Experience Spaces For Critical Co-Reflection On Artefact Use

Current design approaches mainly focus on co-design activities for creating (novel) digital artefacts. Less attention is paid on implications of new technologies on people and their experiences. This paper proposes a conceptual framework aimed at describing and supporting systematic and sustained critical co-reflection on artefact use. It employs and expands ideas from design research and user-oriented design approaches to describe sources and nature of critical co-reflection and to discuss appropriate analytical lenses. Experience spaces are introduced as a complementary concept to design spaces. An experience space is a conceptual space emerging from the collaborative creation, manipulation, merging and discarding of experience-related descriptions of technology appropriation. From a critical reflective perspective, designers not only care about rich design spaces with diverse design proposals but also about rich experience spaces displaying diverse appropriation processes and a broad spectrum of users' perspectives on effects of artefact use. The paper suggests that artefact ecologies constitute the elements of experience spaces.