The processes and the designs both become vehicles for knowledge production as a kind of research through design (Frayling19931<\/sup>) or research-creation, feeding back into the general field of interaction design, affect theory and the coupling between the two in the exploration and design of what I term affectively engaging interfaces. Within interaction design and Human-Computer Interaction HCI more generally, a number of people have been exploring affective aspects of the interaction, most notably under the heading of Affective Computing2<\/sup>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I work with a different notion of affect, primarily fueled conceptually by the philosophy of experience of\u00a0Brian Massumi\u00a0which presents a concept of affect building on\u00a0Spinoza,\u00a0Bergson,\u00a0\u00a0James,\u00a0\u00a0Simondon,\u00a0\u00a0Deleuze & Guattari,\u00a0Stern\u00a0and\u00a0Whitehead. In my work, I have been transforming the philosophical insights into actual affective design concerns to be experimented with in the design work. As a consequence, to come back to the question, all my design experiments are inherently affective-led inquiries in interaction design, where the affective concerns feed into the theoretical and practical explorations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then I suppose that you refer to the following definition from Brian Massumi in his introductory notes of\u00a0Thousand Plateaus\u00a0by Deleuze and Guattari (2005 (1989)?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u00ab\u00a0AFFECT\/AFFECTION. Neither word denotes a personal feeling (sentiment in Deleuze and Guattari).\u00a0L ‘affect(Spinoza’s affectus) is an ability to affect and be affected. It is a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act.\u00a0L’affection(Spinoza’s affectio) is each such state considered as an encounter between the affected body and a second, affecting, body (with body taken in its broadest possible sense to include \u00ab\u00a0mental\u00a0\u00bb or ideal bodies).\u00a0\u00bb\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Yes, exactly \u2013 affect as a prepersonal \u2013 or preindividual \u2013 intensity, which cause a transition between states of capacitation. The very basic idea about \u00ab an ability to affect and be affected \u00bb is, I believe, at the core of contemporary concerns around interactivity. It\u2019s so simple, and still offers such a rich rethinking around some of the basic notions we are dealing with in interaction design, opening a new field of questioning in the discipline, as Massumi also talks about : <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u00ab\u00a0The notion of affect does take many forms, and you\u2019re right to begin by emphasizing that. To get anywhere with the concept, you have to retain the manyness of its forms. It\u2019s not something that can be reduced to one thing. Mainly because it\u2019s not a thing. It\u2019s an event, or a dimension of every event. What interests me in the concept is that if you approach it respecting its variety, you are presented with a field of questioning, a problematic field, where the customary divisions that questions about subjectivity, becoming, or the political are usually couched in do not apply3<\/sup>.\u00a0\u00bb<\/p>\n\n\n\n To be more concrete about \u2018transforming the philosophical insights into actual affective design concerns\u2019, may you share an example of this process please. Then would you say that they emerge more during the creation, the production or the exibition stage?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s a very good question indeed. Here is an example.\u00a0Ekkomaten<\/em>\u00a0is an interactive sound installation, which was designed to give people an experience of the 18th<\/sup>\u00a0century city of Aarhus through six auditory echoes from the past, available through a listening machine situated in the city4<\/sup>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This project was undertaken in the research center\u00a0Digital Urban Living, where we entered into a collaboration with a historical festival. The brief was, very generally speaking, to use interactive technologies to bring the 18th century to life using interactive means. We started out with the basic idea of designing an affectively engaing interface for listening to the 18th<\/sup>century city of Aarhus through an interactive sound design.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n From the outset we were working directly with affective design concerns. On a more concrete level, this fed directly into the experiments with the crafting of the interaction, i.e. the design of the physical Ekkomaten <\/em>machine, and the feeling of interaction with the digital soundscape. It also fed into the actual creation of six different radio plays that were accesible as echoes from the past in a larger soundscape. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Concerning the interaction, we spent a lot of time creating an interface that would demand bodily activation, would, in fact, resist interaction, as opposed to the seamless swiping on a smartphone. Here, the affective outset was used to conceptually unfold the richness of experiential qualities that might be pursued in the design work, opening, as I was talking about above, a problematic field for experimentation. In the creation of the soundscapees, the notion of affect resulted in a move away from creating factual stories \u2013 and to instead focus on craftin sonic situations that would immediately engage the listeners affectively in the auditory universe of the 18th century. <\/p>\n\n\n\n When Ekkomaten <\/em>was on display, and in the work we have been doing afterwards to make sense of how people reacted to and interacted with the installation, we have been able to empirically unfold the different social, experiential and narrative spaces emerging around the affective interaction with the machine. Clearly, people have different experiences when interacting; some only touch the machine and do not engage, others mostly explore the interaction by turning around the machine rather than listening, others really take the time to listen to all the echoes. We do believe, however, that it can be argued that \u2013 at least to some \u2013 Ekkomaten<\/em> perceptually and affectively engages its users in the sonic exploration of a narrative space emerging at the intersection between fact and fiction, echoing people\u2019s everyday lives from the 18th century in our present day society. We have also made the argument that Ekkomaten <\/em>can be understood as a designed electronic object that can powerfully activate a design fictional potential concerning the use of technology in our everyday society in a more poetic sense. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In the\u00a0Ekkomaten\u00a0<\/em>project, affect theoretical concerns set the stage for design experiments, focused on a distinct set of experiential qualities \u2013\u00a0but after seeing how people actually interacted with\u00a0Ekkomaten<\/em>, through observations and interviews, we have been able to add a more elaborate conceptual layer to account for the actual experiential effects and affective exchanges catalyzed through people\u2019s interaction \u2013 and this knowledge has been used to sketch out new design experiments. In another project,\u00a0Echoes from M\u00f8llevangen<\/em>, the\u00a0Ekkomaten<\/em>\u00a0machine, for instance,has been used to orchestrate a collective listening process in a residential area, M\u00f8llevangen, in Aarhus, to activate the auditory sensibility of the inhabitants and use the technology to state a differnet kind of participatyr, community storytelling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What difference(s) are there for you between affect and emotion?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The \u2018easy\u2019 answer to this would be something like; emotion is qualified or recognized affect; the affective hits you non-consciously, and the emotive is the conscious recognition of particular affective reactions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n A lot of time has been spent separating affect from emotion, to better build a vocabulary for articulating how affect works, and this has been extremely productive in a number of ways. However, I think it\u2019s important to continuously reflect on the full \u2018experiential continuum\u2019: <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u00ab\u00a0Experience is a continuum. All its dimensions are always all there, only differently abstracted, in different actual-virtual configurations, expressing different distributions of potentials5<\/sup>.\u00a0\u00bb\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Starting from the idea of a full experiential continuum entails looking more closely into the relation between the affective and emotive. In an article from 2012,\u00a0From Signal to Signification in Interactive Environments<\/em>, I have been exploring this, building on the work of\u00a0Gilbert Simondon.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Simondon states that affectivity can be considered the foundation of emotion by taking the charge of the preindividual nature and making it into a support for the collective individuation. In turn, emotions are for affectivity the discovery of a superior order, of a synergy moving to a higher or more stable metastability. There is resonance between both affect and emotion. In fact, Simondon argues that emotion is integrative and \u2018\u2018more rich\u2019\u2019 than affection. I think it\u2019s important to not fall into an either\/or discourse here \u2013\u00a0the same, I would say, might go for the non-representational and representational \u2013 it\u2019s really about unfolding the different exchanges and dynamics going on here. \u00a0Simondon has an interesting take on how this might be understood, as the relation between signal and siginfication, which I take as a starting point for analyzing the experiential dynamics in relation to this larger experiential continuum. On the basis of this, I argue that \u00ab\u00a0\u2026focusing on signification opens a conceptual path for exploring interactive technologies and environments in terms of the individuations and lived relations that occur through our interactions with them in experiential terms6<\/sup>.\u00a0\u00bb<\/p>\n\n\n\n What difference(s) are there for you between affect and emotion?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n I would rather say that I use the affective vocabulary to address particular experiential qualities \u2013 through interactive sound or poetry production and various forms of physical interaction. Rather than producing specific affects, the affective becomes a starting point for unfolding rich experiential fields, creating conditions of emergence for affective exchanges. But future projects would be able to more thoroughly investigate the particular affects or affective reactions emanating from the interaction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By \u2018affective exchanges\u2019, do you mean with participants, with collaborators or with devices?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Yes! At least from e.g. the work with Ekkomaten<\/em> (see above) and Ink <\/em>(see below), it is clear to see that these affective exchanges happen on a number of levels : between a person and her interaction with the machine, between a person and her relation to e.g. the 18th<\/sup> century of Aarhus or digital literature, between different persons coming together through the interaction \u2013 but also between people and us as researchers; being in \u2018the wild\u2019, actually engaging with the people who experience the installations, talking to them about the installation, about the future if digital technologies, literature, observing how they react \u2013 you get an immediate feel about what actually succeeds in affecting people, about the capacitations (or not) catalyzed by the installations (or not).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Would you say that your approach is rather intuitive, instinctive or in link with cognitive or psychological sciences or philosophical dimensions, if so which ones?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n I am definitely working from a range of (experience) philosophical dimensions, but also from more general foundations from interaction design theory, focusing on experiential aspects of digital technologies, for example McCarthy & Wright\u2019s 2005 book on\u00a0Technology as Experience<\/em>\u00a0from 20047<\/sup>. The experiments are also informed by general themes within interaction design research today, such as Urban Interaction Design, physical\/tangible interfaces, critical design \u2013\u00a0or related to technologies such as 3D projections, Media Facades, interactive tables, sensor technologie and so forth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Could you elaborate how experience feeds your engagment with interaction design and, if I understand well, how it generates new philosophical foundations?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n I might have touched upon this above : my field of inquiry is interaction design, and I always think about the knowledge generated through the design experiments through this field, so somehow I would say that my main contribution is to design theory and philosophy \u2013 but I have also been publishing articles and giving papers at aesthetic and philosophy conferences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I would never say, however, that I am generating new philosophical foundations. Rather, I try to explore through design processes how the different philosophical concepts can feed into the actual design of new interactive technologies and environments, focused on the experiential effects catalyzed on an affective level. Currently, however, I am moving into writing and project collaborations where this knowledge is put to work in different transdisciplinary contexts (e.g. in the Immediations <\/em>project) \u2013 and, possibly new philosophical foundations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What emotions do you feel towards your work of art and what emotions have you observed in the public and concerning which work of art?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s an interesting question, you don\u2019t get that a lot as an interaction design researcher! But the same goes for the public\u2019s reactions to Ekkomaten<\/em>; it is definitely one of my more succesful designs in terms of creating conditions of emergence for affectively engaging with e.g. the history of Aarhus in the 18th<\/sup> century or the life of everyday people in the neigbourhoods M\u00f8llevangen, the two projects where Ekkomaten<\/em> has been used.<\/p>\n\n\n\n During a conference at the research group \u00ab\u00a0Performativit\u00e9 et effets de pr\u00e9sence\u00a0\u00bb, UQAM, a few years ago, Zaven Par\u00e9, an artist who works with robots, described a similar personal engagment with a robot he used to work with. He developed a \u2018friendly\u2019 relationship spending time with it…<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Yes, I am not quite sure whether it was a \u2018friendly\u2019 relationship, though. Right now, it\u2019s more of an exhausted relationship, since we have been spending so much time with the machine, and are now looking for new design opportunities \u2013 but I feel we have not heard the last of Ekkomaten<\/em>, though. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Do these emotions make you change your artistic intentions, and if so how?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n I am not really sure about this; of course, the experiences with these projects feed into new projects; I have a lot of ideas and perspectives I would like to pursue in future experimentation, but whether this has changed my artistic intentions, I am not so sure. Maybe it\u2019s because I rarely talk abouth my artistic intentions; it\u2019s not usually something that goes down very well with the interaction design research community, where we pursue research interests more collectively. But of course my engagement with the different projects feed into new ideas I want to explore in future projects. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Which ones of your artworks have induced emotions the most?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n If\u00a0Ekkomaten\u00a0<\/em>was defenitely the first one,\u00a0<\/em>I would like to mentionthe interactive poetry generation machine\u00a0INK<\/em>\u00a0and the 3D projection work we did for a Danish national icon statue\u00a0Holger Danske<\/em>. The Journey of Holger the Dane<\/em>\u00a0exemplifies affective design concerns in relation to the activation of the statue of Holger the Dane, a national icon, through 3D projections. In this experiment, the concerns were primarily developed as a way to conceptualize affective tensions surrounding both the socio-cultural myth behind the statue as well as the physical location of intervention. According to the legend, Holger the Dane will wake up and become alive if Denmark \u2013\u00a0or Danishness \u2013\u00a0is threatened, to fight for his country. Of course, doing a project concerned with bringing the statue \u2018to life\u2019 immediately raises a range of challenges; if we really woke the statue up, we would to some extent be implying that Denmark was under threat, which would tap into a very heated cultural and political discussions (that have only intensified in the last months with the refugee crisis in Syria, for instance). As a consequence, we decided to bring the statue of Holger the Dane to life \u2013\u00a0without waking him up.<\/p>\n\n\n\nExemplification with Ekkomaten<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Affect and \/ or Emotion?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The interesting part is that I have developed a quite close relationship to the Ekkomaten<\/em> machine, which I described above. As mentioned before, it\u2019s a physically engaging and very big installation that we have been taking down and putting up so many times that I have developed a very close relationship to it; it might sound strange, but there is something about the hands-on experiences with this digitally enhanced object that has translated into a sort of caring, which I have not ususally experienced \u2013 so in that sense it has been a very affectively engaging installation for me personally.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAtworks inducing emotions the most<\/h2>\n\n\n\n