‘Affective Computing’, one of the most trendy words from CHI this year, was used in a number of papers to describe their technological guideline, and raised up many times by the audience as a challenge for the ‘next step’ researches. The ‘Calming Technologies’ workshop brought the fruits from various spheres to the table and left people excited with a promising picture of stress-free future living.
It feels to me that ‘affection’ itself is not a subject but a methodology through human-centered research. ‘Calming’ is not a status to be pursued with the aid of new inventions, but in the course of one’s daily tasks and assimilated by the common technologies already in use.
‘Calming’ within a sensed context
Minimalist Gmail. Readability. Ommwriter. Less distractions is always better? But how do we deal with the changing tension between the need for minimalism and abundance, say, when the writer is seeking for a diversity of inspirational materials online? It seems that before introducing any technology that affects our emotion, a feasible way of sensing the necessity to the occurrence should be investigated. Some discussions that followed the workshop was that how location/context aware technologies can be combined in the ‘sensing’, to make ‘calming’ happen in a desired situation. It is an interesting point, thinking how one’s calender events or geographical location are taken into account to determine the time for triggering the ‘calmer’.
‘Ubiquitous’ therapy
‘Affective computing’ may find its convergence with Ubiquitous Computing. A majority of bio-sensing and emotion influencing prototypes being introduced at CHI are essentially therapeutic inventions which don’t promise applicable scenarios for daily use. They yet requires extra devices and self-discipline for operations, e.g blood sugar level check. While external devices have limit, personal objects (mobile device, hardware accessories, sport gears, etc.) may be the new technology carriers that diminished the ‘unnatural’ interactions.
Content management, an output of ‘cognition’
A CHI paper ‘Now Where Was I? Physiologically-Triggered Bookmarking’ shows a useful scenario for bio sensing technologies: detecting distraction and pause the task one is currently working on and resume it after the interruption. I like the paper in a way that it illustrates ‘affective computing’ can be something as simple and effective as marking the media content on view, a common task for people working virtually.
