Understanding Experience in Interactive Systems (Forlizzi, Battarbee)

Themes: what is experience, especially in design
Design, human factors, interaction design

Ethnographic methods to mediate experience with specialized people & specialty roles of designers

Design research: interactions between people and products + the experience that results

“User experience” has many definitions:
– Product-centered
– User-centered
– Interaction-centered

User-product interactions: 3 ways to describe:
1. Fluent: automatic, e.g. coffee-making machine, bike/riding
2. Cognitive: requires focus on the product at hand, e.g. learning/using “foreign” toilets
3. Expressive: help user form a relationship with the produce, e.g. restoring old furniture, customizing car, appearance

> As I build interactive theater-works that appear through marketing media to present a contract of sit-down-in-the-dark-and-watch-listen, I’m interested in examining what “fluency” to retain when I subvert that expectation and “ask” (through a few methods of communication) my audience to move in the space, acknowledge each other, experiment with their own bodies and social interactions–what Forlizzi and Battarbee would call a “co-experience” with expressive and cognitive interactions. What methods would empower the audience to form their own relationship with the virtual and present media and fellow theater citizens?

“Co-experience”: in social contexts
– Experience in which users interpretations are influences by the physical or virtual presence of others.
– Provide new channels for social interaction

>This, above, is my intention for my approaching 2016 MFA project: to design an interactive experience in which I’ve delineated the fluent, cognitive, and expressive elements in the process towards redefining the theater social interaction with a focus on spoking ideas rising from empathy research.