Technology As Experience questions

As I read through this book on experience and technology I thought it would be good to reflect on what has been discussed. There seems to be quite a few good pointers in there and I need to grasp what they are. I also haven't found much other research yet so this might help with that too.

Someone who came up in the book was Brenda Laurel. She looks into our engagement with computers and how it brings forth an experience similar to theatre. Her work is a little outdated but can still be relevant for the purpose of the type of engagement technology can give us.

Further on in the book some questions were brought up for the quality of engagement for certain types of technology:

Do the technologies connect or fragment experience and life?

Do the technologies help to enrich our experience of what we already
value, or do they impoverish it?

Do the technologies facilitate unfolding potential, critical perception, and
engagement?

The second question is exactly along the lines of what my project is looking into. I don't expect to be able to just gain my answer from the book but I am confident it will give me some justification to what it is I decide.

The book goes on to discuss the aesthetic experience as being fulfilled by the response of the person to and from what it is that is happening/ being experienced. Philosophers John Dewey and Mikhail Bakhtin are exemplified for the theory:

"For Bakhtin, then, enriched, aesthetic experience is created from moments of answerability, the weight of which is located in the relationship between self and other in that moment. For him, the weight of lived moments of experience is felt in answerable engagement with a responsive other. According to Dewey, aesthetic experience involves the interpenetration of self and the world of objects and events, or self and other, according to Bakhtin. This interpenetration of two centers of value, involving what Hicks (2000, p. 231) calls “richly seeing,” entails felt commitment to the other, seeing the other as a center of value."

So I take from this that what the person is expecting, seeking or wanting a response from (i.e technology) will change the engagement of the person's experience. This outlook is becoming quite useful for redevelopment of my project but is still broad. I need a medium.

References

Brenda Laurel. (2013, April 3).Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Brenda_Laurel&oldid=545332938

McCarthy, John C. Technology As Experience. MIT Press, 2004.