Experience as ‘Meaning’: Creating, Communicating & Maintaining in Real-Spaces

Designers of interactive systems have two main goals to attain. The first is to design a system with “appropriate” representations, interactions and functions. And the second is to see how the users use the designed system and what their experiences are. The first is the primary goal but depends heavily on the second. In this paper we focus on the second goal. The proliferation of novel computing technologies into our day-to-day social lives has imposed development of new perspectives to analyze different human activities and their attitude towards the technology. These technologies play a diversity of roles – widely beyond the traditional computing device, placing the non-technical product qualities such as pleasure, fun, trust, etc. amongst the set of main goals of system design. This new era of user-experience has challenged designers to understand human experiences and apply them into the design process. Experience is a subjective and holistic phenomenon [11] where users construct the eventual experience within the settings afforded by the environment. Clearly, the context where this interaction takes place plays an important role in defining the experience. Context has been interchangeably used to address spaces and places. However, Harrison & Dourish [7] argue that spaces are three-dimensional physical representation of context where the human activities are possible. Whereas places are referred to as the lived realities where the actual experience comes about. To them, “Space is the opportunity and place is the understood reality”. In this position paper, however, we focus on conceptualizing user-experience and see how context plays its part in it. We conceptualize experience as ‘meaning’ that is created, communicated and maintained by users during their interaction with the system.