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

A Trip to the Moon: Personalized Animated Movies for Self-reflection

Self-tracking physiological and psychological data poses the challenge of presentation and interpretation. Insightful narratives for self-tracking data can motivate the user towards constructive self-reflection. One powerful form of narrative that engages audience across various culture and age groups is animated movies. We collected a week of self-reported mood and behavior data from each user and created in Unity a personalized animation based on their data. We evaluated the impact of their video in a randomized control trial with a non-personalized animated video as control. We found that personalized videos tend to be more emotionally engaging, encouraging greater and lengthier writing that indicated self-reflection about moods and behaviors, compared to non-personalized control videos

Making evaluations matter: a practical guide for evaluators

This guide is primarily for evaluators working in the international development sector. It is also useful for commissioner of evaluations, evaluation managers and M&E officers. The guide explains how to make evaluations more useful. It helps to better understand conceptual issues and appreciate how evaluations can contribute to changing mindsets and empowering stakeholders. On a practical level, the guide presents core guiding principles and pointers on how to design and facilitate evaluations that matter. Furthermore, it shows how to get primary intended users and other key stakeholders to contribute effectively to the evaluation proces

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

The review of a design practice learning project to pilot heightened social responsibility and engagement

This paper describes the review of a design project devised to pilot a student community learning experience at a heightened level of social responsibility. There is evidence around the world that degree level programmes are beginning this process, albeit through initial discussions (Swan, 2000). The project involved students in the use of open-space technology to promote creative team working and reflective practice reporting on the design project. The review involved a programme of qualitative research into the evidence and outputs created by the students and staff and compared these with interviews with the; participants, industrial sponsor, independent academic staff and professional designers. It was not possible to determine in the review whether the project had led to a greater level of creativity, but those involved described it as a profoundly creative experience. The findings showed that the project engendered truly effective teamworking, complete consensus to solutions amongst the students and a heightened sensitivity to societal issues. The review makes recommendations for the future development of this form of design practice learning at appropriate levels of study

The Value of Stimulated Dissatisfaction

“I’m not saying it’s a good quality to have, but my observation is that good designers are never happy, they’re never satisfied, never content” (Adrian Stokes, quoted in Spencer, 2008, p. 145). It seems self-evident that designers, whose raison d’être is to initiate change in man-made things (Jones, 1970), devising courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones (Simon, 1969), will be dissatisfied, at some level, with the way they experience the material world. However, recent research (Spencer, 2008) suggests that expert designers deliberately enhance the pressure and stress of the design situation – stimulating dissatisfaction. By stimulating the experience of dissatisfaction their imaginative and investigative action is given urgency, focus and purpose as they pursue excellence and attempt to unfold from their own view of the world to empathise with a broad project community. This discursive paper highlights the need for a developed understanding of the reflective practitioner model to inform the post-rationalist generation of design methods. This paper: reviews critical literature about the experience of designing; discusses the role of dissatisfaction within the practise of design; and presents a research project that aims to evaluate the value of stimulated dissatisfaction for the purpose of supporting practitioners’ empathic appreciation in early design direction generation. This paper argues that the reflective practitioner model of the designer must address the stimulation of dissatisfaction as a condition of creative and explorative design practice

Crazy ideas or creative probes?: presenting critical artefacts to stakeholders to develop innovative product ideas

A number of design practices derive from and develop the notion of critical theory. Notable developers of such “critical design practices” are Dunne &amp; Raby with “critical design”, Sengers and colleagues at Cornell University's Culturally Embedded Computing Group with “reflective design”, and Agre with “critical technical practice” within artificial intelligence research. And there are an increasing number of designers who, whilst not specifically explicating their theoretical ancestry, include critical elements in their products. The reflection afforded by the products of critical design is generally seen as its endpoint. However I have used this reflection instrumentally within human-centred design activities. “Critical artefacts” have proved more useful as tools than direct questioning techniques; in particular as a way of enabling stakeholders to engage with novel situations and consequently engage in creative thinking about future possibilities. This paper begins with a review of critical design practices. Two case studies are then detailed demonstrating my approach. A discussion of the commonalities and differences between critical design practices follows noting their relationship to critical social theory and the relationship of my work to them. Finally further research to develop generalisable methods is outlined.</p

Content analysis: What are they talking about?

Quantitative content analysis is increasingly used to surpass surface level analyses in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (e.g., counting messages), but critical reflection on accepted practice has generally not been reported. A review of CSCL conference proceedings revealed a general vagueness in definitions of units of analysis. In general, arguments for choosing a unit were lacking and decisions made while developing the content analysis procedures were not made explicit. In this article, it will be illustrated that the currently accepted practices concerning the ‘unit of meaning’ are not generally applicable to quantitative content analysis of electronic communication. Such analysis is affected by ‘unit boundary overlap’ and contextual constraints having to do with the technology used. The analysis of e-mail communication required a different unit of analysis and segmentation procedure. This procedure proved to be reliable, and the subsequent coding of these units for quantitative analysis yielded satisfactory reliabilities. These findings have implications and recommendations for current content analysis practice in CSCL research