Introduction - Modeling Users' Experiences with Interactive Systems - page 6

beauty, with goodness relating primarily to instrumental qualities, e.g. usefulness
and ease-of-use, and beauty relating primarily to non-instrumental qualities such as
the visual aesthetics and haptic quality (Mahlke, 2006). Desmet (2002), grounded
on Russell's (1980) model of affect, developed a tool for measuring emotional re-
sponses to products and established a framework that relates aesthetic response to
meaning (see Desmet and Hekkert, 2007). Fenko et al. (2009) studied how the dom-
inance of different sensory modalities such as vision, audition, touch, smell and taste
develops over different phases in the adoption of the product such as when choosing
the product in the shop, during the first week, after the first month, and after the first
year of usage.

1.2.2 Holistic Approaches

Holistic approaches are rooted in pragmatist philosophy and phenomenology. They
criticize reductionist approaches in that they reduce the complexity and richness
of user experience to “a set of manipulable and measurable variables” and impose
“abstract models and classifications onto rich and complex models like affect and
emotion” (Wright and Blythe, 2007) (see also Hassenzahl, 2008). Similarly, Suri
(2002) argues that “measurement, by its nature, forces us to ignore all but a few se-
lected variables. Hence, measurement is useful when we are confident about which
variables are relevant”. She argues that designers are concerned about developing
new products and for new contexts and thus no such understanding exists about
how design attributes and contextual details interact in given contexts, and proposes
alternative methods, such as that of experience narratives , for inquiring into how
product meaning and value emerges in given contexts.
From a theoretical point of view, holistic approaches have contributed a number
of frameworks describing how experience is formed, adapted, and communicated in
social contexts.
Forlizzi and Ford (2000) provided a framework that attempts to describe how
experience transcends from unconsciousness to a cognitive state and finally be-
comes “an experience”, something memorable that can also be communicated in
social interactions. They identified four modes or dimensions of experiencing: sub-
consciousness, cognition, narrative and storytelling. Sub-consciousness represents
fluent experiences that do not compete for our attention. Cognition represents ex-
periences that require our attention, e.g. learning to use an unfamiliar product. Nar-
rative represents “experiences that have been formalized in the users' head: ones
that force us to think about and formulate what we are doing and experiencing”.
Forlizzi and Ford (2000) suggest that a product's set of features and affordances
offers a narrative of use. Storytelling, represents the subjective side of experience:
“a person relays the salient parts of an experience to another, making the experi-
ence a personal story”. Forlizzi and Ford (2000) argue that through these particular
sense making users attach meaning and personal relevance to situation, “creating
life stories and stories of product use”. Forlizzi and Ford (2000) subsequently iden-
tify ways of shifting across these four modes of experiencing. One might migrate