Empathy and experience in HCI

ABSTRACT

For a decade HCI researchers and practitioners have been developing methods, practices and designs 'for the full range of human experience'. On the one hand, a variety of approaches to design, such as aesthetic, affective, and ludic that emphasize particular qualities and contexts of experience and particular approaches to intervening in interactive experience have become focal. On the other, a variety of approaches to understanding users and user experience, based on narrative, biography, and role-play have been developed and deployed. These developments can be viewed in terms of one of the seminal commitments of HCI, 'to know the user'. Empathy has been used as a defining characteristic of designer-user relationships when design is concerned with user experience. In this article, we use 'empathy' to help position some emerging design and user-experience methodologies in terms of dynamically shifting relationships between designers, users, and artefacts.

References

1. Ançel, G. Developing empathy in nurses: An in-service training program. Archives of Psychiatric Nursing, 20, 6 (2006), 249--257.
2. Andersen, K., Jacobs, M., and Polazzi, L. Playing games in the emotional space. In M. Blythe, A. Monk, C. Overbeeke and P.C. Wright. (Eds.), Funology: From Usability to User Enjoyment, Kluwer, Dordrecht Kluwer, 151--159, 2003.
3. Bakhtin, M. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. University of Minnesota Press; Minneapolis, 1984.
4. Bakhtin, M. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1986.
5. Battarbee, K. and Koskinen I. Co-Experience: User Experience as Interaction. Co-design, 1, 1 (2004), 5--18.
6. Bell, G., Blythe, M., and Sengers, P. Making by making strange: Defamiliarization and the design of domestic technologies. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human. Interaction, 12, 2 (2005), 149--173.
7. Black, A. (1998) Empathic design. User focused strategies for innovation. In Proc. of New Product Development. IBC conferences.
8. Blythe, M., Monk, A., and Park, J. Technology biographies: Field study techniques for home use product development. In Proc. CHI '02 (Extended Abstracts), ACM Press (2002), 658--659.
9. Blythe, M. Reid, J. Geelhoed, E. and Wright P. Interdisciplinary criticism: Analysing the experience of RIOT!: a location-sensitive digital narrative. Behaviour and Information Technology 25, 2 (2006), 127--139.
10. Blythe M., and Wright P. Technology scruples: why intimidation will not save the recording industry and how enchantment might. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing (in press), on-line first, http://www.springerlink.com/content/106503/?k=enchantment
11. Blythe, M. and Wright, P.C. Pastiche Scenarios: Fiction as a resource for analysing user experience. Interacting with Computers. 18, 5 (2006), 21--29.
12. Boehner, K., Vertesi, J., Sengers, P., and Dourish, P. How HCI interprets the probes. In Proc. CHI 2007. ACM Press (2007), 1077--1086.
13. Boehner, K., DePaula, R., Dourish, P., and Sengers, P. How emotion is made and measured. International Journal of Human Computer Studies, 65, 4 (2007), 275--291.
14. Bruner, E. M. Experience and its expressions. In E.M. Bruner and V. Turner, V. (eds.), The Anthropology of Experience. University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 3--30, 1986.
15. Bruner, J.M. Acts of Meaning. Harvard University Press, Harvard Mass., 1992.
16. Buchenau, M. and Suri, J. F. Experience prototyping. In Proc. DIS 2000, ACM Press (2000), 424--433.
17. Carroll, J. (Ed.) Scenario-Based Design: Envisioning Work and Technology in System Development. Wiley, New York, 1995.
18. Charmaz, K. Constructing grounded theory: A practical guide through qualitative analysis. London, Sage, 2006.
19. Clifford, J. On ethnographic authority. Representations, 2 (1983), 118--146.
20. Collingwood, R. G. The Idea of History. Oxford University Press Oxford, 1994.
21. Cooper, A. The inmates are running the asylum: Why high tech products drive us crazy and how to restore sanity. Sams, New York, 1999.
22. Dourish, P. Implications for design. In Proc. CHI 2006, ACM Press (2006), 541--550.
23. Dourish, P. Where the Action is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction. MIT Press, Cambridge Mass, 2001.
24. Forlizzi J., and Battarbee K. Aesthetics, ephemerality and experience: Understanding experience. In Proc. DIS 2000. ACM Press (2006) 261--268.
25. Forlizzi, J. and Ford, S. The building blocks of experience: An early framework for interaction designers. In Proc. DIS 2000, ACM Press, (2000), 419--423.
26. Gadamer, H-G. Truth and Method (Second Edition). Sheed and Ward, London, 1989.
27. Gaver, W., Dunne, T. and Pacenti, E. Cultural Probes. Interactions, 6, 1 (1999), 21--29.
28. Gaver, W., Beaver, J. and Benford, S. Designing design: Ambiguity as a resource for design. In Proc. CHI 2003. ACM Press (2003). 233--240.
29. Gaver, W., Boucher, A., Pennington, S., and Walker, B. Cultural probes and the value of uncertainty. Interactions 11, 5 (2004), 53--56.
30. Gaver, W., Bowers, J., Boucher, A., Gellerson, H., Pennington, S., Schmidt, A., Steed, A., Villars, N., and Walker, B. The drift table: designing for ludic engagement. In Ext. Abstracts CHI 2003, ACM Press (2004), 885--900.
31. Gaver, W. Cultural Commentators: Non-native Interpretations as Resources for Polyphonic Assessment. International Journal of Human Computer Studies, 65, 4 (2007), 292--305.
32. Graves Petersen, M., Iversen, O. S., Krogh, P. G., and Ludvigsen, M. Aesthetic interaction: A pragmatist's aesthetics of interactive systems. In Proc. DIS 2004 ACM Press (2004), 269--276.
33. Hicks, D. Self and other in Bakhtin's early philosophical essays: Prelude to a theory of prose consciousness. Mind, Culture, and Activity: An International Journal, 7, 3 (2000), 227--242.
34. Koskinen, I. Mattelmäki, T. and Battarbee, K. (eds.). Empathic Design: User Experience in Product Design. IT-Press, Helsinki, 2003.
35. Martin, J. Perspectival selves in interaction with others: Re-reading G.H. Mead's social psychology. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 35, 3 (2005), 231--253.
36. Mattelmäki, T. and Battarbee, K. Empathy Probes. In Proc. Participatory Design Conference 2002, CPSR Palo Alto (2002), 266--271.
37. McCarthy, J. and Wright, P. Technology as Experience. MIT Press, Cambridge Mass, 2004.
38. McCarthy, J. and Wright, P. Putting felt-life at the centre of HCI. In Proc. ECCE'12, EACE Press (2004), 127--134.
39. McCarthy, J. and Wright, P. A dialogical approach to experience: Uncovering critical potential. The Virtual 2006 Conference, Stockholm. Sweden.
40. McCarthy, J., Wright, P.C. Wallace, J., and Dearden, A. The experience of enchantment in human-computer interaction. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing. 10, 6 (2005), 369--378.
41. McQuaid, H. L., Goel, A., and McManus, M. When you can't talk to customers: using storyboards and narratives to elicit empathy for users. In Proc. DPPI '03, ACM Press (2003), 120--125.
42. Nielsen, L. From user to character: An investigation into user descriptions in scenarios. In Proc. DIS 2002 ACM Press (2002) 99--104.
43. Oatley, K. Meetings of Minds: Dialogue, Sympathy and Identification in Reading Fiction. Poetics, 26 (1999), 439--454.
44. Orr, J. Talking About Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job. Cornell University Press, New York, 1999.
45. Raijmakers, B., Gaver, W., Bishay, J. Design Documentaries: Inspiring design research through documentary film. In Proc. DIS 2006, ACM Press (2006), 233--240.
46. Sengers, P. Autobiographical Design. Paper presented at the experience-centred design workshop. In Ext. Abstracts, CHI 2006, ACM Press (2006), 1691--1694.
47. Sengers, P. and Gaver, W. Staying Open to Interpretation: Engaging Multiple Meanings in Design and Evaluation. In Proc. DIS 2006, ACM Press (2006), 99--108.
48. Stockley, D. Empathic reconstruction in history and history teaching. History and Theory, 22, 4 (1983), 50--65.
49. Stueber, K. R. The psychological basis of historical explanation: Reenactment, simulation, and the fusion of horizons. History and Theory, 41, 1 (2002), 25--42.
50. Suri, J.F. The next 50 years: Future challenges and opportunities for empathy in our science. Ergonomics 44, 14 (2001), 1278--1289.
51. Swallow D., Blythe M., & Wright P. Grounding Experience: Relating Theory and Method to Evaluate the User Experience of Smartphones. In Proc. of ECCE '05, EACE Press (2005), 91--98.
52. Tractinsky, N. Aesthetics and apparent usability: empirically assessing cultural and methodological issues. In Proc CHI 1997, ACM Press (1997), 115--122.
53. Vreeke, G.J. and van der Mark, I.L. Empathy, An Integrative Model. New Ideas in Psychology, 21 (2003), 177--207.
54. Winograd, T. Bringing Design to Software. Addison Wesley, Reading Mass., 1997.
55. Wright, P.C. and McCarthy, J.C. Making sense of experience. In M. Blythe, A. Monk, C. Overbeeke and P.C. Wright. (eds), Funology: From usability to user enjoyment. Kluwer, Dordrecht, 43--53, 2003.
56. Wright, P.C. and McCarthy, J.C. The value of the novel in designing for experience. In A. Pirhonen, C. Roast, P. Saariluoma, H, Isom (eds.). Future Interaction Design. Springer, Amsterdam, 9--30, 2004.

Index Terms

• Human-centered computing