Research — The Emotion of Form
In HCI, research linking dimensions of shape to phenomena such as emotion is fairly limited. Certain visual dimensions of form have been shown to express a wide range of emotions, but there is no unified understanding of which dimensions relate to which emotions. To address this gap, in this project we explore the relationship between shape and emotion, providing a taxonomy of affective shape dimensions and insight to how individuals embody emotion in form.
This work understanding affective dimensions of shape and the resulting Constructive Sensual Evaluation Instrument (CSEI) was featured in Popular Science.
You can read more about this research at the Social Emotional Technology website.
Related Publications
Peer Reviewed Conference and Journal Publications
- Edward F. Melcer and Katherine Isbister. (2016). "Motion, Emotion, and Form: Exploring Affective Dimensions of Shape". In Extended Abstracts of the 34th Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. CHI '16, San Jose, CA. ACM.
- Edward F. Melcer and Katherine Isbister. (2014). "Emotional space: understanding affective spatial dimensions of constructed embodied shapes". In Proceedings of the 2nd ACM symposium on Spatial user interaction. SUI '14, Honolulu, HI. ACM.
Workshop Papers
- Edward F. Melcer, and Katherine Isbister. (2014). "CSEI: The Constructive Sensual Evaluation Instrument". In Workshop on Tactile User Experience Evaluation Methods. CHI '14, Toronto, ON, Canada. N.p.