UX Research
Understanding Altered Worlds
Have you ever questioned your relationship with the Digital World?
A commentary by Ernest v.d. Merwe, Ph.D.
In my pursuit to understand human relationships with the Digital World, I journeyed down the rabbit hole. This commentary will provide a guided tour in defining space relationships. As we begin, let’s define the concept of “relationship”. • Simply put, relationships are “the way in which two or more concepts, objects, or people are connected, or the state of being connected.” It is important to understand the difference between the physical and digital worlds, and how we relate to them. Before we continue, pause here for a moment and ask yourself: • How do I view my own relationship and interactions between the physical and digital world? • How do I go about representing or describing this relationship? When beginning my PhD research, I was forced to address these exact questions! However, this exercise only led to more questions, that subsequently led to other questions, all of which had far-reaching consequences for my own design and research practice. The journey of defining my relationship uncovered a range of complexities. This included what I defined as the digital world, how I interacted with it, how I viewed it, and ultimately how it affected me. Researching your own user experience (UX) can be tricky, defining what the issue at hand is may not always be clear, and may instead present itself as a series of seemingly unrelated questions that need to be untangled one at a time. Describing what the digital world represents, and how we define our relationship with it, is complex. As such, I had to narrow it down to a single component, and find the lacuna to make any real sense of it - This is where the digital space of a popular online photo-sharing application and social media platform (SMP), that I viewed as a small component of the digital world at large, came into focus. My interactions and relationship with this SMP led me to question whether a digital space can be viewed as a place, or if it merely remained a digital space for posting and sharing images and videos. • The notion of place has traditionally been reserved for describing forms of attachment towards the physical world, and can succinctly be represented as the following: space + meaning = place. • Digital space, up until recently, has been considered placeless, or forms of non-places. Through my research, it became clear that how we define the concept of place, ultimately affects how we understand and view the world. As such, how we transform digital spaces into places can alter our relationship with the digital world to create meaningful places, interactions and forms of attachment where there once were none. In questioning my own relationship with the digital world, it became clear that discovering our sense of place within this digital age, means that we also need to question, reinterpret, and adjust how we view concepts related to space and place. • Technological mediation can alter long-held beliefs and perceptions about human-technology-world relations. As new forms of technologies, including AR and VR mature and become more prevalent in society, UX research and the creation of “meaningful relationships” between the digital and physical world will become essential if we are to unlock the full potential of extended reality (XR) and the Metaverse. The physical and digital world are no longer separate, it is already intertwined. Whether you refer to it as a hybrid world or phygital, the merger between these worlds will only continue to strengthen. Through my journey, it became clear that space relationship with the digital world, and the wonderous complexity of it, means that our relationship with spaces shift, depending on our experiences. My PhD research culminated in the formulation of a sense of place model, in terms of hybrid space, that consists of social, physical and digital space. This theoretical model has practical applications within research fields related to XR and the Metaverse.
01
User Experience is about
human-technology-world relations
User Experience is about
actions as well as
perceptions
03
User Experience involves
different modes of interactions
01 Types of Human-Technology-World Relations
02 Mediation Theory
03 Modes of Interaction
References
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