Emotional Biosensing: Exploring Critical Alternatives

Emotional biosensing is rising in daily life: Data and categories claim to know how people feel and suggest what they should do about it, while CSCW explores new biosensing possibilities. Prevalent approaches to emotional biosensing are too limited, focusing on the individual, optimization, and normative categorization. Conceptual shifts can help explore alternatives: toward materiality, from representation toward performativity, inter-action to intra-action, shifting biopolitics, and shifting affect/desire. We contribute (1) synthesizing wide-ranging conceptual lenses, providing analysis connecting them to emotional biosensing design, (2) analyzing selected design exemplars to apply these lenses to design research, and (3) offering our own recommendations for designers and design researchers. In particular we suggest humility in knowledge claims with emotional biosensing, prioritizing care and affirmation over self- improvement, and exploring alternative desires. We call for critically questioning and generatively re- imagining the role of data in configuring sensing, feeling, ‘the good life,’ and everyday experience

Tensions of Data-Driven Reflection: A Case Study of Real-Time Emotional Biosensing

Biosensing displays, increasingly enrolled in emotional reflection, promise authoritative insight by presenting users’ emotions as discrete categories. Rather than machines interpreting emotions, we sought to explore an alternative with emotional biosensing displays in which users formed their own interpretations and felt comfortable critiquing the display. So, we designed, implemented, and deployed, as a technology probe, an emotional biosensory display: Ripple is a shirt whose pattern changes color responding to the wearer’s skin conductance, which is associated with excitement. 17 participants wore Ripple over 2 days of daily life. While some participants appreciated the ‘physical connection’ Ripple provided between body and emotion, for others Ripple fostered insecurities about ‘how much’ feeling they had. Despite our design intentions, we found participants rarely questioned the display’s relation to their feelings. Using biopolitics to speculate on Ripple’s surprising authority, we highlight ethical stakes of biosensory representations for sense of self and ways of feeling

egaku: Enhancing the Sketching Process

Architects sketch using a translucent vellum tracing paper with a thick pencil or marker. The translucency of the paper allows architects to employ a layer-drawing technique for the exploration of ideas derived from their basic design. For example, working with a single base layer such as a map of the site, architects can design upwards of hundreds of possible variations. This ultimately leads to a great pile of drawings, which compose the piles of papers typically strewn about an architecture studio. Individually, these “referential” sketches represent small pieces of a much larger design concept [Graves 1977]. Although they are valuable,they are often cumbersome to manage during the ideation process because it interrupts the flow of ideation, and even difficult to understand when a single sketch is taken out of associated sketches

The world as a palette : painting with attributes of the environment

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2005.Includes bibliographical references (p. 159-163).To create everyday art monuments through which we express ourselves--whether in the form of a self-portrait or a life-story--is human nature. Our drive to do so is evident in the natural artistry of young children--representing themselves, people and things around them-through a variety of expressions such as drawing, storytelling, and construction with objects. Yet these creations with diverse media decrease dramatically as traditional forms of literacy take over in school, emphasizing decontextualized and depersonalized forms of expressions. This thesis is about how people, particularly children, create and interact with everyday art monuments, with an emphasis on techniques to support the narrative connection between the creator, creation, and material the creation is made of. This thesis introduces the concept of building visual art projects with elements extracted directly from the artist's personal objects and his/her immediate environment, thus allowing child and adult artist alike to turn their world into a palette of color. For example, by picking up a texture from his pet dog's fur, movements of his own blinking eye, color from his favorite yellow shirt, and by combining these elements into a unique drawing, an artist can not only create a thoroughly personalized piece, but also breathe a new kind of life into the canvas. A number of key design features of the system were developed through observing both adult and child artists using the novel tools over the course of two years.(cont.) During the final five-week study in a kindergarten classroom, the tools supported children's individual creative styles (e.g. 'visualizers' versus 'dramatizers'), and children's work reflected upon the aspects of objects and interactions with these objects that were dear to them. In addition, evidence suggests the children acquired an expanded view of art, associating features in paintings with attributes in their environment. The potential of this new medium that allows artistic expression using attributes taken from the real world is discussed.Kimiko Ryokai.Ph.D

Computer-mediated space for children's fantasy play and collaborative storytelling

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Media Arts & Sciences, 1999.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 107-113).Fantasy play serves an important role in preschool children's development. Making up characters and telling stories around them are activities through which children make sense of and test out their hypotheses about the world. While computers are increasingly present in the world of young children, there is a lack of computational systems that would support children's voice in everyday storytelling, particularly in the context of fantasy play. This thesis introduces StoryMat, an instantiation of a system that supports children's fantasy play. StoryMat offers a child-driven play space by recording and recalling children's own narrating voices, and the movements they make with their toys on the mat. Stories from the past are conjured up on the mat as a narrating moving shadow of the toy, when they are triggered by the present stories that are similar to them. The empirical research with preschool children showed that StoryMat fostered a particular kind of fantasy play that is storytelling. It was also shown that children, with or without a playmate, on StoryMat listened to and incorporated elements from StoryMat stories, in a similar way they do with stories from their real life peer. By listening to and incorporating elements from peer stories offered by StoryMat, the children's stories and the experience of telling them became richer. The thesis addresses the importance of supporting children's fantasy play and suggests a new way for technology to play an integral part in that activity.Kimiko Ryokai.S.M

Learning Mathematics with Digital Resources: Reclaiming the Cognitive Role of Physical Movement

In 1837, Fröbel introduced a pedagogical regimen focused on a set of simple tangible objects, beginning with a yarn ball, that children were invited to manipulate in various ways. Montessori and other educational luminaries followed this tradition of designing instructional manipulatives. Later, when digital technologies were invented for information management, computation, and telecommunication, these new media were adopted by educators eager to offer individualized learning, reach remote students, and create multimedia experiences that would augment on traditional classroom resources, such as textbooks, writing instruments, and authentic objects of inquiry, including natural phenomena and cultural artifacts. While early electric technologies privileged the visual and auditory sensory modalities and were not interactive (e.g., television), human–computer interaction innovations and the advent of personal platforms increasingly evolved toward state-of-the art devices, content, and activities offering immersive multimodal experiences in imaginary landscapes (e.g., virtual reality). What might be the educational promise of these media? How do digital technologies serve mathematics students differently than yarn balls? How might theories of learning guide the design of digital environments? To investigate these questions, we survey the history of digital resources for mathematics education through the prism of philosophical and psychological theories – enactivist cognition and ecological dynamics – that look to capture the role of embodied interaction in cognitive development and conceptual learning. Then, through three case studies of contemporary digital educational resources, a proposal is put forth for how these embodied theories of learning could inform the design of educational technologies compatible with how people naturally learn. First, students should learn to enact new physical movement forms that have been designed to instantiate the targeted concepts. Students learn to move in these new ways by developing perceptual orientations that enable them to solve situated motor-control problems. Only then are these new cognitive skills formalized in disciplinary semiotic forms. Perhaps future technology can be as powerful a learning tool as the historical yarn ball

CreaTable Content and Tangible Interaction in Aphasia

Multimedia digital content (combining pictures, text and music) is ubiquitous. The process of creating such content using existing tools typically requires complex, language-laden interactions which pose a challenge for users with aphasia (a language impairment following brain injury). Tangible interactions offer a potential means to address this challenge, however, there has been little work exploring their potential for this purpose. In this paper, we present CreaTable – a platform that enables us to explore tangible interaction as a means of supporting digital content creation for people with aphasia. We report details of the co-design of CreaTable and findings from a digital creativity workshop. Workshop findings indicated that CreaTable enabled people with aphasia to create something they would not otherwise have been able to. We report how users’ aphasia profiles affected their experience, describe tensions in collaborative content creation and provide insight into more accessible content creation using tangibles

Celebrating Laughter: Capturing and Sharing Tangible Representations of Laughter

We present a novel design idea to capture and preserve the laughter of ourselves, friends, and loved ones with tangible representations. With preliminary design explorations, we discuss interaction design opportunities for celebrating our positive affect through concrete reminders of our laughter