So we have come so far in our study of experience, and at this point in the class we are able to start reading interfaces for the experiential qualities we have been discussing the entire semester. But a recap of this past weeks is quite pertinent:

In the Beginning

Here is an important listing of important conceptss discussed in this class. First, we need to keep in mind of how we theorize phenomena changes what we do – it changes our design goals, what we end up creating, and how we evaluate what we do and what we see. Second, we took a look at what theory has given us so far:

* Experience as a process of doing and undergoing
* Experience is subjective
* There is engagement in experience
* Individual and group perception is very important to the experiential process
* People’s experiences are unique in time and space
* Experience is contextual
* Experience is relative
* Experience is situational
* There is an aesthetic quality of experience
* Emotions are interwoven with our experience
* Experience is made accessible through expressions (account of experience, which mediated through a medium)
* Experiential qualities: the characteristics, features of experience which comprise what an experience is
* The notion of felt experience
* Experience is shaped by horizons, which is a particular part of our lifeworld – everything in our whole perceivable life
* The difference between flow of experience vs an experience
* Experience is describable using interpretive frameworks (4 threads, horizons, remediation, etc.)
* Experience is situated in someone’s subjectivity
* There is the notion of intersubjectivity in experience
* Experience is also situated in cultural context(s)
* Experience can be very elusive to describe and to tap into
* Experience cannot be directly measured
* Experience is holistic and very complex in nature
* Experience cannot be explained in scientific rationalism thought
* Experience can have an analogy to an ice cream cone (from our professor):

/\ experience
/ \ subjective
/ \ intersubjective
/ \ culture

* This ice cream cone has implications for how we look at interactions
* This in turn causes pragmatic implications for user research

Segue to Swallow et al.

This paper is interesting to look at to see a confluence pf research approach and their theory of experience. We each broke up into groups and discussed each of their techniques and how it related to their research philosophy

* For those who looked at Persona Matching, they found out there are a range of positions people can take and the experiences they form and develop with an artifact, especially in different contexts – a good keyword here from our professor is “multisubjecitvity”
* For those who looked at Do Something Challenges: they found out these adjectives are valuable expressions to get at the an experiences the people in the study had
* For those who looked at Voice Note Diaries, they re-confirmed that experience is unique in time and space, and is subjective, filtered, interpreted, and an engagement. This was a near equivalent method to experience sampling
* For those who looked at Anticipation Interviews, they found out the horizons of each candidate for study through a questionnaire – it relates to the 4 qualities of the Rhythmic Dance of Experience on pp62 (aesthetic experience, perceptions, emotions and temporality)
* For those who looked at Reflection Interviews, they found out that experience is subjective, and can give one different expressions based upon when and where questions are asked, the expressions are shaped by the horizons of our lives, and can lead to new kinds of expressions

As we were wrapping up, we also we reminded about the diversity and complexity of what they were studying. Everything the researchers got back from the participants was situated in time, context, and horizons. Then the researchers took this data and looked at the transformations people had with this phone, as this is what they really cared about studying – there is no account of what the phone truly is in this paper, but rather what people interpret from this phone. This ultimately lead to how people make sense of the artifact, which is what we as HCI “people” want to know more about.