Material Detail

We don’t just use technology; we live with it. Much more deeply than ever before, we are aware that interacting with technology involves us emotion- ally, intellectually, and sensually. For this reason, those who design, use, and evaluate interactive systems need to be able to understand and analyze people’s felt experience with technology. While there is a great deal of con- cern with user experience in Human-Computer Interaction and related fields, both in practice and comment, it is often unclear what is meant by the idea. In this book, we provide foundations for a clearer analysis of user experience by developing a way of looking at technology as experience.

Taking as our starting point the pragmatism of philosophers of exper- ience, especially John Dewey and Mikhail Bakhtin, we explore people’s interactions with technology in terms of aesthetic engagement, situated cre- ativity, centers of value, and sense making. For example, Dewey, in Art as Experience (1934), argued against museum conceptions of art that separate it from most people’s experience. Instead, in a move that we also make with respect to technology, Dewey argued that we should approach art as part of ordinary, everyday lived experience, thus restoring the continuity between aesthetic and prosaic experience. Bakhtin’s contribution in this regard was to emphasize the particularity and feltness of experience, which is also cen- tral to our view of technology as experience.

Following Dewey and Bakhtin, we show technology to be deeply embed- ded in everyday experience, in ways that are aesthetic and ethical as well as functional. As an expression of this continuity, we hold up the zestful inte- gration that marks aesthetic experience as paradigmatic of what human experience with technology might become. This aesthetic turn gives our contribution to Human-Computer Interaction a critical edge.

x Preface

What we offer in this book, then, is a new way of seeing experience with technology: as creative, open, and relational, and as participating in felt experience. There is always room for surprise when action is seen as situated creativity and when each moment has potential. This is not meant to be a utopian statement—experience with technology is as often frustrating as it is fulfilling. However, the new way of seeing technology that we offer sug- gests that we have a hand in giving shape to a world that is always open and unfinished. Moreover, it is only by seeing technology as participating in felt experience that we understand the fullness of its potential.