Author: halj

What if spouses and professional caregivers could experience the emotional distress, confusion, and cognitive challenges facing people with dementia ? The DemSim project is about the design and construction of a desktop-sized multi-sensorial space allowing us to experiment with ways to expose people without dementia to a state of cognitive overload. While still in its infancy the project aims to break all the established standards considered crucial for successful interface and interaction design. By means of tactile, visual, proprioceptive, auditory and vestibular stimulation we will systematically seek to push the user towards a state of cognitive overload, amnesia, lack of concentration and Apraxia. In effect…

  This industrial PhD project, that is conducted in collaboration with the digital health agency Daman, explores affective and emotional features of supporting people in coping with chronic illnesses such as Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) facilitated by digital health technologies. Finding out that one has a chronic disease and learning to live with this condition is a life-changing experience characterised by a great amount of affective and emotional uncertainty. The PhD project aims to take this understanding as a starting point for assisting patients in developing empowerment and long-lasting coping strategies through affective interactions with mobile apps. The key question to be explored in this project…

BERMUDA (aka the Affect-o-meter) is a piece of soft white fabric suspended in four wires, each wire controlled by independent data streams fed by real-time analysis of the sounds in the Affective Interactions & Relations (AIR) Lab. The main idea behind the installation is to take data streams and give them a physical presence in a room for people to engage directly with. BERMUDA partially captures the atmospheric intensity in the room, and tries to add creatively to it. Partial capture is a key word here – BERMUDA does not attempt to perform a precise analysis of all the contributing factors to the atmosphere. It…

- a play experience for art museums ‘Never let me go’ is designed by Karin Ryding who as part of her PhD project explores the concept of critical play from aesthetic and affective perspectives in the context of art and history museums.  ‘Never let me go’ is a two-player experience enabling art museum visitors to spontaneously create a personal experience for a companion, taking place in real time in the museum. The name ‘Never let me go’ actually gives a hint to what the experience is all about. It could be described as a playful tool that uses mobile technology to, for brief period of…

Verbal Traces listens to words in a room, and creates an interactive visualisations based on their emotional content and character. It bares evidence of the verbal actions in a space, and feeds its representation of this back into the space. The physical form of the installation is a microphone with the ability to catch voices in the room, and a video projector for showing the resulting visualisation. The project aims at exploring ways of extracting affective value from a space, and uses that as base for interventions in the same space. Concretely its expression are generative visualisations based on sentiment analysis of texts generated by…