David Royer writes this blog about design, technology, and creating delightful user experiences.

“The landscape as well as the city are both highly structured, and our existence is furnished with many different kinds of devices and technological systems. These are what instruct people in contemporary societies ‘how to live.’”-De Vries

There is a wealth of design and social science literature that suggests that the artifacts we use shape our thinking and living. That means that even benign things like computer interfaces, navigational structures, and information architecture have embedded values that inform us how to live and how to think. The problem is that, what is usable is sometimes at opposition to what we value. Here are 2 quick examples:

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This summer I read an interesting article by Jerome Bruner about how we (humans) are actively creating narratives of our experiences. He argues that narrative is really the only way we can understand experiences and the only way we can communicate our experiences to others. While we are experiencing something, we are thinking about how it will be narrated to others, which then affects the experience itself

For example: Getting very lost in Old Delhi can be narrated as humorous incident befalling the clueless international traveler, a tragic incident that ruined a trip, or a challenge that the heroic world traveler overcame. Let’s say the person subconsciously decides, for various reasons, that this narrative will be a comedy. Because he knows it is a comedy, he makes the decision to buy cheap street food in an alley which will most likely lead to an awkward intercultural exchange and even more awkward bowel exchange. If it were a tragedy, he may not have eaten at the food stall, and the fact he was stranded without food would have added to his tragic story. Obviously, the actual process of defining the narrative is much more fluid and complex, but I simplified it for explanations sake.

So, what does this all have to do with Live Journal?

This funny cartoon, which inspired this post, illustrates the connection between experience narrative and Live Journal pretty clearly. Information communication technology allows our experience narratives to be recorded and shared in new and different ways. And this change in narrative communication then changes the experience itself.

I have not done any real research on this topic, but I find it fascinating. So, as HCI designers interested in experience, what does all of this mean to us? Any thoughts?

Note: This entry was originally written for the interaction culture group blog. The original post (and comments) can be found here.

Recently, Heidegger’s concepts of present-at-hand and ready-at-hand have been mentioned in readings for both Jeff’s class and Erik’s class. I find the implications of these concepts interesting for interaction designers and want to examine them further. A fundamental question for an interaction designer being introduced to these concepts is:

Should products be designed to be ready-to-hand, or to be present-at-hand?
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