Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) often focuses on how designers can develop systems that convey a single, specific, clear interpretation of what they are for and how they should be used and experienced. New domains such as domestic and public environments, new influences from the arts and humanities, and new techniques in HCI itself are converging to suggest that multiple, potentially competing interpretations can fruitfully co-exist. In this paper, we lay out the contours of the new space opened by a focus on multiple interpretations, which may more fully address the complexity, dynamics and interplay of user, system, and designer interpretation. We document how design and evaluation strategies shift when we abandon the presumption that a specific, authoritative interpretation of the systems we build is necessary, possible or desirable.

How we design and evaluate for emotions depends crucially on what we take emotions to be. In affective computing, affect is often taken to be another kind of information- discrete units or states internal to an individual that can be transmitted in a loss-free manner from people to computational systems and back. While affective computing explicitly challenges the primacy of rationality in cognitivist accounts of human activity, at a deeper level it often relies on and reproduces the same information-processing model of cognition. Drawing on cultural, social, and interactional critiques of cognition which have arisen in HCI, as well as anthropological and historical accounts of emotion, we explore an alternative perspective on emotion as interaction: dynamic, culturally mediated, and socially constructed and experienced. We demonstrate how this model leads to new goals for affective systems- instead of sensing and transmitting emotion, systems should support human users in understanding, interpreting, and experiencing emotion in its full complexity and ambiguity. In developing from emotion as objective, externally measurable unit to emotion as experience, evaluation, too, alters focus from externally tracking the circulation of emotional information to co-interpreting emotions as they are made in interaction.

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We have designed and built a mobile emotional messaging system named eMoto. With it, users can compose messages through using emotion-related gestures as input, rendering a 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 would provide for an aesthetic 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 used combined Experience clips – where one user is equipped with the system and a friend acts as a spectator documenting experiences of use in situ – with Cultural probes – a set of provocative materials that users respond to and thereby document their own practice and understanding of the system. The five users and five of their friends acting as spectators were able to report and reflect on their communication patterns, their friendships, their physical, intellectual and social experience of their own emotions and reactions to the emotional messages they received. We have chosen to name the five users and their spectators in situ informants, highlighting how this combination of user-centred study methods 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.

Informal histories of HCI commonly document two major intellectual waves that have formed the field: the first orienting from engineering/human factors with its focus on optimizing man-machine fit, and the second stemming from cognitive science, with an increased emphasis on theory and on what is happening not only in the computer but, simultaneously, in the human mind. In this paper, we document underlying forces that constitute a third wave in HCI and suggest systemic consequences for the CHI community. We provisionally name this the ‘phenomenological matrix’. In the course of creating technologies such as ubiquitous computing, visualization, affective and educational technology, a variety of approaches are addressing issues that are bad fits to prior paradigms, ranging from embodiment to situated meaning to values and social issues. We demonstrate the underlying unity of these approaches, and document how they suggest the centrality of currently marginal criteria for design, evaluation, appreciation, and developmental methodology in CHI work.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Copyright © 2007 AIGA | The professional association for design. Many researchers and practitioners in user experience design have turned towards social sciences to find ways to understand the social contexts in which both users and technologies are embedded. Ethnographic approaches are increasingly prominent as means by which this might be accomplished. However, a very wide range of forms of social investigation travel under the “ethnography ” banner in HCI, suggesting that there is still considerable debate over what ethnography is and how it can best be employed in design contexts. Building on earlier discussions and debates around ethnography and its implications, this paper explores how ethnographic methods might be consequential for design. In particular, it illustrates the implications for design that might be derived from classical ethnographic material and shows that these may not be of the form that HCI research normally imagines or expects.

As the current computing systems move from desktop and work settings into our everyday lives (e.g. mobile and ubiquitous systems) a growing interest is seen for designing interactive systems with experiential support. Some conceptual work already exists that tries to analyze and understand users ’ experience with interactive systems but in practice this is still not frequently used. Drawing on the concepts from the domain of art, this paper introduces a way to conceptualize users ’ experience as the meanings or interpretations they construct during their interaction with or through the interactive systems. We consequently apply this conceptualization in a design project where we use it at an early concept design stage for designing aware technologies in care-taking situations.

hour (5pm) enabled by hovering over the bubble (inset). We present AffectAura, an emotional prosthetic that allows users to reflect on their emotional states over long periods of time. We designed a multimodal sensor set-up for continuous logging of audio, visual, physiological and contextual data, a classification scheme for predicting user affective state and an interface for user reflection. The system continuously predicts a user's valence, arousal and engagement, and correlates this with information on events, communications and data interactions. We evaluate the interface through a user study consisting of six users and over 240 hours of data, and demonstrate the utility of such a reflection tool. We show that users could reason forward and backward in time about their emotional experiences using the interface, and found this useful.

New forms of social affective applications are emerging, bringing with them challenges in design and evaluation. We report on one such application, conveying wellbeing for both personal and group benefit, and consider why existing methodologies may not be suitable, before explaining and analyzing our proposed approach. We discuss our experience of using and writing about the methodology, in order to invite discussion about its suitability in particular, as well as the more general need for methodologies to examine experience and affect in social, connected situations. As these fields continue to interact, we hope that these discussions serve to aid in studying and learning from these types of application. Copyright is held by the author/owner(s).

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