The language of technical implementation is not enough. Sensors and actuators encourage a language of magnitudes and intensities, and simple mappings to emotion words.
happy = hot, sad = cold!
In real-world contexts, these simple mappings quickly break down.
So how can we bridge between technology design and complex experience? How can designers communicate and specify their designs, and help users to describe their preferences and experiences?
Naturally we tackle this by turning to Chinese classical poetry!
We drew on poetry by two famed Cí poets: 李清照 Lǐ Qīng Zhào and 苏轼 Sū Shì.
We conducted a lexical analysis of 154 poems by these authors to identify a vocabulary and high level principles for designing and communicating thermal-affective experience.
For example we found that thermal experiences were very often multisensory, sometimes even expressed without reference to the haptic modality.
People also perceive agency in thermal cues. They can be experienced as dominant, aggressive or passive.
This is just a small part of our findings! The paper contains much more, alongside evocative examples which designers can draw upon for inspiration!
Finally, we connect these results to the needs of interaction design, creating a framework to guide thermal affective design.
This provides vocabulary and guiding principles to help designers navigate the complex multisensory landscape of thermal-affective experience.
Feng Feng
Katarzyna Stawarz