Design & Emotion 2012

The 8th “Design & Emotion” conference took place this year in London. It has already been a couple of months since the end of the conference but I am only coming to blog about it now. This was the third time I attended Design & Emotion and it was a great experience as always. A few personal highlights from the program:

• Pieter Desmet, Martijn Vastenburg, Daan Van Bel and Natalia Romero's “Pic-a-mood; Development and application of a pictorial mood-reporting instrument“, a paper about a promising tool to collect quick self-report of people's current mood (and I am not saying this because Pieter has been my boss for many years!).


• Xiaojuan Ma, Jodi Forlizzi, and Steven Dow's “Guidelines for depicting emotions in storyboard scenarios”. The title emphasizes one potential applications but the paper also contains an interesting study of the interpretation of different types of cartoons (manga, US comics, etc.) by people from the US and India.


• Elliott Hedman, Lucy Miller, Sarah Schoen, Darci Nielsen, Matthew Goodwin, and Rosalind Picard's “Measuring autonomic arousal during therapy”. Elliott's presentation was an excellent roundup of the challenges of psychophysiological measurement in applied settings. I talked with him about this and other topics before and I expected that there would be at least some disagreement between us but I actually found myself agreeing with most of what he said (OK, I almost wrote “with everything he said” but I have not read the paper itself and I would not want to commit myself too much!).

This short selection reflects my own interests and research topics but there were many interesting presentations and many papers that seemed well worth checking out. Unfortunately, the proceedings do not seem to be available online… Also, the location of the next edition was not known yet at the end of the conference but it has just been announced and it sounds quite exciting!