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Emotional Space: Understanding Affective Spatial Dimensions of Constructed Embodied Shapes

Authors:

Abstract

We build upon recent research designing a constructive, multi-touch emotional assessment tool and present preliminary qualitative results from a Wizard of Oz study simulating the tool with clay. Our results showed the importance of emotionally contextualized spatial orientations, manipulations, and interactions of real world objects in the constructive process, and led to the identification of two new affective dimensions for the tool.
Emotional Space: Understanding Affective Spatial
Dimensions of Constructed Embodied Shapes
Edward Melcer
NYU Polytechnic School of
Engineering
Brooklyn, NY 11201
eddie.melcer@nyu.edu
Katherine Isbister
NYU Polytechnic School of
Engineering
Brooklyn, NY 11201
katherine.isbister@nyu.edu
ABSTRACT
We build upon recent research designing a constructive,
multi-touch emotional assessment tool and present
preliminary qualitative results from a Wizard of Oz study
simulating the tool with clay. Our results showed the
importance of emotionally contextualized spatial
orientations, manipulations, and interactions of real world
objects in the constructive process, and led to the
identification of two new affective dimensions for the tool.
Author Keywords
Emotional assessment; Affect; Embodiment; Wizard of Oz.
ACM Classification Keywords
H.5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI):
Miscellaneous.
INTRODUCTION
In recent years, HCI researchers and practitioners have
recognized the importance of emotion and pleasure in user
experience [1]. Unfortunately, traditional emotional
assessment tools encounter difficulty with more nuanced
aspects of emotion in an interactive experience. Our recent
work on emotional assessment [2] has identified two causes
for these issues: (1) current emotional assessment tools
provide a limited taxonomy to select emotions from, and (2)
emotional assessment tools only provide snapshots of
emotion and are unable to capture the temporal aspects of
changing emotions over time. This led to the design of a
new emotional assessment tool, the Constructive Sensual
Evaluation Instrument (CSEI). The CSEI utilizes affective
dimensions of shape to provide a multi-touch gestural
interface for constructing affective embodied shapes.
We propose that the use of affective dimensions of shape
creates a larger, constructive emotional space where users
can express a wider range of emotions and capture temporal
aspects through recorded changes in shape over time.
EXPERIMENT
We conducted a Wizard of Oz study to simulate individual
and collaborative use of the CSEI system with clay. For the
study, we created a protocol that combined clay shape
creation with a think-aloud method and semi-structured
interviews. A total of 6 male and 8 female subjects (ages 22-51,
M=36.5) participated. Each test was conducted with two
participants and contained two individual and two collaborative
embodied shape construction phases.
OBSERVATIONS AND RESULTS
The study revealed repetition to be a key dimension in the
construction of embodied shapes. Participants used
repetition to embody low arousal emotions in two distinctly
different ways: (1) repetition of a single shape manipulation
during the construction process (e.g. repeatedly rolling),
and (2) repetition of salient visual features.
The orientation of a shape and its extrusions was another
key dimension found in the study. Participants more
commonly associated an emotion with shapes utilizing
orientations that matched spatial orientations of real world
objects or actions. For instance, several participants
commented on orienting extrusions upwards and away from
the center in order to match the look of an explosion.
CONCLUSION
We found embodiment of emotion through shape relies on
spatial orientations, manipulations, and interactions of real
world objects that are viewed as emotionally similar. For
our study results, this manifested in the affective
dimensions of repetition and orientation. Our results
suggest re-evaluation of the CSEI's affective dimensions to
consider (1) patterns in spatial manipulation and (2) the
spatial orientation of shapes and extrusions.
REFERENCES
1. Höök, Kia, et al. "Evaluation of Affective Interactive
Applications." Emotion-Oriented Systems. Springer
Berlin Heidelberg (2011), 687-703.
2. Melcer, E., Isbister, K. "CSEI: The Constructive Sensual
Evaluation Instrument."Workshop on Tactile User
Experience Evaluation Methods. CHI 2014, N.p.
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SUI'14, Oct 04-05 2014, Honolulu, HI, USA
ACM 978-1-4503-2820-3/14/10.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2659766.2661208.
Poster Session
SUI’14, October 4-5, 2014, Honolulu, HI, USA
143
... In HCI, research linking dimensions of shape to phenomena such as emotion is fairly limited. Certain visual dimensions of form have been shown to express a wide range of emotions [9,15,21,22,25,28], but there is no unified understanding of which dimensions relate to which emotions [20]. To address this gap, we explore the relationship between shape and emotion, providing a taxonomy of affective shape dimensions and insight to how individuals embody emotion in form. ...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
In this paper, we present a study examining how individuals embody emotion within form. Our findings provide a general taxonomy of affective dimensions of shape consistent with and extending previous literature. We also show that ordinary people can reasonably construct embodied shapes using affective dimensions, and illustrate that emotion is conveyed through both visual dimensions and tactile manipulations of shape. Participants used three distinct strategies for embodiment of emotion through shape: the look of a shape (visual representation), creation of a shape symbolizing the experience of an intended emotion (metaphor), and by evoking the intended emotion in the creator through affective movements and manipulations during construction (motion). This work ties together and extends understanding around emotion and form in HCI subdomains such as tangible embodied interaction, emotional assessment, and user experience evaluation.
Research
Full-text available
This paper introduces a constructive and collaborative digital, multi-touch instrument for tactile evaluation of user experiences with interactive systems. We are developing a tool that allows individuals or groups to digitally construct affective objects that represent their own personal mappings of emotions to shape characteristics. Our approach builds upon prior work with nonverbal assessments of affect, and stems from an interest in flexibly evaluating dynamic gestalt during individual and group interactions by using a wider variety of potential shapes. In this paper we provide background for our approach, and present a new valence-arousal model for identifying and constructing affective shapes and the Constructive Sensual Evaluation Instrument (CSEI).
Article
Methods are developed for different audiences and purposes. HCI researchers develop methods to shape the future through pure, applied and blue sky research – as is still the case with most affective interactive applications. Unsurprisingly, practitioners will be more concerned that the methods they use not only are tractable but produce better and more innovative results in terms of the systems they ultimately release into the world. Researchers, on the other hand, may have other concerns, such as the novelty of their techniques. Up until recently, most HCI methods (both for researchers and practitioners) were developed for work applications and desktop situations. They focused on efficiency, learnability, transparency, control and other work-related values. They were developed in response to a theoretical orientation which viewed the user as an information processing system not so dissimilar to the computer itself. But now that HCI is concerned with technologies that enter all aspects of life, our methods have begun to change and will need to continue to change. In keeping with our changing conception of what a “user” is and a wider concern with their experience of use of new technologies, a key challenge will be to develop and expand methods for analyzing not just what people do with the technology but how it makes them feel, and not just how people understand technology but how they make sense of it as part of their lives. Methods must be concerned, not only with issues of usefulness and usability, but also with issues of aesthetics, expression, and emotion. In addition we need to focus on evaluating technology not just in the short term under controlled conditions but also in the longer term and in broader social and cultural contexts. In this section, we will therefore provide two strands of evaluation methods. The first concerns what we might see as more traditional usability evaluation: is my system usable for the purpose it was designed for? The second strand tries to get at what we have named “third wave of HCI” in the previous chapters: does my system provide for the kind of (emotional) experience that it aimed to do?
CSEI: The Constructive Sensual Evaluation Instrument
  • E Melcer
  • K Isbister
Melcer, E., Isbister, K. "CSEI: The Constructive Sensual Evaluation Instrument."Workshop on Tactile User Experience Evaluation Methods. CHI 2014, N.p.