Friday, September 20, 2013

Survey update

285 responses and counting, and a whole lot of enthusiastic sharing (and some festival love, too)!

More to come. I've got more  data and information to dig through than I ever expected (which is awesome!). I know what I'll be doing for the next week...

Notes on Katja Battarbee and Ilpo Kokinen's Co-experience: User Experience as Interaction

Summary

Simply put; many of our experiences as human beings a co-created with other people. User experience research often overlooks that simple fact.  Fundamentally, sharing an experience can make it more meaningful. The act of discussing or even arguing over whether an experience is meaningful allows for better interpretation and even reinterpretation - which can provide a basis for mutual relationships between people, even if just for a moment. Of course, sharing experiences, especially emotionally intense ones, is risky, and can incite all kinds of reactions from other people, from sympathy to laughter. People are inherently creative when they come together and interact, and given any product or situation, will actively adapt and make it their own. User experiences created with other people are fundamentally different than those created alone.

Relevant Quotes

"People as individuals depend on others for all that makes them truly human." (pg 7)

"Lifting up experiences: Often subconscious experience migrates to become 'an experience' through a social process." (pg 8)

"When people act together, they come to create unpredictable situations where they must respond to each other's actions creatively." (pg 9)

"Experience is symbolization: what people select from experience to be shared with others." (pg 10)

"In presenting things as 'an experience', they invite others to join in." (pg 10)

"...an eagerly waited holiday trip to Paris is a complex experience that may last for weeks and contain many larger an smaller, sometimes contradictory elements" (pg 10).

"When experiencing strong emotions, the process of symbolisation requires more effort." (pg 11)

"Social interaction is to the experiences of the individual the same as a sudden jolt of nitroglycerine: it makes things happen." (pg 15)