ongoing

completed

Affector

Affector is an experiment in co-interpreting affect. A video window between the offices of two friends communicates their moods by systematically distorting the video feed according to sensor readings. Emotion is not directly represented in the system but is instead interpreted by its human users as they tune its distortions to match their intuitions of their moods. Affectors design is intended as a challenge to the push in computer-mediated communication for greater realism and accuracy in representation. The system emphasizes instead openness to interpretation and manipulation by end users. Because of the complex and ambiguous nature of affect, human users rarely interpret the affective output of affective systems in the same way it is represented in computational systems relatively simplistic internal emotional model. Is it possible or perhaps even better to build systems to express emotions without directly representing them? Can one develop a computational system that users can usefully interpret emotionally without building emotional models into the system? And in doing so, can we deal with emotion in a more ambiguous, rich, and situated way than is possible when it must be reduced to discrete categories to make it understandable to computers? Affector is designed to test the possibility of interactively expressing emotions without building explicit, formal emotional models.

• Sengers, Phoebe and Bill Gaver. Designing for Interpretation. Proceedings of Human-Computer Interaction International, 2005.