Affect: from information to interaction

  • Authors:
  • Kirsten Boehner;Rogério DePaula;Paul Dourish;Phoebe Sengers

  • Affiliations:
  • Cornell Information Science, Ithaca, NY;University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA;University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA;Cornell Information Science, Ithaca, NY

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 4th decennial conference on Critical computing: between sense and sensibility
  • Year:
  • 2005

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

While affective computing explicitly challenges the primacy of rationality in cognitivist accounts of human activity, at a deeper level it relies on and reproduces the same information-processing model of cognition. In affective computing, affect is often seen as another kind of information - discrete units or states internal to an individual that can be transmitted in a loss-free manner from people to computational systems and back. Drawing on cultural, social, and interactional critiques of cognition which have arisen in HCI, we introduce and explore an alternative model of emotion as interaction: dynamic, culturally mediated, and socially constructed and experienced. This model leads to new goals for the design and evaluation of affective systems - instead of sensing and transmitting emotion, systems should support human users in understanding, interpreting, and experiencing emotion in its full complexity and ambiguity.