Emotional Expressivity
How does a person express their emotion with just a handful of digital bits and bytes? Anna Ståhl et al. reckon that their research is the way forward; using animations and a dimensional model of colour by Russell in 1980 to portray emotions. SMS messages are augmented with a background image; a subsection of an animated colour circle that they came up with (see right).
The authors said, in their paper entitled “A Foundation for Emotional Expressivity“:
Emotional communication is in itself subtle and ambiguous and therefore situated, dependent on context to convey meaning and open up for interpretation. The results of the study show that to be able to capture these characteristics require creative tools for expressivity with a common foundation for understanding, rather than providing users with ready-made expressions [e.g. emoticons] chosen by a majority of the subjects.
This line of thought is not too dissimilar to the research I did on Colour Player, which sought out to realise the potential of a practical application where colour is used to describe music [dissertation pdf]. But also it relates to what I’m looking into at the moment of the nature of groups and how we can relate to them via digital group awareness.
What do you think? Should we really be abstracting away this much?
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