Evocative balance: Designing for interactional empowerment

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2005

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 twotiered 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.

Academy for Design Innovation Management Conference, 2019

This paper introduces empathic design as a framework and a strategy that can be adopted by the emerging field of experience design (XD) to create meaningful experiences connected with people's lives and needs. The paper presents the rationale behind the emergence of empathic design, the traits that characterize this approach to design, a collection of empathic design methods and practices, and a critical discussion of the limitations of empathy in design. Methodologically, this paper is based on a systematic literature review on empathic design, human-centred design, and empathy, which is synthesized and focused its application in experience design. Ultimately, this paper intends to contribute to the broader discussion of how traditional design practices are adapting and evolving to respond to new realities, and how new design paradigms are needed to address the very complex challenges that we face in the 21st century.

Engaging Artifacts 2009 Oslo www.nordes.org 1 This paper proposes affective engagement as a possible resource when designing interactive environments. The notion of affect and affective experience as developed by Brian Massumi in cultural theory is presented as a theoretical foundation for conceptualizing experience in interaction design. In particular, it is shown how Massumi provides a non-informational understanding of affect as distinct from emotions. Instead, Massumi offers a processual and relational account of affective experience as a part of dynamic events of becoming. Through an analysis of the interactive installation Touched Echoes, the concept of affective engagement is introduced to inform the practical work when designing experiential fields as conditions of emergence in interaction design.

This short paper presents an experimental approach to the difficulty of evaluating interactive systems as artefacts for everyday life. The problem arises from the event-like nature of the user-centred evaluation session, as distinct from ‘being’ or the ‘ongoing flow’ of daily life, and from the dynamic complexity of the lifeworlds of users in human centred design approaches. In analysing the data from a recent project investigating the aesthetic and utilitarian figurations of a wireless system of computational jewellery, it was found that the participants made references to a range of notional lifeworlds, and that the premises for use attached to these varied in type. An overview of the evaluation procedure, including pre and post task sessions with the user group, is given, and the results from the project discussed.

2007

La comunicación interpersonal requiere más que solamente palabras, involucra emociones. En términos generales las emociones pueden ser vistas como estados internos complejamente organizados. El Awareness de estos estados permitiría a los seres humanos evaluar la información social y desarrollar inteligencia social estratégica y, por lo tanto, las acciones cotidianas estarían teñidas de significado social y emocional. Este artículo reporta una experiencia que busca permitir un diálogo basado en emociones expresadas, capturadas y transmitidas entre diversos participantes usando interfaces tangibles. Además, se explota el significado social de objetos físicos y cotidianos como un portarretratos, con el fin de crear interfaces afectivas entre usuarios dispersos geográficamente. En este artículo se describe un dispositivo que permite un tipo de Awareness emocional apoyando la interacción interpersonal y afectiva entre personas distantes geográficamente.

Design determines how we operate, perceive, and understand a product. But a good design shapes our experience of using them. The right design ingredients make a product functional, useful, user oriented, long lasting and unobtrusive. Similarly, poor design results in irritatingly overcomplicated products. This paper provides a literature review of three design concepts, viz. affordance, emotion and complexity. It also summarizes the concept of user experience and its key evaluation methods. The study revealed that at every stage of a design process there are trade-offs, but not necessarily at the expense of user experience. Further discussion is targeted on the application of these core concepts in designing computer interfaces along with challenges and concerns. The discussion is extended by providing instances of emerging themes and recent trends in the field of user interface design. Lastly, integrating these concepts into everyday design processes will result in products with in...

Design Management Journal (Former Series), 1997

Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Third wave HCI initiated a slow transformation in the methods of UX research: from widely used quantitative approaches to more recently employed qualitative techniques. Articulating the nuances, complexity, and diversity of a user's experience beyond surface descriptions remains a challenge within design. One qualitative method-micro-phenomenology-has been used in HCI/Design research since 2001. Yet, no systematic understanding of micro-phenomenology has been presented, particularly from the perspective of HCI/Design researchers who actively use it in design contexts. We interviewed 5 HCI/Design experts who utilize micro-phenomenology and present their experiences with the method. We illustrate how this method has been applied by the selected experts through developing a practice, and present conditions under which the descriptions of the experience unfold, and the values that this method can provide to HCI/Design field. Our contribution highlights the value of micro-phenomenology in articulating the experience of designers and participants, developing vocabulary for multi-sensory experiences, and unfolding embodied tacit knowledge.

The ‘Third Wave’ of Human-Computer Interaction research extends beyond cognition and usage contexts to many aspects of user experience, including emotions, feelings, values and motivating worth. Design representations need to evolve, as existing task specification approaches are too limited. This paper motivates and presents User Experience Frames (UEFs), a representational resource for envisaging user experiences. UEFs support designing as connecting, which looks beyond crafting or conceptualising artefacts to a wide range of interdependent connections between designs, usage, outcomes, evaluations and beneficiaries. UEFs expose relationships between design qualities and unfolding user experiences. They connect the design qualities and emotional responses that are in focus for Kansei engineering, but extend beyond first impressions to the motivations that guide human choices.

2008

The emotional experience of an interactive system has been the subject of a great deal of recent interest and study in the HCI community. However, many of researchers have pointed out the extreme difficulty in predicting or controlling these emotional experiences through intentional design choices. However, the user study we conducted proposes a different point-of-view than these claims. Although these emotional responses were not always tied directly to the device itself and influenced by contextual factors, we discovered that certain controllable aspects of interactive products showed clear patterns of emotion in the responses of our participants. We discuss our findings and provide implications for the design of emotional experiences in interactive devices.