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from a cognitive to a sub-conscious experience, for instance by learning how to use
a product. Reversely, a fluent experience may shift to a cognitive if a user encoun-
ters something unexpected in her interaction with the product and is forced to think
about it. A narrative experience can shift to a cognitive one when one “is forced to
challenge his own thinking that has been solidified in her perceptions, attitudes, and
beliefs”. An experience might also shift from a sub-conscious state to story-telling
as she “schematizes it, communicates it and add levels of meaning”.
Forlizzi and Battarbee (2004) modified this framework to include the concept
of co-experience proposed by Battarbee (2003). Battarbee and Koskinen (2005),
further elaborated on the social mechanisms that lift or downgrade experiences as
they participate in people's social interactions. They identified three distinct mech-
anisms: lifting up experiences, reciprocating experiences, rejecting and ignoring
experiences . First, people may “lift things from the stream of events”, considering
them as meaningful enough to be communicated in social settings. Secondly, recip-
ients of communicated experiences may acknowledge the described experience as
personally relevant and respond to it by telling their own, similar experiences. Fi-
nally, experiences communicated in social settings may be rejected or downgraded
by others, eventually altering the dominance of the given experience for the person
who chose to communicate it.
McCarthy and Wright (2004) distinguished between four threads of experience:
compositional, sensual, emotional, and spatio-temporal . The compositional thread
concerns the way that different elements of experience form a coherent whole. It
refers to “the narrative structure, action possibility, plausibility, consequences and
explanations of actions”. The sensual thread relates to “the concrete, palpable, and
visceral character of experience that is grasped pre-reflectively in the immediate
sense of a situation”. The emotional thread refers to value judgments (e.g., frustra-
tion and satisfaction) that ascribe importance to other people and things with respect
to our needs and desires”. Lastly, the spatio-temporal thread “draws attention to the
quality and sense of space-time that pervades experience”. McCarthy and Wright
(2004) pinpoint that while these are positioned as distinct components of experi-
ence they should be seen as intrinsically connected with each other.
Next to the four threads of experience, McCarthy and Wright (2004) described
how sense-making takes place in the development of experience by decomposing it
into six processes: anticipating, connecting, interpreting, reflecting, appropriating,
and recounting . Anticipation refers to users' expectations and imagined possibil-
ities that are grounded in prior experience. In connecting, users make an instant
judgments referring to the immediate, pre-conceptual and pre-linguistic sense of a
situation. In interpreting, users work out what's going on and how they feel about
it. In reflecting users examine and evaluate what is happening in an interaction and
the feelings of frustration or pleasure that are part of the experience. In appropri-
ating, users evaluate how the new experience relates to prior experiences, and in
recounting, users communicate the experienced situation to others and reinterpret
the experience as it participates in storytelling.
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