Capturing, Exploring and Sharing People's Emotional Bond with Places in the City using Emotion Maps

The vision of ubiqitous computing is becoming increasingly realized through smart city solutions. With the proliferation of smartphones and smartwatches, alongside the rise of the quantified-self movement, a new technological layer is being added to the urban environment. This framework offers the possibility to capture, track, measure, visualize, and augment our experience of the urban environment. However, to that end, there is a growing need to better understand the triangular relationship between person, place, and technology. Urban HCI studies are increasingly focused on emotion and affect in order to create a better understanding of people's experience of the city, and investigate how technology could potentially play a role in augmenting this lived urban experience. For one example, artist Christian Nold used wearable technology to measure people's arousal levels as they walked freely through the urban environment, identifying locations in the city that evoked an emotional response from people. After these walks, people's arousal levels were superimposed on a map of the city and participants were asked to interpret their own data, resulting in aggregated, fully annotated, and beautifully visualized emotion maps of the city. Based on a systematic review of emotions maps in existing literature, this paper discusses the strengths, limitations and potential of capturing, representing, exploring and sharing this personal, geo-located emotion data with other people using emotion maps. This is part of a PhD project which seeks to understand how people's experiences of places in the urban environment are meaningful to them on a personal level. Although our analysis seems to indicate that emotion maps in their current form are only of limited efficacy in accurately capturing, representing and communicating the profound, complex emotional bond that people have with personally meaningful places in the city, there appears to be potential for the use of emotion maps as a provocation in a speculative design approach

UrbanIxD: Exploring human interactions for the hybrid city

With the vision of ubiquitous computing becoming increasingly realised, a need is identified to create a better understanding of the relationship between person, place, and technology in the urban environment. The aim of this research in the field of Urban Interaction Design is to investigate how people’s emotional person-place relationships with personally meaningful places in their city of residence, can inform the design of technological devices and services that augment this urban lived experience in the hybrid city of the near future. Based on insights from social science studies of place attachment and research focusing on technology mediating the emotional experience of and in the urban environment, a holistic, human-centred bottom-up approach is taken. It investigates the full range of experiences-in-place and emotions from which emotional person-place relationships in the city develop. Using a three-staged, multimethod approach consisting of a Walking & Talking interview and two sedentary interviews with (speculative) evaluative map techniques, 45 emotional person-place relationships of eight residents of Edinburgh are investigated. This resulted in a taxonomy of 16 types of emotional experience-in-place, and identified potential for capturing, representing, consuming, and sharing emotional person-place relationship data based on different types of positive and negative emotional experience-in-place, different types of representations and sensorial experiences, the closeness of social relationships and shared interests, and to support the self-regulation of emotions. These main findings informed the design of a suite of three speculative design fictions in the form of two short films and a comic, to further explore this design space. These authentic, personally relevant, and provocative conversation pieces successfully engaged residents of Edinburgh in three focus groups on a human, personal level in an informed discussion, enabling critical reflection on current practices and interactions, and speculation about possible future scenarios for this unfamiliar design space. This contributed to a set of design guidelines for emotional experience-in-place. It serves as a framework for urban interaction designers to understand the context of, identify potential for, and inform the design of technological devices and services that leverage emotional person-place relationships in the hybrid city of the near future