How do emotional biosensory data displays become embroiled in questions of how or what we should feel or be?
This work explores the role of ambiguity in emotional biosensing displays. A subtle, ambiguous color-change in the garment’s pattern responds to the wearer’s skin conductance, indicating a potential moment of emotional excitement. Pairs of friends, housemates, or spouses wore such color-changing garments over the course of a conversation or in daily life. They formed social emotional interpretations about the display in a variety of contexts, relating the display to a variety of emotions such as joy or embarrassment.
PUBLICATIONS
Noura Howell, Laura Devendorf, Tomás Vega Gálvez, Rundong (Kevin) Tian, Kimiko Ryokai. 2018. Tensions of data-driven reflection: A case study of real-time emotional biosensing. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’18) (forthcoming).
Noura Howell, Laura Devendorf, Rundong (Kevin) Tian, Tomás Vega Gálvez, Nan-Wei Gong, Ivan Poupyrev, Eric Paulos, Kimiko Ryokai. 2016. Biosignals as social cues: Ambiguity and emotional interpretation in social displays of skin conductance. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS’16). [PDF]
Noura Howell. 2016. Representation and interpretation of biosensing. In Proceedings of the Companion Publication on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS Companion’16). [PDF]