Affective Loop Experiences

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Affective Loop Experiences what are they?

• Kristina Höök
• from
• Mobile Life _at_ Stockholm University SICS

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SenToy
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SenToy
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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

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Questions

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

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eMoto
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eMoto
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eMoto
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eMoto No labelled emotions! Usage is design

• Gesture and animation resonates

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eMoto
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eMoto

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

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eMoto Creating meaning together
Friends Mona is a green person
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.
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eMoto Meaning-making through body?
Mona said I leave out things I think are
implicit due to the color the advantage is that
you dont have to write as much, it is like a
body language. Like when you meet someone you
dont say Im sulky or something like that,
because that shows, I dont need to say that. And
its the same here, but here its color.
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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.
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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

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Affective Diary
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Affective Diary
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Affective Diary
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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.
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Affective Diary Meaning-makingof 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.
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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

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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

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Why non-reductionist?

• Address dualism problem
• Body mind
• Rationality irrationality
• Emotion thinking
• Knowing and communicating through whole being

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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

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Theory?

• How can we explain affective loops?

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Third wave of HCI

• Experiences
• Collaboration
• Usability

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Theories

• Biologistic
• Embodiment
• Holistic

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Theories

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

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Cognitivistic

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

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Theories

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

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Theories

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

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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

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Also in mediated communication
Mona Interesting is the guy you meet in the
pub, you never call him, you send him an SMS
because youre not brave enough to call him. And
then its like Shall I send an emoto or an SMS?
If you send an SMS the signal would be Now Im a
coward and. I think emotos end up somewhere in
between an SMS and actually calling him.
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Theories

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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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....
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Final words

• Bodily persuasion?

I thank the usual crowd and those who give us
money....