Towards Affective Chronometry

Abstract

Increasing HCI work on affective interfaces aimed to capture and communicate users' emotions in order to support self-understanding. While most such interfaces employ traditional screen-based displays, more novel approaches have started to investigate smart materials and actuators-based prototypes. In this paper, we describe our exploration of smart materials and actuators leveraging their temporal qualities as well as common metaphors for real-time representation of changes in arousal through visual and haptic modalities. This exploration provided rationale for the design and implementation of six novel wrist-worn prototypes evaluated with 12 users who wore them over 2 days. Our findings describe how people use them in daily life, and how their material-driven qualities such as responsiveness, duration, rhythm, inertia, aliveness and range shape people's emotion identification, attribution, and regulation. Our findings led to four design implications including support for affective chronometry for both raise and decay time of emotional response, design for slowness, and for expressiveness.

From Biodata to Somadata

“…Following up on our previous work on material representations of EDA mapped to thermochromic displays [58,59], we found Figure 2. Diagrams of the three somadata couplings.…”

“…Touching, feeling and interacting with the material affordances is important for grounding design work in what is possible, but also for spurring novel ideas arising from the technology itself. But as argued by Umair and colleagues [59], exploring sensor data as a material and translating such data in a material form by coupling sensing to actuation has only been partially explored and more work is needed.…”

“…They allowed for applications that support self-awareness by displaying properties of our bodies as they unfold in real-time, or applications that are able to track one's mood over certain periods of time [18], or even to assess one's health status [3]. On the other hand, design researchers and artists bring creative potential to the field, driving further development of biosensing technologies to fit outside the narrow settings they were originally designed for [59,24,25].…”

Experiencing discomfort

“…This measure needs the assessment of heart rate variability (HRV), requiring computationally demanding processing and access to reliable electrocardiography or pulse sensors that need to be worn over long periods. With the growing HCI interest in materials and materiality [14], increasing research has started exploring novel ways of representing biosensory data by testing different actuator-based technology [3,4,12,13,15]. Following this material trend, we started connecting actuators and biosensors to represent biosensory data in daily life settings.…”

“…AffecTech 1 is a large interdisciplinary research project addressing the development of affective health technologies that can support people to become more emotionally aware and able to effectively regulate their emotional responses. Within the AffecTech project, in our attempt to create alternative technology-mediated interactions, we draw upon recent work that focuses on interesting representations of biosensing information [13]. In particular, we take inspiration from examples such as electrodermal activity (EDA) represented in social settings [4], making use of different materials, and combine it with evocative body-centered explorations of actuators [15].…”