Enactments and the design of trail running equipment: An example of carrying systems

Sports equipment brands have increasingly turned to experience-centered design, meaning the integration of users' activity into the design process. From an enactive perspective, this research investigated two entries of collecting and analyzing interactions between trail runners and their equipment. The paper articulates two studies. Study 1 analyzed traces of enactments on online forums and showed that trail runners reported the issues they enacted while running and reflexively posted the traces of their activity by highlighting the flaws in their carrying systems. Study 2 presents a field test protocol for assessing different carrying systems. The results showed four typical sequences of enactment that characterized the runners' activity. The outcomes of these two studies of runners' enactments while using equipment suggest a method that designers can appropriate to analyze experiential data, which can then be integrated into the conception process.