Technology as Experience

by John McCarthy and Peter Wright
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2004
256 pp. Trade $35.00
ISBN: 0-262-13447-0

Reviewed by John Knight
User-Lab
Birmingham Institute of Art and Design

John.knight@uce.ac.uk

The philosophical framework of pragmatism provides a vital and useful foundation for this book. Based on the ideas of John Dewey and Mikhail Bakhtin, it tackles the question of how people experience technology. It is written by two professors of computer science who have collaborated on studies of complex work situations such as ambulance control rooms. Both are well-known figures in the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community. The book does a number of things. It describes the nature of experience and pragmatist philosophy; it then shows how this philosophical approach can be applied to HCI and suggests three methodological approaches to design and research. It is a short book with a lot of ideas.

The authors ask a number of questions including what is the nature of experience? How does technology affect human experience? They make a compelling answer that technology is deeply embedded within human activity and can even mediate the self. This is backed up by studies of mobile phone use and the writings of Sherry Turkle and Brenda Laurel. They go on to unpick the nature of experience.

The authors describe the threads of experience, which they suggest consists of sensual, emotional, compositional and spatio-temporal threads. It is through these four elements that we experience suggesting that experience defies dualism; we experience as a totality. This conclusion is in part drawn from the perspective of pragmatic philosophy of John Dewey and Mikhail Bakhtin.

Common to both thinkers is the centrality of aesthetics and ethics to experience. In this context, aesthetics is defined more broadly as the root of ‘prosaic experience’. Experience is ethical in the sense that it is an exchange of values between the maker and subject. This also suggests that experience is ‘dialogical’, meaning that experience is created as much by the designer as it does the user. The authors' adoption of pragmatism is not just philosophical; it has, they argue, a practical contribution to make through informing design practice. Indeed, pragmatist philosophy is a lens through which the authors critique past movements in HCI.

The book is critical of previous attempts to understand experience. Early sections of the book take the reader through a history of HCI methods. The authors’ criticism hinges on the lack of consideration for the ‘felt life’ in rationalist accounts of experience. Lucy Suchman is central to shifting the focus away from rationalist post hoc descriptions of activity to immersive research styles. Indeed, Suchman heralds an ‘ethnographic turn’ in HCI while ethnomethodology is seen as the solution to the categorisation issue. The authors argue that unlike ethnography, the latter explicates ‘categories from within’ and is thus more real. Even here, however, the authors are looking beyond practice based research to encounter the emotional aspects of experience:

"In this regard, we part company with practice-based approaches and theories when they play down the emotional and sensual quality of experience. It may be that in order to interpret felt experience we have to inquire from the subject what the activity felt like as felt experience entails reflection, after the event, on the personal meaning of the experience." (014-015)

The authors are not content with criticising the past. This evaluation of methods informs the later chapters of the book that attempt to combine pragmatic philosophy with research methods. These methods are not meant to be followed necessarily. Instead, they are offered as suggestions of how experience can be understood, communicated and interpreted for design and secondly what different methods and domains tell us about experience.

The methods are described in three chapters. The first is a personal account of an online shopping experience. The second describes a pilots experience with procedures, which is almost ethnomethodological in nature, and the final chapter is an ethnographic style account of an ambulance control room.

The book concludes by a consideration of future trends and the implications of ‘technology as experience’ for design. Looking for alternatives to the ‘reification’ of professional design practice’ the authors look to literary and artistic approaches to design including those advocated by Anthony Dunne. This is a rich book focused on widening HCI research and design. It ought also to have a wider audience of those interested in understanding people’s experience with technology and indeed the human experience.