the mit press technology as experience sep 2004

JOHN MCCARTHY + PETER WRIGHT JOHN MCCARTHY + PETER WRIGHT TECHNOLOGY TECHNOLOGY AS EXPERIENCE AS EXPERIENCE TECHNOLOGY AS EXPERIENCE In Technology as Experience, John McCarthy and Peter Wright argue that any account of what is often called the user experience must take into consideration the emotional, intellectual, and sen- sual aspects of our interactions with technology. We don’t just use technology, they point out; we live with it. They offer a new approach to under- standing human-computer interaction through examining the felt experience of technology. Drawing on the pragmatism of such philosophers as John Dewey and Mikhail Bakhtin, they provide a framework for a clearer analysis of technology as experience. Just as Dewey, in Art as Experience, argued that art is part of everyday lived experience and not isolated in a museum, McCarthy and Wright show how technology is deeply embedded in everyday life. The “zestful integration” or transcendent nature of the aesthetic experience, they say, is a model of what human experience with technology might become. McCarthy and Wright illustrate their theoretical framework with real-world examples that range from online shopping to ambulance dispatch. Their approach to understanding human-computer interaction—seeing it as creative, open, and rela- tional, part of felt experience—is a measure of the fullness of technology’s potential to be more than merely functional. JOHN MC CARTHY is Senior Lecturer at University College, Cork. PETER WRIGHT is Senior Lecturer at the University of York. “Technology as Experience expertly explores the emotional and aesthetic dimesions of technological encounters, from the visceral aspects of subjective experience to the cultural embeddedness and meaning surrounding artifacts and our experience of them.” —PAUL DOURISH, SCHOOL OF INFORMATION AND COMPUTER SCIENCE, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE COMPUTER SCIENCE/HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION THE MIT PRESS MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS 0214 2 HTTP://MITPRESS.MIT.EDU MC CARTHY + WRIGHT ,!7IA2G2-bdeehh!:t;K;k;K;k 0-262-13447-0 COVER ART DETAIL FROM FINDING A PLACE TO BE, BY MARY MACKEY BOOK DESIGN SHARON DEACON WARNE JACKET DESIGN PATRICK CIANO continued on back flap 46379Mccarthy 9/30/04 1:48 PM Page 1 Technology as Experience John McCarthy and Peter Wright Technology as Experience The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England © 2004 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any elec- tronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. Set in Stone serif and Stone sans by The MIT Press. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McCarthy, John. Technology as experience / John McCarthy and Peter Wright. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-262-13447-0 (alk. paper) 1. Technology—Social aspects. 2. Interactive multimedia. I. Wright, Peter. II. Title. T14.5.M4 2004 303.48'3—dc22 2004049934 10987654321 to Mary, Janet, Megan, and Maddie Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xi 1 Living with Technology 1 2 Going on from Practice 23 3 A Pragmatist Approach to Technology as Experience 49 4 The Threads of Experience 79 5 Making Sense of Experience 105 6 An Online Shopping Experience 131 7 A Pilot’s Experiences with Procedures 147 8 Experiences of Ambulance Control 161 9 Technology as Experience 183 References 199 Index 207 Preface 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. [...]... understand the relationship between the friends texting each other across the world and their mobiles, or between the nurse and the hospital information system, we must understand what the experiences of texting and using the information system feel like for those people We must understand the emotional response and the sensual quality of the interaction Because the word experience already expresses the. .. the total user experience Employing the phrase “user -experience design” as a reminder or motivator to designers to pay attention to people’s 10 Chapter 1 experience of technology is one thing Employing the phrase to indicate that a particular user experience can be designed is another thing altogether The latter suggests a return to the simplicity of a technologically determinist position on what experience. .. that, in contrast with analytical aesthetics, the emphasis is on the experience, not on the formal properties of the object of experience Richard Shusterman (2000) has written an interpretation of pragmatist aesthetics in which he describes aesthetic experience as above all an immediate and directly fulfilling experience He develops his argument by deliberately drawing on forms of music, such as funk and... neglects the agency of people interacting with technology, a focus that has been hard won by the likes of Lave and Suchman While giving those who use experience design” and similar phrases the benefit of the doubt, it is part of the job of a book that claims to examine experience of technology to take the language of user experience seriously For example, the Apple Macintosh Developer page defines “User Experience ... use them as consumers is that consumers are not passive; they actively complete the experience for themselves This brief review of the history of perspectives on people and computers in HCI suggests that although interactive technology designers and manufacturers have taken a shine to the idea of user experience and consumer products, their understanding or use of experience is limited For some of them,... invisible now Unlike the hospital information system for the nurse, these technologies do not take the father out of the relationship with his daughter and the household activities that are most important to him at that time The computer is probably still the most obvious expression of the increasingly pervasive nature of technology for those of us who can remember how difficult it was to get our hands... Our fifth proposition is that the importance given to the emotional-volitional and creative aspects of experience in pragmatism prioritizes the aesthetic in understanding our lived experience of technology According to Dewey, aesthetic experiences are refined forms of everyday, prosaic experience in which the relationship between the person (or people) and the object of experience is particularly satisfying... 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. .. analyzing the aesthetic quality of felt experience in the form of, for example, Dewey’s characterization of an experience and the internal dynamics of experience We shall describe and use these later in the book They are complemented by Bakhtin’s aesthetics, which focuses on the struggle to achieve the sense of fulfillment that can be seen as characterized in Dewey’s characteristics of an experience. .. experience is as much about the imagination of the consumers as it is about the product they are using It is our aim to fill some of these lacunae by developing an account of experience of technology that mines the rich conceptual resources already available to complement the technological and business momentum toward experience Toward a Deeper Understanding of Technology as Experience Perhaps it would . WRIGHT TECHNOLOGY TECHNOLOGY AS EXPERIENCE AS EXPERIENCE TECHNOLOGY AS EXPERIENCE In Technology as Experience, John McCarthy and Peter Wright argue that any account of what is often called the user. PM Page 1 Technology as Experience John McCarthy and Peter Wright Technology as Experience The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England © 2004 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All. IRVINE COMPUTER SCIENCE/HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION THE MIT PRESS MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS 0214 2 HTTP://MITPRESS .MIT. EDU MC CARTHY + WRIGHT ,!7IA2G2-bdeehh!:t;K;k;K;k 0-262-13447-0 COVER