Technology as experience

...the feeling-life does not begin and end with the immediate quality of an experience, rather it extends across space and time to the sense we make of experience in terms of our selves, our culture, and our lives. p. 42

The Four Threads of Experience. What experience IS or consists of.

• Compositional - How do the elements of an experience fit together to form a coherent whole?

• Sensual - What does the design and texture and the overall atmosphere make us feel?

• Emotional - What emotions color the experience for us?

• Spatio-temporal - What effects do place and time have on our experience?

How do we make sense of an experience? The six sense-making processes.

• Anticipating. We never come to technology unprejudiced. This refers to the expectations, possibilities, and ways of making sense that we associate with relevant prior experience.

• Connecting. We make a judgment in an instant and without much thought. This refers to the immediate, pre-conceptual,

and pre-linguistic sense of a situation encountered.

• Interpreting. We work out what’s

going on and how we feel about it. This involves discerning the narrative structure, the agents and action possibilities, what has happened and what is likely to happen. For example, a design may excessively limit what we can do and leave us feeling trapped and frustrated.

• Reflecting. We examine and evaluate

what is happening in an interaction. As the experience unfolds we might reflect on why it was not possible to carry out a very similar action in two related applications or we might reflect with satisfaction on having solved a particularly difficult problem. We also reflect on the feelings of frustration or pleasure that are part of the experience.

• Appropriating. We work out how a

new experience fits with other experiences we have had and with our sense of self.

• Recounting. We enjoy storytelling and

make sense of experience in stories. This is a fundamentally dialogical process that involves telling others and ourselves about the experience.

"...the emergence of an orientation toward experience in HCI..."

focused on understanding the relationship between people and interactive technologies...especially on how these technologies support people in their everyday activities. ...traditional HCI design approaches fail to exploit user’s felt life or emotional aspects with-or-through the system. [On this paper in "APEC: A Framework for Designing Experience" by Vyas & van der Veer, 2005]