Can we design systems that allow users to represent their emotion or feeling through simplistic visual representations? As always with HCI, it depends. In this case, it depends on what social contexts influences the design, what social context influence interpretation of system output, and most importantly what predefined unseen “baggage” the system designer and user brings to the table.
Context is a main driving factor in understanding human affect. Every community has a predefined set of appropriate behaviors and behaviors that are considered out of the norm. And every generation has their own sense of aesthetics that defines their visual world. When designing its easy to refer to your own social upbringing without taking into context who you are designing for. However, what happens when that application or design is released on a far broader scale and users are left to interpreting what it all means.
In the case of Miro, the initial system design was to allow those in a office setting to perceive their co-workers emotional status [1,2]. The co-worker/ user would input their emotion by assigning it a color value. From there, others would see the color and then would have to interrupt what was going on. What researchers found is that each person brought their own situational knowledge of what was happening in the office and then from there they interrupted the results from there. However, those not familiar with the setting could perceive and interrupt the data in context that does not relate to the original context.
So how do we design for aesthetics and affect. Well, there is no clear answer however what is clear is that users need to be involved as they are the ones that will ultimately use the system and the ones who define what they see. Aesthetics is just as subjective as emotions. There are some loosely predefined guidelines however those guidelines are left to be interrupted by the user or viewer. Overall, the success of aesthetics relies on the overwhelming majority accepting or validating its use.
What does it boil down to? Simply, what is the purpose of what you are designing, what requirements need to be met, and what is the ultimate goal for the design? Is it to provide critical feedback, or allow for the user to freely interrupt what is being seen. These questions will drive what practices are implemented and what aesthetics should be used and how they used be used, practical and informative vs free-form and interpreted.
References
[1] Kirsten Boehner, Rogério DePaula, Paul Dourish, and Phoebe Sengers. 2005. Affect: From Information to Interaction. Proceedings of the 4th decennial conference on Critical computing between sense and sensibility – CC ’05 (2005). DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/1094562.1094570
[2] Kirsten Boehner, Phoebe Sengers, and Simeon Warner. 2008. Interfaces with the ineffable. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 15, 3 (November 2008), 1–29. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/1453152.1453155
Nikki Monczewski 