Analyzing lived experience of activity

International audienceAnalysis of activity usually deals with various aspects of how workers accomplishtheir tasks in work settings, and how people use and interact with artefacts intheir everyday lives. In recent years, growing interest has focused on lived or subjectiveexperience in ergonomics and Human-Computer Interaction. Few studieshave focused so far, however, on the relationships between subjective experienceand activity. In addition, the links between these two concepts are not very clear,especially as the meaning of subjective experience is often not well understood. Itis therefore proposed in this paper to address these issues by investigating the linksbetween lived experience, taking a phenomenological approach, and activity.Subjective experience of an activity is defined here as the stream of actions, emotions,thoughts and perceptual sensations generated while performing an activity,which the subject is or can be made aware of. Based on this definition, we describeand discuss some methods (self-confrontation and explicitation interviews) whichseem to be particularly relevant for documenting subjective experience, and showhow detailed analyses of subjective experience can yield new insights which helpto understand the activity in question more clearly