Experience research


To understanding what people experience while using an innovative product, while watching a piece of art or while listening to music is one of the key challenges in psychology. We mainly address the following facets of experience in our research:

User experience

Our research explores how experimental approaches can be used to assess and capture the cognitive as well as emotional mechanisms that underlie the perception of human–product interaction and other facets of design cognition. When most people think of design research for technological products, they limit their associations to technology-based issues, especially which kind of material was used, which technology was employed and how functional the product is. This is simply astonishing when we merely try to imagine why such products have been spontaneously invented, developed, designed and manufactured—obviously consumer products are “consumed” or at least “used”, calling for a perspective towards the consumer, the user.

Art experience

Art experience means the rich experience of artistic objects that are mostly embedded in situational, social, and cultural contexts: for instance when encountering art in art galleries or museums. Art experience lets us reflect on the content, the style, and the artist behind the artwork—moreover, it lets us reflect about the percept, perception, the world, ultimately: about us. Current works in the field of empirical aesthetics unfortunately often ignore context factors that are so important for such deep and far-reaching experiences. Here I intend to refer to the different paths of measuring art experience by a) testing within the ecological valid context of art galleries via field studies, b) by simulating certain contextual and perceptual factors in a lab-oriented study design and c) by testing art-related material in labs without paying attention to such factors. The way we research art experience drastically changes the quality of the output, especially if we ignore certain essential factors which are typically involved when encountering art galleries in real life via path #c—mainly because participants do not show the typical motivation, interest and effort which they would typically face in art galleries. Furthermore, because the depiction quality of artworks, the context and the social situation in which they are inspected is fundamentally different in the lab, the respective impression is also very different. As most research ignores such factors, we might often be misled by the results of such studies; especially when the extraordinary and unique cultural status that makes artworks so different to ordinary objects is ignored.

Experience diagramm

Music experience

How do we perceive music and how does information that is provided changes the experience and the pleasure we have with music? We are currently working on tools to support musicians, orchestras and people who want to deliver music in general in their aims to deepen the hearers‘ experience and to strengthen their memory traces about the music they have previously heard.