Understanding Expressive Machines

Affective design, alternatively called (with slight variations in meaning) hedonic design, emotional design, affective human factors design, human-centered design, and empathetic design, is essentially the focus on the role of human emotions and their influence on the way we understand and relate to artifacts. Because of the ubiquity of emotions in human experience, affective design can be applied to all fields which have as a focus the interaction between humans and objects (broadly defined), and is hence multidisciplinary. Researchers and practitioners come from fields as diverse as information science, ergonomics, philosophy, cognitive science, computer science, artificial intelligence, and linguistics. This paper will explore the use of theory in—as well as the practical applications of— research in a specific subset of affective design, usually referred to as “computers as social actors ” (CASA). The specific focus will be on research and theory that is directed toward two fundamental questions: first, how do people respond to computers that “display ” (here loosely defined) emotions and respond to emotions themselves, and second, what does a computer that “displays ” emotion look like, i.e., what are its potential applications and implications? The first question here has a strong basis in practice, and as such is addressed by many empirical studies within the related literature, while the latter question is more theoretical in its aim to create and understand new models of social interactions with computers. One of the benefits that the CASA framework offers is the disentanglement of two roles that these “expressive machines ” play in an interaction with a person. First, the machine is an emotional actant1 when it displays emotions (and when the person attributes emotionality to it); second, it acts as an emotional respondent by “interpreting ” the emotions of the person interacting with it. Because of this understanding, the CASA framework grounds its focus in th