Understand experience by reading "Technology as Experience"

I have been reading John McCarthy's book called "Technology as Experience". I found I really appreciate John Dewey and Mikhail Bakhtin's approach towards experience. I always go like "exactly". The ideas that keep resonated in my mind are:

1. It (Experience) is more inclusive than knowledge because it tries to encapsulate a person's full relationship - sensory, emotional, and intellectual - with his or her physical and social environment.

-Exactly. That explains why some background knowledge of a piece of art can help us appreciate it more, because the background helps us understand the art more and get us intellectually involved. Furthermore, if we personally have the similar experiences, it will get us emtionally envolved. So experience is more than feeling, more than knowledge. It is the irreducible totality, and we should struggle for richness in our experience.

2. According to Dewey, therefore, experience is constitued by the relationship between self and object-by concerned, feeling people acting and the maertials and tools they use.

He (Bakhtin) thought that totalizing systems worked by alienating people from the most meaningful quality of everyday experience, the particular response formed in relaiton to and with others from which a sense of self emerges....Thus although experience always occurs in cultural, historical, and material contexts, meaning engagement depends on the event or action being felt, known, and valued in unique way. This is also the kind of meaningful engagement that transforms people and systems.

-Exactly. Experience is about individual discovering and making sensing about himself, through interactions with the world, to answer questions like what he is interested in, what are his potenticals, and how unique he is... It is very personal, and can't fully represented by types.
It is also about growing, development and changing.

3. (About Aesthetic experience as a paradigm of experience) In turning to aesthetic experince, Dewey brings to the fore the rythms of life, the tenseion and release of engagment, and the feelings of vulnerability or the face of our own needs and desires.

-Exactly. Again and again, I encountered this concept of rhythm, which always makes me feel things are so beautiful, from music, from pictures, and even from everyday life. I guess it has something do with our own heart beating and life cycle. When the rhythm goes fast, we feel heigh, passionate and energetic, wheras when it goes slow, we feel peace, calm, relaxing, and quiet. Hmm, Rhythm is very beautiful, and it is kind of sensory beauty, a good way to organize things.

4. For pragmatits, creative action is always embedded in human situated freedom...This suggests a view of the world as an open, unfinalized, and unfinalized place where every person and thing is always a dynamic process of becoming, always open to future.

-Exactly. Where are those new ideas coming from? I have been asking this question since forever, and it is also the answer from my own experience. I believe the firm connection between freedom/openess and creativity. I also believe it should work together with the dance of rhythm in our life. One one hand, we need to accumulate knowledge and experience the world to acquire ideas, thoughts and concepts, on the other hand, we need to relax, let the ideas play in your head - and here comes new ideas, that is called creativity.

5. The emotions at work in an experience belongs to a self engaged in a situation and concerned with the movement of events toward an outcome that is desired or disliked. ... in a more recent treatment by Martha Nussbaum, who argues that emotion views the world from the perspective of our goals, needs, desires, and values... We do not perceive an objective, representation of the world; rather, we perceive a unique version colored by our unique desires and vlaues as experienced in the situion we are engaged.

-Exactly. Whether the outcome makes your happy or not largely depends on your expectations, or your desires or needs. Sometimes, I think the key to make ourselves happy is "Don's expect too much". A quote from a Chinese Cartoon - "I am not happy is not because I don't own anything, I just don't have the feeling of owning them until I lose them". Sadly, only after we lose something, you start to lower your expectations and appreciate what we currently have.

6. Faced with the potential arbitrariness of experience, a meaning-making creature or culture may try to bring a meaningful quality to experience. The doing that we engage in can be mindless or mindful. The more we attend to that doing, the more likely our experience is to be meaningful and value ot use. We can also make decisions about the beginnings and the ends of experiences, which would dissolve some f the arbitrariness. Jackson (1998) calls this "framing experience". By framing our experiences and giving ourselves as fully as possible to those experiences that we have diliberately framed, we begin to bring structure and meaning to them.

-Exactly. The world itself could be very rich and very meaningful, but to fully perceive that, or appreciate that, we still need to work one that - that is called sense-making, which I think is what I have been doing. So to be creative, open is good. But to avoid arbitraness, and make the ideas we create more meaningful, we need some frames, like some high level ends "to make something fun" or "to make people think" or "to make people feel connected".

7. One of the main distinguishing characteristics between understanding and interpretation is whether the meaning making involved is linguistically mediated or not. ... Our sense of any particular situations depends on previous experience and reflection....As meanings developed through reflection are absorbed by the object or situation, the sense of that sicuation changes.

-Exactly. It is about how we can make sense of our experience, how we can do reflection - by linguistic articulation, by composing music, or by painting? I think the more ways for you to express, the better chance it is for you to get meaning from the experience and become more senstive to your environment.