Co-experience : user experience as interaction - Katja Battarbee & Ilpo Koskinen

• Social processes are particularly important in explaining how experiences migrate from subconscious into something more meaningful.
• We claim that neglecting co-experience in user experience leads to a limited understanding of user experience - and a similarly limited understanding of design possibilities.
• The concept of co-experience enriches design in several ways 
• Co-experience extends the previous understanding of user experience by showing that user experiences are created together and are thus different from the user experiences people have alone.
• It suggests an interactionist methodology for studying user experience. It is important to see what the content is what people do, or, in the case of the mobile multimedia project, what is in the messages. This alone, however is not enough to make sense of co-experience. It is also necessary to study the interactions between people with and without technologies and to put the messages into context. 
• Co-experience opens new possibilities in design for user experience by focusing on the role of technology in human action. Co-experience focuses on how people make distinctions and meanings, carry on conversations, share stories and do things together. By understanding these interactions, opportunities for co-experience can be designed into the interactions of products and services. 
• In design terms user experiences can only be understood in context.
• Creativity is enabled and constrained by technological possibilities.
• Empathy is necessary in order to understand the experiences of others any study aiming to focus on co-experience needs to apply design empathy in its interaction oriented approach and to aim at creating an emphatic understanding rather than a factual explanation. 
• Co-experience aims to compliment and broaden the ways in which user experience is currently seen in the design professions. It suggests that people's interactions are relevant not just for sociology and computer supported collaborative work but are also relevant for studying user experience.