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Understanding experience using dialogical methods: The case of serendipity

Tuck Wah Leong Center for Digital Urban

Living Aarhus University, Denmark

imvtwl@hum.au.dk

Peter Wright School of Computing Science

Newcastle University, United Kingdom

p.c.wright@ncl.ac.uk

Frank Vetere & Steve Howard Dept of Information Systems The University of Melbourne

Victoria, Australia {fv; showard}@unimelb.edu.au

ABSTRACT McCarthy and Wright’s (2004) approach to understanding user experience provides a rich conceptual framework. In this paper, we report how this framework was used to guide the development of an approach to researching the richness of a particular experience - serendipity. Three themes were identified; life as lived and felt, the whole person, and dialogical sense making. These were used to help understand the key qualities of the strategy, tools and techniques that were required in the empirical study of the experience of serendipity. The paper explains this process and illustrates the depth of understanding that our choice of tools afforded. After describing the case study we offer some guidance on how to choose appropriate tools and methods for researching other types of experience.

Author Keywords Experience-centred design, serendipity, digital music, user experience,

ACM Classification Keywords H5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): Miscellaneous.

THE TURN TO EXPERIENCE IN HCI User experience has become a central concept in discourses in human-computer interaction (HCI) practice and research, and there are many different theoretical and methodological approaches that now fall under the umbrella of experienced-centered design (e.g. Hassenzahl (2010); Wright and McCarthy, (2010)). In some cases, the term ‘user experience’ is used to refer in a general way to what the user does with technology, how they feel about it, and what their attitudes, opinions and preferences are. But in other cases, the turn to experience has been used to offer a more radically different way of conceptualizing the subject matter of HCI research and practice. For example, McCarthy and Wright (2004) have offered a new way of conceptualizing the ‘human’ in human-computer interaction based on the philosophy of John Dewey and Mikhail Bakhtin (see also, Forlizzi & Battarbee (2004), Dalsgaard (2008) for similar uses of Dewey’s philosophy). This new paradigm they argue,

allows the discipline to make sense of new directions in user research and interaction design - particularly what Bødker (2006) has described as the ‘third wave’. Their approach places emphasis on the aesthetics of experience, and the processes by which people as concerned and creative individuals make sense of their experiences with technology. McCarthy and Wright’s approach can be summarized under three themes, briefly outlined here.

Life as lived and felt Wright and McCarthy use the term felt life to draw attention to lived experience as embodied. Their approach argues against the notion that thoughts, ideas, and emotions were entities that can exist in an abstract way separate from our physical embodiment and separate from each other like different communication channels that do not interfere. Life is felt because we have continuous sensory, sensual and intentional connection with our environment. This connection is situated in time and space and built up over time and space. Dewey captures these dual facets of experience and the idea of felt life very well: “....what men do and suffer, what they strive for, love, believe and endure, and also how men act and are acted upon, the ways in which they do and suffer, desire and enjoy, see, believe, imagine - in short, processes of experiencing. ... It is “double barreled” in that it recognizes in its primary integrity no division between act and material, subject and object, but contains them both in an unanalyzed totality” (Dewey, 1958, p. 8)

The whole person To think of a person holistically is to think of them as having a past, present, and future. Their past, their biography or history, is a cumulation of their experiences over time, over places, and over other people (i.e. over situations). This history is part of what defines them as a person with preferences, dispositions, values, and attitudes. It also provides them with a set of resources with which they make sense of their experiences in order to act in or on the current situation. Importantly, it is not just who we are in this historical-biographical sense but also who we want to be in terms of our imagined futures, our dreams, our needs, and our desires that go to make us who we are. Thinking holistically about ‘the users’ also requires recognizing them as creative agents embedded in complex and changing social networks through which they enter into different relationships and roles each day, as lover, as worker, as colleague, and as friend.

OZCHI 2010, November 22-26, 2010, Brisbane, Australia. Copyright the author(s) and CHISIG Additional copies are available at the ACM Digital Library (http://portal.acm.org/dl.cfm) or ordered from the CHISIG secretary (secretary@chisig.org) OZCHI 2010 Proceedings ISBN: x-xxxxx-xxx-x

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Dialogical sense making A central component of McCarthy and Wright’s account of experience is that meaning, or more specifically, the processes by which people make sense of, and give value to the things that they do and the things that happen to them. For Wright and McCarthy, the meaning of a situation does not come pre-given. Rather people accomplish this relationally, bring expectations and ways of looking to a situation in order to make sense of it. Such expectations are based on their own previous experiences and dispositions, but also on their understanding of other people’s experiences, acquired though sharing with others and through culturally received narratives. Through this process of sense making, past, present and imagined experiences are brought together. So for example, the difference between what a person expects and what actually happens, is a gap that is filled with emotions such as satisfaction, anger, disappointment and so on.

People’s understanding of an experience is never entirely finalized, but always more or less open to revision through further reflection and as a consequence of recounting the experience to others. For example, an utterance once spoken remains open to parody, sarcasm, agreement, or disagreement, from the other to whom it is addressed. The other brings something to the interaction and responds to the utterance in a way that is informed by their unique position in the world. Since each ‘other’ has a potentially different point of view, the meaning of the act of utterance or artifact is multi-perspectival, open to change and ultimately unfinalizable.

In this dialogical approach, sharing experiences with others, telling people about our selves and or lives, becomes not simply an act of reporting but rather an act of co-construction of meaning. We tailor our accounts of ourselves in terms of how we evaluate and what we expect from our audience.

These three themes of life as lived and felt, the whole person, and dialogical sense making, provide a conceptual foundation for experience-centered design and has methodological implications for how we engage with users in the design process. It suggests for example that ‘knowing the user’, might involve more than eliciting their needs and requirements, and that evaluating the experience might involve more than assessing user satisfaction. In this paper, we extend McCarthy and Wright’s conceptual foundation for understanding lived experience as a phenomenon by surfacing valuable insights to designers. By presenting some methods, techniques, tools, and approaches, we offer an example of how these three themes can be used generatively in user inquiry that align with this pragmatic and aesthetic conceptualization. In this instance, we used the three conceptual themes to explore a particular variety of human experience, serendipity.

In the next section, we provide a brief description of the study - an empirical investigation carried out to explicate the user experience of serendipity that arises during people’s use of digital media. Then, we describe the design of our of our empirical investigation and how we made sense of McCarthy and Wright’s three themes to

shape an empirical research strategy, the specific methods, tools/techniques used to gather the experiential data, and how we approached the analysis and interpretation of this data. We also present selected quotes from participants’ data but the motivation is not to inform readers of what we learnt about serendipity. Rather, they are used to demonstrate how the methods used (guided by our interpretation of the framework) allowed us access to empirical data that reflect the three themes.

By highlighting and discussing the different aspects and phases of the investigation, we illustrate how the formulation, choice of approach, design or rationale of each of these aspects of the empirical investigation have been influenced and guided by an orientation to one or more of the three themes outlined. We end by sketching out broader points of consideration when approaching experience-centered investigations.

INVESTIGATING THE UX OF SERENDIPITY Serendipity is a coined word, created by Horace Walpole in 1754 to describe events with fortuitous outcomes arising from chance or accidents (Merton & Barber, 2004). Many accidental but desirable discoveries in the history of science have been attributed to serendipity, for example Röntgen’s discovery of X-rays and Fleming’s discovery of penicillin (Roberts, 1989; Austin, 2003). People’s experiences of serendipity can be imbued with magic and wonder, bearing the capacity to delight and thrill. The case study we present in this paper took the phenomenon of serendipity as a point of departure. We were particularly interested in studying the experience of serendipity when it is encountered during-and-through the use of digital media, i.e., serendipity as a user-experience.

In order to ground this investigation, we focused upon a real-life example whereby serendipity is found to arise from the use of technology. This was reported during people’s interactions with their own personal digital media collection, such as whilst randomly browsing through photos (Bentley et al., 2006) or listening to digital music in shuffle mode (Levy, 2006). The example selected for our investigation was the practice of shuffle listening—a mode of digital music listening whereby people delegate their choice of listening to the digital music player which randomly picks tracks from their music library. It is during shuffle listening that people often report experiencing serendipity (Leong et al., 2005).

Our study aimed to produce a deeper understanding of serendipity as a user-experience. This would entail a rich characterization of the experience, an understanding of how the experience could arise during people’s use of technology, and an explication of the elements involved. In doing so, we hoped that this understanding could contribute to broadening HCI’s current conceptualizations of experience and add an understanding of serendipity to the current cast of experiences that are considered in experience-centered design.

The fieldwork conducted in this investigation was a seven-week study with 12 participants (seven females and five males) ranging from 18 to 62 years who listen to digital music daily via their iPods. Participants were

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asked to keep diary entries of their listening experiences. They were also interviewed twice—both open-ended interviews—once at the beginning of the study and the other, after the study has concluded. During the seven-week study, participants were also given ludic listening activities to carry out and diarize. This involved the use of dice to introduce random elements during listening. Given the strong chance/random element in serendipity, these activities were designed specifically to explicate participants’ experiences of this element during music listening. Throughout the seven weeks, the researchers also met each participant informally twice, to check up on their progress.

APPROACHING THE THREE EXPERIENTIAL THEMES IN AN EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION Having introduced and explained in some detail the three experiential themes of life as lived and felt, the whole person, and dialogical sense making, we now describe how they guided our empirical investigation of serendipity including, how the various tools and techniques for data gathering were selected, how data was analyzed. We show how we arrived at a method of empirical enquiry and the way we made sense of it in response to these themes. In particular, we want to note that the particular approach/method/tool we ended up choosing was often related to one or more of the themes and not simply a direct mapping to a specific theme.

Our strategic approach At a strategic level, we chose to carry out qualitative research and adopted an interpretivist paradigm in our empirical investigation because this resonates strongly with all three experiential themes.

Interpretivist qualitative research is a useful approach when exploring felt life. As Mason argues, qualitative research allows researchers to “explore a wide array of dimensions of the social world, including the texture and weave of everyday life, the understanding, experiences and imaginings of our research participants…and the meanings that they generate” (2002, p. 1). Besides shedding light on people’s sense making process, qualitative approach affords us methods and tools that in turn allow us to access people’s lived and felt experiences whereby each person’s experience should be approached as being personal and perspectival, contingent on a host of intellectual, emotional and social factors and thus it is imminently emergent, potentially contradictory, and open to continual revision. As mentioned above, this is what McCarthy and Wright refer to as being unfinalized (2005).

The interpretivist paradigm “sees people, and their interpretations, perceptions, meanings and understandings, as the primary data source” (Mason, 2002, p. 56). It seeks the “insider view” of the whole person in order to learn “what is meaningful or relevant to people being studied, or how individuals experience daily life by discovering how they construct meaning in natural settings” (Neuman, 2006, p. 88). So, besides connecting to the whole person, it is also geared towards understanding how people make sense of experience.

McCarthy & Wright themselves argue that the “ethnographic stance on interpretation of cultures—engaged, relational, perspectival, and plural” (2004, p. 37), offers a good starting point for approaching experience empirically. This suggested that our investigation of people’s serendipitous encounters during digital music listening experience should be couched within the naturalistic settings of people’s everyday lives, where serendipitous encounters is reported to arise.

In other words, the means to access the rich and embodied nature of experience is through qualitative methods carried out “in the field”, as opposed to the laboratory or design workshop. Particularly effective are narrative methods which focus on people’s stories of lived experience (Wright and McCarthy 2010). Consequently, the primary tools and techniques of this investigation were designed to capture people’s stories of their listening experiences within their naturalistic settings of use within the contextualized heterogeneity of people’s quotidian lives.

How data were captured

Capturing reflections on experience A diary was given to each participant to gather participant-generated insights into their listening experiences. The use of a diary allowed participants not only to decide when to diarize their experiences but how they choose to present the information. Furthermore, this asynchronous communication tool can be used later in face-to-face interviews with the participants as resources for dialogues that elaborate on and explore more deeply the meaning of the experiences so diarized (Alaszewski, 2006). Participants were asked to diarize their listening experience daily, for seven weeks. Besides text, participants were free to supplement their entries with other elements such a doodles, poetry, photographs or anything they deemed relevant to the experience they were describing.

This tool was chosen because it is a reflective medium that allows people to express themselves freely when describing their music listening experience. The kinds of entries collected about such experiences can sometimes be perfunctory but on some occasions, they can be extremely vivid, embodied, emergent and threaded with emotion and intimacy. Below is a rather ‘mundane’ diary (excerpt) from Bridget (name anonymized), an IT consultant in her mid-20s. Yet, even here, one can glean aspects of Bridget’s felt and lived experience as she offers us a glimpse into her bedroom on this particular evening.

Today’s listening was definitely what you’d call ‘time filler’. There was nothing to watch on TV nor did I have any shows to watch so I decided to listen to music. In a while I was listening to music whilst playing FreeCell on my PC and at the same time, I was going through my wardrobe for clothes. Actually when I first started playing music and even whilst listening and playing FreeCell, I was in a pretty shitty mood because everyone in my family had plans for the night and had left me at home by myself! Shocking! But by the time I was looking through my wardrobe probably about 30

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minutes after listening, I found myself dancing to dance-able songs – (e.g. clubbing songs, remixed versions) and singing along to the slower songs. By about 10.30 my bad mood was completely forgotten.

We get a hint here about her relationship with her family (and her expectations of them), her emotional state throughout, and the role various technologies figures in her (bedroom) and life. We learn how she amuses herself and how she gets into her music listening actively and physically.

Capturing experience on-the-go People’s experience of listening to music via digital music players is often on the go. As such there is a need to consider techniques that takes into consideration the transitory and fleeting nature of experience, coupled with the mobile nature of listening practice. For McCarthy & Wright, considering the lived experience of the whole person means viewing experience as “an irreducible, dynamic interrelationship between person and environment, in which meaning has sensory, affective, and emotional dimensions, as well as the cognitive and socio-cultural aspects” (2005). It also draws our attention to the idea that experience happens in the continuous present while at the same time being given meaning by what has gone before and what is yet to come. Furthermore, the person is actively engaged in constructing the meaning of their experiences. This meant ensuring that the felt and lived aspects of people’s experiences, including those occurring on-the-go, and their subjective sense making during their digital music listening was captured as much and as fully as possible.

So participants were asked to use their mobile phones’ camera and audio recorder to take pictures, record voice memos or even short videos during interesting listening experiences while on the move. They could also use the phone to enter notes to themselves. The idea was for participants to use these ‘impressionistic data’ later as memory triggers for a fuller account in their diaries (Leong et al., 2008). And to more fully capture the richness of the dynamic interrelationship between person and environment, sticky labels were used.

Capturing the context: Sticky labels We designed sticky labels with printed fields that are easy to fill and gave them to the participants (see fig. 1). These were used to supplement participants’ diary entries, in an attempt to add contextual information to their narratives.

Figure 1: Sticky label to collect contextual information of each diary entry

Participants were asked to peel off a label, paste it onto a new page of the diary and fill in the label prior to writing

a diary entry. Filling in the field allows contextual information, such as the participant’s mood or emotional state, the activity that was accompanying their listening, location, listening mode and whether they were alone or with others to be captured. Interestingly, when participants were asked to report their emotional state via the sticky label, they found it hard to ‘put a word’ on how they feel. Instead, they suggested the alternative of using a number (from a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the most positive)

This contextual data is valuable in contributing to a more holistic view of people’s experiences that include their activity, environment, sensory, affective and emotional dimensions as well as the cognitive factors. Below is what Bridget filled in her label before diarizing the entry we presented earlier:

Date: 10/02/09

Location: home in my lovely bedroom. Approx 9.30pm

General Mood: 5/10 – feeling so-so today. It’s a Saturday night & I’m home alone – quite sad actually

Shuffle from entire library – listening to music through iTunes on PC

Main activity – listening as accompaniment – Just had a shower, sorting out clothes for the next day and getting ready for bed.

Ludic dice-led listening activities In order to better understand the link between randomness and the experience of serendipity during music listening, participants were given dice-led listening activities to carry out in weeks 3, 5, and 7 of the study. Each participant received three dice, a glue stick and an instruction sheet on how to carry out the activity. Although the activities were designed to get insights into how participants’ made sense of randomness, which in turn encouraged participants into situations of creative engagement with serendipity, the use of evocative (and meaningful) materials also meant that more nuanced personal information about participants was gathered.

Briefly, participants began by choosing a photograph that appealed to them and gluing it onto the diary. On week 3, they were supplied with 70 photographs for this purpose, on week 5, they were instructed to select a photo from flickr.com, and on week 7, they were asked to choose a photo from the own personal photo collection (either digital or analogue). After affixing the sticky label and filling in the contextual information, they had to write something about the photo. Following that, they had to throw the three dice once, noting the total in the diary.

With the photo in the diary in view, they were then asked use their iPod to click forward the number of times indicated by the dice and listen to whatever track they arrived at. After the song had finished playing, they diarized their listening experience. See figure 2 for an example of a diarized listening activity, and the material supplied on week 3.

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When writing about the photo they had selected, participants were found to draw from their own history to make sense of the photograph, either in locating similarities, personal connections and so on. This was particularly the case with photographs that did not belong to them. Besides revealing participants’ relational and dialogical sense making of the photo, this activity led to revealing fragments of their biography, past experiences, values, hinted-at issues that were simmering in their minds, their concerns, hopes, and wishes.

Figure 2. Dice-led listening activity

For instance, Andy (anonymized name), a business consultant in his late 20s wrote the following in his diary after choosing this photo of a tree on top of a hill covered in snow.

Alone! Leave me alone -> tree on its own in the middle of nowhere. It also touches on the concept of clarity, very zen. It touches on aspects of my life right now, relationship. Want to be left alone at times but I also can’t imagine being alone! It creates confusion in my head. White indicates clarity in my thinking. I need this. There are reasons why I am thinking like this. I am going through times when I feel like being alone, away from everything.

Andy’s writing revealed a lot about his mood and state of mind. Whilst the source of his confusion is unclear, he certainly appeared to be in considerable angst. In fact, after writing this, Andy threw the three dice, which totaled to 13. After clicking forward 13 times, the song presented by his iPod was Michael Jackson’s song, Leave Me Alone. This led to a serendipitous moment, which he diarized (and which we shall present later).

Andy’s entry above, and his later reflections on it (reported below) reinforce the importance of keeping a

focus on the whole person when analyzing experience. It also reflects the third theme presented by McCarthy & Wright, the dialogical nature of sense making which argues that the unity of felt experience and the “meaning made of it is never available a priori to a person but must always be accomplished dialogically” (2004, p. 18), that experiences and meanings cannot be separated from the self that is the experiencer, and that self and meaning are never complete and finalized but are an ongoing project.

What people bring to the moment and the position or perspective they come to it from infuse the sense making process with personal values (Holquist, 2002, p. 21). People draw on their own selfhood: their personal biography and history, their hopes, fears and expectations as well as their current situation, in order to finalize (if only temporarily) the experience. This applies as much to the kind of sense making we as researchers engage in during research as it does to how our participants make sense of their everyday lives. Acknowledging the dialogical nature of the research process suggests and commits us to methods in which researcher and participant are seen as differently placed centers of value who build an empathic relationship with each other (Wright and McCarthy 2010).

Open-ended interviews While participants’ diary entries provide insights into their listening experiences that resonate with various aspects of the three themes, diary entries can also be fragmentary in nature. To ‘thicken’ these descriptions, and get closer to the whole person and the weight of the experience as lived and felt, the diary entries were used as jumping off points for further sense making during open-ended interviews.

We chose open-ended interviewing in participants’ homes because experience is situated and contextual (Mason, 2002, p. 64). Such interviewing “offers the opportunity for an authentic gaze into the soul of another” (Atkinson & Silverman, 1997, p. 304). It also allows researchers to engage in the kind of active, empathic listening that is central to dialogical approaches (McCarthy and Wright 2010). In addition, semi-structured interviewing allowed us to explore aspects of the whole person as an individual situated in place and time.

As mentioned above, we interviewed each participant twice. We used the first interview to get to know the participants. This involved talking to them about their routine, their everyday lives, to more specific topics such as their musical tastes, their motivations for listening, past listening music experiences, and so on. The second interview focused upon researcher and participant exploring the diarized stories, making sense of the details and constructing joint understandings of the material and the experiences.

To illustrate, let us return to Andy’s serendipitous moment mentioned previously. While the title of the randomly presented song, Leave Me Alone, matched what he wrote about the photo, this serendipitous coincidence took on weight because of the underlying gravity of the moment. This only became clear during the interview

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when Andy revealed that during the period of the study he was going through a tumultuous struggle with his sexuality. After six years of suppressing his true sexuality, he came out to his girlfriend (the day before this diary entry) and in the process ended this single most significant relationship in his life to date.

So how Andy interpreted the coincidence must be understood in terms of what he brought to the moment: his difficult life-situation, his struggle, his fear of loneliness in ‘coming out’, and his recent breakup. Through understanding the added weight that Andy brought to bear on making sense of the moment, the researchers were privileged with a deep insight of how the serendipitous nature of the moment was constituted through its personally meaningful, powerful, and moving quality.

In addition to the two interviews, shorter, informal dialogues were explicitly organized through casual drop-ins on weeks two and five. Although they were meant to see how participants were faring and to answer any questions they might have, these catch-ups allowed researchers to get to know the participant a bit better, and to get the ‘pulse’ of participants’ lives, their general state of mind and to learn about individuals tastes and values. Notes that might contribute to richer insights about the participant are recorded after each visits.

How the data were analyzed With the help of notes taken for each participant during the study, as well as the transcripts, and personal insights, we wrote rich descriptive vignettes of each participant. While these profiles were produced during analysis, they were not analyzed. Rather they were kept accessible to the researchers, serving as a reminder to them of the whole person behind the data; and to contextualize and ground the interpretation of that data.

The first phase of the analysis focused upon one participant at a time with the researchers immersing themselves as much as possible into the participant’s lifeworld. We drew upon their personal encounters with each participant, and read the full set of data collected for the person many times. This data consisted of the full transcripts of the diary (including the contextual data from sticky labels) as well as the participant’s personal profile. This immersion assisted us in our interpretation of the data, to help make sense of how each participant made sense of particular experiences and how meaning was forged.

Focusing on participants’ dialogical and relational sense making meant ‘working outwards’ from instances of an experience of interest. For example, upon identifying a report of serendipity in the data, we searched for contextual clues, beginning with the data that were nearest in time to the event in order to shed light on this serendipitous moment. Putting ourselves in the participant’s shoes as far as possible, we tried to understand the person’s sense making with questions such as “why was this moment meaningful to the person?” or “what led to the meanings created by the person?” or “what are the aspects of the person that

shaped their response and meaning to this moment?” and so on. Only after approaching each individual as a whole person in this way did we shift the analysis to a higher level of abstractions whereby themes emerging from each individual’s data were compared.

Reflections on the case study The case study described above illustrates how McCarthy & Wright’s framework can been used to guide an investigation into the experience of serendipity and in particular, how it can be used to inform and provide a grounding for the choice of appropriate methods. But the framework did not only inform our choices. It also informed by our own understanding of the experience of digital music consumption and the richness of meanings in that activity. The process we went through in order to use McCarthy and Wright’s framework was not a process of systematic operationalization of experiential and contextual variables. Rather it was a process of exploring what seemed to be important to us and our participants and the development of methods that resonated with, and were sympathetic to the kinds of commitments that were implied by the framework. While this process is necessarily situated, we nevertheless feel that there may be some general principles, sensibilities and commitments that may be of use as resources for choosing and developing methods in other situations to explore other varieties of experience.

CONSIDERATIONS FOR CHOOSING APPROPRIATE METHODS FOR ENGAGING WITH EXPERIENCE

Qualitative Research Wright and McCarthy (2010) argue that stories and conversations are the primary means by which people not only share experiences, but also, following their commitment to a dialogical account, co-construct it. Thus, when attempting to engage dialogically with participants, qualitative research and interpretive analysis are particularly powerful approaches to enquiry. But qualitative research itself is a very broad and methods can be used in ways that help or hinder the researcher in forming empathic relationships with participants. As Wright and McCarthy (2010) point out, many of qualitative methods have the potential to elicit the kind of intimate and personally meaningful reflections that are needed to understand how people experience and make sense of situations, relationships, and life events, but ultimately it is the attitude of the researcher and the ability to develop an active, empathic approach to listening that constitute dialogical forms of engagement,

Forming relationships It follows from our commitment to empathy and recognizing the other as a separate centre of value, that where possible, an approach that aims at building a close relationship with people will allow researchers to gain deeper insights not only into the person, the rhythm of their everyday lives, their emotional states, and their fears, worries, wishes and hopes. To build these relationships we took opportunities for informal meeting and conversations in which we also tried to engage in active and attentive listening (Turkle, 2008, pp. 2-3). We

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also took every opportunity to be with people in their own environment be it at home or work. These activities can help illuminate the subjective aspects of experience and how experiences can become charged with personal meaning. We found these informal observations useful as a means to deepening our understanding of the person that in turn could be used as sensitizing material during data analysis.

Working towards understanding The dialogical researcher avoids the temptation to analyze experience on the basis of fixed categories. Rather, they remain open to surprise and to new interpretations. They also recognize that they bring to the situation their own expectations and ways of looking, but use these not to impose their meanings on the experiences of the participant, but rather use them to understand and be surprised by the richness of the other. The richness of the other’s experience is apparent not only in the processes of sense making during the birth of the experience of interest (including personal interpretations and meanings intrinsic to the situation) but also and equally important, the elements that the person brings to that moment.

Direct and indirect and methods We found the diary method supplemented by sticky labels and open-ended interviews to be highly effective in our case study. But the important issue here is the combination of direct and indirect methods to support different forms of reflection. Sticky labels and the process of assigning a number to ‘how I feel now’ were a quick and easy support for forms of reflection that are relatively direct and immediate. Diaries support the process of self-reflection at a distance from the experience, but using the numbers and sticky labels as a stimulus for diary writing grounds that reflection more closely to the moment. An important point here is that it is not the media per se (e.g. sticky labels and diaries) but what aspects of the sense-making process they tap into that is important. These do not have to be novel tools. What is more critical is how they can be employed strategically to surface richer, more intimate and thus more holistic insights about people and their experience. We could have used many different media such as mobile phones, cameras, emails, video blogs, etc. The choice is only limited by researchers’ imagination and guided by the skill and experience of the researcher regarding appropriateness, accessibility, or how particular tools or methods resonate with the research context. But different media support different ways of making sense of an experience. Understanding what aspects of sense-making (e.g., connecting, interpreting, reflecting, recounting) that a tool or media encourages, is an important aspects of a study’s methodological rationale.

Using creative techniques to support co-construction Many experience-centered enquiries (see Wright and McCarthy 2010 for examples)—and in our case study, the ludic listening activities we designed—use novel, creative activities (similar to the use of Cultural Probes (Gaver et al., 1999)) to engage people and free them from known conventions of ‘popular’ data capture methods. Their

open and playful nature allow people to express themselves more freely and spontaneously, which can offer unexpected insights into the phenomenon being studied. These often include aspects of the person: his/her biography, beliefs, values, attitudes, sense of self and so on.

While the data arising from these activities can be fragmentary, they can offer insights into people’s values and their sense making process and surface the unconscious aspects of their emotional and volitional self when deployed with other forms of data capture techniques. More than this though, they work with, rather than resist, the dialogical nature of sense-making highlighted by McCarthy and Wright’s approach, that is to say, that meanings and values do not come fully formed but emerge when people are engaged imaginatively in processes of co-construction of meaning.

Using evocative material Our case concerned music consumption. Although music can be understood as a representational medium, it is perhaps more usefully understood as an evocative medium. Music does not just inform us it moves us and connects us somewhat directly to past experiences, it informs us of places, emotions, sensations and memories. People’s personal music collection is inscribed or imbued with personal associations, memories, past experiences, or a particular time of their life (DeNora, 2000; Tonkiss, 2003). The same holds for people’s photos (Rose, 2003). It is not surprising then that in our study, the act of diarizing music listening experiences produced data that included intimate insights into the participants’ personal lives, their values, their state of mind and their memories. Even using material that has no personal connection with people, such the photos in our first listening activity can reveal insights into the person’s life. This hints at the potential to further explore how other evocative materials can be used to get at aspects or even impressions of people’s lived and felt experiences.

Getting at ‘how I feel right now’. The dialogical approach to experience resists reducing experience to a single measurable dimension. But often enough, in trying to make sense of their experiences, people do try to do just that. Furthermore, this can be a very useful staring point for reflection and appropriation of experiences and as a means of guiding our future actions. When participants chose to report their emotional state on the sticky label using a numerical scale, the number (and scale) used is not a defined emotion, nor does it describe anything specific. We did not use the number as a means of comparing across participants (see by contrast Hassenzahl (2010)). Rather participants used the number (on the label) symbolically to indicate a certain (personal and subjective) level of affective state. They would use this not as a measure but as a starting point for conversations with us during the interview and as a means of helping them explore their emotions in their diary. Given our commitment to a dialogical engagement, it is interesting to note how the method was appropriated by participants and used in ways we did not expect.

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CONCLUSIONS For some researchers interested in the user experience, the commitments made to scientific ways of knowing require an approach which characterizes experience in terms of component processes and identifies factors that can be studied by the operationalization of concepts into measurable components. In contrast, this paper describes a study that extends the pragmatist conceptual foundations of McCarthy and Wright’s framework, demonstrating how their commitment to understanding experience holistically, to seeing sensation, emotion and intellect as reciprocally related, and to understand sense making as a reflexive, dialogical and unfinalized, can suggest methods which recognize interaction, interpretation, and co-construction as active processes in inquiry.

In developing methods for understanding the experience of serendipity that would be consonant with McCarthy and Wright’s theoretical framework, we first identified some important themes in their work that had implications for how to understand experience. For example, the commitment to felt life, suggested the need to have ways of collecting and analyzing data that made visible not just was people did but what they felt and what motivated them to do what they did and how they made sense of how the experience. The commitment to seeing the whole person behind the user, suggested to us the need to identify or develop methods that allowed insights into people’s personal lives, their backgrounds, their habitual ways of being and how this affected their experiences of serendipity. The commitment to sense making as a dialogical process, required us to identify methods that not only revealed but also made use of the open and constructive nature people’s sense making, and how this is contingent and open to different and deeper interpretations depending on when, where and to whom those experiences are being recounted.

What we learnt was that at the heart of the experience of serendipity was the emergence of powerful personal meanings out of seemingly random coincidence of events. Wright and McCarthy’s approach to experience gave us a way of articulating that understanding and the methods we developed aimed to remain faithful to this articulation. We were able to develop a deep understanding of the phenomenon in a way that we hope will inform further experience-centered research. The methods we used and the kind of insights into serendipity they offered, do not allow us to measure or compare the intensity of serendipitous experiences, nor do they allow us on the basis of such comparison to argue that one form of digital shuffle might be more effective than another. What our account offers instead is an understanding of how to shape the processes that need to come together in order for a serendipitous experience to emerge.

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