Affective Interaction
Course Materials
Kristina Höök, Hillevi Sundholm
Table of Contents
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Course information
Picard, R. W. (1997) Affective Computing, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA:
Chapters 1 – 2.
Katz, J. (1999) How Emotions Work, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999:
Chapters 1, 7.
Elliott, C. (2002) The role of elegance in emotion and personality: reasoning for
believable agents, In Emotions in Humans and Artifacts edited by Trappl, R., Petta, P.,
och Payr, S.
Damasio, A. R. (1994) Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain,
Grosset/Putnam, New York: Chapters 1, 3 and 11.
Course information
Literature
The main literature to be read during the course is the material in this bundle. You are also
required to read the following list of papers that can be accessed through their weblinks:
 Boehner, K., DePaula, R., Dourish, P., and Sengers P., 2005. Affect: From
Information to Interaction. Critical computing Conference 2005, Århus, Denmark
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1094570&coll=portal&dl=ACM&CFID=668246
27&CFTOKEN=24952427
 Ståhl, A. (2006) Designing for Emotional Expressivity, Licenciate Thesis, Institute of
Design, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden. Chapter 4 (and for those extra interested,
Chapter 3): http://www.sics.se/~annas/lic/Binder1.pdf
 Höök, K (2004) User-Centred Design and Evaluation of Affective Interfaces, In: Zs.
Ruttkay, C. Pelachaud (Eds.), From Brows till Trust: Evaluating Embodied
Conversational Agents, Kluwer, 2004. http://www.sics.se/~kia/papers/hook1.pdf
 Sundström, P. (2005) Exploring the Affective Loop, Licentiate Thesis, Stockholm
University, Stockholm, Sweden, Chapter 3: http://www.sics.se/~petra/eMoto/licen.pdf
The extra ambitious student will also read:
 Fagerberg, P., Ståhl, A., and Höök, K. (2003). Designing gestures for affective input:
an analysis of shape, effort and valence. In Proceedings of Mobile Ubiquitous and
Multimedia, MUM 2003, Norrköping, Sweden, ACM Press.
http://www.sics.se/~petra/eMoto/PaperA.pdf
 Anna Ståhl, Petra Sundström, and Kristina Höök (2005) A Foundation for Emotional
Expressivity, In Proceedings of DUX 2005, San Francisco, CA, USA.
http://www.sics.se/~petra/eMoto/stahl_affee.pdf
In order to know how to write a short paper in the ACM SIGCHI-format for you assignment,
have a look at, for example:
 Jonathan Sykes, Simon Brown (2003) Affective Gaming: Measuring Emotion
Through the Gamepad, Extended abstracts of the 2004 conference on Human factors
and computing systems, ACM Press, Pages: 732 – 733
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=765957&coll=portal&dl=ACM&CFID=6682332
8&CFTOKEN=47962575
 Richard Hazlett (2003) Measurement of User Frustration: A Biologic Approach,
Extended abstracts of the 2004 conference on Human factors and computing systems,
ACM Press, Pages: 734 – 735
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=765958&coll=portal&dl=ACM&CFID=6682332
8&CFTOKEN=47962575
 Hugo Liu, Ted Selker, Henry Lieberman (2003) Visualizing the Affective Structure of
a Text Document, Extended abstracts of the 2004 conference on Human factors and
computing systems, ACM Press, Pages: 740 – 741
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=765961&coll=portal&dl=ACM&CFID=6682332
8&CFTOKEN=47962575
There will also be hand-outs of slides from each lecture that will be placed in First Class.
We have added three examples of short papers from CHI 2003 that you may use as inspiration
for how to write up your assignment description (Sykes et al 2003, Hazlett 2003, Liu et al,
2003), see below.
Examination
The course will start with a set of lectures (some by invited guest lecturers) laying out the
foundations for affective interaction. This part of the course will render 2 credits and ends
with an exam where questions are asked on the literature, but also on the contents of the
lectures.
The assignment, see below, will render another 2 credits.
Assignment
The theme for the assignment is affective interaction along the road, such as e.g. the subway,
in your car, on your bike. The assignment should be solved by groups of about four to five
students in each.
The group may choose to put more emphasis on either:
 A full-fledged scenario for an interaction with the envisioned system, implemented
using tools such as Flash or through interactive video or similar. The focus should be
on creating an interface that is thought-through in all its details even if nothing is
implemented for real. A user should be able to “play” the interaction with the faked
system.
 A user study that either leads to a particular design idea or that evaluates a design that
has been partly developed. The user study should follow some given method and be
described properly. The group should strive to find subjects outside the university to
test the system with.
 An implemented prototype/artefact/mobile application where some features of an
affective interactive system is fully functioning.
The assignment will be judged on two occasions: on the first occasion the group will meet
with the teachers to show their material/code/scenario, and on the second occasion the group
will give a 10 minute presentation to all participating students and teachers. This second
occasion will be organised in the style of a mini-conference. That is, after the 10 minute
presentation, the audience will be allowed to ask questions. We might also hand out a bestpaper award based on the ratings of the participants in this mini-conference.
The second presentation must be accompanied by a short, two-page, ACM-style formatted,
paper (see example papers in this course material, Sykes et al 2003, Hazlett 2003, Liu et al,
2003), referring to relevant literature and providing a simple description of the system/idea.
We expect students to search for and refer to literature in relevant databases, such as
www.acm.org/dl, www.interaction-design.org/, or www.scholar.google.com. The two-page
descriptions will be bundled together into a “proceedings of Affective Interaction course”.
The presentation should be given in Powerpoint-format or similar. After each presentation
there will be time for questions.