Abstract

Everyday products are becoming increasingly complex, at a time when the population is progressively ageing. These trends highlight the importance of teaching future designers to create inclusive and meaningful experiences for ageing users interacting with digital technologies and “smart” products. This paper presents a pedagogical approach to evaluate and analyse the affective interaction with smart products. Through the development of active problem-solving scenarios, students learn to understand the multidimensional aspects of emotions and cultivate the skills and dispositions needed to empathise with users. The training requires students to capture users’ emotions through mixed methods and visually analyse the data in ways that are adapted from the initial stages of a PhD research project. Visualisations seek to enhance students’ knowledge of how these methods can provide complementary information and how to analyse and interpret the collected data. The proposed model seeks to inform design education on effective ways to design with new technologies for more meaningful and positive emotional experiences.

Keywords

users experience, smart products, digital technologies, interaction design

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

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Jul 9th, 12:00 AM

A UX Pedagogy on Multimodal Aspects of Emotions

Everyday products are becoming increasingly complex, at a time when the population is progressively ageing. These trends highlight the importance of teaching future designers to create inclusive and meaningful experiences for ageing users interacting with digital technologies and “smart” products. This paper presents a pedagogical approach to evaluate and analyse the affective interaction with smart products. Through the development of active problem-solving scenarios, students learn to understand the multidimensional aspects of emotions and cultivate the skills and dispositions needed to empathise with users. The training requires students to capture users’ emotions through mixed methods and visually analyse the data in ways that are adapted from the initial stages of a PhD research project. Visualisations seek to enhance students’ knowledge of how these methods can provide complementary information and how to analyse and interpret the collected data. The proposed model seeks to inform design education on effective ways to design with new technologies for more meaningful and positive emotional experiences.

 

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