asocial design responsibility.
1977 The Voyager islaunched off, destined
to fly the the solar
system. Star Wars by
George Lucas.
1978

First “killer app” on
the computer: spreadsheet software Visicalc.
The compact disk (CD)standard.

1979

EVENTS, INVENTIONS,DESIGN &COMPUTING &RESEARCH ON PEOPLE

ART, CULTURE

BUSINESSTECHNOLOGYAND USER EXPERIENCE

Sony Walkman, cellular Guggenheim Museum,First proper word-

Gibson: The ecologicalphones, rollerblades.

processign software:

approach to visual per-

New York

Apocalypse Now by

WordStar. The Cray su- ception (coins the term:

Francis Ford Coppola.

percomputer.

affordance)

1980 Airplane by Jim Ab-

First portable, self-

Ethnographers arerahams and David

contained computer

brought in to a few US

Zucker.

from Osborne

design firms

Alien by Ridley Scott.

1981 Raiders of the Lost Ark Memphis reintroduces
by Steven Spielberg.

radical designFirst computer virus
attacks via floppy disk.

Das Boot by Wolfgang
Petersen.
1982 First movie that hascomputer-generated
visual effects: Tron.
Blade Runner by Ridley Scott. E.T. by Steven Spielberg.
1983

The Swatch watch

Introduction of the

As computer terminals

IBM PC with useful

become common in of-software.

fices, the need for better ergonomics of also
computers increases.

1984

The first Apple Mac-

Computer supported

intosh computercollaborative workis launched. The

emerges as a field ofmouse and the icon

its own

become the major
tools for computerinteraction.

214

APPENDIX: HISTORICAL TIMELINE

1986 Aliens by James Cam-disposable camera

Shneiderman: Design-eron. Platoon by Oliver

ing the user interface:

Stone.

Strategies for effective
human-computer interaction. Holman: Advertising and Emotionality.

1987

TKO, the Finnish industrial designers’
association begins toelect the designer ofthe year

1988

First internet compu-

Norman: The psychol-ter virus.

ogy of everyday things

DESIGN &COMPUTING &RESEARCH ON PEOPLE

BUSINESSTECHNOLOGYAND USER EXPERIENCE

Juicy Salif citrus

the world wide web/squeezer by Philippeinternet protocol andStarck. OXO GoodGrips HTML language
presents 10 kitchen
tools.
1991 Nokia introduces theFirst two doctorate

first commercial GSM-

degrees at the Univer-phone. Terminator 2sity of Art and Design– Judgement day by

Helsinki.

James Cameron.
1992 Reservoir Dogs by
Quentin Tarantino

Renault introduces theRhea: A new perspec-

Twingotive on design: Focusing on customer experience
The pentium processor Nielsen: Usability En-

1993 Philadelphia bygineering Rheingold:

Jonathan Demme.

The Virtual Community: homesteading on the electronic
frontier
1994

Ron Arad’s Bookworm

Netscape lauches

shelf for Kartell.

the first commercial
graphical internet
browser

1995 Toy Story by John Las-

Smart Products

seter (first full length

Research Group ismovie entirely by com-

started at University

puter animation)of Art and Design
Helsinki
FutureWave introduces Jensen: The Dream

1996 Trainspotting by Danny Boyle. JenniCam,

FutureSplash to becoe

the first live videocast

Macromedia Flash 1.0

Society. Walton: Good
Experiences: Thoughtsfrom a girl’s apartment

on Designing for Bothwill continue for over

Mind and Soul.

7 years. The tamagotchi virtual pet islaunched in Japan.
1997

Pepsi does a brandSegal & Fulton Suri:

overhaul: the new

The Empathic Practi-“blue” Pepsi brand.

tioner: Measurement

Young finnish design-and Interpretation ofers form Snowcrash

User Experience. Beyer

and take Milan by& Holtzblatt: Contex-

storm.

tual Design

HISTORICAL TIMELINE: 1979 –1997

1990

215

EVENTS, INVENTIONS,ART, CULTURE

EVENTS, INVENTIONS,DESIGN &COMPUTING &RESEARCH ON PEOPLE

ART, CULTURE

BUSINESSTECHNOLOGYAND USER EXPERIENCE

Volkswagen launches

The search engine

1998

Pine & Gilmore: Wel-

the New Beetle. Swatch Google is launched.

come to the Experience Economy. Black:and Mercedes launchFirst DVD-ROM drives

together the Smart car.

become available toEmpathic Design: UserApple launches thecomputer users.

focused strategies forfirst bondi blue iMacs.

innovation

Block lamp by Harri
Koskinen.
1999 The Matrix by Andyand Larry Wachowski.

DoCoMo launches i-

Napster brings peer-to- Moggridge: Express-

mode internet service

peer computing to theing Experiences infor digital phones inpublic attention

Design. Sanders

Japan, vastly success-& Dandavate: De-

ful.

sign for Experiencing: New Tools. First
seminar on PleasureBased Design, Delft.
First conference on
Design and Emotion, Copenhagen.
Hummels: Engaging
contexts to evoke experiences. Hummels:
Engaging contexts toevoke experiences.

2000 The “dot-com bubble”

Jordan: Design-

bursts on the US stocking Pleasurable

market with global re-

Products. Forlizzi &percussions

Ford: The Building
Blocks of Experience.
Buchenau & Fulton
Suri: Experience
Prototyping. Branaghan: Emotion, Mo-

216

APPENDIX: HISTORICAL TIMELINE

tivation, Usability
2001 Bombing of the World

Chrysler presents

Shedroff: Experience

Trade Center two tow-

the PT Cruiser. Apple

Design I. Second Con-ers, New York. Spirited

launches the iPod

ference on Affective

Away by Hayao Miya-

Human Factors (waszaki.

Pleasure-Based Design),
Singapore

2002

Nokia launches its

Desing + Emotion 3rd

camera phone in Eu-

interatinal confer-rope.

ence, Loughborough.
Desmet: Designing
EmotionDESIGN &COMPUTING &RESEARCH ON PEOPLE

BUSINESSTECHNOLOGYAND USER EXPERIENCE

find evidence of water

Third conference on
Designing Pleasurable

on Mars. The Lord of

Products and Interfac-

the Rings trilogy is

es, Pittsburgh. Wright,

completed by Peter

McCarthy, Blythe, Over-

Jackson.

beeke: Funology

HISTORICAL TIMELINE: 1998 –2003

2003 First space probes

217

EVENTS, INVENTIONS,ART, CULTURE