Affect: From Information to Interaction

I think I can talk about my transition from first set of workshops to second set of workshops in a similar way Boehner et al did in their study of Affector. (from configuring agency to configuring for agency as I did in my last presentation.)


Boehner et al's paper on affect is really a good resource and example that can inform my research in many different aspects. I will examine the papers arguments and formulation of research in detail.


"In contrast to the informational model, we offer and critically explore an interactional account of emotion and the role that it plays in action and practice. As argued by Boellstorff and Lindquist [5], citing Rosaldo [31], “feelings are not substances to be discovered in our blood but social practices organized by stories that we both enact and tell.”"

"Measures of success for such systems are therefore not whether the systems themselves deduce the ‘right’ emotion but whether the systems encourage awareness of and reflection on emotions in users individually and collectively"

"While affect as information is considered to be discrete, welldefined, and transferable, affect as interaction supports a different quality of affective communication: complex, ambiguous, malleable, and non-formalizable. This requires a shift from designing systems to model and transmit
emotion to designing systems that support humans in producing, experiencing and interpreting emotions, an idea we will now explore through our second design study."

"Emotion is not directly represented in the system but is instead interpreted by its human users as they tune the mapping from sensor readings to distortions to match their intuitions of their moods."

"systems can appear intelligent and exhibit complex behavior without complex representation and
manipulation of abstract information [6]. Instead, Brooks defines effective connections between sensors and effectors so that, when the system is placed in a complex environment, it triggers a complex sequence of actions that can be narrated as intelligent behavior. "

Design Principles:

- The interactional approach recognizes affect as a social and cultural product: users undergo a period where they co-construct the affective implications of the system grounded in their relationship.
- The interactional approah relies on and supports interpretive flexibility: by leaving the definition of emotion and its interpretation to the users, Affector instead allows emotional meanings to emerge in a situated way over the course of interaction.
- The interactional approach avoids trying to formalize the unformalizable: all the emotional meaning in the system can be supplied by the users
- The interactional approach supports an expanded range of communication acts: Affector supports user-defined signs as well as indexes and icons, which can give a more open-ended sense of complexity of emotion.
- The interactional approach focuses on people using systems to experience and understand emotions:  systems aim to stimulate reflection on and awareness of affect.The important thing from the interactional perspective is not making systems more aware of emotions but making people more aware of emotions through system use and design.

"In approaching affect as interaction, we do not try to simplify complexity but instead to augment it and perhaps in some ways to evolve with changing experiences of affect."



"Affector, which tackles the opportunities around affective computing from a non-representationalist
stance, one that supports the enactment of emotional sociality rather than attempting to uncover the parameters of an emotional model that underlies and shapes human action."(Dourish, Responsibilities and implications: further thoughts on ethnography and design)



"Although designed for very specific users, the strategy of designing for the particular and
idiosyncratic does not necessarily limit its general appeal.It is the very specificity of the design and   resulting richness that affords opportunities for others to appropriate the design in new and interesting ways." (disenchantment of affect)


Refs:

Kirsten Boehner, Rogerio DePaula, Paul Dourish, and Phoebe Sengers. 2005. Affect: from information to interaction. In Proceedings of the 4th decennial conference on Critical computing: between sense and sensibility (CC '05), Olav W. Bertelsen, Niels Olof Bouvin, Peter G. Krogh, and Morten Kyng (Eds.). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 59-68.

Paul Dourish. 2007. Responsibilities and implications: further thoughts on ethnography and design. In Proceedings of the 2007 conference on Designing for User eXperiences (DUX '07). ACM, New York, NY, USA,


Phoebe Sengers, Kirsten Boehner, Michael Mateas, and Geri Gay. 2008. The disenchantment of affect. Personal Ubiquitous Comput. 12, 5 (June 2008), 347-358.

Designing for Agency

Recently, I've been reconsidering my initial ideas and conceptions on the meaning of designing for agency. I have been oscillating between pragmatic and philosophical positions and formulations. I have not settled on either yet.

I like the explorative nature of the study but it makes it quite hard for me to formulate the relevancy. I tend to see designing for agency as something that expands the scope of our design space and by extension use space.  For design phase, it allows us to be more reflective, critical, accountable and responsible and understand the importance of relationality, materiality, multiplicity and participation.  For use phase, It enables users to perceive and act in a much more varied ways and supports improvised actions and creative reconfigurations between humans, artefacts and environment.

There are two questions I need to answer:

> Causality? do I need to show a casual link between agency sensitive practices and their effects? (in my work or in others' work)
> One aspect or multiple aspects? should I pick up one aspect of ASD qualities and work on it in more detail or should I try to use all qualities at some extent?