Affective Loop Experiences – what are they? Kristina Höök from Mobile Stockholm University & SICS

SenToy

Affective loop – first stab > Users first express their emotions through some physical interaction involving their body, for example, through gestures or manipulations of an artifact > The system then responds generating affective expressions using, for example, colors, animations, and haptics > This in turn affects users making them respond and, step-by-step, feel more and more involved

Questions > What is an Affective Loop? > Can we design for Affective Loop experiences? > Does it work beyond games?

eMoto

eMoto No labelled emotions! Usage is design Gesture and animation resonates

eMoto

People usually ask: > But how can they communicate? There are no emotion labels? How can they understand one-another?

eMoto Creating meaning together Mona: “Green is my favorite color and my boyfriend knows that, so this is why it is green because he knows that I think that green is a lovely color, just as lovely as he is.” Friends: ”Mona is a green person”

eMoto Meaning-making through body? Mona said: ”I leave out things I think are implicit due to the color… the advantage is that you don’t have to write as much, it is like a body language. Like when you meet someone you don’t say ’I’m sulky’ or something like that, because that shows, I don’t need to say that. And it’s the same here, but here it’s color.”

eMoto Involvement through body Agnes’ partner: ”When she was happy she showed that with her whole body. Not only her arm was shaking but her whole body. Meanwhile a huge smile appeared on her lips.”

Lessons learnt? > Communication of emotions is not an information transfer problem - it is about physically and intellectually experiencing interaction > It is impossible to separate emotion from overall social context or from the on-going conversation > Emotions arise from the dialogue; they are constructed, negotiated and experienced by friends together

Affective Diary

Affective Diary Meaning-making reflection change ”[pointing at the first slightly red character] And then I become like this, here I am kind of, I am kind of both happy and sad in some way and something like that. I like him and then it is so sad tht we see each other so little. And then I cannot really show it.”

Affective Diary Meaning-making–of all kinds! ”After that we talked and the discussions were very intense, a lot about, which shows here [points at the figures], lilac is spirituality, we talked a lot about clairvoyance, shamans, healing. Everybody shared their experiences, a very intense meeting.”

Lessons learnt? > Affective Diary builds on autonomous body reactions rather than conscious gestures, expressing and inducing emotions > Users get involved with a slower, reflective loop where memories of past events are re-interpreted, re-lived and experienced in a new way > ‘Meaning’ is created from a mixture of physical, emotional, bodily experiences, social context and memory of past events

Affective loop – second stab > Emotions are processes, constructed in interaction, starting from bodily, cognitive or social experiences > The user is an active, meaning-making individual – the interpretation responsibility lies with the user, not the system > Affective loops creates for non- dualistic, non-reductionist experiences

Why non-reductionist? Address dualism problem > Body – mind > Rationality – irrationality > Emotion – thinking Knowing and communicating through whole being

Design ideal By privileging users to create meaning from their own data they can make the system fit with their needs, ideas, hopes and dreams These applications will not make sense or have any meaning until users pick them up and make them part of their own practice, their own familiarity with their emotional, social and bodily encounters with the world

Theory? > How can we explain affective loops?

Third wave of HCI Experiences Collaboration Usability

> Biologistic > Embodiment > Holistic Theories

> Cognitivistic > measurements, rules, cognitivistic, in the brain, hedonistic usability, biology > Embodiment > Holistic Theories

Cognitivistic > Measure hedonic qualities by bodily feedback (e.g. Hassenzahl)

> Cognitivistic > measurements, rules, cognitivistic, in the brain, hedonistic usability, biology > Embodiment > Holistic Theories

> Cognitivistic > measurements, rules, cognitivistic, in the brain, hedonistic usability, biology > Embodiment > social & bodily practices, ethnography, phenomenology, in the world > Holistic Theories

Embodiment > Our experiences depend on our human bodies through our experiential and cultural bodies > Emotions are experienced through the constitution of our experiential body > Through our cultural bodies we learn how and when emotions are appropriate, and which expressions fit in different cultures, contexts and situations

Also in mediated communication Mona: ”Interesting is the guy you meet in the pub, you never call him, you send him an SMS because you’re not brave enough to call him. And then it’s like ‘Shall I send an emoto or an SMS?’ If you send an SMS the signal would be ‘Now I’m a coward and…’. I think emotos end up somewhere in between an SMS and actually calling him.”

> Cognitivistic > measurements, rules, cognitivistic, in the brain, hedonistic usability, biology > Embodiment > social & bodily practices, ethnography, phenomenology, in the world > Holistic Theories

> Cognitivistic > measurements, rules, cognitivistic, in the brain, hedonistic usability, biology > Embodiment > social & bodily practices, ethnography, phenomenology, in the world > Holistic > subjective, pragmatics, art, in ourselves Theories

Holistic > Designing systems is an art-form recognizing human beings as something else than machines built in wet-ware > Affective loop experience is similar to concepts such as: > aesthetic experiences > subjectivity > gameplay in games > That is, you know when you experience them, but cannot divide them into subparts that can be measured and then added together as in an equation, calculating its ‘experience-value’

Experiences? Dewey 1934 “An experience has a unity that gives it its name, that meal, that storm, that rupture of a friendship. The existence of this unity is constituted by a single quality that pervades the entire experience in spite of the variation of its constituent parts.”

> Cognitivistic > measurements, rules, cognitivistic, in the brain, hedonistic usability, biology > Embodiment > social & bodily practices, ethnography, phenomenology, in the world > Holistic > subjective, pragmatics, art, in ourselves Theories

Final words A new kind of rigor is called for when we start mixing ‘soft’ design issues with scientific endeavors of understanding human emotion and persuasiveness Producing (design) knowledge in this area may feel like a daunting task as we strive to capture highly elusive, subjective, context- and application-specific qualities But it is necessary! I thank the usual crowd and those who give us money....

Final words Bodily persuasion? I thank the usual crowd and those who give us money....