Interactional Empowerment

Kristina Höök

Anna Ståhl

Petra Sundström

Jarmo Laaksolahti

from

Mobile Life @ Stockholm University & SICS

Empowerment?

> Aim: put users in charge of sense-making and (co)construction of emotion

Interactional approach to affect?

(Boehner et al.)

Modify two of six statements in their agenda:

1.Recognizes affect as a social and cultural product

2.Avoids trying to formalize the unformalizable

Examples!

eMoto

eMoto

eMoto

eMoto:No labelled emotions! Usage is design

Gesture and animation resonates

eMoto

People usually ask:> But how can they communicate? There are no emotion labels? How can they understand one-another?

eMotoCreating meaning together

Mona: “Green is my favorite color and my boyfriend knows that, so this is why it is green because he knows that I think that green is a lovely color, just as lovely as he is.”

Friends: ”Mona is a green person”

eMoto: Meaning-making through body?

Mona said: ”I leave out things I think are implicit due to the color… the advantage is that you don’t have to write as much, it is like a body language. Like when you meet someone you don’t say ’I’m sulky’ or something like that, because that shows, I don’t need to say that. And it’s the same here, but here it’s color.”

eMoto: Involvement through body

Agnes’ partner: ”When she was happy she showed that with her whole body. Not only her arm was shaking but her whole body. Meanwhile a huge smile appeared on her lips.”

Affective Diary

Affective Diary

Affective DiaryMeaning-making, reflection and change

”[pointing at the first slightly red character] And then I become like this, here I am kind of, I am kind of both happy and sad in some way and something like that. I like him and then it is so sad tht we see each other so little. And then I cannot really show it.”

Affective DiaryMeaning-making – of all kinds!

”After that we talked and the discussions were very intense, a lot about, which shows here [points at the figures], lilac is spirituality, we talked a lot about clairvoyance, shamans, healing. Everybody shared their experiences, a very intense meeting.”

Interactional approach to affect?

(Boehner et al.)

1.Recognizes affect as a social and cultural product

2.Avoids trying to formalize the unformalizable

1.Recognizes affect as an embodied social, bodily and cultural product

2. Is non-reductionist

Why non-reductionist?

Address dualism problem> Body – mind> Rationality – irrationality> Emotion – thinking

Knowing and communicating through whole being

Why remove ”avoid formalizing the unformalizable”?

> Is it really unformalizable?> Risks closing the topic off as ”ineffable”

> Knowledge ≠ rules> Cf. Schön’s view on (one form of) knowledge as reflected practice – abstracting only slightly from the specific, but not all the way to scientific, non-contextual rules

Reflected practice?

Design elements for interactional approach:> Open familiar surfaces that can be appropriated

> Ambiguous design> Affective loop experiences

Design elements for interactional approach:> Open familiar surfaces that can be appropriated

> Ambiguous design> Affective loop experiences

Open and familiar

Openness based on:> Surfaces that are not filled or given a definite meaning

Familiarity based on:> Social practice> Bodily practice

Example: eMoto – no labels!

Example: Affective Diary

Familiar> Socially: scraps and bits from your social life from your mobile data

> Bodily: scraps and bits from your bodily experiences from sensor readings – designed as recognisable but abstract characters

Consequences

> Aim: put users in charge of sense-making and (co)construction of emotion

> Consequences for values such as privacy and autonomy

Privacy?

> The systems do not diagnose but mirror in open-ended, ambiguous but still familiar ways

> Thereby users get power over their own data and the interpretation of it is in their hands (not in the systems’)

> Privacy between users becomes a negotiation process – not a matter of protecting data

eMoto example:

Mona: ”Interesting is the guy you meet in the pub, you never call him, you send him an SMS because you’re not brave enough to call him. And then it’s like ‘Shall I send an emoto or an SMS?’ If you send an SMS the signal would be ‘Now I’m a coward and…’. I think emotos end up somewhere in between an SMS and actually calling him.”

Autonomy?

> An interactional design respects users’ autonomy and ability to know themselves what they want to do through the system

> They decide the meaning of what is there and how to act on it

Final words

By privileging users to create meaning from their own data they can make the system fit with their needs, ideas, hopes and dreams

These applications will not make sense or have any meaning until users pick them up and make them part of their own practice, their own familiarity with their emotional, social and bodily encounters with the world

We thank the usual crowd and those who gave us money....