Emotional Design - Science topic

I am sorry that I am also offering a rather critical comment concerning the project itself instead of recommending the tools you asked for.

Heart rate will vary with the degree of arousal, but emotion space is three-dimensional. Therefore, you will fail in distinguishing between emotions that vary on the other dimensions, especially between good and bad emotions. What is more, the emotions need to be fairly extreme to show up in the heartrate. A high heartrate can occur with joy or with fear, and a low heartrate can appear with sadness as well as with silent contentedness, as we all know from experience.

Ever since the idea of emotional computing has come up, people have tried to infer emotions from physiological or behavioural parameters (e.g. facial expressions) or both. No viable solution has ever been demonstrated in all these years, even if skin conductance, respiration or whatever has been included in the measurements. So better forget the whole idea.

Dear Dr. Mahmoudi, If you intend to develop a novel methodology for emotional design in a systematic way, then I suggest you to consider that you need (i) a testable underpinning theory, (ii) a workflow of activities, (iii) a set of purposeful methods, (iv) supporting instrumentation, and (v) criteria of relevance/properness (shown in the figure below). However, I think emotional design is a rather broad concept. It may work in the (i) instrumentality (tasks the artifact helps accomplish), (ii) aesthetics (sensory reactions to the artifact), (iii) cognitive (compliance with personal preferences), and (iv) symbolic (associations the artifact elicits) dimensions. First of all, you need to specify a focus. There is no universal methodology to enable design for emotion over all of the above dimensions. On the other hand, there are already many specific methodologies (e.g. Kansei engineering, Experience-Driven Design, Cultural-Psychological Analysis, Dynamic Preference Maintenance, cultural probes, etc.) from which you may choose. They have been tested, while in the case of a new methodology you will be supposed to justify, validate and consolidate it. Kind regards, I.H.

Hi Fatima. Excellent, it's an interesting subject. what's the focus of your research?