Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Experiencing the Affective Diary

  • Original Article
  • Published:
Personal and Ubiquitous Computing Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

A diary is generally considered to be a book in which one keeps a regular record of events and experiences that have some personal significance. As such, it provides a useful means to privately express inner thoughts or to reflect on daily experiences, helping in either case to put them in perspective. Taking conventional diary keeping as our starting point, we have designed and built a digital diary, named Affective Diary, with which users can scribble their notes, but that also allows for bodily memorabilia to be recorded from body sensors and mobile media to be collected from users’ mobile phones. A premise that underlies the presented work is one that views our bodily experiences as integral to how we come to interpret and thus make sense of the world. We present our investigations into this design space in three related lines of inquiry: (1) a theoretical grounding for affect and bodily experiences; (2) a user-centred design process, arriving at the Affective Diary system; and (3) an exploratory end-user study of the Affective Diary with 4 users during several weeks of use. Through these three inquiries, our overall aim has been to explore the potential of a system that interleaves the physical and cultural features of our embodied experiences and to further examine what media-specific qualities such a design might incorporate. Concerning the media-specific qualities, the key appears to be to find a suitable balance where a system does not dictate what should be interpreted and, at the same time, lends itself to enabling the user to participate in the interpretive act. In the exploratory end-user study users, for the most part, were able to identify with the body memorabilia and together with the mobile data, it enabled them to remember and reflect on their past. Two of our subjects went even further and found patterns in their own bodily reactions that caused them to learn something about themselves and even attempt to alter their own behaviours.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. Bluetooth works at a range of ~10 m. A fair amount of users do have their Bluetooth on their phone enabled and some rename their device to, for example, their own name or something interesting [18]. This means that logging Bluetooth presence will tell the user who has been around during the day at different times.

  2. Two sets of commercially available senor solutions were tested: Polar’s Pulsewatch™ and the SenseWear® armband from BodyMedia.

References

  1. Boehner K, DePaula R, Dourish P, Sengers P (2005) Affect: from information to interaction. Critical computing conference 2005. Århus, Denmark

    Google Scholar 

  2. Csikszentmihalyi M (1990) Flow: the psychology of optimal experience. Harper and Row, New York

  3. Damasio AR (1994) Descartes’ error: emotion, reason and the human brain. Grosset/Putnam, New York

    Google Scholar 

  4. Davidson RJ, Pizzagalli D, Nitschke JB, Kalin NH (2003) Parsing the subcomponents of emotion and disorders of emotion: perspectives from affective neuroscience. In: Davidson RJ, Scherer KR, Goldsmith HH (eds) Handbook of Affective Sciences

  5. Dourish P (2001) Where the action is: the foundations of embodied interaction. MIT Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  6. Fallman D (2003) In romance with the materials of mobile interaction: a phenomenological approach to the design of mobile information technology. Doctoral Thesis, ISSN 1401–4572, RR.03-04, ISBN 91-7305-578-6, Umeå University, Sweden: Larsson & Co:s Tryckeri

  7. Gaver B, Dunne T, Pacenti E (1999) Design: cultural probes, interactions, vol 6(1). ACM Press, pp 21–29

  8. Gaver B, William W, Boucher, Andrew, Pennington, Sarah, Walker, Brendan (2004) Cultural probes and the value of uncertainty, Interactions, vol 11, Issue 5, ACM Press, pp 53–56

  9. Goethe JV (1976) Goethes färglära, Kosmos förlag, Stockholm, Sweden (translated by Pehr Sällström from Zur Fahrbenlehre, 1810)

  10. Harper R, Randall D, Smyth N, Evans C, Heledd L, Moore R (2008) The past is a different place: they do things differently there. In: Proceedings of symposium on designing interactive systems, DIS ‘08, ACM Press, pp 271–280

  11. Höök K (2006) Designing familiar open surfaces. In: Proceedings of the 4th nordic conference on human-computer interaction: changing roles, Oslo, Norway, pp 242–251

  12. Iacucci G, Iacucci C, Kuutti K (2002) Imagining and experiencing in design, the role of performances. In: Proceedings of the 2nd Nordic conference on Human-computer interaction, Aarhus, Denmark, pp 167–176

  13. Katz J (1999) How emotions work. University of Chicago Press, Chicago

    Google Scholar 

  14. Lindström M, Ståhl A, Höök K, Sundström P, Laaksolahti J, Combetto M, Taylor A, Bresin R (2006) Affective Diary - Designing for Bodily Expressiveness and Self-Reflection, In proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI conference Computer-Human Interaction (CHI2006), Work in Progress paper, ACM Press, 2006. (Extended abstract)

  15. Mandryk RL, Atkins MS (2007) A fuzzy physiological approach for continuously modeling emotion during interaction with play environments. Int J Hum Comput Stud 65:329–347

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Parkinson B, Fischer A, Manstead ASR (2005) Emotion in social relations: Cultural, group, and interpersonal processes. Psychology Press, Philadelphia, PA

    Google Scholar 

  17. Reeves B, Nass C (1996) The media equation: How people treat computers, television and new media like real people and places. Cambridge University Press/CSLI Publications, New York, NY

    Google Scholar 

  18. Rudström Å, Höök K, Svensson M (2005). Social positioning: designing the seams between social, physical and digital space. In: 1st international conference on online communities and social computing, at HCII 2005, 24–27 July 2005, Las Vegas, USA., Lawrence Erlbaum Associates (CD-ROM)

  19. Russell JA (1980) Circumplex model of affect. J Pers Soc Psychol 39(6):1161–1178

    Google Scholar 

  20. Ryberg K (1991) Levande färger, ICA Bokförlag, Västerås, Sweden

  21. Scheirer J, Fernandez R, Klein J, Picard R (2002) Frustrating the user on purpose: a step toward building an affective computer. Interact Comput 14(2):93–118

    Google Scholar 

  22. Schön DA (1983) The reflective practitioner: how professionals think in action. Temple Smith, London

    Google Scholar 

  23. Sivik L (1997) Color categories in thought and language, color systems for cognitive research. In: Hardin CL, Maffi L (eds), Cambridge University Press, New York, pp 163–193

  24. Ståhl A (2006) Designing for emotional expressivity. Unpublished Licenciate Thesis, Institute of Design, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden

  25. Sundström P, Ståhl A, Höök K (2007) In situ informants exploring an emotional mobile messaging system in their everyday practice. Int J Hum Comput Stud 65(4):388–403

    Google Scholar 

  26. Tangney JP, Fischer KW (1995) Self-conscious emotions: the psychology of shame, guilt, embarrassment, and pride. Guilford, NY

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

We are indebted to all those who participated in our formative and evaluate user studies. This work as funded by Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK, and SSF (Strategic Research Foundation). We would also like to thank our many colleagues in the Affective Presence group who inspire this work: Phoebe Sengers, Joseph ‘Jofish’ Kaye, Geri Gay, Petra Sundström, Jarmo Laaksolahti, Bill Gaver, Michael Mateas, Paul Dourish, Ylva Fernaeus, and Katherine Isbister.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. SICS (Swedish Institute of Computer Science), Box 1263, 164 29, Kista, Sweden

    Anna Ståhl, Kristina Höök & Martin Svensson

  2. Microsoft Research, 7 J J Thompson Ave, Cambridge, CB3 0FB, UK

    Alex S. Taylor & Marco Combetto

Authors
  1. Anna Ståhl
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Kristina Höök
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Martin Svensson
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Alex S. Taylor
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Marco Combetto
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Anna Ståhl.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Ståhl, A., Höök, K., Svensson, M. et al. Experiencing the Affective Diary. Pers Ubiquit Comput 13, 365–378 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-008-0202-7

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-008-0202-7

Keywords

Search

Navigation