Our field is full of talk about experience these days: usability specialists become user experience architects, HCI researchers start working on affective interaction, and so on. Whether these transitions represent adaptation to market demand or a research reorientation, they all reflect growing insights that people's use of technology is more fruitfully understood as a whole: including aesthetic and ethical as well as instrumental dimensions. McCarthy and Wright aims to provide a conceptual platform on which to build further reasoning and design in this direction. Drawing on Dewey and Bakhtin, they analyze the experience of using technology in pragmatist terms. Important insights include the active role of the user, the intertwined threads of sensual, emotional, compositional and spatio-temporal experience, and the continuum between institutionalized and prosaic aesthetic experience. McCarthy and Wright’s work is a useful entry in a hopefully growing debate in the interaction design field on the nature of experience.

It's now available as an ebook on the MIT press portal http://mitpress-ebooks.mit.edu/product/technology-as-experience