Anna Ståhl

Experiencing the Affective Diary

A diary is generally considered to be a book in which one keeps a regular record of events and experiences that have some personal significance. As such, it provides a useful means to privately express inner thoughts or to reflect on daily experiences, helping in either case to put them in perspective. Taking conventional diary keeping as our starting point, we have designed and built a digital diary, named Affective Diary, with which users can scribble their notes, but that also allows for bodily memorabilia to be recorded from body sensors and mobile media to be collected from users’ mobile phones. A premise that underlies the presented work is one that views our bodily experiences as integral to how we come to interpret and thus make sense of the world. We present our investigations into this design space in three related lines of inquiry: (1) a theoretical grounding for affect and bodily experiences; (2) a user-centred design process, arriving at the Affective Diary system; and (3) an exploratory end-user study of the Affective Diary with 4 users during several weeks of use. Through these three inquiries, our overall aim has been to explore the potential of a system that interleaves the physical and cultural features of our embodied experiences and to further examine what media-specific qualities such a design might incorporate. Concerning the media-specific qualities, the key appears to be to find a suitable balance where a system does not dictate what should be interpreted and, at the same time, lends itself to enabling the user to participate in the interpretive act. In the exploratory end-user study users, for the most part, were able to identify with the body memorabilia and together with the mobile data, it enabled them to remember and reflect on their past. Two of our subjects went even further and found patterns in their own bodily reactions that caused them to learn something about themselves and even attempt to alter their own behaviours.

In situ informants exploring an emotional mobile messaging system in their everyday practice

We have designed and built a mobile emotional messaging system named eMoto. With it, users can compose messages through using emotion-signalling gestures as input, rendering a message background of colours, shapes and animations expressing the emotional content. The design intent behind eMoto was that it should be engaging physically, intellectually and socially, and allow users to express themselves emotionally in all those dimensions, involving them in an affective loop experience. In here, we describe the user-centred design process that lead to the eMoto system, but focus mainly on the final study where we let five friends use eMoto for two weeks. The study method, which we name in situ informants, helped us enter and explore the subjective and distributed experiences of use, as well as how emotional communication unfolds in everyday practice when channelled through a system like eMoto. The in situ informants are on the one hand users of eMoto, but also spectators, that are close friends who observe and document user behaviour. Design conclusions include the need to support the sometimes fragile communication rhythm that friendships require-expressing memories of the past, sharing the present and planning for the future. We saw that emotions are not singular state that exist within one person alone, but permeates the total situation, changing and drifting as a process between the two friends communicating. We also gained insights into the under-estimated but still important physical, sensual aspects of emotional communication. Experiences of the in situ informants method pointed to the need to involve participants in the interpretation of the data obtained, as well as establishing a closer connection with the spectators.

eMoto: emotionally engaging interaction

There is a lack of attention to the emotional and the physical aspects of communication in how we up to now have been approaching communication between people in the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI). As designers of digital communication tools we need to consider altering the underlying model for communication that has been prevailing in HCI: the information transfer model. Communication is about so much more than transferring information. It is about getting to know yourself, who you are and what part you play in the communication as it unfolds. It is also about the experience of a communication process, what it feels like, how that feeling changes, when it changes, why and perhaps by whom the process is initiated, altered, or disrupted. The idea of Affective Loop experiences in design aims to create new expressive and experiential media for whole users, embodied with the social and physical world they live in, and where communication not only is about getting the message across but also about living the experience of communication - feeling it. An Affective Loop experience is an emerging, in the moment, emotional experience where the inner emotional experience, the situation at hand and the social and physical context act together, to create for one complete embodied experience. The loop perspective comes from how this experience takes place in communication and how there is a rhythmic pattern in communication where those involved take turns in both expressing themselves and standing back interpreting the moment. To allow for Affective Loop experiences with or through a computer system, the user needs to be allowed to express herself in rich personal ways involving our many ways of expressing and sensing emotions – muscles tensions, facial expressions and more. For the user to become further engaged in interaction, the computer system needs the capability to return relevant, either diminishing, enforcing or disruptive feedback to those emotions expressed by the user so that the she wants to continue express herself by either strengthening, changing or keeping her expression. We describe how we used the idea of Affective Loop experiences as a conceptual tool to navigate a design space of gestural input combined with rich instant feedback. In our design journey, we created two systems, eMoto and FriendSense.

Interactional empowerment

We propose that an interactional perspective on how emotion is constructed, shared and experienced, may be a good basis for designing affective interactional systems that do not infringe on privacy or autonomy, but instead empowers users. An interactional design perspective may make use of design elements such as open-ended, ambiguous, yet familiar, interaction surfaces that users can use as a basis to make sense of their own emotions and their communication with one-another. We describe the interactional view on design for emotional communication, and provide a set of orienting design concepts and methods for design and evaluation that help translate the interactional view into viable applications. From an embodied interaction theory perspective, we argue for a non-dualistic, non-reductionist view on affective interaction design.

Evaluating experience-focused HCI

There is growing interest in experience-focused, rather than task-focused, HCI. Task-focused HCI has developed methods for creating and validating knowledge, but those methods may not be applicable or sufficient for experience-focused technology. In particular, new evaluation techniques to validate knowledge need to be created, discussed, and understood. I address this in three ways. First, it is important to understand the historical, technical and social factors that impact the evaluation criteria the community consider valid today. Second, I propose an ethnomethodological approach to evaluation that emphasizes the ways users use and make sense of technologies. And third, I demonstrate the validity of my approaches by means of several case studies.

A user-centered approach to affective interaction

We have built eMoto, a mobile service for sending and receiving affective messages, with the explicit aim of addressing the inner experience of emotions. eMoto is a designed artifact that carries emotional experiences only achieved through interaction. Following on the theories of embodiment, we argue emotional experiences can not be design in only design for. eMoto is the result of a user-centered design approach, realized through a set of initial brainstorming methods, a persona, a Laban-analysis of body language and a two-tiered evaluation method. eMoto is not a system that could have been designed from theory only, but require an iterative engagement with end-users, however, in combination with theoretical work. More specifically, we will show how we have managed to design an ambiguous and open system that allows for users’ emotional engagement.

The Aesthetics of Heat: Guiding Awareness with Thermal Stimuli

In this paper we discuss the design process and results from a design exploration on the use of thermal stimuli in body awareness exercises. A user-study was performed on an interactive prototype in the form of an interactive heat mat. The paper brings forth an alternative understanding of heat as a design material that extends the common understanding of thermal stimuli in HCI as a communication modality to instead bring the aesthetic and experiential properties to the fore. Findings account for felt body experiences of thermal stimuli and a number of design qualities related to heat as a design material are formulated, pointing to experiential qualities concerning the felt body, subjectivity and subtleness as well as material qualities concerning materiality, inertia and heat transfer.

Temporal relations in affective health

In the Affective Health project we explore possibilities of how to, through biofeedback support users in making sense of the relationship between their stress and their behavior in everyday life. Affective Health is a tool for visualizing patterns and trends of bodily and contextual information. It is particularly important that the design reflects changes over time as this is how people start recognizing patterns in their own behavior and connect it to their bodily reactions. We spent substantial effort sketching and testing ways of portraying time that would move us away from more mathematically inspired representations such as for example graphs and calendars. Instead, we want users to see the signals our bodies emit as part of themselves, of their own ways of being in the world, alive, acting and reacting to their environment. We have explored many possible, alternative ways of visualizing biofeedback over time. For example as the relation between different places and with time as different layers of history in a concept inspired from ecology. The latest and most developed concept is a cyclic repetition of biodata mapped on a spiral shape.

The Soma Mat and Breathing Light

We present the experience of using the prototypes Soma Mat and Breathing Light. These are designed with a somaesthetic approach to support a meditative bodily introspection. We use light and heat as modalities to subtly guide participants to turn their gaze inwards, to their own bodies. People trying our prototypes reports on a feeling of relaxation, softer movements, and an increased awareness of their own breathing.

Embracing First-Person Perspectives in Soma-Based Design

A set of prominent designers embarked on a research journey to explore aesthetics in movement-based design. Here we unpack one of the design sensitivities unique to our practice: a strong first per ...