Affective Design — the future of design is here.

What is affective computing?

Affective computing — or put more simply as emotional AI — is an area of cognitive computing and AI that explores the emotional interaction between humans and technology. This interdisciplinary field lies at the intersection of computer science, cognitive science, and psychology.

Although this field is not well known within the design community, I believe it’s significant and deserves more attention, particularly with the integration of AI into current services and systems. This is all the more relevant to designers working in the AR/VR space.

Affective computing in action

Although at the time of writing, the field is in the research phase, some products have already started integrating affective computing, such as AIBO, the robot dog by Sony. The robotic dog leverages speech recognition in conjunction with cameras to analyse a human’s facial expressions and alter its reaction depending on the human’s emotional state.

The opportunities for implementing affective computing technology in different channels and touchpoints are vast and can be supplemented by video cameras, sensors, haptics and audio to help the system more effectively simulate a natural connection with the user.

Imagine a scenario where you want to listen to music on your phone. The app will use the front-facing camera (with consent from the user) to analyse your facial expressions. It will also leverage the heart rate sensor on the watch you are wearing as well as sensors from the earbuds. Additionally, if you decide to use a conversational AI to provide a command, it will analyse the tone of your voice. It will combine all of this and use machine learning to build a picture of your emotional state and curate a playlist based on how you are feeling. This is just one scenario, now imagine a household with smart appliances connected via IoT communicating with each other. Crazy, right?

Examples of application:

• Robots, such as AIBO, Sophia, or Elon Musk’s newly unveiled robot — Optimus (Tesla Bot)
• Wearables such as watches (Apple Watch, Google Pixel Watch, Samsung Galaxy Watch, FitBit, etc.)
• Conversational AI, virtual Agents, chatbots
• Websites with dynamic visuals and content depending on your emotional state
• Social media apps that tailor your feed depending on how you are feeling

What is affective design?

Affective design involves designing interfaces to enable human-computer interactions where emotional information is communicated by the user naturally. With this in mind, the interfaces or touchpoints that humans interact with may be able to adapt in response to one’s affective state, allowing for more immersive and visceral interactions to take place.

Affective & UX Design

As a UX Designer, I recognise the significance of affective design in the services and interfaces we are creating, particularly with AI becoming more prevalent and integrated into the systems of tomorrow. I believe this will make design more human-centred as the systems will be capable of empathising with users and providing a more immersive and pleasurable experience.

Tools that UX Designers use could take advantage of emotional AI to measure users’ emotional states when conducting user research or usability testing to paint a more accurate picture of how users are feeling when interacting with interfaces or systems. This data in tandem with other metrics will help inform designer’s decisions on identifying opportunities for improvement on the products they are designing.

Conclusion

Though the field is still in its infancy, it will be interesting to see how affective computing will develop and mature over the years. There is also potential for affective design to become its own field with its own frameworks and methodologies to accommodate its implementation in design.