Blog 04: The Affective Loop

Starting this week’s blog with a wonderful thought by Csikszentmihalyi, “To keep the past registered can contribute to quality of life.” I came across this quote while I read the first paper of this week. The focus of this week was to study the affective loop. An affective loop in the field of affective computing is an empowering process where the user decides what they want to express and not a design where users’ emotions are interpreted by a system. Learning this definition gave me a completely new perspective of this field. This made me curious to learn about how systems would work in an effective loop. This week I studied two papers which introduced two affective loop systems.

The first study “Experiencing the Affective Diary” introduced a digital diary named Affective Diary which enabled users to scribble notes and allowed bodily memorabilia to be recorded from body sensors and mobile media to be collected from users’ mobile phones. The prime aim of the affective diary was brood over intimate thoughts and feelings while shedding some thoughts and re-experiencing some. This reading also introduced me to the term embodiment around which the idea of affective diary was based. The authors defined embodiment as a way of explaining how we create meaning from our interactions with the everyday world we inhabit. The authors gave a brilliant example from Fallman for the concept of embodiment and how it can be applied to emotions. Embodiment  can be related to the act of sitting on a chair. Since our physical bodies are erect, have two arms and legs, get tired, can bend forward at the hip and so on, chairs lend themselves to being sat on. However, it is only when we have acquired the skill of sitting we are able to do so. We need to live and act in a culture where sitting on a chair makes sense.  

The study of Affective Diary enabled the authors to investigate a particular approach to representing bodily experiences and how people might incorporate these representations into their personal, creative and reflective practices. With the help of a theoretical grounding for affect and bodily experiences, a user-centered design process and an exploratory end-user study, the authors explored the potential of the Affective Diary. The system being interleaved with physical and cultural features of our embodied experiences helped authors to further examine what media-specific qualities such a design might incorporate.

Moving on, the second paper this week studied the affective loop with the help of eMoto which was a emotional messaging system for mobile phones. eMoto allowed it’s users to compose messages through using emotion-signaling gestures as input. The design intent behind eMoto was to engage and allow users express themselves emotionally in a physical, intellectual,  and social dimension resulting in an affective loop experience. The thought of the authors  that aligns interaction to harmonize with our everyday practices and everyday bodily experiences has indeed brought a change to how we see interactive systems today. The affective interaction has come a long way in accordance with the affective loop. The current interaction of users with an array of wearable smart devices is a perfect example for the affective loop.

To express ourselves accurately to others, people are mainly required to express their emotions to others. Today it is more evident than any other time that we are required to do this with the help of technology as we are spending more time virtually than in person. I believe that the effect is an important aspect to enable us to communicate our emotions effectively. The study implemented embodiment with the effective loop by providing feedback that reinforced users’ experience, expressing and mirroring their gestures with the help of colors, shapes and animations. This also could have been done in a number of modalities such as sounds, haptics, symbols but the reason authors choose abstract and ambiguous colors was to express  subtle nuances. The findings for emotional communication from this study determine the necessity to  provide ways to maintain the sometimes fragile communication rhythm that friendships require and not communicate emotions separately from the main context of communication. Another key for affective loop is to include an open ended space to allow expression of personal feelings. 

This study being from the year 2007, we have indeed come a long way. Today we have some brilliant implementations of the affective loop which have resulted in enhancing communication over electronic channels. One example of affective communication on a text based communication channel can be observed in the imessage feature which allows users to send messages with different effects and animations. This includes animations and graphics attached to common phrases. Some examples are ‘Happy birthday’ – balloons , ‘Congratulations’ – confetti‘ , ‘Happy New Year’ – fireworks. While I end my week’s blog here, I feel very curious to learn more about the affective loop studies in virtual reality space. 

References:

[1] Ståhl et al - ExperiencingTheAffectiveDiary

[2] Sundstrom, Stahl, Hook – In situ informants exploring an emotional mobile messaging system in their everyday practice