Tracing the user experience of participation

Digital applications and web-based user experiences increasingly incorporate social web technologies that enable the user to become a participant, or someone who actively co-constructs content, context, and meaning in digital ecosystems. This paper explores the user experience of participation by establishing a working definition of the concept and discussing why it is important to researching and designing digital communication tools. The case study presented in this paper explores the ways that user-generated content produced with the game LittleBigPlanet and the community that this content supports are intricately linked to local inventions embedded within cultural practices that improve support people's efforts to learn how to participate within the social web ecosystem. I demonstrate that participation relies on one's ability to coordinate with other participants via social web ecosystems in order to explore digital tools and perform knowledge work. Thus, the user experience of participation can be traced to these local inventions and the culturally situated practices of participants that leverage digital applications to develop, document, and share knowledge with each other. The conclusion to this paper offers preliminary concepts necessary to defining the user experience of participation and to theorizing participation as a critical component of researching and designing social web ecosystems.